Someone else—a third someone, a twentieth … Why, then, had he come to her? Why had he not admitted it? Why this blissful reunion (or meaningless farce)? That was what really hurt, that was her hell. Was it for him, was it for this that she had destroyed her little boy?
Was this the man she had wanted to save? To purify?
To think that she had believed in him! Danced to his tune!
Who are you? Tell me.
She was sitting up in bed.
She lit the lamp.
Replaced the glass chimney with a firm hand.
Her childhood home, untidy and deserted now, seemed still gloomier. Dark doorways opened into other dark rooms.
This was where she had displayed herself to him.
She must tear herself away! From this bed, before all her ribs were crushed! From these rooms. This house. Go anywhere. So long as she was not alone!
Alone—she would hang herself, there would be nothing else to do. She would not be able to go on! Life would be impossible! Especially here. She must get away from this vault, this blackness, this silence, in which her mother had lain dying, and in which they had indulged their passion—while in that other place her baby was dying.
Why did you ask me to come? If you hadn’t I wouldn’t have rushed to join you—and he would not have taken sick!
Now she was dressed.
I must go somewhere, anywhere! To somebody, anybody! Fall on someone’s breast—I … can’t go on alone!
The simplest thing would be to go to her aunt. The convent gates would be open by now—the nuns rose before daylight.
But for some reason she could not go to her aunt. It would have been so natural, and so salutary, to run to her immediately after Zhenya’s death. But now it was impossible.
How have all these troubles piled up? At twenty-two, for other people, life is just beginning. But your path is blocked by a landslide of troubles. Life has no place for you, hang yourself, why don’t you!
Yes, hang yourself! This yellow scarf will do. A long, strong scarf.
To have been so pure, to know yourself to be upright, noble even, and then in a single year to wreak such havoc, ruin so many lives, become so hopelessly entangled. That other family—shattered! Mama betrayed! Little Zhenya—betrayed.
He was the only one she hadn’t betrayed.
So he had betrayed her.
It wasn’t so very early. People were up and around. It was dark because this was November. Anyway, I must get out of here.
She covered her head with her scarf. Can’t stay here. Can’t be by myself—it’ll end badly.
But somehow it seemed absolutely impossible to go to her aunt in the convent.
My hands are trembling. Now I’ve dropped the key. I won’t be able to find it … Perhaps it’s slipped into that crack on the doorstep … Why don’t I leave it and just go … No, I mustn’t, it’s my sister’s home.
She burst into tears. She had held out as long as she could, but now she was weeping. Where could it be, that piece of iron?
Not a soul to be seen on Arapovskaya Street. If lamps had been lit it was behind shuttered windows. People took their time getting up. Took their time living. Spent an hour over their prayers.
There were streetlamps on the corner of High Street. And one on the corner of Dolevaya Street, but its light did not reach her.
She went back inside for matches. What was her aunt really like? She had been in the convent for a long, long time. Being a saint was easy enough. But understanding a sinful woman was impossible for her. A woman who had not suffered this ordeal could not possibly understand one who had.
She struck match after match, but the wind blew them all out. In the end she found where the key had hidden itself.
She locked the door, and set off.
The way to her aunt would have taken her along Bolshaya Street, past Studenets, as far as Voznesensky Street. For no particular reason she walked toward Dolevaya instead.
It was damp. And dark. Breezy too, along Dolevaya, and she felt the wind through her flimsy head scarf. It was bracing.
She walked on, alone, no one on the street, no one standing at a front gate. She might have spoken to the first person she met, but there was no one. On warm evenings, all Tambov sat on benches, or stood at garden gates. Now the city was deserted.
To whom could she turn? Everything was closed. Everyone was indoors.
She used to think that the worse things were, the more interesting life became; when things got better they settled down into a too peaceful pattern, a humdrum routine. But no. That was all very well until the ice gave way under you. When it did, you would be crying out, “Give me a hand! Give me a hand! Pull me out of here!”
She had loved Fyodor for six years, and little Zhenya for only six months. But to him she had been his whole world. He had known nothing and no one else.
And that was all she had needed. So what was the point of those letters? Why, when she was fulfilled, had she called to him? She had held out for so many years, determined not to be importunate, hedging words of affection with irony, rewriting anything that sounded too affectionate. And after all that she had thrown herself at him.
It was not as if he would find happiness with “the other one.” Of course not. But then he had no need of love or happiness, or of anyone to share his life. He was mean-spirited and probably beyond salvation.
Her little one would never toddle on his own little feet. Never even say “mama.” He had been given time for nothing.
How could she face her aunt after getting that letter yesterday? How could such a trollop ever hold her head up again? It had been bad enough having a child by a married man.
Now she was crossing Dvoryanskaya. The cold wind blew still stronger there, rounding the curved facade of the Gentry Assembly. Two cabs dashed by, one after the other, returning empty from the station, their drivers leaning into the wind.
Zinaida came to a stop, out in the wind, in the middle of the square.
The Utkino church stood there before her. A faint light shone through the elongated windows. A few shadowy figures were making their way there from different directions.
She had not consciously intended to come there. Her legs had brought her unbidden.
But where could she go? Not back where she had come from. Not home, to be by herself—anything but that.
The windows were suffused with light, as on a feast day. But a subdued light, soothing to a sick soul.
Since those obligatory services at school she had hardly ever entered a church except for the blessing of the Easter cakes. Though she had sometimes wanted to, by way of protest against the prevailing fashion. True, she had attended a communion service with organ music in a Lutheran church in Moscow, but she had thought of that as a concert.
There too, her thoughts had been of him. Conscious of her own nothingness, in the presence of sublime music she had remembered him, and become so sorry for him: his one thought was to get on, to rise in the world, to achieve something, but he was already in his forties, he had done nothing, he had no niche of his own, he was a failure. And she had yearned to save him.
All by herself?
She passed by two or three beggars in the doorway—she had come out without her purse—and entered the church. There were lamps before all the icons, and a few candles, but just one electric light, over the choir. Not a single chandelier was lit. That explained the subdued half-light.
Zina loved icon lamps. Her mother used to have one at home. In the intimacy of the attic bedroom, the woman and the icon, with a lamp between them. It gave only a little light, but it knew a great deal. What bottomless depths there were in that dialogue. All the things said there, all the blessings asked!
The service was just beginning in the side chapel on the right, the Chapel of Our Lady, where there was an icon, modest in size but renowned throughout the country, of the Tambov Virgin. Almost all the parishioners had congregated. A cantor recited some incomprehensible and intermin
ably dreary rigmarole, while a priest, invisible in the sanctuary, interpolated occasional brief responses.
Zina, almost oblivious of her surroundings, went down the broad, empty middle aisle. She stood near a pillar and looked upward.
The pillar ended in an arch which carried her eyes along its smooth curve until it merged with the vaulted dome.
The dome itself, up above the nave, was like a miniature round heaven. Enough diffused light from icons and lamps reached the heights for her to see that this celestial hemisphere was wholly occupied by a head-and-shoulders representation of God the Father looking down from the clouds. When morning came the dawn light would reach that spot through narrow windows in the dome. The sun’s first and last rays would find it. At present it was in semi-darkness but, lit from below, the countenance of the Lord of Hosts, majestic in conception, was half visible and half recognizable. There was no trace of consolatory tenderness in the Creator’s tense expression, but nor could vengefulness or menace have any place there. He Himself was the heaven above us all, and we were sustained by Him. This attempt to show the face of God in human lineaments, humanized, had been arrogant presumption on the part of the artist. But from beyond and through what was painted there the unimaginable looked down—a portrayal of the Power that sustains the world. And whoever encountered the gaze of those celestial Eyes, and whoever was privileged to glimpse even momentarily that Brow, understood with a shock not his own nullity but the place which he was designed and privileged to occupy in the general harmony. And that he was called upon not to disrupt that harmony.
There Zinaida stood, and went on standing, with her head thrown back, staring into that immensity, deaf to what was happening in the church, with no thought of praying, no thought of anything. What floated above her could not be conveyed in words, was indeed out of reach of thought. It was a wave of life-giving will, surging also into the human breast. Her vocal cords tightened, heat flooded her swollen neck, her legs were unsteady but she had not the strength to tear herself away. Chilled by what she had seen, she stood shivering like a sacrificial victim awaiting the stroke, stood for as long as her neck could endure the strain, scarcely feeling the floor beneath her, unable to pray, to beseech, to question …
A passive receptacle of the Divine Will, she began to feel easier and stronger. Gone was the burning desire she had felt at home to break out, run away, see someone, anyone, talk. Standing there, she felt no urge to run. She stood staring upward, her neck growing numb, but the iron bands that had immobilized her for so many days relaxed, gradually fell away, released her.
She was beginning to feel giddy. She put her hands to her head and with an effort restored it to its normal position. She walked on a little way over the flagstones.
In the side chapel to the right a priest emerged from the sanctuary and bowed to the closed gates, but it was not Father Aloni.
Zinaida found herself, with no one else near her, facing a large icon of Christ, with a big pink lamp burning before it. The icon and its lamp filled her field of vision, shutting out the rest of the church. Somewhere a service was in progress, but she did not catch a single word. She stood gazing on the Saviour’s brown-tinted face.
It was a completely human face, though its complexion was not of this world. It had other peculiarities: the hair descended in two straggling locks, the nose was impossibly long and thin, the raised fingers were frozen in a gesture of benediction. The eyes held an enigmatic omniscience … knowing all, from the beginning to the end of time, things of which we never dream. A mind at ease might not have responded to these depths. But Zinaida, with her heightened perception, saw that Christ was suffering acutely, suffering yet not complaining. His compassion was for all those who approached him—and so at that moment for her. His eyes could absorb whatever pain there might yet be—all her pain, as they had absorbed many times as much before, and would absorb whatever pain was still to come. He had learned to live with pain as something inevitable. And he could grant release from all pain.
A weight was lifted from her.
The pink glass of the icon lamp, and the light it gave, were also unusual. This was not the pinkness of a dawn sky, or of a blush. It was a pinkness with an otherworldly mauve tint, remote from all earthly colors. And that strange light made the dark brown, all-knowing countenance seem all the more perceptive.
In that ghostly pink light it seemed more impossible than ever to believe that her son was … nowhere. She could see now that somewhere there was something.
The icon and the lamp swam before her eyes.
How fortunate that she had strayed unthinkingly to this place. She had no wish to go elsewhere. No wish to pour her heart out to anyone else, as she had longed to a little while ago. That was now the last thing she needed.
Now she could hear the chant from nearby: “For my iniquities have risen above my head, they have weighed me down like a heavy burden … I cry out in the torment of my heart: O Lord, all my desires are open to Thee, and my lamentations are not hidden from Thee.”
She shuddered. Her whole story had been known here before her coming. They were proclaiming it aloud.
She made no attempt to pray. She scarcely knew how to. But some kind of block, some inhibition had been removed from her mind and her breast, and she found herself thinking again. Thinking not in jerks and jolts, which hurt and burned, but contemplating herself as though she were someone else.
She thought that as the Church defined sin she was a sinner three times over.
No, four.
Five, even. (Her reckoning went unquestioned—it might have concerned someone else.)
She had seduced a married man, and the damage she had done was not merely superficial. By insisting that he should “tell” she had split that family irreparably. She had abandoned her dying mother. She had abandoned her son for her lover. She … that made four. What was the fifth? There was a fifth sin somewhere.
“For my soul is overwhelmed with calamities, and my life is close to the bottomless pit.”
Her eyes too became clear, and now, at an angle and in front of her, she saw—and her heart leapt to see him—Father Aloni standing sideways to her by the central pulpit, hearing confessions. Matins was still in progress in the side chapel, but he was hearing confessions, soundlessly, it seemed. Standing beside the lectern, head bowed, he listened closely to another bowed head, then covered it with his stole, made the sign of the cross, and dismissed the penitent. There were several of them waiting, and the line was moving slowly.
Zinaida observed this as something which did not concern her. She had no need to confess. She could see into herself clearly enough without that.
When she reviewed her past feelings she knew that she had never been two-faced, never set out to deceive or to damage anyone. She had wanted only to follow her natural, womanly path. Surely she, like any other woman, had a right to do that? She had not succeeded, she had made only false starts, and—oh, God!—how difficult it was to start at all. You emerge from adolescence feeling so free, so light—why did things immediately become so difficult and confused, why were other people, all of them, and their destinies, always in your way, so that at every move you had to step over or else collide with someone else? How could you start again from the beginning?
She had never meant to harm anyone! Why, then, at every turn in her life did she have to tread on someone?
No, she was being unfair to herself. There was one person toward whom she felt no guilt. For him she had always wanted the best—little though he realized it. She had wanted to open his eyes to the talent of which he was unaware, and likely to remain so all his life. Reading his complacent confidences with bated breath she had seen more and more certainly that she and she alone was the one he needed! She alone could enlarge his life and help him to fulfill himself—but largeness and diversity were not in his character. He was base and trivial. And he bore all the blame—because he had weakly let her go her own way, because he had been ready to surrender he
r to the first taker. It was he who had driven her to it. And then—to behave as he had yesterday, as much as to say be off and take your devotion and your sacrifices somewhere else! Yet even in rejecting her he had been false! If he loved another (if only he could, if only he were mercifully granted the grace to love, but he was incapable of it), if he loved another why had he gone out of his way to Tambov?
Ah, that was it, the fourth sin, or was it the fifth, wrenched from her like something that had become part of her. It was as if her dress had caught fire, and tearing it off and not tearing it off were alike impossible—her fifth sin had stuck to her, merged with her! She had stayed away from her aunt because she knew the answer she would get, and that it was not the one she needed, not the one she would have thought up for herself.
Father Aloni dismissed his last penitent and looked around for others. His eyes swept over the central aisle, he saw her and nodded an invitation, assuming that she had come to see him.
She had not, of course. But he stood waiting. Upright, solid, simple, broad-faced, his thick, wavy hair brushed back from a large, smooth brow, the eyes beneath it bright.
He beckoned, waited.
She had not come there for him!
But still he waited, and called out to her, thinking, of course, that she was still struggling with her fresh grief.
Well, since she was there … And he was still waiting. And if not him, who was it she had come to see? Why had she come there?
One step, another, a third—she was walking toward him, unintentionally, surprising herself.
Careful—don’t trip on the steps up to the choir stalls. She had eyes only for that broad-browed face, framed by an auburn beard, and for his encouraging gaze.
She bowed her head toward the lectern. Her forehead rested on the tooled cover of the Gospel, and there was a crucifix to her right.
Gospel and crucifix watched over her confession. The lectern—she saw it now—was a steep slope, a rough steep slope—and up that slope she had to drag her whole life, struggling under the burden, and against the friction.
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