The recent scene at Anna Ivanovna’s had transformed them both. It was as if they had recovered their sight and looked at each other with new eyes.
Tonya, this old comrade, this person so clear that she needed no explanations, turned out to be the most unattainable and complex of all that Yura could imagine, turned out to be a woman. With a certain stretching of fantasy, Yura could picture himself as a hero climbing Ararat, a prophet, a conqueror, anything you like, but not a woman.
And now Tonya had taken this most difficult and all-surpassing task on her thin and weak shoulders (she suddenly seemed thin and weak to Yura, though she was a perfectly healthy girl). And he became filled with that burning compassion and timid amazement before her which is the beginning of passion.
The same thing, with corresponding modifications, happened to Tonya in relation to Yura.
Yura thought that in any case they had no business leaving the house. What if something should happen during their absence? And then he remembered. Learning that Anna Ivanovna was worse, they had gone to her, already dressed for the evening, and suggested that they stay. She had protested against it with all her former sharpness and insisted that they go to the party. Yura and Tonya went behind the draperies into the deep window niche to see what the weather was like. When they came out of the niche, the two parts of the tulle curtains clung to the still unworn fabric of their new clothes. The light, clinging stuff dragged for several steps behind Tonya like a wedding veil behind a bride. They all burst out laughing, so simultaneously did this resemblance strike the eye of everyone in the room without a word spoken.
Yura looked around and saw the same things that had caught Lara’s eye not long before. Their sleigh raised an unnaturally loud noise, which awakened an unnaturally long echo under the ice-bound trees of the gardens and boulevards. The frosted-over windows of houses, lit from inside, resembled precious caskets of laminated smoky topaz. Behind them glowed Moscow’s Christmas life, candles burned on trees, guests crowded, and clowning mummers played at hide-and-seek and pass-the-ring.
It suddenly occurred to Yura that Blok was the manifestation of Christmas in all domains of Russian life, in the daily life of the northern city and in the new literature, under the starry sky of the contemporary street and around the lighted Christmas tree in a drawing room of the present century. It occurred to him that no article about Blok was needed, but one needed simply to portray a Russian adoration of the Magi, like the Dutch masters, with frost, wolves, and a dark fir forest.
They were driving down Kamergersky. Yura turned his attention to a black hole melted in the icy coating of one window. Through this hole shone the light of a candle, penetrating outside almost with the consciousness of a gaze, as if the flame were spying on the passersby and waiting for someone.
“A candle burned on the table. A candle burned …” Yura whispered to himself the beginning of something vague, unformed, in hopes that the continuation would come of itself, without forcing. It did not come.
11
From time immemorial the Christmas parties at the Sventitskys’ had been organized in the following fashion. At ten, when the children went home, the tree was lighted a second time for the young people and the adults, and the merrymaking went on till morning. The more elderly cut the cards all night in a three-walled Pompeian drawing room, which was an extension of the ballroom and was separated from it by a heavy, thick curtain on big bronze rings. At dawn the whole company had supper.
“Why are you so late?” the Sventitskys’ nephew Georges asked them in passing, as he ran through the front hall to his uncle and aunt’s rooms. Yura and Tonya also decided to go there to greet the hosts, and, on their way, while taking off their coats, looked into the ballroom.
Past the hotly breathing Christmas tree, girdled by several rows of streaming radiance, rustling their dresses and stepping on each other’s feet, moved a black wall of walkers and talkers, not taken up with dancing.
Inside the circle, the dancers whirled furiously. They were spun around, paired off, stretched out in a chain by Koka Kornakov, a lycée student, the son of a deputy prosecutor. He led the dancing and shouted at the top of his voice from one end of the room to the other: “Grand rond! Chaîne chinoise!”*—and it was all done according to his word. “Une valse s’il vous plaît!”* he bawled to the pianist and led his lady at the head of the first turn à trois temps, à deux temps,* ever slowing and shortening his step to a barely noticeable turning in place, which was no longer a waltz but only its dying echo. And everyone applauded, and the stirring, shuffling, and chattering crowd was served ice cream and refreshing drinks. Flushed young men and girls stopped shouting and laughing for a moment and hastily and greedily gulped down some cold cranberry drink or lemonade, and, having barely set the glass on the tray, renewed their shouting and laughing tenfold, as if they had snatched some exhilarating brew.
Without going into the ballroom, Tonya and Yura went on to the hosts’ rooms at the rear of the apartment.
12
The Sventitskys’ inner rooms were cluttered with superfluous things taken from the drawing room and ballroom to make space. Here was the hosts’ magic kitchen, their Christmas storehouse. It smelled of paint and glue, there were rolls of colored paper and piles of boxes with cotillion stars and spare Christmas tree candles.
The old Sventitskys were writing tags for the gifts, place cards for supper, and tickets for some lottery that was to take place. Georges was helping them, but he often confused the numbering and they grumbled irritably at him. The Sventitskys were terribly glad to see Yura and Tonya. They remembered them from when they were little, did not stand on ceremony with them, and with no further talk sat them down to work.
“Felitsata Semyonovna doesn’t understand that this ought to have been thought about earlier and not in the heat of things, when the guests are here. Ah, Georges, you ungodly muddler, again you’ve jumbled up the numbers! The agreement was that we’d put those for the boxes of dragées on the table and the blank ones on the sofa, and again you’ve got it all topsy-turvy and done it backwards.”
“I’m very glad Annette feels better. Pierre and I were so worried.”
“Yes, but you see, dearest, she happens to be worse, worse, you understand, you always get everything devant-derrière.”*
Yura and Tonya hung around backstage for half the festive night with Georges and the old folks.
13
All the while they were sitting with the Sventitskys, Lara was in the ballroom. Though she was not dressed for a ball and did not know anyone there, she now allowed Koka Kornakov to make a turn with her, passively, as if in sleep, now strolled aimlessly about the room, quite crestfallen.
Once or twice already, Lara had stopped irresolutely and hesitated on the threshold of the drawing room, hoping that Komarovsky, who sat facing the ballroom, would notice her. But he kept his eyes on his cards, which he held fanlike in his left hand, and either really did not see her or pretended not to. The affront took Lara’s breath away. Just then a girl Lara did not know went into the drawing room from the ballroom. Komarovsky gave the girl that glance Lara knew so well. The flattered girl smiled at Komarovsky, flushed and beamed happily. Lara almost cried out when she saw it. The color of shame rose high in her face; her forehead and neck turned red. “A new victim,” she thought. Lara saw as in a mirror her whole self and her whole story. But she still did not give up the idea of having a talk with Komarovsky and, having decided to put off the attempt to a more suitable moment, forced herself to calm down and went back to the ballroom.
Three more men were playing at the same table with Komarovsky. One of his partners, sitting next to him, was the father of the foppish lycée student who had invited Lara to waltz. Lara concluded as much from the two or three words she exchanged with him while they made a turn around the room. And the tall, dark-haired woman in black with the crazed, burning eyes and unpleasantly strained, snakelike neck, who kept going from the drawing room to the ballroom, th
e field of her son’s activity, and back to the drawing room and her card-playing husband, was Koka Kornakov’s mother. Finally, it became clear that the girl who had served as pretext for Lara’s complex feelings was Koka’s sister, and Lara’s conclusions had no grounds at all.
“Kornakov,” Koka had introduced himself to Lara at the very start. But then she had not caught it. “Kornakov,” he repeated at the last gliding turn, taking her to a chair and bowing out. This time Lara heard him. “Kornakov, Kornakov,” she fell to thinking. “Something familiar. Something unpleasant.” Then she remembered. Kornakov, the deputy prosecutor of the Moscow court. He had prosecuted the group of railway workers with whom Tiverzin had stood trial. At Lara’s request, Lavrenty Mikhailovich had gone to butter him up, so that he would not be so fierce at the trial, but could not make him bend. “So that’s how it is! Well, well, well. Curious. Kornakov. Kornakov.”
14
It was past twelve or one in the morning. Yura had a buzzing in his ears. After a break, during which tea and cookies were served in the dining room, the dancing began again. When the candles on the tree burned down, no one replaced them anymore.
Yura stood absentmindedly in the middle of the ballroom and looked at Tonya, who was dancing with someone he did not know. Gliding past Yura, Tonya tossed aside the small train of her too-long satin dress with a movement of her foot and, splashing it like a fish, disappeared into the crowd of dancers.
She was very excited. During the break, when they sat in the dining room, Tonya refused tea and quenched her thirst with mandarines, which she peeled in great number from their fragrant, easily separated skins. She kept taking from behind her sash or from her little sleeve a cambric handkerchief, tiny as a fruit tree blossom, and wiping the trickles of sweat at the edges of her lips and between her sticky fingers. Laughing and not interrupting the animated conversation, she mechanically tucked it back behind her sash or the frills of her bodice.
Now, dancing with an unknown partner and, as she turned, brushing against Yura, who was standing to the side and frowning, Tonya playfully pressed his hand in passing and smiled meaningfully. After one of these pressings, the handkerchief she was holding remained in Yura’s hand. He pressed it to his lips and closed his eyes. The handkerchief had the mingled smell of mandarine and of Tonya’s hot palm, equally enchanting. This was something new in Yura’s life, never before experienced, and its sharpness pierced him through. The childishly naïve smell was intimately reasonable, like a word whispered in the dark. Yura stood, covering his eyes and lips with the handkerchief in his palm and breathing it in. Suddenly a shot rang out in the house.
Everyone turned to the curtain that separated the drawing room from the ballroom. For a moment there was silence. Then turmoil set in. Everyone began to bustle and shout. Some rushed after Koka Kornakov to the place where the shot had resounded. People were already coming from there, threatening, weeping, and interrupting each other as they argued.
“What has she done, what has she done?” Komarovsky repeated in despair.
“Borya, are you alive? Borya, are you alive?” Mrs. Kornakov cried hysterically. “I’ve heard Dr. Drokov is among the guests here. Yes, but where is he, where is he? Ah, leave me alone, please. For you it’s a scratch, but for me it’s the justification of my whole life. Oh, my poor martyr, the exposer of all these criminals! Here she is, here she is, trash, I’ll scratch your eyes out, vile creature! Now she won’t get away! What did you say, Mr. Komarovsky? At you? She aimed at you? No, it’s too much. I’m in great distress, Mr. Komarovsky, come to your senses, I can’t take jokes now. Koka, Kokochka, what do you say to that! Your father … Yes … But the right hand of God … Koka! Koka!”
The crowd poured out of the drawing room into the ballroom. In the midst of them, loudly joking and assuring everyone that he was perfectly unharmed, walked Kornakov, pressing a clean napkin to the bleeding scratch on his slightly wounded left hand. In another group a little to the side and behind, Lara was being led by the arms.
Yura was dumbfounded when he saw her. The same girl! And again in such extraordinary circumstances! And again this graying one. But now Yura knows him. He is the distinguished lawyer Komarovsky; he was involved in the trial over father’s inheritance. No need to greet him, he and Yura pretend they’re not acquainted. But she … So it was she who fired the shot? At the prosecutor? It must be something political. Poor girl. She’ll get it now. What a proud beauty she is! And these! They’re dragging her by the arms, the devils, like a caught thief.
But he realized at once that he was mistaken. Lara’s legs had given way under her. They were holding her by the arms so that she would not fall, and they barely managed to drag her to the nearest armchair, where she collapsed.
Yura ran to her, so as to bring her to her senses, but for greater propriety he decided first to show concern for the imaginary victim of the attempt. He went to Kornakov and said:
“There was a request for medical assistance here. I can render it. Show me your hand. Well, you have a lucky star. It’s such a trifle I wouldn’t even bandage it. However, a little iodine won’t do any harm. Here’s Felitsata Semyonovna, we’ll ask her.”
Mrs. Sventitsky and Tonya, who were quickly approaching Yura, did not look themselves. They said he should drop everything and fetch his coat quickly, they had been sent for, something was wrong at home. Yura became frightened, supposing the worst, and, forgetting everything in the world, ran for his coat.
15
They did not find Anna Ivanovna alive when they came running headlong into the house from the Sivtsev entrance. Death had occurred ten minutes before their arrival. It was caused by a long fit of suffocation, resulting from an acute edema of the lungs that had not been diagnosed in time.
During the first hours Tonya cried her head off, thrashed in convulsions, and recognized no one. The next day she calmed down, listened patiently to what her father and Yura told her, but was able to respond only by nodding, because the moment she opened her mouth, grief overwhelmed her with its former force and howls began to escape her of themselves, as if she were possessed.
She spent hours on her knees beside the dead woman, in the intervals between panikhidas,6 embracing with her big, beautiful arms a corner of the coffin along with the edge of the platform it stood on and the wreaths that covered it. She did not notice anyone around her. But the moment her gaze met the gaze of her relations, she hurriedly got up from the floor, slipped out of the room with quick steps, swiftly ran upstairs to her room, holding back her sobs, and, collapsing on the bed, buried in her pillow the outbursts of despair that raged within her.
From grief, long standing on his feet, and lack of sleep, from the dense singing and the dazzling light of candles day and night, and from the cold he had caught during those days, there was a sweet confusion in Yura’s soul, blissfully delirious, mournfully enraptured.
Ten years before then, when his mother was being buried, Yura had been quite little. He could still remember how inconsolably he had wept, struck by grief and horror. Then the main thing was not in him. Then he was hardly even aware that there was some him, Yura, who had a separate existence and was of interest or value. Then the main thing was in what stood around him, the external. The outside world surrounded Yura on all sides, tangible, impenetrable, and unquestionable, like a forest, and that was why Yura was so shaken by his mother’s death, because he had been lost in that forest with her and was suddenly left alone in it, without her. This forest consisted of everything in the world—clouds, city signboards, the balls on fire towers, and the servers riding ahead of the carriage bearing the icon of the Mother of God, with earmuffs instead of hats on their heads, uncovered in the presence of the holy object. This forest consisted of shop windows in the arcades and the unattainably high night sky, with stars, dear God, and the saints.
This inaccessibly high sky bent down low, very low to them in the nursery, burying its head in the nanny’s skirt, when she told them something about God,
and became close and tame, like the tops of hazel bushes when their branches are bent down in the ravines for picking hazelnuts. It was as if it dipped into the gilded basin in their nursery and, having bathed in fire and gold, turned into an early or late liturgy in the little church in the lane where his nanny took him. There the stars of the sky became icon lamps, dear God became the priest, and everyone was assigned his duties more or less according to ability. But the main thing was the actual world of the grown-ups and the city, which stood dark around him like a forest. Then, with all his half-animal faith, Yura believed in the God of this forest, as in a forest warden.
It was quite a different matter now. All these twelve years of secondary school and university, Yura had studied classics and religion, legends and poets, the sciences of the past and of nature, as if it were all the family chronicle of his own house, his own genealogy. Now he was afraid of nothing, neither life nor death; everything in the world, all things were words of his vocabulary. He felt himself on an equal footing with the universe, and he stood through the panikhidas for Anna Ivanovna quite differently than in time past for his mother. Then he had been oblivious from pain, felt timorous, and prayed. But now he listened to the funeral service as information immediately addressed to him and concerning him directly. He listened attentively to the words and demanded meaning from them, comprehensibly expressed, as is demanded of every matter, and there was nothing in common with piety in his feeling of continuity in relation to the higher powers of earth and heaven, which he venerated as his great predecessors.
16
“Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.”7 What is it? Where is he? The carrying out. They are carrying the coffin out. He must wake up. He had collapsed fully clothed on the sofa before six in the morning. He probably has a fever. Now they are looking all over the house for him, and no one has guessed that he is asleep in the library, in the far corner, behind the tall bookshelves that reach the ceiling.
Doctor Zhivago Page 12
