When Sashenka reached them, the morose prisoner and the professor had already cleared the snow off the marked-out area, and now they were taking turns pounding it with a crowbar. The crowbar kept twisting out of the professor’s hands, leaving no more than faint scratches on the frozen surface, and his pounding was done for him by August or Franya, who had marked out the area, but who was extremely drunk and so worked clumsily. The expression of haste that frightened Sashenka had appeared on August’s face again. He stood at the edge of the pit and waited impatiently for his mother’s remains to appear.
“Go and take a walk,” the professor told him, breathing hard from the heavy physical work, “we’ll take her out, and you’ll see your mother in her coffin, not surrounded by filth and frozen night soil…That would be more honorable with regard to your mother…”
“Stop that talking,” the escort shouted.
“I suppose you’re right,” August said, and moved off to one side. Sashenka took hold of his hand and they walked out into the middle of the roadway and went quite a long way away through the streets and along the avenue, past fences, past the sleeping hospital, straight to the snow-covered vegetable lots with the little wattle-and-daub houses sparsely scattered among them. What a night lay all around them, what anguish there was in all of nature, anguish—struck dumb, incapable even of groaning to bring itself relief. The dull light glowed through the clouds onto the snow, incapable either of blazing up more brightly or fading away; nothing stirred, nothing sighed in its sleep, or rustled, or barked. There were none of the sounds either near or far, clear or enigmatic, that living nights are so full of. It seemed that if a conflagration broke out now, or hail started clattering down, or human voices, filled with horror, started calling for help, all of that would merely dispel the fear and help the hearer feel like a human being whom nothing apart from death can threaten.
Sashenka kept a firm hold on August’s hand and he docilely followed her. Taking advantage of this, she turned off the path winding between the vegetable plots and went toward the yard of the hospital, avoiding the trench in which she had imagined she saw a beautiful girl who had been killed with a brick—August’s sister.
It is hard to say how much time went by before Sashenka and August came back to the yard, but a cart was standing in front of the building, and the driver was swearing impatiently, and August’s sister and mother still had not been taken out of the ground. There were eight coffins on the dray, lying on top of each other in two layers. These were wounded men and nurses who had been killed during an air raid on the railroad station in 1944, and then buried in the factory square, which was now needed for the foundation pit of the chemical equipment factory’s foundry shop.
“There, you see,” said the escort, “you see, Comrade Lieutenant…And he was going to leave already, the driver was…”
After that, everything was all hurrying and scurrying, and none of it left Sashenka with any firm memories. Both pits had already been dug, and all that had to be done was to take out the deceased. The mother had dried up, so that she looked like a mummy, and they didn’t lift her out, but chopped her out of the frozen ground that adhered thickly all over her body and her face. It was dangerous to clean the dirt off with spades, since the body was fragile and could fall apart, especially at the joints. It resembled a sculpture molded out of earth, and only the gray hair, growing on the little earthy head, was soft and evoked human compassion, although feelings were also aroused by a scrap of clothesline on a lumpy leg of sand and clay. They raised the body up carefully and placed it in the coffin, ungluing the hair from the wall of the pit and cutting off the clothesline and, naturally, they didn’t try to attire it in the dress that Sashenka had brought, but simply covered it with this dress with the zip fastener, as if with a blanket, and nailed down the lid of the coffin. But the sister was amazingly well preserved, which could be accounted for, to some extent at least, by the internal structure of a young body, as well as the structure of the ground and the location of the burial site. Although the two pits were located quite close to each other, the sister had been buried in pure clay, beside the fence, where there was no sewage or other products of decomposition, and also, thanks to the bushes and the shade, the icy, frozen snow had been preserved for an especially long time in spring and then, after being sprinkled over with earth, it hadn’t thawed out for a long time, and when it did thaw, it had all soaked into the clay and created propitious conditions around the body, cooling it. And for this reason, the sixteen-year-old girl’s body had remained blossoming and attractive, although perhaps that was also partly owing to the diffused moonlight. They raised the sister up, setting her on the greatcoat that August took off, and clothed her there in Sashenka’s frock with the flared hem and little mother-of-pearl buttons.
Everything on her face and in her plump, luscious lips and around her plump, girlish breasts, only appeared to be soft, since the tissues had stiffened and sclerotized. Especially on the lips and the breast, there were clear traces of the filth and excrement that Shuma had dumped and poured onto the bodies, abusing and defiling them when they were already lying in the cesspit.
The professor’s wife, who had long ago recovered from her hysterics and was now hovering solicitously by her husband, wiped away these smears of sewage on the girl’s body with snow. Then both coffins were carried to the dray.
“Professor,” said August, “you will stay here until I come back from the cemetery…Sergeant, you wait here…”
After that Sashenka remembered a dug-up square, soldiers with entrenching tools, a long line of carts loaded with coffins, the cemetery, the frozen river down below at the edge of the cemetery, and all the time that same, dull, wretched sky: neither darkness nor light.
“What should I do?” August asked quite a long time later, standing on the intersection of Yanushpolskaya Street and Paris Commune Street, with the moon that had flared up brightly for a brief moment hanging directly above his head. “It’s terrible murder and humiliation, but there is no equality in death and suffering…Those who stood on the very lowest rung had no right even to slavery…They had no right even to humiliation; with his brick, Shuma was very probably destroying the ideal order of things, for humiliation is at least some kind of mutual relationship that promises a future…In the ideal case, which was perhaps understood by a few erudite bureaucrats, who were familiar with ancient Greek paradoxes and were regarded as freethinkers in the Gestapo, in the ideal case the Jewish people should have died quietly and painlessly in places allocated precisely for that purpose, thus fulfilling their international duty to mankind in the name of universal happiness…This was also understood in his own way by the owner of a small factory near Khazhin that produced lubricating oils…He succeeded in getting the occupying forces to grant him the right to have some of the Jewish children who were doomed to die delivered to him…He put them up in a boarding house, in good conditions…The children were given milk, margarine, fruit jelly…And then they were all given injections, and they died in their sleep, an easy death in clean beds…Special, high-quality sorts of lubricating oil were made from their well-fed childish bodies…After the liberation, several pits were discovered in the factory yard, filled with nothing but children’s heads…The owner regarded his activity as both good and useful at the same time, since otherwise the children would not have calmly gone to sleep forever, they would have died in torment and terror…That is the problem of ideal service to mankind by an entire people, from whom no one demands exhausting labor, or deprivations, but merely an easy death…Such is the viewpoint of cultured anti-Semitism, which considers that Hitler’s atrocities complicate the problem…I happen to have read a work of this kind, printed on a mimeograph…”
“My darling,” Sashenka said, catching August’s hands as they darted through the air amid the snowflakes sprinkling down from the clouds, “my darling, you need to take a rest…Your eyes are bloodshot…”
“Leave me alone,” August shouted, “leave me alone, go away…”
But Sashenka didn’t go away, she knew he was being unfair because he was feeling bad…
After that they sat in the overheated kitchen.
“Professor,” August said, “it’s not a matter of the killings, appalling as they are…That’s an old sin, and humanity has learned to prolong its kind despite it…When I first saw my mutilated father and then afterward…I dreamed of ripping apart the killer’s alien flesh…Tearing his sinews. That night I dreamed I was killing his children…It was appalling…I woke in a cold sweat and realized I couldn’t go on living like this…But here was the desperate resistance of my own flesh, the serpentine cunning that makes everything small, that makes any grief and hatred ludicrous…I’m talking a lot, professor, and erratically, but you know why, of course…An animal in my situation simply howls…”
“There’s a place in the Bible,” the professor said, “do you remember it…‘How long, Lord, will you tolerate our sacrifices and not strike down our tormentors?’…It’s not word-for-word, but that’s the meaning…And the Lord replies: ‘Wait until the number of victims increases and becomes such that the predestined limit shall be reached, after which all sacrifices and torments shall be avenged.’”
“You mean to say,” August shouted, leaning forward and slumping onto the table with his chest, “you mean to say that it was inevitable, and perhaps even necessary…There it is, the vile, serpentine wisdom that creeps into your brain at your temple…Just as soon as you drop your guard. You’re a vile man with your kopeck-cheap philosophy. I ought to smash your face…But you say I’ll survive it all…I must understand, otherwise it will kill me…”
“What I mean to say,” the professor patiently explained, taking no notice of the crude outburst directed at him, “what I mean to say is that the limit is already approaching…. Retribution and vengeance are available to all, atonement is not only for the righteous, who have the truth on their side. The biblical limit is approaching…For centuries, atonement has been continually moving toward this limit; at times the righteousness of the offended could be seen even through the centuries, and now, beyond that boundary, crossed at the price of millions of innocents, retribution and atonement will fuse and become one…”
“That’s not enough,” August said, “that’s incomprehensible…That’s not what I was expecting from you…And another point…Those who perished in trenches and were burned up in crematoriums were far from perfect…But it’s too soon to judge the victims when the butchers have not yet been punished…However, the time will come and the victims will also answer for the crimes committed against them…”
“The time is approaching,” the professor said loudly, speaking more to himself than to the lieutenant, “the time is approaching when man will win from destiny the right to possess justice, that is, to establish it at the scale of his own life, just as he won from the gods the right to possess fire…Herein lies the Promethean feat, unconscious and unaware of it as they may be, of millions of victims who gave themselves up to be butchered, as Prometheus gave up his liver to be tormented by the vulture…That biblical boundary is approaching, the line beyond which lies either universal life or universal death. But eternal glory to those souls who took upon themselves suffering, mockery, and early death in order to exhaust the portion of torments allotted to mankind by destiny and so brought the limit closer…I mean to say, who have allowed us to approach so close to the biblical limit that it is already visible, visible in the gloom, in the night…The light is visible…There will be something new there…Perhaps new torments…Cosmic, interplanetary, God only knows what kinds…But these small, commonplace torments, unworthy even of hate and lamentation, but only of contempt and laughter, these will remain there on the far side of the line…Our most appalling tragedies are essentially comical…A sixteen-years-old girl is killed by a blow to the head with a brick, smeared with shit, and buried beside a privy…Why, that’s a vaudeville sketch…And the prisons…You’ve never seen how they sleep on the concrete floor in prisons…With asthma, cavities in their lungs, and incipient thrombophlebitis…No, colleague, spare me that, let’s get across that biblical boundary as quickly as possible…Perhaps to new torments, even more appalling, but not so comical…”
“Every killing is terrible,” August said, “but ineluctable, planned murder—this is a new degree…The blood of a child who has been found and killed…They were absolutely obliged to kill him and any other outcome was excluded here…Blood like that washes away any stains that a people has…And it renders any fury that its enemies have criminal, even if it is underpinned by so-called just ideas…It would at least be understandable to some extent, if not just, if the ineluctable murdering were the lot of everyone who has declared himself a Jew, in the way that people declared themselves protestants, for instance…”
“It is particularly hard for our generation,” the professor said, “not because the gloom has become a lot denser, but because we have seen the light, approached so closely to the limit, to the end of the tunnel, and this light has aroused our impatience…While man was a semi-animal, he lived on authentic ground, under an authentic sky…But, on becoming a thinking creature, he entered into a long, dark tunnel, in which not even the sky is authentic, but rather was invented by astronomers…Perhaps there are still two or three generations remaining until the end of the tunnel, but the light is already visible…That is why it is particularly hard for us. In fact no, there are only one or two generations remaining to the end, no more than that…But what lies ahead—that is hard to say…Perhaps, once having broken out into open space and found ourselves under an authentic sky, not an invented one, to go back under cover, back into the tunnel, to our petty squabbles, to the possibility of dying at the hand of one of our own kind—perhaps that is what we shall one day regard as happiness.”
“After what has happened to me,” said August, “after everything…After these pits…After my mother sculpted out of clay and sand…I ought not to have talked to you. I’m fighting for my life, and that’s why I’m making myself suffer.”
But in the meantime no one else spoke, for the entire heterogeneous group had suddenly realized that these two should not be interrupted just now…Each of them, however, was silent in his or her own way. The professor’s wife said nothing, even though she was anxious about the dissatisfaction felt concerning her husband’s observations by the man beside her, who held power over her husband. However, she sensed that the man her husband was talking to needed him, and so her husband would continue sitting in the warm kitchen for a while, instead of in a damp cell. Sashenka said nothing because she loved August and felt in her heart that just at the moment everything was going as well as possible, and she didn’t reply to the professor’s stupid words, and in any case this conversation was helping the lieutenant to recover his strength after what he had seen and been through. The escort, observing discipline and also happening to sympathize with the lieutenant—his own cottage had been burned down in the war, with his family in it, and when he saw the smoldering ruins, he didn’t go to a railroad station, to spend the night there alone on a bench, he went to spend the night in boisterous company. And the morose prisoner said nothing, because he was gulping down hot flapjacks straight off the griddle, fueling himself for two days in advance, hoping that the half-raw flapjacks stuffed into his stomach would not be digested soon, but be diluted tomorrow and the next day, and still in three days’ time by the prison gruel, that they would create a continuing sense of satiety and a belch of baked batter. Olga and Vasya were not even in the kitchen, they were lying down in the room on the fresh linen sheets that Sashenka’s mother had been keeping for Sashenka’s dowry, and their caresses could be heard even through the tightly closed door.
“I read a thesis on determining the mysterious number,” the professor said, “the biblical number of victims, which will be followed by the advent of justice…A graphomaniac’s work, superficial, but the problem is in the air…Possibly it will be called something else…There’s an element of fatalism in it that even I find repugnant…But note the fact that the freer man becomes, the more science develops, the greater the increase in the number of people beginning to respect themselves, their own personality and their dignity—the greater the number of their victims grows…The two currents flow toward each other, in order to halt at the covenanted boundary line…Having collided, these two currents will form a third, which will deviate from the channel of current history and, according to some calculations, will move perpendicularly to it, but according to others, at an angle that has yet to be established.”
“I have become convinced,” August said, “that the butcher and the victim are at one only in death. But in life there is a clear distinction…From the moment of birth…Entire families, entire nations, peoples, states…That’s where the greatest abomination lies…A victim who breathes, consumes food, and reproduces, ready to die at any moment and living on into deep old age…An ancestor-victim, a breeding victim, he begets individuals who know full well how sharp and pitiless their executioner’s blades are, but are absolutely unaware of how frail and easily broken the executioner’s spine is…What a pleasure it is to snap it…How easily it disintegrates into the separate vertebrae…And how nonferal, glistening, aware and even intelligent, filled with philosophical musings, the eyes of the butcher become in those brief moments…So let the butchers die now, professor, for each blow struck on their spines transforms them for those brief moments before death into serene, good souls…Your biblical number will start increasing with immense speed and approach the sacred limit.”
“If you enter Sverdlovsk University after the army,” the professor said, “I’ll give you a note to someone there…A highly respected man…He’ll help you…Would you like me to write the note now…Only deliver it personally…In private.”
“Don’t bother,” August said quietly. “I’m preparing for a different career…”
“A pity,” the professor sighed and suddenly looked at August intently, straight in the eyes. “People like you…and perhaps, like me…should have gills alongside their lungs…When it becomes difficult to extract oxygen from the air, we could extract it from water…An absurd image, poetic, not scientific…I do a bit of translating, after all…Even a bad poet hits the bullseye at least once, unlike a bad scholar…There are some interesting words from a certain forgotten author…Deservedly forgotten, basically…Sexual appetite is akin to cruelty…Everything born of woman must die. These words may be polemical and sloppy from the viewpoint of our Central European morality, but they do express the beauty of the ancient Greek worldview, capable of admiring the poetry of tragedy, for instance the poetry of incest, so that one forgets about the essence of the matter and thereby overcomes one’s suffering…”
The professor would have carried on talking for a long time, but just then someone tapped on the kitchen window that looked out onto the landing of the stairs, and a face was pressed up against the glass.
“It’s the culture worker,” Sashenka said in annoyance, “Uncle Fyodor…What does he want?”
She got up and opened the door.
“Did you get the note?” Uncle Fyodor asked, breathing heavily; he had evidently hurried, jumping up the stairs two steps at a time, despite his lameness. “They’re bringing your mother on the morning train…Get your coat on.”
“I can’t,” Sashenka said, “I’ll come to see her tomorrow…Or whenever they allow visits, that is…I’ll come on Thursday…”
“Your mother will be badly disappointed,” said Uncle Fyodor, almost imploring. “Her heart is acting up…She needs to be taken care of…”
“And my husband is ill,” Sashenka said firmly in front of everyone, “I can’t leave him alone…”
She walked over and put her arms around August, and pressed her cheek against his prickly cheek, overgrown with stubble.
Uncle Fyodor looked confused for a moment, then he smiled, stepped across, and held out his hand to August.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said, with a broad smile. “Please accept my congratulations…And Katerina, Sasha’s mother, will be glad. It’s a surprise, of course…But in these times…People don’t ask for advice nowadays, and that’s all for the best…Sasha’s heart isn’t exactly tough, it’s more principled…her father was a Party commissar. She takes after him regarding the interests of the state, even if the violation comes from her own flesh and blood…I don’t condemn her for it…And I told Katerina: It’s for the best…You made a mistake in terms of helping yourself to the people’s property; you have to atone for it…She understood…And we spilt our blood on the front for the interests of the state and the people’s property…So don’t you have any concerns, Sasha, about your mother being offended with you,” he said, turning to Sashenka now. “She loves you a lot and she’ll love your husband too…And accept my personal congratulations, too…” At this point he became totally confused and fell silent.
“What train is it?” August suddenly asked, moving away from Sashenka and getting up. “The Lvov train?”
“That’s the one,” said Uncle Fyodor.
“Then I have to hurry,” August said hastily, “to get ready and pay people…My things are in the hotel…”
After that everything happened quickly, feverishly, awkwardly. Sashenka started bustling too, rather mechanically, not thinking about anything apart from how to help her beloved, who was in such a hurry that he couldn’t get his arm into the sleeve of his greatcoat. She remembered that they ran to the hotel together, but whether it was still night as they did it or already getting light, and whether the full moon was blazing away with all its might or the timid celestial body was lost in a blizzard, and what other phenomena were agitating the sky—Sashenka paid no attention to all of that but, once she found herself on the platform at the station, she stopped and looked around, as if she had suddenly run into something with her chest. Her chest really was hurting, like after a hard bump, and all around her, in the sky, and on the railroad tracks, there was trepidation, lights glowed faintly, illuminating the sleepers; there was a smell of coal, and the clouds, the stars, and the moon—not full and round, but still quite massive—continuously created various, different freakish pictures, swapping places, disappearing and reappearing again, and each picture had its own meaning and order; Sashenka guessed that, but because each picture on the sky was so short-lived, it was impossible to grasp that order, and so everything seemed like haphazard chaos. And it was this imperfect vision that produced the sense of alarm growing stronger and stronger in Sashenka’s heart.
“Why don’t you look at me?” August asked. “Are you offended? Do you despise me?”
“I don’t want you to leave alone,” Sashenka said, “I want to go with you…”
“I’ll write to you,” August said, “and you’ll come to me as soon as the matter of my demobilization has been settled…I’ll go to university, and you’ll study too…”
The station was located in one of the surviving railroad buildings, which used to house the railroad technical college. Passengers with bundles and suitcases were now streaming out of it, attempting to occupy a convenient position on the platform in advance, in preparation for a difficult boarding, since the train had only a short waiting time. The previous station building, destroyed by bombs during an air raid in 1944, was now fenced off with barbed wire and lit up by floodlights on towers. The captured Romanians and convicts were working there. The convicts were already busily doing something in the ruins, but the Romanians had obviously only been brought recently, and they were still taking a roll call.
Uncle Fyodor ran to-and-fro along the platform with his wounded leg skidding on the slippery snow, trying to find out where exactly the prison car was attached—at the front or the back of the train—and in his hands he had a little sack of presents that he was hoping to hand on to Sashenka’s mother. He ran up to Sashenka and August several times, to pass on new and more precise information about the prison car, but every time, when he saw their strange, incomprehensible faces, his courage failed him and he walked off to one side.
A wind started blowing and tearing at the station trees, tousling the forest plantations in the distance beyond the lines, swirling the clouds, the stars, and the moon around the sky in a carousel, scattering the celestial pictures about. The sudden drop in atmospheric pressure, resulting from the thickening of the air in some layers of the atmosphere and its attenuation in others, frightened the passengers ahead of time, so that they started running to-and-fro with their bundles and suitcases ten minutes before the train’s arrival, striking people coming toward them dangerous blows—especially when the blow came from the corner of a plywood suitcase or a trunk bound with sheet metal. Uncle Fyodor had started running about even earlier, when nature was still relatively calm, because his aorta, weakened by his injury, had already sensed the approach of the squally snowstorm when it was still far distant. In fact, some others also sensed it, but the general mass of people only became agitated under the direct influence of the blizzard. The blizzard, however, had a strange effect on Sashenka and August. Sashenka moved close to August and looked up at him, her pupils moved upward and inward, closer to the bridge of her nose, as happens with the approach of sleep, or a fainting fit, or death, and her eyes were filled with awe combined with fear. She saw only her beloved’s head and the agitated heavens above it, and he seemed to be looking down at her from those agitated heavens.
“The train,” shouted Uncle Fyodor. “Your mother…she’s waving to you, Sashenka…Look…They’ve brought her…She’s here…” He choked and spluttered in his joy…
“My love,” Sashenka said to August, without looking back, although Uncle Fyodor was tugging at her, trying to make her notice her mother, who was calling to Sashenka over the heads of the escorts and straining to get to her. “You, my love forever…”
Uncle Fyodor, skidding and stumbling on his injured leg, ran over to get a look at Sashenka’s mother and tried to hand her the presents, since the prisoners were already being loaded into a tarpaulin-covered truck, but Sashenka’s mother, who had managed to squeeze into the final row and so had gained an extra minute or two, immediately dispatched Uncle Fyodor back to Sashenka, to tell her daughter to run over to the cordon of escorts and show her mother what she looked like and tell her in a couple of words how she was getting on, and if she couldn’t manage that, then at least to look around.
“Your mother asked,” Uncle Fyodor shouted, panting for breath from running and wincing at the pain in his injured leg, “your mother’s calling you…Or at least glance around…She misses you…”
However, Sashenka probably didn’t even hear him, and perhaps she didn’t even see him, for, as the physiologist Charles Bell said: “When feeling consumes us completely, external impressions no longer exist for us, we turn our eyes upward, making a movement that we have not learned and have not acquired.”
“Always only you…” Sashenka said joyfully.
“Yes,” said August, and his face sank down from the heavens onto Sashenka’s breast.
Beside the railroad cars, passengers grabbed and pummeled each other, temporarily transformed into the bitterest of enemies by the briefness of the train’s halt. They swarmed, trying to squeeze their bundles and bodies through to the front of the line, forgetting about the love of mankind, since the train had already sounded its whistle to depart, and the next train wouldn’t arrive for another twenty-four hours, which would be spent on the floor or on the benches at the station.
“I’ll write,” August shouted from the steps of the last car as it departed into the space illuminated by the low railroad lamps.
Uncle Fyodor carried on running from Sashenka, standing at the far end of the platform, to the mail sheds, beside which the prisoners were getting into the trucks; he wanted very badly to take a look at Katerina, to cheer her up, to pass on the presents if he could manage it, and to have the joy of her presence, standing close by and exchanging a word or two, because he had been pining badly without her; but the moment Fyodor appeared at the cordon, Katerina immediately heartlessly drove him back to her daughter, refusing to listen to anything and demanding that he bring her daughter back with him.
“Your mother’s asking,” Fyodor shouted, covered in perspiration, whistling as he breathed and feeling pain in his kidneys now—he had an old wound there, from 1941, that had been well patched up in a regular hospital and rarely bothered him, except when he was very tired and agitated.
“Come on, your mother’s feeling anxious,” Fyodor shouted. “You’ve seen your husband off now…What else…They’ll take your mother away…Maybe they’ll only keep her here for the night…I heard they’re sending her to the next region…Not to the district center, but to the next region…Well, look at her at least…She’s your mother, after all…”
But Sashenka didn’t look back to where her mother, standing in the rumbling truck, was straining toward her, but at the snow-covered tracks, where Sashenka’s beloved had been lost to view amid the low railroad track lights…
Five minutes had already gone by, the train had obviously already crossed the bridge, and beyond the bridge a long climb began; the trains always moved slowly and heavily there, rounding the city in a wide arc, and if her beloved was standing at the window, then by the light of the moon anyone who was now walking along Zagrebelnaya Street, which ran right up close to the railroad embankment, could easily see his face; and from the Zagrebelnaya hill beside the little church it was quite possible to see him for a long, long time, and, if it was a sunny day, for even longer, until the engine rounded the hill and pulled the entire train into the tunnel beside the Raiki Forest.
Meanwhile, life on the platform was settling down. Those who had not managed to squeeze into the cars had gone away, dragging the bundles and suitcases that were heavier now, jostling and hurrying as before in order to grab the benches in the station and not spend a day lying on the floor.
“They took your mother away,” Fyodor said quietly. His face was weary and pained. “I didn’t manage to give her the presents after all, it was too awkward…and she needed them, from the look of things, oh she really needed some nourishment…There’s a kilogram of fatback here, and dried plums, you can easily drink hot water with them, instead of candy or sugar…And did you settle things with your husband? Will you go to him, then?”
“We haven’t decided yet,” Sashenka replied, smiling pensively, because it was pleasant to talk about her beloved. “He’s going to write to me…If he’s demobilized, we’ll move to a big city, maybe to Moscow, because August needs to carry on with his studies…He wants me to study too, but I’ll get a job for the time being; after all, we have to have clothes, and food, and they’ll probably give me a place to live at the factory…I just have to master a good trade. I’d like to learn to be a seamstress, work my time at the factory, and then work in the quiet at home…And earn lots of money; people are really short of decent clothes now.”
Sashenka explained all of this in thorough detail, and speaking the words gave her a good, calm feeling.
“Your mother will help,” said Fyodor. “And I’ll help too…After all, we’re almost family. I’ll get a job at the Chemapparat factory…They won’t give your mother much time—the widow of a frontline veteran. I had a talk with the general…She’ll be back home by autumn…So, if you have a child, of course, things will be a bit more difficult…But don’t you hang back, we’ll get by all right, we’ll survive…”
He put his arm round Sashenka’s shoulders and they set off from the station along the hard-trampled, slippery road. And while they walked together like that, all the way through the frozen city, they had time to forgive each other in their hearts for all the bad things, both the old ones and the not so old, and even to become friends.
What happens to people, why they act one way and not another toward someone else, is still hard to understand after all, no matter how well it might all have been studied, how primitively easy it is to explain and how thoroughly the answer has been learned. There is always a little “but” about liking and disliking, running throughout that infinitely unclear world that is called human relationships, in a world full of fleeting mirages and chain reactions, in a world where living organs—blood, lymph, nerve fibers, seminal fluid, bile—interact in a mysterious sequence with the phenomena of the earth’s magnetism, the sun’s emanations, and the phases of the moon. The human ocean is the most amazing, fathomless, and unknowable. Some assert that this is precisely what Job was writing about in his book, in exhorting people not to be deluded by the simplicity that is perceptible to the naked eye, and exhorting them never to cease feeling amazement at the mysteries of existence. And there are three main mysteries of existence. The greatest mystery of the universe is life. The greatest mystery of life is man. The greatest mystery of man is creativity. And on this matter the very greatest wisdom, the most accessible to the human soul has been spoken: “Mark me, and be astonished, and lay your hand upon your mouth” (Job 21:5).
