In late September, Sashenka gave birth to a little girl. Sashenka’s mother had returned from imprisonment long before then; she had been sentenced to six months, but the sentence had been commuted because she was pregnant. She had given birth in summer, three months before Sashenka, and also had a little girl. Olga had also given birth, in March, and her daughter was already sitting up and crawling about, and she could give a painful pinch. Sashenka and Oksanka lived in the small room, and Sashenka’s mother and Fyodor and Sashenka’s sister Verochka lived in the dining room. Vasya and Olga were back in the kitchen, but now they had cordoned off a rather large area for themselves, and not with a screen, but with a brick partition that they had hired workers to build, so that in place of a spacious kitchen, a small room had been formed, with a narrow passage, barely large enough for the stove to fit into. Nadenka, Olga’s daughter, was big for her age, she still didn’t know how to ask for the potty, so she always had a sour smell, but she had realized exceptionally early that those who eat are the ones who live and grow strong, and no matter who sat down at the table and no matter what they ate—lenten gruel made of rye flour; or soup made of fodder beets; or potatoes in their jackets, improved with yellowish, poor-quality fat that caused heartburn—no matter what they ate, Nadenka reached out her hand with the same rapturous delight toward the steam billowing out of the saucepan, and it wasn’t even possible to say that she was begging, it was simply that she was delighted by the sight and smell of food, as other children are delighted by a rattle. One day Vasya, who now worked in a carpentry workshop and earned quite good money, allowed Nadenka to lick a piece of fatback. Nadenka went into such raptures that Olga wrapped the piece of fatback in a clean piece of cloth that was folded over double, tied it on a string, so that Nadenka wouldn’t swallow it, and gave it to her to suck on, like a soother, until Katerina saw it and gave Olga a good piece of her mind for doing that.
Olga and Vasya sat there, large and good-natured, in their little room carved out of the kitchen, loving each other without any words or explanations, with nothing but caresses, and Nadenka, with Vasya’s meek eyes, crawled about on Olga’s knees, releasing bubbles from her little mouth and bumping into Olga’s protruding stomach, because Olga was pregnant again.
Sashenka’s sister Verochka had only been walking for three months, but she also reiterated in some ways the people who had given her life. She liked to laugh, and when she did, tiny little dimples appeared on her cheeks, as they did on Katerina’s, but when she did something bad—for instance, threw a cup off the table or when she once pee-peed straight into her father Fyodor’s face, with a pure, childish little squirt, not yellow, but white, like warm water, not yet saturated with acrid salts of uric acid—when she pee-peed on her father, she knitted her brows and wrinkled up her little forehead so sincerely that one could sense her absolute repentance and honest, but not stupid, good-heartedness. Fyodor laughed, wiped his wet lips and said:
“What does she eat…Her waste output is still as pure as tears.”
Sashenka called her daughter after her late grandma Oksana. At first, she wouldn’t let anyone else near her and always changed her daughter’s diapers and bathed her herself. Sashenka wouldn’t even let her own mother take Oksana, and when Katerina did take her, because Sashenka hadn’t always put the child’s nappy on the right way and she was crying and jerking her head - when Sashenka’s mother did take the child, Sashenka felt terribly anxious and hovered around them, like a cat whose kitten has been taken from her. Oksanka’s eyes were tiny, and so were her little fingers, and her little hands, and her little snub nose, but Oksana’s irises were huge and blue, taking up all of the eyeball, completely grown-up, restless and nervous like her father’s, and at the same time curious, not merely looking, but examining. Now Sashenka loved the nights when she could be alone with Oksanka and no one threatened their seclusion. If the little girl woke up and jerked her head anxiously, getting ready to cry, Sashenka carefully jingled grandma Oksana’s old necklace of Turkish and Polish coins above her, and the granddaughter of the dentist Leopold Lvovich, killed by a blow from a brick to the back of his head, stared with her big, strong, quite un-babylike eyes at this Cossack trophy, her great-grandmother’s coin necklace, as if she was guessing at some secret meaning and contradiction in it and was exhausted by a level of concentration that was still beyond her.
“Oh, loolay, loolay, loolay,” Sashenka sang, “Nothing for the other people’s children, but bread rings for Oksanochka, so she can sleep at night. When daddy writes, we’ll go to Moscow…He’s going to study at the university…And you’ll grow up…You’ll wear little marquisette blouses, and little lisle thread stockings on your legs…And your mummy will get old…”
The tears flowed down Sashenka’s cheeks, but her heart was filled with a gratifying, sweet yearning that was reminiscent in some ways of her old yearning as a girl, only this yearning was calm and gentle, without any audacity, hate, or rebellion. Especially when there were warm autumn nights with train whistles, with a brief rustling of rain, greenish flashes of light from some unknown source in the distance and an immense sky, not like September, but more like August, so alive, so diamond-bright, so infinitely varied, that it was simply impossible to believe that all this was indifferent and blind toward her and the life around her.
One day Fyodor called into the military commissariat, to which he had already written an inquiry on his own initiative, and when he came back he took a long time trying to gather his strength, avoiding answering questions directly, and then he couldn’t hold out any longer and in the middle of the night, lying in bed on the linen sheets that had been intended for Sashenka’s dowry, although now, thanks to Olga, they had become simple household items and were already washed out, lying there on those sheets with his arms around Sashenka’s mother, he spoke into her ear, telling her that the military commissariat had answered vaguely about the lieutenant, in indefinite hints.
“Who can tell,” Fyodor said with a sigh, “even in peacetime these airmen get knocked off like flies…”
Fortunately, Sashenka didn’t hear this conversation, since it was held in very low voices; of course, she heard her mother start sobbing on the other side of the wall, but since her time in prison Sashenka’s mother sobbed quite often; she had become exceptionally weepy, and often cried, not over some serious matter, when tears are a soothing solace to the soul, but over any petty nonsense, and Sashenka took no notice. She rocked Oksanka, and lifted her own head up from time to time, staring out the night-dark window and thinking her own thoughts…
One sultry autumn day, Sashenka was walking along the avenue with Oksanka. It was the drought-ridden, hungry autumn of 1946, which followed a hot summer with a failed harvest. The temperature was higher than any of the old folk could remember at that time of year, and this was obviously connected with the atmospheric phenomena that had been agitating nature all year long. Exceptionally severe famine had broken out, especially in regions far from the center, and in a number of cases it had even surpassed the hunger of wartime; in addition the strength engendered by hopes of the enemy’s imminent rout and a happy, peacetime life, had been exhausted now, the stamina of people’s bodies had been reduced, and the death rate had risen to an extraordinary level. War invalids, whose bodies had been shot to pieces at the front, were dying; chronically ill people, whose bleeding ulcers, tuberculosis, and other disease processes, temporarily suppressed by powerful emotions, had become more acute after the five-year break and started taking their revenge, were dying; children, their living organisms deprived of essential vitamins and their bones, deprived of phosphorus, as brittle as old men’s, were dying; widows, who had shattered their endurance with unwomanly labor and womanly grief, were dying; and also, as they did at all times, old people were dying, and they were pitied least of all, except by their very nearest and dearest, for there was at least something decent and natural about their deaths.
The muscles that raise the shoulders are sometime referred to by anatomists as “the endurance muscles.” In many people these muscles are exceptionally well developed, but unlike mythical Atlantes, supporting the sky on their shoulders, in people these muscles require nourishment from fresh, rich blood, full of digested vitamins, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, derived from food, and the nerve fibers of these muscles also possess reserves of strength, which, though substantial, are not inexhaustible. And the moment comes when the endurance muscles stop functioning, the shoulders slump, the spine curves, and the heart starts working irregularly. It can be hard to recognize a person like that, and so, when three people—two men and a woman—overtook Sashenka on the avenue, and one of the men called her by name, Sashenka looked at him in amazement. But in fact he was Professor Pavel Danilovich, the former prisoner, who had been released thanks to a petition from a certain Moscow celebrity, and thanks to the honesty of the orderly, who was now deceased, having been killed that spring by bandits in the Raiki forest, and also thanks to the good-heartedness of the colonel, the head of the local security forces, to whom the orderly had presented the petition. And so, as a consequence of these three factors, Pavel Danilovich was now at liberty. However, to judge from their appearance, Pavel Danilovich and his wife were living at the extreme stage of poverty, having sold off all their property and items of value during his imprisonment. Pavel Danilovich was scruffy, louse-ridden, unshaved and also, for some reason, on crutches; his right leg was a swollen log, sealed into gray, badly soiled plaster. His wife had somehow lengthened out and would no longer have dared to flirt with the deceased orderly, for every woman knows her own value, and her value at the moment was the very lowest, with her dusty, mouse-gray, plain wool dress, which robbed her of her final strength in this heat, and her breasts that no longer stood out firm and pointed, but drooped like empty army ration bags. This pitiful appearance was completed by a skinny mesh shopping bag, which did, however, have a bunch of green onions protruding from it, although the stems had wilted and buckled, and the heads were not slim and supple as they would be in spring, but swollen and flabby to match the autumn season.
That is how quickly a woman’s appearance is affected by external events, nutrition, and her inner, intimate life. The impoverished couple were accompanied by a youth with a skinny neck and inflamed eyes. The youth’s hollow chest, afflicted by sicknesses since his childhood, could easily have provoked revulsion, even loathing, and perhaps it did provoke them in certain physically healthy tillers of the land, with rounded chests, inflated by the air of the fields and the forests, and muscles acquired from agricultural labor and natural selection. That was probably why Sashenka could sense that the professor’s wife, despite her present appearance, instinctively took a very dim view of the youth and only tolerated him as yet another of her husband’s whims, for she came from a line of hereditary tillers of the land, in which all the men were two meters tall and could smash a plank with a blow of their fist. And the youth had a rather strange name too—Liusik.
“Liusik,” Pavel Danilovich shouted, clearly delighted at this meeting, “remember, I told you about a student…He and I became acquainted in strange and tragic circumstances…A highly interesting individual…Yes…He made highly interesting observations concerning the problems of the biblical number…Concerning the mystery of the biblical limit…This is his wife…I have been looking for you,” he said, turning toward Sashenka. “It’s awkward to call into your home, but I was hoping to meet you…”
“Quiet,” Sashenka said angrily, “you’ll wake the child…”
“I beg your pardon,” Pavel Danilovich said almost in a whisper, embarrassed. “Is this his son?”
“His daughter,” said Sashenka, really angry now, moving back and shielding Oksanka with her body, as if afraid that such dirty, unpleasant people would do something bad to her daughter.
“I would like to have a talk with you,” said the professor.
“I don’t have any time,” Sashenka replied impatiently, “I have to feed the child soon…And in any case what’s the point of these conversations…”
“It concerns your husband,” said the professor.
“Do you know something?” Sashenka shrieked, and her heart started pounding heavily.
“Not here,” said the professor. “We live not far away…Let’s go, it won’t take long…”
The professor really did live not far away. The room was rather spacious and sunny, although it was almost empty and extremely neglected. There was a rather fine mahogany table with mismatched legs, an egg-shaped mirror hanging on the wall, and two iron bedsteads, sloppily made up. And piles of books on the floor. The books were the only thing in which there was any sense of order; the piles were arranged neatly in a chessboard pattern, and an oilcloth, obviously removed from the table, had been laid out under them.
“Would you like some tea?” the professor asked, “Liusik, warm up the tea….”
Liusik, who kept well away from Sashenka and was obviously afraid of her and blushed when he accidentally met her gaze - Liusik was the one who took the kettle and went out.
“Your husband left me his notebook,” the professor said, “his notes…Or rather, until recently my wife kept them…But when I returned, I familiarized myself…Interesting, extremely interesting…But there’s a lot I don’t understand…Do you happen to have anything else…Possibly it could cast light…”
“No,” said Sashenka, perplexed, “I don’t know anything. He didn’t tell me…We didn’t have time…And I’ve never heard about that notebook before…”
“An interesting notebook, a darling notebook,” said Professor Danilovich, stroking the calico cover in jubilation, like a child with a toy. “Liusik quite independently…There’s something similar…In his work…Or rather, they complement each other…And that’s what…”
“Your Liusik’s insane,” his wife shouted angrily, “he’s a cybernetician…And it says in every textbook, every child knows, that cybernetics is a bourgeois pseudoscience…”
“Now, who told you that he’s a cybernetician?” the professor said peaceably, refusing to be provoked into a quarrel. “The little kitten isn’t a cybernetician; he attempts, from the absolutely real positions of dialectical materialism, to employ vector algebra as an instrument for analyzing the laws of history…A mathematical analysis of the quantity and direction of events in history.”
“It’s all Liusik,” the professor’s wife shouted, almost crying, turning to Sashenka and suddenly looking for support from her, “he’s a cybernetician, I can definitely sense it…You can’t fool me…And this gray-haired man isn’t ashamed to consort with him…With this madman…Or perhaps he’s a cunning fraudster…He’s not ashamed…A well-known scholar, the hope of literary scholarship, the translator of Lord Byron…I sacrificed everything for him…I was well provided for, my husband was a Soviet functionary…He loved me, he would have done anything for me…But I believed him.”
She reached out her hand toward Pavel Danilovich, who sat there with his face wrinkled up, as if he had eaten something sour, since he was afraid that the scene and his wife’s tears would go on for a long time, and that would prevent him from concentrating, and meanwhile something new, which had been striving to break out for a long time, but had so far remained elusive, was now stirring in his brain.
“I believed him,” the professor’s wife shouted, breaking into floods of tears, “I considered it my duty to save him for Russia, for the future…And he’s taken up with a cybernetician who is alien to our values, who is quite simply physically incapable of understanding our people or its aspirations…”
She stopped talking, because Liusik had brought the kettle.
“It would be good to have wine,” the professor said. “Days like today should be celebrated with wine…Today is not just any day…”—Pavel Danilovich turned toward Sashenka—“…a long chain of deliberations and calculations has been terminated…A result has been achieved…Naturally, only a preliminary result as yet…Yes, a result is like an abyss…Herein lies the price of every discovery, every achievement…The road leads no further…Wait, the Lord says to the victims in the Bible, until your number shall become such that my tolerance of the executioners shall be exhausted…Yes, I don’t remember the Biblical text precisely now…This number will be reached in 1979…That is precisely the number and the date that is spoken of in the Bible…The date from which a new history shall begin…”
“I cannot agree with you,” said Liusik, setting the kettle on a metal stand, “even though we have worked together. That conclusion is too hasty, and the result is contingent. Certainly, it is elegant and beguiling in its definiteness, but I have no doubt that you have committed elementary mathematical errors…That happens even with great mathematicians…”
“That’s Yurkievich,” Pavel Danilovich shouted angrily. “I’m sure you’ve been associating with that crackpot old dotard again…”
“Sigmund Antonovich taught me to love mathematics,” said Liusik.
“But he’s an anti-Semite,” Pavel Danilovich shouted. “How can you associate with that individual…For shame, for shame…”
“Ah, Pavel Danilovich,” said Liusik, sitting down and pensively resting his chin on his hand, “there are places, apart from the iron ore mines, where even housewives suffer from silicosis…Koch’s tubercle bacillus infiltrates the organism independently of the individual, and in some localities the process is ongoing in every individual…Sometimes unperceived even by him…It is not the individual who must be restored to health, but the locality…I’ve thought about this a lot…And in a healthy locality, healthy children will be born, who will not be in danger of becoming infected…Therefore, I will not take the hand of a Czech, Frenchman, Englishman, Belgian or Dane, for example, if I observe in him even the slightest indications of anti-Semitism…A different locality, a different climate, the demands on him are different…But I can quite well be friends with a Pole, for instance, even if this ‘Koch bacillus’ is present in him, and even if he regards it affectionately, provided, of course, that he does not overstep a certain line…”
“You’re a difficult man, Liusik,” Pavel Danilovich said, “a terrible man, but it’s a pity that you didn’t know this student…A pity that you and he will probably never meet in this world…”
“He’s alive,” Sashenka shouted in a strangled voice that made Oksanka wake up and start crying. “You’re lying, lying…You’re the one who’s mad…”
“Yes,” the professor said absentmindedly, “actually, I imagined it to myself…Don’t you worry…I have an imagination, and dreams…For instance, I dreamed that I would die at forty seven…On March seventh…Even the date…And in a prison infirmary, moreover…That dream is actually quite optimistic…Two and a half years of life still ahead of me…”
“You shouldn’t have been let out of jail,” Sashenka shouted. The tears were streaming down her face, and Oksanka couldn’t calm down either.
The professor and his wife whispered together, while Liusik stood beside the mirror, facing the wall, and his ears and neck were red from embarrassment and confusion.
“I’m going,” Sashenka said. Her heart was hurting, aching from the suffering inflicted on it in this house, suffering that had affrighted her very soul, for in any case she already thought about her beloved the whole night long, pining for him, dreaming of his clumsy kisses and wanting to show him his daughter. And now, after what the professor had said, for the first time during their separation, she had suddenly thought that her beloved might die, and recalled the way he had lain on that terrible night, with his arm bent, pressing his iron hand to his temple. Sashenka couldn’t forgive these people for all this.
“I’m going,” Sashenka said bitterly. “All of you here are enemies of the people…You said anti-Soviet things here…You think I’m a little fool and I don’t understand…My father died for the motherland…And here you…You bastards…You’ve got lice creeping about over there…Creeping across the pillow.” She took particular satisfaction in saying that, because she saw the professor’s wife blush…
There really was a gray clothes louse creeping across the pillow, cutting across it diagonally, and Sashenka felt better, even though her heart still hurt as badly as ever; she pushed the door with her foot, darted out onto the landing and loitered for a moment, listening to the professor’s wife shouting.
“That’s your Liusik,” the professor’s wife shouted. “I’ll tell him so to his face…He’s dirty, he smells…We’ve never had any parasites…He scratches himself at the table…I don’t want him to come here…It’s either him or me.”
The professor’s wife broke into hysterical sobbing, and Sashenka walked down the stairs and out into the street.
Before Sashenka had even reached the end of the side street, the professor’s wife overtook her. The professor’s wife was wearing a man’s jacket, thrown on over her robe, and very beautiful house slippers trimmed with fur, the only things that maintained her respectable appearance, serving as a reminder of her former well-provided life.
“Bear in mind that all his comments, his notes, his papers, I’ll destroy them all…He’s mistaken, but he’s not an enemy of the people…He’s muddleheaded…And three of my brothers were killed in this war, and my father in the civil war…So there now…And if you notify the security forces. Distorting the situation…Then your husband will be held accountable…All his notes are up there…Don’t you think I won’t say anything…So there now…”
She turned around and set off back home at a trot, and Sashenka walked on. Sasha’s heart was sad and troubled, but Oksanka started wiggling her eyebrows strangely and wrinkling up her nose, and then she sneezed and sighed exactly like a grown-up, so that Sashenka laughed and pressed her daughter’s sweet-smelling little face against her own.
At home, everything was in a jolly mess; they were bathing the little girls. Since three families lived here and that created a crush in the little scrap of space that was left of the kitchen, Sashenka’s mother Katerina had suggested bathing all the children together, on the same day, in order not to obstruct the stove all the time. On her way back, Sashenka had already noticed that the windows in the three-story house on the corner were bright with electricity. That meant they had electricity too, since they were on the same line as that house. And the electric light really was on, and the kerosene lamps were standing there extinguished and unnecessary, looking comical. Every time they were given power for one or two days a week, it lifted Sasha’s mood, although it might seem like such a little thing, but even so, it made everything different, and she could believe that soon her life would become really good, and a letter would arrive from August, who hadn’t been able to write sooner for military reasons, but Sashenka never allowed herself to think of what would happen after that, because after that things could become so good that her heart would have started aching from the joy of it, the tears would have come pouring down and her temples would have clenched up tight. That was why Sashenka always thought only as far as the letter, and after that she simply felt glad and was affectionate with everyone, trying to oblige her mother, and Olga, and Fyodor, and even Vasya, who still had a bad chest, but his condition seemed to be improving, and during the day he coughed less often, since he drank the potion recommended by the woman in the choir.
Now the apartment illuminated with electricity was filled with a calm, merry peace. Little Nadya and little Vera, already bathed and swaddled in fluffy towels, were sitting side by side on the sofa, pink and warm, smelling delicious, looking extremely like each other today, even more than they looked like their parents.
“Get Oksana undressed quickly,” said Sashenka’s mother. “They suddenly put on the power, that’s why we decided to make today bath day…”
Bathed and steamed, Oksanka also turned pink and started looking a bit like little Nadya and Vera, as if they were her sisters.
They organized a joint supper. Fyodor opened a jar of stewed pork that was left over from the abundance of winter, Sashenka’s mother made lots of rye-flour pancakes, and Olga set on the table a bowl of hard dumplings, stale doughnuts and poppyseed crumpets of various different shapes and sorts. Although Vasya earned quite good money, clothes and shoes still had to be bought, and little Nadya had to be fed, and now Olga couldn’t go out to do work by the day, whitewashing walls and washing floors, because she was pregnant, and so every Sunday she went to the church porch and they gave her quite a lot, for she took little Nadya with her, and she had a big stomach, since she was preparing to give birth again. All this softened people’s hearts, especially the peasant women’s, and so Olga could even afford to keep some of the alms she received as a reserve, and now she set out part of that reserve on the common table. When everyone was seated at the table, Fyodor suddenly started fidgeting, whispered something to Katerina, jumped up and walked out, but very quickly returned with a bottle of murky moonshine; he obviously hadn’t gone very far, only to Franya’s little room under the stairs. Everyone drank, even Sashenka took just a tiny sip, and started feeling very jolly, she wanted to kiss everyone and cry. Her mother actually hugged her, gave her a kiss and suddenly said:
“Forgive me, Sashenka, forgive me, my daughter, that things are so cheerless for you in this world…”
There was a slight commotion at the table, but all three little girls, well steamed and calm after their baths, carried on sleeping side by side on the sofa, without hearing the commotion, building up their strength for their future, exhausting lives.
“All right,” said Fyodor, “crying’s the last thing we want at a moment like this…I want to tell you this story…During a bombing raid one night I spent the whole night sheltering behind something or other, and when it got light, I realized that I’d been sheltering from the shrapnel behind a wooden trellis, overgrown with Virginia creeper, but I didn’t know that during the night, so I was calm, and perhaps I was saved by not running across open ground in search of cover…”
He wrinkled up his forehead for a moment, perhaps wishing to draw conclusions of some kind from this story told out of context, but he wasn’t able to add anything, and only laughed. But Vasya and Olga dozed off shoulder to shoulder, good-natured and big-boned, looking like brother and sister, and not missing a chance to cosset each other, even at the common table.
Meanwhile it was a superb evening, with no drop in pressure or red clouds with a ponderous sun setting into them, or any other unpleasant signs to be observed, everything in nature was gentle and lyrical, in halftones, there was no increase in the magnetic charge of the upper layers of the atmosphere affecting the blood vessels, or any of the various loud sounds that can set a sick heart fluttering. But even so, Professor Pavel Danilovich had suddenly died only half an hour earlier. And one couldn’t say that he had been particularly upset by the quarrel and the conversations; on the contrary, after Sashenka left, the quarrel had rapidly exhausted itself, and they had all sat down to drink tea with dry biscuits bought at competitive-market prices. True, Pavel Danilovich did have a bad habit that was harmful for the health, the habit of taking a book when he drank tea and sipping while he read. On this occasion, it was Spinoza, a thinker in whom materialism is diluted with an admixture of “theological blood.” The book had been read a great deal, it was frayed and tattered, and Pavel Danilovich had written in the margins in his own skittering, almost illegible handwriting.
“Cognition is a form of struggle for the biological stability of the human species,” Pavel Danilovich had written, “a form that replaces millions of years of evolutionary selection. In the evolutionary selection that is necessary for the existence of a species, it is the mass that participates, and the individual is a fleeting element. Cognition is the anchoring of the stability of the individual, hence the biological hatred of the depersonalized mass for the individual, insofar as the quality of the mass is reduced. Moreover, especial hatred is not aroused by external, scientific, cognition that is visible to the eye, from which it is possible to defend oneself by ignorance or indifference, but by the cognition of simple moral truths, an inner, fixed cognition, or rather, almost fixed, invisible to the eye, in which changes are not measured in years, centuries and millennia, but in civilizations, and against which there is no defense. We deny, Spinoza writes, that God could not do that which He does: in other words, Spinoza’s topic is predetermination. God is not free in his actions and is subject to strict rules…This extremely important definition concerns the perfection of God. All things accomplished by Him are so perfect that they could not be accomplished by Him more perfectly. Everything is necessary and predetermined, otherwise He would be inconstant, which would be a great imperfection…No one knows all the causes of things so that they can judge concerning them as to whether there is truly any disorder in nature.”
Further on in the margins, in Pavel Danilovich’s skittering hand: “The question of questions is whether the world is fortuitous, whether life is fortuitous, whether events are fortuitous, or everything conforms to laws, and, consequently, is predetermined. It seems to me that the law-governed will always encompass the fortuitous, forming a system, so to speak. Within the system, its own imperfect, fortuitous laws operate, but the entire system as a whole is perfect and its movement is predetermined, that is to say, the higher laws predominate over the entire system as a whole, but do not dominate its individual parts. And such is the arrangement for everything capable of movement. Within the system movement is fortuitous, external to it everything is strictly law-governed and moves in a predetermined direction. However, this predetermined direction is itself fortuitous from the viewpoint of a different, greater system, which includes in itself a multitude of such systems, moving in different, fortuitous directions, and this entire encompassing system as a whole moves in a fashion that is law-governed and predetermined, and cannot change its direction, which is equally fortuitous from the viewpoint of a still greater system…And so on to infinity. Human destinies, and the events associated with them, including both the most vast and the most commonplace, are subject to this same law. Movements are predetermined for each individual, but fortuitous from the viewpoint of a greater system. However, a thinking, living system is distinguished by the fact that it is capable of expanding the sphere of the fortuitous, of expanding, through the power of imagination, the cramped prison confines of perfection and conformity to laws, of delighting in the unknown, in whim and desire, of forgetting about predetermination and experiencing happiness, melancholy, hatred, honor, shame and greatness, no matter how comical these may be from the viewpoint of the great system. Hence Spinoza’s definition: ‘Honor and shame are not only useless, but fatal, they are based on vanity and the error that man is the cause of all things and therefore deserving of praise or censure’ is only true from the viewpoint of the highest system for the entire cycle of the development of mankind as a whole, but false for the internal stages of that cycle. Universal chaos is the mingling together of the fortuitous and the law-governed, and the question is: What is it that crowns the whole, that is ultimate in the incalculable sequence of countless systems called the universe?—and this will evidently never be comprehensible to a finite brain. To torment oneself over defining the true meaning of human life is preposterous, for in order to understand this, one has to cease being human, to move beyond the bounds of the system and lose oneself. For someone who has succeeded in doing this, in becoming nonhuman, this question ceases to have any meaning. It becomes petty, ludicrous, and unnecessary. Weakness and fortuitousness are valuable qualities of everything living, and man, in defiance of the absolutely essential reason and cognition that render life more secure and more impersonal, man will cling to this ability to feel that he is himself and is unique, distinct from everything and from those of his own kind. Perhaps our invented little earthly meaning of life consists precisely in that. For millions of years biological natural selection has been striving toward stability, simplicity, unification and law-governed consistency, and perhaps it coincides with the genuine meaning of life, a meaning that is non-earthly but known to man, while the invented, little, human meaning strives toward anarchy, toward unsociability, toward rebellion, toward dissimilitude, in order to maintain a taste for life, in order not to lose the appetite for life through small, comical, personal suffering and the pacification following this little suffering, which protects man like a screen from the big, non-earthly horror, making man become bogged down in his little suffering so that he only reaches the edge of the precipice at the end of his life. Woe to him who has attained unto non-earthly wisdom prematurely and has succeeded in rising above his suffering and laughing at it. Earthly suffering is like a blindfold on the eyes that protects man, concealing from him his brief instant and the great NOTHING that follows it.”
After reading these lines, Pavel Danilovich looked up and saw Liusik, who was dunking a dry biscuit in his tea. He half rose, about to say something, but suddenly burst into laughter. It was not hysterics, it was the healthy, full-blooded laughter of a man who had realized the reason for his failures and was delighting in the new life that should, accordingly, have come to him. However, Pavel Danilovich did not laugh for long, for he suddenly fell and lost consciousness. Since Pavel Danilovich had previously suffered a blockage (thrombosis) of the cerebral blood vessels, the professor’s wife was frightened, but not completely at a loss. She and Liusik quickly undressed the sick man, trying not to disturb the leg sealed in plaster, and put him to bed, as is essential in such cases, with his head slightly raised by thrusting three pillows under it. Liusik ran to the post office to call for an ambulance. The ambulance did not arrive immediately, but the doctor told the professor’s wife that this had not changed matters, since her husband had not suffered a simple thrombosis, but an acute hemorrhage, in other words, a cerebral stroke, and he had been dead for a long time. After that the doctor left and the professor’s wife pulled the two superfluous pillows out from under the deceased’s head, and the professor assumed a natural, calm pose, without a kink in his neck, but with his neck smoothly extended and the head, forever silenced now, lowered right down.
“Is it possible to feel with one’s hand this essential reality enclosed in the head under the skull?” the German philosopher Herder wrote. “The deity himself, say I, has covered it with a forest, a symbol of the sacred groves where mysteries were once consummated. I am gripped by a religious thrill at the thought of this shady mount, concealing within itself lightning bolts, each of which, emerging from chaos, is capable of illuminating, adorning or devastating the whole world.”
And now the professor’s gray-haired head rested motionless on the pillow, preserving in its cooling depths his final discoveries, which had not been recorded on paper in his skittering hand, but had flashed like bolts of lightning and laid waste his blood vessels. There was life only on the professor’s lips: curled sarcastically, they mocked at mysticism, idealism, and the prophetic dreams that had foretold two more years of life for the professor and death in a prison hospital.
The grief of the professor’s wife was so great that she did not scream or cry, and made very few movements in general; as people who do not understand physiological processes sometimes say, her heart had turned to stone.
If the bodily pain is not excessive or completely absent, but the mental pain is great, this leads to depression. In anticipation of suffering a person experiences anxiety, but if there is no hope, then that anxiety develops into despair. And indeed, the blood circulation of the professor’s wife slowed, her face turned pale, her muscles became feeble, her eyelids sank lower, her head sank down onto her constricted breast, her lips, cheeks, and lower jaw sagged under their own weight, her eyes became dull and were frequently moistened by tears, her eyebrows assumed an inclined position, and the corners of her mouth turned downward.
The professor’s wife sat on a chair by Pavel Danilovich’s head, but Liusik sat at the feet of the deceased, and now his face was the same as the face of the professor’s wife, who did not like him. Certainly, since Liusik’s organism was younger and less experienced, every now and then he made an effort at active self-expression, which manifested itself in sighs so deep that they induced spasms of the muscles of respiration and a hard lump stirred in his throat, his eyes and the wings of his nose twitched spasmodically, and the folds on his forehead crept upward, and this fractured the line of his eyebrows, as always occurs during deep, honest suffering. It is no accident that anatomists sometimes refer to this complex of muscles as “the muscles of grief.”
Liusik and the professor’s wife sat like this all night long by the light of a candle, having draped sheets over the mirror and switched off the lights, which had suddenly flashed on and actually frightened them at first. The two of them also spoke to each other frugally, only when necessary, as they saw Pavel Danilovich off on his final journey on a jolting municipal services cart. A certain confusion arose in this connection: the professor’s wife insisted that before her husband was put in the coffin, the plaster must be removed from his bad leg. But this only took place in the early evening of the following day. However, while the night of rare beauty continued, full-mooned, starry and windless, it agitated those whose hearts were free, it was a sweet night for caresses, good for the conception of large, heavy infants.
For the first time in many months, Sashenka fell asleep calmly on that night, beside Oksanka, who was sleeping, pink from her bath; and for the first time, Sashenka dreamed calmly and clearly of her beloved. Everything was good for them and everything was the same as it had been then: sweet torture, blissful torment, in which her strength gratifyingly dissolved away, joyful moans burst forth from her chest and, at the last, there came the disappearance, the fusion, the drunken challenge to destiny, which had divided them into two separate lives. And then came calm, weariness, and deep, sound sleep. The second half of the night arrived and everything all around also began sinking into impetuous, irresistible sleep, and those whose hearts were downcast slept sitting, with their eyes open, and were lost to themselves until the first sounds of morning. But the night kept growing lovelier, and the moment came when its beauty began to inspire terror. Countless swarms of stars teemed, the brightest of them blazed with unbearable brightness, and those that were concealed in cosmic darkness began gradually showing through, assuming form, and there was no end to them. And the moon took on a savagely blinding appearance, unlike its every-night one.
Terror differs from fear in that a large part is played in it by poetic imagination. This is why terror is also akin to beauty. Precisely such a beautiful night is described by the biblical Job in his fourth book: “In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up: it stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof: an image was before mine eyes, there was silence, and I heard a voice, saying: Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall a man be more pure than his maker?”
But everything living slept on that night, and this vision, with no human eyes to behold it, dissolved away uselessly and without trace before the dawn. Only the unfortunate Job, the most keen-eyed among men, was awake on an exactly similar night two thousand years before. Incidentally, a leading specialist in the area of geotectonics, the German scientist Stille, asserted that our planet’s prolonged period of tectonic calm was coming to an end, and he did not exclude the danger of the earth’s crust fracturing, as occurred at the end of the Cambrian geological period. In this regard attempts, admittedly tentative and now forgotten, were made to use this geotectonic hypothesis to explain the ludicrously barbarous and bloody history of mankind. We know, for instance, of one attempt made, not by a philosopher or a geophysicist, but by a failed writer, a Jew who adopted the Lutheran faith and died at the age of twenty-five. Turmoil, travails, wars, instability, the triumph of ignorance, the blood of innocent victims, the groans of the weak, provoking in response only the voluptuous laughter of the butchers—he attempts to explain all this by the reflection, admittedly in vague and complex terms, that is experienced, without their being aware of it, by living things—the reflection of those catastrophic processes, which, according to Stille, threaten to break open the earth’s crust. Naturally, one should not give any weight to extreme forms such as this, since even if the utmost effort has been made to be objective and all-encompassing, they must be regarded with great caution. At the same time, however, it should be noted that many authoritative materialists regard Stille’s works with great respect: once they are liberated from their cataclysmic husk, there is much that is just and true to be found in the ideas embedded in them. Indeed, the end of the Cambrian period, when there were massive cataclysms, when eruptions occurred, mountains were built, new continents were formed, oceans evaporated, lava and magma fell as rain, destroying all living things, and the Neogene Quaternary period, in which modern man lives, represent the most important revolutionary eras in the development of our planet.
A mosquito born in July is in no danger from the snowy blizzards and hard frosts of December of the same year, and likewise man is in no danger from Stille’s geotectonic cataclysms, although they could possibly occur during our Quaternary period. According to the mathematical law of the similarity of systems, in which the law-governed encompasses the fortuitous, life will quite naturally be extinguished long before the ambient environmental conditions cease to be suitable for it. Nonetheless, unlike the mosquito, man subconsciously senses the breath of these cataclysms with his intellect and his imagination, he worries, becomes agitated and feels frightened by a danger that is nonexistent for him. Perhaps it is in order to kill the apocalyptic fear flowing in his blood of the death of the planet, which holds no danger for man, that man aspires so absurdly to an artificial death. Psychologists have determined that many suicides are panic-struck and terrified by their inescapable future death, and so they kill themselves to kill the fear.
“Oh, loolay-loolay-loolay,” Sashenka whispered quietly, because Oksana had tumbled away from her mother’s side and started cooing anxiously: “Oh, loolay-loolay-loolay, nothing for the other people’s children, but bread rings for Oksanochka, so she will sleep at night.”
A naive, unpretentious, human dawn was beginning, and God’s agonizingly wise, soul-crucifying night was ending.
1967