VASILY VASILYEVICH had been wandering about the apartment for a whole hour, peering under tables and divans, turning on the lights everywhere—a lazy dusk had already fallen over the city—yet all his investigations had proved fruitless. He had made several tours of all the rooms, rummaging around in the divans and armchairs and poking his hand into their plush recesses, all dust and velvet, where he found scraps of paper, safety pins and the king of spades, which had fallen out of a deck of cards; what he was looking for, however, was nowhere to be seen. Undismayed, he once again set about his explorations; he was about to climb up onto the sideboard, having repositioned the armchair next to it, when suddenly he espied the black corner of his copybook poking out from under a milk-white vase standing on a small end table. He pulled the book towards him. The table shook, but the book remained firmly in place. He gave a sharp tug and then, comically toppling over, both the table and the vase came toppling down, the latter loudly hitting the parquet and shattering into little white pieces that scattered across the floor. Vasily Vasilyevich froze, breath held, listening to the silence, which was all the more surprising after such a resounding crash. It was almost completely dark; the navy-blue divan seemed black, the clock face showed a hazy yellow and the disc of the tail-like pendulum glinted dimly; on the other side of the window—still, like in a painting—were dark trees. Then, a few seconds later, the street lamps lit up and their pale radiance permeated the apartment, illuminating the table on the floor, the milky shards of glass and Vasily Vasilyevich himself, the newly uncovered copybook finally in his grasp. Vasily Vasilyevich was dressed in long breeches and a sailor’s jacket. He stood there as though bewitched, his big, deep-blue eyes wide open, staring at the white, motionless debris on the floor. A long time seemed to pass before the unhurried approach of footsteps could be heard, the light came on, and a voice from the doorway said:
“What have you broken, Vasily Vasilyevich?”
Only then did Vasily Vasilyevich begin to cry, covering his face and understanding the irreparability of what he had done.
“Why ever did you touch it?”
Sobbing and incoherent with despair, Vasily Vasilyevich tried to explain that he had been searching for his copybook, that his father that morning had drawn in it a wonderful little demon for him, that the book had been under the vase, that he had tugged at it, and then the vase had accidentally fallen.
“It’s all right,” said his mother. “Now help me to clear up the shards. Just be careful not to cut yourself.”
“Are they sharp?” asked Vasily Vasilyevich.
“Very sharp.”
“But the vase wasn’t sharp.”
“But Vasily Vasilyevich was a very silly boy.”
“Was not,” said Vasily Vasilyevich.
At first there was just an armchair with a firm, well-sprung seat; then flashed a face of a cinematic beauty; next came a memory of the taste of the water in the bathhouse and the marinated fish that Natasha had prepared the previous day; then two lines from an old letter she had received: My faith in you knows no bounds, and I hope that while I live there may be nothing to shake this belief. Now, these lines related to something that mustn’t be thought about, something that had effectively ceased to exist. Thought was to be devoted now to other things, to Italian exhibitions, to art and sculpture; however, none of those wielded its usual persuasiveness or weight any longer. And while they did not quite vanish, still, they failed wholly to engulf the attention; they became tiresome and meaningless, like the classroom exercises of yesteryear. The effort required to avoid thinking about something that has very nearly ceased to exist was akin to a physical strain reaching its limit, when the muscles ache and there is a pounding at the temples, and you want to give it all up and end it. In any case, it was unnecessary and to no avail, for life until then had been joyful, successful and proper, just like a classical schema of some abstract theory, flawless in its execution. Life had been composed—till very recently—of a great succession of sensations, memories and concerns, each of which had been a continuation of that same happy principal that was now lost in time and located somewhere far off in the past, perhaps in childhood, on the seashore. Those beginnings had grown richer, more complex, more profound—with time—and more (it seemed) certain; beyond them was just an insignificant external world, almost unreal and powerless over what constituted the very essence of life. But around eight years prior to this, a spectre of doubt had surfaced and then vanished, a stray feeling of inexplicable emptiness, as if, despite all this, something was still missing—but then Vasily Vasilyevich came along, and there could no longer be any misgivings that everything had been settled once and for all in the best and most agreeable manner possible. The days and weeks during this time were especially memorable, and they were characterized by a powerful new awareness of everything that was going on—right down to the smallest, most insignificant detail—and a recognition of the almost limitless profusion of opportunities to have as many experiences and emotions as possible. And as all this came to an end, the resulting state of happiness seemed unalterable, as did everything now in this apartment, where silence and twilight reigned. It was indeed very quiet and dark, and still; everything, it seemed, had already reverted to that classical schema, enriched by yet another day, yet another effort of imagination amid the silence—when suddenly, sharply and unexpectedly, with a desperate, almighty reverberation, the crash of broken glass tore through the apartment.
Vasily Vasilyevich had been asleep for some time, his mouth half open and his head resting on his little arm; Natasha was long gone; the armchair had traded places with the divan, at the head of which now shone a lamp with a green shade; the shards of glass had been cleared away; everything else had been dealt with, but there was still the matter of finding, among all those charming everyday objects that constituted life itself, the blind spot, the point de départ, beyond which things sometimes took on new meanings, shedding their former aspect. Where, when and why could this have happened? In the early years there had been cruel intentions, a couple of stolen kisses, but these could be put down to youth, not to depravity or to a lack of understanding right and wrong. Then came love and marriage, the cold stare of a mother who hated all the happy people on this earth, and a blessing from an icon as old as time, so darkened with age that it was impossible to make out the saint depicted on it; the barely distinguishable face, along with its small stern eyes, had turned black, and the nimbus around the head was yellowing, yet all this bore an arbitrary, symbolic meaning, and no one—neither those who gave nor those who received the blessing—so much as looked at the icon, which was returned to its resting place at the end of the ritual, its dried-out verdure, now brown with age, covered over. Still before that, there had been Russia, a bright apartment with enormous windows, school, lessons in foreign languages… “Like all people,” scornfully said her mother, who had spent her whole life in expectation of some terrible personal tragedy or some catastrophe, and who considered her comfortable existence degrading and unworthy. She was forever planning to join a monastery or a revolutionary group and would tell her husband that to go on living as they did was shameful and that it had to stop; but she entered no monastery nor any revolutionary group, and she continued attending the theatre and receiving visitors, all the while deeply resenting this life of privilege. She came alive only when misfortune truly befell someone, when a person was at death’s door; then, casting all else aside, she would set off in their direction, urging the driver on, summoning doctors, spending untold sums of money, looking after the children and generally doing a great deal of good. These deeds, however, had to be preceded by death, or at least something so severe that no amount of money or any degree of care could ever hope to cure. She did not love her daughter, or her son, or her husband; but then a constant stream of people from all walks of life would come to her—petitioners, wretched-looking individuals, cripples with their eyelids upturned, drunkards, consumptives, unfortunate and pitiful people, to whom she would give money and clothing and for whom she cared as though they were family. Later, as she entered the dining room, whereupon everyone would fall silent, she would say:
“Thanks be to God that we can eat well today.”
Her husband would merely shrug his shoulders, having accustomed himself to this daily comedy over the course of thirty years.
She hated, indeed despised, everything that exhibited health, happiness, wealth and love; anything favourable would elicit from her no more than a sneer and hostility. When her daughter’s future husband had approached her—this was already abroad, in Berlin, although practically nothing in the house had changed (the same poor wretches would crowd the dark stairwell as before, the only difference being that Germans had started appearing alongside the Russians)—to seek permission to ask for Yekaterina Maximovna’s hand in marriage, she had just stood there, silent, staring at him wrathfully, until finally she replied that she was very happy for them; it rang with such hatred and malice that he left, perplexed and almost frightened by this inexplicable ire. On the day of the wedding, wearing a tight-fitting starched dress, she received messages of congratulation and then summoned her daughter to inform her of certain laws of nature, the reproductive instinct, the plaisirs de la lune de miel,* and that, when all is said and done, what will have taken place, though distressing, is perfectly normal. She advised her daughter to bear in mind the fact that there were tens of thousands of people starving in Berlin.
Only her father would occasionally say to her:
“There’s nothing to be done, Katya. Your mother isn’t a happy woman.”
It was so astonishing, then, that later, while living in Paris, Katya received her first letter from her mother:
My dear Katya, my darling daughter… It was composed entirely of such tender phrases, never before employed by her; everything was so congenial and warm, so inexplicable and unexpected, that Katya wept as she read the letter and then showed it to her husband, who said that he had always held a higher opinion of his belle-mère than others around her, because there was undoubtedly much good in this woman and her actions had just been misinterpreted. On the day that Vasily Vasilyevich was born, the first face Katya saw was her mother’s; she, however, left immediately, having ascertained—“with sorrow”, as Katya’s brother put it—that, regrettably, both mother and baby were well and out of harm’s way. When, in the clinic, Katya’s mother ran into her own son, whom she had not seen in a number of years, she said to him, “Hello,” in an almost enquiring tone. “And what exactly are you doing here?”
“My sister is giving birth, Mother,” he replied.
“Precisely. You have absolutely no cause to be here,” she said, and sailed into the ward from which the screams of her daughter could be heard.
Later, as soon as Katya had recovered, the three of them—Katya, her husband and her brother—celebrated the birth of Vasily Vasilyevich: there was champagne, they sent telegrams to their relatives, they drank toasts to Vasily Vasilyevich, who was peacefully asleep at the other end of the apartment, snugly wrapped up in swaddling clothes. It was Katya’s brother, Alexander, who had first called him Vasily Vasilyevich, saying to her:
“Just look how commanding he is. It wouldn’t do to call him by his first name alone. He’s got to be called Vasily Vasilyevich.” Thus it became customary to call him by his first name and patronymic, and everyone later would say in all earnestness:
“Where’s Vasily Vasilyevich? What’s Vasily Vasilyevich up to?”
Vasily Vasilyevich was a small and chubby baby. First he crawled, then he started to walk around the apartment; he would fall over and, without saying a word, look at everyone with those serious, dazzling eyes. He loved his uncle above all others, then his mother, and then “maybe” his father—as he once said when he was asked this for the hundredth time and first used the word “maybe”.
*
She was taking a bath late one evening, before lying down to sleep, when her husband came in. He pushed open the glass door, entered and saw Katya in the bathtub; she suddenly became terribly embarrassed by her body—overwhelmed by a sense of burning, inexplicable shame. Something had changed, something was not quite right. He said, “Forgive me, Katya, je suis un peu dans la lune,”† and walked out of the bathroom. The colour rushing to her face, she donned her bathrobe and went through to her bedroom.
He appeared a few minutes later, carrying a cup of tea on a tray. “I thought you’d care for some tea after your bath.”
“Thank you. You’re a darling, as always.”
He sat down on the armchair and told her about the gala dinner he had just returned from; she listened to him with a feeling of detached wonderment, as though noticing for the first time how cleverly he talked about people, how he immediately grasped what was important and what was not, and how he always knew what needed to be said and done. Never yet, it seemed, had he been mistaken—either in his thoughts or in his actions; thus had it ever been, and so she had grown used to trusting him implicitly in all matters. She had doubts at first: she tested his instincts, subjected him to a huge variety of experiments, all of which confirmed only the most favourable of hypotheses—whether because he loved her more than anything in the world, as he claimed, or because he was aided by his monstrous, as she thought, intellect. A second theory had developed because the man was, or at least made himself out to be, blind in only one respect—his wife. He trusted nothing and nobody—people, ideas, relationships—and based everything on calculation. Katya was sometimes astonished by his callous estimations of people, although they were almost always proved right; he knew exactly how to talk to different sorts of people and never expressed any superfluous sentiments. He understood everything at once, and only when he was alone with Katya would he let down his guard and be transformed into as helpless a creature as little Vasily Vasilyevich, for he was certain that Katya could never be capable of any misdeed. He bid her goodnight and left the room; she again fell to thinking how it could be possible that this man truly believed her incapable of any wrongdoing. Naturally, he could not account for Katya’s having sudden doubts about matters that had been put to bed long ago. Kissing her hand and gazing into her eyes, he understood that he should leave, that she was in no mood for it today. Could it have been that he was just tired? No, she had sensed when he took her hand that this was not the case, and it was only after their eyes had met and his fingers had slowly and affectionately let go that he smiled, kissed her hand and silently made his exit.
His infallibility began to unnerve her sometimes—as if he were not a man, but a perfect, thinking machine. It seemed to require from him no effort whatsoever to know what would please her and what she would find disagreeable, even down to the slightest remark about a dress she was wearing for the first time. She would occasionally start to make cutting, unjust remarks, but he always kept calm and just smiled, and in his smile there was not even a shadow of derision—she would never have forgiven him for that—but only tenderness. He would smile at Vasily Vasilyevich much in the same way. It was thus that he made a complete study of Katya—her hidden desires, her unprompted, ill-reasoned ideas, all her variations. He studied her as easily as he would any problem he was addressing and was able to develop an exact formula, like an algebraic equation.
Yes, and until lately he had been right about everything. But one day, when Katya asked him what it took to know a person inside out, he replied:
“A lover’s intuition.”
“What about the people you don’t love? The general order of things?”
“I don’t think there is a general order of things.”
“Then what is there?”
“The fact that every man projects a personality that can be likened to another’s by casual analogy; although, this is governed not by its own set of rules, of course, but by various associations, characteristic of a certain point in time…”
“Lord, how complicated it all is! But is it actually possible to know a man through and through?”
“No, of course not. One could predict how he might act in a narrow set of circumstances, but even that would be far from certain.”
“But you’re so rarely mistaken.”
“Oh, I make mistakes all the time,” he said, smiling. “It’s just that mistakes are seldom irreparable, and I try not to repeat them.”
“What about me?”
“I know you intuitively, unthinkingly, because I love you.”
It was after one o’clock in the morning, but she was still awake, searching, trying to understand when and how this mistake had occurred. Up to a point, it had all been clear: her life, she thought, as she lay on her back in the dark, was being played out on two stages—one on top of the other. On the first was her husband, whom she loved, Vasily Vasilyevich, her father and brother—bringing her joy to varying degrees and in different ways. The other, to which she almost never gave any thought, but which was self-evident and as distinct as the first, consisted in a sound knowledge of a number of theoretical stances: this knowledge would allow one, for example, to discern accurately whether an act was right or wrong. In the world there was disease, death, misery, hatred, resentment, deceit and betrayal, but none of this could touch her or her loved ones. These things were known to everyone, yet to her they were abstract concepts, knowledge that had never been tested, like the image of a country she had never visited. It did not occur to her that she might one day experience something in this vein. And so a change took place in this network of thoughts and feelings. Where yesterday there had been a dark, empty space, something new and repugnant—in terms of these former notions—now emerged; moreover, it had been deliberate and was nearly as vast in scope as everything that had existed for her until now—a whole new world unlike anything she had experienced before, dangerous, dark and overwhelming.
It was simple enough to establish the facts. First an evening with her husband at the theatre, then an acquaintance—a young man around five years her senior, of uncertain nationality, with a decent command of Russian, of fairly athletic build, and in no way exceptional on first appearance. For some reason he irritated her, although there seemed to be nothing to find fault with. Later he paid them a visit—a first, then a second the following week.
“Do you have much free time?” she asked.
“My whole life,” he replied, smiling. “I recently came into an inheritance.”
Then came the first time they stepped out together, a matinee show at the cinema, a taxi, his approaching lips and the unbearable desire to grip that mouth with her teeth—and the morning after, the pale winter’s light in the window and her own naked body emerging from the bed sheets.
She went home. Her husband had gone out, and Vasily Vasilyevich was building a tower out of iron strips. Ten minutes later the telephone rang, and her husband’s voice informed her that he would not dine at home, that it would be too late by the time he returned.
“Fine,” she answered.
She and Vasily Vasilyevich ate together. Later her brother arrived with some amusing anecdotes and stayed until one o’clock in the morning. Gradually the deathly melancholy that had accompanied her journey home vanished, as though seeping lazily into the distant gloom; then, lifting up her bright eyes, Katya began to feel as though she was back to her usual self, that everything was in its rightful place—and that she loved everything she had previously loved just as much as before.
Three days passed. The telephone rang, and in a strange, altered, drained voice she said that, fine, she was willing—then came a repeat of the first time: first the lips and a buzzing throughout her whole body, then the slow fingers at her breast and legs, and finally that last, indescribably drawn-out motion, the glistening beads of sweat on both face and body, and the touch of firm, burning skin—the realization that she was suffocating and that it could be the most wonderful death.
After that, it became a regular occurrence. It had not the slightest bit to do with love or affection, and it was purely by chance that the young man turned out to be an impeccable, kind and decent fellow in his relations with Katya; moreover, their assignations were surrounded by such secrecy that no one apart from them knew about it. If Katya did not meet him during the course of the week, she would begin once more to feel as though nothing had happened; but all it took for her was the sound of his voice, and she would be prepared to travel anywhere; she was utterly incapable of fighting this urge. They never left a place together and were careful never to be seen in each other’s company. He stopped visiting Katya’s apartment altogether, and her brother, Alexander, even asked one day:
“Whatever happened to that alcoholic, Katya?”
“What alcoholic?”
“Oh, you remember, that young chap, dark-haired, I seem to recall—the rich heir.”
“Yes, I remember. Only why do you call him an alcoholic? Do you know him well?”
“I don’t know him from Adam. But I don’t have to. Just look at him—always pristine, well dressed, cheery… That, my dear, is suspicious. Eventually it’ll all come out: he’s an alcoholic.”
“You’re such an idiot, Sasha.”
“Well, I’m telling you that you don’t know the first thing about psychology. My eyes never fail me. It’s a crime that I’m an architect: I should have been a scientist.”
“Oh, it certainly is a crime that you’re an architect.”
It was with some astonishment that Katya observed how seldom she spoke with her lover and that conversation with him was entirely unnecessary. Right from the very start, however, she had begun to feel, in tandem with this irresistible attraction to him, something verging on hatred. He could not fail to notice this and even said to her one day that perhaps it would be better if they put an end to their trysts—if she did not love him…
“I’ve never loved you,” she said. “Never, do you hear? Never. But I cannot live without you.”
“That is far too complicated for me.”
“Yes,” she said, with regret and contempt. “That’s true. It is too complicated for you.”
She was beginning to rot inside; she would fly into a rage for no good reason and, one day, in the presence of her brother and her husband, she slapped Vasily Vasilyevich right in the face—the boy was so stunned by the act that he did not even cry. Her brother shot up and shouted so loudly that his voice filled the entire apartment:
“You stupid woman!”
She looked at him, and then at her husband—for the first time she noticed his cold, foreign eyes. Without raising his voice, he said:
“Thus far I have not taken advantage of my rights, Katya. Now, however, I am compelled to do so. There are things that I cannot and will not allow.”
“The older you get, the more you’re like Mother,” said Alexander furiously. “A pretty inheritance.”
“I don’t think that’s the issue here, Sasha,” said her husband measuredly.
It ended in hysterics, tears and Katya’s lying down on her bed and not getting up until the following morning.
She became perfectly insufferable. She would scold the maid constantly, fuss bitterly, rearrange the furniture in the apartment, demand, refuse, purchase things and send them back; she lost any resemblance to the meek woman she had once been. Her husband went abroad for a month and Vasily Vasilyevich went to his uncle’s “for a visit”, as his uncle put it, and she was left alone. She thought she was close to suicide. She felt as though she could no longer endure such a life.
Then one day he did not show up for their assignation. She sat a whole hour in the little apartment he rented for their meetings, but he did not come. She left. She waited for the telephone to ring or for a note, thinking that some catastrophe might have befallen him. But there was no call, nor any note.
A week passed. She spent it reading books that she was unable to understand, no matter how hard she tried. She began writing letters to her husband, only to throw them away, unfinished, and await an explanation, despite outward appearances, for what had happened.
Late one evening, a week and a half to the day since their failed assignation, an unfamiliar voice informed her over the telephone that Monsieur So-and-So was very keen to see her. She brusquely hung up, but a minute later the same voice called again and explained that she had misunderstood, that she was mistaken—monsieur was in a very bad way and that if she did not come immediately… “I’m coming,” she said. “The address, please.”
Ten minutes later she entered his unfamiliar apartment. A doctor’s assistant with a very grave expression—one that people have only in exceptional and usually dire circumstances—had opened the door to her, and from this she knew that he must be dying. The doctor, with a hardened, absent-minded expression on his unshaven face, walked past her, seeming not to notice her presence. A few other people had gathered in a large reception room; she knew none of them, but, looking at each one, she was able to read the situation accurately. It was warm and stuffy in the apartment, and a medicinal smell mingled with a strange, foul odour. Through the reception room, towards Katya, came another assistant, carrying a large object under her spotless white apron. A young man sitting in an armchair raised his head, glanced at Katya as one would at a table or a chair, and lowered his head, cradling it in his hands.
No sooner had Katya entered than she was hit by a palpable, chilling, almost unbearable languor. She stood for a moment, crossed herself and finally went into the room where the patient lay. At first sight of him, she felt a strange, insurmountable terror.
He lay on the bed, covered up to his waist. Instead of the torso that she knew so well, with its rippling muscles under dark, firm skin, she saw a tightly covered ribcage with angularly protruding bones. His arms were thin and his fingers too large. She leant over the unfamiliar, overgrown face. His eyes had rolled back into their sockets; in place of the irises were two frozen, jaundiced whites. His mouth lay open. The dying man’s breathing was strangely shallow and quick, like a dog’s after a run. He was unconscious.
She knelt before the bed and took his burning hand; he gave no sign of feeling this. Then, for a second, his eyes appeared and he looked upon Katya, failed to comprehend what was going on and wheezed in an unfamiliar voice: “Oxy… oxy…”
“He’s asking for oxygen,” said Katya.
“Yes, yes,” came the doctor’s absent-minded voice from the reception room, apparently in response to a question from his assistant. “But it’s futile all the same, all the same.”
Overnight his breathing grew slower and slower, and at four o’clock in the morning, without having regained consciousness, he died. Her cheeks moist, Katya left the room. The young man sitting in the chair, the deceased’s brother, was crying inconsolably, sobbing like a child. Only then did it become apparent to Katya, what had long been so, but had never managed to reach her consciousness: namely, that the man who had died was the man she loved, and that she had loved only him.
She returned home, lit a cigarette and sat down to write a letter. At eight o’clock in the morning her husband arrived on the early train. He kissed her hand, looked at her much-altered face and said in French (he often switched to French):
“Tu reviens de loin.”‡
“Je ne reviens pas,” she said. “Je pars.”§
That very day, having signed the petition for divorce, she left.