Nikolai appeared towards evening. They had dinner, and over dinner Sofia recounted, laughing, how she had met and hidden the man who had escaped from exile, how she had been afraid of spies, seeing them in everyone, and how funnily the fugitive had behaved. There was something in her tone that reminded the mother of the bragging of a worker who had done some difficult job well and was happy.
She was now dressed in a light, loose dress, the colour of steel. She seemed taller in this dress, and it was as if her eyes had darkened and her movements become more serene.
“You’re going to have to take on another job, Sofia,” began Nikolai after dinner. “You know we’ve planned a newspaper for the countryside, but the link with the people out there has been lost thanks to the latest arrests. Pelageya Nilovna’s the only one who can show us how to find the man who’s going to take on the distribution of the newspaper. You go there with her. It needs to be done soon.”
“Very well,” said Sofia, puffing at her cigarette. “Shall we go, Pelageya Nilovna?”
“All right, let’s…”
“Is it far?”
“Eighty versts or so…”
“Marvellous! And now I shall play a little. Can you put up with some music, Pelageya Nilovna?”
“Don’t ask me – act as though I’m not here!” said the mother, settling down in a corner of the sofa. She could see that the brother and sister did not seem to be paying her any attention, yet at the same time it turned out that, like it or not, at their imperceptible instigation she was constantly intruding in their conversation.
“Now listen, Nikolai! This is Grieg.* I brought it today… Shut the windows.”
She opened up the music and struck the keys lightly with her left hand. The singing of the strings began, lush and full. With a deep sigh, another note, rich in sound, flowed to join them. Ringing brightly from beneath the fingers of the right hand, there flew from the strings an anxious flock of strangely transparent cries which began to sway and beat like frightened birds against the dark background of the low notes.
At first the mother was untouched by these sounds; she heard in their flow only ringing chaos. Her ear was unable to catch the melody in the complex quivering of the mass of notes. Half-asleep, she watched Nikolai sitting with his legs folded beneath him at the other end of the long sofa, she scrutinized Sofia’s severe profile and her head, covered in a heavy mass of golden hair. At first a ray of sun cast a warm light onto Sofia’s head and shoulder, and then it fell onto the keys of the piano and began to quiver under the woman’s fingers, embracing them. The music was filling the room up ever more tightly and, imperceptibly for the mother, rousing her heart.
And for some reason, from the dark pit of the past there arose before her an injury long forgotten, but now coming back to life with bitter clarity.
One day her now deceased husband had come home from work late at night, very drunk, had grabbed her by the arm, thrown her from the bed onto the floor, kicked her in the side and said:
“Get out of here, scum, I’m sick of you!”
To protect herself from his blows, she had quickly picked up their two-year-old son and, on her knees, used his body to cover her, like a shield. He had cried, struggling in her hands, frightened, naked and warm.
“Get out!” Mikhail had roared.
She had leapt to her feet, rushed into the kitchen, thrown a cardigan over her shoulders, wrapped the child in a shawl and, in silence, without cries or complaints, barefooted, in just her nightshirt with the cardigan on top of it, had set off down the street. It had been May, the night fresh, and the dust of the street had stuck coldly to her feet, getting right in between the toes. The child had cried and struggled. She had bared her breast, pressed her son up against her body and, driven by fear, had walked and walked down the street, singing a lullaby:
“Oh-oh-oh… oh-oh-oh!…”
But it had already been getting light, and she had felt fearful and ashamed, expecting someone to come out into the street and see her, half-naked. She had gone down towards the marsh and sat on the ground beneath a closely packed group of young aspens. And she had sat like that for a long time, embraced by the night, gazing motionless into the darkness with wide-open eyes and fearfully singing a lullaby to the now sleeping child and to her own injured heart…
“Oh-oh-oh… oh-oh-oh… oh-oh-oh!…”
At some point during the moments she had spent there, some kind of quiet black bird had flashed over her head as it flew into the distance, and this had roused her and got her up. Shivering with cold, she had set off for home to meet the customary horror of blows and fresh insults…
An echoing chord, indifferent and cold, sighed a final time, sighed and died away.
Sofia turned, asking her brother in a low voice:
“Did you like it?”
“Very much!” he said, giving a start, like someone being woken. “Very much…”
Quivering and singing in the mother’s breast was the echo of her memories. And somewhere away to one side there was a thought developing:
“Here people are, living amicably, calmly. They don’t quarrel, they don’t drink vodka, they don’t argue over a crust of bread… the way people who lead the hard life do…”
Sofia was smoking a cigarette. She smoked a lot, almost continually.
“It was Kostya’s favourite thing while he was alive!” she said, hurriedly inhaling smoke, and again she struck a soft, sad chord. “How I used to love playing for him. How sensitive he was and responsive to everything, full of everything…”
“She must be reminiscing about her husband,” the mother noted in passing. “Yet she’s smiling…”
“That man gave me so much happiness…” Sofia said quietly, accompanying her thoughts with the light sounds of the strings. “He knew so well how to live…”
“Ye-es!” said Nikolai, pulling at his beard. “A melodious soul!…”
Sofia threw away the cigarette she had started to smoke, turned to the mother and asked her:
“The noise I make doesn’t disturb you, no?”
The mother replied with a vexation she could not contain:
“Don’t ask me – I don’t understand a thing. I just sit and listen and think to myself…”
“No, you ought to understand!” said Sofia. “A woman can’t fail to understand music, especially if she’s sad…”
She struck the keys hard, and a loud cry rang out, as if someone had heard some news that was dreadful for them – it had struck them in the heart and torn out this stunning sound. Young voices trembled in fright and went rushing away in hurried confusion; a loud, wrathful voice cried out again, drowning everything. Some misfortune must have taken place, yet it had called to life not laments, but wrath. Then someone gentle and strong appeared and started to sing a simple, pretty song, persuading, appealing to be followed.
The mother’s heart filled with a desire to say something nice to these people. She was smiling, intoxicated by the music, and felt herself capable of doing something the brother and sister needed.
And after looking around to see what could be done, she quietly went into the kitchen to put on the samovar.
But her desire did not disappear, and while she was pouring the tea, smiling in embarrassment, and as though rubbing her heart with words of warm affection, given in equal measure to them and to herself, she said:
“We people of the hard life feel everything, but it’s hard for us to express it; we’re ashamed that, you know, we understand, but can’t say it. And because of the shame, we often get angry with our thoughts. Life’s battering and stinging us from all directions, and a rest would be nice, but our thoughts won’t allow it.”
Nikolai listened, wiping his glasses. Sofia looked on with her enormous eyes wide open, forgetting to smoke her cigarette, which was going out. She was sitting by the piano, half-turned towards it and gently touching the keys at times with the slender fingers of her right hand. A chord would cautiously be poured into the speech of the mother, who was hurriedly clothing her feelings in simple, heartfelt words.
“At least I’ll be able to say something about myself and other people now, because I’ve started to understand and I can compare things. The way I lived before, I had nothing to compare with. In our existence, everyone lives the same. But now I can see how others live, I remember the way I used to live myself, and I feel bitter, it’s hard for me!”
She lowered her voice and went on:
“Maybe I’m saying something wrong, and there’s no need to say it, because you know it all for yourselves…”
Tears began to ring in her voice and, looking at them with a smile in her eyes, she said:
“But I’d like to open up my heart to you so you can see how I wish you well, the very best!”
“We can see it!” said Nikolai quietly.
She was unable to sate her desire and told them again what had been new for her and had seemed to her inestimably important. She began telling them about her life of hurt and patient suffering, told them without anger, with a smile of regret on her lips, unrolling the grey scroll of sad days, enumerating her husband’s blows, and she was amazed herself at the insignificance of the grounds for those blows, surprised herself at her own inability to deflect them…
They listened to her in silence, overwhelmed by the profound meaning of the simple story of a person who had been considered a beast, and who had herself, for a long time, uncomplaining, felt she was the thing she was taken to be. Thousands of lives seemed to be speaking through her lips; everything in the way she had lived had been commonplace and simple, but a countless multitude of people had lived just as simply and ordinarily on this earth, and her story took on the significance of a symbol. Nikolai set his elbows on the table, rested his head on his palms and did not move, gazing at her through his glasses with tensely narrowed eyes. Sofia reclined against the back of her chair and would wince at times, shaking her head. Her face became even more thin and pale, and she did not smoke.
“I thought I was unfortunate once, it seemed to me that my life was a fever,” she said quietly, lowering her head. “That was in exile. A little provincial town, with nothing to do and nothing to think about except yourself. I was putting all my misfortunes together and weighing them up because of having nothing to do: so, I’d quarrelled with my father, whom I loved, I’d been expelled from grammar school and insulted, then prison, the treachery of a comrade who was dear to me, my husband’s arrest, prison again and exile, my husband’s death. And it seemed to me then that I was the most unfortunate of people. But all my misfortunes, and ten times more, aren’t the equal of a month of your life, Pelageya Nilovna… That daily torture over a period of years… Where do people draw the strength to suffer from?”
“They get used to it!” Vlasova replied with a sigh.
“I thought I knew life!” said Nikolai pensively. “But when it’s not a book talking about it, and not my scattered impressions of it, but life itself, like that – it’s fearful! And it’s the trivialities that are fearful, the insignificant things, the minutes that make up the years…”
The conversation flowed and grew, encompassing the hard life from every side, and the mother delved deep into her memories, extracting the daily injuries from the twilight of the past, and created a painful picture of the mute horror in which her youth had been lost. Finally she said:
“Oh dear, I’ve tired you out with my talking: it’s time you had a rest! Telling it all’s not possible…”
The brother and sister took their leave of her in silence. Nikolai seemed to her to bow lower than he always had before and to squeeze her hand tighter. And Sofia saw her to her room and, stopping in the doorway, said quietly:
“Have a rest, goodnight!”
There was warmth in her voice, and her grey eyes caressed the mother’s face softly…
She took Sofia’s hand and, squeezing it in her own, replied:
“Thank you!…”