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had gone to Leningrad and brought back a very expensive fur jacket for
Maria Vasilievna. He never went to bed if she was not at home. He
persuaded her to give up the university, because it was hard for her to
work and study at the same time. But the most surprising thing of all
had happened that winter. All of a sudden Maria Vasilievna said she did
not want to see him any more. And he disappeared. Went away in the
clothes he stood in and did not come home for ten days. Where he had
been living was a mystery-probably in a hotel room. At this point Nina
Kapitonovna stood up for him. She said this was nothing short of an
'inquisition', and fetched him home herself. But Maria Vasilievna did
not speak to him for a whole month.
Nikolai Antonich madly in love—I couldn't imagine it! Nikolai
Antonich with his stubby fingers and his gold tooth-and so old.
Nevertheless, as Katya went on with her story, I could picture that
complex and painful relationship. I could imagine what Maria
Vasilievna's life had been, during those long years. Such a beautiful
woman left stranded at twenty. 'Neither widowed nor married.' For the
sake of her husband's memory she forced herself to live in her
memories. I could imagine Nikolai Antonich courting her for years,
suave, persistent, patient. He had succeeded in convincing her-and
others too—that he alone understood and loved her husband. Katya was
right. For Maria Vasilievna this letter would be a terrible blow. It would
be better, perhaps, to leave it on the shelf in Sanya's room, between
Tsar Kolokol and The Adventures of a Don Cossack in the Caucasus.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
WE GO FOR WALKS.
I VISIT MOTHER'S GRAVE.
DAY OF DEPARTURE
The week I spent in Ensk was anything but a gay one. But then what
wonderful memories it left me with for the rest of my life.
Katya and I went for walks every day. I showed her my favourite old
spots and spoke about my childhood. I remember reading somewhere
that archaeologists were able to reconstruct the history and customs of a
whole people from a single preserved inscription. That's how it was with
me, when, from the few surviving old nooks in my hometown, I
reconstructed for Katya the story of my previous life.
I spent only one day away from Katya, the day I went to the cemetery.
I expected to find no trace of Mother's grave after all those years. But I
found it. It was enclosed in a broken-down wooden fence and you could
still make out the inscription on the awry cross:
'Sacred to the memory of...' Of course, it was winter and all the graves
were snowed up, yet you could tell at once that this was a neglected
grave.
Saddened, I walked among the paths, calling up memories of my
mother. How old would she have been now? Forty. Still quite a young
woman. With a pang I thought how happily she could have been living
now, the way Aunt Dasha, say, was living. I recollected her tired, heavy
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glance, her hands corroded by washing, and how she could not eat
anything of an evening because she was dead tired.
I found the keeper, who was chopping wood outside the tumbledown
chapel.
'Granddad,' I said to him, 'you have here the grave of Aksinya
Grigorieva. It's along this path here, the second from the corner.' I think
he was pretending when he said he knew the grave I was talking about.
'Couldn't it be tidied up? I'll pay for it.' The keeper went down the
path, looked at the grave and came back.
'That grave is being cared for,' he said. 'You can't see it because it's
winter now. Some of the others aren't being cared for, but this one is.'
I gave him three rubles and went away.
And then the last day came round, the day of parting. It found Aunt
Dasha astir at six, busy baking pies. Smeared with flour, wearing her
spectacles, she came into the dining-room where I was sleeping, the
edge of an envelope between her fingers.
'Must wake Sanya up,' she said. 'Here's a letter from Pyotr. And so it
was, brief, but 'pertinent', as the judge put it. First, he explained why he
had not come home for the holidays. It was because he had been visiting
Leningrad with an excursion party. Secondly, he was astonished to hear
that I had turned up and expressed himself feelingly on that point.
Third, he went for me baldheaded for not having written, not having
looked for him and generally for having 'behaved like an unfeeling
horse'. Fourth, the envelope contained another letter, addressed to my
sister, who laughed and said: 'The silly fool, he could have just added a
postscript.' I don't suppose he could, though, because Sanya took the
letter and sat reading it in her room for three full hours, until I came
charging in demanding that she put a stop to Aunt Dasha, who was
piling up a stack of pies for my journey.
The judge came home specially to have dinner with me for the last
time. He brought a bottle of wine. We drank, and he made a speech. A
jolly good speech it was too. He compared Pyotr and me to eagles and
expressed the hope that we would return more than once to the nest.
We sat so long over dinner that we nearly missed the train. We drove
to the station in cabs. I had never travelled so luxuriously before-sitting
back in a cab with a hamper at my feet.
We arrived to find Katya standing on the carriage steps with the two
old Bubenchikov aunts exhorting her not to catch cold during the
journey, to keep an eye on her luggage, not to go out on the carriage
platform, to wire them on arrival, remember them to everybody and not
to forget to write.
My seat was in another carriage, so we merely bowed a greeting to
Katya and the Bubenchikovs. Katya waved to us and the old ladies
nodded primly.
The second bell. I embraced Sanya and Aunt Dasha. The judge
