anything in the world. He stood staunchly for her honor, more than her own father or than she herself. In defense of her wounded pride he would have torn the offender to pieces with his own hands. And here that offender was he himself.
At home, in his family circle, he felt like an unexposed criminal. The ignorance of the household, their habitual affability, killed him. In the midst of a general conversation, he would suddenly remember his guilt, freeze, and no longer hear or understand anything around him.
If this happened at the table, the swallowed bite stuck in his throat, he set his spoon aside, pushed the plate away. Tears choked him. “What’s the matter?” Tonya would ask in perplexity. “You must have found out something bad in the city? Somebody’s been sent to prison? Or shot? Tell me. Don’t be afraid of upsetting me. You’ll feel better.”
Had he betrayed Tonya, had he preferred someone else to her? No, he had not chosen anyone, had not compared. Ideas of “free love,” words like “the rights and demands of feeling,” were foreign to him. To talk and think of such things seemed vulgar to him. In his life he had never gathered any “flowers of pleasure,” had not counted himself among the demigods or supermen, had demanded no special benefits or advantages for himself. He was breaking down under the burden of an unclean conscience.
“What will happen further on?” he sometimes asked himself and, finding no answer, hoped for something unfeasible, for the interference of some unforeseen circumstances that would bring a resolution.
But now it was not so. He had decided to cut this knot by force. He was bringing home a ready solution. He had decided to confess everything to Tonya, to beg her forgiveness, and not to see Lara anymore.
True, not everything was smooth here. It remained insufficiently clear, as it now seemed to him, that he was breaking with Lara forever, for all eternity. That morning he had announced to her his wish to reveal everything to Tonya and the impossibility of further meetings, but he now had the feeling that he had said it to her too mildly, not resolutely enough.
Larissa Fyodorovna had not wanted to upset Yuri Andreevich with painful scenes. She understood how much he was suffering even without that. She tried to listen to his news as calmly as possible. Their talk took place in the empty room of the former owners, unused by Larissa Fyodorovna, which gave onto Kupecheskaya. Unfelt, unbeknownst to her, tears flowed down Lara’s cheeks, like the rainwater that now poured down the faces of the stone statues opposite, on the house with figures. Sincerely, without affected magnanimity, she repeated quietly: “Do what’s better for you, don’t think about me. I’ll get over it all.” And she did not know she was crying, and did not wipe her tears.
At the thought that Larissa Fyodorovna had misunderstood him and that he had left her in delusion, with false hopes, he was ready to turn and gallop back to the city, to finish what had been left unsaid, and above all to take leave of her much more ardently and tenderly, in greater accordance with what was to be a real parting for their whole lives, forever. He barely controlled himself and continued on his way.
As the sun went down, the forest became filled with cold and darkness. It began to smell of the leafy dampness of a steamed besom, as on going into a bathhouse. Motionless in the air, like floats on the water, spread hanging swarms of mosquitoes, whining in high-pitched unison, all on one note. Yuri Andreevich swatted countless numbers of them on his forehead and neck, and the resounding slaps of his palm on his sweaty body responded amazingly to the other sounds of his riding: the creaking of the saddle girths, the ponderous thud of hooves glancing, swiping, through the squelching mud, and the dry, popping salvos emitted by the horse’s guts. Suddenly, in the distance, where the sunset had gotten stuck, a nightingale began to trill.
“A-wake! A-wake!” it called and entreated, and it sounded almost like before Easter: “My soul, my soul! Arise, why are you sleeping!”10
Suddenly a very simple thought dawned on Yuri Andreevich. What’s the hurry? He would not go back on the word he had given himself. The exposure would be made. But where was it said that it must take place today? Nothing had been declared to Tonya yet. It was not too late to put off the explanation till next time. Meanwhile he would go to the city once more. The conversation with Lara would be brought to an end, with the depth and sincerity that redeem all suffering. Oh, how good! How wonderful! How astonishing that it had not occurred to him before!
The assumption that he would see Antipova once more made Yuri Andreevich mad with joy. His heart began to beat rapidly. He lived it all over in anticipation.
The log-built back streets of the outskirts, the wood-paved sidewalks. He is going to her. Now, in Novosvalochny, the vacant lots and wooden part of the city will end and the stone part will begin. The little houses of the suburb race by like the pages of a quickly leafed-through book, not when you turn them with your index finger, but when you flip through them all with the soft part of your thumb, making a crackling noise. It takes your breath away! She lives there, at that end. Under the white gap in the rainy sky that has cleared towards evening. How he loves these familiar little houses on the way to her! He could just pick them up from the ground and kiss them all over! These one-eyed mezzanines pulled down over the roofs! The little berries of lights and oil lamps reflected in the puddles! Under that white strip of rainy street sky. There again he will receive from the hands of the Creator the gift of this God-made white loveliness. The door will be opened by a figure wrapped in something dark. And the promise of her intimacy, restrained, cold as the pale night of the north, no one’s, belonging to nobody, will come rolling towards him like the first wave of the sea, which you run to in the darkness over the sand of the coast.
Yuri Andreevich dropped the reins, leaned forward in the saddle, embraced his horse’s neck, and buried his face in its mane. Taking this tenderness for an appeal to its full strength, the horse went into a gallop.
At a smooth, flying gallop, in the intervals between the rare, barely noticeable contacts of the horse with the earth, which kept tearing away from its hoofs and flying backward, Yuri Andreevich, besides the beating of his heart, which stormed with joy, also heard some shouts, which he thought he was imagining.
A shot close by deafened him. The doctor raised his head, seized the reins, and pulled at them. The racing horse made several clumsy leaps sideways, backed up, and began to lower his croup, preparing to rear.
Ahead the road divided in two. Beside it the billboard “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers” glowed in the rays of the setting sun. Across the road, barring it, stood three armed horsemen. A high school student in a uniform cap and a jacket crisscrossed with machine-gun cartridge belts, a cavalryman in an officer’s greatcoat and a Cossack hat, and a strange fat man, as if dressed for a masquerade, in quilted trousers, a padded jacket, and a broad-brimmed priest’s hat pulled down low.
“Don’t move, comrade doctor,” the oldest of the three, the cavalryman in the Cossack hat, said evenly and calmly. “If you obey, we guarantee you complete safety. Otherwise—no hard feelings—we’ll shoot you. The medic in our detachment got killed. We mobilize you forcibly as a medical worker. Get off your horse and hand the reins over to our younger comrade. I remind you. At the least thought of escape, we won’t stand on ceremony.”
“Are you the Mikulitsyns’ son Liberius, Comrade Forester?”
