What, isn’t she alone? Of course she’s alone. Her ward, Ksiusha, doesn’t count. Who is she, anyway? There’s no looking into another’s heart. Maybe she’s a friend, maybe an enemy, maybe a secret rival. She came as an inheritance from her husband’s first marriage, as Vlasushka’s adopted daughter. Or maybe not adopted, but illegitimate? And maybe not a daughter at all, but from a completely different opera! Can you climb into a man’s soul? Though there’s nothing to be said against the girl. Intelligent, beautiful, well-behaved. Way smarter than the little fool Tereshka and her adoptive father.
So here she is alone on the threshold of the Holy Feast, abandoned, they’ve all flown off this way and that.
Her husband Vlasushka had gone down the high road to make speeches to the new recruits, as a send-off to their feats of arms. The fool would have done better to look after his own son, to protect him from mortal danger.
The son, Teresha, also couldn’t help himself and took to his heels on the eve of the great feast. Buzzed off to Kuteiny Posad to some relatives, to have fun, to comfort himself after what he’d gone through. The boy had been expelled from high school. Repeated half the classes and nobody said anything, but in the eighth year they lost patience and threw him out.
Ah, what anguish! Oh, Lord! Why has it turned out so bad? You just lose heart. Everything drops from your hands, you don’t want to live! Why has it turned out like this? Is it the force of the revolution? No, ah, no! It’s all because of the war. All the flower of manhood got killed, and what was left was worthless, good-for-nothing rot.
A far cry from her father’s home—her father the contractor. Her father didn’t drink, he was literate, the family lived in plenty. There were two sisters, Polya and Olya. The names went so nicely together, just as the two of them suited each other, a pair of beauties. And the head carpenters who called on their father were distinguished, stately, fine-looking. Then suddenly they took it into their heads—there was no want in the house—took it into their heads to knit scarves out of six kinds of wool. And what then? They turned out to be such knitters, their scarves became famous throughout the district. And everything used to give joy by its richness and shapeliness—church services, dances, people, manners—even though the family was from simple folk, tradesmen, from peasants and workers. And Russia, too, was a young girl, and she had real suitors, real protectors, not like nowadays. Now everything’s lost its sheen, there’s nothing but the civilian trash of lawyers and Yids, chewing words tirelessly, day and night, choking on words. Vlasushka and his retinue hope to lure the old golden times back with champagne and good wishes. Is that any way to win back a lost love? You’ve got to overturn stones for that, move mountains, dig up the earth!
4
More than once already, Galuzina had gone as far as the marketplace, the central square of Krestovozdvizhensk. From there her house was to the left. But she changed her mind each time, turned around, and again went deep into the back alleys adjacent to the monastery.
The marketplace was the size of a big field. On market days in former times, peasants had covered it all over with their carts. One end of it lay against the end of Eleninskaya Street. The other end was built up along a curved line with small one- or two-story houses. They were all used as storage spaces, offices, trading premises, and artisans’ workshops.
Here, in quiet times, on a chair by the threshold of his very wide, four-leaf iron door, reading the
Here, displayed in a dim little window, gathering dust for many years, stood several cardboard boxes of paired wedding candles, decorated with ribbons and little bunches of flowers. Behind the little window, in an empty little room without furniture and with almost no sign of goods, unless one counted several rounds of wax piled one on top of the other, deals in the thousands for mastic, wax, and candles were concluded by no one knew what agents of a candle millionaire who lived no one knew where.
Here, in the middle of the shop-lined street, was the big colonial shop of the Galuzins with its three-window facade. In it the splintery, unpainted floor was swept three times a day with the used leaves of the tea which the shopkeepers and owner drank without moderation all day long. Here the owner’s young wife had often and willingly kept the till. Her favorite color was purple, violet, the color of especially solemn church vestments, the color of unopened lilacs, the color of her best velvet dress, the color of her wineglasses. The color of happiness, the color of memories, the color of the long-vanished maidenhood of prerevolutionary Russia also seemed to her to be pale lilac. And she liked keeping the till at the shop, because the violet dusk of the premises, fragrant with starch, sugar, and deep purple black-currant candies in their glass jar, matched her favorite color.
Here, at the corner, next to the lumberyard, stood an old, gray, two-story wooden house, sagging on four sides like a secondhand coach. It consisted of four apartments. There were two entrances to them, at either end of the facade. The left half of the ground floor was occupied by Zalkind’s pharmacy, the right by a notary’s office. Over the pharmacy lived old Shmulevich, a ladies’ tailor, with his numerous family. Across from the tailor, over the notary, huddled many tenants, whose professions were announced on the signs and plaques that covered the whole front door. Here watches were repaired and a cobbler took in orders. Here the partners Zhuk and Shtrodakh kept a photography studio, here were the premises of the engraver Kaminsky.
In view of the crowdedness of the overfilled apartment, the photographers’ young assistants, the retoucher Senya Magidson and the student Blazhein, built themselves a sort of laboratory in the yard, in the front office of the woodshed. They were apparently busy there now, judging by the angry eye of the developing lamp blinking nearsightedly in the little window of the office. It was under this window that the little dog Tomka was chained up, yelping for the whole of Eleninskaya Street to hear.
“The whole kahal’s bunched up in there,” thought Galuzina, walking past the gray house. “A den of misery and filth.” But she decided at once that Vlas Pakhomovich was wrong in his Judaeophobia. These people aren’t such big wheels as to mean anything in the destiny of the state. However, if you ask old Shmulevich why the trouble and disorder, he’ll cringe, pull a twisted mug, and say with a grin: “That’s Leibochka’s little tricks.”5
Ah, but what, what is she thinking about, what is her head stuffed with? Is that really the point? Is that where the trouble is? The trouble is the cities. Russia doesn’t stand on them. People got seduced by education, trailed after the city folk, and couldn’t pull it off. Left their own shore and never reached the other.
Or maybe, on the contrary, the whole trouble is ignorance. A learned man can see through a stone wall, he figures everything out beforehand. And we go looking for our hat when our head’s been cut off. Like in a dark forest. I suppose they’re not having a sweet time of it either, the educated ones. Lack of bread drives them from the cities. Well, just try sorting it out. The devil himself would break a leg.
But even so, aren’t our country relations something else again? The Selitvins, the Shelaburins, Pamphil Palykh, the brothers Nestor and Pankrat Modykh? Their own masters, their own heads, good farmers. New farmsteads along the high road, admirable. Each has some forty acres sown, plus horses, sheep, cows, pigs. Enough grain stocked up for three years ahead. The inventory—a feast for the eyes. Harvesting machines. Kolchak fawns on them, invites them to him, commissars entice them to the forest militia. They came back from the war covered with medals and were snapped up at once as instructors. With epaulettes, or without. If you’re a man with know-how,
