you’re in demand everywhere. You won’t perish.
But it’s time to go home. It’s simply improper for a woman to walk about for so long. It would be all right in my own garden. But it’s all soggy there, you could sink into the mud. Seems I feel a bit better.
And having gotten definitively entangled in her reasoning and lost the thread, Galuzina came to her house. But before crossing the threshold, she lingered for a moment in front of the porch, her mental gaze taking in many different things.
She remembered the present-day ringleaders in Khodatskoe, of whom she had a good notion, political exiles from the capitals, Tiverzin, Antipov, the anarchist Vdovichenko, called the Black Banner, the local locksmith Gorshenia the Rabid. These were all people who kept their own counsel. They had caused a lot of trouble in their day; they’re sure to be plotting and preparing something again. They couldn’t do without it. Their lives had been spent with machines, and they themselves are merciless, cold, like machines. They go around in short jackets with sweaters under them, smoke cigarettes in bone holders so as not to pick up an infection, drink boiled water. Vlasushka won’t get anywhere with them, they’ll turn everything around, they’ll always have it their way.
And she fell to thinking about herself. She knew that she was a nice and original woman, well-preserved and intelligent, a not-bad person. Not one of these qualities met with recognition in this godforsaken hole, or anywhere else, maybe. And the indecent couplets about foolish Sentetyurikha, known all over the Trans-Urals, of which only the first two lines could be quoted:
Sentetyurikha sold her cart
And bought herself a balalaika,
because further on they turned scabrous, were sung in Krestovozdvizhensk, she suspected, with a hint at her.
And, sighing bitterly, she went into the house.
5
Not stopping in the front hall, she went in her fur coat to the bedroom. The windows of the room gave onto the garden. Now, at night, the heaped-up shadows in front of the windows inside and beyond the windows outside almost repeated each other. The hanging sacks of the draped window curtains were almost like the hanging sacks of the trees in the yard, bare and black, with vague outlines. The taffeta darkness of this night at the end of winter was being warmed in the garden by the black violet heat of approaching spring breaking through the ground. Inside the room approximately the same combination was made up by two similar elements, and the dusty stuffiness of the poorly beaten curtains was softened and brightened by the deep violet heat of the coming feast.
The Holy Virgin on the icon freed her narrow, upturned, swarthy palms from the silver casing. She was holding in them, as it were, the first and last letters of her Byzantine title:
Throwing off her kerchief and fur coat, Galuzina turned awkwardly, and again felt a stitch in her side and a throb in her shoulder blade. She cried out, frightened, and began to murmur: “Great Intercessor for those in sorrow, most pure Virgin, Swift Defender, Protectress of the world”—and burst into tears. Then, after waiting for the pain to subside, she began to undress. The hooks behind the collar and on the back slipped from her fingers and hid in the wrinkles of the smoke-colored fabric. She had trouble feeling for them.
Her ward, Ksiusha, came into the room, awakened by her arrival.
“Why are you in the dark, mama? Would you like me to bring you a lamp?”
“Don’t bother. I can see like this.”
“Mama dear, Olga Nilovna, let me undo it. You needn’t suffer.”
“My fingers don’t obey me, I could just cry. The mangy Yid didn’t have brains enough to sew the hooks on like a human being, the blind bat. I’d like to rip it off all the way down and shove the whole flap in his mug.”
“They sang well in the Vozdvizhenye. A quiet night. It carried here through the air.”
“The singing was good. But I feel bad, my dear. I’ve got stitches here and here. Everywhere. That’s the misery of it. I don’t know what to do.”
“The homeopath Stydobsky used to help you.”
“His advice was always impossible to follow. A horse doctor your homeopath turned out to be. Neither fish nor fowl. That’s the first thing. And second, he’s gone away. Gone away, gone away. And not him alone. Before the feast everybody went rushing out of the city. Are they expecting an earthquake or something?”
“Well, then that captured Hungarian doctor’s treatment did you good.”
“More poppycock with sugar on top. I’m telling you, there’s nobody left, everybody’s scattered. Kerenyi Lajos and the other Magyars wound up behind the demarcation line. They forced the dear fellow into service. Took him into the Red Army.”
“Anyhow, you’re overanxious about your health. Neurosis of the heart. A simple folk charm can work wonders here. Remember, the army wife whispered it away for you quite successfully. Like it was never there. What’s her name, that army wife? I forget.”
“No, you decidedly consider me an ignorant fool. You sing ‘Sentetyurikha’ about me behind my back, for all I know.”
“God forbid! It’s sinful to say such things, mama. Better remind me of the army wife’s name. It’s on the tip of my tongue. I won’t have any peace until I remember it.”
“She’s got more names than skirts. I don’t know which one you want. They call her Kubarikha, and Medvedikha, and Zlydarikha.6 And a dozen more nicknames. She’s not around anymore. The ball’s over, go look for wind in the clover. They locked up the servant of God in the Kezhem prison. For exterminating a fetus and for some sort of powders. But she, look you, rather than languish behind bars, buggered off from prison to somewhere in the Far East. I’m telling you, everybody’s scattered. Vlas Pakhomych, Teresha, Aunt Polya with her yielding heart. The only honest women left in the whole town are you and me—two fools, I’m not joking. And no medical help. If anything happens, it’s the end, call and nobody’ll hear you. They say there’s a celebrity from Moscow in Yuriatin, a professor, the son of a suicide, a Siberian merchant. While I was making up my mind to invite him, they set up twenty Red cordons on the road, there’s no room to sneeze. But now about something else. Go to bed, and I’ll try to lie down. The student Blazhein has turned your head. No use denying it. You won’t hide it anyway, you’re red as a lobster. Your wretched student is toiling over prints on a holy night, developing and printing my photographs. They don’t sleep themselves and won’t let others sleep. Their Tomik barks his head off for the whole town to hear. And the nasty crow is cawing in our apple tree, must be I’m not to sleep all night. Why are you offended, miss touch-
