“Oh, that’s still so far off. Probably no one. I haven’t thought about it yet.”
“Please don’t imagine I’m all that interested.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“You’re a fool.”
They began to quarrel. Nika remembered his morning misogyny. He threatened Nadya that if she did not stop saying insolent things, he would drown her.
“Just try,” said Nadya.
He seized her around the waist. A fight started. They lost their balance and fell into the water.
They both knew how to swim, but the water lilies caught at their arms and legs, and they could not yet feel the bottom. Finally, sinking into the ooze, they clambered out on the bank. Water poured in streams from their shoes and pockets. Nika was particularly tired.
If this had happened still quite recently, no further back than that spring, then in the given situation, sitting together thoroughly soaked after such a crossing, they would surely have made noise, scolding or laughing.
But now they were silent and barely breathed, crushed by the absurdity of what had happened. Nadya was indignant and protested silently, while Nika hurt all over, as if his arms and legs had been broken by a stick and his ribs caved in.
Finally, like a grown-up, Nadya quietly murmured, “Madman!”—and he, in the same grown-up way, said, “Forgive me.”
They began to walk up towards the house, leaving wet trails behind them like two water barrels. Their way led up the dusty slope, swarming with snakes, not far from the place where Nika had seen a grass snake in the morning.
Nika remembered the magic elation of the night, the dawn, and his morning omnipotence, when by his own will he had commanded nature. What should he order it to do now, he wondered. What did he want most of all? He fancied that he wanted most of all to fall into the pond again someday with Nadya, and he would have given a lot right then to know if it would ever happen or not.
A GIRL FROM A DIFFERENT CIRCLE
1
The war with Japan was not over yet. It was unexpectedly overshadowed by other events. Waves of revolution rolled across Russia, each one higher and more prodigious than the last.1
At that time Amalia Karlovna Guichard, the widow of a Belgian engineer and herself a Russified Frenchwoman, came to Moscow from the Urals with two children, her son Rodion and her daughter Larissa. Her son she sent to the Cadet Corps, and her daughter to a girls’ high school, by chance the same one and in the same class in which Nadya Kologrivova was studying.
Mme Guichard’s husband had left her some savings in securities, which had been rising but now had begun to fall. To slow the melting away of her means and not sit with folded arms, Mme Guichard bought a small business, Levitskaya’s dressmaking shop near the Triumphal Arch, from the seamstress’s heirs, with the right to keep the old firm intact, with the circle of its former clients and all its modistes and apprentices.
Mme Guichard did this on the advice of the lawyer Komarovsky, her husband’s friend and her own mainstay, a cold-blooded businessman, who knew business life in Russia like the back of his hand. She corresponded with him about her move, he met them at the station, he took them across the whole of Moscow to the furnished rooms of the Montenegro in Oruzheiny Lane, where he had taken quarters for them, he insisted on sending Rodion to the corps and Lara to the high school he recommended, and he joked distractedly with the boy and fixed his gaze on the girl so that she blushed.
2
Before moving to the small three-room apartment that came with the shop, they lived for about a month at the Montenegro.
These were the most terrible parts of Moscow, slick cabbies and low haunts, whole streets given over to depravity, slums full of “lost creatures.”
The children were not surprised at the dirtiness of the rooms, the bedbugs, the squalor of the furnishings. After their father’s death, their mother had lived in eternal fear of destitution. Rodya and Lara were used to hearing that they were on the verge of ruin. They understood that they were not street children, but in them there was a deep- seated timidity before the rich, as in children from an orphanage.
A living example of this fear was given them by their mother. Amalia Karlovna was a plump blonde of about thirty-five, whose fits of heart failure alternated with fits of stupidity. She was a terrible coward and had a mortal fear of men. Precisely for that reason, being frightened and bewildered, she kept falling from one embrace into another.
In the Montenegro they occupied number 23, and in number 24, from the day the place was founded, the cellist Tyshkevich had been living, a kindly fellow, sweaty and bald, in a little wig, who folded his hands prayerfully and pressed them to his breast when he was persuading someone, and threw back his head and rolled up his eyes inspiredly when he played in society or appeared at concerts. He was rarely at home and went off for whole days to the Bolshoi Theater or the Conservatory. The neighbors became acquainted. Mutual favors brought them close.
Since the children’s presence occasionally hampered Amalia Karlovna during Komarovsky’s visits, Tyshkevich began leaving his key with her when he left, so that she could receive her friend. Soon Mme Guichard became so accustomed to his self-sacrifices that she knocked on his door several times in tears, asking him to defend her against her protector.
3
The house was of one story, not far from the corner of Tverskaya. The proximity of the Brest railway could be felt. Its realm began nearby, the company apartments of the employees, the engine depots and warehouses.
The place was home to Olya Demina, an intelligent girl, the niece of one of the employees of the Moscow Freight Yard.
