some turn of his ascent, as he looked through the openwork under his feet, he could see old buckets, tubs, and broken chairs piled up under the stairway. This repeated itself now, too. Nothing had changed, everything was as before. The doctor was almost grateful to the stairs for this faithfulness to the past.
Once there had been a doorbell. But it had broken and ceased to work already in former times, before the doctor’s forest captivity. He was about to knock on the door, but noticed that it was locked in a new way, with a heavy padlock hanging on rings, crudely screwed into the paneling of the old oaken door, with its fine trimming fallen off in places. Formerly such barbarity had not been allowed. Locks had been mortised into the doorway and had worked well, and if they broke, locksmiths had existed to repair them. This insignificant detail spoke in its own way of a general, greatly advanced deterioration.
The doctor was certain that Lara and Katenka were not at home, and perhaps were not in Yuriatin, and perhaps were not even in this world. He was prepared for the most terrible disappointments. Only for the sake of a clear conscience, he decided to feel in the hole that he and Katenka had been so afraid of, and he tapped his foot on the wall, so that his hand would not come upon a rat in the opening. He had no hope of finding anything in the prearranged place. The hole was stopped up with a brick. Yuri Andreevich removed the brick and stuck his hand inside. Oh, wonder! A key and a note. A rather long note on a big piece of paper. The doctor went over to the window on the landing. A still greater wonder, still more incredible! The note was written to him! He read quickly:
“Lord, what happiness! They say you’re alive and have turned up. They saw you in the neighborhood and came running to tell me. Supposing you’d hurry to Varykino first of all, I’m going there myself with Katenka. In any case the key is in the usual place. Wait for me to come back, don’t go anywhere. Ah, yes, you don’t know, I’m now in the front part of the apartment, in the rooms that give onto the street. But you’ll figure that out yourself. The house is empty, there’s lots of room, I had to sell part of the owners’ furniture. I’m leaving some food, mostly boiled potatoes. Put an iron or something heavy on the lid of the pot, as I’ve done, to protect it from the rats. I’m out of my mind with joy.”
Here ended the front side of the note. The doctor did not notice that there was writing on the other side of the paper. He brought the page unfolded on his palm to his lips and then, without looking, folded it and put it in his pocket along with the key. A terrible, wounding pain was mixed with his mad joy. Since she had gone straight to Varykino, without any hesitation, it meant that his family was not there. Besides the anxiety this detail caused him, he also felt an unbearable pain and sadness for his family. Why did she not say a word about them and where they were, as if they did not exist at all?
But there was no time for thinking. It was beginning to get dark outside. He had to do many things while there was still light. Not the least concern was familiarizing himself with the decrees posted in the street. This was a serious time. Out of ignorance, you could pay with your life for violating some mandatory decree. And not opening the apartment and not taking the sack from his weary shoulder, he went down and outside and approached the wall pasted all over with printed matter.
3
This printed matter consisted of newspaper articles, the records of speeches at meetings, and decrees. Yuri Andreevich glanced cursorily at the titles. “On the Rules of the Requisition and Taxation of the Propertied Classes.” “On Workers’ Control.” “On Factory Committees.” These were the instructions of the new power that had come to the town to abolish the preceding order found there. They were a reminder of the immutability of its foundations, perhaps forgotten by the inhabitants during the temporary rule of the Whites. But Yuri Andreevich’s head began to spin from the endlessness of these monotonous repetitions. What year did these headlines belong to? The time of the first upheaval, or a later period, after some intervening rebellions of the Whites? What were these inscriptions? From last year? The year before last? At one time in his life he had admired the unconditional quality of this language and the directness of this thinking. Could it be that he had to pay for this imprudent admiration by never seeing anything else in his life but these frenzied cries and demands, unchanging in the course of long years, becoming ever more impractical, incomprehensible, and unfeasible? Could it be that for a moment of too-broad sympathy he had enslaved himself forever?
He came upon a fragment from some report. He read:
“Information about famine testifies to the incredible inactivity of the local organizations. The facts of abuse are obvious, the speculation is monstrous, but what has been done by the bureau of the local trade union leaders, what has been done by the heads of municipal and regional factory committees? Unless we conduct massive searches in the warehouses of the Yuriatin freight station and along the Yuriatin–Razvilye and Razvilye–Rybalka lines, unless we take severe measures of terror, down to shooting speculators on the spot, there will be no escape from famine.”
“What enviable blindness!” thought the doctor. “What bread are they talking about, when there has long been none in nature? What propertied classes, what speculators, when they’ve long been abolished by the sense of previous decrees? What peasants, what villages, if they no longer exist? What obliviousness to their own designs and measures, which have long left no stone upon stone in life! What must one be, to rave year after year with delirious feverishness about nonexistent, long-extinct themes, and to know nothing, to see nothing around one!”
The doctor’s head was spinning. He fainted and fell unconscious on the sidewalk. When he came to his senses, people helped him to get up and offered to take him wherever he indicated. He thanked them and declined the help, explaining that he only had to go across the street.
4
He went up the stairs again and started opening the door to Lara’s apartment. It was still quite light on the landing, not a bit darker than when he had first gone up. He noted with grateful joy that the sun was not hurrying him.
The click of the unlocking door caused turmoil inside. The space left empty in the absence of people met him with the clanging and rattling of overturned and falling tin cans. Rats fell smack on the floor and scattered in all directions. The doctor felt ill at ease from a sense of helplessness before these loathsome creatures, which probably bred here by the thousand.
And before making any attempt to settle down for the night, he decided first of all to protect himself from this pestilence, and, finding some easily isolated and tightly closing door, to stop all the rat holes with broken glass and scraps of sheet metal.
From the front hall he turned left, to a part of the apartment unknown to him. Passing through a dark room, he found himself in a bright one, with two windows giving onto the street. Just opposite the windows, on the other side, the house with figures stood darkly. The lower part of its wall was pasted over with newspapers. Their backs to the windows, passersby stood reading the newspapers.
The light in the room and outside was one and the same, the young, unseasoned evening light of early spring. The commonality of the light inside and outside was so great that it was as if there were no separation between the room and the street. Only in one thing was there a slight difference. In Lara’s bedroom, where Yuri Andreevich was standing, it was colder than outside on Kupecheskaya.
When Yuri Andreevich was nearing town during his last march, and was walking through it an hour or two earlier, the immense increase of his weakness had seemed to him the sign of an imminently threatening illness, and
