In some places, the edges of the baseboards had come away from the floor. Yuri Andreevich filled the cracks with several layers of broken glass, the sharp ends pointing inwards. The bedroom door fitted well to the doorstep. It could be closed tightly and, when shut, totally separated the room with the stopped-up holes from the rest of the apartment. In a little more than an hour, Yuri Andreevich managed to do it all.
A tile stove cut off one corner of the bedroom, with a tile cornice that did not reach the ceiling. In the kitchen there was a supply of firewood, about ten bundles. Yuri Andreevich decided to rob Lara of a couple of armloads, and going on one knee, he began to pile the wood on his left arm. He brought it to the bedroom, set it down by the stove, familiarized himself with its mechanism, and quickly checked the condition it was in. He wanted to lock the door, but the lock turned out to be in disrepair, and therefore, tucking in some paper to make it tight and keep it from opening, Yuri Andreevich unhurriedly began making a fire in the stove.
While putting wood into the firebox, he saw a mark on the butt end of one of the logs. He recognized it with surprise. It was the trace of an old brand mark, the two initial letters K and D, which indicated what warehouse the logs came from before they were cut up. Long ago, when Kruger was still there, they had branded with these letters the ends of logs from the Kulabyshev plot in Varykino, when the factory sold off its extra unneeded fuel supplies.
The presence of this sort of firewood in Lara’s household proved that she knew Samdevyatov and that he looked after her, just as he had once supplied all the needs of the doctor and his family. This discovery was a knife in the doctor’s heart. He had been burdened by Anfim Efimovich’s help even before. Now the embarrassment of these favors was complicated by other feelings.
It was unlikely that Anfim was Larissa Fyodorovna’s benefactor just for the beauty of it. Yuri Andreevich pictured Anfim Efimovich’s free and easy ways and Lara’s recklessness as a woman. It could not be that there was nothing between them.
In the stove the dry Kulabyshev wood was beginning to burn furiously, with a concerted crackling, and as it caught fire, Yuri Andreevich’s jealous blindness, having started from weak suppositions, arrived at complete certainty.
But his soul was tormented on all sides, and one pain came to replace another. He had no need to drive these suspicions away. His thoughts, without effort, of themselves, jumped from subject to subject. Reflections about his family, rushing upon him with renewed force, overshadowed his jealous fits for a time.
“So you’re in Moscow, my dear ones?” It already seemed to him that Tuntseva had certified their safe arrival for him. “Meaning that you repeated that long, difficult trip without me? How was the journey? What sort of business was Alexander Alexandrovich summoned for? Probably an invitation from the Academy to start teaching there again? What did you find at home? Come now, you don’t mean that home still exists? Oh, Lord, how difficult and painful! Oh, don’t think, don’t think! How confused my thoughts are! What’s wrong with me, Tonya? I seem to be falling ill. What will become of me and of you all, Tonya, Tonechka, Tonya, Shurochka, Alexander Alexandrovich? O Light that never sets, why hast Thou rejected me from Thy presence?1 Why are you borne away from me all my life? Why are we always apart? But we’ll soon be united, we’ll come together, right? I’ll reach you on foot, if it can’t be otherwise. We’ll see each other. Everything will go well again, right?
“But how can the earth not swallow me up, if I keep forgetting that Tonya was supposed to give birth and probably did give birth? It’s not the first time that I’ve shown this forgetfulness. How did her delivery go? How did she give birth? They stopped in Yuriatin on their way to Moscow. True, Lara doesn’t know them, but still this seamstress and hairdresser, a total stranger, wasn’t ignorant of their fate, yet Lara doesn’t say a word about them in her note. What strange inattention, smacking of indifference! As inexplicable as passing over in silence her relations with Samdevyatov.”
Here Yuri Andreevich looked around at the walls of the bedroom with a different, discerning eye. He knew that, of the things standing or hanging around him, not one belonged to Lara, and that the furnishings of the former owners, unknown and in hiding, in no way testified to Lara’s taste.
But all the same, be that as it may, he suddenly felt ill at ease among the men and women in enlarged photographs gazing from the walls. A spirit of hostility breathed on him from the crude furnishings. He felt himself foreign and superfluous in this bedroom.
And he, fool that he was, had remembered this house so many times, had missed it, and had entered this room, not as a space, but as his yearning for Lara! How ridiculous this way of feeling probably was from outside! Was this how strong, practical people like Samdevyatov, handsome males, lived and behaved and expressed themselves? And why should Lara prefer his spinelessness and the obscure, unreal language of his adoration? Did she have such need of this confusion? Did she herself want to be what she was for him?
And what was she for him, as he had just put it? Oh, to this question he always had the answer ready.
There outside is the spring evening. The air is all marked with sounds. The voices of children playing are scattered at various distances, as if to signify that the space is alive throughout. And this expanse is Russia, his incomparable one, renowned far and wide, famous mother, martyr, stubborn, muddle-headed, whimsical, adored, with her eternally majestic and disastrous escapades, which can never be foreseen! Oh, how sweet it is to exist! How sweet to live in the world and to love life! Oh, how one always longs to say thank you to life itself, to existence itself, to say it right in their faces!
And that is what Lara is. It is impossible to talk to them, but she is their representative, their expression, the gift of hearing and speech, given to the voiceless principles of existence.
And untrue, a thousand times untrue, was all that he had said about her in a moment of doubt. How precisely perfect and irreproachable everything is in her!
Tears of admiration and repentance clouded his vision. He opened the door of the stove and stirred inside with a poker. He pushed the burning, pure heat to the very back of the firebox and moved the as yet unburnt logs towards the front, where the draft was stronger. For some time he did not close the door. He enjoyed feeling the play of warmth and light on his face and hands. The shifting glimmer of the flames finally sobered him. Oh, how he missed her now, how he needed at that moment something tangible that came from her!
He took her crumpled note from his pocket. He unfolded it the other side up, not the way he had read it earlier, and only now noticed that there was writing on the other side as well. Having smoothed out the crumpled paper, he read in the dancing light of the burning stove:
“About your family you know. They are in Moscow. Tonya gave birth to a daughter.” This was followed by several crossed-out lines. Then there was: “I crossed it out, because it’s silly in a note. We’ll talk our fill face-to- face. I’m in a hurry, running to get a horse. I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t get one. With Katenka it will be hard …” The end of the phrase was smudged and he could not make it out.
“She ran to get a horse from Anfim, and probably got it, since she’s gone,” Yuri Andreevich reflected calmly. “If her conscience weren’t completely clear on that account, she wouldn’t have mentioned that detail.”
