8
When the fire burned out, the doctor closed the flue and had a bite to eat. After eating he was overcome by a fit of invincible drowsiness. He lay down on the sofa without undressing and fell fast asleep. He did not hear the deafening and shameless uproar the rats raised outside the door and walls of the room. He had two oppressive dreams, one after the other.
He was in a room in Moscow, facing a glass door locked with a key, which, to make sure, he also held shut by pulling the door handle towards him. Outside the door, his boy Shurochka, in a child’s coat, sailor’s trousers and hat, pretty and miserable, thrashed and wept, asking to be let in. Behind the child, showering him and the door with spray, was a roaring and rumbling waterfall, either from burst pipes, an everyday phenomenon of that epoch, or perhaps there really was some wild mountain gorge coming right up to the door, with a furiously rushing stream and an age-old accumulation of cold and darkness.
The crash and roar of falling water frightened the boy to death. What he was crying could not be heard; the noise drowned out the boy’s cries. But Yuri Andreevich could see that his lips were forming the word “Papa! Papa!”
Yuri Andreevich’s heart was breaking. He wished with all his being to seize the boy in his arms, press him to his breast, and run off with him without looking back. But, flooding himself with tears, he pulled the handle of the locked door towards him, not letting the boy in, sacrificing him to falsely understood feelings of honor and duty before another woman, who was not the boy’s mother and who at any moment might come into the room from the other side.
Yuri Andreevich woke up in sweat and tears. “I have a fever. I’m falling ill,” he thought at once. “It’s not typhus. It’s some sort of heavy, dangerous fatigue that has taken the form of a sickness, some illness with a crisis, as in all serious infections, and the whole question is what will win out, life or death. But how I want to sleep!” And he fell asleep again.
He dreamed of a dark winter morning on a busy lit-up street in Moscow, by all tokens before the revolution, judging by the early street animation, the ringing of the first trams, the light of the street lamps that streaked with yellow the gray, predawn snow on the pavements.
He dreamed of a long, drawn-out apartment with many windows, all on one side, low over the street, probably on the second floor, with curtains lowered to the floor. In the apartment people in traveling clothes slept in various postures without undressing, and there was disorder, as on a train, leftover food on greasy, spread-out newspapers, gnawed bones of roast chicken, wings and legs, lay about, and on the floor in pairs, taken off for the night, stood the shoes of relatives and acquaintances, passersby and homeless people, come for a short stay. The hostess, Lara, in a hastily tied morning robe, rushed about the apartment from one end to the other, bustling quickly and noiselessly, and he followed on her heels, being a nuisance, trying giftlessly and inappropriately to clarify something, and she no longer had a moment for him, and to all his explanations she merely responded in passing by turning her head to him, by quiet, perplexed glances and innocent bursts of her incomparable, silvery laughter, the only forms of intimacy still left to them. And how distant, cold, and attractive she was, to whom he had given everything, whom he preferred to everything, and in contrast to whom he diminished and depreciated everything!
9
Not he, but something more general than he, sobbed and wept in him with tender and bright words, which shone like phosphorus in the darkness. And together with his weeping soul, he himself wept. He felt sorry for himself.
“I’m falling ill, I am ill,” he reflected in moments of lucidity, between the spells of sleep, feverish raving, and oblivion. “It’s some kind of typhus after all, not described in textbooks, which we didn’t study in medical school. I must prepare something, I must eat, otherwise I’ll die of hunger.”
But at the first attempt to raise himself on one elbow, he became convinced that he had no strength to stir, and either lay in a faint or fell asleep.
“How long have I been lying here, still dressed?” he reflected in one of these flashes. “How many hours? How many days? When I collapsed, spring was beginning. And now there’s frost on the window. So loose and dirty it makes the room dark.”
In the kitchen, rats overturned plates with a clatter, ran up the wall on the other side, let their heavy hulks drop to the floor, their weepy contralto voices squealing disgustingly.
And again he slept, and woke up to discover that the windows in the snowy net of frost were suffused with a rosy, burning glow, which shone in them like red wine poured in crystal glasses. And he did not know and asked himself what glow this was, of dawn or sunset?
Once he imagined human voices somewhere quite near, and he lost heart, deciding that this was the beginning of madness. With tears of pity for himself, he murmured against heaven in a voiceless whisper for having turned away from him and abandoned him. “O Light that never sets, why has Thou rejected me from Thy presence, and why has the alien darkness surrounded me, cursed as I am?”
And suddenly he realized that he was not dreaming and this was the fullest truth, that he was undressed and washed, and was lying in a clean shirt, not on the sofa, but on a freshly made bed, and that, mingling her hair with his and his tears with hers, Lara was weeping with him, and sitting by his bed, and leaning towards him. And he fainted from happiness.
10
In his recent delirium he had reproached heaven for its indifference, but now heaven in all its vastness had descended to his bed, and two big woman’s arms, white to the shoulders, reached out to him. His vision went dark with joy and, as one falls into oblivion, he dropped into bottomless bliss.
All his life he had been doing something, had been eternally busy, had worked about the house, had treated people, thought, studied, produced. How good it was to stop doing, striving, thinking, and to give himself for a time to this working of nature, to become a thing himself, a design, a work of her merciful, exquisite, beauty-lavishing hands!
Yuri Andreevich was recovering quickly. Lara nourished him, nursed him by her care, by her swan-white loveliness, by the moist-breathed, throaty whispering of her questions and answers.
Their hushed conversations, even the most trifling ones, were as filled with meaning as Plato’s dialogues.
Still more than by the communion of souls, they were united by the abyss that separated them from the rest of the world. They both had an equal aversion to all that was fatally typical in modern man, his studied rapturousness, his shrill elation, and that deadly winglessness which is assiduously spread by countless workers in the sciences and the arts, so that genius will go on being an extreme rarity.
Their love was great. But everyone loves without noticing the unprecedentedness of the feeling.
