world.”
“Ah, Yurochka, how can you? I’m being serious with you, and you pay me compliments like in a drawing room. You ask how I am? I’m broken, I have a crack in me for all my life. I was made a woman prematurely, criminally early, and initiated into life from its worst side, in the false, boulevard interpretation of a self-confident aging parasite from former times, who profited from everything and allowed himself everything.”
“I can guess. I supposed there was something. But wait. It’s easy to imagine your unchildish pain of that time, the fear of frightened inexperience, the first offense of an immature girl. But that’s a thing of the past. I mean to say—to grieve over it now is not your concern, it’s that of the people who love you, like myself. It’s I who should tear my hair and feel desperate at being late, at not being with you then already, so as to prevent what happened, if it is truly a grief for you. Astonishing. It seems I can be deeply, mortally, passionately jealous only of what is beneath me or distant from me. Rivalry with a superior man calls up totally different feelings in me. If a man close to me in spirit and whom I love should fall in love with the same woman as I, I would have a feeling of sad brotherhood with him, not of dispute and competition. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to share the object of my adoration with him for a second. But I would withdraw with a feeling of suffering quite different from jealousy, not as smoldering and bloody. The same would happen if I should run into an artist who won me over with his superior ability in works similar to mine. I would probably renounce my search and not duplicate his attempts, which had defeated me.
“But I’ve gotten sidetracked. I don’t think I’d love you so deeply if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don’t like the righteous ones, who never fell, never stumbled. Their virtue is dead and of little value. The beauty of life has not been revealed to them.”
“And I’m thinking precisely of that beauty. It seems to me that what’s needed in order to see it is intact imagination, primary perception. And that is just what was taken from me. Perhaps I would have formed my own view of life, if I hadn’t seen it, from the very first steps, with someone else’s vulgarizing stamp on it. But that’s not all. Because of the interference in my just-beginning life of an immoral, self-gratifying mediocrity, my subsequent marriage to a big and remarkable man did not work out, though he loved me deeply and I responded in the same way.”
“Wait. Tell me about your husband later. I told you, jealousy is usually aroused in me by an inferior, not an equal. I’m not jealous of your husband. But that one?”
“What ‘that one’?”
“That profligate, the one who ruined you. Who is he?”
“A well-known Moscow lawyer. He was my father’s associate, and after papa’s death he supported mama materially, when we were living in poverty. A bachelor with a fortune. I’m probably making him far too interesting and unsuitably significant by besmirching him like this. A very ordinary phenomenon. If you like, I’ll tell you his last name.”
“Never mind. I know it. I saw him once.”
“Really?”
“One time in a hotel room, when your mother poisoned herself. Late in the evening. We were still children, schoolboys.”
“Ah, I remember that time. You came and stood in the dark, in the front hall of the room. I might never have recalled that scene myself, but you helped me once to bring it back from oblivion. You reminded me of it, I think, in Meliuzeevo.”
“Komarovsky was there.”
“Was he? Quite possible. It was easy to find me with him. We were often together.”
“Why are you blushing?”
“From the sound of ‘Komarovsky’ on your lips. From the unwontedness and the unexpectedness.”
“A comrade of mine was with me, a schoolmate. Here’s what he told me right then in the hotel room. He recognized Komarovsky as a man he had seen one time by chance, in unforeseen circumstances. Once, while on a journey, this schoolboy, Mikhail Gordon, was eyewitness to the suicide of my father—a millionaire industrialist. Misha was riding on the same train with him. My father threw himself from the moving train with the intention of ending his life, and he was killed. He was in the company of Komarovsky, his lawyer. Komarovsky had encouraged my father’s drinking, gotten his affairs embroiled, driven him to bankruptcy, pushed him onto the path of ruin. He’s to blame for his suicide and for my being left an orphan.”
“It can’t be! What a portentous detail! Is it really true? So he was your evil genius, too? How that brings us together! Simply some sort of predestination!”
“It’s of him that I’m insanely, irremediably jealous over you.”
“What? Why, I not only don’t love him. I despise him.”
“Do you know your whole self so well? Human nature, especially woman’s, is so obscure and contradictory! In some corner of your aversion, you may be in greater subjection to him than to any other man, whom you love by your own goodwill, without constraint.”
“How horrible, what you’re saying. And, as usual, you say it so pointedly that this unnaturalness seems like the truth to me. But then how terrible it is!”
“Calm yourself. Don’t listen to me. I wanted to say that with you I’m jealous of what is obscure, unconscious, of something in which explanations are unthinkable, of something that cannot be puzzled out. I’m jealous of your toilet things, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of infectious diseases borne on the air, which may affect you and poison your blood. And, as of such an infection, I’m jealous of Komarovsky, who will one day take you from me, just as one day we will be separated by my death or yours. I know that this must seem like a heaping up of obscurities to you. I can’t say it in a more orderly and comprehensible way. I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.”
13
“Tell me more about your husband. ‘One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book,’ as Shakespeare says.”
“Where is it from?”
“I told you a lot about him in Meliuzeevo, when I was searching for him. And then here in Yuriatin, when you
