and I first met and I learned from your own words that he had wanted to arrest you on his train. I think I told you, but maybe I didn’t and it only seems so to me, that I saw him once from a distance when he was getting into a car. But you can imagine how protected he was! I found him almost unchanged. The same handsome, honest, resolute face, the most honest of any I’ve ever seen in the world. Not a trace of showing off, a manly character, a complete absence of posturing. He was always that way, and has remained that way. And yet I noticed one change, and it alarmed me.
“It was as if something abstract had entered into that look and discolored it. A living human face had turned into the embodiment, the principle, the portrayal of an idea. My heart was wrung when I noticed it. I realized it was the consequence of the powers whose hands he had given himself into, sublime but deadening and merciless powers, which someday would also not spare him. It seemed to me that he was marked, and that this was the finger of doom. But maybe I’m confused. Maybe your expressions sank into me, when you described your meeting to me. Besides the feelings we have in common, I also borrow a lot from you!”
“No, tell me about your life before the revolution.”
“Early in childhood I began to dream of purity. He was its realization. We were almost from the same courtyard. He and I and Galiullin. I was his childhood passion. He swooned, he went cold when he saw me. It’s probably not good for me to say it and know it. But it would be still worse if I pretended not to know. I was his childhood passion, that enslaving infatuation which one conceals, which a child’s pride doesn’t allow him to reveal, and which is written without words on his face and is obvious to everybody. We were friends. He and I are people as different as you and I are similar. Right then I chose him with my heart. I decided to join my life with this wonderful boy’s as soon as we had both made our way, and mentally I became engaged to him right then.
“And think what abilities he has! Extraordinary! The son of a simple switchman or railroad watchman, through nothing but his own giftedness and persistent work he achieved—I was about to say the level, but I should say the summit of contemporary university knowledge in two fields, mathematics and the humanities. That’s no joke!”
“In that case, what upset your domestic harmony, if you loved each other so much?”
“Ah, how hard it is to answer that. I’ll tell you about it right now. But it’s astonishing. Is it for me, a weak woman, to explain to you, who are so intelligent, what is now happening with life in general, with human life in Russia, and why families fall apart, yours and mine among them? Ah, as if it’s a matter of people, of similarities and dissimilarities of character, of loving and not loving. All that’s productive, settled, all that’s connected with habitual life, with the human nest and its order, all of it went to rack and ruin along with the upheaval of the whole of society and its reorganization. All everyday things were overturned and destroyed. What remained was the un- everyday, unapplied force of the naked soul, stripped of the last shred, for which nothing has changed, because in all times it was cold and trembling and drawing towards the one nearest to it, which is just as naked and lonely. You and I are like Adam and Eve, the first human beings, who had nothing to cover themselves with when the world began, and we are now just as unclothed and homeless at its end. And you and I are the last reminder of all those countless great things that have been done in the world in the many thousands of years between them and us, and in memory of those vanished wonders, we breathe and love, and weep, and hold each other, and cling to each other.”
14
After a pause, she went on much more calmly:
“I’ll tell you. If Strelnikov became Pashenka Antipov again. If he stopped his madness and rebellion. If time turned backwards. If somewhere far away, at the edge of the world, the window of our house miraculously lit up, with a lamp and books on Pasha’s desk, I think I would crawl there on my knees. Everything in me would be aroused. I would not resist the call of the past, the call of faithfulness. I would sacrifice everything. Even what’s most dear. You. And my intimacy with you, so easy, so unforced, so self-implied. Oh, forgive me. I’m not saying the right thing. It’s not true.”
She threw herself on his neck and burst into tears. But very soon she came to herself. Wiping her tears, she said:
“But it’s the same voice of duty that drives you to Tonya. Lord, how miserable we are! What will become of us? What are we to do?”
When she had completely recovered, she went on:
“Anyhow, I haven’t answered you yet about why our happiness fell apart. I understood it so clearly afterwards. I’ll tell you. It won’t be a story only about us. It became the fate of many people.”
“Speak, my bright one.”
“We were married just before the war, two years before it began. And we had just started living by our own wits, setting up house, when war was declared. I’m convinced now that it’s to blame for everything, all the subsequent misfortunes that keep overtaking our generation to this day. I remember my childhood well. I caught the time when the notions of the previous, peaceful age were still in force. It was held that one should trust the voice of reason. What was prompted by conscience was considered natural and necessary. The death of a man at the hands of another was a rarity, an extraordinary phenomenon, out of the common run. Murders, it was supposed, happened only in tragedies, in detective novels, and in newspaper chronicles of events, not in ordinary life.
“And suddenly this leap from serene, innocent measuredness into blood and screaming, mass insanity, and the savagery of daily and hourly, lawful and extolled murder.
“Probably this never goes unpaid for. You probably remember better than I do how everything all at once started going to ruin. Train travel, food supplies for the cities, the foundations of family life, the moral principles of consciousness.”
“Go on. I know what you’ll say further. How well you analyze it all! What a joy to listen to you!”
“Then untruth came to the Russian land. The main trouble, the root of the future evil, was loss of faith in the value of one’s own opinion. People imagined that the time when they followed the urgings of their moral sense was gone, that now they had to sing to the general tune and live by foreign notions imposed on everyone. The dominion of the ready-made phrase began to grow—first monarchistic, then revolutionary.
“This social delusion was all-enveloping, contagious. Everything fell under its influence. Our home couldn’t stand against this bane either. Something in it was shaken. Instead of the unconscious liveliness that had always reigned with us, a dose of foolish declamation crept into our conversations, some ostentatious, mandatory philosophizing on mandatory world themes. Could a man as subtle and self-demanding as Pasha, who could so unerringly distinguish essence from appearance, pass by this insidious falseness and not notice it?
“And here he committed a fatal error, which determined everything beforehand. He took the sign of the time, the social evil, for a domestic phenomenon. He attributed the unnatural tone, the official stiffness of our discussions to himself, he ascribed them to his being a dry stick, a mediocrity, a man in a case.4 To you it probably seems incredible that such trifles could mean anything in our life together. You can’t imagine how important it was, how many stupid things Pasha did because of that childishness.
