those pure feet and wipe them with the hair of my head.’ And suddenly, right after this about her hair, an exclamation is wrung from her: ‘Who can measure the multitude of my sins, or the depth of Thy judgments?’ What intimacy, what equality of God and life, of God and a person, of God and a woman!”9
18
Yuri Andreevich had come back tired from the station. This was his one day off every ten days. Usually on those days he made up in sleep for the whole week. He sat leaning back on the sofa, at times half reclining or stretching out full length on it. Though he listened to Sima through surging waves of drowsiness, her reasoning delighted him. “Of course, it’s all from Uncle Kolya,” he thought, “but how talented and intelligent she is!”
He jumped up from the sofa and went to the window. It gave onto the courtyard, as did the one in the next room, where Lara and Simushka were now whispering indistinctly.
The weather was worsening. It was getting dark in the courtyard. Two magpies flew into the yard and began flying around, looking for a place to light. The wind slightly fluffed and ruffled their feathers. The magpies lighted on the lid of a trash bin, flew over to the fence, came down to the ground, and began walking about the yard.
“Magpies mean snow,” thought the doctor. At the same time he heard Sima tell Lara behind the curtain:
“Magpies mean news,” Sima was saying. “You’re going to have guests. Or receive a letter.”
A little later the doorbell on its wire, which Yuri Andreevich had recently repaired, rang outside. Larissa Fyodorovna came from behind the curtain and with quick steps went to the front hall to open the door. From her conversation, Yuri Andreevich understood that Sima’s sister, Glafira Severinovna, had come.
“Do you want your sister?” asked Larissa Fyodorovna. “Simushka’s here.”
“No, not her. Though why not? We’ll go together, if she’s ready to go home. No, I’ve come for something else. There’s a letter for your friend. He can be thankful I once worked at the post office. It passed through so many hands and landed in mine through an acquaintance. From Moscow. It took five months to come. They couldn’t find the addressee. But I know who he is. I gave him a shave once.”
The letter, long, on several pages, crumpled, soiled, in an unsealed and disintegrating envelope, was from Tonya. The doctor was not fully conscious of how he came to be holding it; he had not noticed Lara handing it to him. When the doctor began to read the letter, he still remembered what town he was in, and in whose house, but as he read, he began to lose that awareness. Sima came out, greeted him, and began saying good-bye. Mechanically, he made the proper response, but paid no attention to her. Her leaving fell out of his consciousness. He was gradually becoming more fully oblivious of where he was and what was around him.
“Yura,” Antonina Alexandrovna wrote to him, “do you know that we have a daughter? She was christened Masha, in memory of your late mother, Marya Nikolaevna.
“Now about something else entirely. Several well-known social figures, professors from the CD Party and socialists of the right, Melgunov, Kiesewetter, Kuskova, some others, as well as Uncle Nikolai Alexandrovich Gromeko, papa, and we as members of his family, are being deported from Russia.10
“This is a misfortune, especially in your absence, but we must submit and thank God for such a soft form of exile in such a terrible time, for it could be much worse. If you had been found and were here, you would come with us. But where are you now? I am sending this letter to Antipova’s address, she will hand it on to you, if she finds you. I suffer from uncertainty, whether afterwards, when—if it is so fated—you are found, they will extend to you, as a member of our family, the permission to leave that we have all been granted. It is my belief that you are alive and will be found. My loving heart tells me so and I trust its voice. It is possible that, by the time you are discovered, the conditions of life in Russia will have softened, and you will be able to obtain separate permission for a trip abroad, and we will all gather again in one place. But as I write it, I myself do not believe that such happiness can come true.
“The whole trouble is that I love you and you do not love me. I try to find the meaning of this condemnation, to interpret it, to justify it, I rummage, I delve into myself, going through our whole life and everything I know about myself, and I cannot see the beginning and cannot recall what I did and how I brought this misfortune upon myself. You look at me somehow wrongly, with unkind eyes, you see me twistedly, as in a distorting mirror.
“And yet I love you. Ah, how I love you, if only you could imagine! I love every peculiarity in you, all that is advantageous and disadvantageous, all your ordinary aspects, dear in their unusual combination, your face ennobled by inner content, which without that might seem unattractive, your talent and intelligence, which have as if taken the place of a total lack of will. All this is dear to me, and I do not know a man who is better than you.
“But listen, do you know what I shall tell you? Even if you were not so dear to me, even if I did not like you so much, still the deplorable truth of my coldness would not have been revealed to me, still I would think that I loved you. From fear alone of the humiliating, annihilating punishment that non-love is, I would unconsciously beware of realizing that I did not love you. Neither I nor you would ever find it out. My own heart would conceal it from me, because non-love is almost like murder, and I would be unable to deal such a blow to anyone.
“Though nothing has been finally decided yet, we are probably going to Paris. I will get to those far-off lands where you were taken as a boy and where papa and my uncle were brought up. Papa sends his greetings. Shura has grown, he’s not so handsome, but he has become a big, strong boy and always cries bitterly, inconsolably, at the mention of you. I can’t go on. My heart is bursting with tears. So, farewell. Let me make the cross over you for this whole unending separation, the trials, the uncertainty, for the whole of your long, long, obscure path. I do not blame you for anything, I do not have a single reproach; shape your life as you want it to be, so long as it is good for you.
“Before leaving the dreadful and, for us, so fateful Urals, I came to know Larissa Fyodorovna quite closely. I owe her my thanks, she was constantly there when it was hard for me, and helped me during the delivery. I must tell you frankly that she is a good person, but I do not want to play the hypocrite—she is the complete opposite of me. I was born into this world to simplify life and seek the right way through, and she in order to complicate and confuse it.
“Farewell, I must end. They have come to take the letter and it is time to pack. Oh, Yura, Yura, my dear, my darling, my husband, father of my children, what is all this? We will never, ever see each other again. There, I have written these words, do you clearly make out their meaning? Do you understand, do you understand? They are hurrying me, and it is a sure sign that they have come to take me to my execution. Yura! Yura!”
Yuri Andreevich looked up from the letter with an absent, tearless gaze, not directed anywhere, dry from grief, devastated by suffering. He saw nothing around him, he was conscious of nothing.
Outside the window it began to snow. Wind carried the snow obliquely, ever faster and ever denser, as if trying all the while to make up for something, and the way Yuri Andreevich stared ahead of him through the window was as if it were not snow falling but the continued reading of Tonya’s letter, and not dry starlike flakes that raced and flashed, but small spaces of white paper between small black letters, white, white, endless, endless.
