“And now, of course, he’s already in the stable hitching up Savraska, his confused, disobedient hands trembling with agitation and haste, and will immediately whip her up to full speed behind them, so as to overtake them while they’re still in the fields, before they get into the forest.”
That was probably what she was thinking. And they had not even said good-bye properly. Yuri Andreevich had only waved his hand and turned away, trying to swallow the pain that stuck like a lump in his throat, as if he were choking on a piece of apple.
The doctor, his coat thrown over one shoulder, was standing on the porch. With his free hand, not covered by the coat, he squeezed the neck of a turned porch post just under the ceiling with such force as if he were trying to strangle it. With all his consciousness he was riveted to a distant point in space. There, a short stretch of the road could be seen, going uphill between a few scattered birches. On that open space the light of the low, already setting sun was falling at that moment. There, into that lit-up strip, the racing sleigh should come at any moment out of the shallow depression they had dipped into for a short time.
“Farewell, farewell,” the doctor repeated soundlessly, senselessly, in anticipation of that moment, forcing the nearly breathless sounds from his chest into the frosty evening air. “Farewell, my only beloved, lost forever!”
“Here they come! Here they come!” his white lips whispered with impetuous dryness, when the sleigh shot up from below like an arrow, passing one birch after another, and began to slow down and—oh, joy!—stopped by the last one.
Oh, how his heart pounded, oh, how his heart pounded, his legs gave way under him, and he became all soft as felt from agitation, like the coat that was slipping from his shoulder! “Oh, God, it seems You have decided to return her to me? What’s happened there? What’s going on there on that distant line of sunset? Where is the explanation? Why are they standing there? No. All is lost. They’ve set off. Racing. She probably asked to stop for a moment for a farewell look at the house. Or maybe she wanted to see whether Yuri Andreevich had already set out and was speeding after them? They’re gone. Gone.
“If they have time, if the sun doesn’t set beforehand” (he wouldn’t be able to see them in the darkness), “they’ll flash by one more time, the last one now, on the other side of the ravine, in the clearing where the wolves stood two nights ago.”
And now this moment came and went. The dark crimson sun still rounded over the blue line of the snowdrifts. The snow greedily absorbed the pineapple sweetness the sun poured into it. And now they appeared, swept by, raced off. “Farewell, Lara, till we meet in the other world, farewell, my beauty, farewell, my fathomless, inexhaustible, eternal joy.” And now they vanished. “I’ll never see you again, never, never in my life, I’ll never see you again.”
Meanwhile, it was getting dark. The crimson-bronze patches of light the sunset scattered over the snow were swiftly fading, going out. The ashen softness of the expanses quickly sank into the lilac twilight, which was turning more and more purple. Their gray mist merged with the fine, lacy handwriting of the birches along the road, tenderly traced against the pale pink of the sky, suddenly grown shallow.
The grief in his soul sharpened Yuri Andreevich’s perceptions. He grasped everything with tenfold distinctness. His surroundings acquired the features of a rare uniqueness, even the air itself. The winter evening breathed an unprecedented concern, like an all-sympathizing witness. It was as if there had never been such a nightfall until now, and evening came for the first time only today, to comfort the orphaned man plunged into solitude. It was as if the woods around stood on the hillocks, back to the horizon, not simply as a girdling panorama, but had just placed themselves there, having emerged from under the ground to show sympathy.
The doctor almost waved away this tangible beauty of the hour, like a crowd of importunate commiserators; he was almost ready to whisper to the sunset’s rays reaching out to him: “Thanks. Don’t bother.”
He went on standing on the porch, his face to the closed door, turning away from the world. “My bright sun has set,” something within him repeated and re-echoed. He had no strength to utter this sequence of words aloud without convulsive spasms in the throat interrupting them.
He went into the house. A double monologue, two sorts of monologue, started and played out in him: a dry, seemingly businesslike one with respect to himself, and an expansive, boundless one addressed to Lara. This is how his thoughts went: “Now I’ll go to Moscow. The first thing is to survive. Not to surrender to insomnia. Not to fall asleep. To work at night to the point of stupefaction, until I drop from fatigue. And another thing. To heat the bedroom at once, so as not to be needlessly cold at night.”
But he also talked to himself like this: “My unforgettable delight! As long as the crooks of my arms remember you, as long as you’re still on my hands and lips, I’ll be with you. I’ll shed tears about you in something worthy, abiding. I’ll write down my memory of you in a tender, tender, achingly sorrowful portrayal. I’ll stay here until I’ve done it. And then I’ll leave myself. This is how I’ll portray you. I’ll set your features on paper, as, after a terrible storm that churns the sea to its bottom, the traces of the strongest, farthest-reaching wave lie on the sand. In a broken, meandering line the sea heaps up pumice stones, bits of cork, shells, seaweed, the lightest, most weightless things it could lift from the bottom. This is the line of the highest tide stretching endlessly along the shore. So the storm of life cast you up to me, my pride. And so I will portray you.”
He went into the house, locked the door, took off his coat. When he went into the room that Lara had tidied up so well and with such care in the morning, and in which everything had now been turned upside down again by her hasty departure, when he saw the rumpled, unmade bed and things lying about in disorder, thrown on the floor and chairs, he sank to his knees before the bed like a little boy, leaned his whole breast against its hard edge, and, burying his face in the hanging end of the coverlet, wept with a childish ease and bitterness. This did not go on for long. Yuri Andreevich stood up, quickly wiped his tears, looked around with a distractedly astonished and wearily absent gaze, took out the bottle Komarovsky had left, uncorked it, poured half a glass, added water, mixed in some snow, and with a pleasure almost equal to his just-shed, inconsolable tears, began drinking this mixture in slow, greedy gulps.
14
Something incongruous was taking place in Yuri Andreevich. He was slowly losing his mind. He had never yet led such a strange existence. He neglected the house, stopped looking after himself, turned nights into days, and lost count of the time that had passed since Lara’s departure.
He drank and wrote things devoted to her, but the Lara of his verses and notes, as he struck out and replaced one word with another, kept moving further away from her true prototype, Katenka’s living mother, who was now traveling with Katya.
Yuri Andreevich did this crossing out from considerations of precision and power of expression, but it also answered to the promptings of inner restraint, which did not allow him to reveal personal experiences and unfictitious happenings too openly, so as not to wound or offend the direct participants in what had been written and lived through. Thus what was visceral, still pulsing and warm, was forced out of the poems, and instead of the bleeding and noxious, a serene breadth appeared in them, raising the particular case to a generality familiar to all. He did not strive for this goal, but this breadth came of itself like a comfort sent to him personally by the traveler, like a distant greeting from her, like her appearance in a dream, or like the touch of her hand on his brow. And he
