turned away from the flying dust, squinting and laughing. Right? How well I know her habits! And then you started walking towards each other, folding the heavy rug first in two, then in four, and she joked and pulled all sorts of antics while you did it. Right? Right?”
They got up, walked over to different windows, started looking in different directions. After some silence, Strelnikov went up to Yuri Andreevich. Catching hold of his hands and pressing them to his breast, he went on with the former hastiness:
“Forgive me, I understand that I’m touching something dear, cherished. But, if I may, I’ll ask more questions. Only don’t go away. Don’t leave me alone. I’ll soon go away myself. Think, six years of separation, six years of inconceivable self-restraint. But it seemed to me that not all of freedom had been conquered yet. I would achieve that first, and then I would belong wholly to them, my hands would be unbound. And now all my constructions have come to nothing. Tomorrow they’ll seize me. You’re close and dear to her. Maybe you’ll see her someday. But no, what am I asking? It’s madness. They’ll seize me and won’t allow me to vindicate myself. They’ll fall upon me all at once, stopping my mouth with shouts and abuse. Don’t I know how it’s done?”
18
At last he would have a good night’s sleep. For the first time in a long while Yuri Andreevich did not notice how he fell asleep as soon as he stretched out on his bed. Strelnikov spent the night with him. Yuri Andreevich gave him a place to sleep in the next room. In those brief moments when Yuri Andreevich woke up to turn on his other side or pull up the blanket that had slipped to the floor, he felt the strengthening power of his healthy sleep and delightedly fell asleep again. During the second half of the night, he began to have short, quickly changing dreams from the time of his childhood, sensible and rich in detail, which it was easy to take for reality.
Thus, for instance, his mother’s watercolor of the Italian seacoast, which hung on the wall, suddenly tore off, fell on the floor, and the sound of breaking glass awakened Yuri Andreevich. He opened his eyes. No, it was something else. It must be Antipov, Lara’s husband, Pavel Pavlovich, whose last name is Strelnikov, scarifying wolves in Shutma again, as Vakkh would say. Ah, no, what nonsense. Of course, it was the painting falling off the wall. There it is in splinters on the floor, he confirmed, as his dream returned and continued.
He woke up with a headache from having slept too long. He could not figure out at first who and where in the world he was.
Suddenly he remembered: “Strelnikov spent the night with me. It’s already late. I must get dressed. He’s probably up already, and if not, I’ll rouse him, make coffee, we’ll have coffee together.”
“Pavel Pavlovich!”
No answer. “It means he’s still asleep. Fast asleep, though.” Yuri Andreevich unhurriedly got dressed and went into the next room. Strelnikov’s military papakha was lying on the table, but he himself was not in the house. “Must have gone for a walk,” thought the doctor. “Without his hat. To keep himself in shape. And I’ve got to put a cross on Varykino today and go to town. But it’s too late. I overslept again. Just like every morning.”
Yuri Andreevich started a fire in the stove, took the bucket, and went to the well for water. A few steps from the porch, obliquely across the path, having fallen and buried his head in a snowdrift, lay Pavel Pavlovich. He had shot himself. The snow under his left temple was bunched into a red lump, soaked in a pool of spilled blood. The small drops of blood spattered around had rolled up with the snow into little red balls that looked like frozen rowan berries.
THE ENDING
1
It remains to tell the uncomplicated story of the last eight or nine years of Yuri Andreevich’s life, in the course of which he declined and went more and more to seed, losing his knowledge and skill as a doctor and as a writer, would emerge from this state of depression and despondency for a short time, become inspired, return to activity, and then, after a brief flash, again fall into prolonged indifference towards himself and everything in the world. During these years his longtime heart ailment, which he himself had diagnosed earlier, though he had no idea of the degree of its seriousness, advanced greatly.
He arrived in Moscow at the beginning of the NEP,1 the most ambiguous and false of Soviet periods. He was more emaciated, overgrown, and wild than at the time of his return to Yuriatin from his partisan captivity. Along the way he had again gradually taken off everything of value and exchanged it for bread, plus some cast-off rags, so as not to be left naked. Thus, as he went, he ate up his second fur coat and his two-piece suit and appeared on the streets of Moscow in a gray papakha, foot cloths, and a threadbare soldier’s greatcoat, which, lacking its buttons, which had all been cut off, had turned into a wraparound prisoner’s robe. In this outfit, he was in no way distinguishable from the countless Red Army soldiers whose crowds flooded the squares, boulevards, and train stations of the capital.
He did not arrive in Moscow alone. A handsome peasant youth, dressed like himself in soldier’s clothes, had followed on his heels everywhere. In this guise they appeared in those surviving Moscow drawing rooms where Yuri Andreevich had spent his childhood, where he was remembered and received with his companion, following delicate inquiries into whether they had gone to the bathhouse after the trip—typhus was still raging—and where Yuri Andreevich was told, in the first days of his appearance, the circumstances of his family’s leaving Moscow for abroad.
They both shunned people, but from acute shyness they avoided the chance of appearing singly as guests, when it was impossible to be silent and one had to keep up the conversation. Usually their two lanky figures showed up at a gathering of their acquaintances, hid in some inconspicuous corner, and silently spent the evening without taking part in the general conversation.
In the company of his young comrade, the tall, thin doctor in homely clothes looked like a seeker of truth from the common people, and his constant attendant like an obedient, blindly devoted disciple and follower. Who was this young companion?
2
For the last part of the trip, closer to Moscow, Yuri Andreevich had gone by rail, but the first, much bigger part he had made on foot.
The sight of the villages he passed through was no better than what he had seen in Siberia and the Urals during his flight from forest captivity. Only then he had passed through that region in winter, and now it was the end of summer and the warm, dry autumn, which was much easier.
Half the villages he passed through were deserted, as after an enemy campaign, the fields abandoned and unharvested, and in fact these were the results of war, of civil war.
For two or three days at the end of September, his road followed the steep, high bank of a river. The river, flowing towards Yuri Andreevich, was on his right. To the left, from the road to the cloud-heaped skyline,
