The ban on private enterprise was lifted, and free trade was permitted within strict limits. Deals were done on the scale of commodity circulation among junkmen in a flea market. The dwarf scope of it encouraged speculation and led to abuse. The petty scrambling of the dealers produced nothing new, it added nothing material to the city’s desolation. Fortunes were made by pointlessly reselling the same things ten times over.
The owners of a few rather modest private libraries would bring the books from their bookcases to some one place. Would make application to the city council asking to open a bookselling cooperative. Would request space for same. Would obtain use of a shoe warehouse that had stood empty since the first months of the revolution or a florist’s greenhouse also closed since then, and under these spacious vaults would try to sell their meager and haphazard collections.
The wives of professors, who even earlier in difficult times had secretly baked white rolls for sale in defiance of the prohibition, now openly sold them in some place registered as a bicycle repair shop all those years. They changed landmarks,3 accepted the revolution, and began saying “You bet,” instead of “Yes” or “Very well.”
In Moscow Yuri Andreevich said:
“You’ll have to start doing something, Vasya.”
“I suppose I’ll study.”
“That goes without saying.”
“I also have a dream. I want to paint mama’s face from memory.”
“Very good. But for that you must know how to draw. Have you ever tried?”
“In Apraksin, when my uncle wasn’t looking, I fooled around with charcoal.”
“Well, all right. With any luck. We’ll give it a try.”
Vasya turned out to have no great ability at drawing, but an average one was enough to allow him to study applied art. Through connections, Yuri Andreevich got him enrolled in the general education program of the former Stroganov school, from which he was transferred to the department of polygraphy. There he studied lithographic techniques, typography and bookbinding, and graphic design.
The doctor and Vasya combined their efforts. The doctor wrote little books the size of one printer’s sheet on the most varied questions, and Vasya printed them at school as work counted for his examinations. The books, published in a small number of copies, were distributed through newly opened secondhand bookstores, founded by mutual acquaintances.
The books contained Yuri Andreevich’s philosophy, explanations of his medical views, his definitions of health and unhealth, his thoughts about transformism and evolution, about personality as the biological basis of the organism, his reflections on history and religion, close to his uncle’s and to Simushka’s, sketches of the Pugachev places he had visited, and his stories and poems.
His works were set forth accessibly, in spoken form, though far from the goals set by popularizers, because they contained disputable, arbitrary opinions, insufficiently verified, but always alive and original. The little books sold. Fanciers valued them.
At that time everything became a specialty, verse writing, the art of literary translation, theoretical studies were written about everything, institutes were created for everything. Various sorts of Palaces of Thought and Academies of Artistic Ideas sprang up. Yuri Andreevich was the staff doctor in half of these bogus institutions.
The doctor and Vasya were friends for a long time and lived together. During this period they took many rooms and half-ruined corners one after another, in various ways uninhabitable and uncomfortable.
Just after his arrival in Moscow, Yuri Andreevich visited his old house in Sivtsev, which, as he learned, his family had never stopped at in passing through Moscow. Their exile had changed everything. The rooms reserved for the doctor and his family had other tenants, and there was nothing left of his or his family’s belongings. People shied away from Yuri Andreevich as from a dangerous acquaintance.
Markel had risen in the world and no longer passed his time in Sivtsev. He had been transferred to Flour Town as a superintendent, one of the benefits of the job being a manager’s apartment for himself and his family. However, he preferred to live in the old porter’s lodge with a dirt floor, running water, and an enormous Russian stove that nearly filled the whole space. In all the buildings of the quarter, the water and heating pipes burst in winter, and only in the porter’s lodge was it warm and did the water not freeze.
At that time a cooling off took place in the relations between the doctor and Vasya. Vasya had become extraordinarily developed. He began to speak and think not at all as the barefoot and shaggy boy had spoken and thought in Veretenniki on the river Pelga. The obviousness, the self-evidence of the truths proclaimed by the revolution attracted him more and more. The doctor’s not entirely clear, figurative speech seemed to him the voice of error, condemned, aware of its weakness, and therefore evasive.
The doctor went around to various departments. He solicited for two causes: for the political rehabilitation of his family and their legal return to the motherland; and for a foreign passport for himself, with permission to go to Paris to fetch his wife and children.
Vasya was surprised at how lukewarm and limp this petitioning was. Yuri Andreevich was in too much of a hurry to establish ahead of time the failure of the efforts he made, announcing too confidently and almost with satisfaction the uselessness of any further attempts.
Vasya disapproved of the doctor more and more often. The latter did not take offense at his fair reproaches. But his relations with Vasya were deteriorating. Finally their friendship broke down and they parted ways. The doctor left Vasya the room they shared and moved to Flour Town, where the all-powerful Markel obtained for him the end of the Sventitskys’ former apartment. This end part consisted of the Sventitskys’ old out-of-use bathroom, a room with one window next to it, and a lopsided kitchen with a half-ruined and sagging back entrance. Yuri Andreevich moved there and after that abandoned medicine, grew unkempt, stopped seeing acquaintances, and started living in poverty.
6
It was a gray winter Sunday. The smoke from the chimneys did not rise in columns above the roofs, but seeped in black streams from the vent windows, through which, despite the prohibition, people continued to stick the iron pipes of their stoves. The city’s everyday life was still not settled. The inhabitants of Flour Town went about as unwashed slovens, suffered from boils, shivered, caught cold.
On the occasion of Sunday, the family of Markel Shchapov was all assembled.
