have enough air.”
“You can see the vent window on the floor is open. Forgive us for smoking. We always forget that we shouldn’t smoke in your presence. Is it my fault that it’s arranged so stupidly here? Find me another room.”
“Well, so I’m leaving, Gordosha. We’ve talked enough. I thank you for caring about me, dear comrades. It’s not a whimsy on my part. It’s an illness, sclerosis of the heart’s blood vessels. The walls of the heart muscle wear out, get thin, and one fine day can tear, burst. And I’m not forty yet. I’m not a drunkard, not a profligate.”
“It’s too early to be singing at your funeral. Nonsense. You’ll live a long while yet.”
“In our time the frequency of microscopic forms of cardiac hemorrhages has increased greatly. Not all of them are fatal. In some cases people survive. It’s the disease of our time. I think its causes are of a moral order. A constant, systematic dissembling is required of the vast majority of us. It’s impossible, without its affecting your health, to show yourself day after day contrary to what you feel, to lay yourself out for what you don’t love, to rejoice over what brings you misfortune. Our nervous system is not an empty sound, not a fiction. It’s a physical body made up of fibers. Our soul takes up room in space and sits inside us like the teeth in our mouth. It cannot be endlessly violated with impunity. It was painful for me to hear you tell about your exile, Innokenty, how you grew during it, and how it re-educated you. It’s as if a horse were to tell how it broke itself in riding school.”
“I’ll stand up for Dudorov. You’ve simply lost the habit of human words. They’ve ceased to reach you.”
“That may well be, Misha. In any case, excuse me, let me go. It’s hard for me to breathe. By God, I’m not exaggerating.”
“Wait. That’s nothing but dodging. We won’t let you go until you give us a straight, sincere answer. Do you agree that you’ve got to change, to mend your ways? What do you intend to do in that respect? You ought to clarify your relations with Tonya and with Marina. They’re living beings, women capable of suffering and feeling, and not some bodiless ideas hovering in your head in arbitrary combinations. Besides, it’s a shame that a man like you should go to waste uselessly. You must wake up from your sleep and indolence, rouse yourself, make out what’s around you without this unjustified haughtiness, yes, yes, without this inadmissible arrogance, find a job, take up practice.”
“Very well, I’ll answer you. I myself have often thought in that same spirit lately, and therefore I can promise you a thing or two without blushing for shame. It seems to me that everything will get settled. And quite soon. You’ll see. No, by God. Everything’s getting better. I have an incredible, passionate desire to live, and to live means always to push forward, towards higher things, towards perfection, and to achieve it.
“I’m glad, Gordon, that you defend Marina, as before you were always Tonya’s defender. But I have no dispute with them, I don’t make war on them or anybody else. You reproached me at first that she addresses me formally in response to my informality and calls me by my name and patronymic, as if it doesn’t weigh on me as well. But the deeper incoherence that underlies that unnaturalness has long been removed, everything’s smoothed over, and equality has been re-established.
“I can tell you some more good news. They’ve started writing to me from Paris again. The children have grown; they feel quite at ease among their French peers. Shura is finishing their primary school,
“By many tokens, my father-in-law and Tonya know about Marina and the girls. I didn’t write to them about it. These circumstances must have reached them from elsewhere. Alexander Alexandrovich is naturally offended in his paternal feelings; it’s painful for him on account of Tonya. That explains the nearly five-year break in our correspondence. I did correspond with them for a while after I came to Moscow. And suddenly they stopped answering. Everything stopped.
“Now, quite recently, I’ve begun to receive letters again from there. From all of them, even the children. Warm, tender letters. Something’s softened. Maybe there are changes with Tonya, some new friend. God grant it’s so. I don’t know. I also sometimes write to them. But I really can’t go on. I must leave or I’ll start suffocating. Good- bye.”
The next day Marina came running to Gordon more dead than alive. She had no one to leave the children with and carried the little one, Klasha, wrapped tightly in a blanket, pressing her to her breast with one hand, and with the other dragged the lagging and protesting Kapa by the hand.
“Is Yura here, Misha?” she asked in a voice not her own.
“Didn’t he spend the night at home?”
“No.”
“Well, then he’s at Innokenty’s.”
“I was there. Innokenty has classes at the university. But his neighbors know Yura. He didn’t show up there.”
“Then where is he?”
Marina placed the swaddled Klasha on the sofa. She became hysterical.
8
For two days Gordon and Dudorov never left Marina’s side. They took turns keeping watch on her, afraid of leaving her alone. In the intervals they went in search of the doctor. They ran around to all the places they supposed he might be wandering in, went to Flour Town and to the Sivtsev house, visited all the Palaces of Thought and Houses of Ideas that he had ever worked in, went to see all the old acquaintances they had any idea of and whose addresses they were able to find. The search yielded no results.
They did not inform the police, so as not to remind the authorities of a man who, though he was registered and had no criminal record, was, in the notions of that time, far from exemplary. They decided to put the police on his trail only in the last extremity.
On the third day, Marina, Gordon, and Dudorov received letters at different times from Yuri Andreevich. They were full of regrets regarding the anxieties and fears he had caused them. He begged them to forgive him and to calm themselves, and adjured them by all that was holy to stop their search for him, which in any case would lead to nothing.
He told them that with the aim of the speediest and fullest remaking of his life, he wanted to be left alone for a time, in order to go about his affairs in a concentrated way, and once he was somewhat set in his new pursuits and was convinced that, after the break that had taken place, there would be no return to the old ways, he would leave
