In expectation of them, the room stood empty, as premises are vacated between the departure of old tenants and the moving in of new ones. The silence was broken only by the decorous tiptoeing and accidental shuffling of those who came for the leavetaking. They were few, but still far more than one might have expected. The news of the death of a man almost without name had spread all around their circle with miraculous speed. A good number of people turned up who had known the dead man at various periods of his life and at various times had lost track of or forgotten him. His scientific thought and his muse were found to have a still greater number of unknown friends, who had never seen the man they were drawn to, and who came to look at him for the first time and to give him a last parting glance.
In those hours when the general silence, not filled by any ceremony, became oppressive in that almost tangible lack, the flowers alone were a substitute for the missing singing and the absent rite.
They did not simply blossom and give off fragrance, but, as if in a chorus, perhaps hastening the corruption by it, poured out their perfume and, endowing everyone with their sweet-scented power, seemed to perform something.
The kingdom of plants so easily offers itself as the nearest neighbor to the kingdom of death. Here, in the earth’s greenery, among the trees of the cemetery, amidst the sprouting flowers rising up from the beds, are perhaps concentrated the mysteries of transformation and the riddles of life that we puzzle over. Mary did not at first recognize Jesus coming from the tomb and took him for the gardener walking in the cemetery. (“She, supposing him to be the gardener …”)6
14
When the dead man was brought to his last address in Kamergersky, his friends, informed of his death and shaken by the news, came running from the front entrance to the wide open door of the apartment with Marina, half-crazed by the terrible news. She was beside herself for a long time, thrashed on the floor, and beat her head against the edge of a long chest with a seat and back that stood in the front hall and on which the body was laid until the coffin came and the untidied room was put in order. She was bathed in tears and whispered and cried out, choking on the words, half of which escaped her against her will like the wailing of mourners. She babbled at random, the way simple people lament, not embarrassed by or noticing anyone. Marina clutched at the body and could not be torn away from it, so that the dead man could be transferred to the room, now tidied and freed of extra furniture, to be washed and placed in the delivered coffin. All that was yesterday. Today the violence of her suffering had eased, giving way to dull dejection, but she was still as beside herself as before, said nothing, and was oblivious of herself.
She had sat there through all the rest of the previous day and that night without going anywhere. Here Klava had been brought to her to be nursed and taken away, and Kapa had come with her young nanny and then gone.
She was surrounded by her own people, by Dudorov and Gordon, as grief-stricken as herself. Her father, Markel, quietly sobbing and deafeningly blowing his nose, came and sat with her on the bench. Here also came her weeping mother and sisters.
And there were two persons in this human flow, a man and a woman, who stood out from them all. They claimed no greater closeness to the dead man than those listed above. They did not vie in their grief with Marina, her daughters, and the dead man’s friends, and acknowledged their precedence. These two had no claims, but had some entirely special rights of their own to the deceased. These incomprehensible and undeclared powers with which the two were somehow invested were of concern to no one, and no one disputed them. Precisely these people had apparently taken upon themselves the cares of the funeral and its arrangement from the very beginning, and had seen it through with such unruffled calm as though it gave them satisfaction. This loftiness of spirit struck everyone’s eye and produced a strange impression. It seemed that these people were involved not only in the funeral, but in the death itself, not as perpetrators or indirect causes, but as persons who, after the fact, accepted this event, reconciled with it, and did not see it as having the greatest importance. Some knew these people, others guessed about them, still others, who were in the majority, had no idea who they were.
But when this man, whose keen, narrow Kirghiz eyes aroused curiosity, and this effortlessly beautiful woman came into the room where the coffin was, all who sat, stood, or moved about in it, not excepting Marina, without objection, as if by arrangement, cleared the premises, stepped aside, got up from the chairs and stools placed along the walls, and, crowding together, went out to the corridor and the front hall, leaving the man and woman alone behind the closed doors, like two initiates called to perform in silence, without hindrance and undisturbed, something immediately concerned with the burial and vitally important. That is what happened now. The two, left alone, sat on two stools by the wall and began to talk business.
“What have you learned, Evgraf Andreevich?”
“The cremation is this evening. In half an hour people from the medical trade union will come for the body and take it to the union’s club. The civil ceremony is scheduled for four. Not a single document was in order. His work record had expired, his old trade union card had not been exchanged, his dues hadn’t been paid for several years. All of that had to be settled. Hence the red tape and delay. Before the body is taken from the house—incidentally, the moment isn’t far off, we must be prepared—I’ll leave you alone, as you asked. Forgive me. Do you hear? The telephone. One minute.”
Evgraf Zhivago went out to the corridor, overflowing with unknown colleagues of the doctor’s, his schoolmates, minor hospital personnel, and publishing workers, and where Marina and the children, her arms around them, keeping them covered with the skirts of her coat (it was a cold day and there was a draft from the front door), sat on the edge of the bench waiting for the door to be opened again, the way a woman who has come to see an arrested man waits for the guard to let her into the prison reception room. It was crowded in the corridor. Some of those gathered could not get into it. The door to the stairway was open. Many stood, paced, and smoked in the front hall and on the landing. Those lower down the stairs talked the more loudly and freely the closer they were to the street. Straining his hearing on account of the subdued murmur, Evgraf, in a muffled voice, as decency required, covering the receiver with his palm, was giving answers over the telephone, probably about the order of the funeral and the circumstances of the doctor’s death. He returned to the room. The conversation continued.
“Please don’t disappear after the cremation, Larissa Fyodorovna. I have a great favor to ask of you. I don’t know where you’re staying. Don’t leave me in ignorance about where to find you. I want in the nearest future, tomorrow or the day after, to start going through my brother’s papers. I’ll need your help. You know so much, probably more than anyone else. You let drop in passing that it’s two days since you arrived from Irkutsk for a short stay in Moscow, and that you came up to this apartment by chance, knowing neither that my brother had been living here in recent months, nor what had happened here. Some of what you said I didn’t understand, and I’m not asking for explanations, but don’t disappear, I don’t know your address. It would be best to spend the few days devoted to sorting the manuscripts under the same roof, or not far from each other, maybe in two other rooms of the house. That could be arranged. I know the manager.”
“You say you didn’t understand me. What is there to understand? I arrived in Moscow, left my things at the checkroom, walked through the old Moscow without recognizing half of it—I’d forgotten. I walk and walk, go down Kuznetsky Most, up Kuznetsky Lane, and suddenly there’s something terribly familiar—Kamergersky Lane. My husband, Antipov, who was shot, rented a room here as a student, precisely this room where you and I are sitting. Well, I think, let’s have a look, maybe if I’m lucky the old owners are still alive. That there was no trace of them and everything was different, I learned later, the next day and today, gradually, from asking. But you were there, why
