What luck, thought Lara, she will not see Komarovsky for the whole time that they are cut off from the rest of the city! She cannot break with him on account of her mother. She cannot say: Mama, don’t receive him. Or else everything will be given away. So what? Why be afraid of that? Ah, God, let it all go to the devil, as long as it’s over. Lord, Lord, Lord! She’ll fall senseless in the middle of the street right now from revulsion. What did she just remember?! How is it called, that horrible painting with the fat Roman in it, in that first private room where it all began?
“Where are you running like crazy? I can’t go so fast,” Amalia Karlovna wailed behind her, breathing heavily and barely keeping up with her.
Lara was moving quickly. Some force bore her up, as if she were walking on air—a proud, inspiring force.
“Oh, how perkily the gunshots crack,” she thought. “Blessed are the violated, blessed are the ensnared. God give you good health, gunshots! Gunshots, gunshots, you’re of the same opinion!”
20
The Gromeko brothers’ house stood at the corner of Sivtsev Vrazhek and another lane. Alexander Alexandrovich and Nikolai Alexandrovich Gromeko were professors of chemistry, the first at the Petrovskaya Academy, the second at the university. Nikolai Alexandrovich was a bachelor; Alexander Alexandrovich was married to Anna Ivanovna, nee Kruger, the daughter of a steel magnate and owner of abandoned, unprofitable mines on the enormous forest dacha18 that belonged to him near Yuryatin in the Urals.
The house was two-storied. The upper, with bedrooms, a schoolroom, Alexander Alexandrovich’s study and library, Anna Ivanovna’s boudoir, and Tonya’s and Yura’s rooms, was the living quarters, and the lower was for receptions. Thanks to its pistachio-colored curtains, the mirrorlike reflections on the lid of the grand piano, the aquarium, the olive-green furniture, and the indoor plants that resembled seaweed, this lower floor made the impression of a green, drowsily undulating sea bottom.
The Gromekos were cultivated people, hospitable, and great connoisseurs and lovers of music. They gathered company at their home and organized evenings of chamber music at which piano trios, violin sonatas, and string quartets were performed.
In January of 1906, soon after Nikolai Nikolaevich’s departure abroad, the next of these chamber concerts on Sivtsev Vrazhek was to take place. They planned to perform a new violin sonata by a beginner from Taneev’s school and a Tchaikovsky trio.
Preparations began the day before. Furniture was moved to free the concert hall. In the corner a tuner produced the same note a hundred times and then spilled out the beads of an arpeggio. In the kitchen fowl were plucked, greens were washed, mustard was beaten with olive oil for sauces and dressings.
In the morning Shura Schlesinger, Anna Ivanovna’s bosom friend and confidante, came to bother them.
Shura Schlesinger was a tall, lean woman with regular features and a somewhat masculine face, which gave her a slight resemblance to the sovereign, especially in her gray lambskin hat, which she wore cocked and kept on when visiting, just barely lifting the little veil pinned to it.
In periods of sorrow and care, the conversations between the two friends afforded them mutual relief. The relief consisted in Shura Schlesinger and Anna Ivanovna exchanging biting remarks of an ever more caustic nature. A stormy scene would break out, quickly ending in tears and reconciliation. These regular quarrels had a tranquilizing effect on both women, like leeches on the bloodstream.
Shura Schlesinger had been married several times, but she forgot her husbands immediately after the divorce and attached so little significance to them that there was in all her habits the cold mobility of the single woman.
Shura Schlesinger was a Theosophist,19 but at the same time she had such excellent knowledge of the course of the Orthodox services that even when
Shura Schlesinger knew mathematics, Hindu mysticism, the addresses of the most important professors of Moscow Conservatory, who was living with whom, and, my God, what did she not know? Therefore she was invited as an arbiter and monitor in all serious situations in life.
At the appointed hour the guests began to arrive. Adelaida Filippovna came, Gintz, the Fufkovs, Mr. and Mrs. Basurman, the Verzhitskys, Colonel Kavkaztsev. It was snowing, and when the front door was opened, the tangled air raced past, all as if in knots from the flitting of big and little snowflakes. Men came in from the cold, their deep rubber boots flopping loosely on their feet, affecting one after the other to be absent-minded, clumsy fellows, while their wives, freshened by the frost, the two upper buttons of their fur coats undone, their fluffy kerchiefs pushed back on their frosty hair, were, on the contrary, images of the inveterate rogue, perfidy itself, not to be trifled with. “Cui’s nephew,” the whisper went around, on the arrival of a new pianist, invited to the house for the first time.20
From the concert hall, through the opened side doors at both ends, they could see a laid table, long as a winter road, in the dining room. The eye was struck by the bright sparkle of rowanberry vodka in bottles with granular facets. The imagination was captivated by little cruets of oil and vinegar on silver stands, and the picturesqueness of the game and snacks, and even the napkins folded in little pyramids that crowned each place setting, and the almond-scented blue-violet cineraria in baskets seemed to excite the appetite. So as not to delay the desired moment of savoring earthly food, they turned as quickly as possible to the spiritual. They sat down in rows in the hall. “Cui’s nephew”—the whispering was renewed when the pianist took his place at the instrument. The concert began.
The sonata was known to be dull and forced, cerebral. It fulfilled expectations, and moreover proved to be terribly drawn out.
During the intermission there was an argument about it between the critic Kerimbekov and Alexander Alexandrovich. The critic denounced the sonata, and Alexander Alexandrovich defended it. Around them people smoked and noisily moved chairs from place to place.
But again their gazes fell upon the ironed tablecloth that shone in the next room. Everyone suggested that the concert continue without delay.
The pianist glanced sidelong at the public and nodded to his partners to begin. The violinist and Tyshkevich swung their bows. The trio burst into sobs.
