“He’s got the shakes in his arms and legs, all he worries about is hugging a bottle day and night like a wife, his nose stuck in drink like a duck’s, and then—why’d they push him, smash the dishes, spill the fish soup! Who pushed you, you cross-eyed devil, you spook? Who pushed you, you Astrakhan rupture, you shameless gape?”
“I done told you, Matryona Stepanovna—watch your tongue.”
“Something else again, if it was worthwhile making noise and smashing dishes, but this fine thing, Missy Prissy, a boulevard touch-me-not, done so well she gobbled arsenic, retired innocence. We’ve lived in the Montenegro, we’ve seen these screwtails and randy old goats.”
Misha and Yura paced up and down the corridor outside the door of the room. Nothing came out as Alexander Alexandrovich had supposed. He had pictured to himself—a cellist, a tragedy, something clean and dignified. But this was devil knows what. Filth, something scandalous, and absolutely not for children.
The boys loitered about in the corridor.
“Go in to the missis, young sirs,” the floor attendant, coming up to the boys, urged them for the second time in a soft, unhurried voice. “Go in, don’t hang back. She’s all right, rest assured. She’s her whole self now. You can’t stand here. We had a disaster here today, costly dishes got smashed. See—we’re serving, running, there’s no room. Go on in.”
The boys obeyed.
In the room, the lighted kerosene lamp had been taken from the holder in which it hung over the dining table and moved behind the wooden partition, which stank of bedbugs, to the other part of the room.
There was a sleeping nook there, separated from the front part and strangers’ eyes by a dusty curtain. Now, in the turmoil, they had forgotten to lower it. Its bottom end was thrown over the upper edge of the partition. The lamp stood on a bench in the alcove. This corner was lit up harshly from below, as if by theater footlights.
The poisoning was from iodine, not arsenic, as the dishwasher had mistakenly jibed. The room was filled with the sharp, astringent smell of young walnuts in unhardened green husks, which turn black at the touch.
Behind the partition, a maid was mopping the floor and a half-naked woman, wet with water, tears, and sweat, was lying on the bed, sobbing loudly, her head with strands of hair stuck together hanging over a basin. The boys at once averted their eyes, so embarrassing and indecent it was to look. But Yura had time to notice how, in certain uncomfortable, hunched-up poses, under the influence of strain and effort, a woman ceases to be the way she is portrayed in sculpture and comes to resemble a naked wrestler, with bulging muscles, in shorts for the match.
It finally occurred to someone behind the partition to lower the curtain.
“Fadei Kazimirovich, dear, where is your hand? Give me your hand,” the woman said, choking with tears and nausea. “Ah, I’ve been through such horror! I had such suspicions! Fadei Kazimirovich … I imagined … But fortunately it all turned out to be foolishness, my disturbed imagination, Fadei Kazimirovich, just think, such a relief! And as a result … And so … And so I’m alive.”
“Calm yourself, Amalia Karlovna, I beg you to calm yourself. How awkward this all is, my word, how awkward.”
“We’ll go home now,” Alexander Alexandrovich grunted, turning to the children.
Perishing with embarrassment, they stood in the dark entry, on the threshold of the unpartitioned part of the room, and, having nowhere to turn their eyes, looked into the depths of it, from which the lamp had been removed. The walls were hung with photographs, there was a bookcase with music scores, a desk littered with paper and albums, and on the other side of the dining table covered with a crocheted tablecloth, a girl slept sitting in an armchair, her arms around its back and her cheek pressed to it. She must have been mortally tired, if the noise and movement around her did not keep her from sleeping.
Their arrival had been senseless, their further presence here was indecent.
“We’ll go now,” Alexander Alexandrovich repeated. “Once Fadei Kazimirovich comes out. I’ll say good-bye to him.”
But instead of Fadei Kazimirovich, someone else came from behind the partition. This was a stout, clean- shaven, imposing, and self-assured man. Above his head he carried the lamp that had been taken from the holder. He went to the table by which the girl was sleeping and put the lamp into the holder. The light woke the girl up. She smiled at the man who had come in, narrowed her eyes, and stretched.
At the sight of the stranger, Misha became all aroused and simply riveted his eyes on him. He tugged at Yura’s sleeve, trying to tell him something.
“Aren’t you ashamed to whisper in a stranger’s house? What will people think of you?” Yura stopped him and refused to listen.
Meanwhile a mute scene was taking place between the girl and the man. They did not say a word to each other and only exchanged glances. But their mutual understanding was frighteningly magical, as if he were a puppeteer and she a puppet, obedient to the movements of his hand.
The weary smile that appeared on her face made the girl half close her eyes and half open her lips. But to the man’s mocking glances she responded with the sly winking of an accomplice. Both were pleased that everything had turned out so well, the secret had not been discovered, and the woman who poisoned herself had remained alive.
Yura devoured them both with his eyes. From the semi-darkness, where no one could see him, he looked into the circle of lamplight, unable to tear himself away. The spectacle of the girl’s enslavement was inscrutably mysterious and shamelessly candid. Contradictory feelings crowded in his breast. Yura’s heart was wrung by their as yet untried power.
This was the very thing he had so ardently yammered about for a year with Misha and Tonya under the meaningless name of vulgarity, that frightening and alluring thing which they had dealt with so easily at a safe distance in words, and here was that force before Yura’s eyes, thoroughly tangible and dim and dreamlike, pitilessly destructive and pitiful and calling for help, and where was their childish philosophy, and what was Yura to do now?
“Do you know who that man is?” Misha asked when they went outside. Yura was immersed in his thoughts and did not answer.
“It’s the same one who got your father to drink and destroyed him. Remember, on the train? I told you about
