The flame choked on the stearine, shot crackling little stars in all directions, and sharpened into an arrow. The room filled with a soft light. The ice on the windowpane at the level of the candle began to melt, forming a black eyehole.
“Listen, Patulya,” said Lara. “I’m in difficulties. I need help to get out of them. Don’t be frightened and don’t question me, but part with the notion that we’re like everybody else. Don’t remain calm. I’m always in danger. If you love me and want to keep me from perishing, don’t put it off, let’s get married quickly.”
“But that’s my constant wish,” he interrupted her. “Quickly name the day, I’ll be glad to do it whenever you like. But tell me more simply and clearly, don’t torture me with riddles.”
But Lara distracted him, imperceptibly avoiding a direct answer. They talked for a long time on themes that had no relation to the subject of Lara’s grief.
10
That winter Yura was writing a scientific paper on the nervous elements of the retina in competition for a university gold medal. Though Yura would be graduating as a generalist, he knew the eye with the thoroughness of a future oculist.
This interest in the physiology of vision spoke for other sides of Yura’s nature—his creative gifts and his reflections on the essence of the artistic image and the structure of the logical idea.
Tonya and Yura were riding in a hired sleigh to the Christmas party at the Sventitskys’. The two had lived for six years side by side through the beginning of youth and the end of childhood. They knew each other in the smallest detail. They had habits in common, their own way of exchanging brief witticisms, their own way of snorting in response. And so they were riding now, keeping silent, pressing their lips from the cold, and exchanging brief remarks. And both thinking their own thoughts.
Yura recalled that the time for the contest was near and he had to hurry with the paper, and in the festive turmoil of the ending year that could be felt in the streets, he jumped from those thoughts to others.
In Gordon’s department a hectograph student magazine was published, and Gordon was the editor. Yura had long been promising them an article on Blok.5 The young people of both capitals were raving about Blok, he and Misha more than anyone.
But these thoughts did not remain long in Yura’s conscience. They rode on, tucking their chins into their collars and rubbing their freezing ears, and thought about differing things. But on one point their thoughts came together.
The recent scene at Anna Ivanovna’s had transformed them both. It was as if they had recovered their sight and looked at each other with new eyes.
Tonya, this old comrade, this person so clear that she needed no explanations, turned out to be the most unattainable and complex of all that Yura could imagine, turned out to be a woman. With a certain stretching of fantasy, Yura could picture himself as a hero climbing Ararat, a prophet, a conqueror, anything you like, but not a woman.
And now Tonya had taken this most difficult and all-surpassing task on her thin and weak shoulders (she suddenly seemed thin and weak to Yura, though she was a perfectly healthy girl). And he became filled with that burning compassion and timid amazement before her which is the beginning of passion.
The same thing, with corresponding modifications, happened to Tonya in relation to Yura.
Yura thought that in any case they had no business leaving the house. What if something should happen during their absence? And then he remembered. Learning that Anna Ivanovna was worse, they had gone to her, already dressed for the evening, and suggested that they stay. She had protested against it with all her former sharpness and insisted that they go to the party. Yura and Tonya went behind the draperies into the deep window niche to see what the weather was like. When they came out of the niche, the two parts of the tulle curtains clung to the still unworn fabric of their new clothes. The light, clinging stuff dragged for several steps behind Tonya like a wedding veil behind a bride. They all burst out laughing, so simultaneously did this resemblance strike the eye of everyone in the room without a word spoken.
Yura looked around and saw the same things that had caught Lara’s eye not long before. Their sleigh raised an unnaturally loud noise, which awakened an unnaturally long echo under the ice-bound trees of the gardens and boulevards. The frosted-over windows of houses, lit from inside, resembled precious caskets of laminated smoky topaz. Behind them glowed Moscow’s Christmas life, candles burned on trees, guests crowded, and clowning mummers played at hide-and-seek and pass-the-ring.
It suddenly occurred to Yura that Blok was the manifestation of Christmas in all domains of Russian life, in the daily life of the northern city and in the new literature, under the starry sky of the contemporary street and around the lighted Christmas tree in a drawing room of the present century. It occurred to him that no article about Blok was needed, but one needed simply to portray a Russian adoration of the Magi, like the Dutch masters, with frost, wolves, and a dark fir forest.
They were driving down Kamergersky. Yura turned his attention to a black hole melted in the icy coating of one window. Through this hole shone the light of a candle, penetrating outside almost with the consciousness of a gaze, as if the flame were spying on the passersby and waiting for someone.
“A candle burned on the table. A candle burned …” Yura whispered to himself the beginning of something vague, unformed, in hopes that the continuation would come of itself, without forcing. It did not come.
11
From time immemorial the Christmas parties at the Sventitskys’ had been organized in the following fashion. At ten, when the children went home, the tree was lighted a second time for the young people and the adults, and the merrymaking went on till morning. The more elderly cut the cards all night in a three-walled Pompeian drawing room, which was an extension of the ballroom and was separated from it by a heavy, thick curtain on big bronze rings. At dawn the whole company had supper.
“Why are you so late?” the Sventitskys’ nephew Georges asked them in passing, as he ran through the front hall to his uncle and aunt’s rooms. Yura and Tonya also decided to go there to greet the hosts, and, on their way, while taking off their coats, looked into the ballroom.
Past the hotly breathing Christmas tree, girdled by several rows of streaming radiance, rustling their dresses and stepping on each other’s feet, moved a black wall of walkers and talkers, not taken up with dancing.
Inside the circle, the dancers whirled furiously. They were spun around, paired off, stretched out in a chain by Koka Kornakov, a lycee student, the son of a deputy prosecutor. He led the dancing and shouted at the top of his voice from one end of the room to the other:
