The hearse, the gig with the wreaths, and the Krugers’ carriage swayed and moved slightly. The cabs drew nearer to the church. The weeping Shura Schlesinger came out and, raising her tear-dampened veil, passed an inquisitive glance over the line of cabs. Finding the pallbearers from the funeral home among them, she beckoned for them to come and disappeared into the church with them. More and more people were pouring out of the church.
“So it’s Ann-Ivanna’s turn. Paid her respects, poor little thing, and drew herself a one-way ticket.”
“Yes, she’s done flitting about, poor thing. The butterfly’s gone to her rest.”
“Have you got a cab, or will you take the number eleven?”
“My legs are stiff. Let’s walk a bit and then catch the tram.”
“Did you notice how upset Fufkov is? He stared at the newly departed, tears pouring down, blowing his nose, as if he could devour her. And the husband right there beside him.”
“Ogled her all his life.”
With such conversations, they dragged themselves off to the cemetery at the other end of town. That day there was a let-up after the severe frost. The day was filled with a motionless heaviness, a day of diminished frost and departed life, a day as if created for a burial by nature herself. The dirtied snow seemed to shine through a covering of crape; from behind the fences wet fir trees, dark as tarnished silver, kept watch and looked as if they were dressed in mourning.
This was that same memorable cemetery, the resting place of Marya Nikolaevna. Yura had not found his way to his mother’s grave at all in recent years. “Mama,” he whispered almost with the lips of those years, looking towards it from far off.
They dispersed solemnly and even picturesquely along the cleared paths, whose evasive meandering accorded poorly with the mournful measuredness of their steps. Alexander Alexandrovich led Tonya by the arm. The Krugers followed them. Mourning was very becoming to Tonya.
Shaggy hoarfrost, bearded like mold, covered the chains of the crosses on the cupolas and the pink monastery walls. In the far corner of the monastery courtyard, ropes were stretched from wall to wall with laundered linen hung out to dry—shirts with heavy, waterlogged sleeves, peach-colored tablecloths, crooked, poorly wrung-out sheets. Yura looked at it more intently and realized that it was the place on the monastery grounds, now changed by new buildings, where the blizzard had raged that night.
Yura walked on alone, quickly getting ahead of the rest, stopping now and then to wait for them. In response to the devastation produced by death in this company slowly walking behind him, he wanted, as irresistibly as water whirling in a funnel rushes into the deep, to dream and think, to toil over forms, to bring forth beauty. Now, as never before, it was clear to him that art is always, ceaselessly, occupied with two things. It constantly reflects on death and thereby constantly creates life. Great and true art, that which is called the Revelation of St. John and that which goes on to finish it.
Yura longingly anticipated his disappearance for a day or two from family and university horizons and would put into his memorial lines for Anna Ivanovna all that turned up at that moment, all the chance things that life put in his way: two or three of the dead woman’s best characteristics; the image of Tonya in mourning; several observations in the street on the way back from the cemetery; the washed laundry in the place where one night long ago a blizzard had howled and he had wept as a little boy.
*Great ring! Chinese chain!
* A waltz please!
* In triple time, in double time.
* Back to front.
IMMINENT INEVITABILITIES
1
Lara lay half delirious in the bedroom on Felitsata Semyonovna’s bed. Around her the Sventitskys, Dr. Drokov, the servants were whispering.
The Sventitskys’ empty house was sunk in darkness, and only in the middle of the long suite of rooms, in a small sitting room, was there a dim wall lamp burning, casting its light up and down the length of this single extended hallway.
Through it, not like a guest, but as if he were in his own home, Viktor Ippolitovich paced rapidly with angry and resolute steps. Now he looked into the bedroom to ask what was going on there, now he set off for the opposite end of the house and, going past the Christmas tree with its strings of silver beads, came to the dining room, where the table was laden with untouched food and the green wineglasses tinkled whenever a carriage drove by outside the window or a little mouse darted over the tablecloth among the dishes.
Komarovsky stormed and raged. Contradictory feelings crowded in his breast. What scandal and indecency! He was furious. His position was threatened. The incident might undermine his reputation. He had at all costs to forestall, to cut short any gossip before it was too late, and if the news had already spread, to hush up, to stifle the rumors at their source. Besides that, he again experienced how irresistible this desperate, crazy girl was. You could see at once that she was not like everyone else. There had always been something extraordinary about her. Yet how painfully and, apparently, irreparably he had mutilated her life! How she thrashes about, how she rises up and rebels all the time, striving to remake her fate in her own way and begin to exist over again!
He has to help her from all points of view, perhaps to rent a room for her, but in any case not to touch her; on the contrary, to withdraw completely, to step aside, so as to cast no shadow, otherwise, being what she is, she might just pull something else for all he knows.
And there’s so much trouble ahead! You don’t get patted on the head for such things. The law never naps. It’s still night and less than two hours since the incident took place, but the police had already come twice, and Komarovsky had gone to the kitchen to have a talk with the police officer and settle it all.
And the further it goes, the more complicated it will get. They’ll demand proof that Lara was aiming at him and not at Kornakov. But things won’t end there. Part of the responsibility will be taken off Lara, but she will be liable to prosecution for the rest.
Naturally, he will do everything in his power to prevent that, and if proceedings are started, he will obtain findings from psychiatric experts that Lara was not answerable at the moment of the shooting, and have the case dropped.
