Again trying to stay close to the cottages, under cover of their corners, Yuri Andreevich quickly headed back to his place. Two houses before his own porch, he was knocked off his feet by the blast of an explosion and wounded by a shrapnel bullet. Yuri Andreevich fell in the middle of the road, covered with blood, and lost consciousness.
14
The hospital in the rear was lost in one of the little towns in the western territory, on a railway line, near general headquarters. Warm days set in at the end of February. In the ward for convalescent officers, at the request of Yuri Andreevich, who was a patient there, the window next to his bed had been opened.
Dinnertime was approaching. The patients filled the remaining time however they could. They had been told that a new nurse had come to the hospital and would make her rounds for the first time that day. Lying across from Yuri Andreevich, Galiullin was looking through the just-arrived editions of
Yuri Andreevich and the lieutenant each recognized her on his own, without knowing about the other. She did not know either of them. She said:
“Good afternoon. Why is the window open? Aren’t you cold?”—and she went up to Galiullin. “What’s your complaint?” she asked and took his wrist to count the pulse, but at the same moment she let go of it and sat down on a chair by his cot, perplexed.
“How unexpected, Larissa Fyodorovna,” said Galiullin. “I served in the same regiment as your husband and knew Pavel Pavlovich. I have his belongings ready for you.”
“It can’t be, it can’t be,” she repeated. “What an amazing chance. So you knew him? Tell me quickly, how did it all happen? So he died buried under the earth? Don’t conceal anything, don’t be afraid. I know everything.”
Galiullin did not have the heart to confirm her information, which was based on rumors. He decided to lie in order to calm her.
“Antipov was taken prisoner,” he said. “He got too far ahead with his unit during an attack and found himself alone. They surrounded him. He was forced to surrender.”
But Lara did not believe Galiullin. The stunning suddenness of the conversation agitated her. She could not hold back the rising tears and did not want to cry in front of strangers. She got up quickly and left the ward, to regain her composure in the corridor.
After a moment she came back, outwardly calm. She deliberately did not look at Galiullin in the corner, so as not to start crying again. Going straight to Yuri Andreevich’s bed, she said absentmindedly and by rote:
“Good afternoon. What’s your complaint?”
Yuri Andreevich had observed her agitation and tears, wanted to ask her what was the matter, wanted to tell her how he had seen her twice in his life, as a schoolboy and as a university student, but he thought it would come out as too familiar and she would misunderstand him. Then he suddenly remembered the dead Anna Ivanovna in her coffin and Tonya’s cries that time in Sivtsev Vrazhek, restrained himself, and, instead of all that, said:
“Thank you. I’m a doctor myself, and I treat myself on my own. I have no need of anything.”
“Why is he offended with me?” Lara thought and looked in surprise at this snub-nosed, in no way remarkable stranger.
For several days there was changing, unstable weather, with a warm, endlessly muttering wind in the nights, which smelled of wet earth.
And all those days strange information came from headquarters, alarming rumors arrived from home, from inside the country. Telegraph connections with Petersburg kept being interrupted. Everywhere, at every corner, political conversations went on.
Each time she was on duty, the nurse Antipova made two rounds, in the morning and in the evening, and exchanged inconsequential remarks with patients in other wards, with Galiullin and Yuri Andreevich. “A strange, curious man,” she thought. “Young and unfriendly. Snub-nosed, and you couldn’t call him very handsome. But intelligent in the best sense of the word, with an alive, winning mind. But that’s not the point. The point is that I must quickly finish my obligations here and get transferred to Moscow, closer to Katenka. And in Moscow I must apply to be discharged as a nurse and go back home to Yuriatin, to my work at the school. It’s all clear about poor Patulechka, there’s no hope, and so there’s no more need to stay on as a heroine of the battlefield, the whole thing was cooked up for the sake of finding him.”
How is it there with Katenka now? Poor little orphan (here she began to cry). Some very sharp changes have been noticeable recently. Not long ago there was a sacred duty to the motherland, military valor, lofty social feelings. But the war is lost, that’s the main calamity, and all the rest comes from that, everything is dethroned, nothing is sacred.
Suddenly everything has changed, the tone, the air; you don’t know how to think or whom to listen to. As if you’ve been led all your life like a little child, and suddenly you’re let out—go, learn to walk by yourself. And there’s no one around, no family, no authority. Then you’d like to trust the main thing, the force of life, or beauty, or truth, so that it’s them and not the overturned human principles that guide you, fully and without regret, more fully than it used to be in that peaceful, habitual life that has gone down and been abolished. But in her case—Lara would catch herself in time—this purpose, this unconditional thing will be Katenka. Now, without Patulechka, Lara is only a mother and will give all her forces to Katenka, the poor little orphan.
Yuri Andreevich learned from a letter that Gordon and Dudorov had released his book without his permission, that it had been praised and a great literary future was prophesied for him, and that it was very interesting and alarming in Moscow now, the latent vexation of the lower classes was growing, we were on the eve of something important, serious political events were approaching.
It was late at night. Yuri Andreevich was overcome by a terrible sleepiness. He dozed off intermittently and fancied that, after the day’s excitement, he could not fall asleep, that he was not asleep. Outside the window, the sleepy, sleepily breathing wind kept yawning and tossing. The wind wept and prattled: “Tonya, Shurochka, how I miss you, how I want to be home, at work!” And to the muttering of the wind, Yuri Andreevich slept, woke up, and fell asleep in a quick succession of happiness and suffering, impetuous and alarming, like this changing weather, like this unstable night.
Lara thought: “He showed so much care, preserving this memory, these poor things of Patulechka’s, and I’m such a pig, I didn’t even ask who he is or where he’s from.”
