rooms in the houses, superfluous refinement of feelings, superfluous expressions. You did very well to make room. But it’s not enough. We must do more.”
“What have you got sticking out of that package? A bird’s beak, a duck’s head. How beautiful! A wild drake! Where did you get it? I can’t believe my eyes! These days it’s a whole fortune!”
“It was given to me on the train. A long story, I’ll tell you later. What’s your advice, shall I unwrap it and leave it in the kitchen?”
“Yes, of course. I’ll send Nyusha now to pluck it and gut it. There are predictions of all sorts of horrors towards winter—hunger, cold.”
“Yes, there’s talk about it everywhere. Just now I was looking out the window of the train and thinking. What can be higher than peace in the family and work? The rest isn’t in our power. It’s apparently true that there are misfortunes in store for many people. Some think of saving themselves in the south, in the Caucasus, of trying to get somewhere further away. That’s not in my rule book. A grown-up man must grit his teeth and share the fate of his native land. In my opinion, that’s obvious. You are a different matter. How I’d like to protect you from calamities, to send you to some safer place, to Finland or somewhere. But if we stand for half an hour on each step like this, we’ll never get upstairs.”
“Wait. Listen. There’s news. And what news! I forgot. Nikolai Nikolaevich has come.”
“What Nikolai Nikolaevich?”
“Uncle Kolya.”
“Tonya! It can’t be! How on earth?”
“Well, so it is. From Switzerland. In a roundabout way by London. Through Finland.”
“Tonya! You’re not joking? Have you seen him? Where is he? Can’t we get him here at once, this minute?”
“Such impatience! He’s outside the city in someone’s dacha. Promised to come back the day after tomorrow. He’s very changed, you’ll be disappointed. Got stuck and Bolshevized passing through Petersburg. Papa argues with him till he’s hoarse. But why, indeed, do we stop at every step? Come on. So you’ve also heard that there’s nothing good coming, only difficulties, dangers, uncertainty?”
“I think so myself. Well, what then. We’ll fight. It’s not necessarily the end for everybody. Let’s see how others do.”
“They say we’ll be without firewood, without water, without light. Money will be abolished. There will be no supplies. And again we’ve stopped. Come on. Listen. They praise the flat cast-iron stoves from a workshop on the Arbat. You can cook supper on a fire of newspapers. I’ve got the address. We should buy one before they’re all snapped up.”
“Right. Let’s buy one. Smart girl, Tonya! But Uncle Kolya, Uncle Kolya! Just think! I can’t get over it!”
“Here is my plan. We’ll choose some out-of-the-way corner upstairs and live there with papa, Sashenka, and Nyusha, say in two or three rooms, connecting, of course, somewhere at the end of the floor, and give up the rest of the house completely. Close ourselves in, as if from the street. We’ll put one of those cast-iron stoves in the middle room, with a pipe through the window. The laundry, the cooking, dinners, receiving guests, will all be done there, to justify the heating, and, who knows, maybe, God willing, we’ll survive the winter.”
“What else? Of course we’ll survive. Beyond any doubt. You’ve thought it out excellently. Good girl. And you know what? Let’s celebrate our acceptance of your plan. We’ll roast my duck and invite Uncle Kolya to the housewarming.”
“Splendid. And I’ll ask Gordon to bring some alcohol. He gets it from some laboratory. And now look. Here’s the room I was talking about. Here’s what I’ve chosen. Do you approve? Put the suitcase down and go back for the wicker hamper. Besides uncle and Gordon, we can also invite Innokenty and Shura Schlesinger. You don’t object? You haven’t forgotten where our bathroom is? Spray yourself with something disinfecting. And I’ll go to Sashenka, send Nyusha downstairs, and when I can, I’ll call you.”
3
The main news for him in Moscow was this boy. Sashenka had only just been born when Yuri Andreevich was called up. What did he know about his son?
Once, when he was already mobilized, Yuri Andreevich came to the clinic to visit Tonya before his departure. He came at the moment when the babies were being fed. They would not let him see her.
He sat down to wait in the anteroom. Just then the far-off children’s corridor, which went at right angles to the delivery corridor, and along which the mothers’ rooms were located, was filled with a weeping chorus of ten or fifteen infant voices, and the nurses, so as not to expose the swaddled newborn babies to the cold, hurriedly began carrying them under their arms, two at a time, like big shopping parcels, to their mothers to be fed.
“Wah, wah,” the babies squealed on one note, almost without feeling, as if performing a duty, and only one voice stood out from this unison. The infant also cried “wah, wah,” and also without a trace of suffering, but, as it seemed, not by obligation, but with some sort of bass-voiced, deliberate, sullen hostility.
Yuri Andreevich had already decided then to call his son Alexander, in honor of his father-in-law. For no apparent reason he imagined that it was his boy who was crying like that, because it was a weeping with a physiognomy, already containing the future character and destiny of the person, a weeping with a tone color that included in itself the name of the boy, the name Alexander, as Yuri Andreevich imagined.
Yuri Andreevich was not mistaken. As it turned out later, that had indeed been Sashenka crying. That was the first thing he knew about his son.
His next acquaintance with him Yuri Andreevich drew from photographs, in letters sent to him at the front. In them a merry, chubby, pretty boy with a big head and pursed lips stood bowlegged on a spread-out blanket and, raising both arms, seemed to be doing a squatting dance. He was one year old then, he was learning to walk; now he was almost two and was beginning to talk.
Yuri Andreevich picked the suitcase up from the floor, undid the straps, and laid it on a card table by the window. What room was this before? The doctor did not recognize it. Tonya must have taken the furniture out or hung some new wallpaper in it.
The doctor opened the suitcase in order to take out his shaving kit. A bright full moon appeared between the columns of the church bell tower that rose up just opposite the window. When its light fell into the suitcase on the linen, books, and toilet articles lying on top, the room lit up somehow differently, and the doctor recognized it.
