Still, in order to finish reading the communique, he began to look around in search of some lighted place sheltered from the snow. It turned out that he had again ended up at his charmed intersection and was standing at the corner of Serebryany and Molchanovka, outside a tall five-story house with a glassed-in porch and a spacious, electric-lit entrance.
The doctor went in and, standing under an electric light in the front hall, became absorbed in the telegrams.
Above his head came the sound of footsteps. Someone was coming down the stairs, stopping frequently as if in some hesitation. Indeed, the descending person suddenly changed his mind, turned, and ran back upstairs. Somewhere a door was opened, and two voices poured out in a wave, made so formless by the echo that it was impossible to tell whether they were men’s or women’s. After that the door slammed and the person who had been coming down earlier now started running down much more resolutely.
Yuri Andreevich, who was completely absorbed in his reading, had his eyes lowered to the newspaper. He did not intend to raise them and examine a stranger. But having run all the way down, the latter stopped running. Yuri Andreevich raised his head and looked at him.
Before him stood an adolescent of about eighteen, in a stiff coat of reindeer hide with the fur side out, as they wear them in Siberia, and a hat of the same fur. The boy had a swarthy face with narrow Kirghiz eyes. There was something aristocratic in his face, that fleeting spark, that hidden fineness that seems brought from far away and occurs in people with complex, mixed blood.
The boy was obviously in error, taking Yuri Andreevich for someone else. He looked at the doctor with shy perplexity, as if he knew who he was and simply could not make up his mind to speak. To put an end to this misunderstanding, Yuri Andreevich looked him up and down with a cold gaze, fending off any urge to approach.
The boy became embarrassed and went to the exit without a word. There, glancing back once more, he opened the heavy, shaky door and went out, slamming it with a bang.
About ten minutes later, Yuri Andreevich went out after him. He forgot about the boy and about the colleague he was going to see. He was full of what he had read and headed for home. On his way another circumstance, a mundane trifle, which in those days had immeasurable importance, attracted and absorbed his attention.
A short distance from his house, in the darkness, he stumbled upon a huge heap of boards and logs, dumped across his way on the sidewalk by the edge of the road. Here in the lane there was some institution to which a supply of government fuel had probably been delivered in the form of some dismantled log house from the outskirts. There had not been enough room in the courtyard and so they had also cluttered up the street in front of it. The pile was being guarded by a sentry with a rifle, who paced the yard and from time to time came out into the lane.
Without thinking twice, Yuri Andreevich seized a moment when the sentry turned into the yard and the blizzard whirled an especially thick cloud of snow up in the air. He went around the heap of beams to the side where it was dark and the light of the street lamp did not fall, and, moving it from side to side, slowly freed a heavy log that was lying on the very bottom. Pulling it from under the pile with difficulty and heaving it onto his shoulder, he stopped feeling its weight (one’s own burden is not heavy), and stealthily, keeping to the shadows of the walls, lugged it home to Sivtsev.
It was timely, the firewood was running out at home. The log was sawed up and split into a pile of small chunks. Yuri Andreevich squatted down to start the stove. He sat silently in front of the trembling and rattling doors. Alexander Alexandrovich rolled the armchair up to the stove and sat in it, warming himself. Yuri Andreevich took the newspaper out of the side pocket of his jacket and handed it to his father-in-law, saying:
“Seen this? Have a look. Read it.”
Still squatting down and stirring the wood in the stove with a small poker, Yuri Andreevich talked to himself out loud.
“What magnificent surgery! To take and at one stroke artistically cut out the old, stinking sores! Simply, without beating around the bush, to sentence age-old injustice, which was used to having people bow and scrape and curtsey before it.
“The fact that it was so fearlessly carried out has something nationally intimate, long familiar about it. Something of Pushkin’s unconditional luminosity, of Tolstoy’s unswerving faithfulness to facts.”
“Pushkin? What did you say? Wait. I’ll finish right now. I can’t both read and listen,” Alexander Alexandrovich interrupted his son-in-law, mistakenly taking as addressed to him the monologue Yuri Andreevich was speaking to himself under his breath.
“Above all, where does the genius lie? If anyone were given the task of creating a new world, of beginning a new chronology, he would surely need to have a corresponding space cleared for him first. He would wait first of all for the old times to end, before he set about building the new, he would need a round number, a new paragraph, a blank page.
“But now, take it and like it. This unprecedented thing, this miracle of history, this revelation comes bang in the very thick of the ongoing everydayness, with no heed to its course. It begins not from the beginning but from the middle, without choosing the dates beforehand, on the first weekday to come along, at the very peak of tramways plying the city. That’s real genius. Only what is greatest can be so inappropriate and untimely.”
9
Winter came, precisely as had been predicted. It was not yet as scary as the two that followed it, but was already of their kind, dark, hungry, and cold, all a breaking up of the habitual and a rebuilding of the foundations of existence, all an inhuman effort to hold on to life as it slipped away.
There were three of them in a row, these dreadful winters, one after another, and not all that now seems to have happened in the year of 1917 to 1918 actually happened then, but may have taken place later. These successive winters merged together and it was hard to tell one from another.
The old life and the new order did not yet coincide. There was no sharp hostility between them, as a year later in the time of the civil war,12 but there was insufficient connection. They were two sides, standing apart, one facing the other, and not overlapping each other.
Administrative re-elections were held everywhere: in house committees, in organizations, at work, in public service institutions. Their makeup was changing. Commissars with unlimited power were appointed everywhere, people of iron will, in black leather jackets, armed with means of intimidation and with revolvers, who rarely shaved and still more rarely slept.
They were well acquainted with the petty bourgeois breed, the average holder of small government bonds, the
