“And again, as if hearing them for the first time, I was amazed at how this song stands out from the calls of all other birds, what a leap, without gradual change, nature performs to the richness and singularity of this trilling. So much variety in changing figures and such force of distinct, far-reaching sound! In Turgenev somewhere8 there is a description of these whistlings, the wood demon’s piping, the larklike drumming. Two turns stood out particularly. The quick, greedy, and luxurious ‘tiokh, tiokh, tiokh,’ sometimes with three beats, sometimes countless, in response to which the thicket, all in dew, shook itself, preened itself, flinching as if it had been tickled. And another falling into two syllables, calling out, soul-felt, entreating, like a plea or an exhortation: ‘A-wake! A-wake! A-wake!’ ”
9
“Spring. We’re getting ready for farmwork. So no more diary. But it has been pleasant to take these notes. I’ll have to set them aside till winter.
“The other day, this time indeed during the week before Lent, the season of bad roads, a sick peasant drives his sled into the yard over water and mud. Naturally, I refuse to receive him. ‘Forgive me, my dear fellow, I’ve stopped doing that—I have neither a real choice of medicines, nor the necessary equipment.’ But there was no getting rid of him. ‘Help me. My skin’s going scant. Have mercy. A bodily ailment.’
“What to do? I don’t have a heart of stone. I decided to receive him. ‘Get undressed.’ I examined him. ‘You’ve got lupus.’ I busy myself with him, glancing sidelong towards the windowsill, at the bottle of carbolic acid. (Good God, don’t ask me where I got it, and another thing or two, the most necessary! It’s all from Samdevyatov.) I look —another sled drives into the yard, with a new patient, as it seems to me at first. And my brother Evgraf drops as if from the clouds. For a while he is at the disposal of the household, Tonya, Shurochka, Alexander Alexandrovich. Afterwards, when I’m free, I join the others. Questions begin—how, from where? As usual, he dodges, evades, not one direct answer, smiles, wonders, riddles.
“He was our guest for about two weeks, often going by himself to Yuriatin, and suddenly he vanished as if he’d fallen through the earth. During that time I was able to notice that he was still more influential than Samdevyatov, yet his doings and connections were still less explicable. Where does he come from? Where does his power come from? What is he engaged in? Before his disappearance, he promised to lighten our farmwork, so that Tonya would have free time to bring up Shura, and I for medical and literary pursuits. We asked curiously what he intended to do towards that end. Again silence and smiles. But he did not deceive us. There are signs that the conditions of our life will indeed change.
“Astonishing thing! He is my half brother. He has the same last name. And yet, strictly speaking, I know him least of all.
“This is already the second time that he has irrupted into my life as a good genius, a deliverer who resolves all difficulties. Perhaps the composition of every biography, along with the cast of characters acting in it, also calls for the participation of a mysterious unknown power, an almost symbolic person, appearing to help without being called, and the role of this beneficent and hidden mainspring is played in my life by my brother Evgraf?”
With that the notes of Yuri Andreevich ended. He never continued them.
10
Yuri Andreevich was looking over the books he had ordered in the Yuriatin city reading room. The many- windowed reading room for a hundred persons was set with several rows of long tables, their narrow ends towards the windows. The reading room closed with the coming of darkness. In springtime the city was not lighted in the evening. But Yuri Andreevich never sat until dusk anyway, and did not stay in the city past dinnertime. He would leave the horse that the Mikulitsyns gave him at Samdevyatov’s inn, spend the whole morning reading, and at midday return home on horseback to Varykino.
Before these raids on the library, Yuri Andreevich had rarely been to Yuriatin. He had no particular business in the city. He knew it poorly. And when the room gradually filled before his eyes with Yuriatin’s citizens, who would seat themselves now far from him, now right next to him, Yuri Andreevich felt as if he was becoming acquainted with the city, standing at one of its populous intersections, and as if what poured into the room were not Yuriatin’s readers, but the houses and streets they lived in.
However, the actual Yuriatin, real and not imagined, could be seen through the windows of the room. Near the middle window, the biggest of them, stood a tank of boiled water. Readers, by way of taking a break, went out to the stairway to smoke, surrounded the tank, drank water, pouring what was left into a basin, and crowded by the window, admiring the view of the city.
There were two kinds of readers: old-timers from the local intelligentsia—they were the majority—and those from simple people.
The first, most of whom were women, poorly dressed, neglectful of themselves and gone to seed, had unhealthy, drawn faces, puffy for various reasons—hunger, biliousness, dropsy. These were the habitues of the reading room, personally acquainted with the library workers and feeling themselves at home there.
Those from the people, with beautiful, healthy faces, dressed neatly, festively, came into the room embarrassed and timid, as into church, and made their appearance more noisily than was customary, not from ignorance of the rules, but owing to their wish to enter perfectly noiselessly and their inability to adjust their healthy steps and voices.
Opposite the windows there was a recess in the wall. In this niche, on a podium, separated from the rest of the room by a high counter, the reading room staff, the senior librarian and his two female assistants, were busy with their tasks. One of them, angry, wearing a woollen shawl, constantly took off her pince-nez and then perched it back on her nose, guided, apparently, not by the needs of vision, but by the changes of her inner state. The other, in a black silk blouse, was probably suffering from chest congestion, because she almost never took the handkerchief from her mouth and nose, and talked and breathed into it.
The library staff had the same swollen faces, elongated and puffy, as half the readers, the same slack skin, sallow shot with green, the color of a pickle covered with gray mold, and the three of them took turns doing one and the same thing, explaining in a whisper to novices the rules for using books, sorting out order slips, handing over books, and receiving the returned ones, and in between worked on putting together some sort of annual report.
And, strangely, by some incomprehensible coupling of ideas, in the faces of the real city outside the window and the imaginary one in the room, and also by some likeness caused by the general deathly puffiness, as if they were all sick with goiter, Yuri Andreevich recalled the displeased switchwoman on the tracks of Yuriatin the morning of their arrival, and the general panorama of the city in the distance, and Samdevyatov beside him on the floor of the car, and his explanations. And Yuri Andreevich wanted to connect those explanations, given far outside the limits of the place, at a great distance, with everything he now saw close up, in the heart of the picture. But he did not remember Samdevyatov’s designations, and nothing came of it.
11
Yuri Andreevich was sitting at the far end of the room, surrounded by books. Before him lay periodicals on local zemstvo statistics and several works on the ethnography of the region. He tried to request two more works on the
