“I have a feeling,” he said, his words dipping under his shaking upper lip like chickens escaping under a rabbit-wire fence, “I have a feeling that this is the last talk we shall have together, Seryozha. … If, when you return, I should be already no more, I entreat you, my boy, to be good to your mother. Remember the dangers she went through for your sake in bearing you—”
“That wasn’t for my sake, papa—she didn’t know me then—it was for her pleasure and yours that she bore me,” said Seryozha.
“Let her lie by my side in the grave,” said Old Sergei, trying to ignore the possibility of an interval of healthy widowhood for poor Anna, “as she has lain so many nights by my side in the big bed.”
“Oh, don’t worry, papa,” said Seryozha. “You’ll both of you live till ninety, I’m sure.” And he began to whistle softly through his teeth again.
Tears squeezed between Old Sergei’s eyelids as he half-realized his impotence in imposing his posthumous pathos on the living. How could he force his wife and son to regret him all their lives? There was no way. There was no love or loyalty in the world.
“Supper is ready,” said Anna, and stood in the doorway, suddenly thinking of something else, her eyes fixed on a fly on the wall. She was trying to think what had irritated and hurt her just before she began cooking the fish pie. Somehow she craved to identify that scar on her temper. But she could not trace any thought to its source because the tiresome wilderness of her old husband’s presence kept on blossoming into silly words that distracted her attention. To stop him talking she said again, “Supper is ready.” But Old Sergei went on talking. Anna went on thinking. Seryozha went on whistling. Anna caught words.
“… and giving to those who are poorer than yourself. God remembers it even if the ungrateful forget it. He will repay. …”
“An investment only—not a gift,” thought Anna, and stood in abstraction, scratching her head, till the next words intruded:
“… sleeping with women, Seryozha. Remember your Russian blood is a pure sacred inheritance … an insult to the land of your fathers to mix your blood with …”
“For poor Seryozha,” thought Anna, “Russia is unluckily becoming nothing but that—the land of his fathers—‘father’—‘Russia’—boring peevish words. And yet the high Russian fields …”
“Supper is ready,” she said aloud. Seryozha, goaded by his empty stomach, got up so abruptly that he knocked his chair over. But still Old Sergei went on talking—commanding them to stay, with his weak, blind, upraised face.
“… worth your while to earn, as I have earned, the reputation of a sound man—a man with a stake in the community—one who pays what he owes, no more, no less. …”
Anna’s thought ran off to the little shop on the other side of the matchwood partition she leaned against—a place of business closed since the Chinese soldiers’ raid, but still containing a tall pile of unwanted tins of Milkex, two dozen fancy diaries, four or five dozen celluloid hand mirrors in pastel shades, a case of comic can-openers in the form of bulldogs, a hundred or so silk-padded coat-hangers, and a few other temptations that could not even tempt thieves. These goods, Anna felt, shone in an idealized form in her old husband’s imagination, and gave him the right, in his own eyes, to claim a stake in the community.
“… and never was drunk in my life, Seryozha,” she heard. It was true, she knew, the taste of alcohol had always made him feel sick. “Some young men think that manliness is found in drunkenness and coarseness and fornication, but there is a truer manliness—”
“For God’s sake!” said Anna. “Supper is ready, I tell you.” As Old Sergei’s blind face turned to her, Anna remembered what it was that had offended her: he had suggested, by accident, what was probably true, that the offer of the kid had been accepted more precipitately than Mrs. Butters had intended. “Do you want to starve yourself as well as talk yourself hoarse, you silly old man?” she said, vehemently.
Old Sergei was conscious of an indecorous anticlimax to a Dying Man’s Advice to His Son. “My son is going on a journey and I am giving him a few parting words of advice, since I am an old man and by the time he comes back I may have been called away on the long—”
“What journey do you mean?”
Old Sergei felt that her horrified question gave him an opportunity for tragic drama such as he seldom wrested from his family. “What journey? Why, death, Anna.”
“No. I mean what journey is Seryozha taking, idiot?” said Anna, stamping irritably with both feet.
“I’m going to Seoul,” said Seryozha, happily, “to fetch some money that papa forgot—”
“Forgot, Seryozha!” exclaimed his father. “It is you that forget—”
“But Seoul is four days’ journey by train and road even when you get to the train,” said Anna. “And on foot. … The police in Korea are most dangerous to poor Russians. … The bandits on the border—”
“Oh, that’s all quite easy,” said Seryozha. “Three weeks’ walking will do it. And I’d like to see the Japanese policeman or the Chinese bandit that—”
“You will see neither,” said Anna. “You will take no such journey. The idea! … Only a couple of imbeciles would have such an idea. Dancing off alone into nowhere. What a notion—and you a mere child still! Let us hear no more of it. Come, must I tell you for the hundredth time that supper is ready? For God’s sake, old man, are you glued to your chair?”
IV
Tatiana Pavlovna Ostapenko and the servant, Katya, bent side by side over washtubs, looked like a sow and a hind feeding side by side from one trough. Both wore the same kind of headkerchief and faded blue cotton bodice and skirt. But Tatiana bent like someone finding
