Tatiana pinched and tore at her agonising finger.
“Alexander Petrovitch is dead,” he said. “He cut his throat. Just before he killed himself he wrote to his mother that his death would relieve you of a nuisance.”
“That was ridiculous of him,” said Tatiana’s mother in a matter-of-fact voice. “It was also very spiteful and theatrical.”
“At any rate, you wouldn’t waste a tear on Sasha Weber, of course,” said Pavel to his daughter, choking with anger. “Sasha knew that, of course. But he was mistaken, poor fool, in thinking that you would feel anything so active as relief, wasn’t he? Why should you feel anything at all? What does it matter to you that a living young man is dead?”
Tatiana looked at her finger. Through the nail, she noticed, the red blood showed purple. Things were hurt, things died, blood ran into burnt fingers and out of cut throats. Containers of uneasy blood, that’s all we are. Big and little, male and female, two-legged, four-legged, six legged, many-legged, winged and creeping, wise and foolish, we slide and stride and wiggle about the world until something called death lets the blood out, to be soaked into the ground, to be dried into the air, to form again in other containers. … Why should there be any of this merging between one skinful of blood and bones and another? Why can’t we get used to the loneliness of having separate blood? Pitchers may go to the same well, be dipped, and come home full, clinking handles, tinkling together, but always separate, each with its dreadful integrity complete, its inviolate solitary storm of contents. Not till the pitcher is spilled is there a merging—a cold, loveless merging into thirsty space. These images, quite clear but wordless, passed across the screen of Tatiana’s sight as she looked at her finger, cramping the muscles round her eyes till her forehead smarted. “Why do I feel my finger and my forehead hurting, and not the wound in Sasha’s throat?” she thought all at once. “What is it that feels one wound so much and another not at all?”
The maple tree rustled as Pavel shook it with his tense arm. His arm was aching to beat his daughter, to break up her exasperating stillness. “I suppose you don’t know why this unhappy young man killed himself,” he croaked.
“No,” said Tatiana. She knew that he had killed himself by way of revenge on her—he had told her that he would, but she did not know why. What were two me’s to each other, that one should be so necessary to another? A sort of accident, it seemed, happened in young men’s blood that made them think that two me’s could be kneaded together into an us. Most of them probably lived to find it a mistake. Only dear Sasha had incredibly thrown his me away—poured it out of a cut throat, because he could not double it into an us. Here in this generous world were a million million me’s—a million million columns of lonely blood and bone. There was no such thing as a real us.
“Except the Siamese twins,” said Tatiana aloud, absentmindedly.
Pavel boxed her ears.
Varvara got up from her chair, her face twisting, her mind profoundly disturbed. “Oh, what a complicated family I’ve got!” she thought, proudly. “You must stop and think, Pavlik,” she said, in a dry, urgent voice. “Think. Think. It’s impossible to make things one way that really are another. Tanya is Tanya, whether you like it or not, and you know, when you’re sober, you like it. She has as much right to be herself as you have—and even if she hadn’t, you couldn’t change her, either by hitting her or in any other way. She couldn’t change herself. She’s alive.”
“Yes, and Sasha’s dead,” shouted Pavel. “He had just as much right to be alive as she has. More right, because he was natural. He was a man. He should have begotten sons. What is this thing we have called our daughter? A thing—a lifeless thing—killing live men. … What about our grandchildren who have a right to be born? A thing that’s not alive is preventing men and women from being alive. She’s cutting us off from our grandchildren. Five times—six times—seven times—she might have been married; she might have been turned into a live woman—a live mother—a live wife. Her face, her body—her woman’s face and body—they’re lies. … Yes, she’s crying now—she looks almost like a woman when she cries, doesn’t she—but it’s all lies. …”
Tatiana, her head still bent over her hand as though she were obsessed by the phenomenon of her burnt finger, was crying violently—her shoulders jerking, her mouth squared, the muscles round her eyes quivering, tears springing down her cheeks and chin. She was rigid with anger against her father because he was invading her—his words were fettering her, just as his hard hands had clapped an ache round her head.
“And Piotr Gavrilovitch—whom she promised only a month or two ago to marry—where is he now? Gone—turned out, I suppose, since all her promises are lies. I suppose she said, You foolish Petya, that promise of mine was a joke—a thing’s promise. … Eh? Eh—? Answer me, girl.”
“What do you want her to answer, Pavlik?” said Varvara, standing within an arm’s-length of her weeping daughter, but not touching her.
“Answer me, girl. Piotr Gavrilovitch, the last young fool you lied to—you showed him the door, I suppose, when you’d sucked him dry. He’s not coming back any more, is he?”
Tatiana shook her head.
“No, of course not. I suppose you said to him, You can go and cut your throat now, Petya, as Sasha did. The joke
