For Tatiana was suddenly laughing. She lifted her eyes at last from her clasped hands and laughed. A picture of a sort of centrifugal burst of young men bouncing from one center had come into her mind. Like a flock of rabbits running from a weasel—jumping off cliffs, plunging into streams, turning head over heels in panic, springing under railway trains—a bomb of furry fugitives bursting as the result of one puny little spark of life inside a separate bag of fur. Certainly seven was too many to cry over. Over one—each one of the seven—tears might be shed. Tatiana knew that as soon as she was quiet again she would be imagining the cruel look of the knife in poor Sasha’s sight—the feel of its pressing edge on his tender throat. But now—seven voices singing in silly unison, “Goodbye forever”—seven twangs of breaking hearts like the snapping strings of balalaikas. …
The father and mother stood and looked at their giggling child.
“She is right,” said Varvara after a moment, with a brisk, hard look, as she folded her sewing. “Seven is too many to cry over. Seven is like the chorus in comic opera. You go and lie down, Pavlik; you are overexcited and you talk nonsense. There is no reason why Tanya should try to be any different from what she is. If seventy lovers instead of seven came along, it wouldn’t be her fault if none of them was the right one. Perhaps she’s just more particular than the rest of us.” … She looked at her husband with a wry, unnatural archness. “Or perhaps she’s not the kind of girl that marries. It’s only a habit that makes men and old virgins think so much of love and marriage. …”
Varvara stopped speaking, overcome with a sort of despair. All this pain, this weeping, this shouting, was like a blot upon perfection—a blot that must be at the same time erased and accepted by her. This storm must be outwardly stilled, yet inwardly justified; it must be part of the air of the house now—and yet it was leaving ruin in its path. Ruin must henceforth decorate the garden. Part of her pride in the family’s perfection must be Tatiana’s imperfection, just as Pavel’s drunkenness had become a subtlety—an Ostapenko essential—misunderstood though it might be outside. She knew that her husband was often drunk, but ignorant outsiders might think—well, they might think that he drank! She knew there was a fundamental perversity, a passional lack, in her daughter—but, with so many disappointed and spiteful lovers about, Heaven knew what the neighbors might say. They might call the child frigid, undesirable, likely to live and die alone. One must fashion these potential weapons into stones to strengthen the ramparts of family defense.
“What have you done to your finger, Tanya?” she said, awkwardly.
“I burnt it on the iron.”
Pavel was walking a few steps here and a few steps there in the hot shade of the garden, clasping and unclasping his hands, mopping his dripping forehead. “Butter,” he said. “Butter is good for a burn.” Thinking of his Tanya—his claimant for Ostapenko immortality—burning her finger on an iron gave him a sharp pain in the pit of his stomach, though he still longed to beat her and make her scream.
“It is very sore, I suppose,” said Varvara. “If you come in I will put something on it.”
“Butter—butter—” murmured Pavel, rather wildly. He was wondering why this business of Tatiana’s disappointed lovers had seemed to him so important just now. By what logical steps had he reached his present condition of agitation and anger against his daughter? Everything seemed unnaturally separated in his mind now: the talk in the drinking-house with old Soloviev, the news of Sasha’s death at Chi-tao-kou, the sudden discovery that the leaves of the maple in the garden had turned gold, Varvara’s comment on Tatiana’s whistling, Tatiana’s tears, Tatiana’s laughter, Tatiana’s burnt finger, Tatiana’s need of a good whipping, Tatiana’s need of butter, his own need of a wash and a good sleep … each of these facts seemed static and ready-made in his mind, none growing out of any other.
Alone with Tatiana, Varvara said as she bent over the wounded finger: “Your papa is overexcited … the hot weather. … His disappointment is natural. Sasha Weber was the son-in-law he would have liked.”
Tatiana’s throat tautened as she imagined a knife at a throat. Yet really Sasha’s suicide hurt her just about as much as her burnt finger hurt her, no more. Her thoughts were intermittently free of either injury; they played with the shape of the sunlight on the floor, with the angular lines of her father’s coat hanging on a chair, with the blowing, casual design of gusty gold sand blowing across the paper screens. Chairs, tables, cupboards—heavy props for heavy Russian bodies, supports for heavy Russian possessions—looked oddly in the light flat Japanese gold-and-white room. They were like vulgar plums in a cake or cube of light sweet air. The alcove that in a Japanese house should hold a flowery suggestion of an altar framed Katya’s sewing-machine. Tatiana could almost see the surprise of that room, finding itself patched with such heavy shapes and
