Her finger was throbbing, her head was aching from her father’s blow. She still felt coldly angry with her father—and yet proud of him. He had attacked her spiritually and physically, and yet, she though the was so splendid, so queer, so much more colored and individual than other men. He was a part of her; for the moment she hated him as she might hate one’s own rebellious limb. “A lonely and wild father,” she thought, “hitting his daughter because she would take no lover. How rare! how Ostapenko!” She would not have contradicted an outsider’s view of her father. “A simple tipsy man,” you might have said, and so he was. Yes, simple with a precious Ostapenko simplicity; tipsy as a poet without words. … Even ordinary derogatory words could be twisted by each Ostapenko to feed the family sense of apartness.
“Well,” said Tatiana, “Sasha’s safe and dead now.” Her finger hurt so much, as her mother touched it, that she could almost have wished to die of this injury as Sasha had died of his. Tatiana’s body was always morbidly sensitive to pain. Little pains, that in other people seemed easily dismissed from attention, often demanded real fortitude of her. That was why she was so much preoccupied with the thought of pain—why she invented stories about pain and death in the night to make her body thrill.
“My darling,” said Varvara, in inquiry, not in criticism, “have you no feelings for other people’s sufferings? Do you not mind very much about poor Sasha?”
Tatiana listened, a little confused. The two questions seemed to her to be quite separate. Minding about a person—no. Minding about people—well, nobody could feel more actually than she felt the very feelings of people, animals, insects, things, ghosts, even the air bruised by shadows.
“No mamma, I haven’t any heart,” she mumbled, feeling this to be the safest claim.
Varvara registered this as a confirmation of a new piece of Ostapenko peculiarity. Her daughter had no heart. Well, were hearts necessary? Men and women—especially women—had been judged too much by their capacity for love. This was because people who love, propagate, thought Varvara, and transmit their vulgar standard of love from generation to generation. Just as rabbits transmit their bobtails. Bobtails are a conventional rabbit standard. A rabbit with a long curly tail would be feared, shunned, trampled to death, so the innovation would die untried, unbequeathed, abortive. But its death didn’t prove the essential wrongness of long curly tails for rabbits. Genius was probably often heartless. But genius did not often propagate. Strangeness meant physical mortality, so strangeness was rare, never reborn, always new in every manifestation. All the stupid things—cruelty, prostitution, womanly modesty, conventional religion, conventional morality—only survived so rampantly because of the excessive fertility of the stupid.
“Well,” she said, lamely, “people with no hearts have no babies.”
“People with no hearts,” said Tatiana, “can be the mothers of—oh—all sorts of things.” She had a vague feeling of tremendous posterity—mountains, clouds, tigers, spiders, flowers, cities—all giving birth. … But even as she spoke she knew that this feeling was an easy and false consolation.
Varvara sighed and went out. Tatiana went to her room, her finger greased and bandaged and the more painful for having been treated so seriously. She stood rigidly, looking toward the window. To look out of her window was, with her, almost always a prayer or an act of praise to some unknown God. The window was like the face of God or of a lover to her; she studied every line and shade, as an adoring lover studies a face, or a believer a miraculous manifestation. She marveled so over living things, simply because they lived, moved, breathed, grew, begot, conceived. Yet she was accused of killing, of treachery to that strange quiet empire, the law of which is the beating of the heart. She, who valued things for their independence of herself, for their incomprehensibility, for their magical remoteness—she who so slightly intruded even upon her own life—was reproached for intruding on the lives of others. All the world outside her window was jeweled with impeccable life—and she, trusted in the treasure-house, was a convicted robber. She set her eyes and her face toward that world, but a voice in her heart was crying: “Take me out of the earth, that I may hear no more the reproach. … If men who lived are dead, why should I, who never lived, have the right to breathe when every breath I
