Her father looked guiltily at the signatures and the drawing. He folded up the paper and put it in his pocket. “Ah, tschah!” he said, as he seized a new bottle of champagne. “It means nothing. We still have tomorrow. … Varitchka, let’s eat your goose.”
IX
From the moment of Seryozha’s departure from Chi-tao-kou, Anna’s world seemed filled with an entirely new air. One would have said that Seryozha must have filled the house as completely as a snail fills its shell—so convoluted, so entire was the emptiness he left, from floor to ceiling, from wall to wall. Out of doors, looking through Anna’s eyes, one would have guessed her son a bright obscuring light—so bleakly new and hard and shadowless was every leaf, every hill, every silly angle of the street, lacking even the possibility of his presence. It was a world lit, as it were, by indirect lighting under low clouds, instead of by the honest bland sun.
Anna’s son, ever since his birth, had always been within a few miles of her, and now those few miles, empty of him—a cube of featureless summer air—boxed her in, a prisoner. She could not spontaneously imagine his return. With a mental effort she could invent elaborate scenes of his homecoming, but she knew them to be artificial, knew them to be constructed with ingenuity rather than with faith and hope. Such scenes were always shattered by her conviction of premonition. “Absurd! … He will never come back. …” Every inch of the earth is, after all, so dangerous. Here, where we stand, a minute or a million years ago, some heart failed. There, at that point to which our dear love is hurrying, the lightning struck, the germ of plague was born, the tree will fall, the flood will surge, the murderer will stab—a minute or a million years hence—a minute or a million years ago. Living is a matter of missing death by a hair’s-breadth or an aeon—it doesn’t matter which—and dying is a matter of coincidence. If we knew the past and the future of every yard of every path we tread, or of every stone our dear love’s foot turns over as he goes, where should we turn for peace? Once we have realized the billions of deaths and horrors that have been, the billions that will be, every inch of the world seems soaked in blood. Every inch of the world, it seemed to Anna, was haunted by the ghost of a son whose mother had let him go. “Even at this very second, perhaps, his foot is lifted for his last stride.”
“Why should you be so pessimistic, Annitchka?” asked Old Sergei, who had rather relaxed his attitudes during this period of acute domestic discomfort, and lived now in an emotional deshabille, content to be seen as Old Sergei Malinin at last. “Hundreds of young men have made the very journey that he is making and have come back safely. Indeed, our Seryozha is doubly safe, since he has a reliable man with him.” He spoke to reassure himself as well as his wife, since her chronic conviction of a fatal presentiment affected him, too. He kept secretly in his pocket a knotted string, making a new knot for every day that brought no news of his son, in order that he might not have to irritate his wife by asking her to verify his calculations by the calendar. Apart from this tiny effort of ingenuity, Old Sergei had become, in a few days, very much more helpless than ever before. The necessity for posing as a father being now past, he had shrunk and withered into immobility, as flowers, dry and forgotten in the empty vase, hardly respond, except by an unlovely rattle, to the moving air that used to swing their bright heads. Old Sergei expressed by his wistful avoidance of authority his craving to be at last old, to be nursed, to be pitied, to have nothing more expected of him.
“Ah, why did you send him away?” said Anna, turning on the old man. “He was our life—our crutch; we’re nothing but a couple of old bags of bones without him. You know what a dangerous, lawless country this is for a Russian, yet you were so greedy to add money to money. … Why, money’s dirt compared with the safety of our Seryozha. The money we had was enough; we lived very well; we were happy enough.”
“Don’t worry yourself so, Annitchka. It’s folly to worry so—besides, it worries me. The boy’s not gone far; he’ll be back again in no time; we shall see him one of these days coming in at that door as usual—or rather, you’ll see him, since I am so afflicted.”
“I shall never see him again,” said Anna, looking at the door, trying to force her imagination to reconstruct the prow of his long shadow, coming in at the door, like a ship into harbor.
“Oh, very well, then, worry—worry. You take pleasure in worrying both yourself and me. Cry yourself sick if you like.”
But Anna was not crying. She never cried. Her eyebrows were hitched up, her forehead strained into wrinkles, there was a little taut pain in the top of her head; these things, with her, took the place of tears. Sometimes she could almost have prayed to her muscles. Let go! Let go! Let go! Her eyes, her brow, and the little sore tiptoe yawning feeling inside the top of her skull seemed to be caught, hooked, seemed to
