“No, they don’t wear blue,” said Anna, sighing gustily. “But Chinese young girls wear nothing but blue.”
“Ah, but they wear trousers. Chinese coolie cloth made into trousers has an ugly effect. Stiff and ugly—not swinging out when they dance or run. … Besides, they don’t wash it enough to let it fade to that cloudy … cloudy blue. …” He sat so long without saying anything more that Anna realized that she might as well leave him.
“Well, Alexander Petrovitch,” she said, feeling nothing but a useless, clumsy old woman again, “remember that I invited you. … You may change your mind. …”
Alexander did not seem to have heard her. His eyes were fixed upon her stockings, which were of a light gray. Alexander felt that he was haunted by light-gray stockings—since Tatiana always wore them. Every woman seemed to flaunt a cruel parody of Tatiana’s slim dancing gray legs, and every time he saw gray legs he felt as though something emotionally final had happened—whether hopeful or hopeless it was impossible to say. It was as if Tatiana had stepped across his vision. Even the station master at Gensan, by wearing gray socks, had stabbed Alexander Weber’s heart hot and cold. Even the piers of the dock at Gensan, bleached with sun and sea, had made him feel, “Is she coming—has she gone?” though he did not realize why. Anna walked away. The sow was now suckling her ten ridiculous little balloons of babies, but taking no notice of them—not fussing about them with the loving attentiveness other mothers show. The sow’s soul seemed to be lost in that huge mound of a body; her body was an outlying region, only very sparsely colonized with the germs of consciousness, only nominally under the government of some little vital citadel of egoism in the soul of the sow. That great swollen body did what it had to do—conceived young, suckled its young, rooted its jaws drearily in mud, shoveled food in under its snout, moved the stiff, overburdened props of its legs—but all these dull doings were uninspired by spirit. Only the tail, knotting and squirming tautly, seemed to have some more direct communication with the sow’s remote inner life.
Anna laughed delightedly as she imagined herself nursing ten little Seryozhas. “With any other husband I should have had four at least—even though I was thirty-five when I married,” she thought. “Then I could have kept three at home with me all the time, and Seryozha could have traipsed off as far as he liked.”
Then suddenly she began walking home very fast, tearing at the armholes of her dress because they were too tight for such rapid movement. She had remembered that Seryozha had not packed the little phial of castor oil she had filled for him out of the big bottle. She made a wild plan to hire a droshky and get Alexander Weber to drive it. Seryozha and Wilfred would by now be about halfway from Pa-tao-kou to their night’s stop—thirty miles from here, perhaps … a droshky with a good horse. … “It is most important,” she assured herself. “Castor oil has saved lives before now. I could leave the old man plenty of cheese and bread, and get that Lai woman to come in and heat up the potatoes tonight. …”
She hurried into the kitchen. Old Sergei was sitting at the table, running his fingers through the heads of a bunch of zinnias he had picked in the yard.
“I am going to drive after Seryozha,” said Anna, in a hasty, defiant voice. “It is most important. I can get a droshky. I shall only be away till tomorrow noon, I dare say. … He left something most important behind … that little bottle of castor oil. It might easily be a matter of life and death—eating at these filthy Korean inns. …”
“The castor oil?” exclaimed Old Sergei, looking dizzy. “He took the castor oil with him. He was packing his pack in here while you were cooking pirozhki, and he said, ‘Tell mamma I have put the castor oil in, since she makes such a point of it. Look, in here—’ he said, forgetting that I cannot look at castor oil or anything else.”
“He forgot it, I tell you,” shouted Anna, in a wild voice. She rushed to the shelf which had been the rendezvous of Seryozha’s accumulation for the journey. She stood looking at the bare shelf for a moment, in a silence broken only by one loud sad hiccup. “Then, if he didn’t forget it, why didn’t you tell me before, you old fool—you silly old fool—you heartless old fool of a father? But why should you care? You send your only son away into the desert without a qualm—selling him for money—for a paltry two hundred yen. … Why should you care if he lives or dies? Or for me, the child’s mother—why should you care if I eat my heart out with worry?” She stood in the middle of the kitchen, quivering, bending toward him as though she would strangle him.
Old Sergei, a little frightened, began to make the low humming noise between his lips that he used to make when they were first married, to soothe her when she became excited and nervous. She had been a slim young woman then, and he, gentle and always a little dense about the causes of her agitation. They used, in those days, to cling together in the dark, after a disquieting day, to the sound of that silly, compassionate humming. It soothed her now, though she seemed rather annoyed to be soothed. With a surrendering quick sigh she went away into the bedroom and, after a long period of silence there which her husband dared not interrupt, returned and cooked the supper, talking only rarely, alternately insulting him and apologizing to him.
But every day she escaped from home in pursuit of torturing reminders of her son. Sometimes she
