“I suppose you sit out here so as to see Seryozha coming round the corner, when at last he comes,” said Old Sergei one day.
“Nothing of the kind,” said Anna. “I know now that Seryozha will never come back.”
To his teasing, “Well then, why sit out there in the dust?” she made no reply.
But presently she said something that so much surprised him that the sense of it fell back from his mind, as a wave falls back from a rock, leaving its surface dark, glossy, and wet, but its shape unchanged. He listened to the low unloving tone of her voice, rather than to the words she uttered, and the tone conveyed to his slow mind nothing but the usual reproach. Immediately, the house shook and he realized that she had jumped off the porch. Then he found, printed on his hearing, as clearly as the shape of a windowpane is printed on suddenly closed eyes, her words: “As a matter of fact, here he comes—your son—and the man that went with him.”
“Annitchka! Annitchka!” he cried, absurdly confused by the discrepancy between her tone and her words. But, as he feared, she was gone from the porch. What could she have meant—here he comes—your son? As he rose, trembling, from his chair, he sought foolishly in his mind for some other possible meaning of those disquietingly simple words—here he comes—your son. … So deeply astonished was he that his sense of direction—his homely familiarity with every object—every wrinkle—every dint in the room, was on the instant lost. He shuffled wildly up and down, hitting his knee painfully against a ledge that seemed to have sprung like a fungus from a smooth wall, rapping his flying knuckles against an anonymous piece of furniture that could not be the ordinary reliable dresser that had for so long acted as signpost to his gropings.
“Annitchka! Annitchka!” he quavered. And as he stumbled to and fro, round and round, lost in a quivering jungle of bewilderment, he heard, fined and diminished by the accurate perspective-sense of the hearing, Seryozha’s far-off shout.
“Mamma! mamma! mamma!”
At the sound of his son’s voice, Old Sergei, in a frenzy of exaltation and desire, saw the dim oblong of the door, and his own upheld hand silhouetted like a blurred crab against that incredible squat pillar of light. He was at once extravagantly dizzy—reeled, swung, moaned, clung to the dresser, shut his new eyes for a few seconds and opened them again. There was a roaring of readjustment in his brain; his whole habit of concentration rushed from all his senses to that one lost and found sense of sight. He leaned his numb hands against the wall and planted his incredulous feet, as though they were wooden blocks, one before the other—the other before the one—forcing his half-paralyzed body to walk along a new path—a path that his feet had forgotten—a path that his eyes could see.
He had lost his power of estimating space by sight; his feet reached the threshold of the door before his eyes expected. Daylight towered round him, as though he tottered in a fountain of terrifying flame. He felt wholly defeated. The light pressed in on him; he was buried alive in an avalanche of light. Weighed down by light, he fell to his knees. As he did so, Seryozha’s voice, from somewhere very near, broke through the roar of his forgotten sense of hearing. It was as if the blood rushed into a limb that had been for a moment numb.
He lifted his face, raised his lids. This smear of smoke in the core of a flame, then—was this all that Old Sergei was to see of his son? Better to be blind, thought Old Sergei, wildly, than to seek in vain through this terrifying new world of fire for the lost face of his son. More lost than ever before, it seemed, for now the promise of returning sight was a broken promise. “Ah! ah! I can’t see you! I can’t see you!” wailed the old man.
“You shall! You shall!” cried Seryozha, giggling with excitement. “Just be hopeful, papa darling—just be hopeful for a minute.”
An appalling smell now awoke to consciousness another of Old Sergei’s momentarily neglected senses. Something of revolting texture was rubbed against his eyes. “What’s this? What’s this?” he screamed in a fury.
“Just be hopeful—be hopeful,” Seryozha’s voice went on. His father could feel the boy’s breath on his brow. What was this filthy, stinking pad over his eyes that shuttered away his son?
“Take it away, boy, take it away. Let me see your face.”
“Can you see my face?” asked Seryozha, withdrawing his magic poultice.
And it seemed to Old Sergei as if that urgent creating young voice cut like a knife through the thin crumbling texture of his limitations. Something that felt like a dark doubt in himself was pushed away from his heart and from his eyes, as the blinds of the house of a dead man run up to admit the sun when the coffin is at last carried away. He felt like a man who, in a dream, finds that he can fly. The voice of his son created before his eyes—a face—a huge, shimmering gray turnip close to his eyes, much bigger than the sky, with features like clouds. It was like an Olympian practical joke, that face—a mask, with blurred craters for eyes, crooked streak for nose, broad black scratch for mouth. Yet, imperfect and grotesque as was the geography of this globe within six inches of his eyes, it was obscurely but surely the face of Seryozha. Every second brought in partial focus some new identifying blur on one plane or another of this refound world that was his son’s face.
“I can see,” whispered Old Sergei, and he could not speak again. Tears ran out of his eyes and trickled past the corners of his trembling mouth. His cheeks were sucked in with the breath drawn to utter words he
