thought, disjointedly, how long it had been since she had allowed him to hold her in his arms—a dejected, months-long eternity of everyday preoccupations, distractions, headaches, which would now stretch on, stretch on indefinitely, in a glittering, echoing Moscow apartment where he was condemned to live from this day forward, exiled from his work, his family, his very existence, talking to no one for weeks at a time save his own reflection and the madman from the ninth floor…
In the next instant, the absurdity of the image made him laugh aloud—a bitter little laugh that startled him out of his trancelike state. Then, feeling all at once afraid to linger in this seductively warm, deceptively cozy, subtly poisonous place that belonged to him no longer, he stood up unsteadily and headed out of the room.
The air was much colder in the drafty corridor that led past the gaping cavern of an unlit kitchen to the front door. Behind him, he heard Nina ask where he was going.
“Back to Moscow,” he said without stopping. The wine he had drunk—half a bottle, it must have been, or quite possibly even three-quarters—made his steps sluggish, and mechanically he chided himself for having briefly forgotten his age. As if from afar, Nina’s feet pattered across the floor as she dashed after him, exclaiming, “But that’s crazy! Let me make supper, we’ll go to bed early, and tomorrow we can talk this over calmly. Please, Tolya, nothing’s decided, we can still—”
Already on the veranda, he fished out his city shoes from a dim corner, then felt for his bag on the floor where he had dropped it just hours before. It was unnecessarily, mockingly heavy
Catching up with him, Nina grabbed his sleeve.
“Please,” she gasped, “you can’t leave like this, it’s already past nine, how are you going to get home, do you even know the train schedule, please…”
He saw her standing there, green-eyed, flushed, and out of breath like a young girl, and his heart bled with the certainty that he had been too late with her as well. And then he understood how laughable it had been to imagine, only one day ago, that the loss of some romanticized image of a thin-blooded, composed Madonna who for years had graced his idea of a perfect home with a mysterious, elegant presence would be in any way comparable to the loss of this flesh-and-blood woman before him—this woman who had once been ready to follow him to whatever amazing new horizons he might take her, this woman who could still find the strength to listen to him when he was sad and make him tea when he was tired, this woman whose fingertips smelled of fruits and earth….
And for one moment, confronted with a bleak monotony of future despair, so unlike the dramatic vision of offended virtue that he had entertained over the purloined letter of a neighbor, he caught himself longing for the Nina of yesterday, furtive and unfaithful, perhaps, but still near him, instead of this new Nina, pure as always—but far away, so far away, with ninety-seven kilometers of solitude and indifference and disappointed hopes to separate them for God knew how long…. And simultaneously it occurred to him how surreal this parting was, how lifeless—how like a labored scene from some novel whose meaning faded amidst the flowery exchanges between unfeeling, cardboard characters—how unlike this bleeding wound that was tearing his living soul in two.
And in truth, why was he standing here, on the threshold of darkness, still and speechless? Shouldn’t he plead with her, shouldn’t he reproach her, shouldn’t he remind her how much he had done for her—how comfortable her life had been with him, how successful he had become for her sake, how many lovely things she had always had at her beck and call? Shouldn’t he throw her ingratitude back into her face, forcing her to remember the pitiful failure of Lev Belkin’s existence, perhaps grabbing her roughly by the shoulders and shouting, “Is that the kind of life you wish we had?” Or should he confess instead how much he needed her? Should he… shouldn’t he…
Still talking about train schedules, Nina was trying to wrestle away his bag. “Please understand, Tolya,” she was saying rapidly, “there’s no need to react like this, I only want a temporary—even brief—”
He knew with perfect conviction what an unfathomable thing it would be to walk away right now, without saying another word, without attempting to restore their life to the way it had been—yet at the same time, he felt strangely unable to break out of his stupor. And deep inside his heart, he sensed that his inaction stemmed from his ultimate acceptance of unhappiness, perhaps even a kind of perverse satisfaction at the thought that an ultimate justice was being served.
For deep inside his heart, he realized that he deserved it all.
Moving Nina’s fluttering hands away, Sukhanov turned and walked through the door. The terrace steps were slippery with evening dew, and the twisting shadows of the path embroiled his shoes in dimly aromatic, faintly menacing coils of invisible rose branches. He stopped and listened briefly: she had not followed. Then, greeting his rightful fate with a quiet smile, he extricated himself from the roses, pushed open the gate—and exited into the night.
SEVENTEEN
The station was in the nearby village of Bogoliubovka. A few summers ago, Sukhanov had gone there with Nina to meet some friends arriving by train. Beyond the gated cluster of well-appointed houses of the privileged, they had walked through a pleasant birch forest, rosy in the light of the morning sun, and on the way through the village, Nina had surreptitiously picked moist, sweet raspberries off bushes spilling over low fences—altogether an effortless little stroll through the Russian countryside in the comfortably familiar, occasionally maudlin style of Levitan.
Now, in the dark, the terrain seemed dramatically altered. The ordinarily smooth road tripped him with devious potholes; ghostly dogs strained on their chains behind his back, growling rabidly at his trespass; fat, furry moths beat a repulsively soft, flickering rhythm against streetlamps; and many-armed, troll-like silhouettes shifted feverishly in the lit windows of neighboring dachas, engaged in some dim, ugly activities of living. He passed through it all, indifferent to the strangeness of the world. But when the last of the imposing houses melted away in the wavering circle of the last streetlamp, and a watchman—a mere contour carelessly sketched by the night around the glowing pinpoint of a cigarette-pushed the gates closed behind Sukhanov’s back, he was startled to see the path ahead of him swallowed by the black mass of the forest.
He hesitated before stepping under the trees.
The night was deeper here, the silence complete, the air musty with pungent smells of dampened moss and sweetly rotting leaves and poisonous mushrooms. He moved cautiously, barely able to see the ground beneath his feet. After a while, he felt the first twinge of worry. From his past walk, he had preserved an impression of this wood being transitory, nearly transparent, with dazzling splashes of clearings visible almost immediately between the birches—yet now, with every passing moment, the trees seemed to draw closer and closer together, crowding him with their motionless presence, and the infinite silence tolled in his aching head like a giant bell. He quickened his pace, and still the forest went on; and as he entered farther into its breathless darkness, he imagined it altering slowly, growing more menacing and strange with each new step. Gradually his eyes began to distinguish murky, twisted shapes, whether dead stumps and gnarled branches or some clumsy, frightening creatures of the earth, creeping after him along the ground or leaning above him from the trunks; and after some time, the profound quiet of the place filled with a multitude of insidious, secret sounds—a rustling shudder of leaves, starting unexpectedly, without wind, and falling still just as incomprehensibly; the hollow moan of an insomniac bird or else a dispossessed spirit; the sharp creak of a twig snapping under a mysterious foot… And all at once he knew that the sunlit birch grove of his summery recollection had long given way to the oppressive, cathedral-like woods of his recent nightmare, and he felt weak with the fear of wandering off his obscure path and becoming forever lost in a suffocating, torturous labyrinth of evil dreams.
He walked faster and faster, until he was running, hurtling headfirst through the chilly blackness, heedless of roots and ghosts. His middle-aged heart pounded painfully, and his mild but persistent inebriation tangled his feet. When the trees finally started to part, revealing pale flashes of the night sky between them, his knees were about to dissolve in trembling aches, and his right shoulder was numb from the weight of his bag. Once in the open, he paused to catch his breath—and as he waited, he became aware of the unfamiliar landscape before him. He had expected to see the lights of Bogoliubovka just beyond the forest, but instead, a wide meadow swayed in the blue light of a dying moon. Shouldering his bag once again, he waded across the expanse, at first simply glad to have outrun his nightmare, then increasingly uneasy. Tall grasses brushed against his legs, heavy and moist; the
