One day in November Migurski was at the Lieutenant Colonel’s house giving his sons their lesson, when the approaching sound of the post sleigh bell was heard, and the runners of a sledge came crunching over the frozen snow and stopped in front of the house entrance. The boys jumped up from their seats to find out who had arrived. Migurski stayed behind in the room, looking at the door and waiting for the boys to return, but through the doorway came the Lieutenant Colonel’s wife in person. ‘Some ladies have come asking for you, Pan,’ she said. ‘They must be from your country – they look like Polish ladies.’
If anyone had asked Migurski whether he thought it possible that Albina might come to see him, he would have said that it was unthinkable; yet in the depths of his soul he was expecting her. The blood rushed to his heart and he ran out gasping for breath, into the hall. In the hall a stout woman with a pockmarked face was untying the shawl which covered her head. A second woman was just going through the doorway which led to the Lieutenant Colonel’s quarters. Hearing steps behind her she looked round. From beneath her bonnet shone the joyful, widely-spaced radiant blue eyes of Albina, their lashes covered with hoarfrost. Migurski stood rooted to the spot, not knowing how he should greet her or what to say. ‘Juzio,’ she cried, calling him by the name his father had used, and she herself had used in the old days, and she flung her arms round his neck, pressing her face, rosy with cold, against his, bursting into laughter and tears at one and the same time.
When she had found out who Albina was and why she had come, the Lieutenant Colonel’s kind-hearted wife took her in and gave her lodging in her own house until it should be time for the wedding.
VI
The good-natured Lieutenant Colonel managed after considerable trouble to obtain an authorization from the high command. A Catholic priest was despatched from Orenburg to marry the Migurskis. The battalion commander’s wife acted as proxy for the bride’s mother, one of Migurski’s pupils carried the ikon, and Brzozowksi, the Polish exile, was best man.
Albina, however strange it may appear, loved her husband passionately but did not know him at all. Only now was she really getting acquainted with him. It stands to reason that she discovered in this living man of flesh and blood a great many commonplace and unpoetic things which had not been part of the image of him which she had nurtured and carried in her imagination; yet on the other hand, precisely because he was a man of flesh and blood, she discovered in him much that was simple and good, which had also not been part of her abstract image of him.
She had heard from friends and acquaintances about his bravery in war and she knew for herself how courageously he had faced the loss of his status and his liberty, so that she imagined him in her own mind as a hero, invariably living a life of exalted heroism; whereas in reality, for all his exceptional physical strength and bravery, he turned out to be as gentle and mild as a lamb, the simplest of men, with his talent for genial jokes and the same childlike smile on his sensitive mouth with its small blond beard and moustache, the smile which had attracted her long ago at Rozanka – but also in his mouth the never-extinguished tobacco pipe which proved particularly trying for her during her pregnancy.
Migurski too was only now getting to know Albina, and getting to know the woman within her. From the women he had known in the period before his marriage he had never gained any understanding of woman herself. And what he discovered in Albina, as in woman in general, surprised him and might well have made him disillusioned with woman in general, had he not felt for Albina a special and grateful tenderness. For Albina and for woman in general he felt a tender, slightly ironic indulgence, but for Albina herself and for her alone he felt not only loving affection, but also an awareness of and an admiration for the unrepayable debt created by her sacrifice, which had given him such totally undeserved happiness.
The Migurskis were blessed in that, directing all the power of their love on one another, they felt amid so many alien people like two half-frozen wanderers who had lost the winter road, yet managed by their mutual contact to keep each other warm. The joyful life the Migurskis spent together was enhanced by the contribution of Albina’s nurse Ludwika, who was utterly self-sacrificing, devoted as a slave to her mistress, full of good-natured grumbles, amusing, and ready to fall in love with any man whatever. The Migurskis were blessed too with the gift of children. At the end of a year a little boy was born; a year and a half later, a girl. The boy was the image of his mother: the same eyes, the same playfulness and grace. The little girl was a fine, healthy child, like a little wild thing.
Yet the Migurskis were still far from blest by their separation from their homeland, and most of all by the harshness of their unaccustomed humble situation. Albina in particular suffered from this humiliation. He, her own Juzio, a hero and a model of humanity, was obliged to stand to attention before any and every officer, to carry out rifle maintenance, to do guard duty and to obey every order without complaint.
On top of all that, the news they received from Poland continued to be extremely miserable. Virtually all their close relatives and friends had either been exiled or, having lost everything, had taken refuge abroad. For the Migurskis themselves there was no prospect of any end to this situation. All attempts to petition for a pardon or at least some improvement in their conditions, or for promotion to officer rank, failed to reach their destination. Tsar Nicholas conducted inspections, parades and exercises, attended masquerades and flirted under the cover of his masks, and galloped unnecessarily through Russia from Chuguyev to Novorossiisk, St Petersburg and Moscow, frightening ordinary people and riding his horses to exhaustion; and when a bold spirit plucked up the courage to ask for some alleviation of the lot of the exiled Decembrists or of the Poles who were now suffering precisely because of that patriotism which he himself extolled, he would stick out his chest, fix his pewter-coloured eyes on whatever happened to be in front of him, and say: ‘Let them go on serving. It is too soon.’ As if he knew when it would no longer be too soon, when it would be time to do something. And all the members of his entourage – the generals, the chamberlains and their wives, who were busy around him looking after their own interests, would feel moved at the extraordinary perspicacity and the wisdom of this great man.
All the same, there was on the whole more of happiness than of unhappiness in the lives of the Migurskis.
So they lived for a period of five years. But suddenly there came upon them an unexpected and terrible sorrow. First the little girl fell ill, then two days later the little boy: he had a high fever for three days, and in the absence of medical help (there was no doctor to be found) on the fourth day he died. Two days after him the little girl also died.
The only thing which stopped Albina from drowning herself in the River Ural was that she could not imagine without horror the state her husband would be in on receiving the news of her suicide. But it was hard for her to go on living. Hitherto always active and solicitous, she now handed over all her concerns to Ludwika and would sit for hours doing nothing, gazing mutely at whatever met her eyes, then suddenly jump up and run off to her tiny room and there, ignoring the consolations offered by her husband and Ludwika, she would weep silently, merely shaking her head and begging them to go away and leave her alone.