A moment before the end he rushed to their compartment, seized Grigory Osipovich by the hand, wanted to say something but could not, and, rushing out to the platform, threw himself from the train.
Misha was examining a small collection of minerals from the Urals in a wooden box—the dead man’s last gift. Suddenly everything around began to stir. A handcar had reached the train by a different track. From it jumped a coroner in a visored cap with a cockade, a doctor, and two policemen. Cold, businesslike voices were heard. Questions were asked, something was written down. Conductors and policemen clumsily dragged the body up the embankment, losing their footing in the gravel and sliding down all the time. Some peasant woman began to wail. The public was asked to go back to the cars and the whistle sounded. The train set off.
8
“Again this holy oil!” Nika thought spitefully and rushed about the room. The voices of the guests were coming closer. Retreat was cut off. There were two beds in the room, Voskoboinikov’s and his own. Without thinking twice, Nika crawled under the second one.
He heard them looking and calling for him in the other rooms, surprised at his disappearance. Then they came into the bedroom.
“Well, what can we do,” said Vedenyapin. “Go for a walk, Yura; maybe your friend will turn up later and you can play.”
They talked for a while about the university unrest in Petersburg and Moscow, keeping Nika for some twenty minutes in his stupid, humiliating concealment. Finally they went to the terrace. Nika quietly opened the window, jumped out of it, and went to the park.
He was not himself today and had not slept the previous night. He was going on fourteen. He was sick of being little. All night he had not slept and at dawn he left the cottage. The sun was rising, and the ground in the park was covered with the long, dewy, openwork shade of trees. The shade was not black, but of a dark gray color, like wet felt. The stupefying fragrance of morning seemed to come precisely from that damp shade on the ground, with its elongated light spots like a young girl’s fingers.
Suddenly a silvery little stream of mercury, just like the dewdrops on the grass, flowed a few steps away from him. The little stream flowed, flowed, not soaking into the ground. Then, with an unexpectedly abrupt movement, it darted to one side and vanished. It was a grass snake. Nika shuddered.
He was a strange boy. In a state of excitement, he talked to himself out loud. He imitated his mother in his predilection for lofty matters and paradoxes.
“How good it is in this world!” he thought. “But why does it always come out so painful? God exists, of course. But if He exists, then He—is me. I’m going to order it,” he thought, glancing at an aspen all seized with trembling from bottom to top (its wet, shimmering leaves seemed cut from tin), “I’m going to command it,” and, in an insane exceeding of his strength, he did not whisper but with all his being, with all his flesh and blood, desired and thought: “Be still!” and the tree at once obediently froze in immobility. Nika laughed for joy and ran off to swim in the river.
His father, the terrorist Dementy Dudorov, was serving at hard labor, which by grace of the sovereign had replaced the hanging to which he had been sentenced. His mother, from the Georgian princely family of the Eristovs, was a whimsical and still young beauty, eternally passionate about something—rebellions, rebels, extreme theories, famous actors, poor failures.
She adored Nika and from his name, Innokenty, made a heap of inconceivably tender and foolish nicknames like Inochka or Nochenka, and took him to show to her relatives in Tiflis. There he was struck most of all by a splay-limbed tree in the courtyard of the house where they were staying. It was some sort of clumsy tropical giant. With its leaves, which resembled elephant’s ears, it shielded the courtyard from the scorching southern sky. Nika could not get used to the idea that this tree was a plant and not an animal.
It was dangerous for the boy to bear his father’s terrible name. With Nina Galaktionovna’s consent, Ivan Ivanovich was preparing to petition the sovereign about Nika adopting his mother’s family name.
While he lay under the bed, indignant at the way things went in the world, he thought about that along with everything else. Who is this Voskoboinikov to push his meddling so far? He’s going to teach them!
And this Nadya! If she’s fifteen, does that mean she has the right to turn up her nose and talk to him like a little boy? He’s going to show her! “I hate her,” he repeated to himself several times. “I’ll kill her! I’ll invite her for a boat ride and drown her.”
Mama’s a good one, too. Of course, she tricked him and Voskoboinikov when she was leaving. She didn’t go to any Caucasus, she quite simply turned north at the first junction and is most calmly shooting at the police along with the students in Petersburg. While he has to rot alive in this stupid hole. But he would outwit them all. He’d drown Nadya, quit school, and run off to his father in Siberia to raise a rebellion.
The edge of the pond was densely overgrown with water lilies. The boat cut into their thickness with a dry rustle. Where the growth was torn, the water of the pond showed like the juice of a watermelon in a triangular cutout.
The boy and girl started picking water lilies. They both took hold of the same tough, rubbery stem, which refused to snap. It pulled them together. The children bumped heads. The boat was drawn to the bank as if by a hook. The stems became entangled and shortened; the white flowers with centers bright as egg yolk and blood sank underwater, then emerged with water streaming from them.
Nadya and Nika went on gathering flowers, heeling the boat over more and more and almost lying next to each other on the lowered side.
“I’m sick of studying,” said Nika. “It’s time to begin life, to earn money, to go among people.”
“And I was just going to ask you to explain quadratic equations to me. I’m so weak in algebra that it almost ended with me repeating the exam.”
Nika sensed some sort of barb in these words. Well, of course, she was putting him in his place, reminding him of how young he still was. Quadratic equations! And they had not even caught a whiff of algebra yet.
Without betraying how wounded he was, he asked with feigned indifference and realizing at the same moment how stupid it was:
“When you grow up, who are you going to marry?”
“Oh, that’s still so far off. Probably no one. I haven’t thought about it yet.”
“Please don’t imagine I’m all that interested.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“You’re a fool.”
They began to quarrel. Nika remembered his morning misogyny. He threatened Nadya that if she did not stop saying insolent things, he would drown her.
“Just try,” said Nadya.
He seized her around the waist. A fight started. They lost their balance and fell into the water.
They both knew how to swim, but the water lilies caught at their arms and legs, and they could not yet feel the bottom. Finally, sinking into the ooze, they clambered out on the bank. Water poured in streams from their shoes and pockets. Nika was particularly tired.
If this had happened still quite recently, no further back than that spring, then in the given situation, sitting together thoroughly soaked after such a crossing, they would surely have made noise, scolding or laughing.
But now they were silent and barely breathed, crushed by the absurdity of what had happened. Nadya was indignant and protested silently, while Nika hurt all over, as if his arms and legs had been broken by a stick and his ribs caved in.
Finally, like a grown-up, Nadya quietly murmured, “Madman!”—and he, in the same grown-up way, said, “Forgive me.”
They began to walk up towards the house, leaving wet trails behind them like two water barrels. Their way led up the dusty slope, swarming with snakes, not far from the place where Nika had seen a grass snake in the morning.