Nika remembered the magic elation of the night, the dawn, and his morning omnipotence, when by his own will he had commanded nature. What should he order it to do now, he wondered. What did he want most of all? He fancied that he wanted most of all to fall into the pond again someday with Nadya, and he would have given a lot right then to know if it would ever happen or not.
Part Two
A GIRL FROM A DIFFERENT CIRCLE
1
The war with Japan was not over yet. It was unexpectedly overshadowed by other events. Waves of revolution rolled across Russia, each one higher and more prodigious than the last.1
At that time Amalia Karlovna Guichard, the widow of a Belgian engineer and herself a Russified Frenchwoman, came to Moscow from the Urals with two children, her son Rodion and her daughter Larissa. Her son she sent to the Cadet Corps, and her daughter to a girls’ high school, by chance the same one and in the same class in which Nadya Kologrivova was studying.
Mme Guichard’s husband had left her some savings in securities, which had been rising but now had begun to fall. To slow the melting away of her means and not sit with folded arms, Mme Guichard bought a small business, Levitskaya’s dressmaking shop near the Triumphal Arch, from the seamstress’s heirs, with the right to keep the old firm intact, with the circle of its former clients and all its modistes and apprentices.
Mme Guichard did this on the advice of the lawyer Komarovsky, her husband’s friend and her own mainstay, a cold-blooded businessman, who knew business life in Russia like the back of his hand. She corresponded with him about her move, he met them at the station, he took them across the whole of Moscow to the furnished rooms of the Montenegro in Oruzheiny Lane, where he had taken quarters for them, he insisted on sending Rodion to the corps and Lara to the high school he recommended, and he joked distractedly with the boy and fixed his gaze on the girl so that she blushed.
2
Before moving to the small three-room apartment that came with the shop, they lived for about a month at the Montenegro.
These were the most terrible parts of Moscow, slick cabbies and low haunts, whole streets given over to depravity, slums full of “lost creatures.”
The children were not surprised at the dirtiness of the rooms, the bedbugs, the squalor of the furnishings. After their father’s death, their mother had lived in eternal fear of destitution. Rodya and Lara were used to hearing that they were on the verge of ruin. They understood that they were not street children, but in them there was a deep-seated timidity before the rich, as in children from an orphanage.
A living example of this fear was given them by their mother. Amalia Karlovna was a plump blonde of about thirty-five, whose fits of heart failure alternated with fits of stupidity. She was a terrible coward and had a mortal fear of men. Precisely for that reason, being frightened and bewildered, she kept falling from one embrace into another.
In the Montenegro they occupied number 23, and in number 24, from the day the place was founded, the cellist Tyshkevich had been living, a kindly fellow, sweaty and bald, in a little wig, who folded his hands prayerfully and pressed them to his breast when he was persuading someone, and threw back his head and rolled up his eyes inspiredly when he played in society or appeared at concerts. He was rarely at home and went off for whole days to the Bolshoi Theater or the Conservatory. The neighbors became acquainted. Mutual favors brought them close.
Since the children’s presence occasionally hampered Amalia Karlovna during Komarovsky’s visits, Tyshkevich began leaving his key with her when he left, so that she could receive her friend. Soon Mme Guichard became so accustomed to his self-sacrifices that she knocked on his door several times in tears, asking him to defend her against her protector.
3
The house was of one story, not far from the corner of Tverskaya. The proximity of the Brest railway could be felt. Its realm began nearby, the company apartments of the employees, the engine depots and warehouses.
The place was home to Olya Demina, an intelligent girl, the niece of one of the employees of the Moscow Freight Yard.
She was a capable apprentice. The former owner had taken notice of her, and now the new one began to bring her closer. Olya Demina liked Lara very much.
Everything remained as it had been under Levitskaya. The sewing machines turned like mad under the pumping feet or fluttering hands of the weary seamstresses. One would be quietly sewing, sitting on a table and drawing her hand with the needle and long thread far out. The floor was littered with scraps. They had to talk loudly to outshout the rapping of the sewing machines and the modulated trills of Kirill Modestovich, a canary in a cage under the window’s arch, the secret of whose name the former owner had taken with her to the grave.
In the waiting room, ladies in a picturesque group surrounded a table with magazines. They stood, sat, or half reclined in the poses they saw in the pictures and, studying the models, discussed styles. At another table, in the director’s place, sat Amalia Karlovna’s assistant from among the senior cutters, Faïna Silantievna Fetisova, a bony woman with warts in the hollows of her wizened cheeks.
She held a bone cigarette holder with a cigarette in it between her yellowed teeth, squinted her eye with its yellow white, and let out a yellow stream of smoke from her nose and mouth as she wrote down measurements, receipt numbers, addresses, and the preferences of the crowding customers.
Amalia Karlovna was a new and inexperienced person in the shop. She did not feel herself the owner in the full sense. But the personnel were honest; Fetisova could be relied on. Nevertheless, it was a troubled time. Amalia Karlovna was afraid to think of the future. She would be seized by despair. Everything would drop from her hands.
Komarovsky visited them often. When Viktor Ippolitovich crossed the whole shop on his way to their apartment and in passing frightened the fancy ladies changing clothes, who hid behind the screen at his appearance and from there playfully parried his casual jokes, the seamstresses disapprovingly and mockingly whispered after him: “His Honor,” “Her’n,” “Amalka’s Heartthrob,” “Stud,” “Skirt-chaser.”
An object of still greater hatred was his bulldog Jack, whom he sometimes brought on a leash and who pulled him along with such violent tugs that Komarovsky would miss his step, lurch forward, and go after the dog with his arms stretched out, like a blind man following his guide.
Once in the spring Jack snapped at Lara’s leg and tore her stocking.
“I’ll do him in, the filthy devil,” Olya Demina whispered in Lara’s ear in a child’s hoarse voice.
“Yes, he’s really a disgusting dog. But how will you do it, silly girl?”
“Shh, don’t shout, I’ll tell you. You know those Easter eggs, the stone ones. Like your mother has on the chest of drawers …”
“Yes, of course, made of marble, of crystal.”
“Right! Bend down, I’ll whisper in your ear. You take one, dip it in lard, the lard sticks to it, the mangy mutt swallows it, stuffs his gut, the little Satan, and—basta! Paws up! It’s glass!”
Lara laughed and thought with envy: The girl lives in poverty, works hard. Young ones from the people develop early. But see how much there still is in her that is unspoiled, childlike. The eggs, Jack—where did she get it all? “Why is it my lot,” thought Lara, “to see everything and take it so to heart?”
4
“But for him mama is—what’s it called … He’s mama’s … whatever … They’re bad words, I don’t want to repeat them. But why in that case does he look at me with such eyes? I’m her daughter.”