They walked past the greenhouse, the gardener’s quarters, and some stone ruins of unknown purpose. Their conversation got on to the new young forces in science and literature.
“You come across talented people,” said Nikolai Nikolaevich. “But now various circles and associations are the fashion. Every herd is a refuge for giftlessness, whether it’s a faith in Soloviev,6 or Kant, or Marx. Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don’t love it sufficiently. Is there anything in the world that merits faithfulness? Such things are very few. I think we must be faithful to immortality, that other, slightly stronger name for life. We must keep faith in immortality, we must be faithful to Christ! Ah, you’re wincing, poor fellow. Again you haven’t understood a thing.”
“M-m-yes,” grunted Ivan Ivanovich, a thin, towheaded, mercurial man, with a malicious little beard that made him look like an American of Lincoln’s time (he kept gathering it in his hand and catching the tip of it in his lips). “I, of course, say nothing. You understand—I look at these things quite differently. Ah, by the way. Tell me how they defrocked you. I’ve long been meaning to ask. I bet you were scared. Did they anathematize you? Eh?”
“Why change the subject? Though, anyhow, why not? Anathematize? No, these days they do without cursing. There was some unpleasantness; it had its consequences. For instance, I can’t hold a government job for a long time. They won’t allow me in the capitals.7 But that’s all rubbish. Let’s go back to what we were talking about. I said we must be faithful to Christ. I’ll explain at once. You don’t understand that one can be an atheist, one can not know whether God exists or why, and at the same time know that man does not live in nature but in history, and that in present-day understanding it was founded by Christ, that its foundation is the Gospel. And what is history? It is the setting in motion of centuries of work at the gradual unriddling of death and its eventual overcoming. Hence the discovery of mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, hence the writing of symphonies. It is impossible to move on in that direction without a certain uplift. These discoveries call for spiritual equipment. The grounds for it are contained in the Gospel. They are these. First, love of one’s neighbor, that highest form of living energy, overflowing man’s heart and demanding to be let out and spent, and then the main component parts of modern man, without which he is unthinkable—namely, the idea of the free person and the idea of life as sacrifice. Bear in mind that this is still extremely new. The ancients did not have history in this sense. Then there was the sanguinary swinishness of the cruel, pockmarked Caligulas, who did not suspect how giftless all oppressors are. They had the boastful, dead eternity of bronze monuments and marble columns. Ages and generations breathed freely only after Christ. Only after him did life in posterity begin, and man now dies not by some fence in the street, but in his own history, in the heat of work devoted to the overcoming of death, dies devoted to that theme himself. Ouf, I’m all in a sweat, as they say. But you can’t even make a dent in him!”
“Metaphysics, old boy. It’s forbidden me by my doctors; my stomach can’t digest it.”
“Well, God help you. Let’s drop it. Lucky man! What a view you have from here—I can’t stop admiring it! And he lives and doesn’t feel it.”
It was painful to look at the river. It gleamed in the sun, curving in and out like a sheet of iron. Suddenly it wrinkled up. A heavy ferry with horses, carts, peasant women and men set out from this bank to the other.
“Just think, it’s only a little past five,” said Ivan Ivanovich. “See, there’s the express from Syzran. It passes here at a little after five.”
Far across the plain, a clean little yellow and blue train, greatly diminished by the distance, rolled from right to left. Suddenly they noticed that it had stopped. White puffs of smoke rose up from the engine. Shortly afterwards came its alarmed whistling.
“Strange,” said Voskoboinikov. “Something’s wrong. It has no reason to stop there in the marsh. Something’s happened. Let’s go and have tea.”
6
Nika was not in the garden, nor in the house. Yura guessed that he was hiding from them because he was bored with them and Yura was no match for him. His uncle and Ivan Ivanovich went to work on the terrace, leaving Yura to loiter aimlessly about the house.
There was a wonderful enchantment about the place! At every moment you could hear the pure, three-note whistling of orioles, with intervals of waiting, so that the moist, drawn-out, flutelike sound could fully saturate the surroundings. The stagnant scent of flowers wandering in the air was nailed down motionless to the flowerbeds by the heat. How reminiscent it was of Antibes and Bordighera! Yura kept turning right and left. Over the lawns in an auditory hallucination hung the phantom of his mother’s voice; it sounded for him in the melodious turns of the birds and the buzzing of the bees. Yura kept being startled; time and again it seemed to him that his mother was hallooing him and calling him somewhere.
He went to the ravine and began to climb down. He climbed down from the sparse and clean woods that covered the top of the ravine to the alder bushes that spread over its bottom.
Here there was damp darkness, windfall and carrion; there were few flowers, and the jointed stalks of horsetail looked like rods and staffs with Egyptian ornaments, as in his illustrated Holy Scriptures.
Yura felt more and more sad. He wanted to cry. He fell to his knees and dissolved in tears.
“Angel of God, my holy protector,” Yura prayed, “set my mind firmly on the true path and tell dear mama that it’s good for me here, so that she doesn’t worry. If there is life after death, Lord, place mama in paradise, where the faces of the saints and the righteous shine like stars. Mama was so good, it can’t be that she was a sinner, have mercy on her, Lord, make it so that she doesn’t suffer. Mama!”—in heartrending anguish he called out to her in heaven as a newly canonized saint, and suddenly could not bear it, fell to the ground, and lost consciousness.
He did not lie oblivious for long. When he came to, he heard his uncle calling him from above. He answered and started to climb up. Suddenly he remembered that he had not prayed for his missing father, as Marya Nikolaevna had taught him to do.
But he felt so good after fainting that he did not want to part with this feeling of lightness and was afraid to lose it. And he thought there would be nothing terrible if he prayed for his father some other time.
“He’ll wait. He’ll be patient,” he all but thought. Yura did not remember him at all.
7
On the train, riding in a second-class compartment with his father, the attorney Gordon from Orenburg, sat the second-year student Misha Gordon, an eleven-year-old boy with a thoughtful face and big dark eyes. The father was moving to work in Moscow, the boy had been transferred to a Moscow school. His mother and sisters had long been there, busy with the cares of readying the apartment.
The boy and his father had been on the train for three days.
Past them in clouds of hot dust, bleached as with lime by the sun, flew Russia, fields and steppes, towns and villages. Wagon trains stretched along the roads, turning off cumbersomely to the crossings, and from the furiously speeding train it seemed that the wagons were standing still and the horses were raising and lowering their legs in place.
At big stations the passengers rushed like mad to the buffet, and the setting sun behind the trees of the station garden shone on their legs and the wheels of the cars.
Separately, all the movements of the world were calculatedly sober, but as a sum total they were unconsciously drunk with the general current of life that united them. People toiled and bustled, set in motion by the mechanism of their own cares. But the mechanisms would not have worked if their chief regulator had not been a sense of supreme and fundamental carefreeness. This carefreeness came from a sense of the cohesion of human existences, a confidence in their passing from one into another, a sense of happiness owing to the fact that everything that happens takes place not only on earth, in which the dead are buried, but somewhere else, in what some call the Kingdom of God, others history, and still others something else again.