April was warm and sunny. “Wipe your feet, your feet,” shouted the empty corridor from one end to another. The furs were laid away for the summer. The rooms were cleaned, transformed; they seemed to sigh in relief. The black alder tree laughed and frolicked the whole day, the long exquisitely painful day, primping itself untiringly, in all the corners, in all the rooms, in all the winter windows, in mirrors, in glasses of water, in the blue garden air. And the honeysuckle washed itself with sighs and swallows. The chattering in the yard lasted the full twenty-four hours. The days announced that the night had been vanquished, and repeated day in and day out, in swelling tones, which made one feel drowsy, that there would be no more evening and that they would let no one sleep. “…Your feet, your feet…”
But the children glowed. They came home drunk with freedom, with a sound in their ears that made them miss the meanings of words, and they were in a rush to finish eating as quickly as possible, to push their chairs back noisily and run out again into this day, which broke impetuously into evening—into this day where drying wood gave out crackling noises and the blue of the sky twittered shrilly and the earth glittered moistly, like melted butter. The border between the house and the yard was wiped out. The cleaning rag had not washed away all traces of its work. The floors were covered with a light, dry wax and they squeaked underfoot.
Their father brought home sweets and other wonderful things. In the house everything was wonderful. The sweetmeats announced with a damp rustle their emergence from the tissue paper; the little white packets, soft as gauze, gradually acquired color and became more and more transparent as the paper was peeled off layer by layer. Some looked like almond milk drops, others like splashes of blue water color, still others like solidified “cheese tears.” Some were blind, sleepy or dreamy; others sparkled insolently like the frozen juice of blood-red oranges. One hardly bear touch them. They were perfect on the frothy paper that had secreted them as plums secrete their cloudy juice.
The father was unusually tender to the children and often accompanied their mother into town. They would return together and seemed happy. But the most important thing of all was that both were quiet, eventempered and friendly, and even if Mother occasionally gave Father a playfully reproachful look, she seemed to be drawing peace from his small, not very attractive eyes and pouring it out upon the children from her own large, beautiful ones.
One day their parents got up very late. Then they decided—nobody knew why—to have breakfast on the steamer that lay in the harbor, and they took the children along. Seryozha was allowed to try the cold beer. They all had such a good time that they breakfasted again on the steamer. The children hardly recognized their parents. What had happened to them? The girl was confused with happiness and believed it would stay like this forever. The children were not even disappointed when they were told they would not spend the summer in the country house. Soon afterward their father went away. Three gigantic yellow traveling trunks with solid iron bands appeared in the house….
3
The train left late at night. Mr. Luvers had gone ahead a month earlier and had written that the apartment was ready. Now they rode in carriages to the railway station, going at a slow trot. They knew they were getting close to the station from the color of the pavement, which became greasy-black and from the light of the street lamps which was reflected from the dark rails. At the same moment they saw the Kama from the viaduct, while below them ran a pitch-black chasm, rumbling with the noise of freight cars. It shot off like an arrow, and far, far at the other end, seemed to lose itself frighteningly under the twinkling pearls of distant signal lights.
The night was windy. The contours of the houses flew away like phantoms, staggering and shaking in the turbulent air. There was the smell of potatoes in the air. Their coachman broke out of the snakelike line of bouncing cars and carriages in order to get ahead of them. They saw, from a distance, the cart with their luggage; they passed it. Ulyasha shouted something from the cart to her mistress, but the rattling of the wheels drowned out her voice; she was jolted from side to side and her voice bounced up and down too.
Zhenya felt no sadness of departure, for these night noises, the darkness and the freshness of the night air were quite new to her. In the far distance the darkness deepened. Behind the harbor buildings, the lights of boats and the shoreline itself wavered and seemed to dip into the water. On the Lyubimovsky wharf chimneys, warehouses, roofs and ship decks stood out, a sober blue color. Roped barges stared up at the stars. “There is a rathole,” thought Zhenya.
Porters in white uniforms surrounded her. Seryozha was the first to leap from the carriage. He looked around and seemed surprised that the cart with their luggage had already arrived; the horse tossed his head, his collar rising like the coxcomb of a strutting rooster; he leaned against the cart and sat down on his hind quarters. And here, all through the ride, Seryozha had been trying to estimate how far the cart lagged behind!
The boy, intoxicated with the thought of the journey before him, stood there in the white shirt of his high school uniform. For both children the journey was something new and unknown, but the boy already knew and loved such words as “station,” “engine,” “railroad siding,” and “express train,” and the collection of sounds called “class” had for him a bittersweet taste. All this interested his sister, too, but in her own way, without the boylike cataloguing of information which was part of her brother’s excitement.
Suddenly their mother stood like a wall beside them. She herded the children into the railway restaurant. From there she strode through the crowd, looking proud as a peacock, straight to the man who was, for the first time, addressed as the “stationmaster,” and who would often be referred to later under different circumstances.
The children were overcome by fits of yawning. They sat by one of the windows, which were so grimy, decorated with painted designs, and so gigantic that they looked like enormous officials, made of glass, to whom one should take off one’s cap. Zhenya saw behind the glass not a street, but a vast room, gloomy and more solemn than the room reflected in the water carafe before her. Engines entered this room, came to a halt and shut out the light with their great bulk. But when they left the room, it became clear that it was no room at all; there was the sky behind the tall columns and on the horizon a hill, with wooden houses toward which people walked; roosters crowed there perhaps, and possibly the water carrier had just been there and had spilled some water.
It was just a provincial railway station, without the crowds and noise of a big city terminus. Travelers came here early and waited a long time. It was a quiet station, with peasants moving about or sleeping on the ground among hunting dogs, crates, machinery packed in straw and unpacked bicycles.
The children lay now in their upper berths. The boy fell asleep immediately, while the train was still standing. It grew light and the girl noticed gradually that the coach was clean and cool. And she was beginning to notice… but then she was already asleep….
He was a very fat man, reading a newspaper and rocking back and forth. As soon as one looked at him one became aware of the rocking, which like the sun flooded and permeated everything in the compartment. Zhenya looked down on him from above with that lazy clarity with which one regards an object after rousing from a good sleep. Especially if you remain in bed until the decision to rise comes of itself, without any intervention of the will, and all your thoughts are clear and unforced. She looked at the man and wondered how he had entered the compartment and when he had had the time to wash and dress. She had no idea what time it was. She had just wakened so it must be morning. She examined the man, but he could not see her because the upper berths were steeply inclined toward the wall. In addition, he hardly ever looked up or sideways from his newspaper, and when he did look up, their eyes did not meet. He either saw only her mattress or—But she quickly picked up her stockings and put them on. Mama sat in the other corner of the compartment. She had already dressed and was reading a book. But Seryozha was nowhere to be seen. Where could he be? She yawned pleasurably and stretched. She suddenly became aware that it was dreadfully hot, and she looked over the heads of her mother and man toward the halfopen window. “But where is the earth?” her soul cried within her.