The Naked Year (8 page)

Father's room resembles a sectarian chapel. The red corner and walls with the ikons, a dark Christ looking sternly out of the ikon-case, lamps and bright, tall wax candles by the ikons burn dimly, and in front of the ikon-case there is a small lectern with holy books on it. And that is all there is in the room, except for, near the rear wall, by the stove-couch, a bench on which the father, Prince Yevgraf, sleeps. There is a smell of cyprus oil here, of benzoin, of wax. There's a church-like gloom in the room, the drape curtains on the windows are drawn–day and night, so there is no light, only a longing for it.

The father, huddled up like a cottage loaf, his dried-up arm under his head, is asleep on the bare bench. Prince Boris seizes him by the shoulder, the father-prince smiles faintly in his sleep and, not seeing Boris, says:

“Was I tossing and turning, tossing and turning in my sleep?… Yes? Christ will forgive!…”

On seeing his son he asks, confused:

“Bothering me? Have you come bothering me again, Borya?”

Prince Boris sits by his side, spreading his large legs wide apart and wearily resting his arms on them.

“No, daddy. I want to talk.”

“Talk, then, talk! Ask me! Christ will forgive!”

“Do you still pray, daddy?”

“I do, Borya.”

Father sits with his legs drawn in. Dryly gleam his eyes, and his white hair, beard, whiskers–are disheveled. He speaks quietly and quickly, quickly moving his sunken lips.

“What then–peace of mind from your prayers?”

“No, Borya,” answers his father gently and curtly.

“Why is that?”

“I'll tell you the truth, I'll tell you the truth!… Christ will forgive. I have sins on me,–sins… But surely one cannot beg the Lord on one's own behalf? It's shameful to beg on one's own behalf! To intercede for oneself is a sin, a sin, Borya! I pray for you, I pray for Yegorushka, I pray for Glebushka, I pray for Lidia, for everyone, for everyone, I pray for mother, I pray for the Bishop Sylvester… for everyone!…” –father's eyes burn with insanity–or, perhaps, ecstasy? “But my sins–I'm stuck with them! They're here, all about, all around! Great sins, fearful ones… And it's impossible to pray for them. Sin! Pride doesn't permit it! Pride! and fiery Gehenna–it's frightening!… It's frightening, Borya! Only by fasting can I save myself… What's redder than the sun?–I can't see it, I won't see… Just once more I'd like to ride in a troika through the frost, have a nice drink, other temptations–I deny myself! I'm facing death. Christ will save me!” –father quickly and convulsively crosses himself. “Christ will save me!”

“You can't ride on a troika through the frost now–it's summer,” says the son tiredly.

“Christ will save me!”

Boris listens sullenly.

“Allow me, Daddy. One little question. Have you s-e-e-n the light? Did you marry into the Pop-kovs?!”

Father answers quickly:

“I've seen the light, son, I've seen the light, Borya! I've seen the earth in spring, its boundless beauty, I've felt God's truth-wisdom, and my sin has frightened me, crushed me with its power, and I've seen the light, Borya, I've seen the light!”

“So-o,” says Boris heavily, without taking his sullen eyes off his father. “And over the earth, while you are seeking salvation, people are building their own justice, without god, god has been sent to the swinish devils, an old branch!… But that's not the point!… –You, daddy, do you happen to know what progressive paralysis is?”

Immediately the father's face changes, it becomes cowardly and pathetic, and the old man throws his puny body back away from his son against the wall.

“Again? Bothering me again?” he says with just his lips. “I don't

know…”

The son gets up heavily near his father.

“Listen! Don't look away, Father–you hear?! Speak!..”

“I don't know!”

“Speak!”

Prince Boris with his large hand seizes his father's shaggy beard.

“I've got syphilis. Yegor's got syphilis. Konstantin, Yevgraf, Dmitry, Olga, Maria, Praskovya, Liudmila–died as children, supposedly from scrofula. Gleb is degenerate, Katerina is degenerate, Lidia is degenerate–Natalya's the only human being… Speak, old man!…”

The father cringes, convulsively seizes hold of Boris's arm with his dried-up hands and cries–wincing, sobbing, childlike.

“I don't know, I don't know!…” he says, rancorously. “Go away, Bolshevik!”

“You're play-acting, holy man!”

But the dark ikons burn by the dim lamps and the slender bright candles. There is a smell of incense and cypress oil. Soon Prince Boris returns to his room, goes and stands by the stove, presses himself to its dead stove coldness–chest, stomach, knees and stands thus motionless. And–

DENOUEMENTS

In Lidia's room candles burn. The trunks are wide open, on the chairs, on the armchairs are spread out underwear, dresses, books without covers, traveling bags, sheet music. On the table lies a crumpled telegram–Lidia picks it up and reads it again:

“Health. Love, Brilling.”

Her lips move painfully, the telegram falls onto the floor.

“Health. I drink to your health! He drinks to my health! Old woman, old woman!… Gleb!…”

Bells. Hysteria. There's no Gleb. Marfusha is running to fetch water.

“Old woman! old woman! There's no need! He drinks to my health. Health! Ha-ha!… Go away, go away, all of you! I'm alone, alone…”

Lidia Yevgrafovna is lying down with a towel on her head. Lidia's lips are moving painfully, eyes closed. Lidia lies motionless for a long time, then takes a small shining syringe out of her traveling bag, lifts her skirts, pushes her underwear on her knee away and injects morphine. A few minutes later Lidia's eyes are moist with enjoyment, and still her lips don't cease twitching convulsively. A yellow dusk.

Katerina was going to town. Almost running, with lips clenched in fright and pain and fear of bursting into tears, she enters Lidia Yevgrafovna's room. In her eyes incomprehension and horror. Lidia is lying with half-closed eyes.

“What? Why so early?” whispers Lidia, half asleep.

“I have… I have… the doctor said… an inherited… shameful disease!”

“Yes? Already?” whispers Lidia indifferently, looking with her indifferent half-closed eyes somewhere on the ceiling.

The day blossoms with heat and sun, and in the evening–a yellow dusk. Soothingly, as in Kitezh, ring the bells in the cathedral:–Dong! Dong! Dong!… –like a stone, thrown into a creek with water lilies. And then in the barracks they play the silver “Taps.”

Gleb met Natalya near the Old Cathedral on the other side of the park–she was coming from her rounds in the hospital, Arkhip was seeing her off, and Arkhip immediately went away.

“Natalya, are you leaving home?” said Gleb.

“Yes. I am.”

“Natasha, you know the house is dying, you can't be so cruel! You're the only strong one. Dying is difficult, Natasha.”

“The house will die anyway, it's dead. But I must live and work. Die?” –and Natalya is speaking softly– “You have to accomplish something in order to die. I as a student, as a girl, dreamed a lot. But you saw that man walking with me, his father shot himself, and the son knew that his father would shoot himself. What were they thinking of before death–they–father and son? The son, surely, tried only
to think,
so as not to suffer.”

“Do you love Arkhipov?”

“No.”

“As… as a girl?”

“No. I love nobody. I cannot love. I'm not a girl. It's impossible for me to love. That's banality and suffering.”

“Why?”

“When I was a girl, at college, well yes, I did have a crush on a boy. I met him, fell in love, went with him and became pregnant. When he, that one, left me, I was like a butterfly with scorched wings, and I thought–my songs are sung, it's all finished. But now I know that nothing is finished. This is life. Life is not in the sentimental trifles of romanticism. I shall get married, I expect. I won't be unfaithful to my husband–but I won't surrender my soul to him, only my body, in order to have a child. This will be bleak and cold, but honest. I've learned too much to be a female for some romantic male. I want a child. Love would only cloud my mind.”

“And youth, and poetry?”

“When a woman is a child–she has youth and poetry. Very good–youth. But when a woman is forty years old–she no longer has youth by reason of natural causes.”

“And how old are you, Natasha?”

“I'm twenty eight. I've still got some living to do. Anyone who's alive must go.”

“Go where?”

“To the Revolution. These days won't come again.”

“You… You, Natalya…”

“I'm a Bolshevik, Gleb. Now you know, Gleb, as I know, that the most valuable things are–bread and boots, right?–dearer than all theories, because without bread and the factory worker you will die and all your theories will die. But it's the peasants who give bread. Let the peasants and factory workers themselves dispose of their valuables.

In the evening around the house of the Ordinins it is empty. Sullen, big, painted in ocher and now greenish, peeling, sunken–the house looks like an evil old man. When Gleb and Natalya stand at the front door, Gleb says:

“It's hard to die, Natasha! You've taken notice, in our house the mirrors have grown dim and faded and there are lots of them. It scares me to meet my face in them all the time. It's all destroyed, all the dreams.”

And when they walk down the stone staircase, past the iron doors with seven locks of the storerooms upstairs in the house a shot rings out:–this is Prince Boris shooting himself. And immediately after the shot, from the hall, through the whole house the victorious “Internationale” resounds–and sacrilegiously, like a vulgar refrain, is woven into it “Juberhardt und Kunigunde.”

CHAPTER THREE

ABOUT FREEDOMS
THROUGH ANDREI'S EYES

A
ND AGAIN
–
that
night:–

Comrade Laitis asked:

“Where's officer-nobleman-student Volkovis' flat?”

Andrei Volkovich answered nonchalantly:

“Go round the house, up the stairs to the first floor!”

–having said that, he yawned, stood for a moment by the wicket gate, lazily, lazily went into the house, to the front door–

and–

and–

immeasurable joy, freedom! Freedom! The house, the old life–forever behind–death to them! The stones of the embankment crumbled, flew together with it down into the ravine (the wind of fall whispered: gviu!…) and everything showered down like sparks of eyes from the fall–and then remained only: a red heart. A scout overhead called out something, and then: the fires of the hungry folk, the railway sleepers, a snatch of a song of the hungry folk, and the water of the Vologa. –Freedom, freedom! Having nothing, refusing everything–being poor! –And night, and days, and dawns, and the sun, and the scorching heat, and the mists, and the storms–not knowing one's tomorrow. And the days in the scorching heat– like a soldier's wife in a sarafan, at thirty years of age–like those who lived in the woods, behind the Ordinins, where the sky closes over the north: how sweet it is, on such nights, to kiss that soldier's wife in the barn.

In May the earth beckons–in May, at dawn, in the mist, a young girl may wish to lie down on the earth, and you will enter the earth: the earth pulls. And the very first evening, when Andrei came to Chornye Rechki, in Poperechye, the girls rapped on his window and shouted:

“Andy, come out to play! We'll play tag!” –girlish laughter showered and gushed down from the window.

Andrei came out of the hut. In the green dusk, beyond the church, on the hill, over the ravine, stood the girls in their multicolored dresses and white head-scarves, and around them the boys stood out in ragged disheveled silhouettes.

“Come on out! Don't be afraid! We'll play tag!”

For a moment there was silence. In the distance the landrails cried out. Then all at once the chorus rang out:

“Chi-vi-li-vi-li-vi-li!

Take whoever you choose.

A fir tree stands on top of the hill

Right at the very top.

Create, oh Lord, create for me,

For me a pretty, young beauty…”

The evening was calm and clear, with white stars. In Nikola, which stands near Belye-Kolodezy the church seemed blue, stern, its tall black roof and cross went up to the sky, to the white stars. Over the river and water-meadows there was peace and tranquillity. There was a troubled, green noise, but still there was that silence–the one night creates. And all night till the crystal dawn the girls sang. And in the night the storm came, it came from the east, roaring and lit with lightning, the tempestuous rain, necessary for the plants, passed hurriedly. Andrei wandered throughout the night along the slopes. –Another life! Being poor. Having nothing. Refusing everything.

The Nikola church, at Belye-Kolodezy, made of limestone, stood on a hill over the river. Once a monastery had stood here, now just a white church remains, sinking into the ground, overgrown with moss, with mica windows looking down, with a crooked, blackened roof–the churchyard of Belye-Kolodezy. From the hill there was a view of the river, of the lands beyond the river, of the blue fir woods of the lands beyond the river, on an endless expanse. Around the graveyard copper-boled pine trees and
moss were growing. Out of the earth, to the right of the church steps, flowed an ice-cold spring, made into an artificial well (hence the name Belye-Kolodezy
*
) –for hundreds of years the spring water had flowed down the slope, cutting out a gully in the hillside and across a country lane–on the other side on a slope, under the high point, the Ordinin princes' estate was situated. Beyond the river in the woods lay the village of Chornye Rechki. The lonely bald Mount Uvek towered. And around were woods, woods to the northern horizon, and steppes, steppes–to the south.

On the evening Andrei arrived, he couldn't find Yegorka. In the hut there was a smell of herbs, and some bread and honey–the first honey–Arina had given him. Then the cocks were already singing, and Arina, the beauty, had gone into the woods, into the night.

–The earth beckons in May–in May, at dawn, in the mist. The May herbs smell of sweet honeys, in May of a night there is a bitter smell of the birch and the cherry trees, May nights are deep, heady, and the dawns in May are crimson, like blood and fire. Arina was born in her grandfather Yegorka's house in May and there were: May, the sky, pines, water-meadows and the river. Together with her mother and Yegorka she would gather herbs, and from them Arina learned that as the earth goes wild in May with nightingales and cuckoos, at night–a man's blood is wild, like May, the month of blossoming. A breed of sorcerer lives according to its own rules–it must have been May time for Arina–without a priest, without incense, with the incense of the cherry tree and the nightingale funeral songs. Who doesn't know how young blood, lonely blood, in a young body, on nights in May, on floriferous May nights can be restive?… Was this not why Arina's words became cheeky and bold like an old woman's–a witch? Arina the girl–became a woman, beautiful, sturdy, ruddy-complexioned, broad-shouldered, with dark eyes which had a cheeky look about them–a cheeky, self-willed, free, young witch? The Revolution came to Chornye Rechki, in May–the earth beckons in May–Arina met the Rebellion as did Yegorka, the sorcerer.

Grandpa Yegorka, the sorcerer, was fishing when Andrei arrived and Andrei went up to him. The water was swift, free, murky, it rippled as if it were breathing. And all night there was a marsh-green dusk with a white cavalry of clouds. It stood by the whirlpool, holding a line, stooping Yegorka, with his white shock of hair and in white trousers, the water circled in eddies, fizzed, crazy pike crashed against the net forecefully–Andrei caught them in flight, cold and clammy, shining in the night murkiness like a dove's wing.

“Jus think,” Yegor said in a whisper. “When did this net come about? Do you think it's only just been invented? What?”

“I don't know.”

“Well I think our forebears fished with it. What?… When St. Nicholas's was founded–five hundred years ago–there was already the net then… There used to be a monastery here, a bandit founded it. Redenya–well, then, I'm telling you, this monastery was taken so many times by the Kalmyks, the Tatars, and the Kirghiz. Because of this they takes me away from the Bolsheviks–straight to jail.”

“For what?”

“Russia was under the Tatars–it was the Tatar yoke. Russia was under the Germans–it was the German yoke. Russia is intelligent. The German–he's clever, but he has a stupid mind–we uses it in the john. I spoke out at a meeting: there's no Internashnal, but there is a popular Russian Revolution, a rebellion–and nothing more. Like Stepan Timofeevich's. –‘And Karl Marx?' they asked. –‘A German,' I say, ‘so he must have been stupid.'–‘And Lenin?'–‘Lenin,' I say, ‘was of peasant stock, a Bolshevik, and I suppose you are Communests. You shout of–the merchants! Get rid of–the landowners, graspers! Get rid of the Constichat Assembly, what's needed is a council for all the land, so that anyone who wants can come and sort it out in the open. Get rid of–tea; get rid of–coffee!–homebrewed booze! Let there be faith and justice. The capital is–Moscow. Believe in what you like, even a block! But get rid, too, of–the Communests!–the Bolsheviks, I say, will sort things out by themselves.' Well, I was promptly put in jail to cool my heels.”

A pike splashed in the murky water, and went away, frightened by Yegorka's loud voice.

“I'm making too much noise,” said Yegorka in a whisper, “Take your Shak… …Shakespearov, is that his name?–You've read ‘Hamlet,' but you don't know our game ‘tag' which the girls play. Or, let's take–‘It Was On a Rainy Saturday.' Do you know it? Well?”

“No, I don't.”

“There then! There's your Communests for you!”

And at that moment on the hill the girls began singing their chorus:

“The white swan straggled behind the flock,

And got attached to a flock of gray geese.”

Because today crashed in so imperiously, because in the stormy human element he was a leaf–torn out of time–Andrei came to thoughts of another freedom–inner freedom, not outer: refusing things, time, having nothing, wanting nothing, regretting nothing, being poor–just living to see if it's with potato or sauerkraut, if it's in a hut, if free or tied–it's all the same: let the elements swirl and crash, the soul will always stay fresh and calm, in order to see. Smallpox and hungry typhus walked over the earth. In the mornings corpses were brought to Nikola, sometimes in the afternoons, at about four o'clock, they would come to christen the young children, and then they rang the bells, which had long ago been heard by the Tatars. And every evening the girls sang near Nikola. It was June.

And in the village of Chornye Rechki lived the peasants–not of the family, but from Kononov's. From spring to autumn they worked their guts out from dawn till dusk, old and young alike, burning from sun and sweat. And from autumn to spring they also worked, burning up from the smoke, like huts without chimneys, freezing, starving.

Life was hard, severe–yet they loved their life very much, with its smoke, cold and scorching heat, and sickliness. They lived with the woods, with the field, with the sky–it was necessary to live in friendship with them, but also to struggle relentlessly. It was necessary to remember the nights, the dawns and one's broods, to have a look at the damp corner, keep an eye on the north wind, listen to the noise and clamor of the forest. The eldest in the village was–grandfather Kononov, Ionov. He is stooped and no longer remembers what his grandfather was called, but he knows the old days and can recall how his forefathers and great-grandparents lived and how one ought to live. And the huts stood with their backs to the wood, over the river, and looked out from under the pines with their pockmarked mugs, sullenly, the dim windows–eyes–glare lupinely, shed tears. The gray timber has sagged. The ruddy thatch–hair in a clip–has fallen to the ground. The huts look like a thousand years ago.

–But on the Ordinin Princes' estate, just before spring, the anarchists settled. –This is–through the eyes of Andrei Volkovich.

One April night the anarchists came to the princes' home
(let the buckle of the tale be the story of how the princes fled from the estate)
unexpectedly no one knows whence, took up their positions during the night, brought cartloads of machine-guns, rifles and magazines, and already by morning the flag flew over the front of the house:

–Let the black flag of the free fly!

April passed, May passed, the cherry tree, the lilacs and lilies-of-the-valley finished flowering, the nightingales in the brushwood near the estate finished their songs. The anarchists, who arrived in the night, unexpected and unforeseen, on the second morning, in their blue working shirts and caps, drove out into the field to plough. –Andrei came to Chornye Rechki just before St. John's day. And towards nighttime on St. John's day Andrei went to the commune–to live. Mermaid weeks passed, the women from the commune went out down the hill to Nikola and sang songs, and St. John's night arrived. On St. John's night they lit the campfires. It was a white witches' night, they burned the campfires in the mist by the river, danced their folk dances and jumped through the flames. Aganka, Comrade Aganka, galloped heartily, sang heartily, seized Andrei by the arm, plunged with him into the darkness, to the water-meadows, stopped, holding his hands, said quickly to him, a stranger:

“My heart aches, I'm from Tambov. My daughter is still there. She's gone into service, wanted to live her own life. My heart aches. Some daughter, eh?” –again she hurled herself towards the fire, towards Pavlenko.

And on that very night Andrei spoke for the first time to Anna. Thirty years–thirty of Anna's years had gone, forever, vanished without trace, and in Anna there was transparency and tenderness:–such as autumn has in the golden season of falling leaves and on the satin falling-star nights. Andrei was going into the night quarters. Before dawn (the white misty fortune telling St. John's night was passing)–in the meadow Andrei met Anna, she was walking alone, in the white mist, in a white dress. Andrei went up to her and said: