The Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers Page 2

  The lamps only emphasized the emptiness of the evening air. They gave out no light. Like spoiled fruit, they swelled from the hydophilia inside them, which blew up their bloated shades. They were located where they should be: standing in their proper places on the tables and suspended from the stucco ceiling. But the lamps had fewer points of contact with the room than with the spring sky, to which they were as close as a water glass to a sickbed. Their souls were in the street, where the gossip of servant girls buzzed over the wet earth and individual waterdrops gradually turned to ice and grew rigid for the coming night. Out there the lamps disappeared in the evening. Their parents were away, but their mother was expected that day—on that longest day or the next one. Yes, perhaps she would return quite suddenly. That, too, was possible.

  Zhenya went to bed and discovered that the day had been long for the same reason as the previous one. At first she wanted to get a pair of scissors and cut out the spots from her nightgown and the bed sheet; but then she decided to take the French governess’ powder and whiten the spots with it. She was reaching for the powder box when the governess came in and struck her. All sinfulness became concentrated in that powder. “She powders herself! That’s the last straw. I suspected as much for a long time.”

  Zhenya burst into tears because the governess had struck her and scolded her; because she was upset because she had not committed the crime of which she was accused; because she knew that she had done something much uglier than the governess suspected. She had to—she felt this deep in her stunned conscience, in her very calves and temples—she had to conceal this, without knowing how or why, but somehow and at any price. Her aching joints moved heavily, as if under a hypnotic compulsion. This tormenting, paralyzing compulsion was the work of her body, which hid from the girl the meaning of the whole frightening process, which behaved like a criminal and forced her to regard this bleeding as somthing disgusting and abominably evil. “Menteuse!” She could only deny everything, obstinately conceal what was worse than anything else and lay somewhere between the disgrace of illiteracy and the shame of making a row in the street. She could only shiver, clench her teeth, suppress her sobs and lean against the wall. She could not throw herself into the Kama; it was still cold and the last floes of ice were still moving down the river.

  Neither she nor the Frenchwoman heard the doorbell in time. The tension in the house was absorbed by the thick, brown-black bearskins, and when her mother came in, it was already too late. She found her daughter in tears and the governess livid with anger. She demanded an explanation. The Frenchwoman quickly explained that—no, not “Zhenya” but “votre fille”—”your daughter” had been powdering herself, that she had seen her doing it and had suspected her for a long time. The mother let her talk herself out; her own horror was genuine—the girl was not quite thirteen. “Zhenya! My God, how far have you gone?” (In that moment, these words had a special meaning to the mother, as though she already knew that her daughter was on the wrong path, that she herself had failed to intervene in time, and that now her own daughter had already sunk this low.) “Zhenya, tell me the whole truth, or else it will be even worse. What have you done—” Mrs. Luvers wanted to say “done with the powder box,” but she said—”with this thing?” And she took the “thing” and waved it in the air.

  “Mama, don’t believe Mam’selle. I have never…” and she began to sob. But her mother heard unrepentant tones in this crying that were not there at all. She felt guilty and became frightened; she believed that she could put everything right and “take pedagogical and rational measures,” even if it went against her maternal instinct. She decided not to yield to compassion. She would wait until the girl’s stream of tears, which hurt her deeply, had stopped.

  She sat on the bed and stared with a quiet, empty look at the edge of the bookshelf. She smelled of an expensive perfume. When Zhenya regained her selfcontrol, her mother questioned her again. Zhenya, with tearful eyes, looked out the window and swallowed. Outside the ice floes drifted by, probably with a crunching noise. A star sparkled. And there was the dull blackness of the desolate night, supple and cold, but dark. Zhenya looked away from the window. Her mother’s voice sounded a note of warning impatience. The Frenchwoman stood against the wall, an image of strictness and concentrated pedagogy. Her hand lay on the wrist band of her watch—the gesture of a military aide. Zhenya cast another glance at the stars and the Kama. She was resolved, in spite of the cold, in spite of the drifting, ice—she would throw herself in. She lost herself in her words, in her terrible, incoherent words, and told her mother about that.

  Her mother let her finish only because she was startled to see how much of the child’s heart and soul went into her account. From the first word, everything became clear to her. No—she knew even as the girl took a deep breath, before she started her story. The mother listened happily, lost in love and tenderness toward this thin little body. She wanted to throw her arms around her daughter’s neck and kiss her. But, no—pedagogy! She rose from the bed and removed the bedspread. She called her daughter to her, and caressed her hair slowly, very slowly and tenderly. “My good child…” she managed to say, then went hastily to the window and stood with her back to the other two.

  Zhenya did not see the Frenchwoman. Her tears-her mother—filled the whole room. “Who makes the bed?” the woman asked. It was a senseless question. The girl shrank into herself. She felt sorry for Grusha. Then her mother said something in French, a language with which she was familiar—but these words were harsh and incomprehensible. Then she said to Zhenya, in a completely different voice, “Zhenichenka, go into the dining room, my child. I’ll be there right away. I’ll tell you about the wonderful country house Papa and I have rented for you—for us all—for the summer.”

  The lamps became familiar to her again, as in the winter, at home, with the family, warm, eager, loyal. Her mother’s marten fur was thrown carelessly over the blue tablecloth. “Good. Stay at Blagodat. Wait till the end of Holy Week, when—” She couldn’t read the rest, the telegram was folded. Zhenya sat down on the edge of the sofa, tired and happy. She sat there relaxed and satisfied, just as she was to sit half a year later on the edge of the yellow bench in the corridor of the Yekaterinburg High School when she passed her Russian oral exam with the highest grade and was told that she could “go now.”

  The next morning her mother told her what to do when it happened again, that there was nothing more to it, that she need not be afraid, that it would happen again and again. She never called “it” by name and explained nothing to her, but she added that hereafter she intended to teach her daughter herself since she wouldn’t be going away any more.

  The Frenchwoman was dismissed for negligence; she had been with the family only a few months. When the cab came for her and she walked down the front steps, she met the doctor who was just coming up. He acknowledged her greeting in a most unfriendly manner and said no word of farewell to her. She guessed that he already knew everything, made a sour face and shrugged her shoulders.

  The servant girl, who had ushered in the doctor, lingered outside the door, and so the noise of the footsteps and of the reverberating stones remained longer than usual in the corridor where Zhenya stood. And when later she thought of her awakening puberty, she always called back this memory: the loud echo of the busy morning street which hesitated on the doorstep and then gaily entered the house; the Frenchwoman, the servant girl and the doctor; two sinners and a confidant, cleansed and purified by the clear sound of shuffling steps.

  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.

  What she saw could not be described. The swaying forest of hazelnut trees, through which the train was winding, became a sea, the world, anything one wished it to be. The sunlit, murmuring forest ran down sloping hills, the trees becoming smaller, denser and gloomier, until it fell away steeply into a black emptiness. And what hung on the other side of the chasm was like a greenish-yellow storm cloud, twisted and convoluted, but frozen, turned to stone. Zhenya held her breath and suddenly felt the speed of this limitless, unself-conscious air, and saw that the storm cloud was a great mass of earth, that it had the name of a famous mountain, which rolled down like thunder and was hurled with sand and rocks into the valley, that the hazelnut forest knew the name and whispered it ceaselessly, here, there, everywhere.

  “Is this the Urals?” she asked the whole compartment and leaned out of the berth.

  She spent the rest of the journey glued to the window in the corridor, leaning out. She was greedy for this new experience. She discovered that it was much more beautiful to look backward than forward. Majestic acquaintances wrapped themselves in mist and disappeared in the distance. After a brief separation, while over the rhythmic clatter and rattle of the couplings a cold draft hit the back of your neck and a new marvel emerged right before your nose, you discovered them again. The mountain panorama stretched itself out and grew ever larger. Some mountains became darker, others were suddenly sunlit; some were obscured, others dis appeared into darkness. They met and separated, they fell and rose. All this moved slowly in a circle, like the stars, with the cautious gyrations of giants, missing disaster by a hair’s breadth, ever worried about the preservation of the earth. These complicated motions were accompanied by a steady and powerful echo that was inaudible to human ears, but which was aware of everything. It watched them with eagle eyes, dark and dumb. It held a grand parade. Thus are the Urals built, built and rebuilt.