• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2156 0

a long time here and lived on the railway, in the car of a train, where you saw him), I kept trying to run into him accidentally, unexpectedly. He sometimes went to headquarters, housed where the military command of the Komuch, the army of the Constituent Assembly, used to be. And—strange trick of fate—the entrance to the headquarters was in the same wing where Galiullin used to receive me when I came to solicit for others. For instance, there was an incident in the cadet corps that made a lot of noise, the cadets began to ambush and shoot objectionable teachers on the pretext of their adherence to Bolshevism. Or when the persecution and slaughter of the Jews began. By the way. If we’re city dwellers and people doing intellectual work, half of our acquaintances are from their number. And in such periods of pogroms, when these horrors and abominations begin, we’re hounded, not only by indignation, shame, and pity, but by an oppressive feeling of duplicity, that our sympathy is half cerebral, with an unpleasant, insincere aftertaste.

“The people who once delivered mankind from the yoke of paganism, and have now devoted themselves in such great numbers to freeing it from social evil, are powerless to free themselves from themselves, from being faithful to an outlived, antediluvian designation, which has lost its meaning; they cannot rise above themselves and dissolve without a trace among others, whose religious foundations they themselves laid, and who would be so close to them if only they knew them better.

“Persecution and victimization probably oblige them to adopt this useless and ruinous pose, this shamefaced, self-denying isolation, which brings nothing but calamities, but there is also an inner decrepitude in it, many centuries of historical fatigue. I don’t like their ironic self-encouragement, humdrum poverty of notions, timorous imagination. It’s as irritating as old people talking about old age and sick people about sickness. Do you agree?”

“I haven’t thought about it. I have a friend, a certain Gordon, who is of the same opinion.”

“So I went there to watch for Pasha. In hopes of his coming or going. The governor-general’s office used to be in the wing. Now there’s a plaque on the door: ‘Complaints Bureau.’ Maybe you’ve seen it? It’s the most beautiful place in the city. The square in front of the door is paved with cut stone. Across the square is the city garden. Viburnums, maples, hawthorns. I stood on the sidewalk in the group of petitioners and waited. Naturally, I didn’t try to force my way in, I didn’t tell them I was his wife. Anyway, our last names aren’t the same. What has the voice of the heart got to do with it? Their rules are completely different. For instance, his own father, Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov, a worker and a former political exile, works in the court here, somewhere quite close by, just down the highway. In the place of his earlier exile. So does his friend Tiverzin. They’re members of the revolutionary tribunal. And what do you think? The son doesn’t reveal himself to the father either, and the father accepts it as proper, does not get offended. If the son is a cipher, it means nothing doing. They’re flint, not people. Principles. Discipline.

“And, finally, if I proved that I was his wife, it’s no big deal! What have wives got to do with it? Is it the time for such things? The world proletariat, the remaking of the universe—that’s something else, that I understand. But an individual biped of some wifely sort, pah! It’s just some last little flea or louse!

“An adjutant went around asking questions. He let a few people in. I didn’t tell him my last name, and to the question about my business answered that it was personal. You could tell beforehand that it was a lost cause, a nonsuit. The adjutant shrugged his shoulders and looked at me suspiciously. So I never saw him even once.

“And you think he disdains us, doesn’t love us, doesn’t remember? Oh, on the contrary! I know him too well! He planned it this way from an excess of feeling! He needs to lay all these military laurels at our