Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [132]
‘Why you have lived!’ she repeated. ‘Why, can anyone’s life be useless?’
‘It can. Mine, for instance,’ he said.
‘You don’t yet know what the aim of your life is, do you?’ she asked, stopping. ‘I don’t believe it: you’re maligning yourself; if not, you are not worthy of life.’
‘I have already passed the place where it can be found, and there is nothing more ahead of me.’
He sighed, and she smiled.
‘Nothing more?’ she repeated questioningly, but gaily and laughingly, as though she did not believe him and foresaw that there was something before him.
‘You may laugh,’ he went on, ‘but it is so.’
She walked on slowly with a lowered head.
‘What am I to live for?’ he said, walking after her. ‘Who for? What am I to seek? What am I to turn to? What am I to strive for? The flowers of life have fallen and only the thorns remain.’
They walked along slowly; she listened absent-mindedly and, in passing, tore off a sprig of lilac and gave it to him without looking.
‘What’s this?’ he asked, taken aback.
‘You see, it’s a twig.’
‘What kind of a twig?’ he asked her, looking at her open-eyed.
‘Lilac.’
‘I know. But what does it mean?’
‘The flower of life and – –’
He stopped and she stopped too.
‘And?’ he repeated questioningly.
‘My vexation,’ she said, looking straight at him with a concentrated gaze, and her smile told him that she knew what she was doing.
The cloud of impenetrability round her had dispersed. The look in her eyes was clear and intelligible. She seemed to have opened a certain page of a book on purpose and let him read the secret passage.
‘Then I may hope for – –’ he said suddenly, flushing with joy.
‘Everything! But – –’
She fell silent. He suddenly came to life. She, too, hardly recognized Oblomov: his sleepy, misty face was transformed in a moment, his eyes opened, colour came into his cheeks; thoughts stirred in his mind, desires and resolution sparkled in his glance. She, too, read clearly in the mute play of his features that Oblomov had instantly acquired an aim in life.
‘Life, life is opening to me once more,’ he said, speaking as though in a delirium. ‘It is there – in your eyes, your smile, in this sprig of lilac, in Casta diva – it’s all there.’
She shook her head.
‘No, not all – half.’
‘The best.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said.
‘But where is the other half? What else is there after this?’
‘Look for it.’
‘Why?’
‘So as not to lose the first,’ she replied, taking his arm, and they went home.
He kept glancing, sometimes with delight and sometimes stealthily, at her pretty head, her figure, her curls, clasping the lilac twig in his hand.
‘It is all mine! Mine!’ he kept repeating musingly, unable to believe his own words.
‘You won’t be moving to Vyborg, will you?’ she asked when he was going home.
He laughed, and did not even call Zakhar a fool.
9
AFTER THAT there were no sudden changes in Olga. She was even-tempered and calm with her aunt and in company, but lived and felt that she was alive only with Oblomov. She no longer asked anyone what she ought to do or how she ought to behave, and did not appeal in her mind to Sonia’s authority. As the different phases in life – that is to say, feelings – opened before her, she keenly observed all that happened around her, listened intently to the voice of her instinct, checking her feelings by the few observations she had made, and moved forward cautiously, trying with her foot the ground on which she was going to tread. She had no one she could ask for advice. Her aunt? But she skimmed over such problems so lightly and dexterously that Olga never succeeded in reducing any opinion of hers to a maxim and in fixing it in her memory. Stolz was away. Oblomov? But he was a kind of Galatea whose Pygmalion she herself had to be. Her life was filled so quietly and imperceptibly that no one noticed it, and she lived in her new sphere without arousing attention and without any visible outbursts of passion and anxieties. She did the same things for the others as before,