Excitement lashed him again as soon as he reached his former haunts. He was out of breath from running, and the rolled-up laprobe weighed heavy on his arm—he had to hurry, but he could not recall the layout of the streets, and the ashy night confused everything, changing as in a negative image the relationship between dark and light parts, and there was no one to ask, everybody was asleep. Suddenly a poplar loomed and behind it a tall church with a violet-red window divided into harlequin rhombuses of colored light: inside a night service was in progress, and an old lady in mourning with cotton-wool under the bridge of her spectacles hastened to mount the steps. He found his street, but at the end of it a post with a gauntleted hand on it indicated that one had to enter from the other end where the post office was, since at this end a pile of flags had been prepared for tomorrow’s festivities.
But he was afraid of losing it in the course of a detour and moreover the post office—that would come afterwards—if Mother had not already been sent a telegram. He scrambled over boards, boxes and a toy grenadier in curls, and caught sight of the familiar house, and there the workmen had already stretched a red strip of carpet across the sidewalk from door to curb, as it used to be done in front of their house on the Neva Embankment on ball nights.
He ran up the stairs and Frau Stoboy immediately let him in. Her cheeks glowed and she wore a white hospital overall—she had formerly practiced medicine. “Only don’t get all worked up,” she said. “Go to your room and wait there. You must be prepared for anything,” she added with a vibrant note in her voice and pushed him into the room which he had thought he would never in his life enter again.
He grasped her by the elbow, losing control over himself, but she shook him off. “Somebody has come to see you,” said Stoboy, “he’s resting … Wait a couple of minutes.” The door banged shut. The room was exactly as if he had been still living in it: the same swans and lilies on the wallpaper, the same painted ceiling wonderfully ornamented with Tibetan butterflies (there, for example, was Thecla bieti). Expectancy, awe, the frost of happiness, the surge of sobs merged into a single blinding agitation as he stood in the middle of the room incapable of movement, listening and looking at the door. He knew who would enter in a moment, and was amazed now that he had doubted this return: doubt now seemed to him to be the obtuse obstinacy of one half-witted, the distrust of a barbarian, the self-satisfaction of an ignoramus.
His heart was bursting like that of a man before execution, but at the same time this execution was such a joy that life faded before it, and he was unable to understand the disgust he had been wont to experience when, in hastily constructed dreams, he had evoked what was now taking place in real life. Suddenly, the door shuddered (another, remote one had opened somewhere beyond it) and he heard a familiar tread, an indoor Morocco-padded step. Noiselessly but with terrible force the door flew open, and on the threshold stood his father. He was wearing a gold embroidered skullcap and a black Cheviot jacket with breast pockets for cigarette case and magnifying glass; his brown cheeks with their two sharp furrows running down from both sides of his nose were particularly smoothly shaven; hoary hairs gleamed in his dark beard like salt; warmly, shaggily, his eyes laughed out of a network of wrinkles.
But Fyodor stood and was unable to take a step. His father said something, but so quietly that it was impossible to make anything out, although one somehow knew it to be connected with his return, unharmed, whole, human, and real. And even so it was terrible to come closer—so terrible that Fyodor felt he would die if the one who had entered should move toward him. Somewhere in the rear rooms sounded the warningly rapturous laughter of his mother, while his father made soft chucking sounds hardly parting his lips, as he used to do when taking a decision or seeking something on the page of a book … then he spoke again—and this again meant that everything was all right and simple, that this was the true resurrection, that it could not be otherwise, and also: that he was pleased—pleased with his captures, his return, his son’s book about him—and then at last everything grew easy, a light broke through, and his father with confident joy spread out his arms. With a moan and a sob Fyodor stepped toward him, and in the collective sensation of woolen jacket, big hands and the tender prickle of trimmed mustaches there swelled an ecstatically happy, living, enormous, paradisal warmth in which his icy heart melted and dissolved.
At first the superposition of a thingummy on a thingabob and the pale, palpitating stripe that went upwards were utterly incomprehensible, like words in a forgotten language or the parts of a dismantled engine—and this senseless tangle sent a shiver of panic running through him: I have woken up in the grave, on the moon, in the dungeon of dingy non-being. But something in his brain turned, his thoughts settled and hastened to paint over the truth—and he realized that he was looking at the curtain of a half-open window, at a table in front of the window: such is the treaty with reason—the theater of earthly habit, the livery of temporary substance. He lowered his head onto the pillow and tried to overtake a fugitive sense—warm, wonderful, all-explaining—but the new dream he dreamt was an uninspired compilation, stitched together out of remnants of daytime life and fitted to it.
The morning was overcast and cool, with gray-black puddles on the yard’s asphalt, and one could hear the nasty flat thumping of carpets being beaten. The Shchyogolevs had finished their packing; Zina had gone off to work and at one o’clock was due to meet her mother for lunch at the Vaterland. Luckily they had not suggested that Fyodor join them—on the contrary, Marianna Nikolavna, as she warmed up some coffee for him in the kitchen where he sat in his dressing gown, disconcerted by the bivouac-like atmosphere in the apartment, warned him that a little Italian salad and some ham had been left in the larder for lunch. It turned out, incidentally, that the luckless person who was getting their number by mistake, had rung up the previous night: this time he had been tremendously agitated, something had happened—something which remained unknown.
For the tenth time Boris Ivanovich transferred from one valise to another a pair of shoes on shoe trees, all clean and shiny—he was unusually meticulous over footwear.
Then they dressed and went out, while Fyodor shaved, carried out long and successful ablutions, and cut his toenails—it was especially pleasant to get under a tight corner, and clip!— the parings shot all over the bathroom. The janitor knocked but was unable to enter because the Shchyogolevs had locked the hall door on the American lock, and Fyodor’s keys had gone forever.
Through the letter-box, clacking the shutter, the mailman threw in the Belgrade newspaper For Tsar and Church, to which Boris Ivanovich subscribed, and later someone thrust in (leaving it to stick out boatlike) a leaflet advertising a new hairdresser’s. At exactly half past eleven there came a loud barking from the stairs and the agitated descent of the Alsatian which was taken for a walk at this time. With a comb in his hand he went out onto the balcony to see if the weather was clearing up, but although it did not rain, the sky remained hopelessly and wanly white—and one could not believe that yesterday it had been possible to lie in the forest.
The Shchyogolevs’ bedroom was cluttered up with paper rubbish, and one of the suitcases was open—at the top a pear-shaped object of rubber was lying on a wafer towel. An itinerant mustache came into the yard with cymbals, a drum, a saxophone—completely hung with metallic music, with bright music on his head, and with a monkey in a red jersey—and sang for a long time, tapping his foot and jangling—without managing, however, to drown out the volleying at the carpets on their trestles. Cautiously pushing the door, Fyodor visited Zina’s room, where he had never been before, and with the bizarre sensation of a glad moving in he looked for a long time at the briskly ticking alarm clock, at the rose in a glass with its stem all studded with bubbles, at the divan that became a bed at night and
