Chapter 28 Chapter Eleven Walking (3)

He paced up and down the embankment, thinking about what she had said.There was no doubt that some shameful thought of his had surfaced, and she had discovered it, much to his annoyance.At the same time, he was ashamed of himself for being so petty.He got into an ordinary moral entanglement—so ordinary that he was in fact no longer disturbed by it, and therefore all the more ashamed.There was something else bothering him too, like the point of a nail just popping out of a shoe, which he couldn't figure out, and didn't want to bother to figure out. When he returned to the apartment, the atmosphere was still a little tense.Matrona got out of bed.She put her mother's top over her pajamas, but her feet were bare. "I'm sick of it!" she kept complaining.She ignores him.Despite sitting at the dinner table with them, she would not eat.There was a sour smell on her body, she was gasping for breath, and she had a violent cough from time to time. "You shouldn't be up, honey," he said gently. "You can't tell me what to do and what not to do, and you're not my father!" she retorted. "Matryosha!" her mother stopped her. "It wasn't supposed to be!" she repeated, pursing her lips in silence.

After he had gone to bed, Anna Sergeyevna came in, knocking lightly on the door.He stood up cautiously. "What's the matter with her?" "I gave her some of the medicine you bought, and now she seems calmer. She shouldn't get out of bed, but she is disobedient, and I can't stop her. I'm here to apologize for what I said. Also ask you tomorrow plan." "There is no need to apologize. It was my fault. I booked a seat on the night train. But it can be changed." "Why? You'll get the file you want tomorrow. Why change it? Why spend it here? After all, you don't want to be a permanent tenant. Is this the name of a book?"

"Eternal tenant? No, I haven't heard of it. Everything can be changed, including tomorrow. Nothing is guaranteed. But it's not up to me to change this one." "Who is in charge?" "up to you." "Me? Of course not! Your arrangements are yours to make, and I have no control over them. We should say goodbye now. I won't see you in the morning. I have to get up early, and tomorrow is market day. You You can leave the key on the door." The moment has finally come.He took a deep breath.His mind went blank.He began to speak in this blank space, saying what came out of him, wherever he went.

"The time you took me to see Pavel's tomb, we got to the ferry," he said, "and I noticed you and Matryosha leaning on the railing looking out at the fog—you remember the fog that day—I Say to yourself, 'She can bring Pavel back. She's—'" He took another breath—"'She's a guide to the soul.' I didn't think of that word then, and I know it now Most accurate." She looked at him blankly.He grabs her hand. "I want him back," he said. "You have to help me. I'm going to kiss him on the mouth." When he said this, he also felt how crazy these words were.He was in and out of madness, like a fly in and out of an open window.

She looked tense, as if trying to break free.He gripped her hand tighter and pulled her back. "That's the truth. It's what I thought of you. It's not accidental that Pavel came here. He was destined to be taken from here to... the night." He both believed and disbelieved what he said.He recalled a scene from the past, which was a painting he saw in a gallery somewhere: a woman in dark plain clothes stood in front of the window, with a child beside her, both looking up at the starry sky. Sky.In his memory, what impresses him more than the painting itself is the carved and gilded frame.

Her hand didn't move in his. "You have every right," he followed the words like a lighthouse beam, to see where they took him. "You can bring him back. Stay a minute. Just a minute." He remembered how dry she looked the first time he saw her.Like a mummy, the dead bones wrapped in a shroud will shatter into powder with a light touch.Her voice creaked as she spoke. "You love him so much," she said, "you will see him again." He let go of her hand.She withdrew her hand like a string of bones.Don't cater to me!He wants to say. "You are an artist, a master," she said. "The one who can bring him back to the world is you, not me."

Grandmaster.He always associated the word with metal—forged steel swords, cast bronze bells.Master Blacksmith, Master Caster.Life Guru: Weird Vocabulary.He wants to give every word its place, no matter how strange, how isolated, if given the chance, it is a pavel's homograph. "I'm far from being a master," he said. "I have a crack running through my body. What's the use of a cracked clock? A cracked clock can't be mended." He was absolutely right.At the same time he remembered that Sergiyev's Trinity Cathedral had a bell that had cracked long before the time of Empress Catherine.It was never taken down and remelted.Its sound echoes over the city every day.It is called the wooden leg of Saint Sergius.

There was irritation in her tone now. "I sympathize with you, Fyodor Mikhailovich," she said, "but you have to remember that you are not the first parent to lose a child. Pavel lived to be twenty-two years old. Think a lot Many children who died in infancy." "therefore---?" "So you have to admit that loss is the rule, not the exception. You have to ask yourself: Are you mourning Pavel, or yourself?" lost.A cold distance separates him and her. "I didn't lose him, and he didn't disappear," he said through clenched teeth. She shrugged. "If he hadn't disappeared, you should know where he was. Of course he wasn't in this room."

He looked around the room.A black shadow in the corner—could it be the breath of his ghostly shadow? "One cannot live in one place without leaving something behind," he whispered. "No, of course nothing will be left behind. That's what I told you this afternoon. But what he left is not in this room. He left here, and this is not where you'll find him. Go Talk to Matrona. Make up with her before you leave. She is very close to your son. If he leaves an impact, it will be on her." "And you?" "I like him very much, Fyodor Mikhailovich. He is a good-hearted young man. As your son, he has had a hard time. He is alone, he has no confidence in himself, and he has to struggle to find My own way. I see all that. But I'm not from his generation. He can't talk to me as easily as he talks to Matryosha. He's a kid with her." She paused . "I've always had the feeling -- we've got everything to talk about now, let's talk about it -- that Pavel's childishness was repressed too early, that he never had enough playtime. I don't know if you had it too when you were a kid. That's the case. Probably not. But it still surprises me that you're mad at him for something as trivial as sleeping in."

"Why are you surprised?" "Because I'm counting on you, as an artist, to show more sympathy. Some children dream at night, others wait until morning. You think twice before waking a dreaming child. Barvel and Matt When Liao Na was with him, his childishness had the opportunity to show. What makes me happy now is that this happened, and he didn't miss it." He recalled Pavel, seven years old, in a gray tartan coat with earmuffs and boots too big for his feet, screaming and running wildly in the snow.Something still appeared in the corner of the image of the memory, and he brushed it aside.

"Pavel and I first met in Semipalatinsk when he was seven years old," he said. "He didn't like me. I was the stranger he and his mother would live with. I was the man who would take his mother away from him." His widow mother.The widow's son.Widow. He wanted to brush it aside, but what he kept seeing before his eyes as he spoke was an ugly little fellow he could only call a dwarf, a redheaded, red-bearded fellow no older than three or four years old. How tall is the child.Pavel was still running, shouting, and jumping in the snow.The dwarf stood and watched.He was wearing a rust-coloured close-fitting coat with the neck open; he didn't seem to feel the cold. "...too hard for a child..." He only heard half of what she said.Who is this midget-like fellow?He looked at the face more intently.Shocked, he finally understood.Pockmarked skin, bluish scars swollen hard in the cold, sparse beards growing out of smallpox scars—it was Nechayev again, Nechayev shrunk, Nechayev was Siberia pesters his newborn son!What's the point of this phantom?He moaned softly to himself, and Anna Sergeyevna stopped immediately. "I'm so sorry," he said apologetically.But he had made her angry. "You definitely need to pack," she said, leaving amidst his apologies.