The Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers by Boris Pasternak

understand. He was already dead, or else I would have heard him cry. I was reading into the night. I would have heard him. But when was he alive? Doctor, can such a thing be? I even went into the bedroom. He was dead. Definitely!”
    What a piece of luck that she had made her observation at the Defendovs yesterday morning and that the horrible business in front of the theater happened the week before last. What a piece of luck that she recognized him yesterday. She thought confusedly that if she hadn’t seen him, she would have definitely believed, after the doctor’s story, that it was the lame man who had been trampled outside the theater.
    And now the doctor was gone, after being their guest for such a long time, almost a member of the family. In the evening, the tutor came. It was washday. In the kitchen the linen was being put through the mangle. The hoar frost melted on the windowpanes, the garden came closer to the window, got tangled in the lace curtains, but reached as far as the table. The rumble of the mangle disturbed the conversation. Dikikh, like everybody else, thought she had changed. She noticed a change in him, too.
    â€œWhy are you so sad?”
    â€œDo I look sad? Well, I have lost a friend.”
    â€œSo you are sad, too. So many dead people—and all of them so suddenly.” She sighed.
    When he wanted to go on with the lesson, something inexplicable happened. Suddenly the girl began to think about how many people were dead, and the reassurance she had gained from the lamp in the room across from the Defendovs began to fade. “Wait! You were once in the tobacconist’s shop, shortly before Negarat left. I saw you with somebody. Was that he?” She was afraid to say “Tsvetkov.”
    Dikikh was startled by the inflection in her voice. He recalled the incident and remembered that he had, indeed, been there to buy some papers and to get the collected works of Turgenev for Mrs. Luvers. Yes, that’s right, he had been there with the dead man.
    She jerked convulsively and tears sprang into her eyes. But she had not found out the most important thing. When Dikikh then told her, between long pauses punctuated by the creaking of the mangle, what a splendid young fellow he had been, from such a good family, he lit a cigarette. Zhenya realized that only a small hesitation stood between what the teacher was saying and what the doctor had told her. And when he had spoken a few words more, among them the word “theater,” she gave a piercing scream and ran from the room.
    Dikikh stood listening. There was no sound in the whole house beyond the rumbling of the mangle. He stood stiff as a stork, his neck stretched and one leg lifted to go to her aid. He went in search for the girl, believing there was no one at home and that she must have fainted. While he collided in the dark with strange objects of wood, wool and metal, Zhenya crouched in a corner and wept. He kept on searching and fumbling about, in his thoughts already lifting her unconscious body from the carpet, and winced when a tear-choked voice cried just beneath his elbow: “I’m here. Look out, there’s a glass cabinet there. Wait for me in the schoolroom.
    The curtains and the star-bright winter night outside the window reached to the floor, while at the bottom, buried to the waist in heaps of snow and dragging chains of branches over the snow, the dreaming trees lifted toward the bright light in the window. And somewhere beyond the wall, the mangle rumbled, working on bed sheets. “How can this excessive sensitivity be explained?” the teacher wondered. “Obviously the dead man had a special meaning for the girl. She’s deeply upset.” He had explained periodical fractions to a child; but a grown girl, almost a young woman, had sent him into the schoolroom ... and all this in a single month? Obviously, the dead man had made a deep, inexpungible impression upon this young woman.