At the wharf Lisa did not immediately recognize Karnovsky: after the ball, she had another impression of him, and in the photo, which he sent in the winter - some third. Now everything is defined.
He was blond, higher than the average height, perhaps that and beautiful in his new hobo and ironed satin shirt. He wore a light blue eyeglasses, as Lisa thought, because it was fashionable to wear eyeglasses. He changed in two years, in Perm he was some kind of Belarusian - "like an angel on a Christmas tree", remembering him, thought Lisa. But in the turn of wide shoulders, in beautiful white teeth, in the firm man's confidence, with which he bowed and spoke smiling, there was nothing angelic, and there was something that made us think about him constantly and look forward to his letters.
This did not mean (as Lisa thought) that she was in love. They had interesting and serious correspondence, they were friends, and the feeling that she had a friend, a math student, smart, well-read, and apparently cherished by their relationship, raised her in her own eyes.
She was worried about how to keep herself to herself as she drove up to Kazan, and decided that it was discreet, in the spirit of his short, discreet letters. But in the first minutes of the meeting, this invented manner somehow forgotten, perhaps because Kostya turned out to be more ordinary than she expected. And now she began to like this commonness. It was decided that Karnovsky would take her to a hotel, and then, after class, would return and show her to Kazan.
- There's nothing to see in general," he said. - But I have an old guide, a funny one. We will read it and watch it.
He left it in Bonartsev's rooms on Black Lake, and Lisa was a little upset when he came back two hours later with more than one: a student in formless pants and a worn-out hoodlum.
- Lisa, meet him. Great mathematician and my friend Kolya Lavrov.
Lavrov had a sharp nose and smart eyes. He took off his cap with a faded blue around and gave Lisa a small hand.
- Mademoiselle, I couldn't deny myself the pleasure of meeting you. The fact is that only two people in the world could make our punctual friend not go to Professor Mavrin's lecture and cancel the lessons.
- Really? Who is this?
- You and Lieutenant Glant.
- Who is Lieutenant Glant?
- Shame on you! Have you read Hamsun's Pan? Glenn is a man with an animal look who lives alone in the woods and doesn't know what he'll do next. Kostya, take off your eyeglasses.
Karnovsky smiled and, having taken off his eyeglasses, wiped him with a handkerchief. His eyes were gray, big, shiny and a little confused, like all myopic ones.
- A dangerous man," Lavrov said seriously. - He is interested in you, but humanity is not. Drunk as a drunk man, he strokes the faces of cabbage horses and pushes passers-by. If we do, goodbye. I hope that the capital city of St. Petersburg will not deceive your hopes.
And he left.
- The smartest head, the hope of the faculty, - said Karnovsky. - He liked you.
- Did he? I am glad.
There was no snow sparkling under the moon, the city was different, unfamiliar. There was no frosty night's silence, unexpected after the ball with its hot air, with serpentine ribbons thrown at it by angry gymnasts. It was no sense of risk, no funny certainty that tomorrow would come.
But all this was, was! In the light of day in the autumn, noisy, lively Kazan!
At the Hay Market, Konstantin Pavlovich bought her a beaded skullcap with a tassel, she immediately put it on, and he pretended to be afraid that now it would disappear like Pushkin's Lyudmila.
- What would you do?
- I would have gone to the nearest police station and reported that Elizaveta Turaeva, an eighteen-year-old student, had gone missing.
Leaving the bazaar, he also bought her pretty Tatar shoes, velvet, decorated with golden thread and in the Derzhavinsky garden, frightened that they did not fit her, offered to try them on. Shoes fit in, he announced that in the skullcap and shoes Lisa looked like Queen Suyumbike, and then played an old, hunched vizier with a shaking head, which shows Kazan capricious queen.
- Here comes the guide to the times of the Kazan Khanate.
And Karnovsky began to read aloud the advice "to all who travel from Tver to Astrakhan on the steamship of the society "Plane": "In Kazan there are many hotels and rooms for those who travel, but we do not undertake to praise the first: the best of them, "Odessa", is still inferior to the numbers of the merchant Khristoforova.
The Kremlin was white, stretched out, but slender. On the thick walls were built other, thin, with loopholes, abruptly cut from the bottom, with towers, accurately covered with huge round monastic hats.
The fortress stood on the mountain, from which the narrow Kazanka was visible. Dirty boards were floating along the river. There were kernels by the walls somewhere, and Karnovsky said that the gymnasts came to the Kremlin before the exams to kiss these kernels - a good sign!
- Do they kiss kernels? And in Perm, they went to get a blessing from an aunt who sold bagels.
They made a stop.
The continuation should be...