She gave Morozov's book: "And there will be no sounds of a harp playing, no singing voice, no trumpet voice, no music of those who play the pipe and other instruments in you," she read. - And there will be no artist or art in you, and the noise of the millstones will no longer be heard in you. What a prediction! "So it will be," she thought stubbornly.
The author interpreted the Apocalypse, the last book of the New Testament. She opened the book somewhere else, not on herself, but on the Bone. "And while the animals of four seasons glorify and praise him sitting on the throne, twenty-four elders-hours in turn bow before him. She laughed: "But this is really about the Bone! Lessons!"
She was still in the hospital, where Anna Ignatievna wandered from room to room, holding onto her heart, in despair - because of her! The frightened girls were stuck in the corners, the gloomy, shaggy gymnast, who is still reading the novel by Count Amory - he was reading this book when they came in. Lord, what can we do?
The room was stuffy. Maybe from flowers? She got up and moved the flowers from the table to the window. "Maybe Kostya had to tell her mother that everything would stay the same.
Somehow she remembered when she went to visit her father at the Votkinsky factory after boarding school and found her father in a newly rented apartment, which was something like the apartment of Karnovsky. He was alone, his stepmother hadn't arrived yet, and Lisa started to arrange the apartment. As her father was grateful to her, as gentle as he was, as happy and proud that she finished the boarding house with a gold medal! She barely talked him out of it - he wanted to show the medal and her certificate to his officers. For the first time she saw him - a gentle, trusting, making herself become different, brave, in spite of her baggy, strict, despite the kindness that glowed in his pink, a bit of a woman's face. Then came his stepmother, something like Anna Ignatievna, but not restrained, but loud, demanding, bourgeois self-confident - and then at her insistence, he burned the letters to Kostina. Strangely all this was connected with the dinner at the Hospital, with the feeling of artificiality, violence, lack of freedom. Freedom was there, in the memory of the Shchukin Gallery that did not leave her there.
She closed her eyes, and the naked dancing figures - wild, free, as if they were the only ones on earth, and they didn't need anyone else - began to spin before her eyes. Matisse! She sighed joyfully and remembered the sense of rhythm that united these figures. They were surrounded by transparency. They seemed to be written on glass. It was impossible to break away from them.
But she forced herself to leave Matisse and rushed to a completely different, rustic, multicolored world. Gauguin! Short-brown girls, almost naked, with bright flowers in their hair, looked at her, breathing easily. They were free! They were confidence simple, infinitely free. Oh, my God! Without the shackling uncertainty, without the need for explanations!
She barely slept on the train, and suddenly fell asleep at once, just like she had plunged into the clear water. Through her thoughts and memories, she tried to understand something very important and finally realized with a sigh of relief. The most important thing was Paris, which looked like a multicolored ball hanging in the air. From him came transparent arrows of light. He was dead breathing at a dizzying height above the peaks of Gothic buildings.
Halfway through, she heard Karnowski come in, with the collar of the overcoat raised (he didn't wear the scarf), with his glasses sweating. He dropped the overcoat, pulled the curtain. She watched him from under his half-lowered eyelashes with his throat suddenly intercepted with excitement.
- Sleeping? - quietly, he gently asked.
- No. Come here. Sit down.
He kissed her.
- Wait. Listen: the next day after the end of the war I'm going to Paris. The Gorins promise to lend me money. I want to learn from Matisse.
She woke up early - and last night was slow in front of her eyes, as if he was patiently waiting for her to wake up. Maybe they wouldn't have quarreled if she hadn't said that Dmitry had offered money for a trip, to live in Paris? Maybe Kostya was right, proving that the very idea of this trip is insulting, insignificant at a time when there is a hard, defeated war, looters rob the country, the diocesan sew for soldiers underpants and women from two o'clock in the morning are in line for rotten fish? While she herself is going to her father, seriously wounded at the front.
Yes, Kostya is right. But it wasn't even hope, it was an attempt at hope. He should not have dealt with this attempt so ruthlessly, so harshly. No, there was something else here, something else, maybe something else, that happened to him after lunch at the hospital. She felt it even in the moments when they were finally alone in silence, in the dark. And then suddenly this argument, this irritated tone, this unexpected, astonishing rudeness that took her breath away. Yes, something happened. A family scandal? A false position in which he did not want to confess?
To be continued...