Konstantin Pavlovich no longer hoped that he would be able to save mankind from the power of blindness with the help of mathematics. He began to study this blind power. He was convinced that in the twentieth century probability theory could change the whole picture of the world in science. But the passion with which he was engaged in this theory, strangely mixed feeling of longing. Self-defense, neutral zone, saving distance allowed him to quietly meet the blows, which, since childhood, consisted of life. He was afraid of losing his freedom and independence, and now he sometimes felt that freedom was frozen. The women, as always, were somewhere away from his spiritual life. There was no Lisa between them.
He was constantly looking through their last meeting, the only day Lisa spent in Kazan. He started talking to his mother, who was crying, hugging the girls and making them bow to him. He suddenly flashed with hope when Karnovsky, seeing Lisa, threw himself at her and picked her up from the stairs of the car with her suitcase...
Then there was a vile lack of openness, pretence, leaving and parishes. Look, when every minute of cutting, as a knife, a piece did not climb into the throat, and Karnovsky cursed himself, not daring to look at Lisa. Again, coming and going, hesitation, regret that he persuaded her to come. And shame. And a conversation with another woman, cheerful and cynical, who proved that it was stupid to get married, while he always had at his fingertips such a "convenient object" as her.
Then there was a quarrel with Lisa, meaningless, because nothing funny or impossible was in her hope of going to Paris to study. And not only meaningless, but insignificant, as if suddenly predicted their future "joint quarters". Maybe these were the minutes when he could still tell her everything he had endured, felt, changed his mind? He kept silent - and she left without saying goodbye...
... Where is she? What happened to her? Did she get to Athens and now wanders through a strange country, poor, helpless, sick? Did she die on the road?
She left a few months before the white man escaped from Crimea, so she did not fall into the bloody turmoil of this escape, which was a terrible rumor. But if she was alive - because she would have written to him, anyway: from Athens, from Constantinople, from Paris!
No, it's over! He will never see her again! And all his doubts, uncertainty, all the consciousness of his limitations stood before him, demanding an answer. He rushed to reread her letters, sad, festive, loving, straightforward. "You do not know how I spent this winter. After all, I tried to interpret in my favor each of your obscure words ... "Everything that happens to me belongs to you, and even if you don't accept it, it still does, regardless of your will and desire.
How did he manage to do science in time? But he had time to sit down at the table for ten minutes or jump up at night to write the idea from nowhere!
The task that the famous Gruzinov set for his seminar in Moscow, he decided, shaking on a barrel of water. There was no water in the city, and he was late for classes and asked the water carrier to drop him off at the institute. He knew about this task from an acquaintance of a Muscovite student and the same day he sent his friend a sheet of paper with a solution that took four lines.
The letter he received from Gruzinov a few days later made him think about the possibility of moving to Moscow.
It was time when many cities began to open universities, and Moscow mathematicians, later famous, began to work in Saratov, in Ivanovo-Voznesensk. Gruzinov's school became thinner - but not for long.
He was a man with a natural gift of attraction. Small, with bright blue eyes and a rare shining white halo over his tall forehead, he always flew somewhere, tried, was late, in a hurry. His simplicity was strangely connected to his love for intrigues, for complicated, confusing relationships (which he, however, was well versed in). He was able to deftly, almost imperceptibly quarrel with his enemies, and sometimes friends. The ease with which he moved from the most common mathematical structures to another microscopic gossip, and struck the enemies and friends ...
Konstantin Pavlovich first went on a scientific trip to him "to improve his specialty", and then, a year later, transferred to Moscow, betraying the high position of professor at the Polytechnic Institute and received at the department of Gruzinov a modest rank of associate professor.
In the autumn of 1921, he lived in Bolshoi Palashovsky Lane, in a family that was unpleasant to him. The owner, the former owner of the pawnshop, was ill with some strange disease that made him fall unexpectedly. The apartment had an internal staircase, and he fell off it, time with a stick, bots, pots, which for some reason he was constantly dragging around the apartment. His wife came running, blurry, angry, and a son giggling foolishly, embarrassed by his thinness. They would put the old man on his feet, and he would shuffle his bots again, muttering and singing. One day Konstantin Pavlovich listened and parsed the words of a belligerent old chansonette (singer):
All patriots will be rewarded:
When we moved from the parade,
I was walking bravely with a marker,
The hussar's wife was led by a hussar under his arm.
Why Konstantin Pavlovich did not move out of the apartment - he did not know. The room was comfortable and bright.
At the end of November, the mistress brought him a small letter, sent from Kazan, with a foreign brand.
To be continued...