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Updated: June 3, 2025
Pyotr Mihalitch's eyes filled with tears and his hand began to tremble as it lay on the table. Zina guessed what he was thinking about, and her eyes, too, glistened and looked red. "Grigory, come here," she said to Vlassitch. They walked away to the window and began talking of something in a whisper.
"This has come . . ." said her son, giving her the letter. Zina's name, and even the pronoun "she" was not uttered in the house. Zina was spoken of impersonally: "this has come," "Gone away," and so on. . . . The mother recognised her daughter's handwriting, and her face grew ugly and unpleasant, and her grey hair escaped again from her cap.
In reality, there has not been a sense of happiness so far. Zina has been thinking all the time of you, of her mother, and has been worrying; looking at her, I, too, felt worried. Hers is a bold, free nature, but, you know, it's difficult when you're not used to it, and she is young, too. The servants call her 'Miss'; it seems a trifle, but it upsets her. There it is, brother."
From the way that Vlassitch stooped down to her and the way she looked at him, Pyotr Mihalitch realised again that everything was irreparably over, and that it was no use to talk of anything. Zina went out of the room. "Well, brother!" Vlassitch began, after a brief silence, rubbing his hands and smiling. "I called our life happiness just now, but that was, so to speak, poetical license.
At once there was the sound of hurried footsteps and Zina came into the dining-room. She was tall, plump, and very pale, and, just as when he had seen her for the last time at home, she was wearing a black skirt and a red blouse, with a large buckle on her belt. She flung one arm round her brother and kissed him on the temple. "What a storm!" she said.
They ran away from us toward the freight-sheds, shouting the alarm, while we calmly walked home to our unsuspected lodgings. Not till then did I think of the bombs. "Where are they?" I asked in alarm. "I left them for the police. They will ruin Nolenki it was he who sent poor Zina to Siberia and her death." "Ruin him?" I said, wondering. "Yes." "Why?" "They were not loaded." "Not loaded!"
This room, too, was large and comfortless; in the middle of the room there was a round table with two leaves with six thick legs, and only one candle. A clock in a large mahogany case like an ikon stand pointed to half-past two. Vlassitch opened the door into the next room and said: "Zina, here is Petrusha come to see us!"
"We'll wait for five years, ten years, and be patient, and then God's will be done." She took her brother's arm, and when she walked through the dark hall she squeezed close to him. They went out on the steps. Pyotr Mihalitch said good-bye, got on his horse, and set off at a walk; Zina and Vlassitch walked a little way with him.
"In August we shall have the money to do up the lodge in the garden," said Vlassitch. "For some reason when it thunders I think of that grandfather," Zina went on. "And in this dining-room somebody was flogged to death." "That's an actual fact," said Vlassitch, and he looked with wide-open eyes at Pyotr Mihalitch. "Sometime in the forties this place was let to a Frenchman called Olivier.
He sat down beside Pyotr Mihalitch and began saying what was utterly beside the point. "I have such a reverence for your sister, Petrusha," he said. "When I used to come and see you, I felt as though I were going to a holy shrine, and I really did worship Zina. Now my reverence for her grows every day. For me she is something higher than a wife yes, higher!" Vlassitch waved his hands.
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