16
PARTISAN REVIEW
provided the revolution lives' ..."
"Do they understand you, Parfenov?"
Parfenov reflected.
"How can anyone tell? It seems to me that they hate me. It
seems to me that they could kill me. On the walls of the toilets
they wrote that I am Jewish, and my real name Yankel Schmoule–
vitch. And there's nothing to be done against the stealing because
it is the hands of hunger that steal. But underneath their hatred, I
believe they understand me, they know I'm right; that's why they
haven't beaten me up yet, I, who go home alone every evening...."
The main entrance of the house had been closed for months,
for precaution's sake. Lytaev went in through the gate of the car–
riage-entrance. An old woman, standing her turn as guard, stared
at him in the dark. He did not notice that she responded to his
greeting with only a nod of determined dignity, because she dis–
approved of such an estimable man consenting to teach under a
reign of gangsters. Having crossed the court, Lytaev climbed,
groping his, way, up a narrow stairway which smelled of mould
and filth, and knocked decisively at the double door of what was
obviously a kitchen. He had to identify himself before the servant
drew the iron bolt and safety chain on the inside.
"It's I, Agrafena, I ..."
A pleasant warmth filled the study, where their lives now
centred about the iron stove and the kerosene lamp. For thirty
years, the same feminine face had been turned up to Vadime Mik–
hailovitch at the quiet hour of midnight tea, before retiring; he
had seen this face bloom with the full radiance of life, then wane,
fade, give way, without losing its clear gaze, the only youthfulness
which persists; he knew this face so well that he forgot it, looked
at it without seeing it, rediscovered it in his memory sometimes
with helpless astonishment. . . . Here we are, old. . . . What is it,
then, what is life?-The same hands, at first slender, the nails
polished and too rosy, the hands he had compared to flowers and
which, afterwards, he had covered with kisses, grown, little by
little discolored, worn, slightly coarsened, with a yellowish tinge
... the same hands set before him the same silver. The same voice,
imperceptibly changed like the hands, spoke to him of the day that
had passed. This evening the hands set down, in the lighted circle,
