446
BORIS PILNYAK
pointless and she had no life of her own.
"Let me feed the little one," she said, "I saw Klavdia go
out. Has Varvara gone too?"
In the provincial backwater outside autumn rain was fall–
ing.
The door creaked in the hall and a man's boots stamped on
the floor to shake off the dirt and the mud. He came into the
room and stared round helplessly as do all short-sighted people
without their spectacles. It was the engineer Akim Yakovlevich
Skudrin and he looked exactly like his father thirty years back.
He had come for no particular purpose that anybody knew of.
"Greetings to you, my dear aunts!" he cried, kissing aunt
~
Rimma first of all.
Here was the Russia of the provinces with its autumn rain
and its samovars.
. . . Akim had come for no particular purpose. His aunts
greeted him with a samovar, some pancakes made in the twink–
ling of an eye, and all the hospitality of rural Russia. Akim did
not call on his father, nor did he visit the local officials. Dying
bells whined over the rooftops and the streets bloomed with
medicinal camomile. Akim left after twenty-four hours, having
established that he had no need of his birthplace and that the
town had no use for him. He spent the day with his aunts, roam–
ing in memory with all its vanities, partaking of the dire poverty
of his aunts, sharing their thoughts, their cares and their dreams.
The arrangement of the furniture was much the same as it had
been twenty or twenty-five years ago, and the tailor's dummy,
which had frig-htened him in childhood, frightened him no
longer. At dusk Klavdia came home from the school. The two
cousins-the difference in age was ten years or so-sat down
side by side on the sofa.
"How's life?" asked Akim.
After some small-talk Klavdia told Akim of her main
~re
occupation. She spoke very simply. She was very beautiful and
quite calm. The twilight dragged on slowly into the darkness.
"I should like your advice," Klavdia ventured. "I'm having
