Chapter 14

Kostya awoke today in good spirits. It was a weekday, but he had no intention of going to work. He decided to take leave under the pretext of illness, fully conscious of all the consequences such an act might bring. Though his mood was good, this light was somehow fragile. Konstantin exerts great effort to wrest it from the darkness. But as soon as the clock's hand crosses the meridian of noon, this battle will be lost. This darkness, enveloping consciousness, strangely enough most often arrives the moment Kostya begins to recall his past relationship with Elizabeth. Their entire life together over those three years, viewed from the position of this fleeting light, appears as impenetrable gloom. At the same time, he nevertheless misses this darkness—Kostya has noticed more than once how native to him are sorrow and melancholy.

For two days he had been visiting his relatives. Despite the fact that he had not been in another city, but merely in another district, he noticed certain differences in human mentalities. His relatives, with whom he had been staying these days, were no exception. "With them everything is somehow simple, no one ponders the eternal questions, no one asks unnecessary questions, they simply live." He wrote in his diary. "I know for certain that this is how the majority of people on planet earth live. Such people do not burden themselves with questions to which they cannot provide answers. They never ask themselves why everything is as it is. Why must I do what I do? They simply do it, simply rest, simply meet, simply marry, bear children, and all of this is done without any particular ardent feelings, without any particularly powerful thoughts."

Once in childhood he often visited his relatives, and back then he enjoyed such carefree existence, but now this world is not for him. He cannot live without questioning and burdening himself with questions. For him this life of ordinary people is strange. Several times he restrained himself from beginning to interrogate them all—why do they live precisely this way? Had they never once wanted to consider that everything could be different? Had they never once doubted that they were living correctly? Were they happy, after all, why did they live with this or that person, why did they simply live? But he knew that all this was pointless, these questions would only provoke negativity.

"People are afraid to ask themselves questions, afraid to cause themselves pain," thought Konstantin. "But as I see it, it is better to cause oneself pain than to spend one's whole life fleeing from oneself, from the awareness that all of life is meaningless."

When he was riding home, the City appeared to him somehow grey and dark compared to the bright and carefree place from which he was returning. For it was precisely as such a bright place that it had remained in his childhood memories. But childhood had passed. And now this dim City is much closer to his soul. All these memories, emanating from every brick of the cold buildings, envelop Konstantin's consciousness in longing and sorrow. Every turn of every alley reminds him of his solitude. As soon as he reached his home, he recorded these words in his diary: "All this longing and sorrow, all this solitude is my own and only through this grief and suffering can I be myself."

Telephone call:

"Hello, are you free now?" Konstantin picked up the receiver.

"Yes, been at liberty since yesterday," rang out Henry's joyful voice.

"And why didn't you call me yesterday?" Konstantin recalled that yesterday he had not spent a very good time.

"Wanted to rest a bit at home," answered Henry.

"As if you were working hard there," Kostya remarked with light irony. "Ah, never mind, forget it, anyway there's one matter. I need you to go somewhere with me tomorrow, are you opposed?"

"In principle, not opposed. This week I'm still off. And where exactly? Is this connected with that society of yours?" asked Henry.

"Precisely. I'll tell you the details later. We meet tomorrow morning, and the earlier the better," Kostya spoke in a serious tone.

"Alright, then until tomorrow," Henry said goodbye.

"So Henry got out yesterday, that's already good," thought Kostya. "And yesterday I was in a bad state of spirit, and why didn't he gladden me yesterday, perhaps today we would already be halfway to the monastery in the village of Dubrava. Now I'll have to waste another whole day and endure yet another evening." Despite everything, evening remains for Konstantin a morally difficult time of day.

Yesterday Elizabeth had called him and asked for a favor. He knew that seeing Liza's countenance again would not affect him favorably, and he left the house in an extremely anxious state. Konstantin's apprehensions were not in vain. After a brief conversation with her in the corridor, as if nothing had happened, one after another meaningless questions surfaced, questions that most often begin with the words why and wherefore. The list of these questions, with which every suffering being who calls itself human is at times beset, could be continued to infinity. Konstantin on his way home successfully answered his own questions. It became clear to him that for Elizabeth he had always been simply a friend and nothing more. At a certain period of time Kostya had desired more, had been jealous of her without having any right to be. Konstantin was superfluous with his superfluous feelings.

Still remembering her just-seen image, though he had already walked a considerable distance from her apartment, he reasoned: "If I have put a cross upon my own life and youth, this does not mean that she too should follow this example. She is an ordinary person, there is no reason for her to sacrifice her life. It is I who cannot live as everyone else. Nor should I, I have a different calling. Everything that happened in the past, everything that is happening now, only proves this supposition."

Every person has a turning point in life, a threshold beyond which the eternally forward-gazing eye one day takes the opposite course. In youth a person eternally looks toward and places hope in the future and the pleasures it may bring him. Later, in more advanced time, he increasingly turns back to find those very pleasures in the past. Before the appearance of the SPSP statute, Kostya believed that the time when he looked forward had ended. Now he is certain that he knows what to do. But be that as it may, night remains for some reason a time of tormenting memories. What could be worse than the desire to change that comes precisely at that time when outside it is already night. A time when even with all one's desire to change at least something besides the position in which one lies—is quite problematic.

Kostya noticed that thoughts of Elizabeth in reality occupied a great deal of time, and only now did he understand how much he knew, how many books he had after all read. In free conversations with his family he simply cannot stop quoting various writers one after another. Any scene of some conversation he imagined, beginning with something simple, would end with "Kant's synthetic judgments," some quotation from Nietzsche, and a couple of little-known examples from the lives of great philosophers. But when his invisible defense weakens, and this happens, as a rule, toward evening or at night, he begins to remember...

This moral pain often passes even into a kind of semblance of physical pain. He again tormented himself with thoughts—"I wonder how I will feel when Elizabeth is married, with children, and moderately happy? Will I be able to rejoice for her or will all this drive me into irreversible depression? I won't be able to shake the thoughts that everything could have been different. After all, these were merely some utterly absurd events, the consequences of which put a cross upon our relationship." He would not want to live to see those times. "If we are destined to meet when she already has a husband and children, then let it be in another life, where she is not she, and I am not I."

Today he firmly resolved to rush into battle and change his life whatever it might cost. "I must stoically endure everything to the end," thought Konstantin, lying in bed. "And I should thank Elizabeth, she by and large showed me the path along which I must go. Having done everything so that I, under no circumstances, would stray from my calling." Indeed, it was precisely thanks to Elizabeth that Konstantin felt upon himself the burden of deprivation and the painful impossibility of changing reality despite all his unbearable desire. Every person has pages of life, the impressions from which they will have to carry through their entire existence. For Konstantin such a page was Elizabeth.