Larissa drummed her nails on the bench while waiting. This seemed to produce some familiar rhythm, some well-known melody, but remember the name she simply could not. This may have been one of the songs that was played in the restaurant, where Victor Ippolitovich brought her, where it was too noisy for the waiter to hear what she was ordering the first time around, and too crowded for the couple to pay good attention to each other.
Larissa knew that this could not continue. She thought of telling her classmate and her dearest friend Olga Demina, a reasonable, serious girl, but then thought against it.
Sometimes the lawyer would wait right by the school hoping to catch a glimpse of her when out walking his dog in the early afternoon. That was when Olya first saw him from the steps and raised her eyebrows. Lara had been inside the school at the time chatting innocently and sharing a harmless conspiracy with Nadya Kologrivova when she noticed him just beyond the gates of the girl's high school and Olya's expression of mingled puzzlement and disgust as she reacted to the incongruousness of his arrival, knowing full well he lived on the other side of town. She knew him as well as Lara, "Komarovsky, the lady-killer" who talked animatedly and a tad lasciviously with the women of the dress shop and let his awful bulldog run wild, wrecking havoc and disturbing the peace. Lara immediately excused herself at this moment as if she were being thrust away by black magic, her face in her hands; corrupted, filthy. Logic could not explain the kind of hold he had over her or what drew her to him. Perhaps she would have been better asking herself what kind of hold she held over him or what drew him to her.
Later that day, the two girlfriends said goodbye coldly, and as she waved goodbye Lara cried to herself, her mind racing with alarm, "She suspects, she suspects!" as she watched Olya elongate into the distance, her winter snow boots kicking up silvery dust in her wake. Above all, Lara's worst fear was that someone would come to a realization that her relationship with Victor was something altogether different from the pure, chaste dependency that people assumed was the case between him and her mother, and the whole house of cards that she had painstakingly built against her will would come crashing down about her, with her being tasked with cleaning up the disaster.
The next day, she will still be angry, thought Lara to herself as she gracefully plowed through the tracks of the trolley buses, her head down and her face wrapped in a black fur muff as she navigated the seedy alleyways where the likhachi prowled, but she won't know quite why; Olya is like that, turning to anger when she feels powerless, afraid, or confused. She will be angry at both of us probably- angry at herself for not being able to reach out to me in my time of need, of being herself so lost when I am trying to navigate the darkness that threatens to overwhelm me. She will be angry at the attorney for entering the sanctuary that she had found within the family Guishar and at Lara for allowing him to stay there- as if she wanted him there! "What could I do?" Lara wanted to shout. As if she had made advances on him! But no, she did allow him to stay there, to remain there firmly in her mind and in her being, to be near her not only physically but mentally and emotionally, to flatter her and bewitch her; hold her and stroke her with velvet caresses, to whisper her name and hold her in his arms while she slept, exhausted from long nights and potent liquors that burned her eyes and seared her throat. She loved his touch, the way he would gently take her hand as if she were a porcelain doll he was afraid of breaking, and so she lay silent.
"Was it love?" she sometimes wondered. No, that was impossible, she told herself. What was love? Was something as vital and simple as strong inexplicable emotion really enough to incite ballads and prose and iambic pentameter? It was all so humiliating, but Lara knew she did not love him, and she knew that when that moment came when she was truly in love, she ought to know. But until then, she would not be left in doubt.
Lara then thought of her dream from the night before where she was buried underground and nothing remained of her except her left side and her right foot, "Black Eyes and White Breast." At this moment she realized she must get home quickly.
She thought of the boys she knew, for she did not know as many as she might have known if her brother Rodya lived at home instead of at the military academy where he was being educated. She thought bitterly for a moment, with a smile on her face, of her brother's affected grin and his emphatic swagger when she and her mother had lasted visited him, when he grew sick from eating too many chocolates that her mother had brought as a present. He was the kind of boy that flew head over heels in and out of love with life, who could gamble away his life's savings in a high-stakes poker match and thereby drink himself blind while threatening suicide the entire evening and waving around his Mauser pistol for all to see and the next morning board a ship to the Dardanelles free from all worries and restraints. Above all though, he was a soldier at heart, virile and red-blooded, raised to be an officer in the Czar's army, who, from a young age, had lived among boys of all shapes and sizes and now was only comfortable sleeping in the heated confines of barracks, comforted by the knowledge that he was safe among numbers. Other than her own brother she knew the proud, straightforward Nikita Dudorov, who hardly gave her a second glance, and whom she knew as Nadya Kologrivova's friend, and Pavel Antipov who had recently moved in with Tiverzina, Olya's grandmother, and her family, on account of the fact that his father had been arrested in connection with a railway strike that had happened not long ago. He, unlike Nikita, was all energy and vivaciousness; she had never met a boy quite like him before. He was slightly younger than her and took a great deal of delight in the few times they had met. Whenever she spoke he seemed enthralled by the words she had to say, and would listen in silent stupor, almost as if he were worshipping her from afar. All in all, he was a good, decent boy to her knowledge, if not a touch too overcome with sensibility. For him, inexplicably, she felt a certain maternal longing, for it seemed a youth with such vivacity and pureness of spirit and mind could not live his life unscathed and unburdened by the pain and misery of life.
Larissa continued drumming on the bench, lost in her thoughts, as if she wanted to recapture the rhythm of the words that she was going to say, when Komarovsky appeared in the distance. He's late five minutes, she noted, consulting with her wristwatch. Five minutes.
"This cannot continue." Of course, it cannot. She thought of everything carefully, each of the arguments, including the one about their age difference. First, Lara thought to mention it first, but could not commit herself to one single idea. In the end, she realized, in all honesty, age had no meaning. Not for Victor.
Larissa spoke carefully harvested phrases- mouthed. Passers-by did not pay attention to her; the bench was placed away from the main avenues of the park, but just in case Larissa whispered unwillingly. She corrected the ribbon in her hair- instinctively, nervously, having nowhere to put her hands. Today it's over, she decided, afraid that if we did not have enough determination, will is not enough, ever.
And so she continued to rap on the bench.
And so a march is played before a battle.
Knocking on the alley pavement came the cane of a Moscow lawyer and Lara almost winced when he appeared before her because Victor Ippolitovich politely raised his hat, just living in the twentieth century, and kissed her by way of greeting.
Because Victor was too experienced an attorney to allow her silly arguments to resist his, he would assuredly clasp her little hands in his and chastise her silly, foolish little head for ever thinking such thoughts before being overtaken by hopeless anguish and groveling at her feet, weeping and insisting that they marry. Of course, she knew this routine all too well and would hardly listen to him.
Because Olga Demina was right, she could not continue, but Larissa was unable to stop it.
Because drummers are the first killed in the folly of gunfire.