The Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers Read Online Free Page B

disappeared into darkness. They met and separated, they fell and rose. All this moved slowly in a circle, like the stars, with the cautious gyrations of giants, missing disaster by a hair’s-breadth, ever worried about the preservation of the earth. These complicated motions were accompanied by a steady and powerful echo that was inaudible to human ears, but which was aware of everything. It watched them with eagle eyes, dark and dumb. It held a grand parade. Thus are the Urals built, built and rebuilt.
    She returned for a moment to the compartment and shut her eyes to the dazzling light. Her mother was talking and laughing with the fat man. Seryozha was sliding back and forth on the red plush seat, holding on to a leather strap fastened to the wall. Her mother spat out the last fruit pulp into her hand, swept away the pips that had fallen on her dress, leaned over lithely and tossed the debris under the seat. The fat man, contrary to all expectation, had a hoarse, cracked voice. He obviously suffered from asthma. Her mother introduced Zhenya to him, and he gave her a tangerine. He was comical and probably good-natured. Time and again he raised his pudgy hand to his mouth when he spoke. His voice rose, suddenly sounded strained and was abruptly cut off. It turned out that he lived in Yekaterinburg, had traveled all over the Urals and knew them very well. When he took his gold watch out of his waistcoat pocket, held it close to his nose and put it back, Zhenya saw that he had good-natured fingers. Like all fat men he did things with an air, as though he were giving them away, and his hand sighed all the time, as if offered for a kiss, and swayed softly in the air, as if it were bouncing a ball on the ground. “It will soon be here,” he murmured and turned his squinting gaze away from Seryozha, at whom he had just glanced, and smiled broadly.
    â€œYou know, the frontier post between Asia and Europe. Asia is written on it,” bubbled Seryozha. He slid quickly from his seat and ran into the corridor.
    Zhenya didn’t understand what he meant, and when the fat man tried to explain it to her, she, too, ran out to wait for the signpost; she was afraid that she had already missed it. In her bewitched head the “frontier of Asia” became a fantastic borderline, like the iron bars which establish a danger zone between the public and a cage full of mountain lions, a zone as black as night and smelling of danger. She waited for this post as for the raising of the curtain on the first act of a geographical tragedy of which she had heard fabulous things from people who had seen it; she felt triumphant because now she would see it with her own eyes.
    Meanwhile, the monotony which had driven her back to the grownups in the compartment, returned. The gray alders, which they had been passing for half an hour, seemed endless, and nature appeared to be making no preparations for what was about to happen. Zhenya was annoyed with boring, dusty Europe, which lazily delayed the appearance of the miracle. And how startled she was when, almost simultaneously with Seryozha’s wild cry, something like a tombstone flitted by the window, turned its other side to them and carried off the longed-for, fairy-tale name deep into the pursuing alders. As if by previous agreement, countless heads shot out of the windows of the compartments of all classes, while a cloud of dust swirled around the train, which was whizzing down a slope. It had already traveled dozens of miles into Asia, but kerchiefs still fluttered over darting heads, and clean-shaven and bearded faces still looked out as they flew along on clouds of sound, past the dusty alders which had been European a short time ago but were now Asiatic.

4
    A new life began. The milk was not brought to the house and into the kitchen by a milkwoman; Ulyasha brought it in every morning in two pails attached to a yoke. The rolls, too, tasted different from those at Perm. The