VI
Soon after that my thoughts are adrift, my recollections grow confused. I see my mother with my baby in her arms, and myself in traveling attire, with my arms twined about them, weeping, despairing, refusing to leave them and set out on a journey of Vassili's planning. But Vassili grows impatient. Vassili grows angry. He is tired of playing the papa, tired of seeing me no longer a little “firebrand,” but calm as a young Madonna in the beatific purity of motherhood.
Vassili has taken it into his head that he wants to study singing. He has made up his mind to go to Italy, to Milan, to study scales and exercises; and I must go with him.
“But our baby, Vassili, our little Tioka! We must take our baby with us!”
No. Vassili does not want babies. He does not want to be bothered or hindered. “We are carting about eight trunks as it is!” he says, cynically.
And so we start for Italy—Italy, the yearned-for goal of all my girlish dreams.
At Milan Vassili sings. I seem always to see him with his handsome mouth open, singing scales and arpeggios. But a slow poison is creeping through my blood and I fall ill, ill with typhoid fever.
Again my thoughts go adrift and my recollections are confused. They dance in grotesque and hideous visions through my brain. I see livid hallucinated faces peering at me, towers and mountains tottering above me, undefined horrors all about me, and in the midst of them all I see Vassili—singing! He sings scales and arpeggios with his rounded open mouth. Now I can see a white spider—no, two white spiders—running about on a scarlet coverlet.... They are my hands. They frighten me. And Vassili is singing.
“Vassili, why are you singing? Don't sing! Don't sing!”