“They shot my brother for a red,” Vanka would answer, pulling the hairs. “They threw him into prison, and my sister took him his food. One day our father was also arrested, then she took two dinner pails instead of one. Once she heard a noise, it sounded like a shot, and our father returned her one of the pails. They say he looked up at her like a man who is gazed at over the shoulder.” He had told the tale often, adding: “My sister became almost bald later on, yet she was a handsome woman; the students used to come to her chambers to hear her talk.”
At such times Louis-Georges would excuse himself and shut himself up to write, in a large and scrawling hand, letters to his aunts with some of Vanka’s phrases in them.
Sometimes Vera Sovna would come in to watch him, lifting her ruffles, raising her brows. Too, she would turn and look for a long time at Vanka who returned her look with cold persistence, the way of a man who is afraid, who does not approve, and yet who likes.
She would stand with her back to the fireplace, her high heels a little apart, tapping the stretched silk of her skirt, saying:
“You will ruin your eyes,” adding: “Vanka, won’t you stop him?”
She seldom got answers to her remarks. Louis-Georges would continue, grunting at her, to be sure, and smiling, but never lifting his eyes: and as for Vanka he would stand there, catching the sheets of paper as they were finished.
Finally Louis-Georges would push back his chair, saying: “Come, we will have tea.”
In the end he fell into a slow illness. It attacked his limbs, he was forced to walk with a cane. He complained of his heart, but he persisted in going out to look at the horses, to the barn to amuse Vera Sovna, swaying a little as he watched the slow-circling flies, sniffing the pleasant odours of cow’s milk and dung.
He still had plans for the haying season, for his crops, but he gave them over to his farm hands, who, left to themselves, wandered aimlessly home at odd hours.
About six months later he took to his bed.