In general, Trirodov did not encourage intimacies with people. He found it painful to look with involuntary penetration into the confusion of their dark, foggy souls.
He found himself at ease only in the company of his wife. Love makes kin of souls. But his wife had died a few years ago, when Kirsha was six years old. Kirsha remembered her; he could not forget her, and kept on recalling her. Trirodov for some reason associated his wife’s death with the birth of his son, though there was no obvious connexion: his wife died from a casual, sharp illness. Trirodov thought:
“She bore, and therefore had to die. Life is only for the innocent.”
After her death he always awaited her; there was for him the consoling thought:
“She will come. She will not deceive me. She will give a sign. She will take me with her.”
And life became as easy to bear as a vacillant vision seen in dream.
He loved to look at his wife’s portrait. It was painted by a celebrated English artist and hung in his study. There were also many photographic reproductions of her. It was his joy to muse of her and, musing, to delight in images of her handsome face and her lovely body.
Sometimes his solitude was broken by the intrusion of external life and external, unemotional love. A woman used to come in to him sometimes—a strange, undemanding woman who seemed to come from nowhere and to lead to nowhere. Trirodov had had relations with her for several months. She was an instructress in the local girls’ school, Ekaterina Nikolayevna Alkina—a quiet, tranquil, cold creature with dark red hair and a thin face, the dull pallor of which emphasized the impressively vivid lips of her large mouth; it seemed as if all the sensuality and colour of the face had poured themselves into the lips and made them startlingly and painfully vivid and suggestive of sin. She had married and had parted from her husband. She had a son, who lived with her. She was an S.D.[14] and worked in the organization, but all this was merely incidental in her life. She met Trirodov in party work. Her comrades understood as by some intuition that in order to carry on negotiations with Trirodov, who did not permit himself any intimacy with them, it was necessary to choose this woman.
And now Alkina had come again, and began as always:
“I’ve come on business.”