II

Since the funeral, their little house had fallen into silence. That was not the quiet, which is just the absence of sound, but silence—when those who keeps it could talk but they won’t. This was Fr. Ignaty’s thought each time he entered his wife’s bedroom to meet the tenacious look, so heavy that the air seemed turning into lead and weighing down onto his head and shoulders. This was his thought when he looked at his daughter’s musical notations with her voice within them, her books, and her portrait—the large painting of her she had brought from St. Petersburg. When contemplating the portrait, Fr. Ignaty got used to begin with its highlighted, painted cheek, imagining the scratch he saw on Vera’s dead one, unable to figure out where it had come from. Each time he pondered the reasons; had it been from the train, the train would have crashed the head, but the head of dead Vera was fully unharmed.

Maybe someone’s boot hit it, or a fingernail, by accident, when they took the body away?

It was scary though, thinking at length of the detail of Vera’s death, and Fr. Ignaty would move to the portrait’s eyes. They were black, beautiful, with long lashes casting a thick shadow, so the whites seemed even brighter, and the eyes looked held in a black mourning frame. It was strange, the expression an unknown but talented artist gave them—as though a thin, translucent film was placed between the eyes and what they were looking at. It was a bit like that invisible, delicate layer of summer dust sitting on top of a black grand piano, soothing the shine of the polished wood. And however Fr. Ignaty displayed the portrait, the eyes followed him relentlessly, but spoke of nothing, keeping silence, and their silence was so clear that it seemed audible. Eventually, Fr. Ignaty began to think that he could hear silence.

Every morning after the service, Fr. Ignaty would come into the living-room, take in with a single look the empty cage and the familiar furniture, sit down in an armchair, close his eyes, and listen to the house being silent. It was something strange. The cage kept silence quietly and gently, some sadness in it, and tears, and the distant, forever gone laugh. The silence of his wife, soothed by the walls, was tenacious, lead-heavy, and frightful—so frightful that the hottest day made Fr. Ignaty freeze. Lingering, cold like grave, and mysterious like death was the silence of his daughter. It seemed tormented itself, that silence, longing to turn into a word, but something strong and dumb, like a machine, kept it still and draw it out, like a wire. And somewhere at the far end, the wire would start vibrating and tingling quietly, meek and piteous. Fr. Ignaty, joyful and scared, would catch the incipient sound and waited for it to come closer, holding on to the armrests and craning his neck. But the sound would snap and fell silent.

“Nonsense!” Fr. Ignaty would say, annoyed, and he would get up from the armchair, still straight and tall.

Through the window, he could see the sunlit square, paved with round, even cobble, along with the blind stone wall of a long shed across it. A cabby waited at the corner, looking like a clay statue, and why he was there with no one passing by for hours remain unknown.