Entry 12

12.


Millions of those who fell for their countries in Europe and Asia
paved the way for a general depreciation of life; human existence
has no more value. For years they were killing people on the battle
fields. It is justified.... They were killing lately, in Russia,
officers (for the reason that they were such.) It can be understood:
the crazy mob is not responsible. But what can one think of murders?
For reasons unknown to the murdered, and perhaps to the murderers.
Here are the results of three years of war, the results of three
hundred years of slavery.

Maroossia read the news of Mikhalovsky's accident in the papers in
Tula, and came yesterday.

"Nothing could stop me," she said, crying bitterly, and leaning on me
so that I would not be too angry. "Dearest, everything is so strange!
Misha's death, and Boris Platonovich's death!... Please, let us go
away somewhere, I cannot think of you, here alone...."

I told her that I had made arrangements to resign, and why it could
not be done yet. "Then," I said, "we will go to Gurzoof, where our
house is rotting without care". I succeeded in calming the poor girl,
explaining with all of the eloquence that I had, that Misha's suicide
and Mikhalovsky's accident in the lift had nothing in common, and that
both deaths were not to be put in the same angle of view.

Later she showed me a postal card from Misha, from Vyborg. He did not
sign it, but his characteristic handwriting spoke only too clearly.
"Wanted to send you some fruit," he wrote, "but here there is no
fruit, so you'll have to get some yourself from the South."

"Poor Misha, there was something strange about him before he killed
himself," she said. "I never asked him for any fruit. He was very
nervous, the poor boy, I see it! And to think that almost in his last
hour he thought of us!..."

Fruit from the south.... I see Misha's dead hand pointing to us the
way out of Petrograd. It is a warning, a cipher warning from the other
side of the grave; one more inducement to leave this filthy place.