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The nature of friendship is different from that of love. It is easy to love for no reason; difficult to love for some reason. Friendship is not so irresponsible, although there is an element of the mystic in friendship too. I know what drew Pavlik to me and what he meant to me at the beginning of our friendship, but as the years went by we became enveloped in such a warmth of feeling that there was no place for rational analysis.

Pavlik was a “cerebral” boy. Of all the book heroes I know, he most resembled Jude the Obscure, with his irresistible longing for books and learning, with his constant thirst for knowledge. Pavlik’s family did not supply him with intellectual nourishment. His father was a watch-maker, whose left eye was made wide and watery from constantly screwing a magnifying glass to it. Nothing in the world was of interest to him except watches and clocks. It is only in fairy-tales that watch-makers are imbued with an air of romanticism and benevolent oddity. Surely, it is thought, one who deals professionally with the mystery of time must not be like ordinary mortals. Pavlik’s father repaired seconds, minutes and hours,
but he himself lived outside of time, untouched by the affairs and interests evolving within it. True, when he was in good spirits he would recall with pleasure that he had once seen the excellent play Mr. Cabalsky and Love. Pavlik would turn pale when his father trespassed on such territory.

His mother made the impression that she had never heard of the invention of the printing-press. This was the more extraordinary in that her two brothers were eminent scientists, one a chemist, the other a biologist. She did not keep in touch with them (or perhaps they with her). She seemed to go about in this world without having quite awakened from the dark sleep of non-existence: a soft voice, a detached gaze, languid movements, little contact with other people. She reduced the cares of life to a minimum. Pavlik did everything in his power to avoid being drawn into her small world, allowing his younger brother to enjoy all the maternal solicitude that was available. On rare occasions she too had an urge: she would push the revolving stool closer to the piano and disturb the keys with listless fingers, closing her white eyelids which were as thin as the membrane of a bird’s eye. At such moments Pavlik would turn as pale as when his father made his cultural sallies.

In my family, everybody exercised their brains, perhaps more than was desirable. We made a cult of books: grandfather collected scientific books, father technical ones, mother and I went in for fiction and memoirs. Violating the injunction that literature should be read but not discussed, we talked about it day and night. It would have been strange if, brought up in such an atmosphere, I had not become a book lover. I was saved from becoming a book worm only by the sinister lure of the streets and of the Akulovs’ country place. The culture of our home was as essential to Pavlik as food and drink.

My communication with him gave me something of more importance. He was always Athos when we boys played The Three Musketeers, and he was like Athos: impeccable in his conduct at all times regardless of circumstances.

With every year we became closer and more essential to each other. As we reached adolescence we were both oppressed by the uncertainty of what we wanted to become. This question arose in our minds long before life faced us with the necessity of answering it. We both wanted to be actors and not walkers—on on life’s stage. Other boys with marked talent already knew what path they should choose. Mathematics itself singled out Slava Zubkov; music: Tolka Simakov; painting: Sergei Lepkovsky, sport: Arsenov. Others who were not dominated by a talent that asserted itself at an early age at least knew the approximate field in which they wished to develop themselves: technology, medicine, teaching or building. Many of our schoolmates lived from day to day without troubling themselves about the future; they limited their interests to the daily round of school, soccer, movies and girls, letting the morrow take care of itself.
We could not content ourselves with such a vegetative sort of existence. Uncertainty oppressed us. Both of us did equally well in all our subjects, taking a passionate interest in none. Reading is a passive passion, one cannot make a vocation of reading any more than of going to the theatre or visiting museums. We were interested in everything. Now as I look back on those days I can see that we both were destined to serve Apollo rather than the sterner gods, yet we preferred attending scientific lectures by academicians Lazarev and Vavilov to going to plays and concerts. We were in search of ourselves. Pavlik was the one who led the search. It was he who decided we ought to make shoe polish. His uncle, the one who became an eminent chemist, began with making shoe polish; this led him to making something so extraordinary that he immediately became famous. Our efforts did not have such a glorious ending though we did our best, as testified by the pungent odour of blacking paste that pervaded the whole flat. We placated the other tenants by shining their shoes for them gratis, even shining Foma Zubtsov’s high boots. Father laughed and said it was not Lavoisier but Rockefeller, who began with shining shoes. We did not even rise to a Rockefeller. Our paste did not polish, and, what was worse, it came off, leaving nasty smudges on everything the polished boot touched. Foma Zubtsov always had his boots repolished by the shine on the corner of Krivokolenny Lane.