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My mother had been ill for a long time with stubborn influenza, complicated with bronchitis. For two months, with a few brief intervals, she had been stupefied by fever and by the enervating sweats which came on when her temperature fell. Her sleep was disturbed by nightmares and she would call out to me in a terror that did not leave even when I had wakened her or when she had told me her dream and I had talked soothingly to her. The dreams pursued her even in her lucid moments and she would fall to weeping because the room had taken on the appearance of the cave she had seen last night or because, superimposed upon my face, was a word of Russian written in huge black letters, or because the bed was intolerably filthy to her since a few hours ago, two colossal tomcats had relieved themselves there. I suppose her dreams tarried exceptionally long because of the fever which could construct a complete hallucination from the barest materials: a piece of lint on the counterpane could swell and shape itself into the mammoth cats, or, vice versa, the cats of the dream could be reduced to a piece of lint. Her whole life was a fantasy, whether she was awake or asleep. If by chance her mind cleared and the objects about her righted themselves, it was not because she had recovered her senses, but that pain had driven the delusions away. Then she lay gasping, pressing her hand against the place in her chest that ached and burned from her shattering cough, and what she saw then: the bleak features of her impoverished room, my face ashen from the glare of the snow-light, the snow itself outside the uncurtained windows, these things were worse than her imagined tormentors and she would tell me to draw the blinds and light a lamp, do anything to change the scene of her suffering, to divert her for a few minutes at least.

Chief of her nightmares was one in which Ivan appeared to her. Often, when I wakened her, she would mistake me for him. She would shrink away and breathe, “You’re dead!” Invariably, after this exclamation, she would be seized with a violent attack of coughing which even her syrup would not soothe. I could hear the tortured rasping of her breath between the barks, and if any ease came at all, she used it up in moaning, “Oh, God! I can’t breathe!” It was no doubt only coincidence that made her suffer particularly after dreaming of Ivan, but I believed, half superstitiously, that she was being punished in her own heart. She often spoke of him and of Varenka, and whenever she heard the foghorns, every muscle in her body tensed and between clenched teeth she said, “It is down where they are, wrapped in seaweed.” Who “they” were she could not or would not tell me. And she thought his hair had grown long and that his nails had pierced through his shroud. “I can see him, Sonie,” she mourned. “His little body, swish, swish with the waves, just like Varenka. Oh, Merciful Mother! Oh, mertvoye ditya!” The Russian words, “the dead child,” were uttered with an elegiac languor, implicit in the syllables themselves.