Khortiza, February 4, 1920

I suffered a relapse on account of recalling the past. The day before yesterday I began to bring back to memory the troublesome time and to take it down on paper. That set me back. However, today I feel much better again.

I have an unappeasable hunger. But these people have not enough bread even for themselves. Except three persons of this family, all are recovering at present, and we cannot help being constantly possessed by a vexing feeling of appetite. It is the same in the neighbors’ houses and all around us. The Russian peasants feel no obligation to bring any help to the plundered colonists; with very rare exceptions, of course.

I cannot write for very long, so I will pause for a while. This time I want to continue the story from where I stopped the other day.—

After that terrible, almost endless, night came a gray, disconsolate morning. It became daylight in our room. The clock struck nine, and nobody came to look after us. Our room was cold, the window-panes were covered with thick ice-flowers; and yet there was no one among us who was able to make fire in the stove.

Suddenly the idea struck me that I had locked the door the day before, and therefore nobody could enter. Probably more than three times I tried in vain to get up. All objects seemed to be so unstable around me; they seemed even to turn around.

However, necessity and reason appealed to the will power within me and strained the physical forces to their utmost effort.

I succeeded in getting dressed somehow. Then I fumbled about like a giddy person and at last found the way out. Somewhat awkwardly I managed to unlock the door. My imagination traces my figure before me just now: I see how that man, who is I, must have looked while turning the key and pushing the door. I remember how I shuddered when the rush of cold air entering the open door struck me. I recall also well, the strange feeling that came upon me; it was as if I were a stranger, strange to myself. Not reasoning why, I went out of doors along the fence until I reached the next house. I asked whether someone could come to help us. There it was just the same, all were sick except a young girl, and she was not strong. She had recovered the first, but she was very pale yet. She promised, however, to come as soon as she had nursed her family.

I knew that she was promising more than she was able to keep. I left this house to enter the house right next to this one. Two men were busy in the kitchen, the only persons left untouched by the malady. They were frightened when they saw me. Evidently I looked very unlike a healthy man. One of them decided at once to come over with me. He supported me.

As he tried to make a fire he discovered that there were no matches, no fuel. Very resolutely he grasped the first available thing; he broke off a few stakes from the fence, ran home and brought two precious matches, more valuable than a load of diamonds at this time. After that he made a fire. More than two matches they could not spare. You could not buy them anywhere.

Toward noon a colleague entered. He had received my request and tried to help me. He is the man whose wife and daughters I protected in the very first days of the invasion. This man brought me down into the house of his sister, where there was, fortunately, still an empty bed. Since that time I have been lying in this home close to the main street.

In the house there, high up, where I lived before, death has entered. He has taken away both husband and wife. My friend and Marguerite are no more. How cruel it sounds! Bereft of their parents the two girls are left behind with their old, feeble grandmother.

Why just him,—my friend? I would not have given him up if I were to command life and death. He was an artist through and through. A teacher too, such as we seldom find. He had the rare gift of opening the eyes of youth to all that is beautiful. He taught them to see and to feel beauty. He made them able to retain and fix those objects of aesthetic experience by means of drawing, design, and sculpture. Thus he enabled them to conserve what they had seen and experienced in a genial moment.

Upon him very largely rested the hope of the few educated people who professed the belief that through art the realistic-materialistic way of thinking and acting, very common among the colonists in Russia, would progressively develop to an understanding of art, and would, at least, result in a universal spiritual need of art.

Maybe this anticipation was somewhat unwarranted, but it was there. The awakening for art amongst youth is largely the fruit of his work. Can one deny that we needed him? We should have him back. It was a calamity to have him die.—Now, can we really say that? What is our own future? Who is alive still? Are we not all in agony and in the clutches of death?

And yet, he who still lives, does have hope. I at least must try to come again to a belief in a future development. Friend, rest in peace! Your spirit did not die with you.

Is it not miserable to lament and to mourn and to complain? We have the will … oh! these terrible pains in the chest again!—

It is afternoon. That excitement was too much for me. I fell back on the pillows. And yet, there is an unavoidable need for me to give expression, either spoken or written, to these pressing thoughts and these strong emotions.

My friend, who so faithfully and so often paid visits to me during my illness has probably become sick, too. She does not come any more. I am longing for her. Her spirit, her intelligent look, her upright and chaste mind—I miss her! I must write now.

The spotted fever is a malicious malady. Always that terrible high temperature. All kinds of mad ideas pass through one’s mind. And then the long, dark, sleepless nights! Who could forget them? I was always terrified when, soon after three o’clock, night was falling. Had I been able to sleep or had I been delirious, as most people were, time would not have crept so slowly. Often I was lying there and could not make out the situation. One time it seemed to me as if one part of my body did not belong to me and thus enraged and molested me. Sometimes the legs did not belong to me; or again, the body up to the chest was not mine. Those are the symptoms of the spotted fever.