Chapter 11

Yuri, knowing perfectly well that his wife had been with another man -- and even knowing where -- nevertheless spent the next day pretending he basked in blissful ignorance. Do not rush to laugh at him or condemn him. Do you think you are better? The good intentions by which we hide what we know from one another are manifold. Tact, pity, love, calculation, magnanimity, emotional comfort ... Does one spouse always want to know everything about the other? And once they know, do they always want to lay it all out? Or, knowing that the other knows something, do they want to hear it spoken aloud? What is left unsaid is never admitted into existence and, in part, does not exist. So many family land mines lie buried and unspoken ... well, now one more had appeared -- let us forget it.

But Yuri did feel like walking through the city alone, which was unlike him. Annette was surprised, but said nothing; after all, she herself had supposedly gone walking the night before.

... Yuri was proud to belong to the great capital. To be part of such a city was magnificent. Yuri looked around, trying to distract himself from thoughts of his unfaithful wife.

Sometimes the only way not to go mad is to stop thinking about the thing that is driving you mad. Yuri decided to cure himself with the beauty of City of B.

That city ... so enormous! As though it had not been built by people at all, but by some ancient Cyclopes, and made for Cyclopes too: streets too broad for small human beings, houses too tall, everything too solemn for ordinary life -- granite, marble, gold. Pride swelled in Yuri’s chest at being a particle of it, a citizen of the capital, belonging to that ancient might, that force capable of raising all this up! It was enough to walk downtown to feel for yourself: we are not some kind of trash, not rootless scum -- we stand on the shoulders of titans from the past, and those titans look down on us from the half-dark with tenderness -- and with demands.