Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [100]
It was a vacated storeroom of the late Anna Ivanovna. In former times, she used to pile broken tables and chairs and unnecessary old waste paper in it. Here was her family archive; here, too, were the trunks in which winter things were put away for the summer. When the late woman was alive, every corner of the room was heaped up to the ceiling, and ordinarily no one was allowed into it. But for big holidays, on days of crowded children’s gatherings, when they were allowed to horse around and run all over the upper floor, this room, too, was unlocked, and they played robbers in it, hid under the tables, painted their faces with burnt cork, and dressed up in costumes.
For some time the doctor stood recalling all this, and then he went down to the entryway for the wicker hamper he had left there.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Nyusha, a timid and bashful girl, squatting down, was plucking the duck over a spread-out newspaper in front of the stove. At the sight of Yuri Andreevich with a heavy thing in his hands, she turned bright red, straightened up in a supple movement, shaking off the feathers stuck to her apron, and, having greeted him, offered her help. But the doctor thanked her and said he would carry the hamper himself.
He had just entered Anna Ivanovna’s former storeroom, when, from two or three rooms away, his wife called to him:
“You can come, Yura!”
He went to Sashenka.
The present nursery was situated in his and Tonya’s former schoolroom. The boy in the little bed turned out to be not at all as pretty as the photos portrayed him, but on the other hand he was the very image of Yuri Andreevich’s mother, the late Marya Nikolaevna Zhivago, a striking copy of her, resembling her more than any of the surviving portraits.
“This is papa, this is your papa, wave to papa,” Antonina Alexandrovna kept saying, as she lowered the side of the bed so that the father could more easily embrace the boy and pick him up.
Sashenka allowed the unfamiliar and unshaven man, who probably frightened and repelled him, to come close, and when he bent down, abruptly stood up, clutched his mother’s blouse, swung and angrily slapped him in the face. His own boldness so terrified Sashenka that he immediately threw himself onto his mother’s breast, buried his face in her dress, and burst into bitter, inconsolable child’s tears.
“Pooh, pooh,” Antonina Alexandrovna chided him. “You mustn’t do that, Sashenka. Papa will think Sasha bad, Sasha no-no. Show papa how you kiss. Kiss him. Don’t cry, you mustn’t cry, what is it, silly?”
“Leave him alone, Tonya,” the doctor asked. “Don’t torment him, and don’t be upset yourself. I know what kind of foolishness gets into your head. That it’s not by chance, that it’s a bad sign. It’s all such nonsense. And so natural. The boy’s never seen me. Tomorrow he’ll get used to me, there’ll be no tearing him away from me.”
But he himself left the room quite downcast, with a sense of foreboding.
4
In the course of the next few days it became clear how alone he was. He did not blame anyone for that. Evidently he himself had wanted it and achieved it.
His friends had become strangely dull and colorless. None of them had held on to his own world, his own opinion. They were much brighter in his memories. Apparently he had overestimated them earlier.
As long as the order of things had allowed the well-to-do to be whimsical and eccentric at the expense of the deprived, how easy it had been to mistake for a real face and originality that whimsicality and the right to idleness which the minority enjoyed while the majority suffered!
But as soon as the lower strata arose and the privileges of the upper strata were abolished, how quickly everyone faded, how unregretfully they parted with independent thinking, which none of them, evidently, had ever had!
Now the only people who were close to Yuri Andreevich were those without phrases and pathos—his wife and father-in-law, and two or three