Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [101]
The evening with the duck and the alcohol had taken place in its time, as planned, on the second or third day after his arrival, once he had had time to see everyone invited, so that it was not their first meeting.
The fat duck was an unheard-of luxury in those already hungry times, but there was no bread to go with it, and that made the magnificence of the food pointless, so that it was even irritating.
Gordon brought the alcohol in a pharmaceutical bottle with a ground-glass stopper. Alcohol was a favorite medium of exchange for black marketeers. Antonina Alexandrovna did not let the bottle out of her hands and diluted the alcohol in small quantities, as it was needed, by inspiration, making it now too strong, now too weak. It turned out that an uneven drunkenness from changing concentrations was much worse than from a strong but consistent one. That, too, was annoying.
The saddest thing of all was that their party represented a deviation from the conditions of the time. It was impossible to imagine that in the houses across the lane people were eating and drinking in the same way at such an hour. Beyond the window lay mute, dark, hungry Moscow. Her food stores were empty, and people had even forgotten to think of such things as game and vodka.
And thus it turned out that the only true life is one that resembles the life around us and drowns in it without leaving a trace, that isolated happiness is not happiness, so that a duck and alcohol, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are even not alcohol and a duck at all. That was the most distressing thing.
The guests also brought on joyless reflections. Gordon had been fine as long as he had thought heavily and explained things morosely and incoherently. He had been Yuri Andreevich’s best friend. He had been liked in high school.
But now he had come to dislike himself and had begun to introduce unfortunate corrections in his moral image. He bucked himself up, played the merry fellow, told stories all the time with a pretense to wit, and often said “How entertaining” and “How amusing”—words not in his vocabulary, because Gordon had never understood life as a diversion.
Before Dudorov’s arrival he told a funny—as it seemed to him—story about Dudorov’s marriage, which circulated among friends. Yuri Andreevich did not know it.
It turned out that Dudorov had been married for about a year, and then separated from his wife. The unlikely salt of the adventure consisted in the following.
Dudorov had been drafted into the army by mistake. While he served and waited for the misunderstanding to be clarified, he was most often on punishment duty for gawkishness and for not saluting officers in the street. Long after he was discharged, his arm would jerk up at the sight of an officer, and he went around as if dazzled, seeing epaulettes everywhere.
In that period, he did everything out of place, committed various blunders and false steps. Precisely at that time he supposedly made the acquaintance, on a Volga landing, of two girls, sisters, who were waiting for the same boat, and, as if absentmindedly, owing to the multitude of officers flashing about, with vestiges of his soldierly saluting still alive, not watching himself, he fell in love by oversight and hastily made the younger sister a proposal. “Amusing, isn’t it?” asked Gordon. But he had to cut short his description. The voice of the story’s hero was heard outside the door. Dudorov came into the room.
With him the opposite change had taken place. The former unstable and extravagant featherbrain had turned into a concentrated scholar.
When he was expelled from school in his youth for participating in the preparation of a political escape, he spent some time wandering through various art schools, but in the end washed up on the classical shore. Dudorov finished university later than his peers, during wartime, and was kept on in two departments, Russian and general history. For the first he was writing something about the land policy of Ivan the Terrible, for the