Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [103]
The two men constantly exclaimed and rushed about the room, clutching their heads from the faultlessness of each other’s conjectures, or went to the window and silently drummed on the glass with their fingers, amazed at the proofs of mutual understanding.
So it was at their first meeting, but later the doctor saw Nikolai Nikolaevich several times in company, and among people he was different, unrecognizable.
He was aware of being a visitor in Moscow and had no wish to part with that awareness. Whether he considered Petersburg or some other place his home remained unclear. He was flattered by the role of political fine talker and society charmer. He may have imagined that political salons would be opened in Moscow as in Paris at Mme Roland’s before the Convention.5
He called on his lady friends, hospitable dwellers in quiet Moscow lanes, and most sweetly mocked them and their husbands for their halfway thinking and backwardness, for the habit of judging everything by their own parochial standards. And he now flaunted his newspaper erudition, just as he once had with the Apocrypha and Orphic texts.
It was said that he had left a new young passion behind in Switzerland, half-finished business, a half-written book, and that he would merely dip himself into the stormy whirlpool of the fatherland, and then, if he came up unharmed, would flit off to his Alps again and be seen no more.
He was for the Bolsheviks and often mentioned two left SR names6 as being of one mind with him: the journalist writing under the pseudonym of Miroshka Pomor, and the essayist Sylvia Coterie.
Alexander Alexandrovich grumblingly reproached him:
“It’s simply dreadful how low you’ve sunk, Nikolai Nikolaevich! These Miroshkas of yours. What a pit! And then you’ve got this Lydia Could-be.”
“Coterie,” Nikolai Nikolaevich corrected. “And it’s Sylvia.”
“Well, it’s all the same. Could-be or Potpourri, we won’t stick at words.”
“Sorry, but all the same it’s Coterie,” Nikolai Nikolaevich patiently insisted. He and Alexander Alexandrovich exchanged such speeches as:
“What are we arguing about? It’s simply a shame to have to demonstrate such truths. It’s like ABC. The main mass of people have led an unthinkable existence for centuries. Take any history book. Whatever it’s called, feudalism, or serfdom, or capitalism and factory industry, the unnaturalness and injustice of such an order have long been noted, and the revolution has long been prepared that will lead the people towards the light and put everything in its place.
“You know that a partial renovation of the old is unsuitable here, what’s needed is to break it radically. Maybe that will cause the building to collapse. Well, what of it? Just because it’s frightening, it doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. It’s a question of time. How can you argue against that?”
“Eh, that’s not the point. I’m not talking about that, am I?” Alexander Alexandrovich would get angry and the argument would flare up.
“Your Potpourris and Miroshkas are people without conscience. They say one thing and do another. And then, too, where’s the logic here? There’s no coherence. No, wait, I’ll show you right now.”
And he would start looking for some magazine with a contrary article, pulling open his desk drawers and slamming them shut, and rousing his eloquence with this noisy fussing about.
Alexander Alexandrovich liked to be hampered by something when he talked, so that the impediment would justify his mumbling pauses, his hems and haws. Loquaciousness would come over him while he was searching for something he had lost, for instance, when he was looking for his second galosh in the semidarkness of the front hall, or when he was standing on the bathroom threshold with a towel over his shoulder, or as he was passing a heavy platter across the table, or while he was pouring