Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [105]
“I don’t know if the people themselves will rise and move like a wall, or if everything will be done in their name. An event of such enormity does not call for dramatic proofs. I’ll believe it without that. It’s petty to rummage around for the causes of cyclopean events. They don’t have any. Domestic squabbles have their genesis, and after so much pulling each other’s hair and smashing of dishes, no one can figure out who first began it. But everything truly great is without beginning, like the universe. It does not emerge, but is suddenly there, as if it always existed or fell from the sky.
“I also think that Russia is destined to become the first realm of socialism since the existence of the world. When that happens, it will stun us for a long time, and, coming to our senses, we will no longer get back the memory we have lost. We will forget part of the past and will not seek explanations for the unprecedented. The new order will stand around us, with the accustomedness of the forest on the horizon or the clouds over our heads. It will surround us everywhere. There will be nothing else.”
He said something more and by then had sobered up completely. But, as before, he did not hear very well what was being said around him, and his answers were beside the point. He saw manifestations of general love for him, but was unable to drive away the sorrow that made him not himself. And so he said:
“Thank you, thank you. I see your feelings. I don’t deserve them. But you shouldn’t love so sparingly and hurriedly, as if fearing you’ll have to love more strongly later.”
They all laughed and applauded, taking it for a deliberate witticism, while he did not know where to escape from the sense of impending misfortune, from the awareness of his powerlessness over the future, despite all his thirst for the good and capacity for happiness.
The guests were leaving. They all had long faces from fatigue. Yawning opened and closed their jaws, making them look like horses.
As they were saying good-bye, they drew the window curtain aside. Threw open the window. A yellowish dawn appeared, a wet sky covered with dirty, sallow clouds.
“There must have been a thunderstorm while we were blathering,” somebody said.
“I got caught in the rain on my way here. Barely made it,” confirmed Shura Schlesinger.
In the deserted and still-dark lane they could hear the sound of drops dripping from the trees, alternating with the insistent chirping of drenched sparrows.
There was a roll of thunder, like a plow drawing a furrow across the whole of the sky, and everything grew still. But then four resounding, belated booms rang out, like big potatoes dumped from a shovelful of loose soil in autumn.
The thunder cleared the space inside the dusty, smoke-filled room. Suddenly, like electrical elements, the component parts of existence became tangible—water and air, the desire for joy, earth, and sky.
The lane became filled with the voices of the departing guests. They went on loudly discussing something outside, exactly as they had just been wrangling about it in the house. The voices moved off, gradually dying down and dying out.
“So late,” said Yuri Andreevich. “Let’s go to bed. Of all the people in the world, I love only you and papa.”
5
August passed, September was coming to an end. The unavoidable was imminent. Winter was drawing near, and so, in the human world, was the foreordained, like winter’s swoon, which hung in the air and was on everyone’s lips.
They had to prepare for the cold, stock up on food, firewood. But in the days of the triumph of materialism, matter turned into a concept, food and firewood were replaced by the provision and fuel question.
People in the cities were