Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [109]
Yuri Andreevich drove them all to the other rooms and opened the vent window. He took half the wood out of the stove and made space among the rest for little chips and birch-bark kindling.
Fresh air burst through the vent window. The curtain swayed and billowed up. A few papers flew off the desk. The wind slammed some far-off door and, whirling in all the corners, began, like a cat after a mouse, to chase what was left of the smoke.
The wood caught fire, blazed up, and began to crackle. The little stove choked on the flames. Red-hot circles glowed on its iron body like the rosy spots on a consumptive’s cheeks. The smoke in the room thinned out and then disappeared altogether.
The room became brighter. The windows, which Yuri Andreevich had recently sealed on the prosector’s instructions, began to weep. The putty gave off a wave of warm, greasy smell. The firewood sawed into small pieces and drying around the stove also gave off a smell: of bitter, throat-chafing, tarry fir bark, and damp, fresh aspen, fragrant as toilet water.
Just then, as impetuously as the wind through the vent, Nikolai Nikolaevich burst into the room with news:
“There’s fighting in the streets. Military action is going on between the junkers who support the Provisional Government and the garrison soldiers who are for the Bolsheviks. There are skirmishes at almost every step, there’s no counting the centers of the uprising. I fell into scraps two or three times on my way here, once at the corner of Bolshaya Dmitrovka, and again by the Nikitsky Gate. There’s no direct route anymore, you have to go roundabout. Hurry, Yura! Get dressed and let’s go. You’ve got to see this. It’s history. It happens once in a lifetime.”
But he himself went on babbling for about two hours, then they sat down to dinner, and when he got ready to go home and was dragging Yuri Andreevich with him, Gordon’s arrival prevented them. He came flying in just as Nikolai Nikolaevich had done, with the same news.
But meanwhile events had moved ahead. There were new details. Gordon spoke about the intensified gunfire and the killing of passersby, accidentally struck by stray bullets. According to his words, traffic in the city had come to a standstill. By a miracle, he had gotten through to their lane, but the way back had closed behind him.
Nikolai Nikolaevich would not listen and tried to poke his nose outside, but came back after a minute. He said you could not go out into the lane, that there were bullets whistling through it, knocking bits of brick and plaster off the corners. There was not a soul in the streets; communication by the sidewalks was broken.
During those days Sashenka caught a cold.
“I’ve told you a hundred times not to put the child near the hot stove,” Yuri Andreevich said angrily. “Overheating is forty times more harmful than cold.”
Sashenka had a sore throat and developed a high fever. His distinctive quality was a supernatural, mystical fear of nausea and vomiting, the approach of which he imagined every moment.
Pushing aside Yuri Andreevich’s hand with the laryngoscope, he would not let him put it down his throat, closed his mouth, shouted and choked. No persuading or threatening worked. Suddenly by inadvertence Sashenka yawned widely and sweetly, and the doctor profited from the moment, with a lightning movement put the spoon into his son’s mouth, pressed his tongue down, and managed to get a glimpse of Sashenka’s raspberry-colored throat and swollen tonsils covered with white spots. Yuri Andreevich was alarmed by the look of them.
A little later, by way of a similar sleight of hand, the doctor managed to take a smear from Sashenka’s throat. Alexander Alexandrovich had his own microscope. Yuri Andreevich took it and carried out a makeshift analysis. Luckily, it was not diphtheria.
But on the third night, Sashenka had an attack of false croup. He was burning up and suffocating. Yuri Andreevich could