Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [110]
They had to get milk, mineral water, or soda for him to drink. But it was the height of the street fighting. The gunfire, as well as artillery fire, did not cease for a minute. Even if Yuri Andreevich were to risk his life and venture to make his way through the limits of the area crisscrossed by shooting, beyond the line of fire he would also not find any life, because it had come to a standstill throughout the city until the situation finally defined itself.
But it was already clear. Rumors came from all sides that the workers were gaining the upper hand. There was still resistance from isolated groups of junkers, which were cut off from each other and had lost touch with their commanders.
The Sivtsev neighborhood was within the circle of action of the units of soldiers pressing towards the center from the Dorogomilovo Gate. The soldiers from the German front and adolescent workers sitting in a trench dug in the lane already knew the inhabitants of the nearby houses and exchanged neighborly jokes with them when they peeked through the gates or came outside. Circulation in that part of the city was being restored.
Then Gordon and Nikolai Nikolaevich, who had been stuck at the Zhivagos’ for three days, left their captivity. Yuri Andreevich was glad of their presence during the difficult days of Sashenka’s illness, and Antonina Alexandrovna forgave them the muddle they introduced on top of the general disorder. But in gratitude for the hospitality, both had considered it their duty to entertain the hosts with endless talk, and Yuri Andreevich was so tired of that three-day pouring from empty into void that he was happy to part with them.
8
There was information that they had reached home safely, but precisely this test showed that the talk of a general cessation of hostilities was premature. Military action still went on in various places, it was impossible to cross through various neighborhoods, and the doctor was still unable to get to his hospital, which he had begun to miss and where his Playing at People and scientific writings lay in a drawer in the interns’ room.
Only within separate neighborhoods did people go out in the mornings a short distance from home to buy bread, stopping people carrying milk in bottles and crowding around them, asking where they had gotten it.
Occasionally the shooting resumed all over the city, scattering the public again. Everyone suspected that some sort of negotiations were going on between the sides, the successful or unsuccessful course of which was reflected in the intensifying or weakening of the shrapnel fire.
Once at the end of the old October, around ten o’clock in the evening, Yuri Andreevich was walking quickly down the street, going with no particular need to see a colleague who lived nearby. Those parts, usually lively, were now deserted. He met almost no one.
Yuri Andreevich walked quickly. The first thin snow was dusting down, with a strong and ever-strengthening wind that transformed it before Yuri Andreevich’s eyes into a snowstorm.
Yuri Andreevich was turning from one lane into another and had already lost count of the turns he had made, when the snow suddenly poured down very thickly and a blizzard set in, the kind of blizzard that skims shriekingly over the ground in an open field, and in the city thrashes about in a blind alley like a lost person.
Something similar was taking place in the moral world and in the physical, nearby and far away, on the ground and in the air. Somewhere, in little islands, the last volleys of the broken resistance rang out. Somewhere on the horizon, the weak glow of extinguished fires swelled and popped like bubbles. And the same rings and funnels, driven and whirled by the blizzard, smoked under Yuri Andreevich’s feet on the wet streets and sidewalks.
At one intersection he was overtaken by a paperboy running past with the shout