Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [111]
“Keep the change,” said the doctor. The boy barely managed to separate the damp page stuck to the bundle, thrust it into the doctor’s hands, and vanished into the blizzard as instantly as he had emerged from it.
The doctor went over to a street lamp burning two steps away to look through the headlines at once, without putting it off.
The special issue, printed on one side only, contained an official communiqué from Petersburg about the forming of the Soviet of People’s Commissars, the establishment of soviet power in Russia, and the introduction of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Then came the first decrees of the new power and the publication of various news items transmitted by telegraph and telephone.
The blizzard lashed at the doctor’s eyes and covered the printed lines of the newspaper with gray and rustling granular snow. But that did not hinder his reading. The grandeur and eternity of the moment astounded him and would not let him come to his senses.
Still, in order to finish reading the communiqué, he began to look around in search of some lighted place sheltered from the snow. It turned out that he had again ended up at his charmed intersection and was standing at the corner of Serebryany and Molchanovka, outside a tall five-story house with a glassed-in porch and a spacious, electric-lit entrance.
The doctor went in and, standing under an electric light in the front hall, became absorbed in the telegrams.
Above his head came the sound of footsteps. Someone was coming down the stairs, stopping frequently as if in some hesitation. Indeed, the descending person suddenly changed his mind, turned, and ran back upstairs. Somewhere a door was opened, and two voices poured out in a wave, made so formless by the echo that it was impossible to tell whether they were men’s or women’s. After that the door slammed and the person who had been coming down earlier now started running down much more resolutely.
Yuri Andreevich, who was completely absorbed in his reading, had his eyes lowered to the newspaper. He did not intend to raise them and examine a stranger. But having run all the way down, the latter stopped running. Yuri Andreevich raised his head and looked at him.
Before him stood an adolescent of about eighteen, in a stiff coat of reindeer hide with the fur side out, as they wear them in Siberia, and a hat of the same fur. The boy had a swarthy face with narrow Kirghiz eyes. There was something aristocratic in his face, that fleeting spark, that hidden fineness that seems brought from far away and occurs in people with complex, mixed blood.
The boy was obviously in error, taking Yuri Andreevich for someone else. He looked at the doctor with shy perplexity, as if he knew who he was and simply could not make up his mind to speak. To put an end to this misunderstanding, Yuri Andreevich looked him up and down with a cold gaze, fending off any urge to approach.
The boy became embarrassed and went to the exit without a word. There, glancing back once more, he opened the heavy, shaky door and went out, slamming it with a bang.
About ten minutes later, Yuri Andreevich went out after him. He forgot about the boy and about the colleague he was going to see. He was full of what he had read and headed for home. On his way another circumstance, a mundane trifle, which in those days had immeasurable importance, attracted and absorbed his attention.
A short distance from his house, in the darkness, he stumbled upon a huge heap of boards and logs, dumped across his way on the sidewalk by the edge of the road. Here in the lane there was some institution to which a supply of government fuel had probably been delivered in the form of some dismantled log house from the outskirts. There had not been enough room in the courtyard and so they had also cluttered up the street in front of it. The pile was being guarded by a sentry with a rifle, who paced the yard and from time to time came out into the lane.
Without thinking twice, Yuri Andreevich