Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [113]
These people controlled everything as the program dictated, and enterprise after enterprise, association after association became Bolshevik.
The Krestovozdvizhensky Hospital was now called the Second Reformed. Changes took place in it. Some of the personnel were fired, but many left on their own, finding the job unprofitable. These were well-paid doctors with a fashionable practice, darlings of society, phrase mongers and fine talkers. They did not fail to present their leaving out of mercenary considerations as a demonstration from civic motives, and they began to behave slightingly towards those who stayed, all but to boycott them. Zhivago was one of those scorned ones who stayed.
In the evenings the following conversations would take place between husband and wife:
“Don’t forget to go to the basement of the Medical Society on Wednesday for frozen potatoes. There are two sacks there. I’ll find out exactly what time I’ll be free, so that I can help you. We must do it together on a sled.”
“All right. There’s no rush, Yurochka. You should go to bed quickly. It’s late. The chores won’t all get done anyway. You need rest.”
“There’s a widespread epidemic. General exhaustion weakens resistance. It’s frightening to look at you and papa. Something must be done. Yes, but what precisely? We’re not cautious enough. We must be more careful. Listen. Are you asleep?”
“No.”
“I’m not afraid for myself, I’m sturdy enough, but if, contrary to all expectation, I should come down with something, please don’t be silly and keep me at home. Take me to the hospital instantly.”
“What are you saying, Yurochka! God help you. Why croak of doom?”
“Remember, there are neither honest people nor friends anymore. Still less anyone knowledgeable. If something happens, trust only Pichuzhkin. If he himself stays in one piece, of course. Are you asleep?”
“No.”
“The devils, they went where the rations are better, and now it turns out it was civic feelings, principles. We meet, and they barely shake hands. ‘You work with them?’ And they raise their eyebrows. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘and don’t take it amiss, but I’m proud of our privations, and I respect the people who honor us by subjecting us to these privations.’ ”
10
For a long period the invariable food of the majority was boiled millet and fish soup made from herring heads. The bodies of the herring were fried as a second course. People ate unground rye and wheat. They boiled the grain into a porridge.
A professor’s wife whom Antonina Alexandrovna knew taught her to bake boiled dough bread on the bottom of a Dutch heating stove, partly for sale, so that the extra and the income from it would justify using the tile stove as in the old days. This would enable them to give up the tormenting iron stove, which smoked, heated poorly, and did not retain its warmth at all.
Antonina Alexandrovna baked very good bread, but nothing came of her commerce. She had to sacrifice her unrealizable plans and bring the dismissed little stove back into action. The Zhivagos lived in want.
One morning Yuri Andreevich left for work as usual. There were two pieces of wood left in the house. Putting on a little winter coat, in which she shivered from weakness even in warm weather, Antonina Alexandrovna went out “for booty.”
She spent about half an hour wandering the nearby lanes, where muzhiks sometimes turned up from their suburban villages with vegetables and potatoes. You had to catch them. Peasants carrying loads were arrested.
She soon came upon the goal of her search. A stalwart young fellow in a peasant coat, walking in company with Antonina Alexandrovna beside a light, toylike sleigh, warily led it around the corner to the Gromekos’ courtyard.
In the bast body of the sleigh, under a mat, lay a small heap of birch rounds, no thicker than the old-fashioned banisters in photographs from the last century. Antonina Alexandrovna knew what they were worth—birch in name only, it was stuff of the worst sort, freshly cut, unsuitable for heating. But there was no choice, she could not argue.
The young peasant made