Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [114]
On his return, Yuri Andreevich did not discuss his wife’s purchase. To chop the given-away wardrobe to splinters would have been more profitable and expedient, but they could not have brought themselves to do it.
“Did you see the note on the desk?” asked his wife.
“From the head of the hospital? They spoke to me, I know about it. It’s a call to a sick woman. I’ll certainly go. I’ll just rest a little and go. It’s quite far. Somewhere by the Triumphal Arch. I wrote down the address.”
“They’re offering a strange honorarium. Did you see? Read it anyway. A bottle of German cognac or a pair of lady’s stockings for the visit. Some enticement! Who can it be? Bad tone, and total ignorance of our present-day life. Nouveaux riches of some sort.”
“Yes, a state purveyor.”
Along with concessionaires and authorized agents, this title was used to designate small private entrepreneurs, for whom the state authorities, having abolished private trade, made small allowances at moments of economic crisis, concluding contracts and deals with them for various provisions.
Their number did not include the fallen heads of old firms, proprietors on a grand scale. They never recovered from the blow they received. Into this category fell the ephemeral dealers, stirred up from the bottom by war and revolution, new and alien people without roots.
After drinking boiled water with saccharine, whitened by milk, the doctor went to the sick woman.
The sidewalks and roadways were buried under deep snow, which covered the streets from one row of houses to the other. In places the covering of snow reached the ground-floor windows. Across the whole width of this space moved silent, half-alive shadows, lugging some sort of meager provisions on their backs or pulling them on sleds. Almost no one drove.
On houses here and there old signboards still remained. The grocery shops and cooperatives placed under them, with no relation to their content, stood locked, their windows barred or boarded up, and empty.
They were locked and empty not only owing to the lack of goods, but because the reorganization of all sides of life, embracing trade as well, was still being carried out in the most general terms, and these boarded-up shops, as minute particulars, had not yet been touched by it.
11
The house that the doctor had been called to turned out to be at the end of Brestskaya Street, near the Tver Gate.
It was a barracklike brick building of antediluvian construction, with an inner courtyard and wooden galleries running in three tiers around the inside walls of the structure.
The tenants were holding a previously arranged general meeting with the participation of a woman representative of the district soviet, when a military commission suddenly appeared on a round to inspect permits to keep arms and confiscate those without permit. The leader of the round asked the delegate not to leave, assuring her that the search would not take much time, the tenants who had been checked would gradually come back, and the interrupted meeting would soon be able to resume.
The round was nearing its end, and the turn had just come for the apartment where the doctor was awaited when he came to the gate of the house. A soldier with a rifle on a string, who was standing guard by one of the stairways leading to the galleries, flatly refused to let Yuri Andreevich pass, but the commander of the detachment interfered in their dispute. He said the doctor should not be hindered and agreed to hold up the search until he had examined the sick woman.
The doctor was met by the owner of the apartment, a courteous young man with a dull, swarthy complexion and dark, melancholy eyes. He was upset by many circumstances: his wife’s illness, the impending search, and the supernatural