Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [115]
To spare the doctor work and time, the owner tried to speak as briefly as he could, but precisely this haste made his speech long and confused.
The apartment, with a mixture of luxury and cheapness, was furnished with things bought slapdash with the aim of investing money in something stable. Furniture in incomplete sets was supplemented by single objects that were missing a second to make up the pair.
The owner of the apartment thought his wife had some sort of nervous ailment from fright. With many irrelevant digressions, he told how they had bought for next to nothing an old, broken clock with musical chimes, which had not worked for a long time. They had bought it only as a curiosity of clock-making craftsmanship, as a rarity (the sick woman’s husband took the doctor to the next room to show it to him). They even doubted it could be fixed. And suddenly the clock, which had not been wound for years, started up by itself, started up, rang out an intricate minuet on its little bells, and stopped. His wife was terrified, the young man said, decided that her last hour had struck, and now she lies there, raves, doesn’t eat, doesn’t drink, doesn’t recognize him.
“So you think it’s nervous shock?” Yuri Andreevich asked with doubt in his voice. “Take me to the patient.”
They went into the next room with its porcelain chandelier and two mahogany bed tables on either side of a wide double bed. At the edge of it, the blanket pulled up over her chin, lay a small woman with big, dark eyes. Seeing the men coming in, she waved them away, freeing an arm from under the blanket, on which the wide sleeve of a robe slid up to the armpit. She did not recognize her husband and, as if there were no one in the room, started singing in a soft voice the beginning of a sad little song, which moved her so much that she burst into tears and, sobbing like a child, began asking to be taken home somewhere. The doctor tried to approach her from different sides, but she resisted examination and each time turned her back on him.
“She does need to be examined,” said Yuri Andreevich. “But, all the same, I can see quite clearly. It’s typhus, and a very grave form of it at that. She’s suffering greatly, poor thing. I’d advise putting her in the hospital. It’s not a matter of comfort, which you could provide for her, but of constant medical attention, which is necessary during the first weeks of the illness. Can you find some sort of transportation, hire a cab or at least a cart, to take the patient, making sure that she’s well wrapped up beforehand? I’ll write an order for you.”
“I can. I’ll try. But wait. Can it really be typhus? How terrible!”
“Unfortunately.”
“I’m afraid to lose her if I let her go from here. Isn’t there some way you could treat her at home, visiting her as often as possible? I’ll pay whatever fee you like.”
“I’ve already explained to you. The important thing is that she have constant attention. Listen. I’m giving you good advice. Dig up a cab somewhere, and I’ll write out an accompanying note for her. It would be best to do it through your house committee. The order will have to have the house seal, and there will be some other formalities.”
12
Having gone through the interrogation and search, the tenants returned one after another, in warm shawls and coats, to the unheated quarters of the former egg storage, now occupied by the house committee.
At one end of the room stood an office desk and several chairs, though not enough to seat so many people. Therefore, in addition to them, long, empty egg crates, turned upside down, were placed around them like benches. A mountain of such crates was piled up to the ceiling at the other end of the room. There in a corner was a swept-up heap of frozen wood shavings stuck together in lumps by the spilt insides of broken eggs. Rats noisily messed about in this heap, occasionally running out to the open space of the stone floor and hiding again in the shavings.
Each time this happened, a loud and fat-bloated woman jumped up on one