Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [118]
“What do you think of her?”
“Careful. It’s slippery here. How many times have I told them not to pour slops in front of the door—like sand against the wind. What do I think of her? What do you mean, think? What’s there to think? I have no time. Here’s where I live. I concealed it from her: her brother, who was in the army, has likely been shot. But her mother, my former boss, I’ll probably save, I’m interceding for her. Well, I go in here, good-bye.”
And so they parted. The beam of Demina’s flashlight poked into the narrow stone stairway and ran ahead, lighting the soiled walls of the dirty way up, and darkness surrounded the doctor. To the right lay Sadovaya-Triumphalnaya Street, to the left Sadovaya-Karetnaya. In the black distance over the black snow, these were no longer streets in the ordinary sense of the word, but like two forest clearings in the dense taiga of stretched-out stone buildings, as in the impassable thickets of the Urals or Siberia.
At home there was light, warmth.
“Why so late?” asked Antonina Alexandrovna, and, not letting him reply, she went on:
“A curious thing happened while you were gone. An inexplicable oddity. I forgot to tell you. Yesterday papa broke the alarm clock and was in despair. The last clock in the house. He tried to repair it, poked at it, poked, with no result. The clockmaker at the corner asked three pounds of bread—an unheard-of price. What to do? Papa was completely downcast. And suddenly, imagine, an hour ago comes a piercing, deafening ring. The alarm clock! You see, it upped and started!”
“So my typhus hour has struck,” joked Yuri Andreevich, and he told his family about the sick woman and her chimes.
14
But he came down with typhus much later. In the meantime, the distress of the Zhivago family reached the limit. They were in want and were perishing. Yuri Andreevich sought out the party man he had once saved, the robbery victim. He did all he could for the doctor. However, the civil war had begun. His protector was traveling all the time. Besides, in accordance with his convictions, the man considered the hardships of the time natural and concealed the fact that he himself was starving.
Yuri Andreevich tried turning to the purveyor by the Tver Gate. But in the months that had passed, even his tracks had grown cold, and of his wife, who had recovered, there was nothing to be heard. The complement of tenants in the house had changed. Demina was at the front, the manager Galiullina was not there when Yuri Andreevich came.
Once by means of a coupon he received firewood at the official price, but had to transport it from the Vindava Station. He accompanied the driver and his nag, hauling this unexpected wealth down the endless Meshchanskaya Street. Suddenly the doctor noticed that Meshchanskaya had ceased somehow to be Meshchanskaya, that he was reeling and his legs would not support him. He realized that he was in for it, things were bad, and it was typhus. The driver picked up the fallen man. The doctor did not remember how they brought him home, somehow placed on top of the firewood.
15
He was delirious for two weeks with some breaks. He dreamed that Tonya put the two Sadovaya streets on his desk, Sadovaya-Karetnaya to the left and Sadovaya-Triumphalnaya to the right, and moved his desk lamp close to them, hot, searching, orange. The streets became light. He could work. And now he is writing.
He is writing heatedly and with extraordinary success something he had always wanted to write and should long ago have written, but never could, and now it is coming out well. And only occasionally is he hindered by a boy with narrow Kirghiz eyes, in an unbuttoned reindeer coat like they wear in Siberia or the Urals.
It is perfectly clear that this boy is the spirit of his death, or, to put it simply, is his death. But how can he be death, when he is helping him to write a poem, can there be any benefit from death, can there be any help from death?
He is writing a poem not about the Resurrection and not about