Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [119]
He had always wanted to describe how, in the course of three days, a storm of black, wormy earth besieges, assaults the immortal incarnation of love, hurling itself at him with its clods and lumps, just as the breaking waves of the sea come rushing at the coast and bury it. How for three days the black earthy storm rages, advances, and recedes.
And two rhymed lines kept pursuing him: “Glad to take up” and “Have to wake up.”
Hell, and decay, and decomposition, and death are glad to take up, and yet, together with them, spring, and Mary Magdalene,13 and life are also glad to take up. And—have to wake up. He has to wake up and rise. He has to resurrect.
16
He began to recover. At first, blissfully, he sought no connections between things, he admitted everything, remembered nothing, was surprised at nothing. His wife fed him white bread and butter, gave him tea with sugar, made him coffee. He forgot that this was impossible now and was glad of the tasty food, as of poetry and fairy tales, which were lawful and admissible in convalescence. But when he began to reflect for the first time, he asked his wife:
“Where did you get it?”
“All from your Granya.”
“What Granya?”
“Granya Zhivago.”
“Granya Zhivago?”
“Why, yes, your brother Evgraf, from Omsk. Your half brother. While you were lying unconscious, he kept visiting us.”
“In a reindeer coat?”
“Yes, yes. So you noticed him through your unconsciousness? He ran into you on the stairs of some house, I know, he told me. He knew it was you and wanted to introduce himself, but you put a scare into him! He adores you, can’t read enough of you. He digs up such things! Rice, raisins, sugar! He’s gone back to his parts. And he’s calling us there. He’s so strange, mysterious. I think he has some sort of love affair with the authorities. He says we should leave the big city for a year or two, ‘to sit on the earth.’ I asked his advice about the Krügers’ place. He strongly recommends it. So that we could have a kitchen garden and a forest nearby. We can’t just perish so obediently, like sheep.”
In April of that year the whole Zhivago family set out for the far-off Urals, to the former estate of Varykino near the town of Yuriatin.
Part Seven
ON THE WAY
1
The last days of March came, days of the first warmth, false harbingers of spring, after which each year an intense cold spell sets in.
In the Gromeko house hurried preparations were being made for the journey. To the numerous inhabitants, whose density in the house was now greater than that of sparrows in the street, this bustle was explained as a general cleaning before Easter.
Yuri Andreevich was against the trip. He did not interfere with the preparations, because he considered the undertaking unfeasible and hoped that at the decisive moment it would fall through. But the thing moved ahead and was near completion. The time came to talk seriously.
He once again expressed his doubts to his wife and father-in-law at a family council especially organized for that purpose.
“So you think I’m not right, and, consequently, we’re going?” he concluded his objections. His wife took the floor:
“You say, weather it out for a year or two, during that time new land regulations will be established, it will be possible to ask for a piece of land near Moscow and start a kitchen garden. But how to survive in the meantime, you don’t suggest. Yet that is the most interesting thing, that is precisely what it would be desirable to hear.”
“Absolute raving,” Alexander Alexandrovich supported his daughter.
“Very well, I surrender,” Yuri Andreevich agreed. “The only thing that pulls me up short is the total uncertainty. We set out, eyes shut, for we don’t know where, not having the least notion of the place. Of three persons who lived in Varykino, two, mama and grandmother, are no longer alive, and the third, Grandfather Krüger, if he’s alive, is being held hostage and behind bars.
“In the last year of the war, he did something