Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [12]
Yura felt good with his uncle. He resembled his mother. He was a free spirit, as she had been, with no prejudice against anything inhabitual. Like her, he had an aristocratic feeling of equality with all that lived. He understood everything at first glance, just as she had, and was able to express his thoughts in the form in which they came to him at the first moment, while they were alive and had not lost their meaning.
Yura was glad that his uncle was taking him to Duplyanka. It was very beautiful there, and the picturesqueness of the place also reminded him of his mother, who had loved nature and had often taken him on walks with her. Besides that, Yura was pleased that he would again meet Nika Dudorov, a high school boy who lived at Voskoboinikov’s and probably despised him for being two years younger, and who, when greeting him, pulled his hand down hard and bowed his head so low that the hair fell over his forehead, covering half his face.
5
“The vital nerve of the problem of pauperism,” Nikolai Nikolaevich read from the corrected manuscript.
“I think it would be better to say ‘essence,’ ” Ivan Ivanovich said, and introduced the required correction into the proofs.
They were working in the semidarkness of the glassed-in terrace. The eye could make out watering cans and gardening tools lying around in disorder. A raincoat was thrown over the back of a broken chair. In a corner stood rubber hip boots with dry mud stuck to them, their tops hanging down to the floor.
“Meanwhile, the statistics of deaths and births show …” Nikolai Nikolaevich dictated.
“We need to put in ‘for the year under review,’ ” Ivan Ivanovich said, and wrote it in.
The terrace was slightly drafty. Pieces of granite lay on the pages of the brochure so that they would not fly away.
When they finished, Nikolai Nikolaevich hurried to go home.
“There’s a storm coming. We must be on our way.”
“Don’t even think of it. I won’t let you. We’ll have tea now.”
“I absolutely must be in town by evening.”
“Nothing doing. I won’t hear of it.”
The fumes of the lighted samovar came drifting from the garden, drowning the scent of nicotiana and heliotrope. Sour cream, berries, and cheesecakes were brought there from the cottage. Suddenly word came that Pavel had gone to bathe in the river and taken the horses with him for a bath. Nikolai Nikolaevich had to give in.
“Let’s go to the bluff and sit on a bench while they set out tea,” Ivan Ivanovich suggested.
Ivan Ivanovich, by right of friendship with the rich Kologrivov, occupied two rooms in the steward’s cottage. This little house with its adjoining garden stood in a dark, neglected part of the park with an old semicircular driveway. The driveway was thickly overgrown with grass. There was no movement on it now, and it was used only for hauling dirt and construction trash to the ravine, which served as a dry dump site. A man of progressive ideas and a millionaire who sympathized with revolution, Kologrivov himself was presently abroad with his wife. Only his daughters Nadya and Lipa were living on the estate, with their governess and a small staff of servants.
The steward’s little garden was set off from the rest of the park, with its ponds and lawns and manor house, by a thick hedge of black viburnum. Ivan Ivanovich and Nikolai Nikolaevich skirted this growth from outside, and, as they