Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [120]
“For you, the safety anchor is Mikulitsyn, whose name you like so much to repeat. But who told you that the old manager is still alive and still in Varykino? And what do we know about him, except that grandfather had difficulty pronouncing his name, which is why we remember it?
“But why argue? You’re set on going. I’m with you. We must find out how it’s done now. There’s no point in putting it off.”
2
Yuri Andreevich went to the Yaroslavsky train station to make inquiries about it.
The flow of departing people was contained by a boardwalk with handrails laid across the halls, on the stone floors of which lay people in gray overcoats, who tossed and turned, coughed and spat, and when they talked to each other, each time it was incongruously loudly, not taking into account the force with which their voices resounded under the echoing vaults.
For the most part they were patients who had been sick with typhus. In view of the overcrowding of the hospitals, they were discharged the day after the crisis. As a doctor, Yuri Andreevich had run into such necessity himself, but he did not know that these unfortunates were so many and that the train stations served them as shelters.
“Get sent on an official mission,” a porter in a white apron told him. “You have to come and check every day. Trains are a rarity now, a matter of chance. And of course it goes without saying …” (the porter rubbed his thumb against his first two fingers). “Some flour or whatever. To grease the skids. Well, and this here …” (he upended an invisible shot glass) “… is a most sacred thing.”
3
Around that time Alexander Alexandrovich was invited to the Supreme Council of National Economy for several special consultations, and Yuri Andreevich to a gravely ill member of the government. Both were remunerated in the best form of that time—coupons to the first closed distribution center then established.1
It was located in some garrison warehouse by the St. Simon monastery. The doctor and his father-in-law crossed two inner courtyards, the church’s and the garrison’s, and straight from ground level, with no threshold, entered under the stone vault of a deep, gradually descending cellar. Its widening far end was partitioned crosswise by a long counter, at which a calm, unhurried storekeeper weighed and handed over provisions, occasionally going back to the storeroom for something, and crossing out items on a list with a broad stroke of the pencil as he handed them over.
There were few customers.
“Your bags,” the storekeeper said to the professor and the doctor, glancing fleetingly at their invoices. The two men’s eyes popped out as flour, grain, macaroni, and sugar poured into the covers for little ladies’ cushions and the bigger pillow cases they held open, along with lard, soap, and matches, and also a piece each of something wrapped in paper, which later, at home, turned out to be Caucasian cheese.
Son-in-law and father-in-law hastened to tie the multitude of small bundles into two big knapsacks as quickly as they could, so that their ungrateful pottering would not offend the eyes of the storekeeper, who had overwhelmed them with his magnanimity.
They came out of the cellar into the open air drunk not with animal joy, but with the consciousness that they, too, were not living in this world for nothing, that they were not just blowing smoke, and at home they would deserve the praise and recognition of the young mistress of the house, Tonya.
4
While the men disappeared into various institutions, soliciting missions and permanent residency papers for the rooms they were leaving, Antonina Alexandrovna was busy selecting