Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [122]
6
They were leaving for the station early in the morning. The inhabitants of the house were not up yet at that hour. The tenant Zevorotkina, the usual ringleader of all concerted actions, together now and heave-ho, ran around to the sleeping lodgers, knocking on their doors and shouting: “Attention, comrades! It’s good-bye time! Look lively, look lively! The former Garumekovs are leaving.”
They came pouring out to the hall and porch of the back entrance (the front entrance was now boarded up year-round) and covered its steps like an amphitheater, as if preparing for a group photograph.
The yawning tenants stooped so that the skimpy coats thrown over their shoulders would not fall off, hunched up, and shifted their chilled bare feet hastily thrust into loose felt boots.
Markel had contrived to get plastered on something lethal in that alcohol-less time, and kept toppling against the banisters, which threatened to break under him. He volunteered to carry the things to the station and was offended that his help was rejected. They had a hard time getting rid of him.
It was still dark outside. In the windless air, the snow fell more thickly than the evening before. Big, shaggy flakes floated down lazily and, nearing the ground, seemed to tarry longer, as if hesitating whether to lie down on it or not.
When they came out from their lane to the Arbat, it was a little lighter. Falling snow veiled everything down to the ground with its white, billowing curtain, the hanging fringe of which tangled under the walkers’ feet, so that the sensation of movement was lost and it seemed to them that they were marching in place.
There was not a soul in the street. The travelers from Sivtsev met no one on their way. Soon they were overtaken by an empty cab, the cabby all covered with snow as if he had been dragged through batter, driving a snow-blanched nag, and for a fabulous sum in those years, amounting to less than a kopeck, took all of them and their things into the droshky, except for Yuri Andreevich, who at his own request, light, without luggage, was allowed to go to the station on foot.
7
At the station, Antonina Alexandrovna and her father were already standing in a numberless line, squeezed between the barriers of wooden fences. Boarding was now done not from the platforms, but a good half mile down the tracks, by the exit semaphore, because there were not enough hands to clean the approach to the platforms, half of the station area was covered with ice and refuse, and the trains could not get that far.
Nyusha and Shurochka were not in the crowd with the mother and grandfather. They strolled freely under the enormous overhanging roof of the entrance, only rarely coming to see if it was time to join the adults. They smelled strongly of kerosene, which had been heavily applied to their ankles, wrists, and necks as protection against typhus lice.
Seeing her husband approaching, Antonina Alexandrovna beckoned to him with her hand, but, not letting him come nearer, she called out from a distance to tell him at which window mandates for official missions were stamped. He went there.
“Show me what kind of seals they gave you,” she asked when he came back. The doctor handed her a wad of folded papers over the barrier.
“That’s a travel warrant for the delegates’ car,” Antonina Alexandrovna’s neighbor said behind her, making out over her shoulder the stamp on the document. The neighbor