Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [125]
The peasant women’s confusion did not last long. The train was coming to a stop. Other passengers were arriving. The public intermingled. Trade became brisk.
Antonina Alexandrovna was making the rounds of the women, the towel thrown over her shoulder, looking as if she were going behind the station to wash with snow. She had already been called to from the lines several times:
“Hey, you, city girl, what are you asking for the towel?”
But Antonina Alexandrovna, without stopping, walked on further with her husband.
At the end of the line stood a woman in a black kerchief with free crimson designs. She noticed the embroidered towel. Her bold eyes lit up. She glanced sideways, made sure that danger did not threaten from anywhere, quickly went up close to Antonina Alexandrovna, and, throwing back the cover of her goods, whispered in a heated patter:
“Looky here. Ever seen the like? Aren’t you tempted? Well, don’t think too long—it’ll be snapped up. Give me the towel for the halfy.”
Antonina Alexandrovna did not catch the last word. She thought the woman had said something about a calf.
“What’s that, my dear?”
By a halfy the peasant woman meant half a hare, split in two and roasted from head to tail, which she was holding in her hands. She repeated:
“I said give me the towel for a halfy. Why are you looking at me? It’s not dog meat. My husband’s a hunter. It’s a hare, a hare.”
The exchange was made. Each side thought she had made a great gain and the opposite side was as great a loser. Antonina Alexandrovna was ashamed to have fleeced the poor woman so dishonestly. But the woman, pleased with the deal, hastened to put sin behind her and, calling the woman next to her, who was all traded out, strode home with her down a narrow path trampled in the snow, which led to somewhere far away.
Just then there was a commotion in the crowd. Somewhere an old woman shouted:
“Where are you off to, young sir? And the money? When did you give it to me, you shameless liar? Ah, you greedy gut, I shout at him, and he walks off and doesn’t look back. Stop, I said, stop, mister comrade! Help! Thief! Robbery! There he is, there, hold him!”
“Which one?”
“Him walking there, with the shaved mug, laughing.”
“The one with a hole on his elbow?”
“Yes, yes. Hold him, the heathen!”
“The one with the patched sleeve?”
“Yes, yes. Ah, dear God, I’ve been robbed!”
“What’s the story here?”
“He was buying pies and milk from this old woman, stuffed himself full, and pffft! She’s here, howling her head off.”
“It can’t be left like that. He’s got to be caught.”
“Go on, catch him. He’s all belts and cartridges. He’ll do the catching.”
10
In freight car 14 there were several men rounded up for the labor army. They were guarded by the convoy soldier Voroniuk. Three of them stood out for different reasons. They were: Prokhor Kharitonovich Pritulyev, known as “casheteer” in the car, a former cashier in a state wine shop in Petrograd; the sixteen-year-old Vasya Brykin, a boy from a hardware store; and the gray-haired revolutionary cooperator Kostoed-Amursky, who had been in all the forced labor camps of the old times and had opened a new series of them in the new time.
These recruits were all strangers to each other, picked up here and there, and gradually got to know each other during the trip. From their conver-sations it was learned that the cashier Pritulyev and the shopkeeper’s apprentice Vasya Brykin were fellow countrymen, both from Vyatka, and moreover were both born in places that the train was supposed to pass through sometime or other.
The tradesman Pritulyev from Malmyzh was a squat man with a brush cut, pockmarked and ugly. His gray jacket, black from sweat under the armpits, fitted him tightly, like the upper part of a sarafan on the fleshy bust of a woman. He was silent as a block of wood and, brooding about something for hours, picked the warts on his freckled hands until