Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [126]
A year back he had been walking down Nevsky Prospect in the fall and at the corner of Liteiny had happened upon a street roundup. They had asked for his documents. He turned out to be the holder of a ration card of the fourth category, prescribed for nonlaboring elements, with which he had never obtained anything. He had been picked up by that token and, together with many others arrested in the street on the same grounds, had been sent to barracks under guard. The party assembled in that way, on the example of one previously put together, which was now digging trenches at the Arkhangelsk front, was first supposed to be moved to Vologda, but was turned back halfway and sent through Moscow to the eastern front.
Pritulyev had a wife in Luga, where he had been working in the pre-war years, before his job in Petersburg. Having learned of his misfortune by hearsay, his wife rushed to look for him in Vologda, to deliver him from the labor army. But the path of the detachment differed from that of her search. Her efforts came to naught. Everything was confused.
In Petersburg, Pritulyev had cohabited with Pelageya Nilovna Tyagunova. He was stopped at the corner of Nevsky just at the moment when he had taken leave of her and was going another way on business, and in the distance, among the passersby flashing along Liteiny, he could still see her back, which soon disappeared.
This Tyagunova, a full-bodied, stately tradeswoman with beautiful hands and a thick braid, which, with a deep sigh, she kept tossing now over one shoulder, now over the other, onto her breast, accompanied Pritulyev on the troop train of her own free will.
It was not clear what good the women who clung to Pritulyev found in such a block of wood as he. Besides Tyagunova, in another car of the train, several cars closer to the engine, rode another acquaintance of Pritulyev, the towheaded and skinny girl Ogryzkova, to whom Tyagunova gave the abusive titles of “the nostril” and “the syringe,” among other insulting nicknames.
The rivals were at daggers drawn and avoided each other’s eye. Ogryzkova never showed herself in their car. It was a mystery where she managed to see the object of her adoration. Perhaps she was content to contemplate him from afar, at the general loading of wood and coal by the forces of all the passengers.
11
Vasya’s story was something else again. His father had been killed in the war. His mother had sent Vasya from the village to apprentice with his uncle in Petrograd.
That winter the uncle, who owned a hardware store in the Apraksin Arcade, was summoned to the soviet for explanations. He went through the wrong door and, instead of the room indicated on the summons, landed in the one next to it. By chance it was the anteroom of the commission for labor conscription. There were a great many people there, appearing in that section on subpoena. When enough of them had accumulated, Red Army soldiers came, surrounded them, and took them for the night to the Semyonovsky barracks, and in the morning dispatched them to the station, to be put on the train to Vologda.
The news of the detention of so great a number of inhabitants spread through the city. The next day a host of relations came to bid farewell to their dear ones at the station. Among them were Vasya and his aunt, who came to see the uncle off.
At the station the uncle started begging the sentry to let him out for a minute to see his wife. This sentry was Voroniuk, who was now escorting the group in freight car 14. Voroniuk refused to let the uncle out without a sure guarantee that he would come back. The uncle and aunt offered to leave their nephew under guard as such a guarantee. Voroniuk agreed. Vasya was taken inside the fence, the uncle was taken outside. The uncle and aunt never came back.
When the hoax was discovered, Vasya, who had not suspected any fraud, burst into tears. He fell at Voroniuk’s feet and kissed his hands, begging him to let him go, but nothing helped. The convoy guard was implacable, not out of cruelty of character. This