Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [127]
The cooperator Kostoed-Amursky, who enjoyed the respect of all the jailers under both the tsar and the present government, and who was always on a personal footing with them, more than once drew the attention of the head of the convoy to Vasya’s intolerable situation. The man acknowledged that it was indeed a blatant error, but that formal difficulties did not allow for touching upon this tangle during the journey, and he hoped to disentangle it once they arrived.
Vasya was a pretty young boy with regular features, like portrayals of the tsar’s bodyguards and God’s angels on popular prints. He was unusually pure and unspoiled. His favorite amusement was to sit on the floor at the feet of the adults, clasping his knees with both arms and throwing his head back, and listen to their talk and stories. The content of it could be reconstructed from the play of the facial muscles with which he held back the tears that were about to flow or fought with the laughter that was choking him. The subject of the conversation was reflected in the impressionable boy’s face as in a mirror.
12
The cooperator Kostoed was sitting up above as a guest of the Zhivagos and sucking with a whistle on the shoulder of hare they had offered him. He feared drafts and chills. “How it blows! Where’s it coming from?” he asked and kept changing his place, seeking a sheltered spot. At last he settled himself so that he felt no cold wind and said: “Now it’s good,” finished gnawing the shoulder, licked his fingers, wiped them with a handkerchief, and, having thanked his hosts, observed:
“It’s coming from the window. You should stop it up. However, let’s get back to the subject of the argument. You’re wrong, doctor. Roasted hare is a splendid thing. But, forgive me, to conclude from it that the countryside is flourishing is bold, to say the least. It’s a very risky leap.”
“Oh, come now!” Yuri Andreevich objected. “Look at these stations. The trees haven’t been cut down. The fences are intact. And the markets! The peasant women! Just think, how satisfying! There’s life somewhere. Somebody’s glad. Not everybody groans. That justifies everything.”
“It would be good if it were so. But it’s not. Where did you get all that? Go fifty miles from the railway. There are ceaseless peasant revolts everywhere. Against whom, you ask? Against the Whites and against the Reds, depending on who’s in power. You say, aha, the muzhik is the enemy of all order, he doesn’t know what he wants himself. Excuse me, but it’s too early to be triumphant. He knows it better than you, but what he wants is not at all what you and I want.
“When the revolution woke him up, he decided that his age-old dream was coming true, of life on his own, of anarchic farmstead existence by the labor of his own hands, with no dependence and no obligation to anyone at all. But, from the vise grip of the old, overthrown state, he’s fallen under the still heavier press of the revolutionary superstate. And now the countryside is thrashing about and finds no peace anywhere. And you say the peasants are flourishing. You know nothing, my dear man, and, as far as I can see, you don’t want to know.”
“Well, so, it’s true I don’t want to. Perfectly right. Ah, go on! Why should I know everything and lay myself out for everything? The times take no account of me and impose whatever they like on me. So allow me to ignore the facts. You say my words don’t agree with reality. But is there any reality in Russia now? In my opinion, it’s been so intimidated that it has gone into hiding. I want to believe that the countryside has benefitted and is prospering. If that, too, is a delusion, what am I to do, then? What am I to live by, who am I to obey? And I have to live, I’m a family man.”
Yuri Andreevich waved his hand and, leaving it to Alexander Alexandrovich to bring the argument with Kostoed to an end, moved