Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [131]
Was anyone living in the house, or was it standing empty and falling to ruin, set down on a list by the local or district land committee? Where were its former inhabitants, and what had happened to them? Had they escaped abroad? Had they perished at the hands of the peasants? Or, having earned a good name, had they settled in the district town as educated experts? Had Strelnikov spared them, if they stayed until recently, or had they been included in his summary justice along with the kulaks?6
The house on the hill piqued his curiosity and kept mournfully silent. But questions were not asked then, and no one answered them. And the sun lit up the snowy smoothness with a blinding white brilliance. How regular were the pieces the shovel cut from it! What dry, diamond-like sparkles spilled from the cuts! How it reminded him of the far-off days of childhood, when, in a light-colored hood trimmed with braid and a lambskin coat with hooks tightly sewn into the black, curly wool, little Yura had cut pyramids and cubes, cream cakes, fortresses, and cave dwellings from the snow in the courtyard, which was just as blinding. Ah, how tasty it was to live in the world then, how delightful and delicious everything around him was!
But even this three-day life in the open air produced an impression of satiety. And not without reason. In the evening the workers were allotted hot, freshly baked white bread, brought from no one knew where, on no one knew whose orders. The bread had a delicious glazed crust that was cracked on the sides, and a thick, superbly browned bottom crust with little bits of coal baked into it.
16
They came to love the ruins of the station, as one can grow attached to a temporary shelter during an excursion in the snowy mountains. They kept the memory of its situation, the external appearance of the buildings, certain details of the damage.
They returned to the station in the evening, when the sun was setting. As if out of faithfulness to the past, it continued to set in the same place, behind the old birch that grew just by the telegraphist’s office window.
The outer wall at that place had collapsed inward and blocked up the room. But the cave-in had not harmed the back corner of the room, facing an intact window. There everything was preserved: the coffee-colored wallpaper, the tile stove with a round vent under a brass cover on a chain, and a list of the inventory in a black frame on the wall.
Having sunk to the ground, the sun, just as before the disaster, reached the tiles of the stove, lit up the coffee-colored wallpaper with a russet heat, and hung the shadows of birch branches on the wall like a woman’s shawl.
In another part of the building, there was a boarded-up door to a waiting room with an inscription of the following content, done probably in the first days of the February revolution or shortly before it:
“In view of medications and bandaging supplies, our respected patients are asked not to worry temporarily. For the reason observed, I am sealing the door, of which I hereby give notice. Senior medical assistant of Ust-Nemda so-and-so.”
When the last snow, which had been left in mounds between the cleared sections, was shoveled away, the whole railway opened out and became visible, straight, like an arrow flying off into the distance. Along the sides of it lay white heaps of cleared snow, bordered for the entire length by two walls of black pine forest.
As far as the eye could see, groups of people with shovels stood in various places along the rails. They were seeing each other in full muster for the first time and were surprised at their great numbers.
17
It became known that the train would leave in a few hours, even though it was late and night was approaching. Before its departure, Yuri Andreevich and Antonina Alexandrovna went for the last time to admire the beauty of the cleared line. There was no one on the tracks now. The doctor and his wife stood for a while, looked into the distance, exchanged