Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [135]
Beyond the opening of the window, by which they lay with their heads thrust forward, spread a flooded area with no beginning or end. Somewhere a river had overflowed, and the waters of its side branch had come up close to the railway embankment. In foreshortening, brought about by looking from the height of the berth, it seemed as if the smoothly rolling train was gliding right over the water.
Its glassy smoothness was covered in a very few places by a ferrous blueness. Over the rest of the surface, the hot morning drove mirrory, oily patches of light, like a cook smearing the crust of a hot pie with a feather dipped in oil.
In this seemingly boundless backwater, along with meadows, hollows, and bushes, the pillars of white clouds were drowned, their piles reaching to the bottom.
Somewhere in the middle of the backwater a narrow strip of land was visible, with double trees suspended upwards and downwards between sky and earth.
“Ducks! A brood!” cried Alexander Alexandrovich, looking in that direction.
“Where?”
“By the island. Not there. To the right, to the right. Ah, damn, they flew away, got frightened.”
“Ah, yes, I see. There’s something I must talk with you about, Alexander Alexandrovich. Some other time. But our labor army and the ladies did well to get away. And it was peaceful, I think, without doing anybody harm. They simply ran off, the way water runs.”
24
The northern white night was ending. Everything was visible, but stood as if not believing itself, like something made up: mountain, copse, and precipice.
The copse had barely begun to turn green. In it several bird cherry bushes were blooming. The copse grew under the sheer of the mountain, on a narrow ledge that also broke off some distance away.
Nearby was a waterfall. It could not be seen from everywhere, but only from the other side of the copse, at the edge of the precipice. Vasya got tired going there to gaze at the waterfall for the experience of terror and admiration.
There was nothing around equal to the waterfall, nothing to match it. It was fearsome in this singularity, which turned it into something endowed with life and consciousness, into a fairy-tale dragon or giant serpent of those parts, who exacted tribute from the people and devastated the countryside.
Halfway down, the waterfall struck a protruding jag of rock and divided in two. The upper column of water was almost motionless, but in the two lower ones a barely perceptible movement from side to side never ceased for a moment, as if the waterfall kept slipping and straightening up, slipping and straightening up, and however often it lurched, it always kept its feet.
Vasya, spreading his sheepskin under him, lay down at the edge of the copse. When the dawn became more noticeable, a big, heavy-winged bird flew down from the mountain, glided in a smooth circle around the copse, and alighted at the top of a silver fir near the spot where Vasya lay. He raised his head, looked at the blue throat and blue-gray breast of the roller, and, spellbound, whispered aloud its Urals name: “Ronzha.” Then he got up, took the sheepskin from the ground, threw it on, and, crossing the clearing, came over to his companion. He said to her:
“Come on, auntie. See, you’re chilled, your teeth are chattering. Well, what are you staring at like you’re so scared? I’m talking human speech to you, we’ve got to go. Enter into the situation, we’ve got to keep to the villages. In a village they won’t harm their own kind, they’ll hide us. We haven’t eaten for two days, we’ll starve to death like this. Uncle Voroniuk must have raised hell looking for us. We’ve got to get out of here, Auntie Palasha, clear off, to put it simply. You’re such a pain to me, auntie, you haven’t said a word the whole day! Grief’s got your tongue, by God. What are you pining over? There was no wrong in