Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [136]
Tyagunova got up from the ground and, giving Vasya her hand, said softly:
“Come on, dovey.”
25
Creaking all over, the cars went uphill along the high embankment. Under it grew a mixed young forest, the tops of which did not reach its level. Below were meadows from which the water had just receded. The grass, mixed with sand, was covered with logs for ties, which lay randomly in all directions. They had probably been prepared for rafting at some nearby woodlot, and had been washed away and carried here by the high water.
The young forest below the embankment was still almost bare, as in winter. Only in the buds, which were spattered all over it like drops of wax, was something superfluous setting in, some disorder, a sort of dirt or swelling, and this superfluous thing, this disorder and dirt, was life, enveloping the first opening trees of the forest in the green flame of foliage.
Here and there birches stood straight as martyrs, pierced by the cogs and arrows of twin, just unfolded leaves. What they smelled of could be told by eye. They smelled of the same thing they shone with. They smelled of wood spirit, from which varnish is made.
Soon the railway came up to the place from which the logs might have been washed. At a turn in the forest, a clearing appeared, strewn with sawdust and chips, with a heap of twenty-foot logs in the middle. The engineer braked by the cutting area. The train shuddered and stopped in the position it assumed, slightly inclined on the high arc of a big curve.
The engine gave several short, barking whistles and someone shouted something. The passengers knew even without the signals: the engineer had stopped the train to take on fuel.
The doors of the freight cars slid open. Out onto the tracks poured the goodly population of a small town, excluding the mobilized men from the front cars, who were always exempt from deckhands’ work and did not take part in it now.
The pile of stove wood in the clearing was not enough to load the tender. In addition they were required to cut up a certain number of the twenty-foot logs.
The engine team had saws in its outfit. They were handed out among volunteers, who broke up into pairs. The professor and his son-in-law also received a saw.
From the open doors of the military freight cars, merry mugs stuck out. Adolescents who had never been under fire, naval cadets from the senior classes, mistakenly intruded into the wagon, as it seemed, among stern workers, family men, who had also never smelled powder and had only just finished military training, deliberately made noise and played the fool with the older sailors, so as not to start thinking. Everyone felt that the hour of trial was at hand.
The jokers accompanied the sawyers, men and women, with loud banter:
“Hey, grandpa! Tell them—I’m a nursling, my mama hasn’t weaned me, I can’t do physical labor. Hey, Mavra, see you don’t saw your skirt off, it’ll be drafty! Hey, girl, don’t go to the forest, better marry me instead!”
26
In the forest there were several sawhorses made from stakes tied crosswise, their ends driven into the ground. One turned out to be free. Yuri Andreevich and Alexander Alexandrovich set themselves to sawing on it.
It was that time of spring when the earth comes out from under the snow looking almost the same as when it went under the snow six months earlier. The forest exuded dampness and was all littered with last year’s leaves, like an untidied room in which people had torn up receipts, letters, and notices for many years of their lives and had had no time to sweep them away.
“Not so fast, you’ll get tired,” the doctor said to Alexander Alexandrovich, making the saw go more slowly and measuredly, and