Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [137]
The forest was filled with the hoarse ringing of other saws going back and forth, now all in rhythm, now discordantly. Somewhere far, far away the first nightingale was testing its strength. A blackbird whistled at still longer intervals, as if blowing through a clogged flute. Even the steam from the engine’s piston rose into the sky with a singsong burble, as if it were milk coming to the boil over a spirit lamp in a nursery.
“You wanted to talk about something,” Alexander Alexandrovich reminded the doctor. “You haven’t forgotten? It was like this: we were passing a flooded field, ducks were flying, you fell to thinking and said: ‘I must talk with you.’ ”
“Ah, yes. I don’t know how to put it briefly. You see, we’re going ever deeper … The whole region here is in ferment. We’ll arrive soon. It’s not known what we’ll find at our destination. Just in case, we must come to an agreement. I’m not talking about convictions. It would be absurd to find them out or establish them in a five-minute talk in a spring forest. We know each other well. The three of us—you, I, and Tonya—along with many others in our time, make up a single world, differing from each other only in the degree of our comprehension. I’m not talking about that. That’s an ABC. I’m talking about something else. We must agree beforehand on how to behave under certain circumstances, so as not to blush for each other and not to put the stain of disgrace on each other.”
“Enough. I understand. I like the way you pose the question. You’ve found precisely the necessary words. Here’s what I’ll tell you. Do you remember the night when you brought the leaflet with the first decrees, in winter, during a blizzard? Do you remember how incredibly unconditional it was? That straightforwardness was winning. But these things live in their original purity only in the heads of their creators, and then only on the first day of their proclamation. The very next day the Jesuitism of politics turns them inside out. What can I say to you? This philosophy is alien to me. This power is against us. They didn’t ask me to consent to this breakup. But they trusted me, and my actions, even if I was forced into them, placed me under obligation.
“Tonya asks if we’ll come in time to start a vegetable garden, if we’ll miss the time for planting. What can I answer? I don’t know the local soil. What are the climatic conditions? The summer’s too short. Does anything at all ripen here?
“Yes, but can we be going such a distance to take up gardening? Even the old saying, ‘Why walk a mile for a pint of beer,’ is impossible here, because there are, unfortunately, two or three thousand of those miles. No, frankly speaking, we’re dragging ourselves so far with a totally different purpose. We’re going to try to vegetate in the contemporary way and somehow get in on squandering grandfather’s former forests, machinery, and inventory. Not on restoring his property, but on wasting it, on the socialized blowing of thousands in order to exist on a kopeck, and like everybody else, to be sure, in a contemporary, incomprehensibly chaotic form. Shower me with gold, I still wouldn’t take the factory on the old basis even as a gift. It would be as wild as starting to run around naked or forgetting how to read and write. No, the history of property in Russia is over. And personally, we Gromekos already lost the passion for money grubbing in the previous generation.”
27
It was so hot and stuffy that it was impossible to sleep. The doctor’s head was bathed in sweat on the sweat-soaked pillow.
He carefully got down from the edge of the berth and quietly, so as not to waken anyone, slid the car door aside.
Dampness breathed in his face, sticky, as when your face runs into a spiderweb in a cellar. “Mist,” he guessed. “Mist. The day will probably be sultry, scorching. That’s why it’s so hard to breathe and there’s such an oppressive heaviness on the heart.”
Before getting down on the tracks, the doctor stood for a while in the doorway, listening all around.
The train was standing in some