Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [14]
“Strange,” said Voskoboinikov. “Something’s wrong. It has no reason to stop there in the marsh. Something’s happened. Let’s go and have tea.”
6
Nika was not in the garden, nor in the house. Yura guessed that he was hiding from them because he was bored with them and Yura was no match for him. His uncle and Ivan Ivanovich went to work on the terrace, leaving Yura to loiter aimlessly about the house.
There was a wonderful enchantment about the place! At every moment you could hear the pure, three-note whistling of orioles, with intervals of waiting, so that the moist, drawn-out, flutelike sound could fully saturate the surroundings. The stagnant scent of flowers wandering in the air was nailed down motionless to the flowerbeds by the heat. How reminiscent it was of Antibes and Bordighera! Yura kept turning right and left. Over the lawns in an auditory hallucination hung the phantom of his mother’s voice; it sounded for him in the melodious turns of the birds and the buzzing of the bees. Yura kept being startled; time and again it seemed to him that his mother was hallooing him and calling him somewhere.
He went to the ravine and began to climb down. He climbed down from the sparse and clean woods that covered the top of the ravine to the alder bushes that spread over its bottom.
Here there was damp darkness, windfall and carrion; there were few flowers, and the jointed stalks of horsetail looked like rods and staffs with Egyptian ornaments, as in his illustrated Holy Scriptures.
Yura felt more and more sad. He wanted to cry. He fell to his knees and dissolved in tears.
“Angel of God, my holy protector,” Yura prayed, “set my mind firmly on the true path and tell dear mama that it’s good for me here, so that she doesn’t worry. If there is life after death, Lord, place mama in paradise, where the faces of the saints and the righteous shine like stars. Mama was so good, it can’t be that she was a sinner, have mercy on her, Lord, make it so that she doesn’t suffer. Mama!”—in heartrending anguish he called out to her in heaven as a newly canonized saint, and suddenly could not bear it, fell to the ground, and lost consciousness.
He did not lie oblivious for long. When he came to, he heard his uncle calling him from above. He answered and started to climb up. Suddenly he remembered that he had not prayed for his missing father, as Marya Nikolaevna had taught him to do.
But he felt so good after fainting that he did not want to part with this feeling of lightness and was afraid to lose it. And he thought there would be nothing terrible if he prayed for his father some other time.
“He’ll wait. He’ll be patient,” he all but thought. Yura did not remember him at all.
7
On the train, riding in a second-class compartment with his father, the attorney Gordon from Orenburg, sat the second-year student Misha Gordon, an eleven-year-old boy with a thoughtful face and big dark eyes. The father was moving to work in Moscow, the boy had been transferred to a Moscow school. His mother and sisters had long been there, busy with the cares of readying the apartment.
The boy and his father had been on the train for three days.
Past them in clouds of hot dust, bleached as with lime by the sun, flew Russia, fields and steppes, towns and villages. Wagon trains stretched along the roads, turning off cumbersomely to the crossings, and from the furiously speeding train it seemed that the wagons were standing still and the horses were raising and lowering their legs in place.
At big stations the passengers rushed like mad to the buffet, and the setting sun behind the trees of the station garden shone on their legs and the wheels of the cars.
Separately, all the movements of the world were calculatedly sober, but as a sum total they were unconsciously drunk with the general current of life