Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [148]
“What are you saying?”
“Just what you heard. But to continue. After his wife’s death, Averky Stepanovich married a second time. His new wife, Elena Proklovna, was a schoolgirl, brought straight from the classroom to the altar. Naïve by nature, but also playing at naïveté out of calculation, a young thing, but already playing at being young. To that end she chirps, twitters, poses as an ingénue, a little fool, a lark of the fields. The moment she sees you, she starts testing you: ‘In what year was Suvorov born?’5 ‘List the cases of the equality of triangles.’ And she’s exultant if you fail and put your foot in it. But you’ll be seeing her in a few hours and can check on my description.
“ ‘Himself’ has other weaknesses: his pipe, seminary archaisms: ‘in this wise,’ ‘suffer it to be so,’ ‘all things whatsoever.’ His calling was to have been the sea. At the institute, he was in the shipbuilding line. He retained it in his appearance and habits. He’s clean-shaven, doesn’t take the pipe out of his mouth the whole day, speaks through his teeth, amiably, unhurriedly. The jutting lower jaw of a smoker, cold, gray eyes. Ah, yes, I nearly forgot one detail: an SR, elected from the region to the Constituent Assembly.”6
“But that’s very important. It means father and son are at daggers drawn? Political enemies?”
“Nominally, of course. Though in reality the taiga doesn’t make war on Varykino. But to continue. The other Tuntsev girls, Averky Stepanovich’s sisters-in-law, are in Yuriatin to this day. Eternal virgins. Times have changed, and so have the girls.
“The oldest of the remaining ones, Avdotya Severinovna, is the librarian in the city reading room. A sweet, dark-haired girl, bashful in the extreme. Blushes like a peony for no reason at all. The silence in the reading room is sepulchral, tense. She’s attacked by a chronic cold, sneezes up to twenty times, is ready to fall through the floor from shame. What are you to do? From nervousness.
“The middle one, Glafira Severinovna, is the blessing among the sisters. A sharp girl, a wonder of a worker. Doesn’t scorn any task. The general opinion, with one voice, is that the partisan leader Forester took after this aunt. You see her there in a sewing shop or as a stocking maker. Before you can turn around, she’s already a hairdresser. Did you pay attention to the switchwoman at the Yuriatin train station, shaking her fist and sticking her tongue out at us? Well, I thought, fancy that, Glafira got herself hired as a watchman on the railroad. But it seems it wasn’t her. Too old for Glafira.
“The youngest, Simushka, is the family’s cross, its trial. An educated girl, well-read. Studied philosophy, loved poetry. But then, in the years of the revolution, under the influence of the general elation, street processions, speeches from a platform on the square, she got touched in the head, fell into a religious mania. The sisters leave for work, lock the door, and she slips out the window and goes roaming the streets, gathering the public, preaching the Second Coming, the end of the world. But here I’m talking away and we’re coming to my station. Yours is the next one. Get ready.”
When Anfim Efimovich got off the train, Antonina Alexandrovna said:
“I don’t know how you look at it, but I think this man was sent to us by fate. It seems to me he’ll