Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [152]
Far ahead, at the end, the plain came up against the transverse ridge of a rising height. It stood across the road like a wall, at the foot of which a ravine or river could be surmised. As if the sky there were surrounded by a fence, with the country road leading to its gates.
At the top of the rise appeared the elongated form of a white, one-story house.
“See the lookout on the knob?” Vakkh asked. “That’s your Mikulich and Mikulichna. And under them there’s a split, a ravine, it’s called Shutma.”
Two gunshots, one after the other, rang out from that direction, generating multiple fragmented echoes.
“What’s that? Can it be partisans, grandpa? Shooting at us?”
“Christ be with you. What partizhans? It’s Stepanych scarifying wolves in Shutma.”
9
The first meeting of the new arrivals with the hosts took place in the yard of the director’s little house. A painful scene, at first silent, then confusedly noisy and incoherent, was played out.
Elena Proklovna was returning to the yard from her evening walk in the forest. The sun’s evening rays stretched behind her from tree to tree across the whole forest, almost the same color as her golden hair. Elena Proklovna was dressed in light summer clothes. She was red-cheeked and was wiping her face, flushed from walking, with a handkerchief. Her open neck was crossed in front by an elastic band, which held the hanging straw hat thrown behind her back.
Her husband was coming home from the opposite direction with a gun, climbing up from the ravine and intending to see at once to the cleaning of the sooty barrels, in view of the defects he had noticed in the discharge.
Suddenly, out of the blue, over the stones of the paved driveway, Vakkh drove up dashingly and loudly with his surprise.
Very soon, having climbed out of the cart with all the rest, Alexander Alexandrovich, falteringly, taking off his hat, then putting it on again, gave the first explanations.
The genuine, unaffected stupefaction of the nonplussed hosts and the unfeigned, sincere embarrassment of the wretched guests, burning with shame, lasted for several moments. The situation was clear without explanations, not only to the participants, Vakkh, Nyusha, and Shurochka. The oppressive feeling communicated itself to the mare and the colt, to the golden rays of the sun, and to the mosquitoes circling around Elena Proklovna and settling on her face and neck.
“I don’t understand,” Averky Stepanovich finally broke the silence. “I don’t understand, don’t understand a thing and never will. What have we got here, the south, the Whites, the land of plenty? Why did your choice fall precisely on us? Why have you come here, here, why on earth to us?”
“I wonder if you’ve thought of what a responsibility it is for Averky Stepanovich?”
“Lenochka, don’t interrupt. Yes, precisely. She’s perfectly right. Have you thought of what a burden it is for me?”
“For God’s sake. You haven’t understood us. What are we talking about? About a very small thing, a nothing. There’s no encroachment on you, on your peace. A corner in some empty, dilapidated building. A spot of land nobody needs, gone to waste, for a vegetable garden. And a load of firewood from the forest when nobody’s looking. Is that so much to ask, is it some sort of infringement?”
“Yes, but the world is wide. What have we to do with it? Why is this honor bestowed precisely on us and not on somebody else?”
“We knew about you and hoped you had heard about us. That we’re no strangers to you and will not be coming to strangers ourselves.”
“Ah, so it’s a matter of Krüger, of you being his relatives? How can you open your mouth and acknowledge such things in our time?”
Averky Stepanovich was a man with regular features, wore his hair thrown back, stepped broadly on his whole foot, and in summer belted his Russian shirt with a tasseled strip of braid. In older times such men went and became river pirates; in modern times they constituted the type of the eternal student, the lesson-giving dreamer.
Averky Stepanovich gave his youth to the liberation movement,