Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [161]
With that the notes of Yuri Andreevich ended. He never continued them.
10
Yuri Andreevich was looking over the books he had ordered in the Yuriatin city reading room. The many-windowed reading room for a hundred persons was set with several rows of long tables, their narrow ends towards the windows. The reading room closed with the coming of darkness. In springtime the city was not lighted in the evening. But Yuri Andreevich never sat until dusk anyway, and did not stay in the city past dinnertime. He would leave the horse that the Mikulitsyns gave him at Samdevyatov’s inn, spend the whole morning reading, and at midday return home on horseback to Varykino.
Before these raids on the library, Yuri Andreevich had rarely been to Yuriatin. He had no particular business in the city. He knew it poorly. And when the room gradually filled before his eyes with Yuriatin’s citizens, who would seat themselves now far from him, now right next to him, Yuri Andreevich felt as if he was becoming acquainted with the city, standing at one of its populous intersections, and as if what poured into the room were not Yuriatin’s readers, but the houses and streets they lived in.
However, the actual Yuriatin, real and not imagined, could be seen through the windows of the room. Near the middle window, the biggest of them, stood a tank of boiled water. Readers, by way of taking a break, went out to the stairway to smoke, surrounded the tank, drank water, pouring what was left into a basin, and crowded by the window, admiring the view of the city.
There were two kinds of readers: old-timers from the local intelligentsia—they were the majority—and those from simple people.
The first, most of whom were women, poorly dressed, neglectful of themselves and gone to seed, had unhealthy, drawn faces, puffy for various reasons—hunger, biliousness, dropsy. These were the habitués of the reading room, personally acquainted with the library workers and feeling themselves at home there.
Those from the people, with beautiful, healthy faces, dressed neatly, festively, came into the room embarrassed and timid, as into church, and made their appearance more noisily than was customary, not from ignorance of the rules, but owing to their wish to enter perfectly noiselessly and their inability to adjust their healthy steps and voices.
Opposite the windows there was a recess in the wall. In this niche, on a podium, separated from the rest of the room by a high counter, the reading room staff, the senior librarian and his two female assistants, were busy with their tasks. One of them, angry, wearing a woollen shawl, constantly took off her pince-nez and then perched it back on her nose, guided, apparently, not by the needs of vision, but by the changes of her inner state. The other, in a black silk blouse, was probably suffering from chest congestion, because she almost never took the handkerchief from her mouth and nose, and talked and breathed into it.
The library staff had the same swollen faces, elongated and puffy, as half the readers, the same slack skin, sallow shot with green, the color of a pickle covered with gray mold, and the three of them took turns doing one and the same thing, explaining in a whisper to novices the rules for using books, sorting out order slips, handing over books, and receiving the returned ones, and in between worked on putting together some sort of annual report.
And, strangely, by some incomprehensible coupling of ideas, in the faces of the real city outside the window and the imaginary one in the room, and also by some likeness caused by the general deathly puffiness, as if they were all