Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [163]
However, his thoughts wandered a thousand miles away from the subject of his studies. Outside of any connection with them, he suddenly realized that the voice he had once heard in his sleep on a winter night in Varykino had been Antipova’s voice. He was struck by this discovery and, attracting the attention of those around him, he abruptly put his chair back in its former position, so as to see Antipova from where he sat, and began to look at her.
He saw her almost from behind, her back half turned. She was wearing a light-colored checkered blouse tied with a belt, and was reading eagerly, with self-abandon, as children do, her head slightly inclined towards her right shoulder. Now and then she lapsed into thought, raising her eyes to the ceiling or narrowing them and peering somewhere far ahead of her, and then again, propped on her elbow, her head resting on her hand, in a quick, sweeping movement she penciled some notes in her notebook.
Yuri Andreevich tested and confirmed his former observations in Meliuzeevo. “She doesn’t want to be admired,” he thought, “to be beautiful, captivating. She scorns that side of a woman’s nature, and it is as if she punishes herself for being so good-looking. And that proud hostility to herself increases her irresistibility tenfold.
“How good is everything she does. She reads as if it were not man’s highest activity, but the simplest of things, accessible to animals. As if she were carrying water or peeling potatoes.”
These reflections calmed the doctor. A rare peace descended into his soul. His thoughts stopped scattering and jumping from subject to subject. He smiled involuntarily. Antipova’s presence had the same effect on him as on the nervous librarian.
Not bothering about how his chair stood, and fearing no hindrances or distractions, he worked for an hour or an hour and a half still more assiduously and concentratedly than before Antipova’s arrival. He went through the tall stack of books in front of him, selected the most necessary ones, and even managed in passing to gulp down the two important articles he came across in them. Deciding to be satisfied with what he had done, he started gathering up the books in order to take them to the librarian’s desk. All extraneous considerations, derogatory to his consciousness, abandoned him. With a clear conscience, and with no second thoughts, he decided that his honestly done work had earned him the right to meet with an old and good acquaintance and that he had legitimate grounds for allowing himself this joy. But when he stood up and looked around the reading room, he did not find Antipova; she was no longer there.
On the counter to which the doctor carried his tomes and brochures, the literature returned by Antipova still lay unshelved. It was all manuals on Marxism. She was probably requalifying herself to be a teacher, as before, going through political retraining on her own at home.
Larissa Fyodorovna’s catalogue requests lay in the books. The ends of the slips were showing. On them Larissa Fyodorovna’s address was written. It could easily be read. Yuri Andreevich wrote it down, surprised by the strangeness of the designation. “Kupecheskaya Street, opposite the house with figures.”
On the spot, having asked someone, Yuri Andreevich learned that the expression “house with figures” was as current in Yuriatin as the naming of neighborhoods by parish churches in Moscow or the name Five Corners in Petersburg.
It was the name of a dark gray, steel-colored house with caryatids and statues of Greek muses with tambourines, lyres, and masks in their hands, built in the last century by a theater-loving merchant as his private theater. The merchant’s heirs sold this house to the Merchants’ Association, which gave its name to the street on the corner of which the house stood. The whole area around it was named for this house with figures. Now