Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [167]
“Ah, so you’re here?”
A girl of about eight with two tightly plaited braids came into the room. Her narrow, wide-set eyes slanting upwards gave her a mischievous and sly look. She raised them when she laughed. She had already discovered outside the door that her mother had a guest, but, appearing on the threshold, she considered it necessary to show an inadvertent astonishment on her face, curtsied, and turned to the doctor the unblinking, fearless eye of a precociously thoughtful child growing up in solitude.
“Kindly meet my daughter Katenka.”
“You showed me pictures of her in Meliuzeevo. How she’s grown and changed!”
“So it turns out you’re at home? And I thought you were outside. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I took the key from the hole, and there was a rat this big! I screamed and backed away. I thought I’d die of fear.”
Katenka made the sweetest faces when she talked, rolling her sly eyes and forming her little mouth into a circle, like a fish taken out of the water.
“Well, go to your room. I’ll persuade the nice man to stay for dinner, take the kasha from the oven, and call you.”
“Thank you, but I’m forced to decline. Because of my visits to the city, our dinners are served at six. I’m used to not being late, and it’s over a three-hour ride, if not all of four. That’s why I came early—forgive me—I’ll get up and go soon.”
“Just half an hour more.”
“With pleasure.”
15
“And now—frankness for frankness. Strelnikov, whom you told about, is my husband Pasha, Pavel Pavlovich Antipov, whom I went to the front in search of and in whose imaginary death I so rightly refused to believe.”
“I’m not shocked and have been prepared. I’ve heard that fable and consider it nonsense. That’s why I forgot myself to such an extent that I spoke to you so freely and incautiously about him, as if this gossip didn’t exist. But these rumors are senseless. I saw the man. How could he be connected with you? What do you have in common?”
“And all the same it’s so, Yuri Andreevich. Strelnikov is Antipov, my husband. I agree with the general opinion. Katenka also knows it and is proud of her father. Strelnikov is his assumed name, a pseudonym, as with all revolutionary activists. For certain considerations, he must live and act under a different name.
“He took Yuriatin, poured shells on us, knew that we were here, never once asked if we were alive, so as not to violate his secret. That was his duty, of course. If he had asked us how to act, we would have advised him to do the same. You could also say that my immunity, the acceptable living quarters given me by the city council, and so on, are indirect proofs of his secret caring for us! All the same, you won’t persuade me of it. To be right here and resist the temptation to see us! My mind refuses to grasp that, it’s beyond my understanding. It’s something inaccessible to me—not life, but some Roman civic valor, one of the clever notions of today. But I’m falling under your influence and beginning to sing your tune. I wouldn’t want that. You and I are not of one mind. We may understand some elusive, optional thing in the same way. But in matters of broad significance, in philosophy of life, it’s better for us to be opponents. But let’s get back to Strelnikov. He’s in Siberia now, and you’re right, information about criticism of him, which chills my heart, has reached me, too. He’s in Siberia, at one of our advanced positions, in the process of defeating his courtyard friend and later frontline comrade, poor Galiullin, for whom his name and his marriage to me are no secret, and who, in his priceless delicacy, has never let me feel it, though he storms and rages and goes out of his mind at the mention of Strelnikov. Yes, well, so he’s now in Siberia.
“And while he was here (he spent