Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [171]
Ahead the road divided in two. Beside it the billboard “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers” glowed in the rays of the setting sun. Across the road, barring it, stood three armed horsemen. A high school student in a uniform cap and a jacket crisscrossed with machine-gun cartridge belts, a cavalryman in an officer’s greatcoat and a Cossack hat, and a strange fat man, as if dressed for a masquerade, in quilted trousers, a padded jacket, and a broad-brimmed priest’s hat pulled down low.
“Don’t move, comrade doctor,” the oldest of the three, the cavalryman in the Cossack hat, said evenly and calmly. “If you obey, we guarantee you complete safety. Otherwise—no hard feelings—we’ll shoot you. The medic in our detachment got killed. We mobilize you forcibly as a medical worker. Get off your horse and hand the reins over to our younger comrade. I remind you. At the least thought of escape, we won’t stand on ceremony.”
“Are you the Mikulitsyns’ son Liberius, Comrade Forester?”
“No, I’m his chief liaison officer, Kamennodvorsky.”
Part Ten
ON THE HIGH ROAD
1
There stood towns, villages, settlements. The town of Krestovozdvizhensk, the Cossack settlement of Omelchino, Pazhinsk, Tysiatskoe, the hamlet of Yaglinskoe, the township of Zvonarskaya, the settlement of Volnoe, Gurtovshchiki, the Kezhemskaya farmstead, the settlement of Kazeevo, the township of Kuteiny Posad, the village of Maly Ermolai.
The highway passed through them—old, very old, the oldest in Siberia, the ancient post road. It cut through towns like bread with the knife of the main street, and flew through villages without looking back, scattering the lined-up cottages far behind it or bending them in the curve or hook of a sudden turn.
Long ago, before the railway came to Khodatskoe, stagecoaches raced down the road. Wagon trains of tea, bread, and wrought iron went one way, and in the other parties of convicts were driven on foot under convoy to the next halting place. They marched in step, their iron chains clanking in unison, lost, desperate men, scary as lightning from the sky. And the forests rustled around them, dark, impenetrable.
The highway lived as one family. Town knew and fraternized with town, village with village. In Khodatskoe, at the railway crossing, there were locomotive repair shops, machine shops servicing the railways; wretches lived miserably, crowded into barracks, fell sick, died. Political prisoners with some technical knowledge, having served their term at hard labor, became foremen here and settled down.
Along all this line, the initial Soviets had long since been overthrown. For some time the power of the Siberian Provisional Government had held out, but now it had been replaced throughout the region by the power of the Supreme Ruler, Kolchak.1
2
At one stretch the road went uphill for a long time. The field of vision opened out ever more widely into the distance. It seemed there would be no end to the ascent and the increasing view. And just when the horses and people got tired and stopped to catch their breath, the ascent ended. Ahead the swift river Kezhma threw itself under a roadway bridge.
Across the river, on a still steeper height, appeared the brick wall of the Vozdvizhensky Monastery. The road curved around the foot of the monastery hillside and, after several twists among outlying backyards, made its way into the town.
There it once more skirted the monastery grounds on the main square, onto which the green-painted iron gates of the monastery opened. The icon on the arch of the entrance was half wreathed by a gilt inscription: “Rejoice, lifegiving Cross, invincible victory of Orthodoxy.”
It was the departure of winter. Holy Week, the end of the Great Lent.2 The snow on the roads was turning black, indicating the start of the thaw, but on the roofs it was still white and hung there in dense, tall hats.
To the boys who climbed up to the ringers in the Vozdvizhensky bell tower, the houses below seemed like little boxes or chests clustered