Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [173]
So here she is alone on the threshold of the Holy Feast, abandoned, they’ve all flown off this way and that.
Her husband Vlasushka had gone down the high road to make speeches to the new recruits, as a send-off to their feats of arms. The fool would have done better to look after his own son, to protect him from mortal danger.
The son, Teresha, also couldn’t help himself and took to his heels on the eve of the great feast. Buzzed off to Kuteiny Posad to some relatives, to have fun, to comfort himself after what he’d gone through. The boy had been expelled from high school. Repeated half the classes and nobody said anything, but in the eighth year they lost patience and threw him out.
Ah, what anguish! Oh, Lord! Why has it turned out so bad? You just lose heart. Everything drops from your hands, you don’t want to live! Why has it turned out like this? Is it the force of the revolution? No, ah, no! It’s all because of the war. All the flower of manhood got killed, and what was left was worthless, good-for-nothing rot.
A far cry from her father’s home—her father the contractor. Her father didn’t drink, he was literate, the family lived in plenty. There were two sisters, Polya and Olya. The names went so nicely together, just as the two of them suited each other, a pair of beauties. And the head carpenters who called on their father were distinguished, stately, fine-looking. Then suddenly they took it into their heads—there was no want in the house—took it into their heads to knit scarves out of six kinds of wool. And what then? They turned out to be such knitters, their scarves became famous throughout the district. And everything used to give joy by its richness and shapeliness—church services, dances, people, manners—even though the family was from simple folk, tradesmen, from peasants and workers. And Russia, too, was a young girl, and she had real suitors, real protectors, not like nowadays. Now everything’s lost its sheen, there’s nothing but the civilian trash of lawyers and Yids, chewing words tirelessly, day and night, choking on words. Vlasushka and his retinue hope to lure the old golden times back with champagne and good wishes. Is that any way to win back a lost love? You’ve got to overturn stones for that, move mountains, dig up the earth!
4
More than once already, Galuzina had gone as far as the marketplace, the central square of Krestovozdvizhensk. From there her house was to the left. But she changed her mind each time, turned around, and again went deep into the back alleys adjacent to the monastery.
The marketplace was the size of a big field. On market days in former times, peasants had covered it all over with their carts. One end of it lay against the end of Eleninskaya Street. The other end was built up along a curved line with small one- or two-story houses. They were all used as storage spaces, offices, trading premises, and artisans’ workshops.
Here, in quiet times, on a chair by the threshold of his very wide, four-leaf iron door, reading the Penny Daily, the woman-hater Briukhanov used to sit, a boorish bear in spectacles and a long-skirted frock coat, a dealer in leather, tar, wheels, horse harness, oats, and hay.
Here, displayed in a dim little window, gathering dust for many years, stood several cardboard boxes of paired wedding candles, decorated with ribbons and little bunches of flowers. Behind the little window, in an empty little room without furniture and with almost no sign of goods, unless one counted several rounds of wax piled one on top of the other, deals in the thousands for mastic, wax, and candles were concluded by no one knew what agents of a candle millionaire who lived no one knew where.
Here, in the middle of the shop-lined street, was the big colonial shop of the Galuzins with its three-window façade. In it the splintery, unpainted floor was swept three times a day with the used leaves of the tea which