Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [174]
Here, at the corner, next to the lumberyard, stood an old, gray, two-story wooden house, sagging on four sides like a secondhand coach. It consisted of four apartments. There were two entrances to them, at either end of the façade. The left half of the ground floor was occupied by Zalkind’s pharmacy, the right by a notary’s office. Over the pharmacy lived old Shmulevich, a ladies’ tailor, with his numerous family. Across from the tailor, over the notary, huddled many tenants, whose professions were announced on the signs and plaques that covered the whole front door. Here watches were repaired and a cobbler took in orders. Here the partners Zhuk and Shtrodakh kept a photography studio, here were the premises of the engraver Kaminsky.
In view of the crowdedness of the overfilled apartment, the photographers’ young assistants, the retoucher Senya Magidson and the student Blazhein, built themselves a sort of laboratory in the yard, in the front office of the woodshed. They were apparently busy there now, judging by the angry eye of the developing lamp blinking nearsightedly in the little window of the office. It was under this window that the little dog Tomka was chained up, yelping for the whole of Eleninskaya Street to hear.
“The whole kahal’s bunched up in there,” thought Galuzina, walking past the gray house. “A den of misery and filth.” But she decided at once that Vlas Pakhomovich was wrong in his Judaeophobia. These people aren’t such big wheels as to mean anything in the destiny of the state. However, if you ask old Shmulevich why the trouble and disorder, he’ll cringe, pull a twisted mug, and say with a grin: “That’s Leibochka’s little tricks.”5
Ah, but what, what is she thinking about, what is her head stuffed with? Is that really the point? Is that where the trouble is? The trouble is the cities. Russia doesn’t stand on them. People got seduced by education, trailed after the city folk, and couldn’t pull it off. Left their own shore and never reached the other.
Or maybe, on the contrary, the whole trouble is ignorance. A learned man can see through a stone wall, he figures everything out beforehand. And we go looking for our hat when our head’s been cut off. Like in a dark forest. I suppose they’re not having a sweet time of it either, the educated ones. Lack of bread drives them from the cities. Well, just try sorting it out. The devil himself would break a leg.
But even so, aren’t our country relations something else again? The Selitvins, the Shelaburins, Pamphil Palykh, the brothers Nestor and Pankrat Modykh? Their own masters, their own heads, good farmers. New farmsteads along the high road, admirable. Each has some forty acres sown, plus horses, sheep, cows, pigs. Enough grain stocked up for three years ahead. The inventory—a feast for the eyes. Harvesting machines. Kolchak fawns on them, invites them to him, commissars entice them to the forest militia. They came back from the war covered with medals and were snapped up at once as instructors. With epaulettes, or without. If you’re a man with know-how, you’re in demand everywhere. You won’t perish.
But it’s time to go home. It’s simply improper for a woman to walk about for so long. It would be all right in my own garden. But it’s all soggy there, you could sink into the mud. Seems I feel a bit better.
And having gotten definitively entangled in her reasoning and lost the thread, Galuzina came