Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [177]
The speaker, in a black cotton cap that covered his completely bald head, with a matte, pale olive complexion and a black beard up to his ears, suffered from nervous perspiration and sweated profusely all the time. He greedily relighted his unfinished butt in the stream of hot air over the kerosene lamp burning on the table, and bent low to the scraps of paper scattered in front of him. He ran his nearsighted little eyes over them nervously and quickly, as if he were sniffing them, and went on in a dull and weary voice:
“This union of the urban and village poor can be realized only through the soviets. Like it or not, the Siberian peasantry will now strive towards the same thing for which the Siberian workers have long since begun to fight. Their common goal is the overthrow of the autocracy of admirals and atamans, hateful to the people, and the establishment of the power of the peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets by means of a nationwide armed insurrection. For that, their struggle against the Cossack-officer hirelings of the bourgeoisie, who are armed to the teeth, will have to be conducted as a regular frontline war, persistent and prolonged.”
Again he stopped, wiped his forehead, and closed his eyes. Contrary to the rules, someone stood up, raised his hand, and wished to put in a comment.
The partisan leader, or, more precisely, the commander of the Kezhem formation of the Trans-Ural partisans, was sitting right in front of the speaker’s nose in a defiantly casual posture and kept rudely interrupting him, without showing him any respect. It was hard to believe that such a young soldier, almost a boy, was in command of whole armies and formations, and was obeyed and held in awe. He was sitting with his hands and feet covered by the skirts of his cavalry greatcoat. The flung-off top and sleeves of the greatcoat, thrown over the back of the chair, revealed his body in a tunic with dark spots where the lieutenant’s epaulettes had been ripped off.
At his sides stood two silent stalwarts of his guard, the same age as he, in white sheepskin vests that had had time to turn gray, with curly lambswool showing at the edges. Their handsome, stony faces showed nothing but blind devotion to their superior and a readiness for anything for his sake. They remained indifferent to the meeting, the questions touched upon at it, the course of the debate, did not speak, and did not smile.
Besides these people, there were another ten or fifteen men in the shed. Some stood, others sat on the floor with their legs stretched out or their knees sticking up, leaning against the wall and its roundly projecting caulked logs.
For the guests of honor, chairs had been provided. They were occupied by three or four workers, former participants in the first revolution, among them the sullen, changed Tiverzin and his friend, old Antipov, who always yessed him. Counted among the divinities at whose feet the revolution laid all its gifts and sacrifices, they sat like silent, stern idols in whom political arrogance had exterminated everything alive and human.
There were other figures worthy of attention in the shed. Not knowing a moment’s peace, getting up from the floor and sitting down again, pacing the shed and stopping in the middle of it, was the pillar of Russian anarchism, Vdovichenko the Black Banner, a fat giant with a big head, a big mouth, and a leonine mane, an officer, if not in the last Russo-Turkish War, then at least in the Russo-Japanese War, a dreamer eternally absorbed in his ravings.
By reason of his boundless good nature and gigantic height, which kept him from noticing events of unequal and smaller size, he treated all that was happening with insufficient attention and, misunderstanding everything, took opposite opinions for his own and agreed with everybody.