Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [180]
“This glass of the people’s home brew I drink to you, dear lads, in place of champagne. Many years to you, many years to you departing young men!11 Gentlemen recruits! I wish to congratulate you on many other points and respects. Give me your attention. The way of the cross that stretches like a long road before you is to staunchly defend the motherland from violators who have flooded the motherland’s fields with fratricidal blood. The people cherished bloodless discussions of the conquests of the revolution, but the Bolshevik Party being servants of foreign capital, its sacred dream, the Constituent Assembly, is dispersed by the crude force of the bayonet, and blood flows in a defenseless stream. Young departing men! Raise higher the violated honor of Russian arms, as being indebted to our honorable allies, we have covered ourselves in shame, observing, in the wake of the Reds, Germany and Austria again insolently raising their heads. God is with us, dear lads,” Galuzin was still saying, but already shouts of “Hurrah” and demands that Vlas Pakhomovich be carried in triumph drowned out his words. He put his glass to his lips and began taking small sips of the raw, poorly distilled liquid. The drink did not afford him any pleasure. He was used to grape wines of a more delicate bouquet. But the consciousness of the sacrifice offered to society filled him with a sense of satisfaction.
“Your old man’s an eagle. Such a fierce, flaming talker! Like some Miliukov in the Duma.12 By God,” Goshka Ryabykh, with a half-drunken tongue, amidst the drunken hubbub that had arisen, praised the father of his friend and companion at the table, Terenty Galuzin. “I tell you true—an eagle. Obviously not for nothing. Wants his tongue to solicit you out of going for a soldier.”
“Come on, Goshka! Shame on you. To think up that ‘solicit out.’ I’ll get a notice the same day as you, for all his soliciting out. We’ll wind up in the same unit. Now they’ve kicked me out of school, the scum. My mother’s crushed. It’ll be a good thing if I don’t wind up with the volumpeers. Get sent to the ranks. And as for formal speeches, papa really is unbeatable, no disputing it. A master. The main thing is, where’d he get it? It’s natural. He has no systematic education.”
“Did you hear about Sanka Pafnutkin?”
“Yes. Is it really so nasty?”
“For life. He’ll waste away in the end. It’s his own fault. He was warned not to go there. The main thing is who you get tangled up with.”
“What’ll happen to him now?”
“A tragedy. He wanted to shoot himself. Today he’s being examined by the commission in Ermolai. They’ll probably take him. ‘I’ll go to the partisans,’ he says. ‘I’ll avenge the sores of society.’ ”
“Listen, Goshka. You say it’s so nasty. But if you don’t go to them, you can get sick with something else.”
“I know what you’re getting at. You must be doing it. That’s not a sickness, it’s a secret vice.”
“I’ll punch your face in for such words, Goshka. Don’t you dare offend a comrade, you rotten liar!”
“Calm down, I was joking. I wanted to tell you something. I went to Pazhinsk for the Easter meal. In Pazhinsk an itinerant lecturer talked about ‘The Emancipation of the Person.’ Very interesting. I liked the thing. I’ll damn well sign up with the anarchists. There’s a force inside us, he says. Sex and character, he says, that’s the awakening of animal electricity. Eh? Quite a wunderkind. But I’m really plastered. And they’re shouting all around, jabber-jabber, it’s deafening. I can’t stand it, Tereshka, be quiet. You son of a bitch, you little mama’s boy, shut up, I said.”
“Just tell me this, Goshka. I still don’t know all the words about socialism. Saboteur, for instance. What kind of expression is that? What’s it about?”
“I’m a real professor in these words, but like I told you, Tereshka, leave off, I’m drunk. A saboteur is somebody who’s in the same band as others. Once they say