Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [184]
She recognized him first. He could not at once determine who this woman with the familiar face was, who was casting ambiguous glances at him from across the road, as from one bank of a canal to the other, now fully resolved to greet him, if he recognized her, now showing a readiness to retreat.
After a moment he remembered everything. Together with images of the overcrowded freight car, the multitudes being driven to forced labor, their convoy, and the woman passenger with braids thrown over her breast, he saw his own people in the center of the picture. The details of the family trip of two years ago vividly crowded around him. The dear faces, for which he felt a mortal longing, stood before him as if alive.
With a nod of the head he gave a sign that Tyagunova should go a little further up the street, to a place where it could be crossed on stones sticking up from the mud, went to the place himself, crossed over to Tyagunova, and greeted her.
She told him many things. Reminding him of the handsome, unspoiled boy Vasya, illegally taken into the party of forced laborers, who had ridden in the same car with them, Tyagunova described for the doctor her life in the village of Veretenniki with Vasya’s mother. Things were very good for her with them. But the village flung it in her face that she was a stranger, an outsider in the Veretenniki community. She was reproached for her supposed intimacy with Vasya, which they invented. She had to leave, so as not to be pecked to death. She settled in the town of Krestovozdvizhensk with her sister, Olga Galuzina. Rumors that Pritulyev had been seen in Pazhinsk lured her there. The information proved false, but she got stuck living there, having found a job.
Meanwhile misfortunes befell people who were dear to her heart. From Veretenniki came news that the village had been subjected to a punitive expedition for disobeying the law on food requisitioning.2 Apparently the Brykins’ house had burned down and someone from Vasya’s family had perished. In Krestovozdvizhensk the Galuzins’ house and property had been confiscated. Her brother-in-law had been imprisoned or shot. Her nephew had disappeared without a trace. At first, after the devastation, her sister Olga went poor and hungry, but now she works for her grub with peasant relations in the village of Zvonarsk.
As it happened, Tyagunova worked as a dishwasher in the Pazhinsk pharmacy, the property of which the doctor was about to requisition. The requisition meant ruin for everyone who fed off the pharmacy, including Tyagunova. But it was not in the doctor’s power to cancel it. Tyagunova was present at the handing over of the goods.
Yuri Andreevich’s cart was brought into the backyard of the pharmacy, to the doors of the storeroom. Bundles, bottles sleeved in woven wicker, and boxes were removed from the premises.
Along with the people, the pharmacist’s skinny and mangy nag mournfully watched the loading from its stall. The rainy day was declining. The sky cleared a little. For a moment the sun appeared, squeezed between clouds. It was setting. The dark bronze of its rays sprayed into the yard, sinisterly gilding the pools of liquid dung. The wind did not stir them. The dungy wash was too heavy to move. But the rainwater flooding the roadway rippled under the wind and was tinged with cinnabar.
And the army walked and walked along the edges of the road, stepping or driving around the deepest lakes and potholes. In the seized batch of medicines a whole jar of cocaine turned up, the sniffing of which had lately been the weakness of the partisan chief.
3
The doctor was up to his neck in work among the partisans. In winter typhus, in summer dysentery, and, besides that, the growing influx