Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [187]
The text of the psalm was considered miracle-working, a protection against bullets. Troops already wore it as a talisman in the last imperialist war. Decades went by, and much later arrested people started sewing it into their clothing, and convicts in prison repeated it to themselves when they were summoned to the investigators for night interrogations.
From the telephonist, Yuri Andreevich went to the clearing, to the body of the young White Guard he had killed. The features of innocence and an all-forgiving suffering were written on the young man’s handsome face. “Why did I kill him?” thought the doctor.
He unbuttoned the dead man’s greatcoat and opened its skirts wide. On the lining, in calligraphic lettering by a careful and loving hand, no doubt a mother’s, there was embroidered “Seryozha Rantsevich”—the first and last name of the dead man.
Through the opening of Seryozha’s shirt a little cross fell and hung outside on a chain, with a medallion, and also some flat little gold case or snuff box with a damaged lid, as if pushed in by a nail. The little case was half open. A folded piece of paper fell out of it. The doctor unfolded it and could not believe his eyes. It was the same ninety-first psalm, only typed and in all its Slavonic genuineness.
Just then Seryozha moaned and stretched. He was alive. As it turned out later, he had been stunned by a slight internal contusion. A spent bullet had hit the face of his mother’s amulet, and that had saved him. But what was he to do with the unconscious man?
The brutality of the fighting men had by that time reached the extreme. Prisoners were never brought alive to their destination, and enemy wounded were finished off on the spot.
Given the fluctuating makeup of the forest militia, which new volunteers kept joining, and old members kept deserting and going over to the enemy, it was possible, by preserving the strictest secrecy, to pass Rantsevich off as a new, recently joined-up ally.
Yuri Andreevich took the outer clothing off the dead telephonist and, with the help of Angelyar, whom the doctor initiated into his plan, put it on the young man, who had not regained consciousness.
Together with his assistant, he nursed the boy back to health. When Rantsevich was fully recovered, they let him go, though he did not conceal from his saviors that he would return to the ranks of Kolchak’s army and continue fighting the Reds.
5
In the fall the partisans camped at Fox Point, a small wood on a high knoll, under which a swift, foaming river raced, surrounding it on three sides and eroding the bank with its current.
Before the partisans, Kappel’s troops had wintered there. They had fortified the wood with their own hands and the labor of the local inhabitants, but in spring they had abandoned it. Now the partisans settled into their unblown-up dugouts, trenches, and passages.
Liberius Averkievich shared his dugout with the doctor. For the second night he engaged him in conversation, not letting him sleep.
“I wish I knew what my esteemed parent, my respected Vater, my Papachen, is doing now.”
“Lord, I simply can’t stand that clowning tone,” the doctor sighed to himself. “And he’s the very spit and image of his father!”
“As far as I have concluded from our previous talks, you came to know Averky Stepanovich sufficiently well. And, as it seems to me, are of a rather good opinion of him. Eh, my dear sir?”
“Liberius Averkievich, tomorrow we have a pre-election meeting at the stamping ground. Besides that, the trial of the moonshining orderlies is upon us. Lajos and I haven’t prepared the materials for that yet. We’re going to get together tomorrow in order to do so. And I haven’t slept for two nights. Let’s put off our discussion. Be a good heart.”
“No, still, let’s get back to Averky Stepanovich. What do you say about the old man?”
“Your father is still quite young, Liberius Averkievich. Why do you speak of him like that? But for now I’ll answer you. I’ve often told you that I have trouble making out the separate gradations