Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [189]
“Understand, understand, finally, that all this is not for me. ‘Jupiter,’ ‘Don’t give way to panic,’ ‘Whoever says A must say B,’ ‘The Moor has done his work, the Moor can go’5—all these banalities, all these phrases are not for me. I’ll say A, but I won’t say B, even if you burst. I grant that you’re all bright lights and liberators of Russia, that without you she would perish, drowned in poverty and ignorance, and nevertheless I can’t be bothered with you, and I spit on you, I don’t like you, and you can all go to the devil.
“The rulers of your minds indulge in proverbs, but they’ve forgotten the main one, that love cannot be forced, and they have a deeply rooted habit of liberating people and making them happy, especially those who haven’t asked for it. You probably fancy that there’s no better place in the world for me than your camp and your company. I probably should even bless you and thank you for my captivity, for your having liberated me from my family, my son, my home, my work, from everything that’s dear to me and that I live by.
“Rumors have reached us of the invasion of Varykino by an unknown, non-Russian unit. They say it’s been devastated and looted. Kamennodvorsky doesn’t deny it. My family and yours supposedly managed to escape. Some mythical slant-eyed people in quilted jackets and papakhas crossed the ice of the Rynva in a terrible frost, and, without an ill word spoken, shot everything alive in the village, and then vanished as mysteriously as they appeared. What do you know about it? Is it true?”
“Nonsense. Made up. Unverified gibberish spread by gossip mongers.”
“If you’re as kind and magnanimous as you are in your exhortations about the moral education of the soldiers, set me free. I’ll go in search of my family—I don’t even know if they’re alive or where they are. And if not, then please stop talking and leave me alone, because all the rest is uninteresting to me, and I can’t answer for myself. And, finally, devil take it, don’t I have the right simply to want to sleep?”
Yuri Andreevich lay prone on the bunk, his face in the pillow. He tried as hard as he could not to listen to Liberius justifying himself, continuing to reassure him that by spring the Whites would certainly be crushed. The civil war would be over, there would be freedom, prosperity, and peace. Then no one would dare to keep the doctor. But until then he had to bear with it. After all they had endured, after so many sacrifices and so much waiting, they would not have long to wait now. And where would the doctor go? For his own sake it was impossible right now to let him go anywhere.
“He keeps grinding away, the devil! Giving his tongue a workout! How can he not be ashamed to chew the same cud for so many years?” Yuri Andreevich sighed to himself in indignation. “He loves listening to himself, the golden-tongue, the wretched dope addict. Night isn’t night for him, there’s no sleep, no life where he is, curse him. Oh, how I hate him! As God is my witness, I’ll kill him some day.
“Oh, Tonya, my poor girl! Are you alive? Where are you? Lord, she must have given birth long ago! How did the delivery go? Who have we got, a boy or a girl? My dear ones, how are you all? Tonya, my eternal reproach and my guilt! Lara, I’m afraid to name you, so as not to breathe out my soul along with your name. Lord! Lord! And this one here keeps speechifying, he won’t shut up, the hateful, unfeeling brute! Oh, someday I’ll lose control and kill him, kill him.”
6
Indian summer was over. The clear days of golden autumn set in. The little wooden tower of the volunteers’ undestroyed blockhouse jutted up from the ground in the western corner of Fox Point. It was there that Yuri Andreevich had arranged to meet his assistant, Dr. Lajos, to discuss some general matters. Yuri Andreevich went there at the appointed time. While waiting for his colleague, he began pacing the dirt rim of the collapsed entrenchment, went up and into the watchtower, and looked through the empty loopholes of the machine-gun nest at the