Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [191]
Though the partisans would not agree to leave Fox Point until their families running after them in carts caught up with them, the latter were already within a few marches of the camp, and preparations were under way in the forest for quickly pulling up stakes and moving further to the east. Things were repaired, cleaned, boxes were nailed shut, wagons counted, their condition inspected.
In the middle of the forest there was a large, trodden-down glade, a sort of barrow or former settlement, locally known as the stamping ground. Military meetings were usually called there. Today, too, a general assembly was set up there for the announcement of something important.
In the forest there were still many trees that had not turned yellow. In the deepest part it was almost all still fresh and green. The sinking afternoon sun pierced it from behind with its rays. The leaves let the sunlight through, and their undersides burned with the green fire of transparent bottle glass.
On the open grass next to his archive, the liaison officer Kamennodvorsky was burning the looked-over and unnecessary paper trash of the regimental office inherited from Kappel, along with his own partisan accounts. The bonfire was placed so that it stood against the sun. It shone through the transparent flames, as through the green of the forest. The fire itself could not be seen, and only by the undulating, mica-like streams of hot air could it be concluded that something was burning.
Here and there the forest was gaily colored with ripe berries of all sorts: the prettily pendant berries of lady’s-smock, brick-brown, flabby elderberries, the shimmering white-crimson clusters of the guelder rose. Dragonflies, their glassy wings tinkling, floated slowly through the air, speckled and transparent, like the fire and the forest.
Since childhood Yuri Andreevich had loved the evening forest shot through with the fire of sunset. In such moments it was as if he, too, let these shafts of light pass through him. As if the gift of the living spirit streamed into his breast, crossed through his whole being, and came out under his shoulder blades as a pair of wings. That youthful archetype, which is formed in every young man for the whole of life and serves him forever after and seems to him to be his inner face, his personality, awakened in him with its full primary force, and transformed nature, the forest, the evening glow, and all visible things into an equally primary and all-embracing likeness of a girl. “Lara!”—closing his eyes, he half whispered or mentally addressed his whole life, the whole of God’s earth, the whole sunlit expanse spread out before him.
But the immediate, the actual, went on, in Russia there was the October revolution, he was a prisoner of the partisans. And, without noticing it himself, he went up to Kamennodvorsky’s bonfire.
“Destroying the records? They’re still not burnt?”
“Far from it! There’s stuff enough for a long time yet.”
With the toe of his boot the doctor pushed and broke up one of the piles. It was the telegraph correspondence of White headquarters. The vague notion that he might run across the name of Rantsevich among the papers flashed in him, but he was disappointed. It was an uninteresting collection of last year’s ciphered communiqués in incomprehensible abbreviations, like the following: “Omsk genquasup first copy Omsk stareg map Omsky thirty miles Yenisei never received.” He scattered another pile with his foot. Out of it crawled the protocols of old partisan meetings. On top lay a paper: “Highly urgent. On furloughs. Re-election of members of the review committee. Current business. In view of insufficient charges of the Ignatodvortsy schoolmistress, the army council thinks …”
Just then Kamennodvorsky took something from his pocket, handed it to the