Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [192]
“Here’s the schedule for your medical unit when we come to breaking camp. The carts with the partisan families are already close by. The dissension in the camp will be settled today. We can expect to leave any day now.”
The doctor cast a glance at the paper and gasped:
“That’s less than they gave me last time. And there are so many more wounded! Those who are ambulant or bandaged can walk. But they’re an insignificant number. How am I to transport the badly wounded? And the medications, and the cots, the equipment?”
“Squeeze yourself in somehow. We’ve got to adjust to circumstances. Now about something else. There’s a general request to you from everybody. We have a seasoned, tried comrade here, devoted to the cause and an excellent fighter. Something’s gone wrong with him.”
“Palykh? Lajos told me.”
“Yes. Go and see him. Look into it.”
“Something mental?”
“I suppose so. Some sort of fleetlings, as he puts it. Apparently hallucinations. Insomnia. Headaches.”
“Very well. I’ll go at once. I have some free time now. When does the meeting begin?”
“I think they’re already gathering. But why you? You see, I’m not going. They’ll do without us.”
“Then I’ll go to Pamphil. Though I’m so sleepy I’m ready to drop. Liberius Averkievich likes to philosophize at night; he’s worn me out with talking. How do I get to Pamphil? Where is he quartered?”
“You know the young birch grove behind the filled-in pit? Birch saplings.”
“I’ll find it.”
“There are some commanders’ tents in a clearing. We assigned one to Pamphil. In expectation of his family. His wife and children are coming to him in the train. So he’s in one of the commanders’ tents. With the rights of a battalion commander. For his revolutionary merits.”
8
On the way to Pamphil the doctor felt that he could not go any further. He was overcome by fatigue. He could not fight off his sleepiness, the result of a lack of sleep accumulated over several nights. He could go back for a nap in the dugout. But Yuri Andreevich was afraid to go there. Liberius could come at any moment and disturb him.
He lay down in one of the not overgrown places in the forest, all strewn with golden leaves that had fallen onto the clearing from the surrounding trees. The leaves lay crosshatched like a checkerboard in the clearing. The sun’s rays fell in the same way onto their golden carpet. This double, crisscrossed motleyness rippled in one’s eyes. It lulled one to sleep, like reading small print or murmuring something monotonous.
The doctor lay on the silkily rustling leaves, putting his hand under his head on the moss that covered the gnarled roots of a tree like a pillow. He dozed off instantly. The motley sun spots that put him to sleep covered his body stretched out on the ground with a checkered pattern and made him undiscoverable, indistinguishable in the kaleidoscope of rays and leaves, as if he had put on the cap of invisibility.
Very soon the overintensity of his wish and need to sleep woke him up. Direct causes work only within commensurate limits. Deviations from the measure produce the opposite effect. Finding no rest, his wakeful consciousness worked feverishly in idle. Fragments of thoughts raced and whirled in circles, almost knocking like a broken machine. This inner turmoil tormented and angered the doctor. “That scoundrel Liberius,” he thought indignantly. “It’s not enough for him that there are hundreds of reasons now for a man to go off his head. By his captivity, by his friendship and idiotic babble, he needlessly turns a healthy man into a neurasthenic. Someday I’ll kill him.”
A colorful folding and opening little scrap, a brown speckled butterfly, flew by on the sunny side. The doctor followed its flight with sleepy eyes. It alighted on what most resembled its coloring, the brown speckled bark of a pine tree, with which it merged quite indistinguishably. The butterfly imperceptibly effaced itself on it, just as Yuri Andreevich was lost without trace to an outsider’s eye under the net of sunlight and shadow playing over him.
The usual round of thoughts