Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [193]
And he fell back to sleep, and after a minute woke up again. He was awakened by soft, muffled talk not far away. The few words that reached him were enough for Yuri Andreevich to understand that something secret and illegal was being arranged. The conspirators obviously did not notice him, did not suspect his proximity. If he were to stir now and betray his presence, it would cost him his life. Yuri Andreevich kept quiet, froze, and began to listen.
Some of the voices he knew. These were the scum, the riffraff of the partisans, the hangers-on, the boys Sanka Pafnutkin, Goshka Ryabykh, Koska Nekhvalenykh, and Terenty Galuzin, who sided with them—the ringleaders of all nastiness and outrage. With them was also Zakhar Gorazdykh, a still shadier type, involved with the moonshine case, but temporarily left out of it for having betrayed the chief culprits. Yuri Andreevich was surprised by the presence of a partisan from the “silver company,” Sivobluy, who was one of the commander’s personal guards. By a tradition stemming from Razin and Pugachev,7 this retainer, owing to the trust Liberius put in him, was known as “the ataman’s ear.” So he, too, was in the conspiracy.
The conspirators were making arrangements with men sent from the enemy’s advance patrols. The parleyers could not be heard at all, they discussed things so softly with the traitors, and only by the pauses in the whispering of the accomplices could Yuri Andreevich guess that the enemy representatives were speaking.
The drunkard Zakhar Gorazdykh talked most of all, in a hoarse, rasping voice, using foul language all the time. He was probably the main instigator.
“Now listen, you guys. Above all it’s got to be on the quiet, in secret. If anybody drops out and rats, see this knife? With this knife here I’ll spill his guts. Understand? Now for us it’s not here, not there, whichever way we turn it’s the high oak tree. We’ve got to earn our pardon. We’ve got to pull a stunt like the whole world never saw, out of the old rut. They want him alive, tied up. We hear their chief, Gulevoy, is coming to this forest.” (They told him the right way to say it; he did not quite hear and corrected it to “General Galeev.”) “There won’t be no more chances like this. Here are their delegates. They’ll tell you everything. They say he’s got to be delivered tied up and alive, without fail. Ask the comrades yourselves. Speak up, you guys. Tell ’em something, brothers.”
The strangers, the ones sent, began to speak. Yuri Andreevich could not catch a single word. By the length of the general silence, the thoroughness of what was being said could be imagined. Again Gorazdykh spoke:
“You hear, brothers? Now you can see for yourselves what a little treasure, what a sweet little potion we’ve run into. Do we have to pay for it with our lives? Is he a human being? He’s a freak, a holy fool, a sort of runt, or a hermit. I’ll teach you to guffaw, Tereshka! What are you baring your teeth for, you sin of Sodom? It’s not for your jeers I’m talking. Yes. He’s like a young hermit. Give in to him and he’ll make a total monk, a eunuch, out of you. What’s his talk all about? Driving from our midst, away with foul language, fight drunkenness, attitude towards women. Can we live like that? My final word. Tonight at the river crossing, where the stones are laid out. I’ll lure him into the open. We’ll fall on him in a heap. Is it so tricky to deal with him? Nothing to it. Where’s the hitch? They want him