Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [196]
“So there’s my fleetlings. By night I seem to see that station. It was funny then, but now I’m sorry.”
“Was it in the town of Meliuzeevo, the Biriuchi station?”
“I forget.”
“Was it a riot with the people of Zybushino?”
“I forget.”
“What front was it? At what front? The western?”
“Something like that. It’s all possible. I forget.”
Part Twelve
THE FROSTED ROWAN
1
The families of the partisans had long been following the body of the army in carts, with their children and chattels. At the tail of the refugee train, far behind, countless herds of cattle were driven, mostly cows, some several thousand of them.
Along with the partisans’ wives a new person appeared in the camp, an army wife, Zlydarikha or Kubarikha, a cattle doctor, a veterinarian, and secretly also a sorceress.
She went about in a forage cap cocked to one side and the gray-green greatcoat of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, from the British uniforms supplied to the Supreme Ruler, and assured people that she had had these things made from a prisoner’s hat and smock, and that the Reds had supposedly freed her from the jail in Kezhem, where Kolchak had held her for some unknown reason.
At that time the partisans were halted in a new place. It was assumed that this would be a brief halt, until the area was reconnoitered and a place was found for a long and settled wintering over. But later on circumstances took a different turn and forced the partisans to stay there and spend the winter.
This new halting place was in no way like the recently abandoned Fox Point. It was dense, impassable forest, the taiga. To one side, away from the road and the camp, there was no end to it. During the first days, while the army was setting up a new bivouac and preparing to live in it, Yuri Andreevich had more leisure. He went deep into the forest in several directions with the aim of exploring it and convinced himself that it would be very easy to get lost in it. Two spots caught his attention, and he remembered them from that first round.
At the way out of the camp and the forest, which was now autumnally bare and could be seen through, as if gates had been thrown open into its emptiness, there grew a solitary, beautiful, rusty-red-leafed rowan tree, the only one of all the trees to keep its foliage. It grew on a mound above a low, hummocky bog, and reached right up to the sky, into the dark lead of the prewinter inclemency, the flatly widening corymbs of its hard, brightly glowing berries. Small winter birds, bullfinches and tomtits, with plumage bright as frosty dawns, settled on the rowan tree, slowly and selectively pecked the larger berries, and, thrusting up their little heads and stretching their necks, swallowed them with effort.
Some living intimacy was established between the birds and the tree. As if the rowan saw it all, resisted for a long time, then surrendered, taking pity on the little birds, yielded, unbuttoned herself, and gave them the breast, like a nurse to a baby. “Well, what can I do with you? Go on, eat, eat me. Feed yourselves.” And she smiled.
The other place in the forest was still more remarkable.
It was on a height. This height, like a drumlin, ended on one side in a sheer drop. It seemed that below, under the drop, there should have been something other than what was above—a river, or a ravine, or an abandoned, unmowed meadow overgrown with grass. However, below there was a repetition of the same thing as above, only at a dizzying depth, on another level, where the treetops were low down under one’s feet. This was probably the result of a landslide.
It was as if this severe, cloud-propping, mighty forest had stumbled once, just as it was, and plunged down, and should have fallen through the earth into Tartarus, but at the decisive moment had miraculously kept itself on earth and now, safe and sound, could be seen rustling below.
But this forest height was remarkable not for that, but for another