Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [199]
The level of distillation they achieved reached almost two hundred proof. Liquid of such strength dissolved the crystal preparations very well. At the beginning of winter, Yuri Andreevich used this same alcohol, infused with quinine bark, to treat cases of typhus, which set in again with the coming of cold weather.
3
In those days the doctor saw Pamphil Palykh and his family. His wife and children had spent the whole previous summer fleeing along dusty roads under the open sky. They were frightened by the horrors they had lived through and expected new ones. Their wanderings had put an indelible stamp on them. Pamphil’s wife and the three children, a son and two daughters, had light, sun-bleached, flaxen hair and white, stern eyebrows on dark, weather-beaten, tanned faces. The children were too small to bear any signs of what they had endured, but from their mother’s face the shocks and dangers she had experienced had driven all the play of life and left only the dry regularity of the features, the lips pressed into a thread, the strained immobility of suffering, ready for self-defense.
Pamphil loved them all, especially the children, to distraction, and with a deftness that amazed the doctor sculpted wooden toys for them with the corner of a sharply honed axe—hares, bears, cocks.
When they arrived, Pamphil cheered up, took heart, began to recover. But then it became known that, owing to the harmful influence the presence of the families had on the mood of the camp, the partisans would be obliged to separate from their kinfolk, the camp would be freed of unnecessary nonmilitary appendages, and the refugee train would set up camp for the winter, under sufficient guard, somewhere further away. There was more talk about this separation than actual preparation for it. The doctor did not believe in the feasibility of the measure. But Pamphil turned gloomy and his former fleetlings returned.
4
On the threshold of winter, for several reasons, the camp was gripped by a long stretch of anxiety, uncertainty, menacing and confusing situations, strange incongruities.
The Whites carried out the plan of surrounding the insurgents. At the head of the accomplished operation stood the generals Vitsyn, Quadri, and Basalygo. These generals were famous for their firmness and inflexible resolution. Their names alone instilled terror in the wives of the insurgents in the camp and in the peaceful population, who still had not left their native places and remained behind in their villages, outside the enemy line.
As has already been said, it was impossible to see how the enemy circle could be tightened. On that account they could rest easy. However, to remain indifferent to this encirclement was also not possible. Submission to circumstances would morally strengthen the enemy. It was necessary to attempt to break out of the trap, unthreatening as it was, for the sake of military display.
To that end large forces of the partisans were detached and concentrated against the western bend of the circle. After many days of hot fighting, the partisans inflicted a defeat on the enemy and, breaching their line at that point, came at them from the rear.
Through the freed space formed by the breach, access to the insurgents was opened in the taiga. New crowds of refugees came pouring in to join them. This influx of peaceful country people was not limited to direct relations of the partisans. Frightened by the punitive measures of the Whites, all the neighboring peasantry moved from their places, abandoning their hearths and naturally drawing towards the peasant forest army, in which they saw their defense.
But in the camp they were trying to get rid of their own hangers-on. The partisans could not be bothered with the newcomers and strangers. They went out to meet the fugitives, stopped them on the road, and turned them aside, towards the mill in the Chilim clearing, on the Chilimka River. This cleared space, formed from the farmsteads that had grown up around the mill, was called the Steadings. The