Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [201]
“Don’t hurry me, comrade chief. I’m no talker as it is. The words stick in my teeth, I choke on them. What am I saying to you? Go to the refugee train, talk some sense into these runaway women. It’s all gone haywire with them there. I ask you, what is it with us, ‘All against Kolchak!’ or female slaughter?”
“Make it short, Svirid. See, they’re calling me. Don’t lay it on thick.”
“Now there’s this demon woman, Zlydarikha, deuce knows who the wench is. Sign me up to look after the cattle, she says, I’m a vitalinarian …”
“Veterinarian, Svirid.”
“Like I said—a vitalinarian, to treat animals in their vitals. But now you can forget your cattle, she’s turned out to be a heretic witch from the Old Believers,2 serves cow liturgies, leads the refugee women astray. It’s your own fault, she says, see where you get when you go running after the red flag with your skirts pulled up. Next time don’t do it.”
“I don’t understand what refugees you’re talking about. Our partisan wives, or some others?”
“Others, sure enough. The new ones, from different parts.”
“But there was an order for them to go to the Steadings, to the Chilim mill. How did they wind up here?”
“The Steadings, sure. There’s nothing but ashes left of your Steadings, it’s all burned down. The mill and the whole place is in cinders. They got to Chilimka and saw a barren waste. Half of them lost their minds, howled away, and went back to the Whites. The others swung around and are coming here, a whole train of them.”
“Through the thicket, through the bog?”
“Ever heard of axes and saws? Our men were sent to protect them—they helped out. Some twenty miles of road have been cut. With bridges, the hellcats. Talk about wenches after that! They do such things, the shrews, it takes you three days to figure it out.”
“A fine goose you are! Twenty miles of road, you jackass, what’s there to be glad about? It plays right into Vitsyn and Quadri’s hands. The way into the taiga is open. They can roll in their artillery.”
“Cover them. Cover them. Send a covering detachment, and that’s the end of it.”
“By God, I could have thought of that without you.”
6
The days grew shorter. By five o’clock it was getting dark. Towards dusk Yuri Andreevich crossed the road in the place where Liberius had wrangled with Svirid the other day. The doctor was heading for the camp. Near the clearing and the mound on which the rowan tree grew, considered the camp’s boundary marker, he heard the mischievous, perky voice of Kubarikha, his rival, as he jokingly called the quack wisewoman. His competitor, with loud shrieks, was pouring out something merry, rollicking, probably some folk verses. There were listeners. She was interrupted by bursts of sympathetic laughter, men’s and women’s. Afterwards everything became quiet. They all probably left.
Then Kubarikha began to sing differently, to herself and in a low voice, thinking she was completely alone. Taking care not to step into the swamp, Yuri Andreevich slowly made his way in the darkness down the footpath that skirted the boggy clearing in front of the rowan tree, then stopped as if rooted to the spot. Kubarikha was singing some old Russian song. Yuri Andreevich did not know it. Might it be her own improvisation?
A Russian song is like water in a mill pond. It seems stopped up and unmoving. But in its depths it constantly flows through the sluice gates, and the calm of its surface is deceptive.
By all possible means, by repetitions, by parallelisms, it holds back the course of the gradually developing content. At a certain limit, it suddenly opens itself all at once and astounds us. Restraining itself, mastering itself, an anguished force expresses itself in this way. It is a mad attempt