Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [206]
His constant fear for the fate of his family in case of his death came over him to an unprecedented degree. In imagination he already saw them handed over to slow torture, saw their faces disfigured by torment, heard their moans and calls for help. To deliver them from future sufferings and shorten his own, in a frenzy of anguish he finished them off himself. He cut down his wife and three children with that same razor-sharp axe with which he had carved wooden toys for the girls and his beloved son, Flenushka.7
It is astonishing that he did not lay hands on himself right after he did it. What was he thinking of? What could lie ahead for him? What prospects, what intentions? He was clearly deranged, an irrevocably finished being.
While Liberius, the doctor, and the members of the military council sat discussing what was to be done with him, he wandered freely about the camp, his head lolling on his chest, looking from under his brows with his dull yellow eyes and seeing nothing. A witless, vagrant smile of inhuman, invincible suffering never left his face.
No one pitied him. Everyone recoiled from him. Voices were raised calling for lynch law against him. They were not seconded.
There was nothing for him to do in the world. At dawn he disappeared from the camp, as an animal maddened by rabies flees from its own self.
9
Winter had long since come. It was freezing cold. Torn-up sounds and forms appeared with no evident connection from the frosty mist, stood, moved, vanished. Not the sun we are accustomed to on earth, but the crimson ball of some other substitute sun hung in the forest. From it, strainedly and slowly, as in a dream or a fairy tale, rays of amber yellow light, thick as honey, spread and on their way congealed in the air and froze to the trees.
Barely touching the ground with rounded soles, and at each step awakening a fierce creaking of the snow, invisible feet in felt boots moved in all directions, while the figures attached to them, in hoods and sheepskin jackets, floated through the air separately, like luminaries circling through the heavenly sphere.
Acquaintances stopped, got into conversation. They brought their faces close to each other, crimson as in a bathhouse, with frozen scrub brushes of beards and mustaches. Billows of dense, viscous steam escaped in clouds from their mouths and in their enormity were incommensurate with the frugal, as if frostbitten, words of their laconic speech.
On a footpath Liberius and the doctor ran into each other.
“Ah, it’s you? Long time no see! I invite you to my dugout this evening. Spend the night. We’ll talk, just like the old days. There’s new information.”
“The messenger’s back? Any news of Varykino?”
“The report doesn’t make a peep about my family or yours. But I draw comforting conclusions precisely from that. It means they saved themselves in time. Otherwise there would have been mention of them. Anyhow, we’ll talk about it when we meet. So I’ll be waiting for you.”
In the dugout the doctor repeated his question:
“Just tell me, what do you know about our families?”
“Again you don’t want to look beyond your nose. Ours are evidently alive, in safety. But they’re not the point. There’s splendid news. Want some meat? Cold veal.”
“No, thanks. Don’t get side-tracked. Stick to business.”
“Big mistake. I’ll have a go at it. There’s scurvy in the camp. People have forgotten what bread and vegetables are. We should have done better at organizing the gathering of nuts and berries in the fall, while the refugee women were here. I was saying, our affairs are in splendid shape. What I’ve always predicted has come true. The ice has broken. Kolchak is retreating on all fronts. It’s a total, spontaneously unfolding defeat. You see? What did I say? And you kept whining.”
“When did I whine?”
“All the time. Especially when we were pressed by Vitsyn.”
The doctor recalled that past fall, the execution of the rebels, Palykh’s murder