Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [210]
These pictures and spectacles made the impression of something outlandish, transcendent. They seemed like parts of some unknown, other-planetary existences, brought to earth by mistake. And only nature remained true to history and showed itself to the eye as the artists of modern times portrayed it.
There were some quiet winter evenings, light gray, dark pink. Against the pale sunset, black birch tops were outlined, fine as handwriting. Black streams flowed under a gray mist of thin ice, between banks of white heaped snow, moistened from beneath by dark river water. And now such an evening, frosty, transparently gray, tenderhearted as pussy-willow fluff, promised to settle in after an hour or two opposite the house with figures in Yuriatin.
The doctor was going up to the board of the Central Printing Office on the stone wall of the house to look over the official information. But his gaze kept falling on the other side and up towards the several windows on the second floor of the house opposite. These windows giving onto the street had once been painted over with whitewash. In the two rooms inside, the owners’ furniture had been stored. Though frost covered the lower parts of the windowpanes with a thin, crystalline crust, he could see that the glass was now transparent and the whitewash had been removed. What did this change mean? Had the owners returned? Or had Lara gone away, and there were new tenants in the apartment, and everything in it was different now?
The uncertainty agitated the doctor. He was unable to control his agitation. He crossed the street, went into the hall through the front door, and began to go up the main stairs, so familiar and so dear to his heart. How often he had remembered, in the forest camp, the openwork pattern of the cast-iron steps, down to the last curlicue. At some turn of his ascent, as he looked through the openwork under his feet, he could see old buckets, tubs, and broken chairs piled up under the stairway. This repeated itself now, too. Nothing had changed, everything was as before. The doctor was almost grateful to the stairs for this faithfulness to the past.
Once there had been a doorbell. But it had broken and ceased to work already in former times, before the doctor’s forest captivity. He was about to knock on the door, but noticed that it was locked in a new way, with a heavy padlock hanging on rings, crudely screwed into the paneling of the old oaken door, with its fine trimming fallen off in places. Formerly such barbarity had not been allowed. Locks had been mortised into the doorway and had worked well, and if they broke, locksmiths had existed to repair them. This insignificant detail spoke in its own way of a general, greatly advanced deterioration.
The doctor was certain that Lara and Katenka were not at home, and perhaps were not in Yuriatin, and perhaps were not even in this world. He was prepared for the most terrible disappointments. Only for the sake of a clear conscience, he decided to feel in the hole that he and Katenka had been so afraid of, and he tapped his foot on the wall, so that his hand would not come upon a rat in the opening. He had no hope of finding anything in the prearranged place. The hole was stopped up with a brick. Yuri