Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [211]
“Lord, what happiness! They say you’re alive and have turned up. They saw you in the neighborhood and came running to tell me. Supposing you’d hurry to Varykino first of all, I’m going there myself with Katenka. In any case the key is in the usual place. Wait for me to come back, don’t go anywhere. Ah, yes, you don’t know, I’m now in the front part of the apartment, in the rooms that give onto the street. But you’ll figure that out yourself. The house is empty, there’s lots of room, I had to sell part of the owners’ furniture. I’m leaving some food, mostly boiled potatoes. Put an iron or something heavy on the lid of the pot, as I’ve done, to protect it from the rats. I’m out of my mind with joy.”
Here ended the front side of the note. The doctor did not notice that there was writing on the other side of the paper. He brought the page unfolded on his palm to his lips and then, without looking, folded it and put it in his pocket along with the key. A terrible, wounding pain was mixed with his mad joy. Since she had gone straight to Varykino, without any hesitation, it meant that his family was not there. Besides the anxiety this detail caused him, he also felt an unbearable pain and sadness for his family. Why did she not say a word about them and where they were, as if they did not exist at all?
But there was no time for thinking. It was beginning to get dark outside. He had to do many things while there was still light. Not the least concern was familiarizing himself with the decrees posted in the street. This was a serious time. Out of ignorance, you could pay with your life for violating some mandatory decree. And not opening the apartment and not taking the sack from his weary shoulder, he went down and outside and approached the wall pasted all over with printed matter.
3
This printed matter consisted of newspaper articles, the records of speeches at meetings, and decrees. Yuri Andreevich glanced cursorily at the titles. “On the Rules of the Requisition and Taxation of the Propertied Classes.” “On Workers’ Control.” “On Factory Committees.” These were the instructions of the new power that had come to the town to abolish the preceding order found there. They were a reminder of the immutability of its foundations, perhaps forgotten by the inhabitants during the temporary rule of the Whites. But Yuri Andreevich’s head began to spin from the endlessness of these monotonous repetitions. What year did these headlines belong to? The time of the first upheaval, or a later period, after some intervening rebellions of the Whites? What were these inscriptions? From last year? The year before last? At one time in his life he had admired the unconditional quality of this language and the directness of this thinking. Could it be that he had to pay for this imprudent admiration by never seeing anything else in his life but these frenzied cries and demands, unchanging in the course of long years, becoming ever more impractical, incomprehensible, and unfeasible? Could it be that for a moment of too-broad sympathy he had enslaved himself forever?
He came upon a fragment from some report. He read:
“Information about famine testifies to the incredible inactivity of the local organizations. The facts of abuse are obvious, the speculation is monstrous, but what has been done by the bureau of the local trade union leaders, what has been done by the heads of municipal and regional factory committees? Unless we conduct massive searches in the warehouses of the Yuriatin freight station and along the Yuriatin–Razvilye and Razvilye–Rybalka lines, unless we take severe measures of terror, down to shooting speculators on the spot, there will be no escape from famine.”
“What enviable blindness!” thought the doctor. “What bread are they talking about, when there has long