Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [212]
The doctor’s head was spinning. He fainted and fell unconscious on the sidewalk. When he came to his senses, people helped him to get up and offered to take him wherever he indicated. He thanked them and declined the help, explaining that he only had to go across the street.
4
He went up the stairs again and started opening the door to Lara’s apartment. It was still quite light on the landing, not a bit darker than when he had first gone up. He noted with grateful joy that the sun was not hurrying him.
The click of the unlocking door caused turmoil inside. The space left empty in the absence of people met him with the clanging and rattling of overturned and falling tin cans. Rats fell smack on the floor and scattered in all directions. The doctor felt ill at ease from a sense of helplessness before these loathsome creatures, which probably bred here by the thousand.
And before making any attempt to settle down for the night, he decided first of all to protect himself from this pestilence, and, finding some easily isolated and tightly closing door, to stop all the rat holes with broken glass and scraps of sheet metal.
From the front hall he turned left, to a part of the apartment unknown to him. Passing through a dark room, he found himself in a bright one, with two windows giving onto the street. Just opposite the windows, on the other side, the house with figures stood darkly. The lower part of its wall was pasted over with newspapers. Their backs to the windows, passersby stood reading the newspapers.
The light in the room and outside was one and the same, the young, unseasoned evening light of early spring. The commonality of the light inside and outside was so great that it was as if there were no separation between the room and the street. Only in one thing was there a slight difference. In Lara’s bedroom, where Yuri Andreevich was standing, it was colder than outside on Kupecheskaya.
When Yuri Andreevich was nearing town during his last march, and was walking through it an hour or two earlier, the immense increase of his weakness had seemed to him the sign of an imminently threatening illness, and it had frightened him.
Now the uniformity of light in the house and in the open delighted him for no reason. The column of cold air, one and the same outside and inside, made him akin to the passersby in the evening street, to the moods of the town, to life in the world. His fears went away. He no longer thought he would fall ill. The evening transparency of the all-pervading spring light seemed to him a pledge of distant and generous hopes. He believed that everything was for the better, that he would achieve everything in life, would find and reconcile everybody, would think everything through and express it. And he waited for the joy of seeing Lara as for the nearest proof.
Mad excitement and unbridled restlessness replaced his previously failing strength. This animation was a surer symptom of beginning illness than the recent weakness. Yuri Andreevich could not stay put. He was again drawn outside, and here is the reason why.
Before settling himself in here, he wanted to have his hair cut and his beard shaved. With that in mind, he looked into the windows of the former barbershops as he went through the city. Some of them were empty or occupied by other businesses. Others, which corresponded to their former purpose, were under lock and key. There was nowhere for him to have a shave and a haircut. Yuri Andreevich had no razor of his own. Scissors, if he could find Lara’s, might help him out of his difficulty. But, rummaging through everything in her dressing table with