Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [216]
In some places, the edges of the baseboards had come away from the floor. Yuri Andreevich filled the cracks with several layers of broken glass, the sharp ends pointing inwards. The bedroom door fitted well to the doorstep. It could be closed tightly and, when shut, totally separated the room with the stopped-up holes from the rest of the apartment. In a little more than an hour, Yuri Andreevich managed to do it all.
A tile stove cut off one corner of the bedroom, with a tile cornice that did not reach the ceiling. In the kitchen there was a supply of firewood, about ten bundles. Yuri Andreevich decided to rob Lara of a couple of armloads, and going on one knee, he began to pile the wood on his left arm. He brought it to the bedroom, set it down by the stove, familiarized himself with its mechanism, and quickly checked the condition it was in. He wanted to lock the door, but the lock turned out to be in disrepair, and therefore, tucking in some paper to make it tight and keep it from opening, Yuri Andreevich unhurriedly began making a fire in the stove.
While putting wood into the firebox, he saw a mark on the butt end of one of the logs. He recognized it with surprise. It was the trace of an old brand mark, the two initial letters K and D, which indicated what warehouse the logs came from before they were cut up. Long ago, when Krüger was still there, they had branded with these letters the ends of logs from the Kulabyshev plot in Varykino, when the factory sold off its extra unneeded fuel supplies.
The presence of this sort of firewood in Lara’s household proved that she knew Samdevyatov and that he looked after her, just as he had once supplied all the needs of the doctor and his family. This discovery was a knife in the doctor’s heart. He had been burdened by Anfim Efimovich’s help even before. Now the embarrassment of these favors was complicated by other feelings.
It was unlikely that Anfim was Larissa Fyodorovna’s benefactor just for the beauty of it. Yuri Andreevich pictured Anfim Efimovich’s free and easy ways and Lara’s recklessness as a woman. It could not be that there was nothing between them.
In the stove the dry Kulabyshev wood was beginning to burn furiously, with a concerted crackling, and as it caught fire, Yuri Andreevich’s jealous blindness, having started from weak suppositions, arrived at complete certainty.
But his soul was tormented on all sides, and one pain came to replace another. He had no need to drive these suspicions away. His thoughts, without effort, of themselves, jumped from subject to subject. Reflections about his family, rushing upon him with renewed force, overshadowed his jealous fits for a time.
“So you’re in Moscow, my dear ones?” It already seemed to him that Tuntseva had certified their safe arrival for him. “Meaning that you repeated that long, difficult trip without me? How was the journey? What sort of business was Alexander Alexandrovich summoned for? Probably an invitation from the Academy to start teaching there again? What did you find at home? Come now, you don’t mean that home still exists? Oh, Lord, how difficult and painful! Oh, don’t think, don’t think! How confused my thoughts are! What’s wrong with me, Tonya? I seem to be falling ill. What will become of me and of you all, Tonya, Tonechka, Tonya, Shurochka, Alexander Alexandrovich? O Light that never sets, why hast Thou rejected me from Thy presence?1 Why are you borne away from me all my life? Why are we always apart? But we’ll soon be united, we’ll come together, right? I’ll reach you on foot, if it can’t be otherwise. We’ll see each other. Everything will go well again, right?
“But how can the earth not swallow me up, if I keep forgetting that Tonya was supposed to give birth and probably did