Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [217]
Here Yuri Andreevich looked around at the walls of the bedroom with a different, discerning eye. He knew that, of the things standing or hanging around him, not one belonged to Lara, and that the furnishings of the former owners, unknown and in hiding, in no way testified to Lara’s taste.
But all the same, be that as it may, he suddenly felt ill at ease among the men and women in enlarged photographs gazing from the walls. A spirit of hostility breathed on him from the crude furnishings. He felt himself foreign and superfluous in this bedroom.
And he, fool that he was, had remembered this house so many times, had missed it, and had entered this room, not as a space, but as his yearning for Lara! How ridiculous this way of feeling probably was from outside! Was this how strong, practical people like Samdevyatov, handsome males, lived and behaved and expressed themselves? And why should Lara prefer his spinelessness and the obscure, unreal language of his adoration? Did she have such need of this confusion? Did she herself want to be what she was for him?
And what was she for him, as he had just put it? Oh, to this question he always had the answer ready.
There outside is the spring evening. The air is all marked with sounds. The voices of children playing are scattered at various distances, as if to signify that the space is alive throughout. And this expanse is Russia, his incomparable one, renowned far and wide, famous mother, martyr, stubborn, muddle-headed, whimsical, adored, with her eternally majestic and disastrous escapades, which can never be foreseen! Oh, how sweet it is to exist! How sweet to live in the world and to love life! Oh, how one always longs to say thank you to life itself, to existence itself, to say it right in their faces!
And that is what Lara is. It is impossible to talk to them, but she is their representative, their expression, the gift of hearing and speech, given to the voiceless principles of existence.
And untrue, a thousand times untrue, was all that he had said about her in a moment of doubt. How precisely perfect and irreproachable everything is in her!
Tears of admiration and repentance clouded his vision. He opened the door of the stove and stirred inside with a poker. He pushed the burning, pure heat to the very back of the firebox and moved the as yet unburnt logs towards the front, where the draft was stronger. For some time he did not close the door. He enjoyed feeling the play of warmth and light on his face and hands. The shifting glimmer of the flames finally sobered him. Oh, how he missed her now, how he needed at that moment something tangible that came from her!
He took her crumpled note from his pocket. He unfolded it the other side up, not the way he had read it earlier, and only now noticed that there was writing on the other side as well. Having smoothed out the crumpled paper, he read in the dancing light of the burning stove:
“About your family you know. They are in Moscow. Tonya gave birth to a daughter.” This was followed by several crossed-out lines. Then there was: “I crossed it out, because it’s silly in a note. We’ll talk our fill face-to-face. I’m in a hurry, running to get a horse. I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t get one. With Katenka it will be hard …” The end of the phrase was smudged and he could not make it out.
“She ran to get a horse from Anfim, and probably got it, since she’s gone,” Yuri Andreevich reflected calmly. “If her conscience weren’t completely clear on that account, she wouldn’t have mentioned that detail.”
8
When the fire burned out, the doctor closed the flue