Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [219]
“How long have I been lying here, still dressed?” he reflected in one of these flashes. “How many hours? How many days? When I collapsed, spring was beginning. And now there’s frost on the window. So loose and dirty it makes the room dark.”
In the kitchen, rats overturned plates with a clatter, ran up the wall on the other side, let their heavy hulks drop to the floor, their weepy contralto voices squealing disgustingly.
And again he slept, and woke up to discover that the windows in the snowy net of frost were suffused with a rosy, burning glow, which shone in them like red wine poured in crystal glasses. And he did not know and asked himself what glow this was, of dawn or sunset?
Once he imagined human voices somewhere quite near, and he lost heart, deciding that this was the beginning of madness. With tears of pity for himself, he murmured against heaven in a voiceless whisper for having turned away from him and abandoned him. “O Light that never sets, why has Thou rejected me from Thy presence, and why has the alien darkness surrounded me, cursed as I am?”
And suddenly he realized that he was not dreaming and this was the fullest truth, that he was undressed and washed, and was lying in a clean shirt, not on the sofa, but on a freshly made bed, and that, mingling her hair with his and his tears with hers, Lara was weeping with him, and sitting by his bed, and leaning towards him. And he fainted from happiness.
10
In his recent delirium he had reproached heaven for its indifference, but now heaven in all its vastness had descended to his bed, and two big woman’s arms, white to the shoulders, reached out to him. His vision went dark with joy and, as one falls into oblivion, he dropped into bottomless bliss.
All his life he had been doing something, had been eternally busy, had worked about the house, had treated people, thought, studied, produced. How good it was to stop doing, striving, thinking, and to give himself for a time to this working of nature, to become a thing himself, a design, a work of her merciful, exquisite, beauty-lavishing hands!
Yuri Andreevich was recovering quickly. Lara nourished him, nursed him by her care, by her swan-white loveliness, by the moist-breathed, throaty whispering of her questions and answers.
Their hushed conversations, even the most trifling ones, were as filled with meaning as Plato’s dialogues.
Still more than by the communion of souls, they were united by the abyss that separated them from the rest of the world. They both had an equal aversion to all that was fatally typical in modern man, his studied rapturousness, his shrill elation, and that deadly winglessness which is assiduously spread by countless workers in the sciences and the arts, so that genius will go on being an extreme rarity.
Their love was great. But everyone loves without noticing the unprecedentedness of the feeling.
For them, however—and in this they were exceptional—those instants when the breath of passion flew like a breath of eternity into their doomed human existence, were moments of revelation and of learning ever new things about themselves and life.
11
“You absolutely must return to your family. I won’t keep you for a single extra day. But you see what’s going on. As soon as we merged with Soviet Russia, we were swallowed up by its devastation. Siberia and the East are plugging its holes. You don’t know anything. During your illness there have been such changes in town! The stores from our warehouses are being transported to the center, to Moscow. For her it’s a drop in the ocean, these supplies disappear into her as into a bottomless barrel, while we’re left without provisions. The mails don’t work, passenger transportation has ceased, express trains loaded with grain are all that run. There’s murmuring in town again, as there was before the Gajda uprising,2 and again the Cheka rages in response to the signs of discontent.
“So where are you going to go like that, skin and bones, your soul barely keeping