Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [221]
“Oh, please. You’re probably interested in something else—what sort of relations we have? You want to know whether anything more personal has crept into our good acquaintance? Of course not. I’m obliged to Anfim Efimovich for a countless number of things, I’m roundly in debt to him, but even if he showered me with gold, if he gave his life for me, it wouldn’t bring me a step closer to him. I have an inborn hostility to people of that alien cast. In practical matters, these enterprising, self-assured, peremptory people are irreplaceable. In matters of the heart, such strutting, mustachioed male self-satisfaction is disgusting. I understand intimacy and life quite differently. But that’s not all. In the moral respect, Anfim reminds me of another, far more repulsive man, who is to blame for my being this way, thanks to whom I am what I am.”
“I don’t understand. Just how are you? What are you getting at? Explain. You’re the best of all people in the world.”
“Ah, Yurochka, how can you? I’m being serious with you, and you pay me compliments like in a drawing room. You ask how I am? I’m broken, I have a crack in me for all my life. I was made a woman prematurely, criminally early, and initiated into life from its worst side, in the false, boulevard interpretation of a self-confident aging parasite from former times, who profited from everything and allowed himself everything.”
“I can guess. I supposed there was something. But wait. It’s easy to imagine your unchildish pain of that time, the fear of frightened inexperience, the first offense of an immature girl. But that’s a thing of the past. I mean to say—to grieve over it now is not your concern, it’s that of the people who love you, like myself. It’s I who should tear my hair and feel desperate at being late, at not being with you then already, so as to prevent what happened, if it is truly a grief for you. Astonishing. It seems I can be deeply, mortally, passionately jealous only of what is beneath me or distant from me. Rivalry with a superior man calls up totally different feelings in me. If a man close to me in spirit and whom I love should fall in love with the same woman as I, I would have a feeling of sad brotherhood with him, not of dispute and competition. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to share the object of my adoration with him for a second. But I would withdraw with a feeling of suffering quite different from jealousy, not as smoldering and bloody. The same would happen if I should run into an artist who won me over with his superior ability in works similar to mine. I would probably renounce my search and not duplicate his attempts, which had defeated me.
“But I’ve gotten sidetracked. I don’t think I’d love you so deeply if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don’t like the righteous ones, who never fell, never stumbled. Their virtue is dead and of little value. The beauty of life has not been revealed to them.”
“And I’m thinking precisely of that beauty. It seems to me that what’s needed in order to see it is intact imagination, primary perception. And that is just what was taken from me. Perhaps I would have formed my own view of life, if I hadn’t seen it, from the very first steps, with someone else’s vulgarizing stamp on it. But that’s not all. Because of the interference in my just-beginning life of an immoral, self-gratifying mediocrity, my subsequent marriage to a big and remarkable man did not work out, though he loved me deeply and I responded in the same way.”
“Wait. Tell me about your husband later. I told you, jealousy is usually aroused in me by an inferior, not an equal. I’m not jealous of your husband. But that one?”
“What ‘that one’?”
“That profligate, the one who ruined you. Who is he?”
“A well-known Moscow lawyer. He was my father’s associate, and after papa’s death he supported mama materially, when we were living in poverty. A bachelor with a fortune. I’m probably making him far too interesting and unsuitably significant by besmirching him like this. A very ordinary phenomenon. If you