Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [222]
“Never mind. I know it. I saw him once.”
“Really?”
“One time in a hotel room, when your mother poisoned herself. Late in the evening. We were still children, schoolboys.”
“Ah, I remember that time. You came and stood in the dark, in the front hall of the room. I might never have recalled that scene myself, but you helped me once to bring it back from oblivion. You reminded me of it, I think, in Meliuzeevo.”
“Komarovsky was there.”
“Was he? Quite possible. It was easy to find me with him. We were often together.”
“Why are you blushing?”
“From the sound of ‘Komarovsky’ on your lips. From the unwontedness and the unexpectedness.”
“A comrade of mine was with me, a schoolmate. Here’s what he told me right then in the hotel room. He recognized Komarovsky as a man he had seen one time by chance, in unforeseen circumstances. Once, while on a journey, this schoolboy, Mikhail Gordon, was eyewitness to the suicide of my father—a millionaire industrialist. Misha was riding on the same train with him. My father threw himself from the moving train with the intention of ending his life, and he was killed. He was in the company of Komarovsky, his lawyer. Komarovsky had encouraged my father’s drinking, gotten his affairs embroiled, driven him to bankruptcy, pushed him onto the path of ruin. He’s to blame for his suicide and for my being left an orphan.”
“It can’t be! What a portentous detail! Is it really true? So he was your evil genius, too? How that brings us together! Simply some sort of predestination!”
“It’s of him that I’m insanely, irremediably jealous over you.”
“What? Why, I not only don’t love him. I despise him.”
“Do you know your whole self so well? Human nature, especially woman’s, is so obscure and contradictory! In some corner of your aversion, you may be in greater subjection to him than to any other man, whom you love by your own goodwill, without constraint.”
“How horrible, what you’re saying. And, as usual, you say it so pointedly that this unnaturalness seems like the truth to me. But then how terrible it is!”
“Calm yourself. Don’t listen to me. I wanted to say that with you I’m jealous of what is obscure, unconscious, of something in which explanations are unthinkable, of something that cannot be puzzled out. I’m jealous of your toilet things, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of infectious diseases borne on the air, which may affect you and poison your blood. And, as of such an infection, I’m jealous of Komarovsky, who will one day take you from me, just as one day we will be separated by my death or yours. I know that this must seem like a heaping up of obscurities to you. I can’t say it in a more orderly and comprehensible way. I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.”
13
“Tell me more about your husband. ‘One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book,’ as Shakespeare says.”
“Where is it from?”
“Romeo and Juliet.”3
“I told you a lot about him in Meliuzeevo, when I was searching for him. And then here in Yuriatin, when you and I first met and I learned from your own words that he had wanted to arrest you on his train. I think I told you, but maybe I didn’t and it only seems so to me, that I saw him once from a distance when he was getting into a car. But you can imagine how protected he was! I found him almost unchanged. The same handsome, honest, resolute face, the most honest of any I’ve ever seen in the world. Not a trace of showing off, a manly character, a complete absence of posturing. He was always that way, and has remained that way. And yet I noticed one change, and it alarmed me.
“It was as if something abstract had entered into that look and discolored it. A living human face had turned into the embodiment, the principle, the portrayal of an idea. My heart was wrung when I noticed it. I realized it was the consequence of the powers whose hands he had given himself into, sublime but deadening and merciless powers, which someday would also not spare him. It seemed to me that he was marked, and that this was the finger of doom. But maybe I’m confused.