Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [23]
“My Darya’s got typhoid fever. I’d like to get her to the hospital. Until I do, my head’s not good for anything.”
“They say they’re handing out wages today. I’ll go to the office. If it wasn’t payday, as God is my witness, I’d spit on you all and personally put an end to all this dithering without a moment’s delay.”
“In what way, may I ask?”
“Nothing to it. Go down to the boiler room, give a whistle, and the party’s over.”
They said good-bye and went off in different directions.
Tiverzin went along the tracks towards the city. On his way he met people coming from the office with their pay. There were a great many of them. Tiverzin judged by the look of it that almost everyone on station territory had been paid.
It was getting dark. Idle workers crowded on the open square near the office, lit by the office lights. At the entrance to the square stood Fuflygin’s carriage. Fuflygina sat in it in the same pose, as if she had not left the carriage since morning. She was waiting for her husband, who was getting his money in the office.
Wet snow and rain unexpectedly began to fall. The driver climbed down from the box and began to raise the leather top. While he rested his foot on the back and stretched the tight braces, Fuflygina admired the mess of watery silver beads flitting past the light of the office lamps. She cast her unblinking, dreamy gaze over the crowding workers with such an air, as though in case of need this gaze could pass unhindered through them, as through fog or drizzle.
Tiverzin happened to catch that expression. He cringed. He walked past without greeting Fuflygina, and decided to draw his salary later, so as to avoid running into her husband in the office. He walked on into the less well lit side of the workshops, where the turntable showed black with its tracks radiating towards the engine depot.
“Tiverzin! Kuprik!” several voices called to him from the darkness. In front of the workshops stood a bunch of people. Inside there was shouting and a child’s weeping could be heard. “Kiprian Savelyevich, step in for the boy,” said some woman in the crowd.
The old master Pyotr Khudoleev was again giving a habitual hiding to his victim, the young apprentice Yusupka.
Khudoleev had not always been a torturer of apprentices, a drunkard and a heavy-fisted brawler. Time was when merchants’ and priests’ daughters from the industrial suburbs near Moscow cast long glances at the dashing workman. But Tiverzin’s mother, to whom he proposed just after she graduated from the diocesan girls’ school, refused him and married his comrade, the locomotive engineer Savely Nikitich Tiverzin.
In the sixth year of her widowhood, after the terrible death of Savely Nikitich (he was burned up in 1888 in one of the sensational train collisions of that time), Pyotr Petrovich renewed his suit, and again Marfa Gavrilovna refused him. After that Khudoleev started drinking and became violent, settling accounts with the whole world, which was to blame, as he was convinced, for his present misfortunes.
Yusupka was the son of the yard porter Gimazetdin from the Tiverzins’ courtyard. Tiverzin protected the boy in the workshops. This added heat to Khudoleev’s dislike of him.
“Look how you’re holding your file, you slope-head,” Khudoleev shouted, pulling Yusupka’s hair and beating him on the neck. “Is that any way to file down a casting? I’m asking you, are you going to foul up the work for me, you Kasimov bride,2 allah-mullah, slant-eyes?”
“Ow, I won’t, mister, ow, ow, I won’t, I won’t, ow, that hurts!”
“A thousand times he’s been told, first bring the mandril under, then tighten the stop, but no, he’s got his own way. Nearly broke the spendler on me, the son of a bitch.”
“I didn’t touch the spindle, mister, by God, I didn’t.”
“Why do you tyrannize the boy?” asked Tiverzin, squeezing through the crowd.
“Don’t poke your nose in other people’s business,” Khudoleev snapped.
“I’m asking you, why do you tyrannize the boy?”
“And I’m telling you to shove the hell off, social commander. Killing