Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [231]
“And yet I love you. Ah, how I love you, if only you could imagine! I love every peculiarity in you, all that is advantageous and disadvantageous, all your ordinary aspects, dear in their unusual combination, your face ennobled by inner content, which without that might seem unattractive, your talent and intelligence, which have as if taken the place of a total lack of will. All this is dear to me, and I do not know a man who is better than you.
“But listen, do you know what I shall tell you? Even if you were not so dear to me, even if I did not like you so much, still the deplorable truth of my coldness would not have been revealed to me, still I would think that I loved you. From fear alone of the humiliating, annihilating punishment that non-love is, I would unconsciously beware of realizing that I did not love you. Neither I nor you would ever find it out. My own heart would conceal it from me, because non-love is almost like murder, and I would be unable to deal such a blow to anyone.
“Though nothing has been finally decided yet, we are probably going to Paris. I will get to those far-off lands where you were taken as a boy and where papa and my uncle were brought up. Papa sends his greetings. Shura has grown, he’s not so handsome, but he has become a big, strong boy and always cries bitterly, inconsolably, at the mention of you. I can’t go on. My heart is bursting with tears. So, farewell. Let me make the cross over you for this whole unending separation, the trials, the uncertainty, for the whole of your long, long, obscure path. I do not blame you for anything, I do not have a single reproach; shape your life as you want it to be, so long as it is good for you.
“Before leaving the dreadful and, for us, so fateful Urals, I came to know Larissa Fyodorovna quite closely. I owe her my thanks, she was constantly there when it was hard for me, and helped me during the delivery. I must tell you frankly that she is a good person, but I do not want to play the hypocrite—she is the complete opposite of me. I was born into this world to simplify life and seek the right way through, and she in order to complicate and confuse it.
“Farewell, I must end. They have come to take the letter and it is time to pack. Oh, Yura, Yura, my dear, my darling, my husband, father of my children, what is all this? We will never, ever see each other again. There, I have written these words, do you clearly make out their meaning? Do you understand, do you understand? They are hurrying me, and it is a sure sign that they have come to take me to my execution. Yura! Yura!”
Yuri Andreevich looked up from the letter with an absent, tearless gaze, not directed anywhere, dry from grief, devastated by suffering. He saw nothing around him, he was conscious of nothing.
Outside the window it began to snow. Wind carried the snow obliquely, ever faster and ever denser, as if trying all the while to make up for something, and the way Yuri Andreevich stared ahead of him through the window was as if it were not snow falling but the continued reading of Tonya’s letter, and not dry starlike flakes that raced and flashed, but small spaces of white paper between small black letters, white, white, endless, endless.
Yuri Andreevich involuntarily moaned and clutched his chest. He felt faint, made several hobbling steps towards the couch, and collapsed on it unconscious.
Part Fourteen
IN VARYKINO AGAIN
1
Winter settled in. Snow fell in big flakes. Yuri Andreevich came home from the hospital.
“Komarovsky’s come,” Lara said in a failing, husky voice, coming to meet him. They stood in the front hall. She had a lost look, as if she had been beaten.
“Where? To whom?