Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [236]
“And again, again. Forgive me for the confusion that keeps breaking through my words. How I’d like to talk to you without this foolish pathos! But we really have no choice. Call it what you like, death really is knocking at our door. The days at our disposal are numbered. Let’s use them in our own way. Let’s spend them on taking leave of life, on a last coming together before separation. Let’s bid farewell to all that was dear to us, to our habitual notions, to how we dreamed of living and to what our conscience taught us, bid farewell to hopes, bid farewell to each other. Let’s say once more to each other our secret night words, great and pacific as the name of the Asian ocean. It’s not for nothing that you stand at the end of my life, my secret, my forbidden angel, under a sky of wars and rebellions, just as you once rose up under the peaceful sky of childhood at its beginning.
“On that night, a girl in the last year of high school, in a coffee-colored uniform, in the semidarkness behind the partition of a hotel room, you were exactly as you are now, and as stunningly beautiful.
“Often, later in life, I tried to define and name that light of enchantment that you poured into me then, that gradually dimming ray and fading sound that suffused my whole existence ever after and became, owing to you, the key for perceiving everything else in the world.
“When you, a shadow in a schoolgirl’s uniform, stepped out of the darkness of the hotel room’s depths, I, a boy who knew nothing about you, understood with all the torment of a force that answered yours: this slight, skinny girl is charged to the utmost, as with electricity, with all conceivable femininity in the world. If you go near her or touch her with your finger, a spark will light up the room and either kill you on the spot or electrify you for your whole life with a magnetically attractive, plaintive craving and sorrow. I was all filled with wandering tears, all my insides glittered and wept. I felt a mortal pity for the boy I was, and still more pity for the girl you were. My whole being was astonished and asked: If it’s so painful to love and absorb electricity, how much more painful it is to be a woman, to be the electricity, to inspire love.
“Here at last I’ve spoken it out. It could make you lose your mind. And the whole of me is in it.”
Larissa Fyodorovna was lying on the edge of the bed, dressed and feeling unwell. She was curled up and had covered herself with a shawl. Yuri Andreevich was sitting on a chair next to her and speaking quietly, with long pauses. At times Larissa Fyodorovna raised herself on her elbow, propped her chin in her hand, and gazed open-mouthed at Yuri Andreevich. At times she pressed herself to his shoulder and, not noticing her tears, wept quietly and blissfully. She finally drew towards him, hanging over the edge of the bed, and whispered joyfully:
“Yurochka! Yurochka! How intelligent you are! You know everything, you guess about everything. Yurochka, you are my fortress, my refuge, and my foundation—God forgive my blasphemy. Oh, how happy I am! Let’s go, let’s go, my dear. Once we’re there, I’ll tell you what’s troubling me.”
He decided that she was hinting at her supposed pregnancy, probably imaginary, and said:
“I know.”
4
They drove out of town in the morning of a gray winter day. It was a weekday. People walked down the streets about their business. They frequently met acquaintances. At bumpy intersections, next to the old pump houses, women who had no wells near their houses lined up with their buckets and yokes set aside, waiting their turn to draw water. The doctor reined in Savraska, a smoky yellow, curly-haired Viatka horse, who was straining forward, and steered him carefully