Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [237]
At full speed they overtook Samdevyatov walking down the street, flew past him, and did not look back to see if he recognized them and his horse and shouted anything after them. In another place, similarly, without any greeting, they left Komarovsky behind, having ascertained in passing that he was still in Yuriatin.
Glafira Tuntseva shouted all the way across the street from the opposite sidewalk:
“And they said you left yesterday. Go trusting people after that. Off to fetch potatoes?”—and, with a gesture showing that she had not heard their answer, she waved good-bye behind them.
For Sima’s sake they tried to pull up on a hillside, in an awkward place, where it was hard to stop. The horse had to be held back all the time without that, by tugging tightly on the reins. Sima was wrapped from head to foot in two or three shawls, which lent her figure the rigidity of a round log. With straight, unbending steps she came to the sleigh in the middle of the pavement and said good-bye, wishing them a safe journey.
“We must finish our talk when you get back, Yuri Andreevich.”
They finally drove out of town. Though Yuri Andreevich had occasionally ridden on this road in winter, he mainly remembered it as it was in summer and now did not recognize it.
The sacks of provisions and other luggage were placed deep in the hay at the front of the sleigh, under the dashboard, and tied securely. Yuri Andreevich drove either kneeling on the bottom of the broad sleigh, in local parlance a koshovka, or sitting sideways, his feet in Samdevyatov’s felt boots hanging over the edge.
In the afternoon, when winter’s deceptiveness made it seem that the day was coming to an end long before sunset, Yuri Andreevich started whipping Savraska mercilessly. She shot off like an arrow. The koshovka flew up and down like a boat, bobbing over the unevenness of the much-used road. Katya and Lara were wearing fur coats, which hindered their movements. As the sleigh leaned or jolted, they shouted and laughed their heads off, rolling from one side of the sleigh to the other and burying themselves in the hay like unwieldly sacks. At times, for the fun of it, the doctor purposely rode one runner over the snowbank on the edge of the road, turning the sleigh on its side and throwing Lara and Katya out into the snow without doing them any harm. After being dragged by the reins a few steps along the road, he would stop Savraska, set the sleigh back on both runners, and get a scolding from Lara and Katya, who would shake themselves off and climb into the sleigh, laughing and pouting.
“I’ll show you the place where the partisans stopped me,” the doctor promised, when they had driven far enough from town, but he was unable to keep his promise, because the winter bareness of the forest, the deathly calm and emptiness all around, changed the place beyond recognition. “Here it is!” he soon cried, mistaking the first Moreau and Vetchinkin billboard, which stood in a field, for the second one in the forest, where he had been taken. When they raced past this second one, which was still in its former place, in the woods by the Sakma intersection, the billboard could not be made out through the scintillating lattice of thick hoarfrost, which turned the forest into a filigree of silver and niello. And they did not notice the billboard.
They flew into Varykino while it was still light and stopped at the Zhivagos’ old house, since it was the first on the road, closer than the Mikulitsyns’. They burst into the room hurriedly, like robbers—it would soon be dark. Inside it was already dark. In his haste, Yuri Andreevich did not make out half the destruction and filth. Some of the familiar furniture was intact. In deserted Varykino there was no one left to carry through the destruction that had been begun. Of their household things Yuri Andreevich found nothing. But he had not