Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [24]
“So according to you, Uncle Khudolei, he should have his head torn off for it? You really ought to be ashamed. An old master, gray in your hair, but no brains in your head.”
“Shove off, shove off, I said, while you’re still in one piece. I’ll knock your soul through your shoes for teaching me, you dog’s ass! You got made on the ties, fish-blood, right under your father’s nose. I know your mother, the wet-tail, all too well, the mangy cat, the skirt-dragger!”
What came next took no more than a minute. They each grabbed the first thing that came to hand among the heavy tools and pieces of iron that lay about on the machines, and they would have killed each other if at that same moment people had not rushed in a mob to pull them apart. Khudoleev and Tiverzin stood, their heads lowered, their foreheads almost touching, pale, with bloodshot eyes. They were unable to speak from agitation. Their arms were seized and held tightly from behind. At moments, gathering their strength, they would try to tear free, their whole bodies writhing and dragging the comrades who were hanging on to them. Hooks and buttons were torn from their clothes, their jackets and shirts were pulled from their bared shoulders. The disorderly uproar around them would not quiet down.
“The chisel! Take the chisel from him—he’ll split his skull.” “Easy, easy, Uncle Pyotr, we’ll sprain your arm.” “Are we just going to keep dancing around them? Pull them apart, lock them up, and be done with it.”
Suddenly, with a superhuman effort, Tiverzin shook off the tangle of bodies holding him and, breaking free of them, found himself running for the door. They were about to rush after him, but, seeing that he had something else in mind, let him go. He went out, slamming the door, and marched off without looking back. He was surrounded by autumnal dampness, night, darkness. “You reach them a hand and they bite it off,” he muttered, having no idea where he was going or why.
This world of baseness and falsity, where a well-fed little lady dares to look like that at witless working people, and the drunken victim of this order finds pleasure in jeering at one of his own kind, this world was now more hateful to him than ever. He walked quickly, as if the speed of his pace could bring closer the time when everything in the world would be as reasonable and harmonious as it now was in his feverish head. He knew that their strivings in recent days, the disorders on the line, the speeches at meetings, and their decision to go on strike—not yet brought to fulfillment, but also not renounced—were all separate parts of that great path which still lay before them.
But now his excitement had reached such a degree that he was impatient to run the whole of that distance at once, without stopping for breath. He did not realize where he was going with such long strides, but his feet knew very well where they were taking him.
Tiverzin did not suspect for a long time that, after he and Antipov left the dugout, the committee had decided to start the strike that same evening. The members of the committee at once assigned who among them was to go where and who would relieve whom. When the hoarse, gradually clearing and steadying signal burst from the engine repair shop, as if from the bottom of Tiverzin’s soul, a crowd from the depot and the freight yard was already moving towards the city from the semaphore at the entrance, merging with a new crowd which, at Tiverzin’s whistle, had dropped their work in the boiler room.
For many years Tiverzin thought that he alone had stopped all work and movement on the railway that night. Only later trials, in which he was judged collectively and the accusations did not include inciting to strike, led him out of that error.
People came running out, asking: “Why is the whistle blowing?” The response came from the darkness: “Are you deaf? Can’t you hear? It’s the