Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [241]
He terribly liked everything she said, but did not show it, so as not to fall into excessive sweetness. Restraining himself, he remarked:
“Our bivouac life really is false and overwrought. You’re profoundly right. But we didn’t invent it. A frantic casting about is everybody’s lot, it’s the spirit of the time.
“I myself have been thinking today, since morning, about approximately the same thing. I’d like to make every effort to stay on here longer. I can’t tell you how much I miss work. I don’t mean agricultural work. Once our whole household here threw itself into it, and it succeeded. But I wouldn’t be able to repeat that again. It’s not what I have in mind.
“Life on all sides is gradually being put in order. Maybe someday books will be published again.
“Here’s what I’ve been thinking over. Couldn’t we arrange it with Samdevyatov, on conditions profitable for him, to keep us supplied for six months, on the pledge of a work I would promise to write during that time, a textbook on medicine, let’s suppose, or something artistic, a book of poems, for example. Or let’s say I undertake to translate some world-famous foreign book. I have a good knowledge of languages, I recently read an advertisement from a big Petersburg publisher who specializes in bringing out works in translation. Work like that would probably acquire an exchange value that could be turned into money. I’d be happy to busy myself with something of that sort.”
“Thank you for reminding me. I was also thinking of something like that today. But I don’t believe we can hold out here. On the contrary, I have a presentiment that we’ll soon be carried somewhere further on. But while this stopover is at our disposal, I have something to ask you. Sacrifice a few hours for me during the next few nights and, please, write down everything you’ve recited to me from memory at various times. Half of it has been lost, the other half has never been written down, and I’m afraid you’ll forget it all afterwards and it will perish, as you say has often happened to you before.”
8
By the end of the day they had all washed with hot water, left over in abundance from the laundry. Lara bathed Katenka. Yuri Andreevich, with a blissful feeling of cleanness, sat at the desk by the window with his back to the room in which Lara, fragrant, wrapped in a bathrobe, her wet hair wound turbanlike in a Turkish towel, was putting Katenka to bed and settling for the night. All immersed in the foretaste of impending concentration, Yuri Andreevich perceived everything that was going on through a veil of softened and all-generalizing attention.
It was one o’clock in the morning when Lara, who until then had been pretending, actually fell asleep. The changed linen on her, on Katenka, and on the bed shone, clean, ironed, lacy. Even in those years Lara somehow contrived to starch it.
Yuri Andreevich was surrounded by blissful silence, filled with happiness and breathing sweetly with life. The light of the lamp cast its calm yellowness on the white sheets of paper, and its golden patches floated on the surface of the ink in the inkstand. The frosty winter night shone pale blue outside the window. Yuri Andreevich stepped into the next room, cold and unlit, from which he could better see outside, and looked through the window. The light of the full moon bound the snowy clearing with the tangible viscosity of egg white or white sizing. The luxuriance of the winter night was inexpressible. There was peace in the doctor’s soul. He went back to the bright, warmly heated room and got down to writing.
In a sweeping script, taking care that the appearance of the writing conveyed the living movement of his hand and did not lose its personality, becoming soulless and dumb, he recalled and wrote out in gradually improving versions, deviating from the previous ones, the most fully formed and memorable poems, “The Star of the Nativity,” “Winter Night,” and quite a few others of a similar kind, afterwards forgotten, mislaid, and never found again by anyone.
Then, from