Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [25]
Doors banged, new people came out. Other voices were heard. “Go on—a fire! Country hicks! Don’t listen to the fool. It’s what’s called a walkout, understand? Here’s my hat and here’s the door, I’m not your servant anymore. Let’s go home, boys.”
More and more people joined in. The railway was on strike.
7
Tiverzin came home two days later, chilled, sleepy, and unshaven. The night before there had been a sudden cold snap, unprecedented for that time of year, and Tiverzin was dressed for fall. At the gate he was met by the yard porter Gimazetdin.
“Thank you, Mr. Tiverzin,” he began. “You not let Yusup be hurt, you make us all pray God forever.”
“Are you out of your mind, Gimazetdin? What kind of ‘mister’ am I to you? Drop all that, please. Speak quickly, you see how freezing it is.”
“Why freezing, you warm, Savelyich. Yesterday we bring your mother, Marfa Gavrilovna, full shed of firewood from freight yard, birch only, good firewood, dry firewood.”
“Thank you, Gimazetdin. There’s something else you wanted to tell me. Be quick, please, you can see I’m cold.”
“I wanted to tell you, no sleep home, Savelyich, must hide. Policeman asked, police chief asked, who come to see you. I say no one come. An assistant come, the engine team comes, railway people. But strangers—no, no!”
The house where the bachelor Tiverzin lived with his mother and his married younger brother belonged to the neighboring church of the Holy Trinity. This house was inhabited partly by certain of the clergy, by two associations of fruit- and meat-sellers who hawked their wares from stands in town, but mostly by minor employees of the Moscow–Brest railway.
The house was of stone with wooden galleries. They surrounded on four sides a dirty, unpaved courtyard. Dirty and slippery wooden stairways led up to the galleries. They smelled of cats and pickled cabbage. To the landings clung outhouses and closets with padlocks.
Tiverzin’s brother had been called up as a private in the war and had been wounded at Wafangkou.3 He was recovering in the Krasnoyarsk hospital, where his wife and two daughters had gone to visit him and receive him when he was dismissed. Hereditary railwaymen, the Tiverzins were light-footed and went all over Russia on free company passes. At the time, the apartment was quiet and empty. Only the mother and son were living in it.
The apartment was on the second floor. On the gallery outside the front door stood a barrel, which was filled by a water carrier. When Kiprian Savelyevich got up to his level, he discovered that the lid of the barrel had been moved aside and a metal mug stood frozen to the crust of ice that had formed on the water.
“Prov and nobody else,” thought Tiverzin with a smirk. “Can’t drink enough, got a hole in him, guts on fire.”
Prov Afanasyevich Sokolov, a psalm-reader, a stately and not yet old man, was a distant relation of Marfa Gavrilovna.
Kiprian Savelyevich tore the mug from the ice crust, put the lid on the barrel, and pulled the handle of the doorbell. A cloud of domestic smell and savory steam moved to meet him.
“You’ve really heated it up, mama. It’s warm here, very nice.”
His mother fell on his neck, embraced him, and wept. He stroked her head, waited a little, and moved her away gently.
“A stout heart takes cities, mama,” he said softly. “My path goes from Moscow right to Warsaw.”
“I know. That’s why I’m crying. It’s going to be bad for you. Take yourself off somewhere, Kuprinka, somewhere far away.”
“Your dear little friend, your kindly shepherd boy,4 Pyotr Petrovich, almost split my skull.” He meant to make her laugh. She did not understand the joke and earnestly replied:
“It’s a sin to laugh at him, Kuprinka. You should pity him. A hopeless wretch, a lost soul.”
“They’ve taken Pashka Antipov. Pavel Ferapontovich. They came at night, made a search, raked everything over. Led him away in the morning. Worse still, his Darya’s in the hospital with typhoid. Little Pavlushka—he’s in a progressive high school