Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [253]
“Whom do you want?” escaped from the doctor with an unconsciousness that did not oblige him to anything, and when no answer followed, Yuri Andreevich was not surprised.
The man who had come in was strong and well-built, with a handsome face. He was wearing a short fur jacket, fur-lined trousers, and warm goatskin boots, and had a rifle slung over his shoulder on a leather strap.
Only the moment of the stranger’s appearance was unexpected for the doctor, not his coming. His findings in the house and other tokens had prepared Yuri Andreevich for this meeting. The man who had come in was obviously the one to whom the supplies in the house belonged. In appearance he seemed to be someone the doctor had already seen and knew. The visitor had probably also been forewarned that the house was not empty. He was not surprised enough to find it inhabited. Maybe he had been told whom he would meet inside. Maybe he himself knew the doctor.
“Who is he? Who is he?” The doctor painfully searched his memory. “Lord help me, where have I seen him before? Can it be? A hot May morning in some immemorial year. The railway junction in Razvilye. The ill-omened carriage of the commissar. Clarity of notions, straightforwardness, strictness of principles, rightness, rightness, rightness. Strelnikov!”
16
They had been talking for a long time already, several hours straight, as only Russians in Russia talk, in particular those who are frightened and anguished, and those who are distraught and frenzied, as all people were then. Evening was coming. It was getting dark.
Besides the uneasy talkativeness that Strelnikov shared with everybody, he also talked incessantly for some other reason of his own.
He could not have enough of talking and clung with all his might to the conversation with the doctor, so as to avoid solitude. Did he fear pangs of conscience or sad memories that pursued him, or was he tormented by dissatisfaction with himself, which makes a man unbearable and hateful to himself and ready to die of shame? Or had he taken some dreadful, irrevocable decision, with which he did not want to be left alone, and the fulfillment of which he kept postponing as long as possible by chatting with the doctor and being in his company?
However it was, Strelnikov was hiding some important secret that weighed on him, while giving himself in all the rest to the most lavish outpourings of the heart.
This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver. On the slightest pretext, a rage of self-castigating imagination would play itself out to the uttermost limits. People fantasized, denounced themselves, not only under the effect of fear, but also drawn on by a destructively morbid inclination, of their own free will, in a state of metaphysical trance and passion for self-condemnation that, once set loose, could not be stopped.
How much of this evidence, written and oral, given on the point of death, had been read and heard in his time by the prominent military, and sometimes also court-martial, figure Strelnikov. Now he himself was possessed by a similar fit of self-exposure, re-evaluated himself entirely, put a bottom line to everything, saw everything in a feverish, distorted, delirious misinterpretation.
Strelnikov was telling it all without order, jumping from confession to confession.
“It was near Chitá. Were you struck by the curiosities I stuffed the cupboards and drawers in this house with? It’s all from war requisitions, which we carried out when the Red Army occupied eastern Siberia. Naturally, I didn’t drag it on my back myself. Life always pampered me with loyal, devoted people. These