Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [257]
18
At last he would have a good night’s sleep. For the first time in a long while Yuri Andreevich did not notice how he fell asleep as soon as he stretched out on his bed. Strelnikov spent the night with him. Yuri Andreevich gave him a place to sleep in the next room. In those brief moments when Yuri Andreevich woke up to turn on his other side or pull up the blanket that had slipped to the floor, he felt the strengthening power of his healthy sleep and delightedly fell asleep again. During the second half of the night, he began to have short, quickly changing dreams from the time of his childhood, sensible and rich in detail, which it was easy to take for reality.
Thus, for instance, his mother’s watercolor of the Italian seacoast, which hung on the wall, suddenly tore off, fell on the floor, and the sound of breaking glass awakened Yuri Andreevich. He opened his eyes. No, it was something else. It must be Antipov, Lara’s husband, Pavel Pavlovich, whose last name is Strelnikov, scarifying wolves in Shutma again, as Vakkh would say. Ah, no, what nonsense. Of course, it was the painting falling off the wall. There it is in splinters on the floor, he confirmed, as his dream returned and continued.
He woke up with a headache from having slept too long. He could not figure out at first who and where in the world he was.
Suddenly he remembered: “Strelnikov spent the night with me. It’s already late. I must get dressed. He’s probably up already, and if not, I’ll rouse him, make coffee, we’ll have coffee together.”
“Pavel Pavlovich!”
No answer. “It means he’s still asleep. Fast asleep, though.” Yuri Andreevich unhurriedly got dressed and went into the next room. Strelnikov’s military papakha was lying on the table, but he himself was not in the house. “Must have gone for a walk,” thought the doctor. “Without his hat. To keep himself in shape. And I’ve got to put a cross on Varykino today and go to town. But it’s too late. I overslept again. Just like every morning.”
Yuri Andreevich started a fire in the stove, took the bucket, and went to the well for water. A few steps from the porch, obliquely across the path, having fallen and buried his head in a snowdrift, lay Pavel Pavlovich. He had shot himself. The snow under his left temple was bunched into a red lump, soaked in a pool of spilled blood. The small drops of blood spattered around had rolled up with the snow into little red balls that looked like frozen rowan berries.
Part Fifteen
THE ENDING
1
It remains to tell the uncomplicated story of the last eight or nine years of Yuri Andreevich’s life, in the course of which he declined and went more and more to seed, losing his knowledge and skill as a doctor and as a writer, would emerge from this state of depression and despondency for a short time, become inspired, return to activity, and then, after a brief flash, again fall into prolonged indifference towards himself and everything in the world. During these years his longtime heart ailment, which he himself had diagnosed earlier, though he had no idea of the degree of its seriousness, advanced greatly.
He arrived in Moscow at the beginning of the NEP,1 the most ambiguous and false of Soviet periods. He was more emaciated, overgrown, and wild than at the time of his return to Yuriatin from his partisan captivity. Along the way he had again gradually taken off everything of value and exchanged it for bread, plus some cast-off rags, so as not to be left naked. Thus, as he went, he ate up his second fur coat and his two-piece suit and appeared on the streets of Moscow in a gray papakha, foot cloths, and a threadbare soldier’s greatcoat, which, lacking its buttons, which had all been cut off, had turned into a wraparound prisoner’s robe.