Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [259]
Forest and fields were complete opposites then. The fields were orphaned without man, as if they had fallen under a curse in his absence. Delivered from man, the forests stood beautiful in their freedom, like released prisoners.
Usually people, mainly village children, do not let hazelnuts ripen fully, but break them off while they are still green. Now the wooded hillsides and ravines were completely covered with untouched, rough, golden foliage, as if dusty and coarsened from autumnal sunburn. Out of it stuck handsomely bulging clusters of nuts, three or four at a time, as if tied in knots or bows, ripe, ready to fall from their common stem, but still holding to it. Yuri Andreevich cracked and ate them endlessly on his way. His pockets were stuffed with them, his sack was filled with them. For a week nuts were his chief nourishment.
It seemed to the doctor that the fields he saw were gravely ill, in a feverish delirium, but the forests were in a lucid state of recovery, that God dwelt in the forests, but the devil’s mocking smile snaked over the fields.
3
In those same days, in that part of the journey, the doctor entered a burned-down village deserted by its inhabitants. Before the fire, it had been built in only one row, across the road from the river. The river side had remained unbuilt on.
In the village a few intact houses could be counted, blackened and scorched on the outside. But they, too, were empty, uninhabited. The other cottages had turned into heaps of coal from which black, sooty chimneys stuck up.
The steep banks of the riverside were pitted with holes where the villagers had extracted millstones, which had been their livelihood. Three such unfinished, round millstones lay on the ground across from the last cottage in the row, one of the intact ones. It was also empty, like all the rest.
Yuri Andreevich went into it. The evening was still, but it was as if a wind burst into the cottage as soon as the doctor stepped inside. On the floor wisps of hay and tow crawled in all directions, on the walls shreds of unstuck paper fluttered. Everything in the cottage moved, rustled. It was swarming with mice, like the whole area around, and they squeaked and scurried all over it.
The doctor left the cottage. The sun was going down behind the fields. The warm, golden glow of the sunset flooded the opposite bank, the separate bushes and backwaters stretching the glitter of their fading reflections into the middle of the river. Yuri Andreevich crossed the road and sat down to rest on one of the millstones that lay on the grass.
Above the edge of the bank a light brown, shaggy head appeared, then shoulders, then arms. Someone was coming up the path from the river with a bucket of water. The man saw the doctor and stopped, showing to the waist above the line of the bank.
“Want a drink, my good man? Don’t hurt me and I won’t touch you.”
“Thanks. Yes, I’ll have a drink. Come all the way up, don’t be afraid. Why should I touch you?”
The water carrier, having come up over the bank, turned out to be a young adolescent. He was barefoot, ragged, and disheveled.
Despite his friendly words, he fastened his anxious, piercing gaze on the doctor. For some inexplicable reason, the boy was strangely excited. In his excitement, he set the bucket down, suddenly rushed towards the doctor, stopped halfway, and began to murmur:
“It can’t be … It can’t be … No, it’s impossible, I’m dreaming. But I beg your pardon, comrade, allow me to ask you anyway. It seems to me that you’re somebody I knew once. Ah, yes! Yes! Uncle doctor?!”
“And who would you be?”
“You don’t recognize me?”
“No.