Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [26]
“How do you know he did?”
“I saw the barrel uncovered and the mug standing on it. It must have been bottomless Prov, I thought, guzzling water.”
“You’re so sharp, Kuprinka. That’s right, it was Prov, Prov Afanasyevich. He ran by to ask if he could borrow some firewood. I gave it to him. But what a fool I am—firewood! He brought such news and it went clean out of my head. You see, the sovereign has signed a manifesto so that everything will be turned a new way, nobody’s offended, the muzhiks get the land, and everybody’s equal to the nobility.5 The ukase has been signed, just think of it, it only has to be made public. A new petition came from the Synod to put it into the litany or some sort of prayer of thanksgiving, I’m afraid to get it wrong. Provushka told me, and I went and forgot.”
8
Patulya Antipov, the son of the arrested Pavel Ferapontovich and the hospitalized Darya Filimonovna, came to live with the Tiverzins. He was a neat boy with regular features and dark blond hair parted in the middle. He kept smoothing it with a brush and kept straightening his jacket and his belt with its school buckle. Patulya could laugh to the point of tears and was very observant. He imitated everything he saw and heard with great likeness and comicality.
Soon after the manifesto of October 17, there was a big demonstration from the Tver to the Kaluga gate. This was an initiative in the spirit of “too many cooks spoil the broth.” Several of the revolutionary organizations that took part in the enterprise squabbled with each other and gave it up one by one, but when they learned that on the appointed morning people took to the streets even so, they hastened to send their representatives to the demonstration.
Despite Kiprian Savelyevich’s protests and dissuasions, Marfa Gavrilovna went to the demonstration with the cheerful and sociable Patulya.
It was a dry, frosty day in early November, with a still, leaden sky and a few snowflakes, so few that you could almost count them, swirling slowly and hesitantly before they fell to earth and then, in a fluffy gray dust, filled the potholes in the road.
Down the street the people came pouring, a veritable babel, faces, faces, faces, quilted winter coats and lambskin hats, old men, girl students and children, railwaymen in uniform, workers from the tram depot and the telephone station in boots above their knees and leather jackets, high school and university students.
For some time they sang the “Varshavianka,” “You Fell Victims,” and the “Marseillaise,” but suddenly the man who had been walking backwards ahead of the marchers and conducting the singing by waving a papakha6 clutched in his hand, stopped directing, put his hat on, and, turning his back to the procession, began to listen to what the rest of the leaders marching beside him were saying. The singing faltered and broke off. You could hear the crunching steps of the numberless crowd over the frozen pavement.
Some well-wishers informed the initiators of the march that there were Cossacks lying in wait for the demonstrators further ahead. There had been a phone call to a nearby pharmacy about the prepared ambush.
“So what?” the organizers said. “The main thing then is to keep cool and not lose our heads. We must immediately occupy the first public building that comes our way, announce the impending danger to people, and disperse one by one.”
They argued over which would be the best place to go. Some suggested the Society of Merchant’s Clerks, others the Technical Institute, still others the School of Foreign Correspondents.
During the argument, the corner of a government building appeared ahead of them. It also housed an educational institution, which as a suitable shelter was no whit worse than the ones enumerated.
When the walkers drew level with it, the leaders went up onto the semicircular landing in front of it and made signs for the head of the procession to stop. The