Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [265]
Yuri Andreevich sometimes said jokingly that their intimacy was a novel of twenty buckets, as there are novels of twenty chapters or twenty letters.
Marina forgave the doctor his strange quirks, which had already formed by then, the whims of a man gone to seed and aware of his fall, and forgave the dirt and disorder that he spread around him. She put up with his grumbling, sharpness, irritability.
Her self-sacrifice went still further. When through his fault they fell into voluntary, self-created poverty, Marina, so as not to leave him alone in those intervals, would abandon her job, where she was so valued and where she was eagerly taken back after these forced interruptions. Submitting to Yuri Andreevich’s fantasy, she would go with him through the courtyards looking for odd jobs. They did woodcutting for tenants living on various floors. Some of them, particularly the speculators grown rich at the beginning of the NEP and people of science and art who were close to the government, began fixing up their apartments and furnishing them. One day Marina and Yuri Andreevich, stepping carefully on the rugs in their felt boots, so as not to track in sawdust from outside, brought a load of firewood to the study of an apartment owner, who was insultingly immersed in some reading and did not bestow so much as a glance on the sawyers. The lady of the house negotiated, gave orders, and paid them.
“What is the swine so riveted to?” The doctor became curious. “What is he marking up so furiously with his pencil?” Going around the desk with the firewood, he peeked over the reading man’s shoulder. On the desk lay Yuri Andreevich’s little books in Vasya’s early art school editions.
7
Marina and the doctor lived on Spiridonovka. Gordon was renting a room nearby on Malaya Bronnaya. Marina and the doctor had two girls, Kapka and Klashka. Kapitolina (Kapka) was going on seven; the recently born Klavdia was six months old.
The beginning of the summer of 1929 was hot. Acquaintances from two or three streets away ran to visit each other without hats or jackets.
Gordon’s room was strangely organized. In its place there used to be a fashionable dressmaker’s shop with two sections, a lower and an upper one. From the street, these two levels had a single plate-glass window. The gold inscription on the glass gave the dressmaker’s last name and the nature of his occupation. Inside, behind the glass, there was a spiral staircase from the lower to the upper section.
Now this space had been divided in three.
By means of an additional floor, the shop had gained an intermediary entresol, with a window strange for an inhabited room. It was a meter high and was at floor level. It was covered with remnants of the gold lettering. Through the spaces between them, the legs of those in the room could be seen up to the knees. Gordon lived in this room. Sitting with him were Zhivago, Dudorov, Marina and the children. Unlike the adults, the children filled the entire window frame. Soon Marina and the children left. The three men remained alone.
They were having a conversation, one of those lazy, unhurried summer conversations conducted among schoolmates whose friendship dates back countless years. How are they usually conducted?
There are some who possess a sufficient stock of words and are satisfied with it. They speak and think naturally and coherently. Only Yuri Andreevich was in that position.
His friends were lacking in necessary expressions. They did not possess the gift of speech. To make up for their poor vocabulary, they paced the room as they talked, smoked