Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [267]
“You can see the vent window on the floor is open. Forgive us for smoking. We always forget that we shouldn’t smoke in your presence. Is it my fault that it’s arranged so stupidly here? Find me another room.”
“Well, so I’m leaving, Gordosha. We’ve talked enough. I thank you for caring about me, dear comrades. It’s not a whimsy on my part. It’s an illness, sclerosis of the heart’s blood vessels. The walls of the heart muscle wear out, get thin, and one fine day can tear, burst. And I’m not forty yet. I’m not a drunkard, not a profligate.”
“It’s too early to be singing at your funeral. Nonsense. You’ll live a long while yet.”
“In our time the frequency of microscopic forms of cardiac hemorrhages has increased greatly. Not all of them are fatal. In some cases people survive. It’s the disease of our time. I think its causes are of a moral order. A constant, systematic dissembling is required of the vast majority of us. It’s impossible, without its affecting your health, to show yourself day after day contrary to what you feel, to lay yourself out for what you don’t love, to rejoice over what brings you misfortune. Our nervous system is not an empty sound, not a fiction. It’s a physical body made up of fibers. Our soul takes up room in space and sits inside us like the teeth in our mouth. It cannot be endlessly violated with impunity. It was painful for me to hear you tell about your exile, Innokenty, how you grew during it, and how it re-educated you. It’s as if a horse were to tell how it broke itself in riding school.”
“I’ll stand up for Dudorov. You’ve simply lost the habit of human words. They’ve ceased to reach you.”
“That may well be, Misha. In any case, excuse me, let me go. It’s hard for me to breathe. By God, I’m not exaggerating.”
“Wait. That’s nothing but dodging. We won’t let you go until you give us a straight, sincere answer. Do you agree that you’ve got to change, to mend your ways? What do you intend to do in that respect? You ought to clarify your relations with Tonya and with Marina. They’re living beings, women capable of suffering and feeling, and not some bodiless ideas hovering in your head in arbitrary combinations. Besides, it’s a shame that a man like you should go to waste uselessly. You must wake up from your sleep and indolence, rouse yourself, make out what’s around you without this unjustified haughtiness, yes, yes, without this inadmissible arrogance, find a job, take up practice.”
“Very well, I’ll answer you. I myself have often thought in that same spirit lately, and therefore I can promise you a thing or two without blushing for shame. It seems to me that everything will get settled. And quite soon. You’ll see. No, by God. Everything’s getting better. I have an incredible, passionate desire to live, and to live means always to push forward, towards higher things, towards perfection, and to achieve it.
“I’m glad, Gordon, that you defend Marina, as before you were always Tonya’s defender. But I have no dispute with them, I don’t make war on them or anybody else. You reproached me at first that she addresses me formally in response to my informality and calls me by my name and patronymic, as if it doesn’t weigh on me as well. But the deeper incoherence that underlies that unnaturalness has long been removed, everything’s smoothed over, and equality has been re-established.
“I can tell you some more good news. They’ve started writing to me from Paris again. The children have grown; they feel quite at ease among their French peers. Shura is finishing their primary school, école primaire. Manya is just beginning. I don’t know my daughter at all. For some reason I have the feeling that, despite their receiving French citizenship, they will soon return, and everything will be set right in some unknown way.
“By many tokens, my father-in-law and Tonya know about Marina and the girls. I didn’t write to them about it. These circumstances must have reached them from elsewhere. Alexander Alexandrovich is naturally offended