Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [271]
Yuri Andreevich recalled school problems on the calculation of the time and order of arrival of trains starting at different moments and moving at different speeds, and he wanted to recall the general method of solving them, but failed to do so and, without finishing, skipped from these memories to other, much more complicated reflections.
He thought about several existences developing side by side, moving next to each other at different speeds, and about one person’s fate getting ahead of another’s fate in life, and who outlives whom. He imagined something like a principle of relativity in the arena of life, but, getting thoroughly confused, he dropped these comparisons as well.
Lightning flashed, thunder rolled. The luckless tram got stuck yet again on the descent from Kudrinskaya to the Zoological Garden. The lady in purple appeared a little later in the frame of the window, went past the tram, began to move off. The first big drops of rain fell on the sidewalk and pavement, and on the lady. A gust of dusty wind dragged over the trees, brushing leaves against leaves, began tearing the lady’s hat off and tucking her skirts under, and suddenly died down.
The doctor felt a rush of debilitating nausea. Overcoming his weakness, he got up from the seat and began jerking the window straps up and down, trying to open the window. It did not yield to his efforts.
They shouted to the doctor that the frame was screwed permanently to the jamb, but, fighting against the attack and seized by some sort of anxiety, he did not take these shouts as addressed to him and did not grasp their meaning. He continued his attempts and again tugged at the frame in three different movements, up, down, and towards himself, and suddenly felt an unprecedented, irreparable pain inside, and realized that he had torn something internally, that he had committed something fatal, and that all was lost. At that moment the car began to move, but having gone a little way down Presnya, it stopped again.
By an inhuman effort of will, staggering and barely making his way through the congested throng standing in the aisle between the seats, Yuri Andreevich reached the rear platform. They snarled at him and would not let him pass. He fancied that the breath of air had refreshed him, that perhaps all was not lost yet, that he felt better.
He began to squeeze through the crowd on the rear platform, provoking more abuse, kicks, and anger. Paying no attention to the shouts, he broke through the crowd, climbed down from the standing tram onto the pavement, took one step, another, a third, collapsed on the cobbles, and did not get up again.
Noise, talk, arguments, advice arose. Several persons got down from the platform and surrounded the fallen man. They soon established that he was not breathing and that his heart had stopped. People from the sidewalks came over to the little group around the body, some reassured, others disappointed that the man had not been run over and that his death had no connection with the tram. The crowd grew. The lady in purple also came up to the group, stood for a while, looked at the dead man, listened to the talk, and went on. She was a foreigner, but she understood that some suggested carrying the body into the tram car and taking it to the hospital, while others said that the police must be called. She went on without waiting to see what decision they would come to.
The lady in purple was the Swiss subject Mademoiselle Fleury from Meliuzeevo, now very, very old. For twelve years she had been pleading in writing for the right to leave for her native country. Quite recently her efforts had been crowned with success. She had arrived in Moscow to obtain an exit visa. She was going that day to pick it up at the consulate, fanning herself with her documents tied with a ribbon. And she went on, getting ahead of the tram for