Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [272]
13
Through the doorway from the corridor one could see the corner of the room, with a table standing at an angle to it. From the table to the doorway peered the narrowing lower end of a crudely hollowed-out, boatlike coffin, with the dead man’s feet resting against it. This was the same table at which Yuri Andreevich used to write. There was no other in the room. The manuscripts had been put in the drawer, and the table had been put under the coffin. The pillows under the head had been plumped up high, the body in the coffin lay as if on the rising slope of a hill.
It was surrounded by a multitude of flowers, whole bushes of white lilacs, rare at that season, cyclamens, cineraria in pots and baskets. The flowers blocked the light from the windows. The light barely seeped through the flowers onto the dead man’s waxen face and hands, onto the wood and lining of the coffin. On the table lay a beautiful pattern of shadows that seemed as if it had just stopped swaying.
The custom of burning the dead in a crematorium was widespread by then.5 In hopes of obtaining a pension for the children, out of concern for their future at school, and from an unwillingness to damage Marina’s situation at work, they renounced a church funeral and decided to have nothing but a civil cremation. Application had been made to the relevant organizations. Representatives were expected.
In expectation of them, the room stood empty, as premises are vacated between the departure of old tenants and the moving in of new ones. The silence was broken only by the decorous tiptoeing and accidental shuffling of those who came for the leavetaking. They were few, but still far more than one might have expected. The news of the death of a man almost without name had spread all around their circle with miraculous speed. A good number of people turned up who had known the dead man at various periods of his life and at various times had lost track of or forgotten him. His scientific thought and his muse were found to have a still greater number of unknown friends, who had never seen the man they were drawn to, and who came to look at him for the first time and to give him a last parting glance.
In those hours when the general silence, not filled by any ceremony, became oppressive in that almost tangible lack, the flowers alone were a substitute for the missing singing and the absent rite.
They did not simply blossom and give off fragrance, but, as if in a chorus, perhaps hastening the corruption by it, poured out their perfume and, endowing everyone with their sweet-scented power, seemed to perform something.
The kingdom of plants so easily offers itself as the nearest neighbor to the kingdom of death. Here, in the earth’s greenery, among the trees of the cemetery, amidst the sprouting flowers rising up from the beds, are perhaps concentrated the mysteries of transformation and the riddles of life that we puzzle over. Mary did not at first recognize Jesus coming from the tomb and took him for the gardener walking in the cemetery. (“She, supposing him to be the gardener …”)6
14
When the dead man was brought to his last address in Kamergersky, his friends, informed of his death and shaken by the news, came running from the front entrance to the wide open door of the apartment with Marina, half-crazed by the terrible news. She was beside herself for a long time, thrashed on the floor, and beat her head against the edge of a long chest with a seat and back that stood in the front hall and on which the body was laid until the coffin came and the untidied room was put in order. She was bathed in tears and whispered and cried out, choking on the words, half of which escaped her against her will like the wailing of mourners. She babbled at random, the way simple people lament, not embarrassed by or noticing anyone. Marina clutched at the body and could not be torn away from it, so that the dead man could be transferred to the room, now tidied and freed of extra furniture,