Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [276]
“Nobody’s left. One has died. The other killed himself. And only the one who should have been killed is left alive, the one she had tried to shoot but missed, that alien, useless nonentity who had turned her life into a chain of crimes unknown to her. And that monster of mediocrity hangs or hustles about the mythical byways of Asia, known only to stamp collectors, but none of my near and needed ones is left.
“Ah, but it was at Christmas, before her intended shooting of that horror of banality, that she had had a conversation with the boy Pasha in this room, and Yura, of whom they were now taking leave here, had not come into her life yet.”
And she began straining her memory to restore that Christmas conversation with Pashenka, but could recall nothing except the candle burning on the windowsill and the melted circle beside it in the icy crust of the windowpane.
Could she have thought that the dead man lying there on the table had seen that peephole from the street as he drove past and had paid attention to the candle? That from this flame seen from outside—“A candle burned on the table, a candle burned”—his destiny had come into his life?
Her thoughts strayed. She mused: “What a pity all the same that he won’t have a church funeral! The burial service is so majestic and solemn! Most of the dead aren’t worthy of it. But Yurochka was such a gratifying cause! He was so worthy of it all, he would so justify and repay that ‘making our funeral dirge the song: Alleluia’!”8
And she felt a wave of pride and relief, which always happened to her at the thought of Yuri and in the brief periods of her life close to him. The breath of freedom and lightheartedness that always issued from him came over her now. She impatiently got up from the stool she was sitting on. Something not quite comprehensible was going on in her. She wanted, with his help, to break free, if only for a short time, into the fresh air, out of the abyss of sufferings that entangled her, to experience, as she once had, the happiness of liberation. This happiness she dreamed, she imagined, as the happiness of taking leave of him, the occasion and the right to weep her fill over him, alone and unhindered. And with the haste of passion, she cast at the crowd a glance broken by pain, unseeing and filled with tears, as from burning eyedrops administered by an oculist, and they all stirred, blew their noses, began moving aside, and went out of the room, leaving her finally alone behind the closed door, and she, quickly crossing herself, went to the table and the coffin, stepped onto the footstool Evgraf had placed there, slowly made three big crosses over the body, and put her lips to the cold forehead and hands. She passed by the sensation that the cold forehead had become smaller, like a hand clenched into a fist; she managed not to notice it. She became still and for a few moments did not speak, did not think, did not weep, covering the middle of the coffin, the flowers, and the body with herself, her head, her breast, her soul, and her arms, as big as her soul.
15
She shook all over with repressed sobs. While she could, she fought them back, but suddenly it became beyond her strength, the tears burst from her and poured over her cheeks, her dress, her arms, and the coffin to which she pressed herself.
She said nothing and thought nothing. Successions of thoughts, generalities, facts, certainties, freely raced, sped through her, like clouds across the sky, as in the times of their former nighttime conversations. It was this that used to bring happiness and liberation. An uncerebral, ardent, mutually inspired knowledge. Instinctive, immediate.
She was filled with such knowledge now as well, an obscure, indistinct knowledge of death, a preparedness for it, an absence of perplexity before it. As if she had already lived twenty times in the world,