Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [280]
“And when the war broke out, its real horrors, real danger, and the threat of real death were beneficial in comparison with the inhuman reign of fiction, and brought relief, because they limited the magic power of the dead letter.
“Not only people in your situation, at forced labor, but decidedly everybody, in the rear and at the front, breathed more freely, with a full breast, and threw themselves rapturously, with a feeling of true happiness, into the crucible of the fierce fight, deadly and salutary.
“The war is a special link in the chain of revolutionary decades. The action of causes that lay directly in the nature of the upheaval came to an end.
“The indirect results began to tell, the fruits of the fruits, the consequences of the consequences. A tempering of character derived from calamity, nonindulgence, heroism, readiness for the great, the desperate, the unprecedented. These are fantastic, stunning qualities, and they constitute the moral flower of the generation.
“These observations fill me with a feeling of happiness, in spite of the martyr’s death of Christina, of my wounds, of our losses, of all this high, bloody price of the war. The light of self-sacrifice that shines on her end and on the life of each of us helps me to endure the pain of Orletsova’s death.
“Just when you, poor fellow, were enduring your countless tortures, I was released. At that time, Orletsova was studying history at the university. The nature of her scholarly interests placed her under my guidance. Much earlier, after my first term in the camps, when she was still a child, I had paid attention to this remarkable girl. While Yuri was still alive, remember, I told you about her. Well, so now she turned up among my auditors.
“The custom of students publicly criticizing teachers had just come into fashion then. Orletsova fervently threw herself into it. God only knows why she picked on me so ferociously. Her attacks were so persistent, bellicose, and unjust that other students in the department occasionally rose up and defended me. Orletsova was a remarkable satirist. Under an imaginary name, in which everybody recognized me, she mocked me to her heart’s content in a wall newspaper. Suddenly, by complete chance, it turned out that this deep-rooted hostility was a form of camouflage for a young love, strong, hidden, and long-standing. I had always felt the same.
“We spent a wonderful summer in forty-one, the first year of the war, just on the eve of it and soon after it was declared. Several young students, boys and girls, and she among them, had settled in a summer place outside Moscow, where my unit was later stationed. Our friendship began and took its course in the circumstances of their military training, the forming of suburban militia units, Christina’s training as a parachutist, the repulsing of the first German air raids by night from the rooftops of Moscow. I’ve already told you that we celebrated our engagement there and were soon parted by the beginning of my displacements. I never saw her again.3
“When there were signs of a favorable change in our affairs, and the Germans began to surrender by the thousand, I was transferred, after two wounds and two stays in the hospital, from the anti-aircraft artillery to seventh division headquarters, where there was a demand for people with a knowledge of foreign languages, and where I insisted that you, too, should be sent, after I fished you up as if from the bottom of the sea.”
“The linen girl Tanya knew Orletsova well. They met at the front and were friends. She told many stories about Christina. This Tanya has the same manner of smiling with her whole face as Yuri had, have you noticed? For a moment, the turned-up nose and angular cheekbones disappear, and the face becomes attractive,