Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [281]
“I know what you’re talking about. Maybe so. I hadn’t paid attention.”
“What a barbaric, ugly name, Tanka Bezocheredeva, ‘Tanka Out-of-Turn.’ In any case it’s not a surname, it’s something invented, distorted. What do you think?”
“She did explain it. She was a homeless child, of unknown parents. Probably somewhere in the depths of Russia, where the language is still pure and unsullied, she was called Bezotchaya, meaning ‘without father.’ Street kids, for whom this derivation was incomprehensible, and who get everything from hearing and distort it, remade the designation in their own way, closer to their actual vulgar parlance.”
3
It was not long after the night Gordon and Dudorov spent in Chern and their nighttime conversation there. Overtaking the army in the town of Karachevo, which had been razed to its foundations, the friends found some rear units that were following the main forces.
The clear and calm weather of the hot autumn had settled in for more than a month without interruption. Bathed in the heat of the cloudless blue sky, the fertile black soil of Brynshchina, the blessed region between Orel and Bryansk, was burnished to a chocolate-coffee color by the play of sunlight.
The town was cut by a straight main street that merged with the high road. On one side of it lay collapsed houses, turned by mines into heaps of building rubble, and the uprooted, splintered, and charred trees of orchards flattened to the ground. On the other side, across the road, stretched empty lots, probably little built upon to begin with, before the town’s destruction, and spared more by the fire and powder blasts because there was nothing there to destroy.
On the formerly built-up side, the shelterless citizens poked in the piles of still-smoldering ashes, digging things up and carrying them to one place from the far corners of the burned-down site. Others hastily burrowed into dugouts and sliced layers of earth so as to cover the upper parts of their dwellings with sod.
On the opposite, unbuilt side there were white tents, a crowd of trucks and horse-drawn wagons of various second-line services, field hospitals strayed from their division headquarters, confused units of every sort of depot, commissariat, supply dump, lost and looking for each other. There, too, relieving themselves, snatching something to eat, sleeping, and then trudging further west, were companies of skinny, ill-nourished adolescent draftees in gray forage caps and heavy gray coats, with wasted, sallow faces, bloodless from dysentery.
The town, blown up and half reduced to ashes, went on burning and exploding in the distance, where timed charges had been planted. Now and then men digging in their gardens interrupted their work, stopped by a trembling of the ground under their feet, straightened their bent backs, leaned on the handles of their spades and, turning their heads in the direction of the blast, rested, looking off that way for a long time.
There, first in pillars and fountains, then in lazy, ponderous swellings, the gray, black, brick-red and smokily flaming clouds of airborne trash ascended into the sky, thinned out, spread into plumes, scattered, and settled back down to earth. And the workers took up their work again.
One of the clearings on the unbuilt side was bordered with bushes and covered completely by the shade of the old trees growing there. The clearing was fenced off from the rest of the world by this vegetation, like a covered courtyard standing by itself and immersed in cool twilight.
In the clearing, the linen girl Tanya, with two or three persons from her regiment and several self-invited fellow travelers, as well as Gordon and Dudorov, had been waiting since morning for a truck sent for Tanya and the regimental property she was in charge of. It was stowed in several boxes piled up in the clearing. Tatiana kept an eye on them and did not move a step away, but the others also stayed close to the boxes, so as not to miss the possibility of leaving when it presented