Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [34]
While Lara, slowly going around the praying people, copper money clutched in her hand, went to the door to buy candles for herself and Olya, and went back just as carefully, so as not to push anyone, Prov Afanasyevich managed to rattle off the nine beatitudes,14 like something well-known to everyone without him.
Blessed are the poor in spirit … Blessed are those who mourn … Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness …
Lara walked, suddenly shuddered, and stopped. That was about her. He says: Enviable is the lot of the downtrodden. They have something to tell about themselves. They have everything before them. So He thought. It was Christ’s opinion.
18
Those were the Presnya days.15 They found themselves in the zone of the uprising. A few steps away from them, on Tverskaya, a barricade was being built. It could be seen from the living-room window. People were fetching buckets of water from their courtyard to pour over the barricade and bind the stones and scraps of metal it was made of in an armor of ice.
The neighboring courtyard was a gathering place of the people’s militia, a sort of first-aid station or canteen.
Two boys used to come there. Lara knew them both. One was Nika Dudorov, a friend of Nadya’s, at whose house Lara had made his acquaintance. He was of Lara’s ilk—direct, proud, and taciturn. He resembled Lara and did not interest her.
The other was a student at a progressive school, Antipov, who lived with old Tiverzina, Olya Demina’s grandmother. When visiting Marfa Gavrilovna, Lara began to notice what effect she had on the boy. Pasha Antipov was still so childishly simple that he did not conceal the bliss her visits afforded him, as if Lara were some sort of birch grove during summer vacation, with clean grass and clouds, and he could express his calfish raptures to her unhindered, with no fear of being laughed at for it.
As soon as she noticed the sort of influence she had on him, Lara unconsciously began to take advantage of it. However, she busied herself with the more serious taming of that soft and yielding nature after several years, at a much later season of her friendship with him, when Patulya already knew that he loved her to distraction and that in his life there was no more turning back.
The boys were playing at the most dreadful and adult of games, at war, and moreover of a sort that you were hanged or exiled for taking part in. Yet the ends of their bashlyks16 were tied at the back with such knots that it gave them away as children and showed that they still had papas and mamas. Lara looked at them as a big girl looks at little boys. There was a bloom of innocence on their dangerous amusements. They imparted the same stamp to everything else. To the frosty evening, overgrown with such shaggy hoarfrost that its thickness made it look not white but black. To the blue courtyard. To the house opposite, where the boys were hiding. And, above all, to the pistol shots that cracked from it all the time. “The boys are shooting,” thought Lara. She thought it not of Nika and Patulya, but of the whole shooting city. “Good, honest boys,” she thought. “They’re good, that’s why they’re shooting.”
19
They learned that cannon fire might be directed at the barricade and that their house was in danger. It was too late to think of moving in with acquaintances somewhere in another part of Moscow: their area was surrounded. They had to look for a niche closer by, within the circle. They remembered the Montenegro.
It turned out that they were not the first. The entire hotel was occupied. Many had found themselves in their situation. But being remembered of old, they were promised quarters in the linen room.
They gathered everything necessary into three bundles, so as not to attract attention with suitcases, and began putting off the move to the hotel from day to day.
Owing to the patriarchal customs that reigned in the shop, work went on until the last minute, despite the strike. Then, in