Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [35]
“Come here, girls!” she soon called the seamstresses there and began introducing them in turn to the visitor. He greeted each of them separately with a handshake, feelingly and clumsily, and left, having come to some agreement with Fetisova.
Returning to the big room, the seamstresses began wrapping themselves in shawls and flinging their arms up over their heads, putting them through the sleeves of tight-fitting fur coats.
“What’s happened?” asked Amalia Karlovna, just coming in.
“They’ve tooken us out, madame. We’re on strike.”
“Maybe I … Have I done you any wrong?” Mme Guichard burst into tears.
“Don’t be upset, Amalia Karlovna. We’re not angry with you, we’re very grateful to you. But the talk’s not about you and us. It’s the same now with everybody, the whole world. And how can you go against everybody?”
They all went home, even Olya Demina and Faïna Silantievna, who whispered to the mistress as she was leaving that she had staged this strike for the benefit of her and the business. But she would not be appeased.
“What black ingratitude! Just think how mistaken one can be about people! This girl on whom I spent so much of my soul! Well, all right, let’s say she’s a child. But that old witch!”
“Try to understand, mama, they can’t make an exception for you,” Lara comforted her. “Nobody’s angry with you. On the contrary. Everything that’s going on around us now is being done in the name of man, in defense of the weak, for the good of women and children. Yes, yes, don’t shake your head so mistrustfully. It will be better someday for me and you because of it.”
But her mother did not understand anything.
“It’s always this way,” she said, sobbing. “My thoughts are confused to begin with, and then you blurt things out that just make me roll my eyes. They dump on my head, and it turns out to be in my own interest. No, truly, I must have gone soft in the brain.”
Rodya was at the corps. Lara and her mother wandered about the empty house alone. The unlit street looked into the rooms with vacant eyes. The rooms returned the same gaze.
“Let’s go to the hotel, mama, before it gets too dark. Do you hear, mama? Without putting it off, right now.”
“Filat, Filat,” they called the yard porter. “Filat, dearest, take us to the Montenegro.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Take the bundles, and another thing, Filat, please look after the place in the meantime. And don’t forget seed and water for Kirill Modestovich. And keep everything locked. Oh, and please come to see us there.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Thank you, Filat. Christ save you. Well, let’s sit down before we go, and God be with us.”
They went outside and did not recognize the air, as after a long illness. Through the frosty expanse, polished like new, round, smooth sounds, as if turned on a lathe, rolled lightly in all directions. Salvoes and gunshots smacked, splatted, and slapped, flattening the distances into a pancake.
Much as Filat tried to dissuade them, Lara and Amalia Karlovna considered these shots blanks.
“You’re a little fool, Filat. Judge for yourself, how could they not be blanks if you can’t see who’s shooting. Who do you think is shooting, the Holy Spirit or something? Of course they’re blanks.”
At one of the intersections a patrol stopped them. They were searched by grinning Cossacks, who brazenly felt them from head to foot. Their visorless caps with chin straps were cocked dashingly over the ear. They all looked one-eyed.
What luck, thought Lara, she will not see Komarovsky for the whole time that they are cut off from the rest of the city! She cannot break with him on account of her mother. She cannot say: Mama, don’t receive him. Or else everything will be given away. So what? Why be afraid of that? Ah, God, let it all go to the devil, as long as it’s over. Lord, Lord, Lord! She’ll fall senseless in the middle of the street right now from revulsion. What did she