Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [48]
Her fits of hypochondria did not keep Lara from sharing in the amusements of the numerous company that visited Duplyanka. She bathed and swam, went boating, took part in nighttime picnics across the river, set off fireworks, and danced. She acted in amateur theatricals and with particular passion competed in target shooting from short Mauser rifles, to which, however, she preferred Rodya’s light revolver. She came to fire it with great accuracy and jokingly regretted that she was a woman and the career of a swashbuckling duelist was closed to her. But the merrier Lara’s life was, the worse she felt. She did not know what she wanted herself.
This increased especially after her return to the city. Here to Lara’s troubles were added some slight disagreements with Pasha (Lara was careful not to quarrel seriously with him, because she considered him her last defense). Lately Pasha had acquired a certain self-confidence. The admonishing tones in his conversation upset her and made her laugh.
Pasha, Lipa, the Kologrivovs, money—it all started spinning in her head. Life became repugnant to Lara. She was beginning to lose her mind. She felt like dropping everything familiar and tested and starting something new. In that state of mind, around Christmastime of the year 1911, she came to a fateful decision. She decided to part from the Kologrivovs immediately and somehow build her life alone and independently, and to ask Komarovsky for the money needed for that. It seemed to Lara that after all that had happened and the subsequent years of her hard-won freedom, he should help her chivalrously, not going into any explanations, disinterestedly and without any filth.
With that aim she went, on December 27, to the Petrovsky neighborhood and, on the way out, put Rodya’s revolver, loaded and with the safety off, into her muff, intending to shoot Viktor Ippolitovich if he should refuse her, understand her perversely, or humiliate her in any way.
She walked in terrible perturbation along the festive streets, not noticing anything around her. The intended shot had already rung out in her soul, with total indifference to the one it had been aimed at. This shot was the only thing she was conscious of. She heard it all along the way, and it was fired at Komarovsky, at herself, at her own fate, and at the oak in Duplyanka with a target carved on its trunk.
8
“Don’t touch the muff,” she said to the oh-ing and ah-ing Emma Ernestovna when she reached out to help Lara take off her coat.
Viktor Ippolitovich was not at home. Emma Ernestovna went on persuading Lara to come in and take off her coat.
“I can’t. I’m in a hurry. Where is he?”
Emma Ernestovna said he was at a Christmas party. Address in hand, Lara ran down the gloomy stairs with the stained glass coats of arms in the windows, which vividly reminded her of everything, and set out for the Sventitskys’ in Flour Town.
Only now, going out for the second time, did Lara look around properly. It was winter. It was the city. It was evening.
It was freezing cold. The streets were covered with black ice, thick as the glass bottoms of broken beer bottles. It was painful to breathe. The air was choked with gray hoarfrost, and it seemed to tickle and prickle with its shaggy stubble, just as the icy fur of Lara’s collar chafed her and got into her mouth. With a pounding heart Lara walked along the empty streets. Smoke came from the doorways of tearooms and taverns along the way. The frostbitten faces of passersby, red as sausage, and the bearded muzzles of horses and dogs hung with icicles emerged from the mist. Covered with a thick layer of ice and snow, the windows of houses were as if painted over with chalk, and the colorful reflections of lighted Christmas trees and the shadows of merrymakers moved over their opaque surface, as if the people outside were being shown shadow pictures from inside on white sheets hung before a magic lantern.
In Kamergersky Lara stopped. “I can’t do it anymore, I can’t stand it” burst