Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [53]
Yura was dumbfounded when he saw her. The same girl! And again in such extraordinary circumstances! And again this graying one. But now Yura knows him. He is the distinguished lawyer Komarovsky; he was involved in the trial over father’s inheritance. No need to greet him, he and Yura pretend they’re not acquainted. But she … So it was she who fired the shot? At the prosecutor? It must be something political. Poor girl. She’ll get it now. What a proud beauty she is! And these! They’re dragging her by the arms, the devils, like a caught thief.
But he realized at once that he was mistaken. Lara’s legs had given way under her. They were holding her by the arms so that she would not fall, and they barely managed to drag her to the nearest armchair, where she collapsed.
Yura ran to her, so as to bring her to her senses, but for greater propriety he decided first to show concern for the imaginary victim of the attempt. He went to Kornakov and said:
“There was a request for medical assistance here. I can render it. Show me your hand. Well, you have a lucky star. It’s such a trifle I wouldn’t even bandage it. However, a little iodine won’t do any harm. Here’s Felitsata Semyonovna, we’ll ask her.”
Mrs. Sventitsky and Tonya, who were quickly approaching Yura, did not look themselves. They said he should drop everything and fetch his coat quickly, they had been sent for, something was wrong at home. Yura became frightened, supposing the worst, and, forgetting everything in the world, ran for his coat.
15
They did not find Anna Ivanovna alive when they came running headlong into the house from the Sivtsev entrance. Death had occurred ten minutes before their arrival. It was caused by a long fit of suffocation, resulting from an acute edema of the lungs that had not been diagnosed in time.
During the first hours Tonya cried her head off, thrashed in convulsions, and recognized no one. The next day she calmed down, listened patiently to what her father and Yura told her, but was able to respond only by nodding, because the moment she opened her mouth, grief overwhelmed her with its former force and howls began to escape her of themselves, as if she were possessed.
She spent hours on her knees beside the dead woman, in the intervals between panikhidas,6 embracing with her big, beautiful arms a corner of the coffin along with the edge of the platform it stood on and the wreaths that covered it. She did not notice anyone around her. But the moment her gaze met the gaze of her relations, she hurriedly got up from the floor, slipped out of the room with quick steps, swiftly ran upstairs to her room, holding back her sobs, and, collapsing on the bed, buried in her pillow the outbursts of despair that raged within her.
From grief, long standing on his feet, and lack of sleep, from the dense singing and the dazzling light of candles day and night, and from the cold he had caught during those days, there was a sweet confusion in Yura’s soul, blissfully delirious, mournfully enraptured.
Ten years before then, when his mother was being buried, Yura had been quite little. He could still remember how inconsolably he had wept, struck by grief and horror. Then the main thing was not in him. Then he was hardly even aware that there was some him, Yura, who had a separate existence and was of interest or value. Then the main thing was in what stood around him, the external. The outside world surrounded Yura on all sides, tangible, impenetrable, and unquestionable, like a forest, and that was why Yura was so shaken by his mother’s death, because he had been lost in that forest with her and was suddenly left alone in it, without her. This forest consisted of everything in the world—clouds, city signboards, the balls on fire towers, and the servers riding ahead of the carriage