Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [54]
This inaccessibly high sky bent down low, very low to them in the nursery, burying its head in the nanny’s skirt, when she told them something about God, and became close and tame, like the tops of hazel bushes when their branches are bent down in the ravines for picking hazelnuts. It was as if it dipped into the gilded basin in their nursery and, having bathed in fire and gold, turned into an early or late liturgy in the little church in the lane where his nanny took him. There the stars of the sky became icon lamps, dear God became the priest, and everyone was assigned his duties more or less according to ability. But the main thing was the actual world of the grown-ups and the city, which stood dark around him like a forest. Then, with all his half-animal faith, Yura believed in the God of this forest, as in a forest warden.
It was quite a different matter now. All these twelve years of secondary school and university, Yura had studied classics and religion, legends and poets, the sciences of the past and of nature, as if it were all the family chronicle of his own house, his own genealogy. Now he was afraid of nothing, neither life nor death; everything in the world, all things were words of his vocabulary. He felt himself on an equal footing with the universe, and he stood through the panikhidas for Anna Ivanovna quite differently than in time past for his mother. Then he had been oblivious from pain, felt timorous, and prayed. But now he listened to the funeral service as information immediately addressed to him and concerning him directly. He listened attentively to the words and demanded meaning from them, comprehensibly expressed, as is demanded of every matter, and there was nothing in common with piety in his feeling of continuity in relation to the higher powers of earth and heaven, which he venerated as his great predecessors.
16
“Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.”7 What is it? Where is he? The carrying out. They are carrying the coffin out. He must wake up. He had collapsed fully clothed on the sofa before six in the morning. He probably has a fever. Now they are looking all over the house for him, and no one has guessed that he is asleep in the library, in the far corner, behind the tall bookshelves that reach the ceiling.
“Yura, Yura!” the yard porter Markel is calling him from somewhere close by. They are carrying out the coffin. Markel has to take the wreaths down to the street, and he cannot find Yura, and besides he has gotten stuck in the bedroom, because the door is blocked by the open door of the wardrobe, preventing Markel from coming out.
“Markel! Markel! Yura!” they call for them from downstairs. With one shove, Markel makes short work of the obstruction and runs downstairs with several wreaths.
“Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal”—gently drifts down the lane and lingers there, like a soft ostrich feather passing through the air, and everything sways: the wreaths and the passersby, the plumed heads of the horses, the censer swinging on its chain in the priest’s hand, the white earth underfoot.
“Yura! My God, at last. Wake up, please,” Shura Schlesinger, who has finally found him, shakes him by the shoulder. “What’s the matter with you? They’re carrying out the coffin. Are you coming?”
“Why, of course.”
17
The funeral service was over. The beggars, shifting their feet from the cold, moved closer together in two files. The hearse, the gig with the wreaths, and the Krügers’ carriage swayed and moved slightly. The cabs drew nearer to the church. The weeping Shura Schlesinger came out and, raising her tear-dampened veil, passed an inquisitive glance over the line of cabs. Finding the pallbearers from the funeral home among them, she beckoned for them to come and disappeared into the church with them. More and