Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [56]
Komarovsky stormed and raged. Contradictory feelings crowded in his breast. What scandal and indecency! He was furious. His position was threatened. The incident might undermine his reputation. He had at all costs to forestall, to cut short any gossip before it was too late, and if the news had already spread, to hush up, to stifle the rumors at their source. Besides that, he again experienced how irresistible this desperate, crazy girl was. You could see at once that she was not like everyone else. There had always been something extraordinary about her. Yet how painfully and, apparently, irreparably he had mutilated her life! How she thrashes about, how she rises up and rebels all the time, striving to remake her fate in her own way and begin to exist over again!
He has to help her from all points of view, perhaps to rent a room for her, but in any case not to touch her; on the contrary, to withdraw completely, to step aside, so as to cast no shadow, otherwise, being what she is, she might just pull something else for all he knows.
And there’s so much trouble ahead! You don’t get patted on the head for such things. The law never naps. It’s still night and less than two hours since the incident took place, but the police had already come twice, and Komarovsky had gone to the kitchen to have a talk with the police officer and settle it all.
And the further it goes, the more complicated it will get. They’ll demand proof that Lara was aiming at him and not at Kornakov. But things won’t end there. Part of the responsibility will be taken off Lara, but she will be liable to prosecution for the rest.
Naturally, he will do everything in his power to prevent that, and if proceedings are started, he will obtain findings from psychiatric experts that Lara was not answerable at the moment of the shooting, and have the case dropped.
After these thoughts Komarovsky began to calm down. The night was over. Streaks of light began to dart from room to room, peeking under the tables and sofas like thieves or pawnshop appraisers.
Having stopped at the bedroom and learned that Lara was no better, Komarovsky left the Sventitskys’ and went to see a lady of his acquaintance, Rufina Onisimovna Voit-Voitkovskaya, a lawyer and the wife of a political émigré. Her eight-room apartment now exceeded her needs and was beyond her means. She rented out two rooms. One of them had recently been vacated, and Komarovsky took it for Lara. A few hours later Lara was transported there with a high temperature and half-conscious. She had brain fever.
2
Rufina Onisimovna was a progressive woman, the enemy of prejudice, the well-wisher, as she thought and expressed it, of all that was “positive and viable” around her.
On her chest of drawers lay a copy of the Erfurt Program with a dedication by the author. One of the photographs pinned to the wall showed her husband, “my good Voit,” at a popular fairground in Switzerland together with Plekhanov.1 They were both wearing lustrine jackets and panama hats.
Rufina Onisimovna disliked her sick lodger at first glance. She considered Lara an inveterate malingerer. Lara’s fits of delirium seemed a pure sham to Rufina Onisimovna. She was ready to swear that Lara was playing the mad Gretchen in prison.2
Rufina Onisimovna expressed her contempt for Lara by a heightened animation. She slammed doors and sang loudly, rushed like a whirlwind around her part of the apartment, and spent whole days airing out the rooms.
Her apartment was on the top floor of a big house on the Arbat. The windows of this floor, starting with the winter solstice, were filled to overflowing with light blue sky, wide as a river in flood. For half the winter the apartment was full of signs of the coming spring, its harbingers.
A warm breeze from the south blew through the vent windows, locomotives howled rendingly in the train stations, and the ailing Lara, lying in bed, gave herself at leisure to distant memories.
Very often