Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [62]
Yuri Andreevich turned his back to the window and yawned from fatigue. He had nothing to think about. Suddenly he remembered. In the surgical section of the Krestovozdvizhensky Hospital,7 where he worked, a woman patient had died a couple of days ago. Yuri Andreevich had insisted that she had echinococcus of the liver. Everyone had disagreed with him. Today there would be an autopsy. The autopsy would establish the truth. But the prosector of their clinic was a hardened drunkard. God knows how he would go about it.
It quickly grew dark. It was now impossible to see anything outside the window. As if by the stroke of a magic wand, electricity lit up in all the windows.
From Tonya’s room, through a small vestibule that separated the ward from the corridor, the head doctor of the section came out, a mastodon of a gynecologist, who always responded to all questions by raising his eyes to the ceiling and shrugging his shoulders. These gestures of his mimic language meant that, however great the successes of knowledge, there are riddles, friend Horatio,8 before which science folds.
He walked past Yuri Andreevich, bowing to him with a smile, performed several swimming movements with the fat palms of his plump hands, implying that one had to wait and be humble, and went down the corridor to smoke in the waiting room.
Then the assistant of the reticent gynecologist came out to Yuri Andreevich, in her garrulousness the total opposite of her superior.
“If I were you, I’d go home. I’ll phone you tomorrow at the Krestovozdvizhensky. It will hardly begin before then. I’m sure the delivery will be natural, without artificial interference. But, on the other hand, the somewhat narrow pelvis, the occipito-posterior position of the fetus, the absence of pain, and the insignificance of the contractions are cause for some apprehension. However, it’s too early to tell. It all depends on how she responds to the contractions once the delivery begins. And that the future will show.”
The next day, in answer to his telephone call, the hospital porter who took the phone told him not to hang up, went to find out, left him hanging for some ten minutes, and brought the following information in a crude and incompetent form: “They told me to tell you, tell him, they said, you brought your wife too early, you have to take her back.” Furious, Yuri Andreevich demanded that someone better informed take the phone. “Symptoms can be deceptive,” a nurse told him. “The doctor shouldn’t be alarmed, he’ll have to wait a day or two.”
On the third day he learned that the delivery had begun during the night, the water had broken at dawn, and strong contractions had continued uninterruptedly since morning.
He rushed headlong to the clinic, and as he walked down the corridor, he heard, through the accidentally half-open door, Tonya’s screams, like the screams of accident victims with severed limbs when they are pulled from under the wheels of a train.
He was not allowed to go to her. Biting his bent finger till it bled, he went to the window, outside which oblique rain poured down, the same as yesterday and the day before.
A hospital nurse came out of the ward. The squealing of a newborn could be heard from there.
“Safe, safe,” Yuri Andreevich repeated joyfully to himself.
“A little son. A boy. Congratulations on the successful delivery,” the nurse said in a singsong voice. “You can’t go in now. We’ll show him to you in due time. Then you’ll have to loosen your purse strings for the new mother. She suffered all right. It’s her first. They always suffer with the first one.”
“Safe, safe,” Yuri Andreevich rejoiced, not understanding what the nurse was saying and that with her words she was including him as a participant in what had happened, though what did he have to do with it? Father, son—he saw no pride in this gratuitously