Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [63]
He had a patient who lived not far from the clinic. He went to see him and came back in half an hour. Both doors, from the corridor to the vestibule, and further on, from the vestibule to the ward, were again slightly open. Himself not knowing what he was doing, Yuri Andreevich slipped into the vestibule.
Spreading his arms, the mastodon-gynecologist in his white smock rose up before him as if from under the earth.
“Where are you going?” he stopped him in a breathless whisper, so that the new mother would not hear him. “Are you out of your mind? Lesions, blood, antiseptics, not to mention the psychological shock. A good one you are! And a doctor at that.”
“But I didn’t … I only wanted a little peek. From here. Through the chink.”
“Ah, that’s a different matter. All right, then. But don’t you … ! Watch out! If she sees you, you’re dead, I won’t leave an ounce of life in you!”
In the ward, their backs to the door, stood two women in white smocks, the midwife and the nurse. On the nurse’s hand squirmed a squealing and tender human offspring, contracting and stretching like a piece of dark red rubber. The midwife was putting a ligature on the umbilical cord, to separate the baby from the placenta. Tonya lay in the middle of the ward on a surgical bed with an adjustable mattress. She lay rather high. Yuri Andreevich, who in his excitement exaggerated everything, thought she was lying approximately on the level of those desks one can write at standing up.
Raised higher towards the ceiling than happens with ordinary mortals, Tonya was floating in the vapors of what she had suffered, she was as if steaming from exhaustion. She rose up in the middle of the ward, as a bark just moored and unloaded rides high in a bay, a bark that crosses the sea of death to the land of life with new souls, migrating here from no one knows where. She had just carried out the landing of one of these souls and now stood at anchor, resting with all the emptiness of her lightened hull. Along with her rested her broken and toil-worn rigging and planking, and her forgetfulness, her extinguished memory of where she had recently been, what she had crossed, and how she had moored.
And just as no one knew the geography of the country under whose flag she had dropped anchor, so no one knew in what language to address her.
At work they all vied with each other in congratulating him. “How quickly they found out!” Yuri Andreevich thought in surprise.
He went to the interns’ room, which was known as the pot-house and the garbage dump, because, owing to the crowdedness of the overburdened hospital, people now took their coats off there, came from outside in galoshes, forgot all sorts of things brought from elsewhere, littered it with cigarette butts and paper.
By the window of the interns’ room stood the bloated prosector, his arms raised, looking over his spectacles and examining against the light some cloudy liquid in a flask.
“Congratulations,” he said, continuing to look in the same direction and not even deigning to glance at Yuri Andreevich.
“Thank you. I’m touched.”
“No need to thank me, I had nothing to do with it. Pichuzhkin did the autopsy. But everybody’s amazed. Echinococcus. There, they say, is a diagnostician! It’s all they talk about.”
Just then the head doctor of the clinic came in. He greeted the two men and said:
“Devil knows what this is. A public square, not an interns’ room, it’s outrageous! Ah, yes, Zhivago, imagine—it was echinococcus! We were wrong. Congratulations. And another thing—rather unpleasant. They’ve reviewed your category again. This time we won’t be able to keep you from it. There’s a terrible lack of medical personnel at the front. You’ll be getting a whiff of powder.”
6
Beyond all expectations, the Antipovs settled very well in Yuriatin. There was a good memory of the Guichards there. For Lara this lightened