Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [64]
Lara was immersed in work and cares. The house and their little three-year-old Katenka fell to her. No matter how red-haired Marfutka, the Antipovs’ maid, tried, her help was not enough. Larissa Fyodorovna entered into all of Pavel Pavlovich’s affairs. She herself taught in the girls’ high school. She worked without respite and was happy. This was precisely the life she had dreamed of.
She liked it in Yuriatin. It was her native town. It stood on the big river Rynva, navigable in its middle and lower parts, and also on one of the Ural railway lines.
The approach of winter in Yuriatin was betokened by boat owners transporting their boats from the river to town on carts. There they conveyed them to their own courtyards, where the boats wintered over until spring under the open sky. The overturned boats, showing white on the ground at the far end of the yards, signified in Yuriatin the same thing as the fall migration of cranes or the first snow in other places.
Such a boat, under which Katenka played as under the domed roof of a garden gazebo, lay with its white bottom up in the courtyard of the house the Antipovs rented.
Larissa Fyodorovna liked the ways of the remote place, the local intelligentsia with their long northern o, their felt boots and warm gray flannel jackets, their naïve trustfulness. She was drawn to the earth and to simple people.
Strangely, it was Pavel Pavlovich, the son of a Moscow railway worker, who turned out to be an incorrigible capital dweller. His attitude towards the people of Yuriatin was much more severe than his wife’s. He was annoyed by their wildness and ignorance.
Now in retrospect it became clear that he had an extraordinary ability to acquire and retain knowledge drawn from cursory reading. Even before, partly with Lara’s help, he had read a great deal. During these years of provincial solitude, he read so much that now even Lara seemed insufficiently informed to him. He was head and shoulders above the pedagogical milieu of his colleagues and complained that he felt stifled among them. In this time of war, their humdrum patriotism, official and slightly jingoist, did not correspond to the more complex forms of the same feeling that Antipov entertained.
Pavel Pavlovich had graduated in classics. He taught Latin and ancient history in the high school. But suddenly the almost extinguished passion for mathematics, physics, and the exact sciences awakened in him, the former progressive school student. By self-education he acquired a command of all these disciplines at a university level. He dreamed of passing examinations in them at the first opportunity in the district capital, of reorienting himself to some mathematical specialization, and being transferred with his family to Petersburg. Arduous studying at night undermined Pavel Pavlovich’s health. He began to suffer from insomnia.
His relations with his wife were good but lacking in simplicity. She overwhelmed him with her kindness and care, and he did not allow himself to criticize her. He was afraid that his most innocent observation might sound to her like some imaginary, hidden reproach, for instance, for being above him socially, or for having belonged to another before him. The fear that she might suspect him of some unjustly offensive absurdity introduced an artificiality into their life. They tried to outdo each other in nobility and that complicated everything.
The Antipovs had guests—several teachers, Pavel Pavlovich’s colleagues, the headmistress of Lara’s high school, a member of the court of arbitration in which Pavel Pavlovich had once acted as a conciliator, and others. From Pavel Pavlovich’s point of view, every man and woman of them was an utter fool. He was amazed at Lara, who was amiable with them all, and did not believe that she could sincerely like anyone there.
When the guests left, Lara spent a long time airing out and sweeping the rooms and washing dishes in the kitchen with Marfutka. Then, having made sure that Katenka was well tucked