Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [72]
Gordon made no reply.
12
And here again they were lying on two sides of the long, narrow window, it was night, and they were talking.
Zhivago was telling Gordon how he had seen the sovereign at the front. He told it well.
It was his first spring at the front. The headquarters of the unit to which he had been attached was in the Carpathians, in a hollow, the entrance to which, from the Hungarian valley, was blocked by that army unit.
At the bottom of the hollow there was a railway station. Zhivago described to Gordon the external appearance of the place, the mountains overgrown with mighty firs and pines, with white tufts of clouds caught among them, and the stone cliffs of gray slate and graphite, which showed through the forest like worn spots in thick fur. It was a damp, dark April morning, gray as that slate, locked in by the heights on all sides and therefore still and stuffy. Steaming hot. Steam hung over the hollow, and everything fumed, everything drew upwards in streams of smoke, engine smoke from the station, gray steam from the meadows, gray mountains, dark forests, dark clouds.
In those days the sovereign was making the rounds of Galicia. Suddenly it became known that he would visit the unit stationed here, of which he was the honorary colonel.
He might come at any moment. An honor guard was stationed on the platform to meet him. An hour or two of wearisome waiting followed. Then quickly, one after another, two trains came with the suite. Shortly afterwards the tsar’s train arrived.
Accompanied by the grand duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the sovereign inspected the lined-up grenadiers. With every syllable of his quiet greeting he raised up bursts and splashes of thunderously rolling hurrahs, like water dancing in swaying buckets.
The embarrassed and smiling sovereign gave the impression of a man older and more gone to seed than he appeared on rubles and medals. He had a listless, slightly puffy face. He kept casting guilty sidelong glances at Nikolai Nikolaevich, not knowing what was required of him in the given circumstances, and Nikolai Nikolaevich, respectfully bending towards his ear, not even with words but with the movement of an eyebrow or a shoulder, helped him out of his difficulty.
The tsar was pitiable on that gray and warm mountain morning, and it was eerie to think that such timorous reserve and shyness could be the essence of an oppressor, that this weakness could punish and pardon, bind and loose.
“He should have pronounced something on the order of ‘I, my sword, and my people,’ like Wilhelm,11 or something in that spirit. But certainly about the people, that’s indispensable. But, you understand, he was natural in a Russian way and tragically above such banality. In Russia this theatricality is unthinkable. Because it is theatricality, isn’t it? I can understand that there were still such peoples in Caesar’s time, some sort of Gauls, or Suevians, or Illyrians. But from then on it’s only been a fiction, existing so that tsars and activists and kings could make speeches about it: ‘The people, my people.’
“Now the front is flooded with correspondents and journalists. They note down ‘observations,’ the utterances of popular wisdom, make the rounds of the wounded, construct a new theory of the people’s soul. It’s a sort of new Dahl,12 just as contrived, a linguistic graphomania of verbal incontinence. That’s one type. But there’s another. Clipped speech, ‘jottings and sketches,’ skepticism, misanthropy. For instance, in one of them (I read it myself), there are such sentences as: ‘A gray day, like yesterday. Rain and slush since morning. I look through the window