Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [75]
Dinnertime was approaching. The patients filled the remaining time however they could. They had been told that a new nurse had come to the hospital and would make her rounds for the first time that day. Lying across from Yuri Andreevich, Galiullin was looking through the just-arrived editions of Speech and The Russian Word and exclaiming indignantly at the blanks in the print left by the censors. Yuri Andreevich was reading letters from Tonya, a number of which had accumulated and were delivered all at once by the field post. The wind stirred the pages of the letters and newspapers. Light footsteps were heard. Yuri Andreevich raised his eyes from a letter. Lara came into the ward.
Yuri Andreevich and the lieutenant each recognized her on his own, without knowing about the other. She did not know either of them. She said:
“Good afternoon. Why is the window open? Aren’t you cold?”—and she went up to Galiullin. “What’s your complaint?” she asked and took his wrist to count the pulse, but at the same moment she let go of it and sat down on a chair by his cot, perplexed.
“How unexpected, Larissa Fyodorovna,” said Galiullin. “I served in the same regiment as your husband and knew Pavel Pavlovich. I have his belongings ready for you.”
“It can’t be, it can’t be,” she repeated. “What an amazing chance. So you knew him? Tell me quickly, how did it all happen? So he died buried under the earth? Don’t conceal anything, don’t be afraid. I know everything.”
Galiullin did not have the heart to confirm her information, which was based on rumors. He decided to lie in order to calm her.
“Antipov was taken prisoner,” he said. “He got too far ahead with his unit during an attack and found himself alone. They surrounded him. He was forced to surrender.”
But Lara did not believe Galiullin. The stunning suddenness of the conversation agitated her. She could not hold back the rising tears and did not want to cry in front of strangers. She got up quickly and left the ward, to regain her composure in the corridor.
After a moment she came back, outwardly calm. She deliberately did not look at Galiullin in the corner, so as not to start crying again. Going straight to Yuri Andreevich’s bed, she said absentmindedly and by rote:
“Good afternoon. What’s your complaint?”
Yuri Andreevich had observed her agitation and tears, wanted to ask her what was the matter, wanted to tell her how he had seen her twice in his life, as a schoolboy and as a university student, but he thought it would come out as too familiar and she would misunderstand him. Then he suddenly remembered the dead Anna Ivanovna in her coffin and Tonya’s cries that time in Sivtsev Vrazhek, restrained himself, and, instead of all that, said:
“Thank you. I’m a doctor myself, and I treat myself on my own. I have no need of anything.”
“Why is he offended with me?” Lara thought and looked in surprise at this snub-nosed, in no way remarkable stranger.
For several days there was changing, unstable weather, with a warm, endlessly muttering wind in the nights, which smelled of wet earth.
And all those days strange information came from headquarters, alarming rumors arrived from home, from inside the country. Telegraph connections with Petersburg kept being interrupted. Everywhere, at every corner, political conversations went on.
Each time she was on duty, the nurse Antipova made two rounds, in the morning and in the evening, and exchanged inconsequential remarks with patients in other wards, with Galiullin and Yuri Andreevich. “A strange, curious man,” she thought. “Young and unfriendly. Snub-nosed, and you couldn’t call him very handsome. But intelligent in the best sense of the word, with an alive, winning mind. But that’s not the point. The point is that I must quickly finish my obligations