Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [86]
The doctor’s voice failed him again. He waved his hand and with the feeling of an irreparable blunder got up and went to the window. He stood with his back to the room, propped his cheek in his hand, leaning his elbow on the windowsill, and, in search of pacification, directed his absentminded, unseeing gaze into the depths of the garden shrouded in darkness.
Going around the ironing board that rested on the table and on the edge of the other window, Larissa Fyodorovna stopped a few steps away from the doctor, behind him, in the middle of the room.
“Ah, how I’ve always been afraid of this!” she said softly, as if to herself. “What a fatal error! Stop, Yuri Andreevich, you mustn’t. Ah, look what I’ve done because of you!” she exclaimed loudly and ran to the board, where a thin stream of acrid smoke was rising from a blouse burned through under the iron forgotten on it. “Yuri Andreevich,” she went on, banging the iron down angrily on the burner. “Yuri Andreevich, be a good boy, go to Mademoiselle for a moment, drink some water, dearest, and come back here the way I’m used to you and would like to see you. Do you hear, Yuri Andreevich? I know you can do it. Please, I beg you.”
Such talks between them were not repeated again. A week later Larissa Fyodorovna left.
9
A short time later Zhivago began to prepare for the road. The night before his departure, there was a terrible storm in Meliuzeevo.
The noise of the hurricane merged with the noise of the downpour, which now fell vertically on the roofs, now, under the pressure of the shifting wind, moved down the street, its lashing torrents as if winning step by step.
Peals of thunder followed one another without pause, becoming one uniform rumbling. Frequent flashes of lightning showed the street running away into the distance, with trees bending over and running in the same direction.
During the night, Mademoiselle Fleury was awakened by an anxious knocking at the front door. Frightened, she sat up in bed and listened. The knocking did not stop.
Can it be that in the whole hospital not a soul will be found to come out and open the door, she thought, and that she alone, a wretched old woman, must do it all for them, only because nature had made her honest and endowed her with a sense of duty?
Well, all right, the Zhabrinskys were rich people, aristocrats. But the hospital is theirs, the people’s. Why did they abandon it? It would be curious to know, for instance, where the orderlies have vanished to. Everybody’s scattered, there are no directors, no nurses, no doctors. And there are still wounded in the house, two with amputated legs upstairs in the surgical section, where the drawing room used to be, and the storeroom downstairs, next to the laundry, is full of dysentery cases. And that she-devil Ustinya has gone visiting somewhere. The foolish woman could see the storm gathering, why the deuce did she have to go? Now she’s got a good excuse for staying the night.
Well, they’ve stopped, thank God, they’ve quieted down. They saw no one will open and they waved their hand and left. What the devil are they doing out in such weather? But maybe it’s Ustinya? No, she has her own key. My God, how frightening, they’re knocking again!
But, all the same, what swinishness! I suppose you can’t expect anything from Zhivago. He’s leaving tomorrow, and in his thoughts he’s already in Moscow or on his way. But what about Galiullin? How can he snore away or lie quiet, hearing such knocking, and count on her, a weak and defenseless old woman, to get up in the end and go to open the door to some unknown person, on this dreadful night, in this dreadful country?
“Galiullin!” She suddenly caught herself. “What Galiullin?” No, only half-awake could such an absurdity occur to her! What Galiullin, if even his tracks are cold? Didn’t she