Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [87]
If those fellows hadn’t come rolling in, there’d be no stone left upon stone in the town. An armored division happened to be passing through. They stood up for the inhabitants and curbed the scoundrels.
The thunderstorm was weakening, moving away. The thunderclaps came from a distance, more rare and muffled. The rain stopped intermittently, but water continued to trickle down with a soft splashing from the leaves and gutters. Soundless glimmers of lightning came into Mademoiselle’s room, lit it up, and lingered there for an extra moment, as if searching for something.
Suddenly the knocking at the door, which had ceased for a long time, started again. Someone needed help and was knocking desperately and rapidly. The wind picked up again. More rain poured down.
“One moment!” Mademoiselle cried out, not knowing to whom, and frightened herself with her own voice.
An unexpected surmise dawned on her. Lowering her feet from the bed and putting on her slippers, she threw her house robe over her and ran to awaken Zhivago, so as not to feel so frightened alone. But he, too, had heard the knocking and was himself coming down to meet her with a candle. They had made the same assumptions.
“Zhivagó, Zhivagó! There’s knocking at the outside door, I’m afraid to open it by myself,” she cried in French, and added in Russian: “ ’Ave a luke. Ees Lar or Lieutenant Gaioul.”
Yuri Andreevich had also been awakened by the knocking, and thought that it must be someone they knew, either Galiullin, be hidden by something and coming back to the refuge where he could hide, or the nurse Antipova, forced by some difficulties to turn back from her journey.
In the front hall, the doctor handed Mademoiselle the candle, while he turned the key in the door and unbolted it. A gust of wind tore the door from his hand, blew out the candle, and showered them both with a cold spray of rain from outside.
“Who’s there? Who’s there? Is anybody there?” Mademoiselle and the doctor called out in turn into the darkness, but nobody answered. Suddenly they heard the former knocking in another place, from the back entrance, or, as it now seemed to them, at the window to the garden.
“It’s evidently the wind,” said the doctor. “But for the sake of a clear conscience, go to the back door anyway, to make sure, and I’ll wait here, so that we don’t cross each other, if it really is someone, and not from some other cause.”
Mademoiselle went off into the depths of the house, and the doctor went outside under the roof of the porch. His eyes, growing accustomed to the darkness, made out signs of the coming dawn.
Over the town, like halfwits, clouds raced swiftly, as if escaping pursuit. Their tatters flew so low that they almost caught in the trees leaning in the same direction, so that it looked as if someone were sweeping the sky with them, as if with bending besoms. Rain lashed at the wooden wall of the house, turning it from gray to black.
“Well?” the doctor asked Mademoiselle when she came back.
“You’re right. There’s nobody.” And she told him that she had gone around the whole house. In the butler’s pantry a window had been broken by a piece of a linden branch that struck the glass, and there were huge puddles on the floor, and it was the same in the room Lara had left behind, a sea, a veritable sea, a whole ocean.
“And here’s a shutter torn loose and beating against the window frame. You see? That’s the whole explanation.”
They talked a little more, locked the door, and went their ways to bed, both sorry that the alarm had proved false.
They had been certain that they would open the front door and the woman they knew so well would come in, wet to the skin and freezing, and they would