Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [88]
They were so certain of it that, when they locked the door, the traces of their certainty remained by the corner of the house outside, in the form of the woman’s watermark or image, which continued to appear to them from around the turning.
10
The one considered to be indirectly responsible for the soldiers’ riot at the station was the Biriuchi telegraphist Kolya Frolenko.
Kolya was the son of a well-known Meliuzeevo watchmaker. He had been known in Meliuzeevo from the cradle. As a boy, he had visited someone among the Razdolnoe house staff and, under the surveillance of Mademoiselle, had played with her two charges, the countess’s daughters. Mademoiselle knew Kolya well. It was then that he had begun to understand a little French.
People in Meliuzeevo were used to seeing Kolya lightly dressed in any weather, without a hat, in canvas summer shoes, on a bicycle. Letting go of the handlebars, his body thrown back and his arms crossed on his chest, he rolled down the main street and around town and glanced at the poles and wires, checking the state of the network.
Some houses in town were connected with the station through a branch line of the railway telephone. The management of this line was in Kolya’s hands at the station control room.
There he was up to his ears in work: the railway telegraph, the telephone, and occasionally, in moments of the station chief Povarikhin’s brief absences, the signals and the block system, the apparatus for which was also in the control room.
The necessity of keeping an eye on the operation of several mechanisms at once made Kolya develop a special manner of speaking, obscure, abrupt, and full of riddles, to which Kolya resorted when he had no wish to answer someone or get into conversation. The word was that he had made too broad a use of this right on the day of the disorders.
By his omissions he had, in fact, deprived of force all of Galiullin’s good intentions in his phone calls from town, and, perhaps against his will, had given a fatal turn to the subsequent events.
Galiullin had asked to speak to the commissar, who was somewhere at the station or nearby, in order to tell him that he would soon come to join him at the clearing and to ask that he wait for him and undertake nothing without him. Kolya had refused Galiullin’s request to call Gintz to the phone, on the pretext that he had the line busy transmitting signals to the train approaching Biriuchi, while he himself was at the same time trying by hook or by crook to hold the train, which was bringing the summoned Cossacks to Biriuchi, at the previous junction.
When the troop train arrived after all, Kolya could not hide his displeasure.
The engine slowly crept under the dark roof of the platform and stopped just in front of the huge window of the control room. Kolya opened wide the heavy railway station curtains of dark blue broadcloth with railway monograms woven into the borders. On the stone windowsill stood a huge carafe of water and a thick, simply cut glass on a big tray. Kolya poured water into the glass, took several gulps, and looked out the window.
The engineer noticed Kolya and gave him a friendly nod from the cab. “Ooh, you stinking trash, you wood louse!” Kolya thought with hatred, stuck his tongue out at the engineer, and shook his fist at him. The engineer not only understood Kolya’s miming, but, by shrugging his shoulders and turning his head in the direction of the carriages, was able to convey: “What can I do? Try it yourself. He’s in charge.” “You’re trash and filth all the same,” Kolya mimed back.
They began leading the horses out of the freight cars. They balked, refusing to move. The hollow thud of hooves on the wooden gangways changed to the clanging of horseshoes against the stone of the platform. The rearing horses were led across several