Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [90]
He made a running leap onto the high platform. At that moment the soldiers chasing him ran from behind the broken-down cars. Povarikhin and Kolya shouted something to Gintz and made signs for him to come inside the station, where they could save him.
But again the sense of honor bred over generations, urban, sacrificial, and inapplicable here, barred his way to safety. By an inhuman effort of will, he tried to control the trembling of his runaway heart. “I must call out to them: ‘Brothers, come to your senses, what kind of spy am I?’ ” he thought. “Something sobering, heartfelt, that will stop them.”
In recent months the sense of heroic deeds, of the soul’s outcry, had unconsciously become connected with rostrums and tribunes, with chairs that one could jump up on and hurl some call, something fiery, to the throng.
By the door of the station, under the signal bell, stood a tall firefighting barrel. It was tightly covered. Gintz jumped onto the lid and addressed to the approaching men several soul-wrenching words, inhuman and incoherent. The insane boldness of his address, two steps from the thrown-open doors of the station, where he could so easily have run, stunned them and rooted them to the spot. The soldiers lowered their guns.
But Gintz stepped on the edge of the lid and turned it under. One of his legs went into the water, the other hung down the side of the barrel. He wound up sitting astride the edge.
The soldiers met this clumsiness with an explosion of guffaws and the first one killed the unfortunate man with a point-blank shot in the neck, while the others rushed to stab the dead body with their bayonets.
11
Mademoiselle called Kolya on the telephone and told him to settle the doctor comfortably on the train, threatening him otherwise with disclosures that he would find unpleasant.
While answering Mademoiselle, Kolya was as usual conducting some other telephone conversation and, judging by the decimals that peppered his speech, was telegraphing something in ciphers to a third place.
“Pskov, north line, do you hear me? What rebels? What hand? What is it, Mam’selle? Nonsense, mumbo jumbo. Get off, hang up the phone, you’re bothering me. Pskov, north line, Pskov. Thirty-six comma zero zero fifteen. Ah, curse it all, the tape broke off! What? What? I don’t hear. Is that you again, Mam’selle? I told you in plain Russian, it’s impossible, I can’t. Ask Povarikhin. Nonsense, mumbo jumbo. Thirty-six … ah, the devil … Get off, don’t bother me, Mam’selle.”
And Mademoiselle was saying:
“Don’t throw dust in my eye, mumbo jumbo, Pskov, Pskov, mumbo jumbo, I see right through you and back again, you put the doctor in car tomorrow, and I won’t more speak with any murderer and little Judas-traitor.”
12
It was sultry when Yuri Andreevich left. A thunderstorm was gathering, as two days earlier.
The clay huts and geese in the settlement around the station, all scattered with spat-out husks of sunflower seeds, sat white and frightened under the immobile gaze of the black, menacing sky.
Bordering the station building was a wide clearing that stretched far to both sides. The grass on it was trampled down, and it was entirely covered by an immense crowd of people, who had spent weeks waiting for trains in the various directions each needed.
There were old men in the crowd, dressed in coarse gray kaftans, who went from group to group under the scorching sun gathering rumors and information. Silent adolescents around fourteen years old lay on their sides, propped on an elbow with a leafless switch in their hands, as if tending cattle. Their younger brothers and sisters darted underfoot, their shirts pulling up, exposing their pink bottoms. Their mothers sat on the ground, their tightly joined legs stretched out, with nursing babies swaddled crookedly under their brown homespun coats.
“They all scattered like sheep when the shooting began. Didn’t like it at all!” the stationmaster Povarikhin was saying with hostility as he and