Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [94]
Having performed his traveling ablutions in prewar comfort, the doctor returned to the compartment for breakfast, offered him by his curious companion. Now Yuri Andreevich had a better look at him.
The distinctive features of this personage were extreme garrulousness and mobility. The stranger liked to talk, and the main thing for him was not communication and the exchange of thoughts, but the activity of speech itself, the pronouncing of words and the uttering of sounds. While talking, he bounced up and down on the seat as if on springs, guffawed deafeningly and causelessly, rubbed his hands briskly with pleasure, and when this proved insufficient to express his delight, slapped his knees with his palms, laughing to the point of tears.
The conversation resumed with all the previous day’s oddities. The stranger was astonishingly inconsistent. Now he would make confessions to which no one had prompted him; now, without batting an eye, he would leave the most innocent questions unanswered.
He poured out a whole heap of the most fantastic and incoherent information about himself. Sad to say, he probably fibbed a little. He was undoubtedly aiming at the effect of the extremity of his views and the denial of all that was generally accepted.
It was all reminiscent of something long familiar. The nihilists of the last century had talked in the spirit of such radicalism, and some of Dostoevsky’s heroes a little later, and then still quite recently their direct continuation, that is, the whole of educated provincial Russia, often going ahead of the capitals, thanks to a thoroughness preserved in the backwoods, which in the capitals had become dated and unfashionable.
The young man told him that he was the nephew of a well-known revolutionary, while his parents, on the contrary, were incorrigible reactionaries—mastodons, as he put it. They had a decent estate in one of the areas near the front. It was there that the young man had grown up. His parents had been at daggers drawn with his uncle all their lives, but the young man felt no rancor and now his influence had spared them many an unpleasantness.
He himself, in his convictions, had taken after his uncle, the garrulous subject informed him—extremist and maximalist in everything: in questions of life, politics, and art. Again there was a whiff of Petenka Verkhovensky, not in the leftist sense, but in the sense of depravity and hollow verbiage. “Next he’ll recommend himself as a Futurist,” thought Yuri Andreevich, and indeed the talk turned to the Futurists.15 “And next he’ll start talking about sports,” the doctor went on second-guessing, “horse races or skating rinks or French wrestling.” And in fact the conversation turned to hunting.
The young man said that he had just been hunting in his native region, and boasted that he was an excellent shot, and if it were not for his physical defect, which kept him from being a soldier, he would have distinguished himself in war by his marksmanship.
Catching Zhivago’s questioning glance, he exclaimed:
“What? You mean you haven’t noticed anything? I thought you’d guessed about my deficiency.”
And he took two cards from his pocket and gave them to Yuri Andreevich. One was his visiting card. He had a double last name. He was Maxim Aristarkhovich Klintsov-Pogorevshikh—or just Pogorevshikh, as he asked to be called in honor of his uncle, who called himself precisely by that name.
The other card had on it a table divided into squares showing pictures of variously joined hands with their fingers composed in various ways. It was sign language for deaf-mutes. Suddenly everything became clear.
Pogorevshikh was a phenomenally gifted pupil of either Hartmann’s or Ostrogradsky’s school, that is, a deaf-mute who had learned with