Doctor Zhivago (81 page)
Authors: Boris Pasternak
“So he beats on the floor, he beats, time goes by, and she sits on the trunk rolling her eyes and doesn’t listen.
“After a while—oh, saints alive, oh, dear saints alive, the things I’ve seen and suffered in my life, but I don’t remember any such horror, all my life long I’ll hear Petenka’s pitiful little voice—Petenka, that angelic little soul, crying and moaning from underground—he just bit him to death, the fiend.
“Well, what am I to do, what am I to do now, I think, what am I to do with the half-crazed old woman and this murderous robber? And time’s going by. I only just thought it when I heard Udaloy neighing outside the window, he was standing there hitched up all the while. Yes. Udaloy neighed as if he wanted to say, come on, Tanyusha, let’s gallop off quickly to some good people and ask for help. I look out, it’s already getting light. Have it your way, Udaloy, I think, thanks for the suggestion—you’re right, let’s run for it. And I only just thought it when, hah, I hear, it’s like somebody’s talking to me again from the forest: ‘Wait, Tanyusha, don’t rush, we’ll handle this matter differently.’ And again I’m not alone in the forest. Like a cock singing out something I knew, a familiar engine whistle called to me from below, I knew this engine by its whistle, it was always standing in Nagornaya under steam, it was called a pusher, to push freight trains up the hill, but this was a mixed train, it went by every night at that time—so I hear the familiar engine calling me from below. I hear it and my heart leaps. Can it be, I think, that I’m out of my mind like Auntie Marfusha, since a living creature and a speechless machine talk to me in clear Russian language?
“Well, why stand thinking, the train was already close, there was no time to think. I grabbed the lantern, because it still wasn’t very light, and rushed like mad to the tracks, swinging the lantern back and forth.
“Well, what more can I say? I stopped the train, thanks to its being slowed down by the wind, well, simply speaking, it was creeping along. I stopped the train, the engineer I knew, he stuck himself out the window of his cabin, asked something; I didn’t hear what he asked on account of the wind. I shout to the engineer, the railway post’s been attacked, there’s been murder and robbery, the robber’s in the house, do something, comrade uncle, we need urgent help. And as I was saying it, Red Army soldiers got out of the cars onto the tracks one after another, it was a military train, the soldiers came down the tracks, said: ‘What’s the matter?’—wondering what the story was, why the train had been stopped in the forest on a steep hill at night.
“They learned about it all, dragged the robber from the cellar, he squealed in a high voice, higher than Petenka’s, have mercy, good people, he said, don’t kill me, I won’t do it again. They dragged him to the tracks, tied his legs and arms to the rails, and ran the train over him alive—lynch law.
“I didn’t go to the house for my clothes, it was so scary. I begged—dear
uncles, take me on the train. They took me with them on the train and drove off. Afterwards, it’s no lie, I went around half the world, foreign and our own, with homeless children, I’ve been everywhere. Such freedom, such happiness I got to know, after the woes of my childhood! But, true, there was all sorts of trouble and sin. That was all later, I’ll tell about it some other time. But then a railway worker from the train went to the signalman’s house to take charge of the government property and give orders about Auntie Marfusha, to arrange her life. They say she later died insane in the madhouse. But others say she got better and came out.”
Long after hearing all that, Gordon and Dudorov were silently pacing up and down on the grass. Then a truck arrived, turning awkwardly and cumbersomely from the road into the clearing. The boxes were loaded onto the truck. Gordon said:
“You realize who this linen girl Tanya is?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Evgraf will look after her.” Then, pausing briefly, he added: “It has already been so several times in history. What was conceived as ideal and lofty became coarse and material. So Greece turned into Rome, so the Russian enlightenment turned into the Russian revolution. Take Blok’s ‘We, the children of Russia’s terrible years,’
4
and you’ll see the difference in epochs. When Blok said that, it was to be understood in a metaphorical sense, figuratively. The children were not children, but sons, offspring, the intelligentsia, and the terrors were not terrible, but providential, apocalyptic, and those are two different things. But now all that was metaphorical has become literal, and the children are children, and the terrors are terrifying—there lies the difference.”
Five or ten years went by, and one quiet summer evening they were sitting again, Gordon and Dudorov, somewhere high up by an open window over the boundless evening Moscow. They were leafing through the notebook of Yuri’s writings put together by Evgraf, which they had read many times and half of which they knew by heart. As they read, they exchanged observations and abandoned themselves to reflections. Midway through their reading it grew dark, they had difficulty making out the print and had to light the lamp.
And Moscow below and in the distance, the native city of the author and of half of what had befallen him, Moscow now seemed to them, not the place of these events, but the main heroine of a long story, which they had reached the end of that evening, with the notebook in their hands.
Though the brightening and liberation they had expected after the war did not come with victory, as had been thought, even so, the portents of freedom were in the air all through the postwar years, constituting their only historical content.
To the aging friends at the window it seemed that this freedom of the soul had come, that precisely on that evening the future had settled down tangibly in the streets below, that they themselves had entered into that future and henceforth found themselves in it. A happy, tender sense of peace about this holy city and about the whole earth, about the participants in this story who had lived till that evening and about their children, filled them and enveloped them in an inaudible music of happiness, which spread far around. And it was as if the book in their hands knew it all and lent their feelings support and confirmation.
THE POEMS OF YURI ZHIVAGO
1
Hamlet
The hum dies down. I step out on the stage.
Leaning against a doorpost,
I try to catch the echoes from far off
Of what my age is bringing.
The night’s darkness focuses on me
Thousands of opera glasses.
Abba Father, if only it can be,
Let this cup pass me by.
I love the stubbornness of your intent
And agree to play this role.
But now a different drama’s going on—
Spare me, then, this once.
But the order of the acts has been thought out,
And leads to just one end.
I’m alone, all drowns in pharisaism.
Life is no stroll through a field.
March
The sun heats up to the seventh sweat,
And the ravine, gone foolish, rages.
Like the work of a robust barnyard girl,
Spring’s affairs are in full swing.
The snow wastes away with anemia
In the branchwork of impotent blue veins,
But life is steaming in the cowshed,
And the pitchfork’s teeth are the picture of health.
Oh, these nights, these days and nights!
The drumming of drops towards the middle of day,
The dwindling of icicles on the eaves,
The sleepless babbling of the brooks!
Everything wide open, stables and cowshed,
Pigeons peck up oats from the snow,
And the lifegiver and culprit of it all—
Dung—smells of fresh air.
Holy Week
Still the gloom of night around.
Still so early in the world,
The stars are countless in the sky,
And each of them as bright as day,
And if the earth were able to,
It would sleep its way through Easter
To the reading of the psalms.
Still the gloom of night around.
So early an hour in the world,
The square lies like eternity
From the crossroads to the corner,
And the light and warmth of dawn
Are still a millennium away.
The earth’s still bare as bare can be,
With nothing to put on at night
To go and swing the bells outside
And there back up the choristers.
And from Great and Holy Thursday
Right to Holy Saturday,
Water bores the riverbanks
And twines in whirlpools round itself.
And the woods are undressed, uncovered,
And at the service of Christ’s Passion,
Like the ranks of people praying,
Stand trunks of pine trees in a crowd.
And in town, with very little
Space, as at a local meeting,
Trees, stark naked, stand and look
Through the church’s grillwork gates.
And their gaze is filled with terror.
The cause of their alarm is clear.
Gardens are coming through the fence,
The order of the earth is shaken:
It is God they’re burying.
And they see light by the royal doors,
A black pall and a row of candles,
Tear-stained faces—suddenly
The procession of the cross
Comes to meet them with the shroud,
And two birches by the gate
Are forced to step aside for it.
And the procession makes its way
Around the yard and down the walk,
And brings to the chapel from outside
Spring, and springtime conversation,
And air that smacks of blessed bread,
And of spring’s intoxication.
And March squanders its hoard of snow
On cripples crowding by the porch,
As if a man came out to them
Carrying the ark, and opened it,
And gave away all to the very last.
And the singing goes on till dawn,
And, when it has sobbed its fill,
The reading of psalms and the epistle
Reaches more softly from inside
To vacant lots under the lamps.
But at midnight creature and flesh
Fall silent, hearing the springtime rumor
That the moment the weather clears
Death itself may be overcome
By the effort of the Resurrection.
White Night
I am dreaming of a far-off time,
A house over on the Petersburg Side.
The daughter of a modest steppe landowner,
You’re taking courses, you were born in Kursk.
You’re sweet, you have admirers.
On this white night the two of us,
Having settled on your windowsill,
Are looking down from your skyscraper.
Streetlights like gas butterflies,
Morning touched by a first tremor.
What I am softly telling you
Is so much like the sleeping distance!
We are gripped by the very same
Timid loyalty to the secret
As Petersburg spreading its panorama
Beyond the boundless river Neva.
Far off at the dense confines,
On this white night in the spring,
Nightingales fill the forest’s limits
With their thunderous hymns of glory.
The crazy trilling surges, rolls,
The voice of the little homely bird
Awakens ecstasy and turmoil
In the depths of the enchanted wood.
In those parts, night, the barefoot pilgrim,
Making her way along the fence,
Draws after her from the windowsill
A trail of overheard conversation.
To the echoes of talk heard aloud,
In orchards fenced with wooden palings,
Bending apple and cherry boughs
Clothe themselves in whitish flowers.
And the trees, like white apparitions,
Pour in a crowd out to the road,
Waving as if to bid farewell
To the white night that has seen so much.
Bad Roads in Spring
Sunset’s fires were burning down.
A man on horseback dragged himself
Over a bad road through the pines
To a far-off farmstead in the Urals.
The horse’s spleen was tossed about,
The splashing of its iron shoes
Was echoed in its wake by water
In the sinkholes of the springs.
When the rider dropped the reins
And went on at a walking pace,
The flooding waters spread nearby
With all their roar and rumbling.
Someone laughed, someone wept,
Stone against stone crashed and crumbled,
Tree stumps torn out by the root
Toppled into the whirling pools.
And at sunset’s conflagration,
In the far-off, blackened branches,
Like the tolling of the tocsin,
A nightingale sang furiously.
Where the widowed willow bowed
Her headdress over the ravine,
Like old Nightingale the Robber,
He whistled in the seven oaks.
What calamity, what ladylove
Was this ardor destined for?
At whom did he fire off his load
Of grapeshot in the thickset wood?
A demon, he seemed, about to step
From the camp of fugitives from hard labor
And go to meet the local posts
Of partisans, mounted or on foot.
Earth and sky, forest and field
Tried to snare this rarest sound,
These measured shares of madness, pain,
Happiness, and suffering.
A Final Talk
Life has come back as causelessly
As once it was strangely broken off.
I am here on the same old street
As then, that summer day and hour.
The same people and the cares the same,
And the fire of sunset not yet cooled,
As when death’s evening hastily
Nailed it to the wall of the Manège.
Women in cheap workday clothes
In the same way wear out their shoes at night.
And later the garrets crucify them
In the same way on the iron roofs.
Here one with a weary gait
Slowly emerges on the threshold
And, climbing up from the half basement,
Goes diagonally across the yard.
I again ready my excuses,
And again it’s all the same to me.
And the neighbor woman skirts the backyard,
Leaving the two of us alone.
———
Don’t cry, don’t pucker your swollen lips,
Don’t gather them in wrinkles.
You’ll reopen the dried-up scab
Of your spring fever sore.
Take your palm off of my breast,
We are high-tension wires,
Watch out, or by accident we may be
Thrown together again.
Years will pass, you will get married,
And forget all this disorder.
To be a woman is a giant step,
To drive men mad—heroic.
While at the miracle of a woman’s arms,
Shoulders, and back, and neck,
I’ve stood in reverence all my life
Like a devoted servant.
But howsoever night may bind me
With its anguished coil,
Strongest of all is the pull away,
The passion for a clean break.