Authors: Boris Pasternak
“Metaphysics, old boy. It’s forbidden me by my doctors; my stomach can’t digest it.”
“Well, God help you. Let’s drop it. Lucky man! What a view you have from here—I can’t stop admiring it! And he lives and doesn’t feel it.”
It was painful to look at the river. It gleamed in the sun, curving in and out like a sheet of iron. Suddenly it wrinkled up. A heavy ferry with horses, carts, peasant women and men set out from this bank to the other.
“Just think, it’s only a little past five,” said Ivan Ivanovich. “See, there’s the express from Syzran. It passes here at a little after five.”
Far across the plain, a clean little yellow and blue train, greatly diminished by the distance, rolled from right to left. Suddenly they noticed that it had stopped. White puffs of smoke rose up from the engine. Shortly afterwards came its alarmed whistling.
“Strange,” said Voskoboinikov. “Something’s wrong. It has no reason to stop there in the marsh. Something’s happened. Let’s go and have tea.”
Nika was not in the garden, nor in the house. Yura guessed that he was hiding from them because he was bored with them and Yura was no match for him. His uncle and Ivan Ivanovich went to work on the terrace, leaving Yura to loiter aimlessly about the house.
There was a wonderful enchantment about the place! At every moment you could hear the pure, three-note whistling of orioles, with intervals of waiting, so that the moist, drawn-out, flutelike sound could fully saturate the surroundings. The stagnant scent of flowers wandering in the air was nailed down motionless to the flowerbeds by the heat. How reminiscent it was of Antibes and Bordighera! Yura kept turning right and left. Over the lawns in an auditory hallucination hung the phantom of his mother’s voice; it sounded for him in the melodious turns of the birds and the buzzing of the bees. Yura kept being startled; time and again it seemed to him that his mother was hallooing him and calling him somewhere.
He went to the ravine and began to climb down. He climbed down from the sparse and clean woods that covered the top of the ravine to the alder bushes that spread over its bottom.
Here there was damp darkness, windfall and carrion; there were few flowers, and the jointed stalks of horsetail looked like rods and staffs with Egyptian ornaments, as in his illustrated Holy Scriptures.
Yura felt more and more sad. He wanted to cry. He fell to his knees and dissolved in tears.
“Angel of God, my holy protector,” Yura prayed, “set my mind firmly on the true path and tell dear mama that it’s good for me here, so that she doesn’t worry. If there is life after death, Lord, place mama in paradise, where the faces of the saints and the righteous shine like stars. Mama was so
good, it can’t be that she was a sinner, have mercy on her, Lord, make it so that she doesn’t suffer. Mama!”—in heartrending anguish he called out to her in heaven as a newly canonized saint, and suddenly could not bear it, fell to the ground, and lost consciousness.
He did not lie oblivious for long. When he came to, he heard his uncle calling him from above. He answered and started to climb up. Suddenly he remembered that he had not prayed for his missing father, as Marya Nikolaevna had taught him to do.
But he felt so good after fainting that he did not want to part with this feeling of lightness and was afraid to lose it. And he thought there would be nothing terrible if he prayed for his father some other time.
“He’ll wait. He’ll be patient,” he all but thought. Yura did not remember him at all.
On the train, riding in a second-class compartment with his father, the attorney Gordon from Orenburg, sat the second-year student Misha Gordon, an eleven-year-old boy with a thoughtful face and big dark eyes. The father was moving to work in Moscow, the boy had been transferred to a Moscow school. His mother and sisters had long been there, busy with the cares of readying the apartment.
The boy and his father had been on the train for three days.
Past them in clouds of hot dust, bleached as with lime by the sun, flew Russia, fields and steppes, towns and villages. Wagon trains stretched along the roads, turning off cumbersomely to the crossings, and from the furiously speeding train it seemed that the wagons were standing still and the horses were raising and lowering their legs in place.
At big stations the passengers rushed like mad to the buffet, and the setting sun behind the trees of the station garden shone on their legs and the wheels of the cars.
Separately, all the movements of the world were calculatedly sober, but as a sum total they were unconsciously drunk with the general current of life that united them. People toiled and bustled, set in motion by the mechanism of their own cares. But the mechanisms would not have worked if their chief regulator had not been a sense of supreme and fundamental carefreeness. This carefreeness came from a sense of the cohesion of human existences, a confidence in their passing from one into another, a sense of happiness owing to the fact that everything that happens takes place not only on earth, in which the dead are buried, but somewhere else, in what
some call the Kingdom of God, others history, and still others something else again.
To this rule the boy was a bitter and painful exception. His mainspring remained a sense of care, and no feeling of unconcern lightened or ennobled it. He knew he had this inherited trait and with self-conscious alertness caught signs of it in himself. It upset him. Its presence humiliated him.
For as long as he could remember, he had never ceased to marvel at how, with the same arms and legs and a common language and habits, one could be not like everyone else, and besides that, be someone who was liked by few, someone who was not loved. He could not understand a situation in which, if you were worse than others, you could not make an effort to correct yourself and become better. What did it mean to be a Jew? Why was there such a thing? What could reward or justify this unarmed challenge that brought nothing but grief?
When he turned to his father for an answer, he said that his starting points were absurd and one could not reason that way, but he did not offer anything instead that would attract Misha by its profound meaning and oblige him to bow silently before the irrevocable.
And, making an exception for his father and mother, Misha gradually became filled with scorn for adults, who had cooked a pudding they were unable to eat. He was convinced that when he grew up, he would untangle it all.
Now, too, no one would dare to say that his father had acted wrongly in rushing after that madman when he ran out onto the platform, and that there was no need to stop the train, when, powerfully shoving Grigory Osipovich aside and throwing open the door of the car, the man had hurled himself headlong off the speeding express onto the embankment, as a diver throws himself off the deck of a bathing house into the water.
But since the brake handle had been turned not by just anyone, but precisely by Grigory Osipovich, it came out that the train went on standing there so unaccountably long thanks to them.
No one really knew the cause of the delay. Some said that the sudden stop had damaged the air brakes, others that the train was standing on a steep slope and the engine could not get up it without momentum. A third opinion spread that, since the man who had killed himself was an eminent person, his attorney, who was traveling with him on the train, had demanded that witnesses be summoned from the nearest station, Kologrivovka, to draw up a report. That was why the assistant engineer had climbed the telephone pole. The handcar must already be on its way.
In the car there was a bit of a whiff from the toilets, which they tried to ward off with eau de cologne, and it smelled of roast chicken gone slightly
bad, wrapped in dirty greased paper. The graying Petersburg ladies, powdering themselves as before, wiping their palms with handkerchiefs, and talking in chesty, rasping voices, all turned into jet-black Gypsy women from the combination of engine soot and greasy cosmetics. As they passed by the Gordons’ compartment, wrapping the corners of their shoulders in shawls and turning the narrowness of the corridor into a source of fresh coquetry, it seemed to Misha that they hissed, or, judging by their compressed lips, meant to hiss: “Ah, just imagine, such sensitivity! We’re special! We’re intelligentsia! We simply can’t!”
The body of the suicide lay on the grass by the embankment. A streak of dried blood made a sharp black mark across the forehead and eyes of the broken man, as if crossing out his face. The blood seemed not to be his blood, flowing from him, but a stuck-on, extraneous addition, a plaster, or a spatter of dried mud, or a wet birch leaf.
The little bunch of curious and sympathizing people around the body kept changing all the time. Over him, frowning, expressionless, stood his friend and compartment companion, a stout and arrogant lawyer, a purebred animal in a sweat-soaked shirt. He was weary from the heat and fanned himself with a soft hat. To all questions, he replied ungraciously through his teeth, shrugging and without even turning: “An alcoholic. Can’t you understand? The most typical consequence of delirium tremens.”
A thin woman in a woollen dress and lace fichu approached the body two or three times. This was old Tiverzina, a widow and the mother of two engineers, who was traveling free in third class with her two daughters-in-law on a company pass. The quiet women, their kerchiefs drawn low, silently followed behind her, like two nuns behind their mother superior. The group inspired respect. People made way for them.
Tiverzina’s husband had been burned alive in a railroad accident. She stopped a few steps from the corpse, so that she could see it through the crowd, and sighed as if making the comparison. “To each as it’s set down at birth,” she seemed to say. “Some die by God’s will, but this one, see what a notion took him—from rich living and a fuddled brain.”
All the passengers on the train came in turn to see the body and went back to their cars only for fear that something might be stolen from them.
When they jumped down on the tracks, stretched their limbs, picked flowers, and took a little run, they all had the feeling that the place had just emerged only thanks to the stop, and that the swampy meadow with its knolls, the wide river, with a beautiful house and a church on the high bank opposite, would not be there had it not been for the accident that had taken place.
Even the sun, which also seemed like a local accessory, shone upon the
scene by the rails with an evening shyness, approaching as if timorously, as a cow from the herd grazing nearby would if it were to come to the railway and start looking at the people.
Misha was shaken by all that had happened and for the first moments wept from pity and fright. In the course of the long journey the suicide had come to their compartment several times and had sat talking for hours with Misha’s father. He had said that his soul felt relaxed in the morally pure quiet and comprehension of their world, and he had questioned Grigory Osipovich about various legal subtleties and cavils to do with promissory notes and donations, bankruptcies and frauds. “Ah, is that so?” he kept being surprised at Gordon’s explanations. “You dispose of a much more merciful set of statutes. My attorney has different information. He takes a much darker view of these things.”
Each time this nervous man calmed down, his lawyer and compartment companion came from first class and dragged him off to drink champagne in the dining car. This was the stout, insolent, clean-shaven fop of an attorney who now stood over the body, not surprised at anything in the world. It was impossible to rid oneself of the feeling that his client’s constant agitation had somehow played into his hands.
The father said that this was a well-known rich man, kindly and wayward, already half out of his mind. Unembarrassed by Misha’s presence, he had told of his son, the same age as Misha, and of his late wife, and had then gone on to his second family, which he had also abandoned. Then he remembered something new, paled with terror, and began talking nonsense and forgetting himself.
Towards Misha he showed an inexplicable tenderness, probably reflected, and perhaps not destined for him. He kept giving him things, for which he got out at the biggest stations and went to the first-class waiting rooms, where there were book stalls and they sold games and local curiosities.
He drank incessantly and complained that he had not slept for three months and, when he sobered up even for a short time, suffered torments of which a normal man could have no notion.
A moment before the end he rushed to their compartment, seized Grigory Osipovich by the hand, wanted to say something but could not, and, rushing out to the platform, threw himself from the train.
Misha was examining a small collection of minerals from the Urals in a wooden box—the dead man’s last gift. Suddenly everything around began to stir. A handcar had reached the train by a different track. From it jumped a coroner in a visored cap with a cockade, a doctor, and two policemen.
Cold, businesslike voices were heard. Questions were asked, something was written down. Conductors and policemen clumsily dragged the body up the embankment, losing their footing in the gravel and sliding down all the time. Some peasant woman began to wail. The public was asked to go back to the cars and the whistle sounded. The train set off.
“Again this holy oil!” Nika thought spitefully and rushed about the room. The voices of the guests were coming closer. Retreat was cut off. There were two beds in the room, Voskoboinikov’s and his own. Without thinking twice, Nika crawled under the second one.
He heard them looking and calling for him in the other rooms, surprised at his disappearance. Then they came into the bedroom.
“Well, what can we do,” said Vedenyapin. “Go for a walk, Yura; maybe your friend will turn up later and you can play.”
They talked for a while about the university unrest in Petersburg and Moscow, keeping Nika for some twenty minutes in his stupid, humiliating concealment. Finally they went to the terrace. Nika quietly opened the window, jumped out of it, and went to the park.