Free Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak Page A

mug from the ice crust, put the lid on the barrel, and pulled the handle of the doorbell. A cloud of domestic smell and savory steam moved to meet him.
    “You’ve really heated it up, mama. It’s warm here, very nice.”
    His mother fell on his neck, embraced him, and wept. He stroked her head, waited a little, and moved her away gently.
    “A stout heart takes cities, mama,” he said softly. “My path goes from Moscow right to Warsaw.”
    “I know. That’s why I’m crying. It’s going to be bad for you. Take yourself off somewhere, Kuprinka, somewhere far away.”
    “Your dear little friend, your kindly shepherd boy, 4 Pyotr Petrovich, almost split my skull.” He meant to make her laugh. She did not understand the joke and earnestly replied:
    “It’s a sin to laugh at him, Kuprinka. You should pity him. A hopeless wretch, a lost soul.”
    “They’ve taken Pashka Antipov. Pavel Ferapontovich. They came at night, made a search, raked everything over. Led him away in the morning. Worse still, his Darya’s in the hospital with typhoid. Little Pavlushka—he’s in a progressive high school—is alone at home with his deaf aunt. What’s more, they’re being chased out of the apartment. I think we’ll have to take the boy in. Why did Prov come?”
    “How do you know he did?”
    “I saw the barrel uncovered and the mug standing on it. It must have been bottomless Prov, I thought, guzzling water.”
    “You’re so sharp, Kuprinka. That’s right, it was Prov, Prov Afanasyevich. He ran by to ask if he could borrow some firewood. I gave it to him. But what a fool I am—firewood! He brought such news and it went clean out of my head. You see, the sovereign has signed a manifesto so that everything will be turned a new way, nobody’s offended, the muzhiks get the land, and everybody’s equal to the nobility. 5 The ukase has been signed, just think of it, it only has to be made public. A new petition came from the Synod to putit into the litany or some sort of prayer of thanksgiving, I’m afraid to get it wrong. Provushka told me, and I went and forgot.”
8
    Patulya Antipov, the son of the arrested Pavel Ferapontovich and the hospitalized Darya Filimonovna, came to live with the Tiverzins. He was a neat boy with regular features and dark blond hair parted in the middle. He kept smoothing it with a brush and kept straightening his jacket and his belt with its school buckle. Patulya could laugh to the point of tears and was very observant. He imitated everything he saw and heard with great likeness and comicality.
    Soon after the manifesto of October 17, there was a big demonstration from the Tver to the Kaluga gate. This was an initiative in the spirit of “too many cooks spoil the broth.” Several of the revolutionary organizations that took part in the enterprise squabbled with each other and gave it up one by one, but when they learned that on the appointed morning people took to the streets even so, they hastened to send their representatives to the demonstration.
    Despite Kiprian Savelyevich’s protests and dissuasions, Marfa Gavrilovna went to the demonstration with the cheerful and sociable Patulya.
    It was a dry, frosty day in early November, with a still, leaden sky and a few snowflakes, so few that you could almost count them, swirling slowly and hesitantly before they fell to earth and then, in a fluffy gray dust, filled the potholes in the road.
    Down the street the people came pouring, a veritable babel, faces, faces, faces, quilted winter coats and lambskin hats, old men, girl students and children, railwaymen in uniform, workers from the tram depot and the telephone station in boots above their knees and leather jackets, high school and university students.
    For some time they sang the “Varshavianka,” “You Fell Victims,” and the “Marseillaise,” but suddenly the man who had been walking backwards ahead of the marchers and conducting the singing by waving a papakha 6 clutched in his