Doctor Zhivago by Boris Leonidovich Pasternak Read Free Book Online

soon be warm, Kuprian Savelich. Me and your mother Marfa Gavrilovna brought a whole shedful of wood from the freight station yesterday—all birch—good, dry wood. "
    " Thanks, Gimazetdin. If there ' s something else you want to tell me let ' s have it quickly. I ' m frozen. "
    " I wanted to tell you not to spend the night at home, Savelich. You must hide. The police have been here asking who comes to the house. Nobody comes, I said, my relief comes, I said, the people from the railway but no strangers come, I said, not on your life. "
    Tiverzin was unmarried and lived with his mother and his younger married brother. The tenements belonged to the neighboring Church of the Holy Trinity. Among the lodgers were some of the clergy and two artels ,or associations, of street hawkers—one of butchers, the other of greengrocers—but most of them were workers on the Moscow-Brest railway.
    It was a stone house. All around the dirty and unpaved courtyard ran a wooden passageway. Out of it rose a number of dirty, slippery outside staircases, reeking of cats and cabbage. On the landings were privies and padlocked storerooms.
    Tiverzin ' s brother had fought as a conscript in the war and had been wounded at Wafangkou. Now he was convalescing at the military hospital in Krasnoyarsk, and his wife and two daughters had gone there to see him and to bring him home (the Tiverzins, hereditary railway workers, travelled all over Russia on official passes). The flat was quiet; only Tiverzin and his mother lived in it at present.
    It was on the second floor. On the landing outside there was a water butt, filled regularly by the water carrier. Tiverzin noticed as he came up that the lid of the butt had been pushed sideways and a tin mug stood on the frozen surface of the water. " Prov must have been here, " he thought, grinning. " The way that man drinks, his guts must be on fire, " Prov Afanasievich Sokolov, the church psalmist, was a relative of Tiverzin ' s mother.
    Tiverzin jerked the mug out of the ice and pulled the handle of the doorbell. A wave of warm air and appetizing vapors from the kitchen came out to him.
    " You ' ve got a good fire going, Mother. It ' s nice and warm in here. "
    His mother flung herself on his neck and burst into tears. He stroked her head and, after a while, gently pushed her aside.
    " Nothing ventured, nothing won, Mother, " he said softly. " The line ' s struck from Moscow to Warsaw. "
    " I know, that ' s why I ' m crying. They ' ll be after you, Kuprinka, you ' ve got to get away. "
    " That nice boy friend of yours, Piotr, nearly broke my head! " He meant to make her laugh but she said earnestly: " It ' s a sin to laugh at him, Kuprinka. You should be sorry for him, the poor wretch, the drunkard. "
    " Antipov ' s been arrested. They came in the night, searched his flat, turned everything upside down, and took him away this morning. And his wife Daria ' s in hospital with the typhus. And their kid, Pasha, who ' s at the Realgymnasium ,is alone in the house with his deaf aunt. And they ' re going to be evicted. I think we should have the boy to stay with us. What did Prov want? "
    " How did you know he came? "
    " I saw the water butt was uncovered and the mug on the ice—sure to have been Prov guzzling water, I said to myself. "
    " How sharp you are, Kuprinka. Yes, he ' s been here. Prov—Prov Afanasievich. Came to borrow some logs—I gave him some. But what am I talking about, fool that I am. It went clean out of my head—the news Prov brought. Think of it, Kuprinka! The Tsar has signed a manifesto and everything ' s to be changed—everybody ' s to be treated right, the peasants are to have land, and we ' re all going to be equal with the gentry! It ' s actually signed, he says, it ' s only got to be made public. The Synod ' s sent something to be put into the Church service, a prayer of thanks or something. He told me what it was, but I ' ve forgotten. "
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    Pasha Antipov, whose father had been arrested as