Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak Read Free Book Online

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 thescene 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