Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak Read Free Book Online Page 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.
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    “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.
    He was not himself today and had not slept the previous night. He was going on fourteen. He was sick of being little. All night he had not slept and at dawn he left the cottage. The sun was rising, and the ground in the park was covered with the long, dewy, openwork shade of trees. The shade was not black, but of a dark gray color, like wet felt. The stupefying fragrance of morning seemed to come precisely from that damp shade on the ground, with its elongated light spots like a young girl’s fingers.
    Suddenly a silvery little stream of mercury, just like the dewdrops on the grass, flowed a few steps away from him. The little stream flowed, flowed, not soaking into the ground. Then, with an unexpectedly abrupt movement, it darted to one side and vanished. It was a grass snake. Nika shuddered.
    He was a strange boy. In a state of excitement, he talked to himself out loud. He imitated his mother in his predilection for lofty matters and paradoxes.
    “How good it is in this world!” he thought. “But why does it always come out so painful? God exists, of course. But if He exists, then He—is me. I’m going to order it,” he thought, glancing at an aspen all seized with trembling from bottom to top (its wet, shimmering leaves seemed cut from tin), “I’m going to command it,” and, in an insane exceeding of his strength, he did not whisper but with all his being, with all his flesh and blood,desired and thought: “Be still!” and the tree at once obediently froze in immobility. Nika laughed for joy and ran off to swim in the river.
    His father, the terrorist Dementy Dudorov, was serving at hard labor, which by grace of the sovereign had replaced the hanging to which he had been sentenced. His mother, from the Georgian princely family of the Eristovs, was a whimsical and still young beauty, eternally passionate about something—rebellions, rebels, extreme theories, famous actors, poor failures.
    She adored Nika and from his name, Innokenty, made a heap of inconceivably tender and foolish nicknames like Inochka or Nochenka, and took him to show to her relatives in Tiflis. There he was struck most of all by a splay-limbed tree in the courtyard of the house where they were staying. It was some sort of clumsy tropical giant. With its leaves, which resembled elephant’s ears, it shielded the courtyard from the scorching southern sky. Nika could not get used to the idea that this tree was a plant and not an animal.
    It was dangerous for the boy to bear his father’s terrible name. With Nina Galaktionovna’s consent, Ivan Ivanovich was preparing to petition the sovereign about Nika adopting his mother’s family name.
    While he lay under the bed, indignant at the way things went in the world, he thought about that along with everything else. Who is this