The Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers by Boris Pasternak Read Free Book Online

moved back and forth as if their hands were tied together with ropes. Their rocking motions were emphasized by the fact that from neck to ankles they looked poured into gowns cut like those of acrobats. There was nothing frightening about them, and the women did not run away, but stood there laughing.
    â€œDavlecha, what are you doing?”
    â€œThe horse pulls; it doesn’t want to stay here.”
    Davlecha beat the horse a few times with the reins, then drew them tight and let them out again. “Quiet! You’ll overturn the coach!”
    â€œWhy do you beat him?”
    â€œI have to.”
    And only when the sly Tartar was in an open field and the shying horse had quieted down and, swift as an arrow, had removed his young lady from the shameful scene, did Davlecha take the reins into his right hand and put his tobacco pouch, which he had been holding all the while, back under his coat tails.
    They returned by another route. Mrs. Luvers saw them coming, probably from the doctor’s window. She came to the threshold at the very moment when the bridge, which had told them its whole tale, resumed it under the water carrier’s cart.

3
    The entrance examination at the high school brought Zhenya together with a girl called Lisa Defendov, who had picked rowanberries along the way and brought them with her to school. The daughter of a choir leader had to repeat her French exam. Eugenia Luvers was seated in the empty seat next to her. And so they became acquainted as they sat side by side repeating the same sentence: “ Est-ce Pierre qui a volé la pomme? Oui, c’est Pierre qui a volé ... etc.”
    The fact that Zhenya had been tutored at home proved no handicap to the friendship of the girls. They met often. The visits, however, were one-sided, thanks to certain views held by Zhenya’s mother: Lisa could come to see her friend, but Zhenya was forbidden, for the time being, to go to the Defendovs.
    The intervals between their meetings did not keep Zhenya from attaching herself quickly to her friend. She loved Defendova—that is to say, she played a passive role in their relationship. She became Lisa’s “pressure gauge,” watchful and easily upset. All of Lisa’s remarks about her classmates, whom Zhenya did not know, roused in her a feeling of impending rage and bitterness. She was depressed and sad. These were the first attacks of jealousy. Without reason, and solely on the basis of her distrust, Zhenya was convinced that Lisa was playing a game with her, that outwardly she made a show of sincerity but privately laughed about everything that marked her as a Luvers, sneering behind Zhenya’s back at school and at home. But Zhenya found that this was the way it had to be, that it was in the nature of her attachment. Her feeling sprang from the powerful desire of an instinct that knows no self-seeking and can do but one thing: suffer for the sake of its idol and burn itself out when it really feels for the first time. Neither Zhenya nor Lisa influenced each other permanently. Zhenya remained Zhenya; Lisa remained Lisa; they met and separated—the one deeply moved, the other completely untouched.
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    The father of the Akhmedianovs dealt in iron. In the year between the birth of Nazzedin and Smagil he suddenly became rich. Thereafter Smagil was called Samuel and the father decided to give his sons a Russian education. The father overlooked not one peculiarity of the way of life of a “ Carin ,” a gentleman, and after ten years of eager imitation he had in every respect overshot his goal. The boys did excellently—that is, they adhered strictly to the model their father held up to them, and the brashness of their father’s ambition remained with them, noisy and destructive, so that they were like two circling flywheels left to the mercy of the power of inertia.
    In the fourth class the Akhmedianov boys were merely fourth-class pupils. They