The wind often stopped him on his way, blocking his path by raising clouds of sand and dust. The doctor turned away, squinted his eyes, lowered his head, waiting for the dust to sweep past, and went further on.
Antipova lived at the corner of Kupecheskaya and Novosvalochny Lane, opposite the dark, verging on blue, house with figures, which the doctor now saw for the first time. The house indeed corresponded to its nickname and made a strange, disturbing impression.
The whole top was surrounded by female mythological caryatids half again human size. Between two gusts of wind that hid its facade, the doctor fancied for a moment that the entire female population of the house had come out to the balcony and was leaning over the balustrade looking at him and at Kupecheskaya spread out below.
There were two entrances to Antipova’s, the front one from the street and one through the courtyard from the lane. Not knowing about the existence of the first, Yuri Andreevich took the second.
When he turned through the gate from the lane, the wind whirled dirt and litter from the whole yard up into the sky, screening the yard from the doctor. Hens rushed clucking from under his feet behind this black curtain, trying to save themselves from the rooster pursuing them.
When the cloud scattered, the doctor saw Antipova by the well. The whirlwind had surprised her with water already drawn in both buckets and the yoke over her left shoulder. Her head was covered with a kerchief, hastily knotted on her forehead, so as not to get dust in her hair, and she was holding the billowing skirt of her coat to keep it from being lifted by the wind. She started towards the house, carrying the water, but stopped, held back by a new gust of wind, which tore the kerchief from her head, started blowing her hair about, and carried the kerchief towards the far end of the fence, to the still clucking hens.
Yuri Andreevich ran after the kerchief, picked it up, and handed it to the taken-aback Antipova by the well. Ever faithful to her naturalness, she did not betray how amazed and perplexed she was by any exclamation. The only thing that escaped her was:
“Zhivago!”
“Larissa Fyodorovna!”
“By what miracle? By what chance?”
“Put your buckets down. I’ll carry them.”
“I never turn back halfway, never abandon what I’ve started. If you’ve come to me, let’s go.”
“And to whom else?”
“Who knows with you?”
“Anyway, let me take the yoke from your shoulders. I can’t stand idle while you work.”
“Work, is it! I won’t let you. You’ll splash water all over the stairs. Better tell me what wind blew you here. You’ve been around for more than a year, and still couldn’t decide, couldn’t find time?”
“How do you know?”
“Word gets around. And I saw you, finally, in the library.”
“Why didn’t you call out to me?”
“You won’t make me believe you didn’t see me yourself.”
Following Larissa Fyodorovna, who was swaying slightly under the swaying buckets, the doctor stepped under the low archway. This was the back entrance to the ground floor. Here, quickly squatting down, Larissa Fyodorovna set the buckets on the dirt floor, freed her shoulders from the yoke, straightened up, and began to wipe her hands with a little handkerchief she took from no one knows where.
“Come, I’ll take you, there’s an inner passage to the front entrance. It’s light there. You can wait there. And I’ll take the water up the back way, tidy things upstairs a little, change my clothes. See what sort of stairs we’ve got. Cast-iron steps with an openwork design. You can see everything through them from above. It’s an old house. It got jolted a bit during the days of the shelling. There was artillery fire. See, the stones have separated. There are holes, openings between the bricks. Katenka and I put the key to the apartment into this hole and cover it with a brick when we leave. Keep that in mind. You may come one day and not find me here, and then you’re welcome to open the door, come in, make yourself at home. And meanwhile I’ll come back. It’s here now, the key. But I don’t need it. I’ll go in from the back and open the door from inside. The one trouble is the rats. Hordes and hordes, there’s no getting rid of them. They jump all over us. The structure’s decrepit, the walls are shaky, there are cracks everywhere. Where I can, I plug them, I fight. It doesn’t do much good. Maybe someday you’ll come by and help me? Together we can bush up the floors and plinths. Hm? Well, stay on the landing, think about something. I won’t let you languish long, I’ll call you soon.”
Waiting to be called, Yuri Andreevich let his eyes wander over the peeling walls of the entrance and the cast- iron steps of the stairs. He was thinking: “In the reading room I compared the eagerness of her reading with the passion and ardor of actually doing something, of physical work. And, on the contrary, she carries water lightly, effortlessly, as if she were reading. She has this facility in everything. As if she had picked up the momentum for life way back in her childhood, and now everything is done with that momentum, of itself, with the ease of an ensuing consequence. She has it in the line of her back when she bends over, and in the smile that parts her lips and rounds her chin, and in her words and thoughts.”
“Zhivago!” rang out from the doorway of an apartment on the upper landing. The doctor went upstairs.
14
“Give me your hand and follow me obediently. There will be two rooms here where it’s dark and things are piled to the ceiling. You’ll stumble and hurt yourself.”
“True, it’s a sort of labyrinth. I wouldn’t find my way. Why’s that? Are you redoing the apartment?”
“Oh, no, not at all. It’s somebody else’s apartment. I don’t even know whose. We used to have our own, a government one, in the school building. When the building was taken over by the housing office of the Yuriatin City Council, they moved me and my daughter into part of this abandoned one. There were leftovers from the former owners. A lot of furniture. I don’t need other people’s belongings. I put all their things in these two rooms and whitewashed the windows. Don’t let go of my hand or you’ll get lost. That’s it. To the right. Now the jungle’s behind us. This is my door. There’ll be more light. The threshold. Don’t trip.”
When Yuri Andreevich went into the room with his guide, there turned out to be a window in the wall facing the door. The doctor was struck by what he saw through it. The window gave onto the courtyard of the house, onto the
