Alleluia’!”8
And she felt a wave of pride and relief, which always happened to her at the thought of Yuri and in the brief periods of her life close to him. The breath of freedom and lightheartedness that always issued from him came over her now. She impatiently got up from the stool she was sitting on. Something not quite comprehensible was going on in her. She wanted, with his help, to break free, if only for a short time, into the fresh air, out of the abyss of sufferings that entangled her, to experience, as she once had, the happiness of liberation. This happiness she dreamed, she imagined, as the happiness of taking leave of him, the occasion and the right to weep her fill over him, alone and unhindered. And with the haste of passion, she cast at the crowd a glance broken by pain, unseeing and filled with tears, as from burning eyedrops administered by an oculist, and they all stirred, blew their noses, began moving aside, and went out of the room, leaving her finally alone behind the closed door, and she, quickly crossing herself, went to the table and the coffin, stepped onto the footstool Evgraf had placed there, slowly made three big crosses over the body, and put her lips to the cold forehead and hands. She passed by the sensation that the cold forehead had become smaller, like a hand clenched into a fist; she managed not to notice it. She became still and for a few moments did not speak, did not think, did not weep, covering the middle of the coffin, the flowers, and the body with herself, her head, her breast, her soul, and her arms, as big as her soul.
15
She shook all over with repressed sobs. While she could, she fought them back, but suddenly it became beyond her strength, the tears burst from her and poured over her cheeks, her dress, her arms, and the coffin to which she pressed herself.
She said nothing and thought nothing. Successions of thoughts, generalities, facts, certainties, freely raced, sped through her, like clouds across the sky, as in the times of their former nighttime conversations. It was this that used to bring happiness and liberation. An uncerebral, ardent, mutually inspired knowledge. Instinctive, immediate.
She was filled with such knowledge now as well, an obscure, indistinct knowledge of death, a preparedness for it, an absence of perplexity before it. As if she had already lived twenty times in the world, had lost Yuri Zhivago countless times, and had accumulated a whole heart’s experience on that account, so that everything she felt and did by his coffin was apropos and to the point.
Oh, what love this was, free, unprecedented, unlike anything else! They thought the way other people sing.
They loved each other not out of necessity, not “scorched by passion,” as it is falsely described. They loved each other because everything around them wanted it so: the earth beneath them, the sky over their heads, the clouds and trees. Everything around them was perhaps more pleased by their love than they were themselves. Strangers in the street, the distances opening out during their walks, the rooms they lived or met in.
Ah, it was this, this was the chief thing that united them and made them akin! Never, never, even in moments of the most gratuitous, self-forgetful happiness, did that most lofty and thrilling thing abandon them: delight in the general mold of the world, the feeling of their relation to the whole picture, the sense of belonging to the beauty of the whole spectacle, to the whole universe.
They breathed only by that oneness. And therefore the exaltation of man over the rest of nature, the fashionable fussing over and worshipping of man, never appealed to them. Such false principles of social life, turned into politics, seemed to them pathetically homemade and remained incomprehensible.
16
And so she began to take leave of him in the simple, ordinary words of a brisk, informal conversation, which breaks up the framework of reality and has no meaning, as there is no meaning in the choruses and monologues of tragedies, in verse, in music, and in other conventions, justified only by the conventionality of emotion. The conventionality in the present case, which justified the tension of her light, unpreconceived talk, was her tears, in which her everyday, unfestive words plunged, bathed, floated.
It seemed that these words wet with tears stuck together of themselves in her tender and quick prattle, as the wind rustles silky and moist foliage tousled by a warm rain.
“So we’re together once more, Yurochka. This is how God granted that we meet again. How terrible, just think! Oh, I can’t! Oh Lord! I weep and weep! Just think! So again it’s something of our sort, from our arsenal. Your going, my end. Again something big, irrevocable. The riddle of life, the riddle of death, the enchantment of genius, the enchantment of nakedness—that, yes, if you please, that we understood. But petty worldly squabbles like recarving the globe—sorry, we pass, it’s not in our line.
“Farewell, my great and dear one, farewell, my pride, farewell, my swift, deep river, how I loved your daylong splashing, how I loved to throw myself into your cold waves.
“Remember how I said good-bye to you that time, there, in the snow? How you deceived me! Would I ever have gone without you? Oh, I know, I know, you forced yourself to do it, for the sake of my imaginary good. And then everything went to rack and ruin. Lord, what a cup I drank there, what I endured! But you don’t know anything. Oh, what have I done, Yura, what have I done! I’m such a criminal, you have no idea! But it wasn’t my fault. I was in the hospital for three months then, for one of them unconscious. Since then there’s been no life for me, Yura. There’s no peace for my soul from pity and torment. But I’m not telling, I’m not revealing the main thing. I can’t name it, I haven’t got strength enough. When I come to this point in my life, my hair stands on end from horror. And, you know, I can’t even swear I’m quite normal. But, you see, I don’t drink, as many do, I didn’t set out on that path, because a drunken woman is the end, it’s an unthinkable thing, right?”
And she said something more and wept and suffered. Suddenly she raised her head in surprise and looked around. There had long been people in the room, anxiousness, movement. She got down from the footstool and, staggering, stepped away from the coffin, passing her palm over her eyes, as if to squeeze out the remaining unwept tears and shake them onto the floor.
Some men went up to the coffin and lifted it on three cloths. The carrying out began.
17
Larissa Fyodorovna spent several days in Kamergersky Lane. The sorting of papers she had talked about with Evgraf Andreevich was begun with her participation, but not brought to an end. The conversation with Evgraf that she had asked for also took place. He learned something important from her.
One day Larissa Fyodorovna left the house and did not come back again. Evidently she was arrested on the street in those days and died or vanished no one knew where, forgotten under some nameless number on subsequently lost lists, in one of the countless general or women’s concentration camps in the north.
EPILOGUE
1
