Doctor Zhivago by Boris Leonidovich Pasternak Page A

that dirt it was better to give up my right to a nonexistent property and let it go to all that bunch of false rivals and pretenders who were after it. One claimant, as you know, is a certain Madame Alice, who calls herself Zhivago and lives with her children in Paris—I ' ve known about her for a long time. But now there are various new claims—I don ' t know about you, but I was told of them quite recently.
    " It appears that while Mother was still alive, Father became infatuated with a certain dreamy, eccentric Princess Stolbunova-Enrici. This lady has a son by him, Evgraf; he is ten years old.
    " The Princess is a recluse. She lives—God knows on what—in her house just outside Omsk, and she never goes out. I ' ve seen a photograph of the house. It ' s very handsome, with five French windows and stucco medallions on the cornices. And recently I ' ve been having the feeling that the house was staring at me nastily, out of all its five windows, right across all the thousands of miles between Siberia and Moscow, and that sooner or later it would give me the evil eye. So what do I want with all this—imaginary capital, phony claimants, malice, envy? And lawyers. "
    " All the same, you shouldn ' t have renounced it, " said Anna Ivanovna. " Do you know why I called you? " she asked again and immediately went on, " His name came back to me. You remember the forest guard I was telling you about yesterday? He was called Bacchus. Extraordinary, isn ' t it! A real bogeyman, black as the devil, with a beard growing up to his eyebrows, and calls himself Bacchus! His face was all disfigured, a bear had mauled him but he had fought it off. And they ' re all like that out there. Such names—striking, sonorous! Bacchus or Lupus or Faustus. Every now and then somebody like that would be announced—perhaps Auctus or Frolus—somebody with a name like a shot from your grandfather ' s gun—and we would all immediately troop downstairs from the nursery to the kitchen. And there—you can ' t think what it was like—you ' d find a charcoal dealer with a live bear cub, or a prospector from the far end of the province with a specimen of the ore. And your grandfather would always give them a credit slip for the office. Some were given money, some buckwheat, others cartridges. The forest came right up to the windows. And the snow, the snow! Higher than the roofs! " Anna Ivanovna had a coughing fit.
    " That ' s enough, it ' s bad for you, " Tonia and Yura urged her.
    " Nonsense, I ' m perfectly all right. That reminds me. Egorovna told me that you two are worrying about whether you should go to the party the day after tomorrow. Don ' t let me hear anything so silly again, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves! And you call yourself a doctor, Yura! So that ' s settled, you ' ll go, and that ' s that. But to return to Bacchus. He used to be a blacksmith when he was young. He got into a fight and was disembowelled. So he made himself a set of iron guts. Now, Yura, don ' t be silly. Of course I know he couldn ' t. You mustn ' t take it literally! But that ' s what the people out there said. "
    She was interrupted by another coughing fit, a much longer one than the last. It went on and on; she could not get her breath.
    Yura and Tonia hurried across to her simultaneously. They stood shoulder to shoulder by her bedside. Their hands touched. Still coughing, Anna Ivanovna caught their hands in hers and kept them joined awhile. When she was able to speak she said: " If I die, stay together. You ' re meant for each other. Get married. There now, you ' re engaged, " she added and burst into tears.
5
    As early as the spring of 1906—only a few months before she would begin her last year in the gymnasium—six months of Lara ' s liaison with Komarovsky had driven her beyond the limits of her endurance. He cleverly turned her wretchedness to his advantage, and when it suited him subtly reminded her of her shame. These reminders brought her to just that