368
BORIS
PASTERNAK
ing for
him,
took the half which the horse could see over the edge
of the snowdrift.
At the previous station Gimazetdin had woken only Koval–
evsky and the coachman who had driven them to this point was
a stranger to Goltsev. But now he immediately recognized De–
menty Mekhanoshin to whom he had once issued a certificate
in
his
office-a good sixty miles from here-to the effect that,
being the owner of a
troika
and plying the last stage between
Bilyar and Syuginsk, he was working for defense.
It was odd to
think
that he had certified this house and its
coachyard and that, knowing nothing at all of them, he had
underwritten this magic village and the starry night above it.
Later, while the horses were being reharnessed and the sleepy
wife of the coachman gave them tea; while the clock ticked and
they tried to make conversation, and bugs crawled sultrily over
calendars and portraits of crowned persons; while bodies sleeping
on the benches snored and wheezed fitfully like clockwork de–
vices of different systems, Dementy kept going out and returning,
and each time his appearance changed, depending on what he
had taken down from a nail or dragged from under his bed.
When he came in the first time to tell his wife to give the
gentlemen sugar and to get out the white bread for them, he
was wearing a smock and looked like a hospitable peasant; the
second time, coming in for the reins, he was a laborer dressed in
a short Siberian jacket and finally he appeared as
a:
coachman
in a heavy fur coat. Without coming in, he leaned through the
doorway and said that the horses were ready, that it was past
three in the morning and time for them to leave. Then, pushing
open the door with the stock of his whip, he went into the dark
world outside which reverberated loudly at his first steps.
The rest of the journey left no trace in their memories. It
was getting light when Goltsev woke and the countryside was
covered in a haze. An endless, straggling convoy of .sleighs was
lumbering by in a cloud of steam. They were overtaking it, and
it looked therefore as though the timber-loaded sleighs were
