Doctor Zhivago

2

The last part of the journey, closer to Moscow, Yuri Andreevich traveled by rail, and the first, much larger, walked.
A spectacle of villages, which he went through, it was no better than that, what he saw in Siberia and the Urals during his escape from forest captivity. Only then did he pass through the edge in winter, and now at the end of summer, warm, dry autumn, which was much easier.
Half of the villages he passed through were empty., like after an enemy campaign, fields are abandoned and not cleaned, yes, these were indeed the consequences of the war, civil war.
For two or three days at the end of September his road stretched along the steep high bank of the river. The river, flowing towards Yuri Andreevich, was on his right. Left wide, from the road itself to the cloud-cluttered sky line, uncompressed fields stretched. They were occasionally interrupted by deciduous forests, with a predominance of oak, elm and maple. The forests ran out into deep ravines to the river, and crossed the road with cliffs and steep slopes.
In unharvested fields, rye remained in overripe ears, flowed and fell from them. Yuri Andreevich stuffed his mouth with handfuls of grain, grinded it with difficulty with his teeth and ate it in those especially difficult cases, when it was not possible to cook porridge from bread grains. The stomach did not digest raw food well, barely chewed food.
Yuri Andreevich has never seen rye so ominously brown in his life, brown, the color of old tarnished gold.
Usually, when it is removed on time, she's much lighter.
These, colors of flames without fire burning, these, with a cry for help without a sound, the screaming fields with cold calm were bordered from the edge by a large, the sky has already turned towards winter, according to which, like shadows across the face, long layered snow clouds with a black center and white sides floated non-stop.
And everything was in motion, slow, uniform. The river flowed. There was a road coming towards her. The doctor walked along it. Clouds were stretching in the same direction as him. But the fields did not remain still. Something was moving across them, they were engulfed in small, restless swarming, disgusting.
In the unprecedented, Until then, there were mice in unprecedented numbers in the fields. They scurried across the doctor's face and hands and ran through his trouser legs and sleeves., when night overtook him in the field and he had to lie down somewhere near the boundary for the night. Their countless numbers have multiplied, the well-fed flocks darted along the road underfoot during the day and turned into slippery, squeaky moving slush, when they were pressed.
Scary, wild, shaggy village mongrels, who looked at each other like that, definitely conferred, when they pounce on the doctor and bite him to death, walked en masse behind the doctor at a respectful distance. They ate carrion, but they didn’t disdain mouse meat either, what a field was swarming with, and looking from a distance at the doctor, confidently followed him, always waiting for something. Strangely, they did not enter the forest, as they approached him, little by little they began to lag behind, turned back and disappeared.
The forest and the field were then complete opposites.
Fields without man are orphans, as if cursed in his absence. Forests freed from man flaunted freedom, like released prisoners.
Usually people, mainly, village kids, the nuts are not allowed to ripen and are broken off green. Now the forested slopes of the hills and ravines were completely covered with untouched rough golden foliage, as if dusty and roughened by an autumn tan. Sticking out of it were fairly protruding, exactly tied in knots or bows, tripled and quadrupled nuts, ripe, ready to fall out of the galleys, but still holding on to them. Yuri Andreevich endlessly gnawed and snapped them along the way. His pockets were full of them, the knapsack is full of them.
For a week, nuts were his main food..
It seemed to the doctor, that he sees the fields when he is seriously ill, in a fever delirium, and the forest is in an enlightened state of recovery, that God lives in the forest, and the mocking smile of the devil snakes across the field.

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