The Blizzard Read Online Free PDF

Let’s go!” The doctor clapped him on the shoulder.
    Crouper laughed, sighed, and gestured with his hand: “At yur service!”
    Crouper threw back the snow-covered bear rug and sat down. Having fastened his own traveling bag in back, the doctor sat down next to Crouper, and wrapped himself in the rug with an expression of satisfaction and the feeling of an important job successfully accomplished.
    “How’re ye doin’ in there?” Crouper looked under the tarpaulin.
    In reply came friendly neighs from the horses, who had been standing in place all this time.
    “Thank the Lord. Heigh-yup!”
    The horses’ hooves scrabbled against the drive belt, then the sled trembled and moved. Crouper straightened it out, and steered it in the right direction. Glancing at the road, both riders noticed immediately that during the time they’d been working on the runner, snow had covered all trace of the sleighs that had traveled the path earlier; the road that lay ahead of them was white and untouched.
    “Whoa, just look at all the snow—a herd of elephants couldn’t pack it down.” Crouper clicked his tongue and tugged on the reins. “Quick, let’s go now, faster.”
    The horses, who’d been bored under their tarp, didn’t need any encouragement: they ran energetically on the frozen drive belt, their little shoed hooves tapping noisily. The sled started briskly across the fresh snow.
    “If’n we cross the ravine, up ’bove past it, the road is good all the ways to the mill!” Crouper shouted, frowning in the snowy wind.
    “We’ll make it!” the doctor encouraged him, hiding his face under his collar and fur cap, leaving only his nose, which had turned slightly blue, out in the open.
    The wind blew large snowflakes about and swirled them into snowdrifts. The forest was sparse on either side, with clear indications of felled timber.
    The doctor saw an old dry oak that had apparently been split by lightning many years before, and for some reason he remembered the time. He took out his pocket watch and checked it: “Past five already. How we’ve dawdled … Well, no matter … There’s no traveling fast in this kind of snow, but if we can keep at this crawl, we should make it in a couple of hours. How did we manage to run into that strange pyramid? What is it for? Must be some sort of table decoration—it’s clearly not a tool or machine. The transport must have been overloaded, carrying lots like it; one fell out and ended up under the sled…”
    He remembered the crystal rhinoceros in Nadine’s house, the rhinoceros that stood on the shelf with her sheet music, the music she picked up with her small fingers, placed on the piano, and played, turning the pages with a brisk, abrupt movement, the kind of movement that instantly conveyed her impulsive nature, unreliable as ice in March. That sparkling rhinoceros with its sharp, crystal horn and dainty tail, curled like a pig’s, always looked at Platon Ilich with a hint of mockery, as though teasing him: remember, you’re not the only one who’s walking on thin ice.
    “Nadine is already in Berlin,” he thought. “There’s never any snow there in winter. It’s probably rainy and dank. In the Wannsee, the lake never even freezes over, ducks and swans swim there all winter … Their house is nice, with that stone knight, the centuries-old linden trees and sycamores … How stupidly we parted. I didn’t even promise to write to her … When I get back I’ll definitely write to her, immediately, enough playing the insulted and injured—I’m not insulted and I’m not injured … And she’s marvelous, she’s wonderful, even when she’s nasty…”
    “We should have taken that pyramid with us,” he said suddenly, and glanced at the driver.
    Crouper, who didn’t hear him, drove along with his usual birdlike expression. He was happy that the sled was riding smoothly, as though it had never broken down, happy that his beloved horses were feeling lively,