Doctor Zhivago (30 page)

He was surprised by Nikolai Nikolaevich’s calmness, by the cool, bantering tone in which he talked on political themes. His social bearing exceeded Russian possibilities of the day. This feature bespoke a newcomer. It struck the eye, seemed old-fashioned, and caused a certain awkwardness.

Ah, it was not at all that, not that which filled the first hours of their meeting,
made them throw themselves into each other’s arms, weep, and, breathless with excitement, interrupt the rush and fervor of their initial conversation with frequent pauses.

This was a meeting of two creative characters, bound by family ties, and, though the past arose and began to live a second life, memories came in a flood, and circumstances surfaced that had occurred during their time of separation; still, as soon as the talk turned to what was most important, to things known to people of a creative cast, all ties disappeared except that single one, there was neither uncle nor nephew, nor any difference in age, and there remained only the closeness of element to element, energy to energy, principle to principle.

Over the last decade, Nikolai Nikolaevich had had no occasion to speak of the fascination of authorship and the essence of the creative vocation in such conformity with his own thoughts and so deservedly apropos as now. On the other hand, Yuri Andreevich had never happened to hear opinions that were so perceptively apt and so inspiringly captivating as this analysis.

The two men constantly exclaimed and rushed about the room, clutching their heads from the faultlessness of each other’s conjectures, or went to the window and silently drummed on the glass with their fingers, amazed at the proofs of mutual understanding.

So it was at their first meeting, but later the doctor saw Nikolai Nikolaevich several times in company, and among people he was different, unrecognizable.

He was aware of being a visitor in Moscow and had no wish to part with that awareness. Whether he considered Petersburg or some other place his home remained unclear. He was flattered by the role of political fine talker and society charmer. He may have imagined that political salons would be opened in Moscow as in Paris at Mme Roland’s before the Convention.
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He called on his lady friends, hospitable dwellers in quiet Moscow lanes, and most sweetly mocked them and their husbands for their halfway thinking and backwardness, for the habit of judging everything by their own parochial standards. And he now flaunted his newspaper erudition, just as he once had with the Apocrypha and Orphic texts.

It was said that he had left a new young passion behind in Switzerland, half-finished business, a half-written book, and that he would merely dip himself into the stormy whirlpool of the fatherland, and then, if he came up unharmed, would flit off to his Alps again and be seen no more.

He was for the Bolsheviks and often mentioned two left SR names
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as being of one mind with him: the journalist writing under the pseudonym of Miroshka Pomor, and the essayist Sylvia Coterie.

Alexander Alexandrovich grumblingly reproached him:

“It’s simply dreadful how low you’ve sunk, Nikolai Nikolaevich! These Miroshkas of yours. What a pit! And then you’ve got this Lydia Could-be.”

“Coterie,” Nikolai Nikolaevich corrected. “And it’s Sylvia.”

“Well, it’s all the same. Could-be or Potpourri, we won’t stick at words.”

“Sorry, but all the same it’s Coterie,” Nikolai Nikolaevich patiently insisted. He and Alexander Alexandrovich exchanged such speeches as:

“What are we arguing about? It’s simply a shame to have to demonstrate such truths. It’s like ABC. The main mass of people have led an unthinkable existence for centuries. Take any history book. Whatever it’s called, feudalism, or serfdom, or capitalism and factory industry, the unnaturalness and injustice of such an order have long been noted, and the revolution has long been prepared that will lead the people towards the light and put everything in its place.

“You know that a partial renovation of the old is unsuitable here, what’s needed is to break it radically. Maybe that will cause the building to collapse. Well, what of it? Just because it’s frightening, it doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. It’s a question of time. How can you argue against that?”

“Eh, that’s not the point. I’m not talking about that, am I?” Alexander Alexandrovich would get angry and the argument would flare up.

“Your Potpourris and Miroshkas are people without conscience. They say one thing and do another. And then, too, where’s the logic here? There’s no coherence. No, wait, I’ll show you right now.”

And he would start looking for some magazine with a contrary article, pulling open his desk drawers and slamming them shut, and rousing his eloquence with this noisy fussing about.

Alexander Alexandrovich liked to be hampered by something when he talked, so that the impediment would justify his mumbling pauses, his hems and haws. Loquaciousness would come over him while he was searching for something he had lost, for instance, when he was looking for his second galosh in the semidarkness of the front hall, or when he was standing on the bathroom threshold with a towel over his shoulder, or as he was passing a heavy platter across the table, or while he was pouring glasses of wine for his guests.

Yuri Andreevich listened to his father-in-law with delight. He adored the old Moscow singsong speech he knew so well, with the Gromekos’ soft, slightly guttural
r
s, like a cat’s purring.

Alexander Alexandrovich’s upper lip with its trim little mustache protruded slightly over the lower one. The bow tie stood out on his chest in the same way. There was something in common between the lip and the tie,
and it lent Alexander Alexandrovich a certain touching, trustfully childish quality.

Late at night, just before the guests’ departure, Shura Schlesinger appeared. She came straight from some meeting, in a jacket and worker’s visored cap, walked into the room with resolute strides, shook everyone’s hand in turn, and in the same motion abandoned herself to reproaches and accusations.

“Hello, Tonya. Hello, Sanechka. Anyhow it’s swinishness, you must agree. I hear from everywhere, he’s here, the whole of Moscow is talking about it, and I’m the last to learn it from you. Well, to hell with you. Obviously, I don’t deserve it. Where is he, the long-awaited one? Let me through. You’re standing around him like a wall. Well, hello! Good for you, good for you. I’ve read it. I don’t understand a thing, but it’s brilliant. You can see it straight off. Hello, Nikolai Nikolaevich. I’ll come back to you at once, Yurochka. I must have a big, special talk with you. Hello, young people. Ah, Gogochka, you’re here, too? Goosey Goosey Gander, whither do you wander?”

The last exclamation referred to the Gromekos’ distant relation Gogochka, a zealous admirer of all the rising powers, who for being silly and laughter-prone was known as Goosey, and for being tall and skinny—the Tapeworm.

“So you’re all eating and drinking here? I’ll catch up with you right away. Ah, ladies and gentlemen! You know nothing, you suspect nothing! What’s going on in the world! Such things are happening! Go to some real local meeting with nonfictional workers, with nonfictional soldiers, not out of books. Try to make a peep there about war to a victorious conclusion. You’ll get your victorious conclusion!
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I was just listening to a sailor! Yurochka, you’d go out of your mind! Such passion! Such integrity!”

Shura Schlesinger was interrupted. They all shouted with no rhyme or reason. She sat down beside Yuri Andreevich, took him by the hand, and, bringing her face close to his, so as to outshout the others, shouted without raising or lowering her voice, as through a speaking trumpet:

“Come with me some day, Yurochka. I’ll show you the people. You must, you must touch the earth, remember, like Antaeus. Why are you goggling your eyes? It seems I surprise you? I’m an old warhorse, an old Bestuzhevist,
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didn’t you know, Yurochka? I’ve known preliminary detention, I’ve fought at the barricades. Of course! What did you think? Oh, we don’t know the people! I’ve come straight from there, from the thick of them. I’m setting up a library for them.”

She had already taken a drop and was obviously getting tipsy. But Yuri
Andreevich also had a clamor in his head. He did not notice how Shura Schlesinger turned up at one end of the room and he at the other, at the head of the table. He was standing and, by all tokens, beyond his own expectations, speaking. He did not obtain silence all at once.

“Ladies and gentlemen … I want … Misha! Gogochka! … But what else can I do, Tonya, when they don’t listen? Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to say a couple of words. Something unheard-of, something unprecedented is approaching. Before it overtakes us, here is my wish for you. When it comes, God grant that we do not lose each other and do not lose our souls. Gogochka, you can shout hurrah afterwards. I haven’t finished. Stop talking in the corners and listen carefully.

“By the third year of the war a conviction has been formed in the people that sooner or later the boundary between the front and the rear will be effaced, the sea of blood will come to everyone and flood those who sat it out and entrenched themselves. That flood is the revolution.

“In the course of it, it might seem to you, as to us at the war, that life has ceased, everything personal is over, nothing happens in the world any more except killing and dying, and if we survive till there are notes and memoirs of this time, and we read those recollections, we will realize that in these five or ten years we have lived through more than some do in a whole century.

“I don’t know if the people themselves will rise and move like a wall, or if everything will be done in their name. An event of such enormity does not call for dramatic proofs. I’ll believe it without that. It’s petty to rummage around for the causes of cyclopean events. They don’t have any. Domestic squabbles have their genesis, and after so much pulling each other’s hair and smashing of dishes, no one can figure out who first began it. But everything truly great is without beginning, like the universe. It does not emerge, but is suddenly there, as if it always existed or fell from the sky.

“I also think that Russia is destined to become the first realm of socialism since the existence of the world. When that happens, it will stun us for a long time, and, coming to our senses, we will no longer get back the memory we have lost. We will forget part of the past and will not seek explanations for the unprecedented. The new order will stand around us, with the accustomedness of the forest on the horizon or the clouds over our heads. It will surround us everywhere. There will be nothing else.”

He said something more and by then had sobered up completely. But, as before, he did not hear very well what was being said around him, and his answers were beside the point. He saw manifestations of general love for him, but was unable to drive away the sorrow that made him not himself. And so he said:

“Thank you, thank you. I see your feelings. I don’t deserve them. But you shouldn’t love so sparingly and hurriedly, as if fearing you’ll have to love more strongly later.”

They all laughed and applauded, taking it for a deliberate witticism, while he did not know where to escape from the sense of impending misfortune, from the awareness of his powerlessness over the future, despite all his thirst for the good and capacity for happiness.

The guests were leaving. They all had long faces from fatigue. Yawning opened and closed their jaws, making them look like horses.

As they were saying good-bye, they drew the window curtain aside. Threw open the window. A yellowish dawn appeared, a wet sky covered with dirty, sallow clouds.

“There must have been a thunderstorm while we were blathering,” somebody said.

“I got caught in the rain on my way here. Barely made it,” confirmed Shura Schlesinger.

In the deserted and still-dark lane they could hear the sound of drops dripping from the trees, alternating with the insistent chirping of drenched sparrows.

There was a roll of thunder, like a plow drawing a furrow across the whole of the sky, and everything grew still. But then four resounding, belated booms rang out, like big potatoes dumped from a shovelful of loose soil in autumn.

The thunder cleared the space inside the dusty, smoke-filled room. Suddenly, like electrical elements, the component parts of existence became tangible—water and air, the desire for joy, earth, and sky.

The lane became filled with the voices of the departing guests. They went on loudly discussing something outside, exactly as they had just been wrangling about it in the house. The voices moved off, gradually dying down and dying out.

“So late,” said Yuri Andreevich. “Let’s go to bed. Of all the people in the world, I love only you and papa.”

August passed, September was coming to an end. The unavoidable was imminent. Winter was drawing near, and so, in the human world, was the foreordained, like winter’s swoon, which hung in the air and was on everyone’s lips.

They had to prepare for the cold, stock up on food, firewood. But in the
days of the triumph of materialism, matter turned into a concept, food and firewood were replaced by the provision and fuel question.

People in the cities were helpless as children in the face of the approaching unknown, which overturned all established habits in its way and left devastation behind it, though it was itself a child of the city and the creation of city dwellers.

All around there was self-deception, empty verbiage. Humdrum life still limped, floundered, hobbled bow-legged somewhere out of old habit. But the doctor saw life unvarnished. Its condemnation could not be concealed from him. He considered himself and his milieu doomed. They faced ordeals, perhaps even death. The numbered days they had left melted away before his eyes.

He would have gone out of his mind, if it had not been for everyday trifles, labors, and cares. His wife, his child, the need to earn money, were his salvation—the essential, the humble, the daily round, going to work, visiting patients.