Doctor Zhivago (43 page)

“But that’s very important. It means father and son are at daggers drawn? Political enemies?”

“Nominally, of course. Though in reality the taiga doesn’t make war on Varykino. But to continue. The other Tuntsev girls, Averky Stepanovich’s sisters-in-law, are in Yuriatin to this day. Eternal virgins. Times have changed, and so have the girls.

“The oldest of the remaining ones, Avdotya Severinovna, is the librarian in the city reading room. A sweet, dark-haired girl, bashful in the extreme. Blushes like a peony for no reason at all. The silence in the reading room is sepulchral, tense. She’s attacked by a chronic cold, sneezes up to twenty times, is ready to fall through the floor from shame. What are you to do? From nervousness.

“The middle one, Glafira Severinovna, is the blessing among the sisters. A sharp girl, a wonder of a worker. Doesn’t scorn any task. The general opinion, with one voice, is that the partisan leader Forester took after this aunt. You see her there in a sewing shop or as a stocking maker. Before you can turn around, she’s already a hairdresser. Did you pay attention to the switchwoman at the Yuriatin train station, shaking her fist and sticking her tongue out at us? Well, I thought, fancy that, Glafira got herself hired as a watchman on the railroad. But it seems it wasn’t her. Too old for Glafira.

“The youngest, Simushka, is the family’s cross, its trial. An educated girl, well-read. Studied philosophy, loved poetry. But then, in the years of the revolution, under the influence of the general elation, street processions, speeches from a platform on the square, she got touched in the head, fell into a religious mania. The sisters leave for work, lock the door, and she slips out the window and goes roaming the streets, gathering the public, preaching the Second Coming, the end of the world. But here I’m talking away and we’re coming to my station. Yours is the next one. Get ready.”

When Anfim Efimovich got off the train, Antonina Alexandrovna said:

“I don’t know how you look at it, but I think this man was sent to us by fate. It seems to me he’ll play some beneficial role in our existence.”

“That may well be, Tonechka. But I’m not glad that you’re recognized by your resemblance to your grandfather and that he’s so well remembered here. And Strelnikov, too, as soon as I mentioned Varykino, put in caustically: ‘Varykino? Krüger’s factories? His little relatives, by any chance? His heirs?’

“I’m afraid we’ll be more visible here than in Moscow, which we fled from in search of inconspicuousness.

“Of course, there’s nothing to be done now. No use crying over spilt milk. But it will be better not to show ourselves, to lie low, to behave more modestly. Generally, I have bad presentiments. Let’s wake up the others, pack our things, tie the belts, and prepare to get off.”

Antonina Alexandrovna stood on the platform in Torfyanaya counting people and things innumerable times to make sure nothing had been forgotten in the car. She felt the trampled sand under her feet, and yet the fear of somehow missing the stop did not leave her, and the rumble of the moving train went on sounding in her ears, though her eyes convinced her that it was standing motionless by the platform. This kept her from seeing, hearing, and understanding.

Her companions on the long journey said good-bye to her from above, from the height of the car. She did not notice them. She did not notice the train leaving and discovered its disappearance only after she noticed the second track, revealed after its departure, with a green field and blue sky beyond it.

The station building was of stone. By its entrance stood two benches, one on each side. The Moscow travelers from Sivtsev were the only passengers to get off at Torfyanaya. They put down their things and sat on one of the benches.

The newcomers were struck by the silence at the station, the emptiness, the tidiness. It seemed unusual to them that there was no crowding around, no swearing. Life was delayed in this out-of-the-way place, it lagged behind history. It had yet to catch up with the savagery of the capital.

The station was hidden in a birch grove. It became dark in the train as it approached it. The moving shadows cast by its barely swaying tops shifted over hands and faces and over the clean, damp yellow sand of the platform. The whistling of birds in the grove suited its freshness. As undisguisedly pure
as ignorance, the full sounds echoed throughout the wood and permeated it. The grove was crosscut by two roads, the railway and the country track, and it curtained both with its flung-out, low-hanging branches, like the ends of wide, floor-length sleeves.

Suddenly Antonina Alexandrovna’s eyes and ears were opened. She became aware of everything at once. The ringing birdcalls, the purity of the forest solitude, the serenity of the peace all around her. In her mind she had composed a phrase: “I couldn’t believe we would arrive unharmed. You understand, your Strelnikov might play at magnanimity before you and let you go, but telegraph orders here to have us all detained when we got off. I don’t believe in their nobility, my dear. It’s all only for show.” Instead of these prepared words, she said something different. “How delightful!” escaped her when she saw the loveliness around her. She could not say any more. Tears began to choke her. She burst into loud sobs.

Hearing her weeping, a little old man, the stationmaster, came out of the building. With rapid little steps he trotted over to the bench, put his hand politely to the visor of his red-topped uniform cap, and asked:

“Perhaps the young lady needs some drops of calmative? From the station medicine chest?”

“It’s nothing. Thank you. It will pass.”

“The cares and anxieties of travel. A well-known, widespread thing. Besides, there’s this African heat, rare in our latitudes. And, on top of that, the events in Yuriatin.”

“We watched the fire from the train as we passed.”

“So you’d be coming from Russia, if I’m not mistaken?”

“From our White-Stoned Mother.”
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“Muscovites? Then no wonder the lady’s nerves are upset. They say there’s no stone left upon stone?”

“They’re exaggerating. But it’s true
we’ve seen all kinds of things. This is my daughter, this is my son-in-law. This is their little boy. And this is our young nanny, Nyusha.”

“How do you do. How do you do. Very pleased. I’ve been partly forewarned. Anfim Efimovich Samdevyatov rang up on the railway phone from the Sakma junction. Doctor Zhivago and family from Moscow, he says, please render them all possible assistance. So you must be that same doctor?”

“No, this is Doctor Zhivago, my son-in-law, and I’m in a different sector, in agriculture—Gromeko, professor of agronomy.”

“Sorry, my mistake. Forgive me. Very glad to make your acquaintance.”

“So, judging by your words, you know Samdevyatov?”

“Who doesn’t know that magician! Our hope and provider. Without him we’d all have turned our toes up long ago. Yes, he says, render them all possible assistance. Yes, sir, I say. I promised. So you’ll have a horse, if need be, or anything else I can do to help. Where are you headed for?”

“Varykino. Is it far from here?”

“Varykino? That’s why I keep thinking who on earth your daughter reminds me of so much. So you’re headed for Varykino! Then everything’s explained. Ivan Ernestovich and I built that road together. I’ll get busy and fit you out. We’ll call a man, get hold of a cart. Donat! Donat! Here are the things, take them to the waiting room meanwhile. And what about a horse? Run over to the tea room, brother, and ask if there isn’t one. Seems like Vakkh was hanging around here this morning. Ask if he maybe hasn’t gone. Tell them there’s four people to be taken to Varykino, with no luggage to speak of. Newcomers. Look lively. And some fatherly advice for you, madam. I’m purposely not asking you about the degree of your relation to Ivan Ernestovich, but be careful on that account. Don’t go unbuttoning yourself to just anybody. Think what times these are.”

At the name of Vakkh, the travelers glanced at each other in amazement. They still remembered the late Anna Ivanovna’s stories about the legendary blacksmith who forged indestructible iron guts for himself, and other local tall tales and fables.

A lop-eared, white-haired, shaggy old man was driving them behind a white, just foaled mare. Everything on him was white for different reasons. His new bast shoes had not yet darkened from wear, and his pants and shirt had grown faded and bleached with time.

Behind the white mare, kicking up his wobbly, soft-boned legs, ran a curly-headed foal, black as night, looking like a hand-carved toy.

Sitting at the sides of the cart, which jolted over the potholes in the road, the travelers clung to the edges so as not to fall. There was peace in their souls. Their dream was coming true, they were nearing the goal of their journey. With generous largesse and luxury, the pre-evening hours of the wonderful, clear day lingered, delayed.

The road went now through forest, now through open clearings. In the forest, the bumping over snags threw the travelers into a heap, and they huddled, frowned, pressed close to each other. In the open places, where it was as if space itself doffed its hat out of fullness of feeling, they straightened up, settled more freely, shook their heads.

It was mountainous country. The mountains, as always, had their own
look, their physiognomy. They stood dark in the distance, mighty, arrogant shadows, silently scrutinizing the people in the cart. A comforting rosy light followed the travelers across the field, reassuring them and giving them hope.

They liked everything, were surprised at everything, and most of all at the incessant babble of their whimsical old driver, in which traces of vanished old Russian forms, Tartar layers, and regional peculiarities were mixed with unintelligibilities of his own invention.

When the foal lagged behind, the mare stopped and waited for him. He smoothly overtook her in wavy, splashing leaps. With awkward steps of his long, close-set legs, he came to the cart from the side and, thrusting his tiny head on its long neck behind the shaft, sucked at his mother.

“I still don’t understand,” Antonina Alexandrovna shouted to her husband, her teeth chattering from the jolts, spacing out the words so as not to bite off the tip of her tongue at an unforeseen bump. “Is it possible that this is the same Vakkh mama told us about? Well, you remember, all sorts of balderdash. A blacksmith, his guts hurt in a fight, fashioned new ones for himself. In short, the blacksmith Vakkh Iron Belly. I understand it’s all just a tall tale. But can it be a tale about him? Can he be the same one?”

“Of course not. First of all, you say yourself it’s just a tall tale, folklore. Second, in mama’s time this folklore was already over a hundred years old, as she said. But why so loud? The old man will hear and get offended.”

“He won’t hear anything—he’s hard of hearing. And if he does hear, he won’t make sense of it—he’s a bit off.”

“Hey, Fyodor Nefyodych!” the old man urged the mare on, addressing her with a masculine name for no apparent reason, knowing perfectly well, and better than his passengers, that she was a mare. “What anathematic heat! Like the Hebrew youths in the Persian furnace! Hup, you unpastured devil. I’m talking to you, Mazeppa!”
⁸

He would unexpectedly strike up snatches of popular songs composed in the local factories in former times.

“Hey, little sod, you’ve forgotten God! Look, people, at this carrion of a beast! You give her the whip, she gives you the slip. Hup, Fedya-Nefedya, where’ll that get ya? This here forest’s called the taiga, there’s no end to it. There’s a force of peasant folk in it, ho, ho! There’s the Forest Brotherhood in it. Hey, Fedya-Nefedya, stopped again, you devil, you goblin!”

Suddenly he turned around and, looking point-blank at Antonina Alexandrovna, said:

“What notion’s got into you, young’un, think I don’t sense where you come from? You’re a simple one, ma’am, I must say. Let the earth swallow me up, but I recognize you! That I do! Couldn’t believe my blinkers, a live Grigov!” (The old man called eyes “blinkers” and Krüger “Grigov.”) “You wouldn’t happen to be his granddaughter? Ain’t I got an eye for Grigov? I spent my whole life around him, broke my teeth on him. In all kinds of handiwork, all the jobs. As a pit-prop man, a winch man, a stable man. Hup, shake a leg! She’s stopped again, the cripple! Angels in China-land, I’m talking to you, ain’t I?

“Here you’re asking what Vakkh is he, that blacksmith maybe? You’re real simple, ma’am, such a big-eyed lady, but a fool. Your Vakkh, he was Postanogov by name. Postanogov Iron Belly, it’s fifty years he’s been in the ground, between the boards. And us now, on the contrary, we’re Mekhonoshin. Same name, namesakes, but the last name’s different—Efim, but not him.”

The old man gradually told his passengers in his own words what they already knew about the Mikulitsyns from Samdevyatov. He called him Mikulich and her Mikulichna. The manager’s present wife he called the second-wed, and of “the little first, the deceased one,” he said that she was a honey-woman, a white cherub. When he got on to the partisan leader Liberius and learned that his fame had not yet reached Moscow, that seemed incredible to him:

“You haven’t heard? Haven’t heard of Comrade Forester? Angels in China-land, what’s Moscow got ears for?”

Evening was beginning to fall. The travelers’ own shadows, growing ever longer, raced ahead of them. Their way lay across a wide empty expanse. Here and there, sticking up high, grew woody stalks of goosefoot, thistles, loosestrife, in solitary stands, with clusters of flowers at their tips. Lit from
below, from the ground, by the rays of the sunset, their outlines rose up ghostly, like motionless mounted sentinels posted thinly across the field.