Doctor Zhivago (49 page)

Larissa Fyodorovna had not wanted to upset Yuri Andreevich with painful scenes. She understood how much he was suffering even without that. She tried to listen to his news as calmly as possible. Their talk took place in the empty room of the former owners, unused by Larissa Fyodorovna, which gave onto Kupecheskaya. Unfelt, unbeknownst to her, tears flowed down Lara’s cheeks, like the rainwater that now poured down the faces of the stone statues opposite, on the house with figures. Sincerely, without affected magnanimity, she repeated quietly: “Do what’s better for you, don’t think about me. I’ll get over it all.” And she did not know she was crying, and did not wipe her tears.

At the thought that Larissa Fyodorovna had misunderstood him and that he had left her in delusion, with false hopes, he was ready to turn and gallop back to the city, to finish what had been left unsaid, and above all to take leave of her much more ardently and tenderly, in greater accordance with what was to be a real parting for their whole lives, forever. He barely controlled himself and continued on his way.

As the sun went down, the forest became filled with cold and darkness. It began to smell of the leafy dampness of a steamed besom, as on going into a bathhouse. Motionless in the air, like floats on the water, spread hanging swarms of mosquitoes, whining in high-pitched unison, all on one note. Yuri Andreevich swatted countless numbers of them on his forehead and neck, and the resounding slaps of his palm on his sweaty body responded amazingly to the other sounds of his riding: the creaking of the saddle girths, the ponderous thud of hooves glancing, swiping, through the squelching mud, and the dry, popping salvos emitted by the horse’s guts. Suddenly, in the distance, where the sunset had gotten stuck, a nightingale began to trill.

“A-wake! A-wake!” it called and entreated, and it sounded almost like before Easter: “My soul, my soul! Arise, why are you sleeping!”
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Suddenly a very simple thought dawned on Yuri Andreevich. What’s the hurry? He would not go back on the word he had given himself. The exposure would be made. But where was it said that it must take place today? Nothing had been declared to Tonya yet. It was not too late to put off the explanation till next time. Meanwhile he would go to the city once more. The conversation with Lara would be brought to an end, with the depth and sincerity that redeem all suffering. Oh, how good! How wonderful! How astonishing that it had not occurred to him before!

The assumption that he would see Antipova once more made Yuri Andreevich mad with joy. His heart began to beat rapidly. He lived it all over in anticipation.

The log-built back streets of the outskirts, the wood-paved sidewalks. He is going to her. Now, in Novosvalochny, the vacant lots and wooden part of the city will end and the stone part will begin. The little houses of the suburb race by like the pages of a quickly leafed-through book, not when you turn them with your index finger, but when you flip through them all with the soft part of your thumb, making a crackling noise. It takes your breath away! She lives there, at that end. Under the white gap in the rainy sky that has cleared towards evening. How he loves these familiar little houses on the way to her! He could just pick them up from the ground and kiss them all over! These one-eyed mezzanines pulled down over the roofs! The little berries of lights and oil lamps reflected in the puddles! Under that white strip of rainy street sky. There again he will receive from the hands of the
Creator the gift of this God-made white loveliness. The door will be opened by a figure wrapped in something dark. And the promise of her intimacy, restrained, cold as the pale night of the north, no one’s, belonging to nobody, will come rolling towards him like the first wave of the sea, which you run to in the darkness over the sand of the coast.

Yuri Andreevich dropped the reins, leaned forward in the saddle, embraced his horse’s neck, and buried his face in its mane. Taking this tenderness for an appeal to its full strength, the horse went into a gallop.

At a smooth, flying gallop, in the intervals between the rare, barely noticeable contacts of the horse with the earth, which kept tearing away from its hoofs and flying backward, Yuri Andreevich, besides the beating of his heart, which stormed with joy, also heard some shouts, which he thought he was imagining.

A shot close by deafened him. The doctor raised his head, seized the reins, and pulled at them. The racing horse made several clumsy leaps sideways, backed up, and began to lower his croup, preparing to rear.

Ahead the road divided in two. Beside it the billboard “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers” glowed in the rays of the setting sun. Across the road, barring it, stood three armed horsemen. A high school student in a uniform cap and a jacket crisscrossed with machine-gun cartridge belts, a cavalryman in an officer’s greatcoat and a Cossack hat, and a strange fat man, as if dressed for a masquerade, in quilted trousers, a padded jacket, and a broad-brimmed priest’s hat pulled down low.

“Don’t move, comrade doctor,” the oldest of the three, the cavalryman in the Cossack hat, said evenly and calmly. “If you obey, we guarantee you complete safety. Otherwise—no hard feelings—we’ll shoot you. The medic in our detachment got killed. We mobilize you forcibly as a medical worker. Get off your horse and hand the reins over to our younger comrade. I remind you. At the least thought of escape, we won’t stand on ceremony.”

“Are you the Mikulitsyns’ son Liberius, Comrade Forester?”

“No, I’m his chief liaison officer, Kamennodvorsky.”

There stood towns, villages, settlements. The town of Krestovozdvizhensk, the Cossack settlement of Omelchino, Pazhinsk, Tysiatskoe, the hamlet of Yaglinskoe, the township of Zvonarskaya, the settlement of Volnoe, Gurtovshchiki, the Kezhemskaya farmstead, the settlement of Kazeevo, the township of Kuteiny Posad, the village of Maly Ermolai.

The highway passed through them—old, very old, the oldest in Siberia, the ancient post road. It cut through towns like bread with the knife of the main street, and flew through villages without looking back, scattering the lined-up cottages far behind it or bending them in the curve or hook of a sudden turn.

Long ago, before the railway came to Khodatskoe, stagecoaches raced down the road. Wagon trains of tea, bread, and wrought iron went one way, and in the other parties of convicts were driven on foot under convoy to the next halting place. They marched in step, their iron chains clanking in unison, lost, desperate men, scary as lightning from the sky. And the forests rustled around them, dark, impenetrable.

The highway lived as one family. Town knew and fraternized with town, village with village. In Khodatskoe, at the railway crossing, there were locomotive repair shops, machine shops servicing the railways; wretches lived miserably, crowded into barracks, fell sick, died. Political prisoners with some technical knowledge, having served their term at hard labor, became foremen here and settled down.

Along all this line, the initial Soviets had long since been overthrown. For some time the power of the Siberian Provisional Government had held out, but now it had been replaced throughout the region by the power of the Supreme Ruler, Kolchak.
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At one stretch the road went uphill for a long time. The field of vision opened out ever more widely into the distance. It seemed there would be no end to the ascent and the increasing view. And just when the horses and people got tired and stopped to catch their breath, the ascent ended. Ahead the swift river Kezhma threw itself under a roadway bridge.

Across the river, on a still steeper height, appeared the brick wall of the Vozdvizhensky Monastery. The road curved around the foot of the monastery hillside and, after several twists among outlying backyards, made its way into the town.

There it once more skirted the monastery grounds on the main square, onto which the green-painted iron gates of the monastery opened. The icon on the arch of the entrance was half wreathed by a gilt inscription: “Rejoice, lifegiving Cross, invincible victory of Orthodoxy.”

It was the departure of winter. Holy Week, the end of the Great Lent.
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The snow on the roads was turning black, indicating the start of the thaw, but on the roofs it was still white and hung there in dense, tall hats.

To the boys who climbed up to the ringers in the Vozdvizhensky bell tower, the houses below seemed like little boxes or chests clustered together. Little black men the size of dots went up to the houses. Some could be recognized from the bell tower by the way they moved. They were reading the decree of the Supreme Ruler, pasted on the walls, about the conscription of the next three age groups into the army.

Night brought much that was unforeseen. It became warm, unusually so for the time of year. A fine-beaded rain drizzled down, so airy that it seemed to diffuse through the air in a misty, watery dust without reaching the earth. But that was an illusion. Its warm, streaming water was enough to wash the earth clean of snow and leave it all black now, glistening as if with sweat.

Stunted apple trees, all covered with buds, miraculously sent their branches from the gardens over the fences into the streets. Drops, tapping discordantly, fell from them onto the wooden sidewalks. Their random drumming resounded all over town.

The puppy Tomik, chained up in the photographers’ yard since morning, barked and whined. Perhaps annoyed by his barking, a crow in the Galuzins’ garden cawed for the whole town to hear.

In the lower part of town, three cartloads of goods were delivered to the
merchant Lyubeznov. He refused to accept them, saying it was a mistake and he had never ordered these goods. Pleading the lateness of the hour, the stalwart carters asked him to let them spend the night. The merchant shouted at them, told them to go away, and would not open the gates. Their altercation could also be heard all over town.

At the seventh hour by church time,
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and by common reckoning at one o’clock in the morning, a wave of soft, dark, and sweet droning separated from the heaviest, barely moving bell of the Vozdvizhenye and floated away, mixing with the dark moisture of the rain. It pushed itself from the bell as a mass of soil washed away by flooding water is torn from the bank and sinks, dissolving in the river.

This was the night of Holy Thursday, the day of the Twelve Gospels.
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In the depths behind the netlike veil of rain, barely distinguishable little lights, and the foreheads, noses, and faces lit up by them, set out and went floating along. The faithful were going to matins.

A quarter of an hour later, steps were heard coming from the monastery along the boards of the sidewalk. This was the shopkeeper Galuzina returning home from the just-begun service. She walked irregularly, now hastening, now stopping, a kerchief thrown over her head, her fur coat unbuttoned. She had felt faint in the stuffy church and had gone outside for a breath of air, and now she was ashamed and regretted that she had not stood through the service and for the second year had not gone to communion. But that was not the cause of her grief. During the day she had been upset by the mobilization order posted everywhere, which concerned her poor, foolish son Teresha. She had tried to drive this unpleasantness from her head, but the white scrap of the announcement showing everywhere in the darkness had reminded her of it.

Her house was around the corner, within arm’s reach, but she felt better outside. She wanted to be in the open air, she did not feel like going home to more stuffiness.

She was beset by sad thoughts. If she had undertaken to think them aloud, in order, she would not have had words or time enough before morning. But here in the street these joyless reflections fell upon her in whole lumps, and she could have done with them all in a few moments, in two or three turns from the corner of the monastery to the corner of the square.

The bright feast is at hand, and there’s not a living soul in the house, they’ve all gone off, leaving her alone. What, isn’t she alone? Of course she’s alone. Her ward, Ksiusha, doesn’t count. Who is she, anyway? There’s no looking into another’s heart. Maybe she’s a friend, maybe an enemy, maybe a secret rival. She came as an inheritance from her husband’s first marriage,
as Vlasushka’s adopted daughter. Or maybe not adopted, but illegitimate? And maybe not a daughter at all, but from a completely different opera! Can you climb into a man’s soul? Though there’s nothing to be said against the girl. Intelligent, beautiful, well-behaved. Way smarter than the little fool Tereshka and her adoptive father.

So here she is alone on the threshold of the Holy Feast, abandoned, they’ve all flown off this way and that.

Her husband Vlasushka had gone down the high road to make speeches to the new recruits, as a send-off to their feats of arms. The fool would have done better to look after his own son, to protect him from mortal danger.

The son, Teresha, also couldn’t help himself and took to his heels on the eve of the great feast. Buzzed off to Kuteiny Posad to some relatives, to have fun, to comfort himself after what he’d gone through. The boy had been expelled from high school. Repeated half the classes and nobody said anything, but in the eighth year they lost patience and threw him out.

Ah, what anguish! Oh, Lord! Why has it turned out so bad? You just lose heart. Everything drops from your hands, you don’t want to live! Why has it turned out like this? Is it the force of the revolution? No, ah, no! It’s all because of the war. All the flower of manhood got killed, and what was left was worthless, good-for-nothing rot.

A far cry from her father’s home—her father the contractor. Her father didn’t drink, he was literate, the family lived in plenty. There were two sisters, Polya and Olya. The names went so nicely together, just as the two of them suited each other, a pair of beauties. And the head carpenters who called on their father were distinguished, stately, fine-looking. Then suddenly they took it into their heads—there was no want in the house—took it into their heads to knit scarves out of six kinds of wool. And what then? They turned out to be such knitters, their scarves became famous throughout the district. And everything used to give joy by its richness and shapeliness—church services, dances, people, manners—even though the family was from simple folk, tradesmen, from peasants and workers. And Russia, too, was a young girl, and she had real suitors, real protectors, not like nowadays. Now everything’s lost its sheen, there’s nothing but the civilian trash of lawyers and Yids, chewing words tirelessly, day and night, choking on words. Vlasushka and his retinue hope to lure the old golden times back with champagne and good wishes. Is that any way to win back a lost love? You’ve got to overturn stones for that, move mountains, dig up the earth!