Doctor Zhivago (53 page)

With a nod of the head he gave a sign that Tyagunova should go a little further up the street, to a place where it could be crossed on stones sticking up from the mud, went to the place himself, crossed over to Tyagunova, and greeted her.

She told him many things. Reminding him of the handsome, unspoiled boy Vasya, illegally taken into the party of forced laborers, who had ridden in the same car with them, Tyagunova described for the doctor her life in the village of Veretenniki with Vasya’s mother. Things were very good for her with them. But the village flung it in her face that she was a stranger, an outsider in the Veretenniki community. She was reproached for her supposed intimacy with Vasya, which they invented. She had to leave, so as not to be pecked to death. She settled in the town of Krestovozdvizhensk with her sister, Olga Galuzina. Rumors that Pritulyev had been seen in Pazhinsk lured her there. The information proved false, but she got stuck living there, having found a job.

Meanwhile misfortunes befell people who were dear to her heart. From Veretenniki came news that the village had been subjected to a punitive expedition for disobeying the law on food requisitioning.
²
Apparently the Brykins’ house had burned down and someone from Vasya’s family had perished. In Krestovozdvizhensk the Galuzins’ house and property had been confiscated. Her brother-in-law had been imprisoned or shot. Her nephew had disappeared without a trace. At first, after the devastation, her sister Olga went poor and hungry, but now she works for her grub with peasant relations in the village of Zvonarsk.

As it happened, Tyagunova worked as a dishwasher in the Pazhinsk pharmacy, the property of which the doctor was about to requisition. The requisition meant ruin for everyone who fed off the pharmacy, including Tyagunova. But it was not in the doctor’s power to cancel it. Tyagunova was present at the handing over of the goods.

Yuri Andreevich’s cart was brought into the backyard of the pharmacy, to the doors of the storeroom. Bundles, bottles sleeved in woven wicker, and boxes were removed from the premises.

Along with the people, the pharmacist’s skinny and mangy nag mournfully watched the loading from its stall. The rainy day was declining. The sky cleared a little. For a moment the sun appeared, squeezed between clouds. It was setting. The dark bronze of its rays sprayed into the yard, sinisterly gilding the pools of liquid dung. The wind did not stir them. The dungy wash was too heavy to move. But the rainwater flooding the roadway rippled under the wind and was tinged with cinnabar.

And the army walked and walked along the edges of the road, stepping or driving around the deepest lakes and potholes. In the seized batch of medicines a whole jar of cocaine turned up, the sniffing of which had lately been the weakness of the partisan chief.

The doctor was up to his neck in work among the partisans. In winter typhus, in summer dysentery, and, besides that, the growing influx of wounded on days of fighting in the renewed military activity.

In spite of failures and the predominance of retreats, the ranks of the partisans were constantly replenished by new insurgents from the places the peasant horde passed through and by deserters from the enemy camp. During the year and a half that the doctor had spent with the partisans, their army had grown tenfold. When Liberius Mikulitsyn mentioned the numbers of his forces at the meeting in the underground headquarters in Krestovozdvizhensk, he exaggerated them about ten times. Now they had reached that size.

Yuri Andreevich had assistants, several fresh-baked medical orderlies with appropriate experience. His right-hand men in the medical unit were the captured Hungarian Communist and military doctor Kerenyi Lajos, known in camp as Comrade Layoff, and the Croat medic Angelyar, also an Austrian prisoner of war. With the former Yuri Andreevich spoke German; the latter, born in the Slavic Balkans, just managed to understand Russian.

According to the international convention of the Red Cross, army doctors and those serving in medical units did not have the right to armed participation in the military actions of the belligerents. But once, against his will, the doctor had to violate this rule. The skirmish that had started caught him in the field and forced him to share the fate of the combatants and shoot back.

The partisan line, in which the doctor, surprised by enemy fire, lay next to the detachment telephonist, occupied the edge of a forest. At the partisans’ back was the taiga, ahead was an open clearing, a bare, unprotected space, across which the Whites were moving to the attack.

They were approaching and were already close. The doctor saw them very well, the face of each one. They were boys and young men from the nonmilitary strata of the capitals and older men mobilized from the reserves. But the tone was set by the former, the young ones, the first-year students and high school boys recently enlisted as volunteers.

The doctor did not know any of them, but the faces of half of them seemed to him habitual, seen, familiar. They reminded him of his former
schoolmates. Could it be that these were their younger brothers? Others he seemed to have met in street or theater crowds in years gone by. Their expressive, attractive physiognomies seemed close, kindred.

Doing their duty, as they understood it, inspired them with enthusiastic daring, unnecessary, defiant. They walked in a strung-out, sparse line, drawn up to full height, outdoing the regular guards in their bearing, and, braving the danger, did not resort to making rushes and then lying flat in the field, though there were unevennesses in the clearing, bumps and hummocks behind which they could have hidden. The bullets of the partisans mowed them down almost to a man.

In the middle of the wide, bare field over which the Whites were advancing stood a dead, burned tree. It had been charred by lightning or fire or split and scorched by previous battles. Each advancing volunteer rifleman cast glances at it, struggling with the temptation to get behind its trunk so as to take aim more safely and accurately, then ignored the temptation and went on.

The partisans had a limited number of cartridges. They had to use them sparingly. There was an order, upheld by mutual agreement, to shoot at close range, from the same number of rifles as there were visible targets.

The doctor lay unarmed in the grass, watching the course of the battle. All his sympathy was on the side of the heroically dying children. In his heart he wished them success. They were offspring of families probably close to him in spirit, to his upbringing, his moral cast, his notions.

The thought stirred in him to run out to them in the clearing and surrender and in that way find deliverance. But it was a risky step, fraught with danger.

While he was running to the middle of the clearing, holding his hands up, he could be brought down from both sides, shot in the chest and the back, by his own as a punishment for committing treason, by the others, not understanding his intentions. He had been in similar situations more than once, had thought over all the possibilities, and had long recognized these plans for salvation as unfeasible. And, reconciling himself to the ambiguity of his feelings, the doctor went on lying on his stomach, facing the clearing, and, unarmed, watched from the grass the course of the battle.

However, to look on and remain inactive amidst the fight to the death that was seething around him was inconceivable and beyond human strength. And it was not a matter of loyalty to the camp to which his captivity chained him, nor of his own self-defense, but of following the order of what was happening, of submitting to the laws of what was being played out before and around him. It was against the rules to remain indifferent to
it. He had to do what the others were doing. A battle was going on. He and his comrades were being shot at. It was necessary to shoot back.

And when the telephonist next to him in the line jerked convulsively and then stretched out and lay still, Yuri Andreevich crawled over to him, removed his pouch, took his rifle, and, returning to his place, began firing it shot after shot.

But pity would not allow him to aim at the young men, whom he admired and with whom he sympathized. And to fire into the air like a fool was much too stupid and idle an occupation, contradictory to his intentions. And so, choosing moments when none of the attackers stood between him and his target, he began shooting at the charred tree. Here he had his own method.

Taking aim and gradually adjusting the precision of his sights, imperceptibly increasing the pressure on the trigger, but not all the way, as if not counting on ever firing, until the hammer fell and the shot followed of itself, as if beyond expectation, the doctor began with an accustomed accuracy to knock off the dry lower branches and scatter them around the dead tree.

But, oh horror! Careful as the doctor was not to hit anybody, now one, now another of the attackers got between him and the tree at the decisive moment and crossed his line of sight just as the gun went off. Two he hit and wounded, but the third unfortunate, who fell not far from the tree, paid for it with his life.

Finally the White commanders, convinced of the uselessness of the attempt, gave the order to retreat.

The partisans were few. Their main forces were partly on the march, partly shifted elsewhere, starting action against a much larger enemy force. The detachment did not pursue the retreating men, so as not to betray their small numbers.

The medic Angelyar brought two orderlies to the edge of the forest with a stretcher. The doctor ordered them to take care of the wounded, and went himself to the telephonist, who lay without moving. He vaguely hoped that the man might still be breathing and that he might be brought back to life. But the telephonist was dead. To make finally sure of it, Yuri Andreevich unbuttoned the shirt on his chest and began listening to his heart. It was not beating.

The dead man had an amulet on a string around his neck. Yuri Andreevich removed it. In it there turned out to be a piece of paper, decayed and worn at the edges, sewn into a scrap of cloth. The doctor unfolded its half-detached and disintegrating parts.

The paper contained excerpts from the ninety-first psalm, with those changes and errors that people introduce into prayers, gradually moving further from the original as they recopy it. The fragments of the Church Slavonic text on the paper were rewritten in Russian.
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In the psalm it is said: “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High.” In the paper this became the title of a spell: “Dwellers in Secret.” The verse of the psalm “Thou shalt not be afraid … of the arrow that flieth by day” was misinterpreted as words of encouragement: “Have no fear of the arrow flying by thee.” “Because he hath known my name,” says the psalm. And the paper: “Because he half knows my name.” “I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him” in the paper became: “It will be winter and trouble, I will shiver for him.”

The text of the psalm was considered miracle-working, a protection against bullets. Troops already wore it as a talisman in the last imperialist war. Decades went by, and much later arrested people started sewing it into their clothing, and convicts in prison repeated it to themselves when they were summoned to the investigators for night interrogations.

From the telephonist, Yuri Andreevich went to the clearing, to the body of the young White Guard he had killed. The features of innocence and an all-forgiving suffering were written on the young man’s handsome face. “Why did I kill him?” thought the doctor.

He unbuttoned the dead man’s greatcoat and opened its skirts wide. On the lining, in calligraphic lettering by a careful and loving hand, no doubt a mother’s, there was embroidered “Seryozha Rantsevich”—the first and last name of the dead man.

Through the opening of Seryozha’s shirt a little cross fell and hung outside on a chain, with a medallion, and also some flat little gold case or snuff box with a damaged lid, as if pushed in by a nail. The little case was half open. A folded piece of paper fell out of it. The doctor unfolded it and could not believe his eyes.
It was the same ninety-first psalm, only typed and in all its Slavonic genuineness.

Just then Seryozha moaned and stretched. He was alive. As it turned out later, he had been stunned by a slight internal contusion. A spent bullet had hit the face of his mother’s amulet, and that had saved him. But what was he to do with the unconscious man?

The brutality of the fighting men had by that time reached the extreme. Prisoners were never brought alive to their destination, and enemy wounded were finished off on the spot.

Given the fluctuating makeup of the forest militia, which new volunteers kept joining, and old members kept deserting and going over to the enemy, it was possible, by preserving the strictest secrecy, to pass Rantsevich off as a new, recently joined-up ally.

Yuri Andreevich took the outer clothing off the dead telephonist and, with the help of Angelyar, whom the doctor initiated into his plan, put it on the young man, who had not regained consciousness.

Together with his assistant, he nursed the boy back to health. When Rantsevich was fully recovered, they let him go, though he did not conceal from his saviors that he would return to the ranks of Kolchak’s army and continue fighting the Reds.

In the fall the partisans camped at Fox Point, a small wood on a high knoll, under which a swift, foaming river raced, surrounding it on three sides and eroding the bank with its current.

Before the partisans, Kappel’s troops had wintered there. They had fortified the wood with their own hands and the labor of the local inhabitants, but in spring they had abandoned it. Now the partisans settled into their unblown-up dugouts, trenches, and passages.

Liberius Averkievich shared his dugout with the doctor. For the second night he engaged him in conversation, not letting him sleep.

“I wish I knew what my esteemed parent, my respected
Vater
, my
Papachen
, is doing now.”

“Lord, I simply can’t stand that clowning tone,” the doctor sighed to himself. “And he’s the very spit and image of his father!”