Doctor Zhivago (65 page)

“On the day I returned here from captivity, her sister, the seamstress Glafira, shaved me.”

“I know. The sisters live together with the eldest, Avdotya, the librarian.
An honest, hardworking family. I want to persuade them, in the worst case, if you and I are picked up, to take Katenka into their charge. I haven’t decided yet.”

“But really only in the most hopeless case. And God grant that such a misfortune is still a long way off.”

“They say Sima’s a bit odd, not all there. In fact, one has to admit that she’s not an entirely normal woman. But that’s owing to her depth and originality. She’s phenomenally well educated, only not like the intelligentsia, but like the people. Your views and hers are strikingly similar. I would trust Katya to her upbringing with an easy heart.”

Again he went to the station and came back with nothing for his pains. Everything remained undecided. He and Lara were faced with uncertainty. It was a cold, dark day, as before the first snow. The sky over the intersections, where it spread wider than over the streets drawn out lengthwise, had a wintry look.

When Yuri Andreevich came home, he found Simushka visiting Lara. A talk was going on between the two that bore the character of a lecture read by the guest to the hostess. Yuri Andreevich did not want to disturb them. Besides, he wanted to be alone for a while. The women were talking in the next room. The door was ajar. A floor-length curtain hung from the lintel, through which he could hear every word of their conversation.

“I’ll sew, but don’t pay any attention to that, Simochka. I’m all ears. In my time I took courses in history and philosophy at the university. The structure of your thought is after my own heart. Besides, listening to you is such a relief for me. These last few nights we haven’t had enough sleep, because of various worries. My motherly duty towards Katenka is to assure her safety in case of possible troubles with us. I have to think soberly about her. I’m not particularly strong in that. It makes me sad to realize it. I’m sad from fatigue and lack of sleep. Your conversation calms me down. Besides, it’s going to snow any moment. When it snows, it’s such a pleasure to listen to long, intelligent reasoning. If you glance out the window when it’s snowing, it seems like somebody’s coming towards the house through the courtyard, doesn’t it? Begin, Simochka. I’m listening.”

“Where did we stop last time?”

Yuri Andreevich did not hear Lara’s reply. He began to follow what Sima was saying.

“It’s possible to make use of the words ‘culture’ and ‘epochs.’ But they are
so differently understood. In view of the uncertainty of their meaning, we won’t resort to them. Let’s replace them with other expressions.

“I’d say that a human being is made up of two parts. Of God and work. The development of the human spirit breaks down into separate works of enormous duration. They were realized in the course of generations and followed one after the other. Egypt was such a work, Greece was such a work, the biblical prophets’ knowledge of God was such a work. Such a work—the latest in time, not yet supplanted by anything else, performed by the entire inspiration of our time—is Christianity.

“In order to present to you in all its freshness and unexpectedness, not as you yourself know and are used to it, but more simply, more directly, what it brought that was new and unprecedented, I’ll analyze several fragments of liturgical texts with you, very few and brief ones.

“Most hymns are formed by juxtaposing images from the Old and New Testaments. Instances from the old world—the burning bush, the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, the youths in the fiery furnace, Jonah in the belly of the whale, and so on—are compared with instances from the new, for example, the Mother of God’s conception and the Resurrection of Christ.

“In this frequent, almost constant matching, the oldness of the old, the newness of the new, and their difference appear with particular distinctness.

“In a whole multitude of verses, the virgin motherhood of Mary is compared with the crossing of the Red Sea by the Jews. For instance, in the verses of ‘In the Red Sea, a type of the virgin bride was figured’ it is said: ‘After Israel’s passage, the sea remained impassable; after Emmanuel’s birth the undefiled one remained intact.’
⁷
In other words, the waters of the sea closed after the crossing of Israel, and the Virgin remained intact after giving birth to the Lord. What sort of incidents are made parallel here? Both events are supernatural, both are equally recognized as miracles. In what did these two different times, the ancient, primitive time and the new, post-Roman time, which was far more advanced, see a miracle?

“In the one case, by the command of the people’s leader, the patriarch Moses, and by the swinging of his magic rod, the sea opens up, lets a whole nation pass across it, a countless multitude, hundreds of thousands, and when the last one has crossed, closes again, and covers and drowns the pursuing Egyptians. A spectacle in the ancient spirit, the elements obedient to the magician’s voice, the great thronging multitudes, like Roman armies on the march, the people and their leader, things visible and invisible, stunning.

“In the other case, a maiden—an ordinary thing, the ancient world wouldn’t have paid attention to it—secretly and quietly gives life to a child, brings life into the world, the miracle of life, the
life of all, He who is ‘the Life of all,’ as he was later called. Her childbirth is unlawful not only from the point of view of the scribes, being outside wedlock. It also contradicts the laws of nature. The maiden gives birth not by force of necessity, but by miracle, by inspiration. It is that very inspiration upon which the Gospel, by opposing the exception to the rule and the feast to the everyday, wants to build a life contrary to all constraint.

“What an enormously significant change! How is it that for heaven (because it is in the eyes of heaven that this must be evaluated, before the face of heaven, in the sacred framework of uniqueness in which it is all accomplished)—how is it that for heaven a private human circumstance, negligible from the point of view of antiquity, became equivalent to the migration of an entire people?

“Something shifted in the world. Rome ended, the power of numbers, the necessity, imposed by arms, of living en masse, as a whole population. Leaders and nations became things of the past.

“The person, the preaching of freedom came to supplant them. An individual human life became God’s story, filling the space of the universe with its content. As it’s said in one of the hymns of the Annunciation, Adam wanted to become God and made a mistake and did not become Him, but now ‘God becomes man, so as to make Adam God.’ ”
⁸

Sima went on:

“I’ll tell you something else on that same theme in a moment. But meanwhile a small digression. In relation to the care for workers, the protection of mothers, the struggle with the power of capital, our revolutionary time is an unprecedented, unforgettable time, with achievements that will abide for a long time, forever. As for the understanding of life, the philosophy of happiness that’s being propagated now, it’s simply hard to believe that it’s spoken seriously, it’s such a ridiculous remnant. These declamations about leaders and people could send us back to Old Testament times of cattle-breeding tribes and patriarchs, if they had the power to reverse the course of time and throw history back thousands of years. Fortunately, that’s impossible.

“A few words about Christ and Mary Magdalene. This isn’t from the Gospel account of her, but from the prayers of Holy Week, I think from Holy Tuesday or Wednesday. But you know that without me, Larissa Fyodorovna. I simply want to remind you of a thing or two, and not at all to lecture you.

“ ‘Passion’ in Slavonic, as you know perfectly well, first of all means ‘suffering,’ the Passion of our Lord, ‘the Lord goeth to His voluntary passion’ (that is, to His voluntary suffering). Besides that, the word is used in the later Russian meaning of vices and lusts. ‘Having enslaved the dignity of my
soul to passions, I turned into a beast,’ ‘Having been expelled from paradise, let us strive to enter it by abstention from passions,’ and so on. I’m probably very depraved, but I don’t like the pre-Easter readings in that line, devoted to harnessing sensuality and mortifying the flesh. It always seems to me that these crude, flat prayers, lacking in the poetry proper to other spiritual texts, were composed by greasy, fat-bellied monks. And the point is not that they themselves did not live by their own rules and deceived others. Suppose they even lived according to conscience. The point isn’t them, but the content of these texts. These laments give unnecessary significance to various infirmities of the body and to whether it is well-fed or famished. It’s disgusting. Here a dirty, inessential secondariness is raised to an undue, inappropriate height. Forgive me for putting off the main thing like this. I’ll reward you presently for the delay.

“It has always interested me why the mention of Mary Magdalene is placed just before Easter, on the threshold of Christ’s end and His resurrection. I don’t know the reason, but the reminder of what life is comes so timely at the moment of taking leave of it and on the threshold of its return. Now listen with what genuine passion, with what directness regardless of anything, this mention is made.

“There’s a debate about whether it’s Mary Magdalene, or Mary of Egypt, or some other Mary. Whoever she may be, she asks the Lord: ‘Loose my debt as I have loosed my hair.’ That is: ‘Release me from guilt, just as I have released my hair.’ How materially the thirst for forgiveness, for repentance, is expressed! You can touch it with your hands.

“And there is a similar exclamation in another hymn for the same day, a more detailed one, which we can refer with greater certainty to Mary Magdalene.

“Here, with terrible tangibility, she laments for her past, for the fact that every night her former, inveterate habits flare up in her. ‘For I live in the night of licentiousness, shrouded in the dark and moonless love of sin.’ She asks Christ to accept her tears of repentance and incline His ear to the sighing of her heart, so that she may wipe His most pure feet with her hair, with which the stunned and ashamed Eve covered herself in paradise. ‘Once Eve heard Thy footstep in paradise in the cool of day and in fear ran and hid herself. But now I will tenderly embrace those pure feet and wipe them with the hair of my head.’ And suddenly, right after this about her hair, an exclamation is wrung from her: ‘Who can measure the multitude of my sins, or the depth of Thy judgments?’ What intimacy, what equality of God and life, of God and a person, of God and a woman!”
⁹

Yuri Andreevich had come back tired from the station. This was his one day off every ten days. Usually on those days he made up in sleep for the whole week. He sat leaning back on the sofa, at times half reclining or stretching out full length on it. Though he listened to Sima through surging waves of drowsiness, her reasoning delighted him. “Of course, it’s all from Uncle Kolya,” he thought, “but how talented and intelligent she is!”

He jumped up from the sofa and went to the window. It gave onto the courtyard, as did the one in the next room, where Lara and Simushka were now whispering indistinctly.

The weather was worsening. It was getting dark in the courtyard. Two magpies flew into the yard and began flying around, looking for a place to light. The wind slightly fluffed and ruffled their feathers. The magpies lighted on the lid of a trash bin, flew over to the fence, came down to the ground, and began walking about the yard.

“Magpies mean snow,” thought the doctor. At the same time he heard Sima tell Lara behind the curtain:

“Magpies mean news,” Sima was saying. “You’re going to have guests. Or receive a letter.”

A little later the doorbell on its wire, which Yuri Andreevich had recently repaired, rang outside. Larissa Fyodorovna came from behind the curtain and with quick steps went to the front hall to open the door. From her conversation, Yuri Andreevich understood that Sima’s sister, Glafira Severinovna, had come.

“Do you want your sister?” asked Larissa Fyodorovna. “Simushka’s here.”

“No, not her. Though why not? We’ll go together, if she’s ready to go home. No, I’ve come for something else. There’s a letter for your friend. He can be thankful I once worked at the post office. It passed through so many hands and landed in mine through an acquaintance. From Moscow. It took five months to come. They couldn’t find the addressee. But I know who he is. I gave him a shave once.”

The letter, long, on several pages, crumpled, soiled, in an unsealed and disintegrating envelope, was from Tonya. The doctor was not fully conscious of how he came to be holding it; he had not noticed Lara handing it to him. When the doctor began to read the letter, he still remembered what town he was in, and in whose house, but as he read, he began to lose that awareness. Sima came out, greeted him, and began saying good-bye. Mechanically, he made the proper response, but paid no attention to her.
Her leaving fell out of his consciousness. He was gradually becoming more fully oblivious of where he was and what was around him.

“Yura,” Antonina Alexandrovna wrote to him, “do you know that we have a daughter? She was christened Masha, in memory of your late mother, Marya Nikolaevna.

“Now about something else entirely. Several well-known social figures, professors from the CD Party and socialists of the right, Melgunov, Kiesewetter, Kuskova, some others, as well as Uncle Nikolai Alexandrovich Gromeko, papa, and we as members of his family, are being deported from Russia.
¹⁰

“This is a misfortune, especially in your absence, but we must submit and thank God for such a soft form of exile in such a terrible time, for it could be much worse. If you had been found and were here, you would come with us. But where are you now? I am sending this letter to Antipova’s address, she will hand it on to you, if she finds you. I suffer from uncertainty, whether afterwards, when—if it is so fated—you are found, they will extend to you, as a member of our family, the permission to leave that we have all been granted. It is my belief that you are alive and will be found. My loving heart tells me so and I trust its voice. It is possible that, by the time you are discovered, the conditions of life in Russia will have softened, and you will be able to obtain separate permission for a trip abroad, and we will all gather again in one place. But as I write it, I myself do not believe that such happiness can come true.