Doctor Zhivago (66 page)

“The whole trouble is that I love you and you do not love me. I try to find the meaning of this condemnation, to interpret it, to justify it, I rummage, I delve into myself, going through our whole life and everything I know about myself, and I cannot see the beginning and cannot recall what I did and how I brought this misfortune upon myself. You look at me somehow wrongly, with unkind eyes, you see me twistedly, as in a distorting mirror.

“And yet I love you. Ah, how I love you, if only you could imagine! I love every peculiarity in you, all that is advantageous and disadvantageous, all your ordinary aspects, dear in their unusual combination, your face ennobled by inner content, which without that might seem unattractive, your talent and intelligence, which have as if taken the place of a total lack of will. All this is dear to me, and I do not know a man who is better than you.

“But listen, do you know what I shall tell you? Even if you were not so dear to me, even if I did not like you so much, still the deplorable truth of my coldness would not have been revealed to me, still I would think that I loved you. From fear alone of the humiliating, annihilating punishment that
non-love is, I would unconsciously beware of realizing that I did not love you. Neither I nor you would ever find it out. My own heart would conceal it from me, because non-love is almost like murder, and I would be unable to deal such a blow to anyone.

“Though nothing has been finally decided yet, we are probably going to Paris. I will get to those far-off lands where you were taken as a boy and where papa and my uncle were brought up. Papa sends his greetings. Shura has grown, he’s not so handsome, but he has become a big, strong boy and always cries bitterly, inconsolably, at the mention of you. I can’t go on. My heart is bursting with tears. So, farewell. Let me make the cross over you for this whole unending separation, the trials, the uncertainty, for the whole of your long, long, obscure path. I do not blame you for anything, I do not have a single reproach; shape your life as you want it to be, so long as it is good for you.

“Before leaving the dreadful and, for us, so fateful Urals, I came to know Larissa Fyodorovna quite closely. I owe her my thanks, she was constantly there when it was hard for me, and helped me during the delivery. I must tell you frankly that she is a good person, but I do not want to play the hypocrite—she is the complete opposite of me. I was born into this world to simplify life and seek the right way through, and she in order to complicate and confuse it.

“Farewell, I must end. They have come to take the letter and it is time to pack. Oh, Yura, Yura, my dear, my darling, my husband, father of my children, what is all this? We will never, ever see each other again. There, I have written these words, do you clearly make out their meaning? Do you understand, do you understand? They are hurrying me, and it is a sure sign that they have come to take me to my execution. Yura! Yura!”

Yuri Andreevich looked up from the letter with an absent, tearless gaze, not directed anywhere, dry from grief, devastated by suffering. He saw nothing around him, he was conscious of nothing.

Outside the window it began to snow. Wind carried the snow obliquely, ever faster and ever denser, as if trying all the while to make up for something, and the way Yuri Andreevich stared ahead of him through the window was as if it were not snow falling but the continued reading of Tonya’s letter, and not dry starlike flakes that raced and flashed, but small spaces of white paper between small black letters, white, white, endless, endless.

Yuri Andreevich involuntarily moaned and clutched his chest. He felt faint, made several hobbling steps towards the couch, and collapsed on it unconscious.

Winter settled in. Snow fell in big flakes. Yuri Andreevich came home from the hospital.

“Komarovsky’s come,” Lara said in a failing, husky voice, coming to meet him. They stood in the front hall. She had a lost look, as if she had been beaten.

“Where? To whom? Is he here?”

“No, of course not. He was here in the morning and wanted to come in the evening. He’ll show up soon. He needs to talk with you.”

“Why has he come?”

“I didn’t understand all he said. He says he was passing through on his way to the Far East and purposely made a detour and turned off at Yuriatin in order to see us. Mainly for your sake and Pasha’s. He talked a lot about you both. He insists that all three of us, that is, you, Patulia, and I, are in mortal danger, and that only he can save us, if we listen to him.”

“I’ll leave. I don’t want to see him.”

Lara burst into tears, tried to fall on her knees before the doctor, embrace his legs, and press her face to them, but he prevented her, holding her back by force.

“Stay for my sake, I implore you. I’m not at all afraid of finding myself face-to-face with him. But it’s hard. Spare me from meeting him alone. Besides, he’s a practical man, he’s been around. Maybe he really will give us some advice. Your loathing for him is natural. But I beg you, overcome yourself. Stay.”

“What’s the matter, my angel? Calm yourself. What are you doing? Don’t throw yourself on your knees. Stand up. Be cheerful. Drive away this obsession
that pursues you. He’s frightened you for life. I’m with you. If need be, if you tell me to, I’ll kill him.”

Half an hour later evening fell. It became completely dark. For six months already, the holes in the floor had been stopped up everywhere. Yuri Andreevich watched for the forming of new ones and blocked them in time. They acquired a large, fluffy cat, who spent his time in immobile, mysterious contemplation. The rats did not leave the house, but they became more cautious.

In expectation of Komarovsky, Larissa Fyodorovna cut up the black rationed bread and put a plate with a few boiled potatoes on the table. They intended to receive the guest in the previous owners’ dining room, which had kept its purpose. In it stood a big oak dining table and a big, heavy sideboard of the same dark oak. On the table, castor oil burned in a vial with a wick in it—the doctor’s portable lamp.

Komarovsky came in from the December darkness all covered with the snow that was falling heavily outside. Snow fell in thick layers from his fur coat, hat, and galoshes, and melted, forming puddles on the floor. The snow that stuck to his mustaches and beard, which Komarovsky used to shave but now had let grow, made them look clownish, buffoonish. He was wearing a well-preserved jacket and vest and well-creased striped trousers. Before greeting them or saying anything, he spent a long time combing his damp, flattened hair with a pocket comb and wiping and smoothing his wet mustaches and eyebrows with a handkerchief. Then silently, with an expression of great significance, he held out his two hands simultaneously, the left to Larissa Fyodorovna and the right to Yuri Andreevich.

“Let’s consider ourselves acquaintances,” he addressed Yuri Andreevich.
“I was on such good terms with your father—you probably know. He gave up the ghost in my arms. I keep looking closely at you, searching for a resemblance. No, clearly you didn’t take after your papa. He was a man of an expansive nature. Impulsive, impetuous. Judging by appearances, you are more like your mother. She was a gentle woman. A dreamer.”

“Larissa Fyodorovna asked me to hear you out. She says you have some business with me. I yielded to her request. Our conversation has been forced upon me against my will. I would not seek your acquaintance by my own inclination, and I do not consider us acquainted. Therefore let’s get down to business. What do you want?”

“Greetings, my good ones. I feel everything, decidedly everything, and understand everything thoroughly, to the end. Forgive my boldness, but you’re awfully well suited to each other. A harmonious couple in the highest degree.”

“I must interrupt you. I ask you not to interfere in things that do not concern you. No one has asked for your sympathy. You forget yourself.”

“Don’t you flare up at once like that, young man. No, perhaps you’re like your father after all. The same pistol and powder. Yes, so with your permission, I congratulate you, my children. Unfortunately, however, you are children not only in my expression, but in fact, who don’t know anything, who don’t reflect on anything. I’ve been here for only two days and have learned more about you than you yourselves suspect. You’re walking on the edge of an abyss without thinking of it. If the danger isn’t somehow averted, the days of your freedom, and maybe even of your lives, are numbered.

“There exists a certain Communist style. Few people measure up to it. But no one so clearly violates that way of living and thinking as you do, Yuri Andreevich. I don’t understand—why stir up a hornets’ nest? You’re a mockery of that world, an insult to it. It would be fine if it were your secret. But there are influential people from Moscow here. They know you inside and out. You’re both terribly distasteful to the local priests of Themis. Comrades Antipov and Tiverzin are sharpening their claws for Larissa Fyodorovna and you.

“You are a man—a free Cossack, or whatever it’s called. Madcap behavior, playing with your own life, is your sacred right. But Larissa Fyodorovna is not a free person. She’s a mother. She has a young life, a child’s destiny, in her hands. She’s in no position to fantasize, to live in the clouds.

“I wasted a whole morning talking to her, persuading her to take the local situation more seriously. She refuses to listen to me. Use your authority, influence Larissa Fyodorovna. She has no right to toy with Katenka’s safety, she should not disregard my arguments.”

“Never in my life have I tried to persuade or compel anyone. Especially people close to me. Larissa Fyodorovna is free to listen to you or not. That’s her business. Besides, I have no idea what you’re talking about. What you call your arguments are unknown to me.”

“No, you remind me more and more of your father. Just as intractable. So, then, let’s go on to the main thing. But since it’s a rather complex matter, arm yourselves with patience. I beg you to listen and not to interrupt.

“Big changes are being prepared at the top. No, no, I have it from the most reliable sources, you can trust me. They have in mind a switch to more democratic tracks, concessions to general legality, and that in the very near future.

“But precisely as a result of that, the punitive institutions liable to abolition will become all the more ferocious towards the end and will hasten to settle their local accounts. You are next in line to be annihilated, Yuri
Andreevich. Your name is on the list. I’m not joking when I say it, I saw it myself, believe me. Think about saving yourself, otherwise it will be too late.

“But this is all a preface so far. I go on to the essence of the matter.

“In Primorye, on the Pacific Ocean, a gathering of political forces that have remained loyal to the deposed Provisional Government and the disbanded Constituent Assembly is taking place. Members of the Duma, social figures, the most prominent of the former zemstvo activists, businessmen, industrialists are coming together. The generals of the volunteer armies are concentrating what remains of their forces there.

“The Soviet government turns a blind eye to the emergence of the Far Eastern republic. The existence of such a formation on its outskirts is advantageous to it as a buffer between Red Siberia and the outside world. The government of the republic will be mixed. Moscow has negotiated more than half the seats for Communists, so that with their aid, at the right time, they can carry out a coup and take the republic in hand. The scheme is perfectly transparent, and the only thing is to be able to take advantage of the remaining time.
¹

“Before the revolution I used to conduct the affairs of the Arkharov brothers, the Merkulovs, and other trading and banking houses in Vladivostok. I’m known there. An unofficial emissary of the forming government brought me, half secretly, half with official Soviet connivance, an invitation to enter the Far Eastern government as minister of justice. I accepted and am on my way there. All this, as I’ve just said, is happening with the knowledge and silent consent of Soviet power, though not so openly, and there should be no noise about it.

“I can take you and Larissa Fyodorovna with me. From there you can easily make your way to your family by sea. Of course, you already know about their deportation. A story that made noise, the whole of Moscow is talking about it. I promised Larissa Fyodorovna to ward off the blow hanging over Pavel Pavlovich. As a member of an independent and recognized government, I’ll seek out Strelnikov in eastern Siberia and assist in his transfer to our autonomous region. If he doesn’t manage to flee, I’ll suggest that he be exchanged for some person detained by the allies who is of value for the central power in Moscow.”

Larissa Fyodorovna had difficulty following the content of the conversation, the meaning of which often escaped her. But at Komarovsky’s last words, concerning the safety of the doctor and Strelnikov, she came out of her state of pensive nonparticipation, pricked up her ears, and, blushing slightly, put in:

“You understand, Yurochka, how important these plans are for you and Pasha?”

“You’re too trusting, my dear friend. One can hardly take things promised for things performed. I’m not saying that Viktor Ippolitovich is consciously pulling our leg. But it’s all still in the air! And now, Viktor Ippolitovich, a few words from me. I thank you for your attention to my fate, but can you possibly think I’ll let you arrange it? As for your taking care of Strelnikov, Lara has to think it over.”

“What are you driving at? Either we go with him, as he suggests, or we don’t. You know perfectly well that I won’t go without you.”

Komarovsky sipped frequently from the diluted alcohol Yuri Andreevich had brought from the dispensary and set on the table, munched the potatoes, and gradually became tipsy.

It was already late. Relieved now and then of its snuff, the wick of the lamp flared up with a crackle, brightly lighting the room. Then everything sank into darkness again. The hosts wanted to sleep and had to talk things over alone. But Komarovsky would not leave. His presence was wearying, like the oppressive sight of the heavy oak sideboard and the dispiriting, icy December darkness outside the window.