Doctor Zhivago (71 page)

“I’m shaken by the news of Pavel Pavlovich’s execution and can’t come to my senses. I’m having trouble following your words. But I agree with you. After Strelnikov has been dealt with, by our present-day logic, the lives of Larissa Fyodorovna and Katya are also in danger. One of us is certain to be deprived of freedom, and therefore, one way or the other, we’ll be separated. It’s true, then, that it’s better if you separate us and take them somewhere far away, to the ends of the earth. Right now, as I say this to you, things are going your way anyhow. I probably won’t be able to bear it and, surrendering my pride and self-love, will obediently come crawling to you to receive her from your hands, and life, and a way by sea to my family, and my own salvation. But let me sort it all out. The news you’ve reported has stunned me. I’m overwhelmed by suffering, which deprives me of the ability to think and reason. Maybe by obeying you I’m committing a fatal, irrevocable error that will horrify me all my life, but in the fog of pain that robs me of strength the only thing I can do now is mechanically agree with you and obey you blindly and will-lessly. And so, for the sake of her good, I’ll pretend now and tell her that I’m going to hitch up the horse and overtake you, and I’ll stay here alone by myself. Only one small thing. How are you going to go now, with night falling? It’s a forest road, there are wolves around, you must be careful.”

“I know. I have a rifle and a revolver. Don’t worry. And, incidentally, I brought a bit of alcohol along in case of cold. A good amount. Want some?”

“What have I done? What have I done? Given her away, renounced her, surrendered her. Run headlong after them, overtake them, bring her back. Lara! Lara!

“They can’t hear. The wind’s against me. And they’re probably talking
loudly. She has every reason to be cheerful, calm. She’s let herself be deceived and doesn’t suspect the delusion she’s in.

“These are probably her thoughts. She’s thinking. Everything has turned out in the best possible way, just as she wanted. Her Yurochka, a fantastic and obstinate man, has finally softened, praise God, and is now setting out with her for some safe place, to people wiser than they, under the protection of law and order. Even if, to stand on his mettle and show his character, he turns pigheaded and refuses to get on their train tomorrow, Viktor Ippolitovich will send another one for him in the nearest future.

“And now, of course, he’s already in the stable hitching up Savraska, his confused, disobedient hands trembling with agitation and haste, and will immediately whip her up to full speed behind them, so as to overtake them while they’re still in the fields, before they get into the forest.”

That was probably what she was thinking. And they had not even said good-bye properly. Yuri Andreevich had only waved his hand and turned away, trying to swallow the pain that stuck like a lump in his throat, as if he were choking on a piece of apple.

The doctor, his coat thrown over one shoulder, was standing on the porch. With his free hand, not covered by the coat, he squeezed the neck of a turned porch post just under the ceiling with such force as if he were trying to strangle it. With all his consciousness he was riveted to a distant point in space. There, a short stretch of the road could be seen, going uphill between a few scattered birches. On that open space the light of the low, already setting sun was falling at that moment. There, into that lit-up strip, the racing sleigh should come at any moment out of the shallow depression they had dipped into for a short time.

“Farewell, farewell,” the doctor repeated soundlessly, senselessly, in anticipation of that moment, forcing the nearly breathless sounds from his chest into the frosty evening air. “Farewell, my only beloved, lost forever!”

“Here they come! Here they come!” his white lips whispered with impetuous dryness, when the sleigh shot up from below like an arrow, passing one birch after another, and began to slow down and—oh, joy!—stopped by the last one.

Oh, how his heart pounded, oh, how his heart pounded, his legs gave way under him, and he became all soft as felt from agitation, like the coat that was slipping from his shoulder! “Oh, God, it seems You have decided to return her to me? What’s happened there? What’s going on there on that distant line of sunset? Where is the explanation? Why are they standing there? No. All is lost. They’ve set off. Racing. She probably asked to stop for a moment for a farewell look at the house. Or maybe she wanted to see
whether Yuri Andreevich had already set out and was speeding after them? They’re gone. Gone.

“If they have time, if the sun doesn’t set beforehand” (he wouldn’t be able to see them in the darkness), “they’ll flash by one more time, the last one now, on the other side of the ravine, in the clearing where the wolves stood two nights ago.”

And now this moment came and went. The dark crimson sun still rounded over the blue line of the snowdrifts. The snow greedily absorbed the pineapple sweetness the sun poured into it. And now they appeared, swept by, raced off. “Farewell, Lara, till we meet in the other world, farewell, my beauty, farewell, my fathomless, inexhaustible, eternal joy.” And now they vanished. “I’ll never see you again, never, never in my life, I’ll never see you again.”

Meanwhile, it was getting dark. The crimson-bronze patches of light the sunset scattered over the snow were swiftly fading, going out. The ashen softness of the expanses quickly sank into the lilac twilight, which was turning more and more purple. Their gray mist merged with the fine, lacy handwriting of the birches along the road, tenderly traced against the pale pink of the sky, suddenly grown shallow.

The grief in his soul sharpened Yuri Andreevich’s perceptions. He grasped everything with tenfold distinctness. His surroundings acquired the features of a rare uniqueness, even the air itself. The winter evening breathed an unprecedented concern, like an all-sympathizing witness. It was as if there had never been such a nightfall until now, and evening came for the first time only today, to comfort the orphaned man plunged into solitude. It was as if the woods around stood on the hillocks, back to the horizon, not simply as a girdling panorama, but had just placed themselves there, having emerged from under the ground to show sympathy.

The doctor almost waved away this tangible beauty of the hour, like a crowd of importunate commiserators; he was almost ready to whisper to the sunset’s rays reaching out to him: “Thanks. Don’t bother.”

He went on standing on the porch, his face to the closed door, turning away from the world. “My bright sun has set,” something within him repeated and re-echoed. He had no strength to utter this sequence of words aloud without convulsive spasms in the throat interrupting them.

He went into the house. A double monologue, two sorts of monologue, started and played out in him: a dry, seemingly businesslike one with respect to himself, and an expansive, boundless one addressed to Lara. This is how his thoughts went: “Now I’ll go to Moscow. The first thing is to survive. Not to surrender to insomnia. Not to fall asleep. To work at night to the
point of stupefaction, until I drop from fatigue. And another thing. To heat the bedroom at once, so as not to be needlessly cold at night.”

But he also talked to himself like this: “My unforgettable delight! As long as the crooks of my arms remember you, as long as you’re still on my hands and lips, I’ll be with you. I’ll shed tears about you in something worthy, abiding. I’ll write down my memory of you in a tender, tender, achingly sorrowful portrayal. I’ll stay here until I’ve done it. And then I’ll leave myself. This is how I’ll portray you. I’ll set your features on paper, as, after a terrible storm that churns the sea to its bottom, the traces of the strongest, farthest-reaching wave lie on the sand. In a broken, meandering line the sea heaps up pumice stones, bits of cork, shells, seaweed, the lightest, most weightless things it could lift from the bottom. This is the line of the highest tide stretching endlessly along the shore. So the storm of life cast you up to me, my pride. And so I will portray you.”

He went into the house, locked the door, took off his coat. When he went into the room that Lara had tidied up so well and with such care in the morning, and in which everything had now been turned upside down again by her hasty departure, when he saw the rumpled, unmade bed and things lying about in disorder, thrown on the floor and chairs, he sank to his knees before the bed like a little boy, leaned his whole breast against its hard edge, and, burying his face in the hanging end of the coverlet, wept with a childish ease and bitterness. This did not go on for long. Yuri Andreevich stood up, quickly wiped his tears, looked around with a distractedly astonished and wearily absent gaze, took out the bottle Komarovsky had left, uncorked it, poured half a glass, added water, mixed in some snow, and with a pleasure almost equal to his just-shed, inconsolable tears, began drinking this mixture in slow, greedy gulps.

Something incongruous was taking place in Yuri Andreevich. He was slowly losing his mind. He had never yet led such a strange existence. He neglected the house, stopped looking after himself, turned nights into days, and lost count of the time that had passed since Lara’s departure.

He drank and wrote things devoted to her, but the Lara of his verses and notes, as he struck out and replaced one word with another, kept moving further away from her true prototype, Katenka’s living mother, who was now traveling with Katya.

Yuri Andreevich did this crossing out from considerations of precision and power of expression, but it also answered to the promptings of inner
restraint, which did not allow him to reveal personal experiences and unfictitious happenings too openly, so as not to wound or offend the direct participants in what had been written and lived through. Thus what was visceral, still pulsing and warm, was forced out of the poems, and instead of the bleeding and noxious, a serene breadth appeared in them, raising the particular case to a generality familiar to all. He did not strive for this goal, but this breadth came of itself like a comfort sent to him personally by the traveler, like a distant greeting from her, like her appearance in a dream, or like the touch of her hand on his brow. And he loved this ennobling stamp on his verses.

With this lament for Lara, he also finished scribbling down his stuff from various periods about all sorts of things, about nature, about everyday life. As had always happened to him before as well, a multitude of thoughts about personal life and
the life of society descended upon him while he worked, simultaneously and in passing.

He again thought that his notion of history, of what is known as the course of history, was not at all the same as the accepted one, and that he pictured it as similar to the life of the vegetable kingdom. In winter, under snow, the bare branches of a deciduous forest are as scraggly and pathetic as the hairs on an old man’s wart. In spring the forest is transformed in a few days, rises to the clouds; one can lose oneself, hide oneself in its leafy maze. This transformation is achieved by a movement that surpasses in speed the movements of animals, since animals do not grow as quickly as plants, and that can never be observed. A forest does not move; we cannot catch it, cannot surprise it changing place. We always find it immobile. And it is in the same immobility that we find the eternally growing, eternally changing life of society, history, in its unobservable transformations.

Tolstoy did not carry his thought through to the end when he denied the role of initiators to Napoleon, to rulers, to generals.
³
He thought precisely the same, but he did not voice it with full clarity. No one makes history, it is not visible, just as it is impossible to see grass grow. Wars, revolutions, tsars, Robespierres—these are its organic stimulants, its fermenting yeast. Revolutions are produced by men of action, one-sided fanatics, geniuses of self-limitation. In a few hours or days they overturn the old order. The upheavals last for weeks, for years at the most, and then for decades, for centuries, people bow down to the spirit of limitation that led to the upheavals as to something sacred.

With his lament for Lara, he also lamented that far-off summer in Meliuzeevo, when the revolution was a god come down from heaven to earth, the god of that time, that summer, and each one went mad in his own way, and the life of each existed by itself and not as an explanatory illustration confirming the rightness of superior politics.

With this sketching out of various odds and ends, he again verified and noted down that art always serves beauty, and beauty is the happiness of having form, while form is the organic key to existence, for every living thing must have form in order to exist, and thus art, including tragic art, is an account of the happiness of existing. These reflections and notes also brought him happiness, so tragic and filled with tears that his head grew weary and ached from it.

Anfim Efimovich came to call on him. He also brought vodka and told him about the departure of Antipova with her daughter and Komarovsky. Anfim Efimovich came by rail on a handcar. He scolded the doctor for not taking proper care of the horse and took her back, despite Yuri Andreevich’s request to bear with him for three or four more days. Instead he promised to come in person and fetch the doctor after that time and remove him from Varykino for good.

Sometimes, writing away, working away, Yuri Andreevich suddenly remembered the departed woman in all distinctness and lost his head from tenderness and the keenness of deprivation. As once in childhood, amidst the splendor of summer nature, he had fancied that he heard the voice of his dead mother in the trilling of the birds, so his hearing, accustomed to Lara, grown used to her voice, now sometimes deceived him. “Yurochka,” he sometimes heard in an auditory hallucination from the next room.

Other sensory deceptions also befell him during that week. At the end of it, in the night, he suddenly woke up after an oppressive, absurd dream about a dragon’s lair under the house. He opened his eyes. Suddenly the bottom of the ravine was lit up with fire and resounded with the crack and boom of someone firing a gun. Surprisingly, a moment after this extraordinary occurrence, the doctor fell back to sleep, and in the morning he decided that he had dreamed it all.