Doctor Zhivago (5 page)

Lara laughed and thought of Olia with envy. Here was a working girl who lived in poverty. Such children were precocious. Yet how unspoiled and childlike she was! Jack, the eggs—where on earth did she get all her ideas?
"
And why is it,
"
thought Lara,
"
that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?
"

"
Mother is his—what
'
s the word…He
'
s Mother
'
s…They
'
re bad words, I won
'
t say them. Then why does he look at me like that? I
'
m her daughter, after all.
"

Lara was only a little over sixteen but she was well developed. People thought she was eighteen or more. She had a good mind and was easy to get along with. She was very good-looking.

She and Rodia realized that nothing in life would come to them without a struggle. Unlike the idle and well-to-do, they did not have the leisure for premature curiosity and theorizing about things that were not yet practical concerns. Only the superfluous is sordid. Lara was the purest being in the world.

Brother and sister knew the value of things and appreciated what they had achieved so far. People had to think well of you if you were to get on. Lara worked well at school, not because she had an abstract love of learning but because only the best pupils were given scholarships. She was just as good at washing dishes, helping out in the workshop, and doing her mother
'
s errands. She moved with a silent grace, and all her features—voice, figure, gestures, her gray eyes and her fair hair—formed a harmonious whole.

It was a Sunday in the middle of July. On holidays you could stay in bed a little longer. Lara lay on her back, her hands clasped behind her head.

The workshop was quiet. The window looking out on the street was open. Lara heard the rattle of a droshki in the distance turn into a smooth glide as the wheels left the cobbles for the groove of a trolley track.
"
I
'
ll sleep a bit more,
"
she thought. The rumble of the town was like a lullaby and made her sleepy.

Lara felt her size and her position in the bed with two points of her body—the salient of her left shoulder and the big toe of her right foot. Everything else was more or less herself, her soul or inner being, harmoniously fitted into her contours and impatiently straining toward the future.

"
I must go to sleep,
"
thought Lara, and conjured up in her imagination the sunny side of Coachmakers
'
Row as it must be at this hour—the enormous carriages displayed on the cleanly swept floors of the coachmakers
'
sheds, the lanterns of cut glass, the stuffed bears, the rich life. And a little farther down the street, the dragoons exercising in the yard of the Znamensky barracks—the chargers mincing in a circle, the men vaulting into the saddles and riding past, at a walk, at a trot, and at a gallop, and outside, the row of children with nannies and wet-nurses gaping through the railings.

And a little farther still, thought Lara, Petrovka Street.
"
Good heavens, Lara, what an idea! I just wanted to show you my apartment. We
'
re so near.
"

It was the name day of Olga, the small daughter of some friends of Komarovsky
'
s who lived in Coachmakers
'
Row. The grownups were celebrating the occasion with dancing and champagne. He had invited Mother, but Mother couldn
'
t go, she wasn
'
t feeling well. Mother said:
"
Take Lara. You
'
re always telling me to look after Lara. Well, now you look after her.
"
And look after her he did—what a joke!

It was all this waltzing that had started it. What a crazy business it was! You spun round and round, thinking of nothing. While the music played, a whole eternity went by like life in a novel. But as soon as it stopped you had a feeling of shock, as if a bucket of cold water were splashed over you or somebody had found you undressed. Of course, one reason why you allowed anyone to be so familiar was just to show how grown-up you were.

She could never have imagined that he danced so well. What clever hands he had, what assurance as he gripped you by the waist! But never again would she allow anyone to kiss her like that. She could never have dreamed there could be so much effrontery in anyone
'
s lips when they were pressed for such a long time against your own.

She must stop all this nonsense. Once and for all. Stop playing at being shy, simpering and lowering her eyes—or it would end in disaster. There loomed an imperceptible, a terrifying border-line. One step and you would be hurtled into an abyss. She must stop thinking about dancing. That was the root of the evil. She must boldly refuse—pretend that she had never learned to dance or that she
'
d broken her leg.

That autumn there was unrest among the railway workers on the Moscow network. The men on the Moscow-Kazan line went on strike, and those of the Moscow-Brest line were expected to join them. The decision to strike had been taken, but the strike committee was still arguing about the date. Everyone on the railway knew that a strike was coming and only a pretext was needed for it to begin.

It was a cold overcast morning at the beginning of October, and on that day the wages were due. For a long time nothing was heard from the bookkeeping department; then a boy came into the office with a pay sheet and a pile of records that had been consulted for the deduction of fines. The cashier began handing out the pay. In an endless line, conductors, switchmen, mechanics and their assistants, scrubwomen from the depot, moved across the ground between the wooden buildings of the management and the station with its workshops, warehouses, engine sheds, and tracks.

The air smelled of early winter in town—of trampled maple leaves, melted snow, engine soot, and warm rye bread just out of the oven (it was baked in the basement of the station buffet). Trains came and went. They were shunted, coupled, and uncoupled to the waving of furled and unfurled signal flags. Locomotives hooted, guards tooted their horns, and shunters blew their whistles. Smoke rose in endless ladders to the sky. Hissing engines scalded the cold winter clouds with clouds of boiling steam.

Fuflygin, the Divisional Manager, and Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov, the Track Overseer of the station area, walked up and down along the edge of the tracks. Antipov had been pestering the repair shops about the quality of the spare parts for mending the tracks. The steel was not sufficiently tensile, the rails failed the test for strains, and Antipov thought that they would crack in the frosty weather. The management merely shelved his complaints. Someone was making money on the contracts.

Fuflygin wore an expensive fur coat on which the piping of the railway uniform had been sewn; it was unbuttoned, showing his new civilian serge suit. He stepped cautiously on the embankment, glancing down with pleasure at the line of his lapels, the straight creases on his trousers, and his elegant shoes. What Antipov was saying came in one ear and went out the other. Fuflygin had his own thoughts; he kept taking out his watch and looking at it; he was in a hurry to be off.

"
Quite right, quite right, my dear fellow,
"
he broke in impatiently,
"
but that
'
s only dangerous on the main lines with a lot of traffic. But just look at what you
'
ve got. Sidings and dead ends, nettles and dandelions. And the traffic—at most an old shunting engine for sorting the empties. What more do you want? You must be out of your mind! Talk about steel—wooden rails would do here!
"

Fuflygin looked at his watch, snapped the lid, and gazed into the distance where a road ran toward the railway. A carriage came into sight at a bend of the road. This was Fuflygin
'
s own turnout. His wife had come for him. The coachman drew in the horses almost at the edge of the tracks, talking to them in a high-pitched womanish voice, like a nursemaid scolding fretful children; they were frightened of trains. In a corner of the carriage sat a pretty woman negligently leaning against the cushions.

"
Well, my good fellow, some other time,
"
said the Divisional Manager with a wave of the hand, as much as to say,
"
I
'
ve got more important things than rails to think about.
"
The couple drove off.

Three or four hours later, almost at dusk, in a field some distance from the track, where no one had been visible until then, two figures rose out of the ground and, looking back over their shoulders, quickly walked away.

"
Let
'
s walk faster,
"
said Tiverzin.
"
I
'
m not worried about spies following us, but the moment those slowpokes in their hole in the ground have finished they
'
ll come out and catch up with us. I can
'
t bear the sight of them. What
'
s the point of having a committee if you drag things out like that? You play with fire and then you duck for shelter. You
'
re a fine one yourself—siding with that lot.
"

"
My Daria
'
s got typhus. I ought to be taking her to the hospital. Until I
'
ve done that I can
'
t think about anything else.
"

"
They say the wages are being paid today. I
'
ll go around to the office. If it wasn
'
t payday I
'
d chuck the lot of you, honest to God I would. I
'
d stop all this myself, I wouldn
'
t wait a minute.
"

"
And how would you do that, if I may ask?
"

"
Nothing to it. I
'
d go down to the boiler room and blow the whistle. That
'
s all.
"

They said goodbye and went off in different directions.

Tiverzin walked across the tracks toward the town. He ran into people coming from the office with their pay. There were a great many of them. By the look of it he reckoned that nearly all the station workers had been paid.

It was getting dark, the lights were on in the office. Idle workers crowded in the square outside it. In the driveway stood Fuflygin
'
s carriage and in it sat Fuflygin
'
s wife, still in the same pose as though she had not moved since morning. She was waiting for her husband, who was getting his money.

Suddenly sleet began to fall. The coachman climbed down from his box to put up the leather hood. While he tugged at the stiff struts, one leg braced against the back of the carriage, Fuflygin sat admiring the silver beads of sleet glittering in the light of the office lamps; her unblinking dreamy eyes were fixed on a point above the heads of the workers in a manner suggesting that her glance could, in case of need, go through them as through sleet or mist.

Tiverzin caught sight of her expression. It gave him a turn. He walked past without greeting her and decided to call for his wages later, so as not to run into her husband at the office. He crossed over to the darker side of the square, toward the workshops and the black shape of the turntable with tracks fanning out from it toward the depot.

"
Tiverzin! Kuprik!
"
Several voices called out of the darkness. There was a little crowd outside the workshops. Inside, someone was yelling and a boy was crying.
"
Do go in and help that boy, Kuprian Savelievich,
"
said a woman in the crowd.

As usual, the old foreman, Piotr Khudoleiev, was walloping his young apprentice Yusupka.

Khudoleiev had not always been a tormentor of apprentices and a brawling drunkard. There had been a time when, as a dashing young workman, he had attracted the admiring glances of merchants
'
and priests
'
daughters in Moscow
'
s industrial suburbs. But the girl he courted, Marfa, who had graduated that year from the diocesan convent school, had turned him down and had married his comrade, the mechanic Savelii Nikitich, Tiverzin
'
s father.

Five years after Savelii
'
s horrible end (he was burned to death in the sensational railway crash of 1888) Khudoleiev renewed his suit, but again Marfa Gavrilovna rejected him. So Khudoleiev took to drink and rowdiness, trying to get even with a world which was to blame, so he believed, for all his misfortunes.