CHAPTER FIVE
Farewell to the Old
1
The small town was called Meliuzeievo and lay in the fertile, black-soil country. Black dust hung over its roofs like a cloud of locusts. It was raised by the troops and convoys passing through the town; they moved in both directions, some going to the front and others away from it, and it was impossible to tell whether the war were still going on or had ceased.
Every day newly created offices sprang up like mushrooms. And they were elected to everything—Zhivago, Lieutenant Galiullin, and Nurse Antipova, as well as a few others from their group, all of them people from the big cities, well-informed and experienced.
They served as temporary town officials and as minor commissars in the army and the health department, and they looked upon this succession of tasks as an outdoor sport, a diversion, a game of blindman’s buff. But more and more they felt that it was time to stop and to get back to then” ordinary occupations and their homes.
Zhivago and Antipova were often brought together by their work.
2
The rain turned the black dust into coffee-colored mud and the mud spread over the streets, most of them unpaved.
The town was small. At the end of almost every street you could see the steppe, gloomy under the dark sky, all the vastness of the war, the vastness of the revolution.
Yurii Andreievich wrote to his wife:
“The disintegration and anarchy in the army continue. Measures are being taken to improve discipline and morale. I have toured units stationed in the neighborhood.
“By way of a postscript, though I might have mentioned it much earlier, I must tell that I do a lot of my work with a certain Antipova, a nurse from Moscow who was born in the Urals.
“You remember the girl student who shot at the public prosecutor on that terrible night of your mother’s death? I believe she was tried later. I remember telling you that Misha and I had once seen her, when she was still a schoolgirl, at some sordid hotel where your father took us. I can’t remember why we went, only that it was a bitterly cold night. I think it was at the time of the Presnia uprising. Well, that girl was Antipova.
“I have made several attempts to go home, but it is not so simple. It is not so much the work—we could hand that over easily enough—the trouble is the trip. Either there are no trains at all or else they are so overcrowded that there is no way of finding a seat.
“But of course it can’t go on like this forever, and some of us, who have resigned or been discharged, including Antipova, Galiullin, and myself, have made up our minds that whatever happens we shall leave next week. We’ll go separately; it gives us a better chance.
“So I may turn up any day out of the blue, though I’ll try to send a telegram.”
Before he left, however, he received his wife’s reply. In sentences broken by sobs and with tear stains and ink spots for punctuation, she begged him not to come back to Moscow but to go straight to the Urals with that wonderful nurse whose progress through life was marked by portents and coincidences so miraculous that her own, Tonia’s, modest life could not possibly compete with it.
“Don’t worry about Sasha’s future,” she wrote. “You will never need to be ashamed of him. I promise you to bring him up in those principles which as a child you saw practiced in our house.”
Yurii Andreievich wrote back at once: “You must be out of your mind, Tonia! How could you imagine such a thing? Don’t you know, don’t you know well enough, that if it were not for you, if it were not for my constant, faithful thoughts of you and of our home, I would never have survived these two terrible, devastating years of war? But why am I writing this—soon we’ll be together, our life will begin again, everything will be cleared up.
“What frightens me about your letter is something else. If I really gave you cause to write in such a way, my behavior must have been ambiguous and I am at fault not only before you but before that other woman whom I am misleading. I’ll apologize to her as soon as she is back. She is away in the country. Local councils, which formerly existed only in provincial capitals and county seats, are being set up in the villages, and she has gone to help a friend of hers who is acting as instructor in connection with these legislative changes.
“It may interest you to know that although we live in the same house I don’t know to this day which is Antipova’s room. I’ve never bothered to find out.”
3
Two main roads ran from Meliuzeievo, one going east, the other west. One was a mud track leading through the woods to Zybushino, a small grain center that was administratively a subdivision of Meliuzeievo although it was ahead of it in every way. The other was gravelled and went through fields, boggy in winter but dry in summer, to Biriuchi, the nearest railway junction.
In June Zybushino became an independent republic. It was set up by the local miller Blazheiko and supported by deserters from the 212th Infantry who had left the front at the time of the upheavals, kept their arms, and come to Zybushino through Biriuchi.
The republic refused to recognize the Provisional Government and split off from the rest of Russia. Blazheiko, a religious dissenter who had once corresponded with Tolstoy, proclaimed a new millennial Zybushino kingdom where all work and property were to be collectivized, and referred to the local administration as an Apostolic Seat.
Zybushino had always been a source of legends and exaggerations. It is mentioned in documents dating from the Times of Troubles[10] and the thick forests surrounding it teemed with robbers even later. The prosperity of its merchants and the fabulous fertility of its soil were proverbial. Many popular beliefs, customs, and oddities of speech that distinguished this whole western region near the front originated in Zybushino.
Now amazing stories were told about Blazheiko’s chief assistant. It was said that he was deaf and dumb, that he acquired the gift of speech at moments of inspiration, and then lost it again.
The republic lasted two weeks. In July a unit loyal to the Provisional Government entered the town. The deserters fell back on Biriuchi. Several miles of forest had once been cleared along the railway line on both sides of the junction, and there, among the old tree stumps overgrown with wild strawberries, the piles of timber depleted by pilfering, and the tumble-down mud huts of the seasonal laborers who had cut the trees, the deserters set up their camp.
4
The hospital in which Zhivago convalesced and later served as a doctor, and which he was not preparing to leave, was housed in the former residence of Countess Zhabrinskaia. She had offered it to the Red Cross at the beginning of the war.
It was a two-story house on one of the best sites of the town, at the corner of the main street and the square, known as the Platz, where soldiers had drilled in the old days and where meetings were held now.
Its position gave it a good view of the neighborhood; in addition to the square and the street it overlooked the adjoining farm (owned by a poor, provincial family who lived almost like peasants) as well as the Countess’s old garden at the back.
The Countess had a large estate in the district, Razdolnoie, and had used the house only for occasional business visits to the town and as a rallying point for the guests who came from near and far to stay at Razdolnoie in summer.
Now the house was a hospital, and its owner was in prison in Petersburg, where she had lived.
Of the large staff, only two women were left, Ustinia, the head cook, and Mademoiselle Fleury, the former governess of the Countess’s daughters, who were now married.
Gray-haired, pink-cheeked, and dishevelled, Mademoiselle Fleury shuffled about in bedroom slippers and a floppy, worn-out housecoat, apparently as much at home in the hospital as she had been in the Zhabrinsky family. She told long stories in her broken Russian, swallowing the ends of her words in the French manner, gesticulated, struck dramatic poses, and burst into hoarse peals of laughter that ended in coughing fits.
She believed that she knew Nurse Antipova inside out and thought that the nurse and the doctor were bound to be attracted to each other. Succumbing to her passion for matchmaking, so deep-rooted in the Latin heart, she was delighted when she found them in each other’s company, and would shake her finger and wink slyly at them. This puzzled Antipova and angered the doctor; but, like all eccentrics, Mademoiselle cherished her illusions and would not be parted from them at any price.
Ustinia was an even stranger character. Her clumsy, pear-shaped figure gave her the look of a brood hen. She was dry and sober to the point of maliciousness, but her sober-mindedness went hand in hand with an imagination unbridled in everything to do with superstition. Born in Zybushino and said to be the daughter of the local sorcerer, she knew countless spells and would never go out without first muttering over the stove and the keyhole to protect the house in her absence from fire and the Evil One. She could keep quiet for years, but once she was roused nothing would stop her. Her passion was to defend the truth.
After the fall of the Zybushino republic, the Meliuzeievo Executive Committee launched a campaign against the local anarchistic tendencies. Every night peaceful meetings were held at the Platz, attended by small numbers of citizens who had nothing better to do and who, in the old days, used to gather for gossip outside the fire station. The Meliuzeievo cultural soviet encouraged them and invited local and visiting speakers to guide the discussions. The visitors believed the tales about the talking deaf-mute to be utter nonsense and were anxious to say so. But the small craftsmen, the soldiers’ wives, and former servants of Meliuzeievo did not regard these stories as absurd and stood up in his defense.
One of the most outspoken of his defenders was Ustinia. At first held back by womanly reserve, she had gradually become bolder in heckling orators whose views were unacceptable in Meliuzeievo. In the end she developed into an expert public speaker.
The humming of the voices in the square could be heard through the open windows of the hospital, and on quiet nights even fragments of speeches. When Ustinia took the floor, Mademoiselle often rushed into any room where people were sitting and urged them to listen, imitating her without malice in her broken accent: “Disorder ... Disorder ... Tsarist, bandit ... Zybushi- ... deaf-mute ... traitor! traitor!”
Mademoiselle was secretly proud of the spirited and sharp-tongued cook. The two women were fond of each other although they never stopped bickering.
5
Yurii Andreievich prepared to leave, visiting homes and offices where he had friends, and applying for the necessary documents.
At that time the new commissar of the local sector of the front stopped at Meliuzeievo on his way to the army. Everybody said he was completely inexperienced, a mere boy.
A new offensive was being planned and a great effort was made to improve the morale of the army masses. Revolutionary courts-martial were instituted, and the death penalty, which had recently been abolished, was restored.
Before leaving, the doctor had to obtain a paper from the local commandant.
Usually crowds filled his office, overflowing far out into the street. It was impossible to elbow one’s way to the desks and no one could hear anything in the roar caused by hundreds of voices.
But this was not one of the reception days. The clerks sat writing silently in the peaceful office, disgruntled at the growing complication of their work, and exchanging ironic glances. Cheerful voices came from the commandant’s room; it sounded as if, in there, people had unbuttoned their tunics and were having refreshments.
Galiullin came out of the inner room, saw Zhivago, and vigorously beckoned to him.
Since the doctor had in any case to see the commandant, he went in. He found the room in a state of artistic disorder.
The center of the stage was held by the new commissar, the hero of the day and the sensation of the town, who, instead of being at his post, was addressing the rulers of this paper kingdom quite unconnected with staff and operational matters.
“Here’s another of our stars,” said the commandant, introducing the doctor. The commissar, completely self-absorbed, did not look around, and the commandant turned to sign the paper that the doctor put in front of him and waved him politely to a low ottoman in the center of the room.
The doctor was the only person in the room who sat normally. All the rest were lolling eccentrically with an air of exaggerated and assumed ease. The commandant almost lay across his desk, his cheek on his fist, in a thoughtful, Byronic pose. His aide, a massive, stout man, perched on the arm of the sofa, his legs tucked on the seat as if he were riding side saddle. Galiullin sat astride a chair, his arms folded on its back and his head resting on his arms, and the commissar kept hoisting himself up by his wrists onto the window sill and jumping off and running up and down the room with small quick steps, buzzing about like a wound-up top, never still or silent for a moment. He talked continuously; the subject of the conversation was the problem of the deserters at Biriuchi.
The commissar was exactly as he had been described to Zhivago. He was thin and graceful, barely out of his teens, aflame with the highest ideals. He was said to come of a good family (the son of a senator, some people thought) and to have been one of the first to march his company to the Duma in February. He was called Gints or Gintse—the doctor had not quite caught the name—and spoke very distinctly, with a correct Petersburg accent and a slight Baltic intonation.
He wore a tight-fitting tunic. It probably embarrassed him to be so young, and in order to seem older he assumed a sneer and an artificial stoop, hunching his shoulders with their stiff epaulettes and keeping his hands deep in his pockets; this did in fact give him a cavalryman’s silhouette which could be drawn in two straight lines converging downward from the angle of his shoulders to his feet.
“There is a Cossack regiment stationed a short distance down the railway,” the commandant informed him. “It’s Red, it’s loyal. It will be called out, the rebels will be surrounded, and that will be the end of the business. The corps commander is anxious that they should be disarmed without delay.”
“Cossacks? Out of the question!” flared the commissar. “This is not 1905. We’re not going back to prerevolutionary methods. On this point we don’t see eye to eye. Your generals have outsmarted themselves.”
“Nothing has been done yet. This is only a plan, a suggestion.”
“We have an agreement with the High Command not to interfere with operational matters. I am not cancelling the order to call out the Cossacks. Let them come. But I, for my part, will take such steps as are dictated by common sense. I suppose they have a bivouac out there?”
“I guess so. A camp, at any rate. Fortified.”
“So much the better. I want to go there. I want to see this menace, this nest of robbers. They may be rebels, gentlemen, they may even be deserters, but remember, they are the people. And the people are children, you have to know them, you have to know their psychology. To get the best out of them, you must have the right approach, you have to play on their best, most sensitive chords.
“I’ll go, and I’ll have a heart-to-heart talk with them. You’ll see, they’ll go back to the positions they have deserted. You don’t believe me? Want to bet?”
“I wonder. But I hope you’re right.”
“I’ll say to them, ‘Take my own case, I am an only son, the hope of my parents, yet I haven’t spared myself. I’ve given up everything—name, family, position. I have done this to fight for your freedom, such freedom as is not enjoyed by any other people in the world. This I did, and so did many other young men like myself, not to speak of the old guard of our glorious predecessors, the champions of the people’s rights who were sent to hard labor in Siberia or locked up in the Schlüsselburg Fortress. Did we do this for ourselves? Did we have to do it? And you, you who are no longer ordinary privates but the warriors of the first revolutionary army in the world, ask yourselves honestly: Have you lived up to your proud calling? At this moment when our country is being bled white and is making a supreme effort to shake off the encircling hydra of the enemy, you have allowed yourselves to be fooled by a gang of nobodies, you have become a rabble, politically unconscious, surfeited with freedom, hooligans for whom nothing is enough. You’re like the proverbial pig that was allowed in the dining room and at once jumped onto the table.’ Oh, I’ll touch them to the quick, I’ll make them feel ashamed of themselves.”
“No, that would be risky,” the commandant objected halfheartedly, exchanging quick, meaningful glances with his aide.
Galiullin did his best to dissuade the commissar from his insane idea. He knew the reckless men of the 212th, they had been in his division at the front. But the commissar refused to listen.
Yurii Andreievich kept trying to get up and go. The commissar’s naïveté embarrassed him, but the sly sophistication of the commandant and his aide—two sneering and dissembling opportunists—was no better. The foolishness of the one was matched by the slyness of the others. And all this expressed itself in a torrent of words, superfluous, utterly false, murky, profoundly alien to life itself.
Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!
The doctor remembered his coming talk with Antipova. Though it was bound to be unpleasant, he was glad of the necessity of seeing her, even at such a price. She was unlikely to be back. But he got up as soon as he could and went out, unnoticed by the others.
6
She was back. Mademoiselle, who gave him the news, added that she was tired, she had had a quick meal and had gone Up to her room saying she was not to be disturbed. “But I should go up and knock if I were you,” Mademoiselle suggested. “I am sure she is not asleep yet.”—“Which is her room?” the doctor asked. Mademoiselle was surprised beyond words by his question. Antipova lived at the end of the passage on the top floor, just beyond several rooms in which all of the Countess’s furniture was kept locked, and where the doctor had never been.
It was getting dark. Outside, the houses and fences huddled closer together in the dusk. The trees advanced out of the depth of the garden into the light of the lamps shining from the windows. The night was hot and sticky. At the slightest effort one was drenched with sweat. The light of the kerosene lamps streaking into the yard went down the trees in a dirty, vaporous flow.
The doctor stopped at the head of the stairs. It occurred to him that even to knock on Antipova’s door when she was only just back and tired from her journey would be discourteous and embarrassing. Better leave the talk for tomorrow. Feeling at a loss as one does when one changes one’s mind, he walked to the other end of the passage, where a window overlooked the neighboring yard, and leaned out.
The night was full of quiet, mysterious sounds. Next to him, inside the passage, water dripped from the washbasin regularly and slowly. Somewhere outside the window people were whispering. Somewhere in the vegetable patch they were watering cucumber beds, clanking the chain of the well as they drew the water and poured it from pail to pail.
All the flowers smelled at once; it was as if the earth, unconscious all day long, were now waking to their fragrance. And from the Countess’s centuries-old garden, so littered with fallen branches that it was impenetrable, the dusty aroma of old linden trees coming into bloom drifted in a huge wave as tall as a house.
Noises came from the street beyond the fence on the right—snatches of a song, a drunken soldier, doors banging.
An enormous crimson moon rose behind the crows’ nest in the Countess’s garden. At first it was the color of the new brick mill in Zybushino, then it turned yellow like the water tower at Biriuchi.
And just under the window, the smell of new-mown hay, as perfumed as jasmine tea, mixed with that of belladonna. Below there a cow was tethered; she had been brought from a distant village, she had walked all day, she was tired and homesick for the herd and would not yet accept food from her new mistress.
“Now, now, whoa there, I’ll show you how to butt,” her mistress coaxed her in a whisper, but the cow crossly shook her head and craned her neck, mooing plaintively, and beyond the black barns of Meliuzeievo the stars twinkled, and invisible threads of sympathy stretched between them and the cow as if there were cattle sheds in other worlds where she was pitied.
Everything was fermenting, growing, rising with the magic yeast of life. The joy of living, like a gentle wind, swept in a broad surge indiscriminately through fields and towns, through walls and fences, through wood and flesh. Not to be overwhelmed by this tidal wave, Yurii Andreievich went out into the square to listen to the speeches.
7
By now the moon stood high. Its light covered everything as with a thick layer of white paint. The broad shadows thrown by the pillared government buildings that surrounded the square in a semicircle spread on the ground like black rugs.
The meeting was being held across the square. Straining one’s ears, one could hear every word. But the doctor was stunned by the beauty of the spectacle; he sat down on the bench outside the fire station and instead of listening looked about him.
Narrow dead-end streets ran off the square, as deep in mud as country lanes and lined with crooked little houses. Fences of plaited willows stuck out of the mud like bow nets in a pond, or lobster pots. You could see the weak glint of open windows. In the small front gardens, sweaty red heads of corn with oily whiskers reached out toward the rooms, and single pale thin hollyhocks looked out over the fences, like women in night clothes whom the heat had driven out of their stuffy houses for a breath of air.
The moonlit night was extraordinary, like merciful love or the gift of clairvoyance. Suddenly, into this radiant, legendary stillness, there dropped the measured, rhythmic sound of a familiar, recently heard voice. It was a fine ardent voice and it rang with conviction. The doctor listened and recognized it at once. Commissar Gints was addressing the meeting on the square.
Apparently the municipality had asked him to lend them the support of his authority. With great feeling he chided the people of Meliuzeievo for their disorganized ways and for giving in to the disintegrating influence of the Bolsheviks, who, he said, were the real instigators of the Zybushino disorders. Speaking in the same spirit as at the commandant’s, he reminded them of the powerful and ruthless enemy, and of their country’s hour of trial. Then the crowd began to heckle.
Calls of protest alternated with demands for silence. The interruptions grew louder and more frequent. A man who had come with Gints, and who now assumed the role of chairman, shouted that speeches from the floor were not allowed and called the audience to order. Some insisted that a citizeness who wished to speak should be given leave.
A woman made her way through the crowd to the wooden box that served as a platform. She did not attempt to climb on the box but stood beside it. The woman was known to the crowd. Its attention was caught. There was a silence. This was Ustinia.
“Now you were saying, Comrade Commissar, about Zybushino,” she began, “and about looking sharp—you told us to look sharp and not to be deceived—but actually, you yourself, I heard you, all you do is to play about with words like ‘Bolsheviks, Mensheviks,’ that’s all you talk about—Bolsheviks, Mensheviks. Now all that about no more fighting and all being brothers, I call that being godly, not Menshevik, and about the works and factories going to the poor, that isn’t Bolshevik, that’s just human decency. And about that deaf-mute, we’re fed up hearing about him. Everybody goes on and on about the deaf-mute. And what have you got against him? Just that he was dumb all that time and then he suddenly started to talk and didn’t ask your permission? As if that were so marvellous! Much stranger things than that have been known to happen. Take the famous she-ass, for instance. ‘Balaam, Balaam,’ she says, ‘listen to me, don’t go that way, I beg you, you’ll be sorry.’ Well, naturally, he wouldn’t listen, he went on. Like you saying, ‘A deaf-mute,’ he thought ‘a she-ass, a dumb beast, what’s the good of listening to her.’ He scorned her. And look how sorry he was afterwards. You all know what the end of it was.”
“What?” someone asked curiously.
“That’s enough,” snapped Ustinia. “If you ask too many questions you’ll grow old before your time.”
“That’s no good. You tell us,” insisted the heckler.
“All right, all right, I’ll tell you, you pest. He was turned into a pillar of salt.”
“You’ve got it wrong, that was Lot. That was Lot’s wife,” people shouted. Everyone laughed. The chairman called the meeting to order. The doctor went to bed.
8
He saw Antipova the following evening. He found her in the pantry with a pile of linen, straight out of the wringer; she was ironing.
The pantry was one of the back rooms at the top, looking out over the garden. There the samovars were got ready, food was dished out, and the used plates were stacked in the dumb-waiter to be sent down to the kitchen. There too the lists of china, silver, and glass were kept and checked, and there people spent their moments of leisure, using it as a meeting place.
The windows were open. In the room, the scent of linden blossoms mingled, as in an old park, with the caraway-bitter smell of dry twigs and the charcoal fumes of the two flat-irons that Antipova used alternately, putting them each in turn in the flue to keep them hot.
“Well, why didn’t you knock last night? Mademoiselle told me. But it’s a good thing you didn’t. I was already in bed. I couldn’t have let you in. Well, how are you? Look out for the charcoal, don’t get it on your suit.”
“You look as if you’ve been doing the laundry for the whole hospital.”
“No, there’s a lot of mine in there. You see? You keep on teasing me about getting stuck in Meliuzeievo. Well, this time I mean it, I’m going. I’m getting my things together, I’m packing. When I’ve finished I’ll be off. I’ll be in the Urals and you’ll be in Moscow. Then one day somebody will ask you: ‘Do you happen to know a little town called Meliuzeievo?’ and you’ll say: ‘I don’t seem to call it to mind.’—‘And who is Antipova?’—‘Never heard of her.’ ”
“That’s unlikely. Did you have a good trip? What was it like in the country?”
“That’s a long story. How quickly these irons cool! Do hand me the other, do you mind? It’s over there, look, just inside the flue. And could you put this one back? Thanks. Every village is different, it depends on the villagers. In some the people are industrious, they work hard, then it isn’t bad. And in others I suppose all the men are drunks. Then it’s desolate. A terrible sight.”
“Nonsense! Drunks? A lot you understand! It’s just that there is no one there, all the men are in the army. What about the new councils?”
“You’re wrong about the drunks, I don’t agree with you at all. The councils? There’s going to be a lot of trouble with the councils. The instructions can’t be applied, there’s nobody to work with. All the peasants care about at the moment is the land question. ... I stopped at Razdolnoie. What a lovely place, you should go and see it. ... It was burned a bit and looted last spring, the barn is burned down, the orchards are charred, and there are smoke stains on some of the houses. Zybushino I didn’t see, I didn’t get there. But they all tell you the deaf-mute really exists. They describe what he looks like, they say he’s young and educated.”
“Last night Ustinia stood up for him on the square.”
“The moment I got back there was another lot of old furniture from Razdolnoie. I’ve asked them a hundred times to leave it alone. As if we didn’t have enough of our own. And this morning the guard from the commandant’s office comes over with a note—they must have the silver tea set and the crystal glasses, it’s a matter of life and death, just for one night, they’ll send it back. Half of it we’ll never see again. It’s always a loan—I know these loans. They’re having a party—in honor of some visitor or something.”
“I can guess who that is. The new commissar has arrived, the one who’s appointed to our sector of the front. They want to tackle the deserters, have them surrounded and disarmed. The commissar is a greenhorn, a babe in arms. The local authorities want to call out the Cossacks, but not he—he’s planning to speak to their hearts. The people, he says, are like children, and so on; he thinks it’s a kind of game. Galiullin tried to argue with him, he told him to leave the jungle alone, not to rouse the wild beast. ‘Leave us to deal with it,’ he said. But you can’t do anything with a fellow like that once he’s got a thing in his head. I do wish you’d listen to me. Do stop ironing a minute. There will be an unimaginable mess here soon; it’s beyond our power to avert it. I do wish you’d leave before it happens.”
“Nothing will happen, you’re exaggerating. And anyway, I am leaving. But I can’t just snap my fingers and say goodbye. I have to hand in a properly checked inventory. I don’t want it to look as if I’ve stolen something and run away. And who is to take over? That’s the problem, I can’t tell you what I’ve been through with that miserable inventory, and all I get is abuse. I listed Zhabrinskaia’s things as hospital property, because that was the sense of the decree. Now they say I did it on purpose to keep them for the owner! What a dirty trick!”
“Do stop worrying about pots and rugs. To hell with them. What a thing to fuss about at a time like this! Oh, I wish I’d seen you yesterday. I was in such good form that I could have told you all about everything, explained the whole celestial mechanics, answered any accursed question! It’s true, you know, I’m not joking, I really did want to get it all off my chest. And I wanted to tell you about my wife, and my son, and myself. ... Why the hell can’t a grown-up man talk to a grown-up woman without being at once suspected of some ulterior motive? Damn all motives—ulterior ones and others.
“Please, go on with your ironing, make the linen nice and smooth, don’t bother about me, I’ll go on talking. I’ll talk a long time.
“Just think what’s going on around us! And that you and I should be living at such a time. Such a thing happens only once in an eternity. Just think of it, the whole of Russia has had its roof torn off, and you and I and everyone else are out in the open! And there’s nobody to spy on us. Freedom! Real freedom, not just talk about it, freedom, dropped out of the sky, freedom beyond our expectations, freedom by accident, through a misunderstanding.
“And how great everyone is, and completely at sea! Have you noticed? As if crushed by his own weight, by the discovery of his greatness.
“Go on ironing, I tell you. Don’t talk. You aren’t bored. Let me change your iron for you.
“Last night I was watching the meeting in the square. An extraordinary sight! Mother Russia is on the move, she can’t stand still, she’s restless and she can’t find rest, she’s talking and she can’t stop. And it isn’t as if only people were talking. Stars and trees meet and converse, flowers talk philosophy at night, stone houses hold meetings. It makes you think of the Gospel, doesn’t it? The days of the apostles. Remember St. Paul? You will speak with tongues and you will prophesy. Pray for the gift of understanding.”
“I know what you mean about stars and trees holding meetings. I understand that. It’s happened to me too.”
“It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life—as if life could be put off for a time—what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly, like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions—his own personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it—the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice.”
The sudden trembling of his voice betrayed his rising agitation. Antipova stopped ironing and gave him a grave, astonished look. It confused him and he forgot what he was saying. After a moment of embarrassed silence he rushed on, blurting out whatever came into his head.
“These days I have such a longing to live honestly, to be productive. I so much want to be a part of all this awakening. And then, in the middle of all this general rejoicing, I catch your mysterious, sad glance, wandering God knows where, far away. How I wish it were not there! How I wish your face to say that you are happy with your fate and that you need nothing from anyone. If only someone who is really close to you, your friend or your husband—best of all if he were a soldier—would take me by the hand and tell me to stop worrying about your fate and not to weary you with my attentions. But I’d wrest my hand free and take a swing Ah, I have forgotten myself. Please forgive me.”
Once again the doctor’s voice betrayed him. He gave up struggling and, feeling hopelessly awkward, got up and went to the window. Leaning on the sill, his cheek on his hand, he stared into the dark garden with absent, unseeing eyes, trying to collect himself.
Antipova walked round the ironing board, propped between the table and the other window, and stopped in the middle of the room a few steps behind him. “That’s what I’ve always been afraid of,” she said softly, as if to herself. “I shouldn’t have ... Don’t, Yurii Andreievich, you mustn’t. Oh. now just look at what you’ve made me do!” she exclaimed. She ran back to the board, where a thin stream of acrid smoke came from under the iron that had burned through a blouse.
She thumped it down crossly on its stand. “Yurii Andreievich,” she went on, “do be sensible, go off to Mademoiselle for a minute, have a drink of water and come back, please, as I’ve always known you till now and as I want you to be. Do you hear, Yurii Andreievich? I know you can do it. Please do it. I beg you.”
They had no more talks of this kind, and a week later Larisa Feodorovna left.
9
Some time later, Zhivago too set out for home. The night before he left there was a terrible storm. The roar of the gale merged with that of the downpour, which sometimes crashed straight onto the roofs and at other times drove down the street with the changing wind as if lashing its way step by step.
The peals of thunder followed each other uninterruptedly, producing a steady rumble. In the blaze of continual flashes of lightning the street vanished into the distance, and the bent trees seemed to be running in the same direction.
Mademoiselle Fleury was waked up in the night by an urgent knocking at the front door. She sat up in alarm and listened. The knocking went on.
Could it be, she thought, that there wasn’t a soul left in the hospital to get up and open the door? Did she always have to do everything, poor old woman, just because nature had made her reliable and endowed her with a sense of duty?
Well, admittedly, the house had belonged to rich aristocrats, but what about the hospital—didn’t that belong to the people, wasn’t it their own? Whom did they expect to look after it? Where, for instance, had the male nurses got to, she’d like to know. Everyone had fled—no more orderlies, no more nurses, no doctors, no one in authority. Yet there were still wounded in the house, two legless men in the surgical ward where the drawing room used to be, and downstairs next to the laundry the storeroom full of dysentery cases. And that devil Ustinia had gone out visiting. She knew perfectly well that there was a storm coming, but did that stop her? Now she had a good excuse to spend the night out.
Well, thank God the knocking had stopped, they realized that nobody would answer, they’d given it up. Why anybody should want to be out in this weather ... Or could it be Ustinia? No, she had her key. Oh God, how terrible, they’ve started again.
What pigs, just the same! Not that you could expect Zhivago to hear anything, he was off tomorrow, his thoughts were already in Moscow or on the journey. But what about Galiullin? How could he sleep soundly or lie calmly through all this noise, expecting that in the end she, a weak, defenseless old woman, would go down and open for God knows whom, on this frightening night in this frightening country.
Galiullin!—she remembered suddenly. No, such nonsense could occur to her only because she was half asleep, Galiullin wasn’t there, he should be a long way off by now. Hadn’t She herself, with Zhivago, hidden him, and disguised him as a civilian, and then told him about every road and village in the district to help him to escape after that horrible lynching at the station when they killed Commissar Gints and chased Galiullin all the way from Biriuchi to Meliuzeievo, shooting at him and then hunting for him all over the town!
If it hadn’t been for those automobiles, not a stone would have been left standing in the town. An armored division happened to be passing through, and stopped those evil men.
The storm was subsiding, moving away. The thunder was less continuous, duller, more distant. The rain stopped occasionally, when the water could be heard splashing softly off the leaves and down the gutters. Noiseless reflections of distant lightning lit up Mademoiselle’s room, lingering as though looking for something.
Suddenly the knocking at the front door, which had long since stopped, was resumed. Someone was in urgent need of help and was knocking repeatedly, in desperation. The wind rose again and the rain came down.
“Coming,” shouted Mademoiselle to whoever it was, and the sound of her own voice frightened her.
It had suddenly occurred to her who it might be. Putting down her feet and pushing them into slippers, she threw her dressing gown over her shoulders and hurried to wake up Zhivago, it would be less frightening if he came down with her. But he had heard the knocking and was already coming down with a lighted candle. The same idea had occurred to both of them.
“Zhivago, Zhivago, they’re knocking on the front door, I’m afraid to go down alone,” she called out in French, adding in Russian: “You will see, it’s either Lar or Lieutenant Gaiul.”
Roused by the knocking, Yurii Andreievich had also felt certain that it was someone he knew—either Galiullin, who had been stopped in his flight and was coming back for refuge, or Nurse Antipova, prevented from continuing her journey for some reason.
In the hallway the doctor gave the candle to Mademoiselle, drew the bolts, and turned the key. A gust of wind burst the door open, putting out the candle and showering them with cold raindrops.
“Who is it? Who is it? Anybody there?”
Mademoiselle and the doctor shouted in turn into the darkness but there was no reply. Suddenly the knocking started again in another place—was it at the back door, or, as they now thought, at the French window into the garden?
“Must be the wind,” said the doctor. “But just to make sure, perhaps you’d have a look at the back. I’ll stay here in case there really is someone.”
Mademoiselle disappeared into the house while the doctor went out and stood under the entrance roof. His eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, and he could make out the first signs of dawn.
Above the town, clouds raced dementedly as if pursued, so low that their tatters almost caught the tops of the trees, which bent in the same direction so that they looked like brooms sweeping the sky. The rain lashed the wooden wall of the house, turning it from gray to black.
Mademoiselle came back. “Well?” said the doctor.
“You were right. There’s no one.” She had been all around the house; a branch knocking on the pantry window had broken one of the panes and there were huge puddles on the floor, and the same thing in what used to be Lara’s room—there was a sea, a real sea, an ocean. “And on this side, look, there’s a broken shutter knocking on the casement, do you see it? That’s all it was.”
They talked a little, locked the door, and went back to their rooms, both regretting that the alarm had been a false one.
They had been sure that when they opened the door Antipova would come in, chilled through and soaked to the skin, and they would ask her dozens of questions while she took off her things, and she would go and change and come down and dry herself in front of the kitchen stove, still warm from last night, and would tell them her adventures, pushing back her hair and laughing.
They had been so sure of it that after locking the front door they imagined that she was outside the house in the form of a watery wraith, and her image continued to haunt them.
10
It was said that the Biriuchi telegrapher, Kolia Frolenko, was indirectly responsible for the trouble at the station.
Kolia, the son of a well-known Meliuzeievo clockmaker, had been a familiar figure in Meliuzeievo from his earliest childhood. As a small boy he had stayed with some of the servants at Razdolnoie and had played with the Countess’s daughters. It was then that he learned to understand French. Mademoiselle Fleury knew him well.
Everyone in Meliuzeievo was used to seeing him on his bicycle, coatless, hatless, and in canvas summer shoes in any weather. Arms crossed on his chest, he free-wheeled down the road, glancing up at the poles and wires to check the condition of the network.
Some of the houses in Meliuzeievo were connected by a branch line with the exchange at the station. The calls were handled by Kolia at the station switchboard. There he was up to his ears in work, for not only the telephone and telegraph were in his charge, but, if the stationmaster Povarikhin was absent for a few moments, also the railway signals, which were operated from the same control room.
Having to look after several mechanical instruments at once, Kolia had evolved a special style of speech, obscure, abrupt, and puzzling, which enabled him, if he chose, to avoid answering questions or getting involved in a conversation. He was said to have abused the advantage this gave him on the day of the disorders.
It is true that, by suppressing information, he had defeated Galiullin’s good intentions and, perhaps unwittingly, had given a fatal turn to the events.
Galiullin had called up from town and asked for Commissar Gints, who was somewhere at the station or in its vicinity, in order to tell him that he was on his way to join him and to ask him to wait for him and do nothing until he arrived. Kolia, on the pretext that he was busy signalling an approaching train, refused to call the commissar. At the same time he did his utmost to delay the train, which was bringing up the Cossacks summoned to Biriuchi.
When the troops arrived nevertheless he did not conceal his dismay.
The engine, crawling slowly under the dark roof of the platform, stopped in front of the huge window of the control room. Kolia drew the green serge curtain with the initials of the Company woven in yellow into the border, picked up the enormous water jug standing on the tray on the window ledge, poured some water into the plain, thick, straight-sided glass, drank a few mouthfuls, and looked out.
The engineer saw him from his cab and gave him a friendly nod.
“The stinker, the louse,” Kolia thought with hatred. He stuck out his tongue and shook his fist. The engineer not only understood him but managed to convey by a shrug of the shoulders and a nod in the direction of the train: “What was I to do? I’d like to know what you’d have done in my place. He’s the boss.”—“You’re a filthy brute all the same,” Kolia replied by gestures.
The horses were taken, balking, out of the freight cars. The thud of their hoofs on the wooden gangways was followed by the ring of their shoes on the stone platform. They were led, rearing, across the tracks.
At the end of the tracks were two rows of derelict wooden coaches. The rain had washed them clean of paint, and worms and damp had rotted them from inside, so that now they were reverting to their original kinship with the wood of the forest, which began just beyond the rolling stock, with its lichen, its birches, and the clouds towering above it.
At the word of command, the Cossacks mounted their horses and galloped to the clearing.
The rebels of the 212th were surrounded. In woods, horsemen always seem taller and more formidable than in an open field. They impressed the infantrymen, although they had rifles in their mud huts. The Cossacks drew their swords.
Within the ring formed by the horses, some timber was piled up. Gints mounted it and addressed the surrounded men.
As usual, he spoke of soldierly duty, of the fatherland, and many other lofty subjects. But these ideas found no sympathy among his listeners. There were too many of them. They had suffered a great deal in the war, they were thick-skinned and exhausted. They had long been fed up with the phrases Gints was giving them. Four months of wooing by the Left and Right had corrupted these unsophisticated men, who, moreover, were alienated by the speaker’s foreign-sounding name and Baltic accent.
Gints felt that his speech was too long and was annoyed at himself, but he thought that he had to make himself clear to his listeners, who instead of being grateful rewarded him with expressions of indifference or hostile boredom. Gradually losing his temper, he decided to speak straight from the shoulder and to bring up the threats he had so far held in reserve. Heedless of the rising murmurs, he reminded the deserters that revolutionary courts-martial had been set up, and called on them, on pain of death, to disarm and give up their ringleaders. If they refused, he said, they would prove that they were common traitors, and irresponsible swollen-headed rabble. The men had become unused to being talked to in such a tone.
Several hundred voices rose in an uproar. Some were low pitched and almost without anger: “All right, all right. Pipe down. That’s enough.” But hate-filled, hysterical trebles predominated:
“The nerve! Just like in the old days! These officers still treat us like dirt. So we’re traitors, are we? And what about you yourself, Excellency? Why bother with him? Obviously he’s a German, an infiltrator. Show us your papers, blueblood. And what are you gaping at, pacifiers?” They turned to the Cossacks. “You’ve come to restore order, go on, tie us up, have your fun.”
But the Cossacks, too, liked Gints’ unfortunate speech less and less. “They are all swine to him,” they muttered. “Thinks himself the lord and master!” At first singly, and then in ever-growing numbers, they began to sheathe their swords. One after another they got off their horses. When most of them had dismounted, they moved in a disorderly crowd toward the center of the clearing, mixed with the men of the 212th, and fraternized.
“You must vanish quietly,” the worried Cossack officers told Gints. “Your car is at the station, we’ll send for it to meet you. Hurry.”
Gints went, but he felt that to steal away was beneath his dignity, so he turned quite openly toward the station. He was terribly agitated but out of pride forced himself to walk calmly and unhurriedly.
He was close to the station. At the edge of the woods, within sight of the tracks, he looked back for the first time. Soldiers with rifles had followed him. “What do they want?” he wondered. He quickened his pace.
So did his pursuers. The distance between them remained unchanged. He saw the double wall of derelict coaches, stepped behind them, and ran. The train that had brought the Cossacks had been shunted. The lines were clear. He crossed them at a run and leapt onto the steep platform. At the same moment the soldiers ran out from behind the old coaches. Povarikhin and Kolia were shouting and waving to him to get into the station building, where they could save him.
But once again the sense of honor bred in him for generations, a city-bred sense of honor, which impelled him to self-sacrifice and was out of place here, barred his way to safety. His heart pounding wildly, he made a supreme effort to control himself. He told himself: “I must shout to them, ‘Come to your senses, men, you know I’m not a spy.’ A really heartfelt word or two will bring them to their senses.”
In the course of the past months his feeling for a courageous exploit or a heart-felt speech had unconsciously become associated with stages, speakers’ platforms, or just chairs onto which you jumped to fling an appeal or ardent call to the crowds.
At the very doors of the station, under the station bell, there stood a water butt for use in case of fire. It was tightly covered. Gints jumped up on the lid and addressed the approaching soldiers with an incoherent but gripping speech. His unnatural voice and the insane boldness of his gesture, two steps from the door where he could so easily have taken shelter, amazed them and stopped them in their tracks. They lowered their rifles.
But Gints, who was standing on the edge of the lid, suddenly pushed it in. One of his legs slipped into the water and the other hung over the edge of the butt.
Seeing him sitting clumsily astride the edge of the butt, the soldiers burst into laughter and the one in front shot Gints in the neck. He was dead by the time the others ran up and thrust their bayonets into his body.
11
Mademoiselle called up Kolia and told him to find Dr. Zhivago a good seat in the train to Moscow, threatening him with exposure if he did not.
Kolia was as usual conducting another conversation and, judging by the decimal fractions that punctuated his speech, transmitting a message in code over a third instrument.
“Pskov, Pskov, can you hear me? What rebels? What help? What are you talking about, Mademoiselle? Ring off, please. Pskov, Pskov, thirty-six point zero one five. Oh hell, they’ve cut me off. Hello, hello, I can’t hear. Is that you again, Mademoiselle? I’ve told you, I can’t. Ask Povarikhin. All lies, fictions. Thirty-six ... Oh hell ... Get off the line, Mademoiselle.”
And Mademoiselle was saying:
“Don’t you throw dust in my eyes, Pskov, Pskov, you liar, I can see right through you, tomorrow you’ll put the doctor on the train, and I won’t listen to another word from any murdering little Judases.”
12
The day Yurii Andreievich left, it was sultry. A storm like the one that had broken two days earlier was brewing. Near the station, at the outskirts of the town, littered with the shells of sunflower seeds, the clay huts and the geese looked white and frightened under the still menace of the black sky.
The grass on the wide field in front of the station and stretching to both sides of it was trampled and entirely covered by a countless multitude who had for weeks been waiting for trains.
Old men in coarse gray woollen coats wandered about in the hot sun from group to group in search of news and rumors. Glum fourteen-year-old boys lay on their elbows twirling peeled twigs, as if they were tending cattle, while their small brothers and sisters scuttled about with flying shirts and pink bottoms. Their legs stretched straight in front of them, their mothers sat on the ground with babies packed into the tight shapeless bosoms of their brown peasants coats.
“All scattered like sheep as soon as the shooting began. They didn’t like it,” the stationmaster told the doctor un-sympathetically as they walked between the rows of bodies lying on the ground in front of the entrance and on the floors inside the station. “In a twinkling everybody cleared off the grass. You could see the ground again; we hadn’t seen it in four months with all this gypsy camp going on, we’d forgotten what it looked like. This is where he lay. It’s a strange thing, I’ve seen all sorts of horror in the war, you’d think I’d be used to anything. But I felt so sorry somehow. It was the senselessness of it. What had he done to them? But then they aren’t human beings. They say he was the favorite son. And now to the right, if you please, into my office. There isn’t a chance on this train, I’m afraid, they’d crush you to death. I’m putting you on a local one. We are making it up now. But not a word about it until you’re ready to get on it, they’d tear it apart before it was made up. You change at Sukhinichi tonight.”
13
When the “secret” train backed into the station from behind the railway sheds, the whole crowd poured onto the tracks. People rolled down the hills like marbles, scrambled onto the embankment, and, pushing each other, jumped onto the steps and buffers or climbed in through the windows and onto the roofs. The train filled in an instant, while it was still moving, and by the time it stood by the platform, not only was it crammed but passengers hung all over it, from top to bottom. By a miracle, the doctor managed to get into a platform and from there, still more unaccountably, into the corridor.
There he stayed, sitting on his luggage, all the way to Sukhinichi.
The stormy sky had cleared. In the hot, sunny fields, crickets chirped loudly, muffling the clatter of the train.
Those passengers who stood by the windows shaded the rest from the light. Their double and triple shadows streaked across the floor and benches. Indeed, these shadows went beyond the cars. They were crowded out through the opposite windows, and accompanied the moving shadow of the train itself.
All around people were shouting, bawling songs, quarreling, and playing cards. Whenever the train stopped, the noise of the besieging crowds outside was added to this turmoil. The roar of the voices was deafening, like a storm at sea, and, as at sea, there would be a sudden lull. In the inexplicable stillness you could hear footsteps hurrying down the platform, the bustle and arguments outside the freight car, isolated words from people, farewells spoken in the distance, and the quiet clucking of hens and rustling of trees in the station garden.
Then, like a telegram delivered on the train, or like greetings from Meliuzeievo addressed to Yurii Andreievich, there drifted in through the windows a familiar fragrance. It came from somewhere to one side and higher than the level of either garden or wild flowers, and it quietly asserted its excellence over everything else.
Kept from the windows by the crowd, the doctor could not see the trees; but he imagined them growing somewhere very near, calmly stretching out their heavy branches to the carriage roofs, and their foliage, covered with dust from the passing trains and thick as night, was sprinkled with constellations of small, glittering waxen flowers.
This happened time and again throughout the trip. There were roaring crowds at every station. And everywhere the linden trees were in blossom.
This ubiquitous fragrance seemed to be preceding the train on its journey north as if it were some sort of rumor that had reached even the smallest, local stations, and which the passengers always found waiting for them on arrival, heard and confirmed by everyone.
14
That night at Sukhinichi a porter who had preserved his pre-war obligingness took the doctor over the unlit tracks to the back of some unscheduled train that had just arrived, and put him in a second-class carriage.
Hardly had he unlocked it with the conductor’s key and heaved the doctor’s luggage inside when the conductor came and tried to throw it out. He was finally appeased by Yurii Andreievich and withdrew and vanished without a trace.
The mysterious train was a “special” and went fairly fast, stopping only briefly at stations, and had some kind of armed guard. The carriage was almost empty.
Zhivago’s compartment was lit by a guttering candle that stood on the small table, its flame wavering in the stream of air from the half-open window.
The candle belonged to the only other occupant of the compartment, a fair-haired youth who, judging by the size of his arms and legs, was very tall. His limbs seemed to be attached too loosely at the joints. He had been sprawling nonchalantly in a corner seat by the window, but when Zhivago came in he politely rose and sat up in a more seemly manner.
Something that looked like a floor cloth lay under his seat. One corner of it stirred and a flop-eared setter scrambled out. It sniffed Yurii Andreievich over and ran up and down the compartment throwing out its paws as loosely as its lanky master crossed his legs. Soon, at his command, it scrambled back under the seat and resumed its former likeness to a floor rag.
It was only then that Yurii Andreievich noticed the double-barrelled gun in its case, the leather cartridge belt, and the hunter’s bag tightly packed with game that hung on a hook in the compartment.
The young man had been out shooting.
He was extremely talkative, and, smiling amiably, at once engaged the doctor in conversation, looking, as he did so, fixedly at his mouth.
He had an unpleasant, high-pitched voice that now and then rose to a tinny falsetto. Another oddity of his speech was that, while he was plainly Russian, he pronounced one vowel, u, in a most outlandish manner, like the French u. To utter even this garbled u, he had to make a great effort, and he pronounced it louder than any other sound, accompanying it each time with a slight squeal. At moments, apparently by concentrating, he managed to correct this defect but it always came back.
“What is this?” Zhivago wondered. “I’m sure I’ve read about it, as a doctor I ought to know, but I can’t think what it is. It must be some brain trouble that causes defective speech.” The squeal struck him as so funny that he could hardly keep a straight face. “Better go to bed,” he told himself.
He climbed up onto the rack which was used as a berth. The young man offered to blow out the candle lest it keep him awake. The doctor accepted, thanking him, and the compartment was plunged into darkness.
“Shall I close the window?” Yurii Andreievich asked. “You are not afraid of thieves?”
There was no reply. He repeated his question louder, but there was still no answer.
He struck a match to see if his neighbor had gone out during the brief interval. That he had dropped off to sleep in so short a time seemed even more improbable.
He was there, however, sitting in his place with his eyes open. He smiled at the doctor, leaning over him from his berth.
The match went out. Yurii Andreievich struck another, and while it was alight repeated his question for the third time.
“Do as you wish,” the young man replied at once. “I’ve got nothing a thief would want. But perhaps leave it open. It’s stuffy.”
“What an extraordinary character!” thought Zhivago. “An eccentric, evidently. Doesn’t talk in the dark. And how distinctly he pronounced everything now, without any slur. It’s beyond me.”
15
Tired out by the events of the past week, the preparations for the trip, and the early start, the doctor expected to go to sleep the moment he had stretched comfortably, but he was mistaken. His exhaustion made him sleepless. Only at daybreak did he fall asleep.
His thoughts swarmed and whirled in the dark. But they all fell clearly into two distinct groups, as it were, two main threads that kept getting tangled and untangled.
One group of thoughts centered around Tonia, their home, and their former, settled life where everything, down to the smallest detail, had an aura of poetry and was permeated with affection and warmth. The doctor was concerned about this life, he wanted it safe and whole and in his night express was impatient to get back to it after two years of separation.
In the same group were his loyalty to the revolution and his admiration for it. This was the revolution in the sense in which it was accepted by the middle classes and in which it had been understood by the students, followers of Blok, in 1905.
These familiar, long-held ideas also included the anticipations and promises of a new order which had appeared on the horizon before the war, between 1912 and 1914, which had emerged in Russian thinking, in Russian art, in Russian life, and which had a bearing on Russia as a whole and on his own future.
It would be good to go back to that climate, once the war was over, to see its renewal and continuation, just as it was good to be going home.
New things were also in the other group of his thoughts, but how different, how unlike the first! These new things were not familiar, not led up to by the old, they were unchosen, determined by an ineluctable reality, and as sudden as an earthquake.
Among these new things was the war with its bloodshed and its horrors, its homelessness and savagery, its ordeals and the practical wisdom that it taught. So, too, were the lonely little towns to which the war washed you up, and the people you met in them. And among these new things too was the revolution—not the idealized intellectuals’ revolution of 1905, but this new upheaval, today’s, born of the war, bloody, ruthless, elemental, the soldiers’ revolution led by those professional revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks.
And among the new thoughts, too, was Nurse Antipova, stranded by the war God knows where, about whose past he knew nothing, who never blamed anyone but whose very silence seemed to be a complaint, who was mysteriously reserved and so strong in her reserve. And so was Yurii Andreievich’s honest endeavor not to love her, as wholehearted as his striving throughout his life until now to love everyone, not only his family and his friends, but everyone else as well.
The train rushed on at full speed. The head wind, coming through the open window, ruffled and blew dust on Yurii Andreievich’s hair. At every station, by night as by day, the crowds stormed and the linden trees rustled.
Sometimes carts or gigs rattled up to the station out of the darkness, and voices and rumbling wheels mingled with the rustling of trees.
At such moments Yurii Andreievich felt he understood what it was that made these night shadows rustle and put their heads together, and what it was they whispered to each other, lazily stirring their leaves heavy with sleep, like faltering, lisping tongues. It was the very thing he was thinking of, turning restlessly in his berth—the tidings of the ever-widening circles of unrest and excitement in Russia, the tidings of the revolution, of its difficult and fateful hour and its probable ultimate greatness.
16
The doctor did not wake up until after eleven. “Prince, Prince,” his neighbor was calling softly to his growling dog. To Yurii Andreievich’s astonishment, they still had the compartment to themselves; no other passenger had got in.
The names of the stations were familiar to him from childhood. They were out of the province of Kaluga and well into that of Moscow.
He washed and shaved in prewar comfort and came back to the compartment in time for breakfast, to which his strange companion had invited him. Now he had a better look at him.
What struck him most were his extreme garrulousness and restlessness. He liked to talk, and what mattered to him was not communicating and exchanging ideas but the function of speech itself, pronouncing words and uttering sounds. As he spoke he kept jumping up as if he were on springs; he laughed deafeningly for no reason, briskly rubbing his hands with contentment, and, when all this seemed inadequate to express his delight, he slapped his knees hard, laughing to the point of tears.
His conversation had the same peculiarities as the night before. He was curiously inconsistent, now indulging in uninvited confidences, now leaving the most innocent questions unanswered. He poured out incredible and disconnected facts about himself. Perhaps he lied a little; he obviously was out to impress by his extremism and by his rejection of all commonly accepted opinions.
It all reminded Zhivago of something long familiar to him. Similar radical views were advanced by the nihilists of the last century, and a little later by some of Dostoievsky’s heroes, and still more recently by their direct descendants, the provincial educated classes, who were often ahead of the capitals because they still were in the habit of going to the root of things while in the capitals such an approach was regarded as obsolete and unfashionable.
The young man told him that he was the nephew of a well-known revolutionary, but that his parents were incorregible reactionaires, real dodoes, as he called them. They had a fairly large estate in a place near the front, where he had been brought up. His parents had been at swords’ points with his uncle all their lives, but the uncle did not bear them a grudge and now used his influence to save them a good deal of unpleasantness.
His own views were like his uncle’s, the talkative man informed Zhivago; he was an extremist in everything, whether in life, politics, or art. This too reminded the doctor of Piotr Verkhovensky[11]—not so much the leftism as the frivolity and the shallowness. “He’ll be telling me he’s a futurist next,” thought Yurii Andreievich, and indeed they spoke of modern art. “Now it’ll be sport—race horses, skating rinks, or French wrestling.” And the conversation turned to shooting.
The young man had been shooting in his native region. He was a crack shot, he boasted, and if it had not been for the physical defect that had kept him out of the army he would have distinguished himself by his marksmanship. Catching Zhivago’s questioning glance, he exclaimed: “What? Haven’t you noticed anything? I thought you had guessed what was the matter with me.”
He took two cards out of his pocket and handed them to Yurii Andreievich. One was his visiting card. He had a double name; he was called Maxim Aristarkhovich Klintsov-Pogorevshikh—or just Pogorevshikh, as he asked Zhivago to call him, in honor of his uncle who bore this name.
The other card showed a table with squares, each containing a drawing of two hands variously joined and with fingers differently folded. It was an alphabet for deaf-mutes. Suddenly everything became clear. Pogorevshikh was a phenomenally gifted pupil of the school of either Hartman or Ostrogradov, a deaf-mute who had reached an incredible facility in speaking and understanding speech by observing the throat muscles of his teachers.
Putting together what he had told him of the part of the country he came from and of his shooting expedition, the doctor said:
“Forgive me if this is indiscreet; you needn’t tell me. Did you have anything to do with setting up the Zybushino republic?”
But how did you guess ... Do you know Blazheiko? Did I have anything to do with it? Of course I did!” Pogorevshikh burst forth joyfully, laughing, rocking from side to side, and frenziedly slapping his knees. And once again he launched on a long and fantastic discourse.
He said that Blazheiko had provided the opportunity and Zybushino the place for the application of his own theories. Yurii Andreievich found it hard to follow his exposition of them. Pogorevshikh’s philosophy was a mixture of the principles of anarchism and hunter’s tall stories.
Imperturbable as an oracle, he prophesied disastrous upheavals in the near future. Yurii Andreievich inwardly agreed that this was not unlikely, but the calm, authoritative tone in which this unpleasant boy was making his forecasts angered him.
“Just a moment,” he said hesitantly. “True, all this may happen. But it seems to me that with all that’s going on—the chaos, the disintegration, the pressure from the enemy—this is not the moment to start dangerous experiments. The country must be allowed to recover from one upheaval before plunging into another. We must wait till at least relative peace and order are restored.”
“That’s naïve,” said Pogorevshikh. “What you call disorder is just as normal a state of things as the order you’re so keen about. All this destruction—it’s a natural and preliminary stage of a broad creative plan. Society has not yet disintegrated sufficiently. It must fall to pieces completely, then a genuinely revolutionary government will put the pieces together and build on completely new foundations.”
Yurii Andreievich felt disturbed. He went out into the corridor.
The train, gathering speed, was approaching Moscow. It ran through birch woods dotted with summer houses. Small roofless suburban stations with crowds of vacationers flew by and were left far behind in the cloud of dust raised by the train, and seemed to turn like a carrousel. The engine hooted repeatedly, and the sound filled the surrounding woods and came back in long, hollow echoes from far away.
All at once, for the first time in the last few days, Yurii Andreievich understood quite clearly where he was, what was happening to him, and what awaited him in an hour or so.
Three years of changes, moves, uncertainties, upheavals; the war, the revolution; scenes of destruction, scenes of death, shelling, blown-up bridges, fires, ruins—all this turned suddenly into a huge, empty, meaningless space. The first real event since the long interruption was this trip in the fast-moving train, the fact that he was approaching his home, which was intact, which still existed, and in which every stone was dear to him. This was real life, meaningful experience, the actual goal of all quests, this was what art aimed at—homecoming, return to one’s family, to oneself, to true existence.
The woods had been left behind. The train broke out of the leafy tunnels into the open. A sloping field rose from a hollow to a wide mound. It was striped horizontally with dark green potato beds; beyond them, at the top of the mound, were cold frames. Opposite the field, beyond the curving tail of the train, a dark purple cloud covered half the sky. Sunbeams were breaking through it, spreading like wheel spokes and reflected by the glass of the frames in a blinding glare.
Suddenly, warm, heavy rain, sparkling in the sun, fell out of the cloud. The drops fell hurriedly and their drumming matched the clatter of the speeding train, as though the rain were afraid of being left behind and were trying to catch up.
Hardly had the doctor noticed this when the Church of Christ the Savior showed over the rim of the hill, and a minute later the domes, chimneys, roofs, and houses of the city.
“Moscow,” he said, returning to the compartment. “Time to get ready.”
Pogorevshikh jumped up, rummaged in his hunter’s bag, and took out a fat duck. “Take it,” he said. “As a souvenir. I have rarely spent a day in such pleasant company.”
Zhivago’s protests were unavailing. In the end he said: “All right, I’ll take it as a present from you to my wife.”
“Splendid, splendid, your wife,” Pogorevshikh kept repeating delightedly, as though he had heard the word for the first time, jerking and laughing so much that Prince jumped out and took part in the rejoicing.
The train drew into the station. The compartment was plunged into darkness. The deaf-mute held out the wild duck, wrapped in a torn piece of some printed poster.