Doctor Zhivago

Part Five

FAREWELL TO THE OLD

1

The little town was called Meliuzeevo. It was in the black earth region.¹ Over its roofs, like a swarm of locusts, hung the black dust raised by the troops and wagon trains that kept pouring through it. They moved from morning to evening in both directions, from the war and to the war, and it was impossible to say exactly whether it was still going on or was already over.

Each day, endlessly, like mushrooms, new functions sprang up. And they were elected to them all. Himself, Lieutenant Galiullin, and the nurse Antipova, and a few more persons from their group, all of them inhabitants of big cities, well-informed and worldly-wise people.

They filled posts in the town government, served as commissars in minor jobs in the army and in medical units, and looked upon these succeeding occupations as an outdoor amusement, like a game of tag. But more and more often they wanted to leave this tag and go home to their permanent occupations.

Work often and actively threw Zhivago and Antipova together.

2

In the rain, the black dust in the town turned to a dark brown slush of a coffee color, which covered its mostly unpaved streets.

It was not a big town. From any place in it, at each turn, the gloomy steppe, the dark sky, the vast expanses of the war, the vast expanses of the revolution opened out.

Yuri Andreevich wrote to his wife:

“The disorganization and anarchy in the army continue. Measures are being taken to improve the discipline and martial spirit of the soldiers. I made a tour of the units stationed nearby.

“Finally, instead of a postscript, though I might have written you about this much earlier—I work here alongside a certain Antipova, a nurse from Moscow, born in the Urals.

“Do you remember, at the Christmas party on the dreadful night of your mother’s death, a girl shot at a prosecutor? It seems she was tried later. As I recall, I told you then that Misha and I had seen this girl when she was still in high school, in some trashy hotel rooms we had gone to with your father, for what purpose I don’t remember, at night, in the freezing cold, during an armed uprising on Presnya, as it now seems to me. That girl is Antipova.

“I have tried several times to go home. But it is not so simple. What mainly keeps us here is not the work, which we could turn over to others without any harm. The difficulties are presented by the trip itself. The trains either don’t run at all or come so full that it is impossible to get on them.

“However, to be sure, it cannot go on like this endlessly, and therefore several people who have recovered or have left the service or been discharged, including myself, Galiullin, and Antipova, have decided at all costs to leave starting next week, and, to make taking the train easier, to leave separately on different days.

“I may arrive any day now like a bolt from the blue. However, I will try to send you a telegram.”

But even before his departure, Yuri Andreevich had time to receive a reply from Antonina Alexandrovna.

In her letter, in which the construction of the sentences was broken by sobs, and tearstains and inkblots served as periods, Antonina Alexandrovna insisted that her husband should not return to Moscow, but go straight on to the Urals after that wonderful nurse, who journeys through life accompanied by such portents and coincidences, with which her, Tonya’s, modest path in life could not be compared.

“Don’t worry about Sashenka and his future,” she wrote. “You will not have to be ashamed for him. I promise to bring him up by those same principles that you saw an example of as a child in our home.”

“You’re out of your mind, Tonya,” Yuri Andreevich rushed to reply. “What suspicions! Don’t you know, or don’t you know well enough, that you, the thought of you, and faithfulness to you and our home saved me from death and all sorts of destruction during these two horrible and devastating years of war? Anyhow, there’s no need for words. Soon we’ll see each other, our former life will begin again, everything will become clear.

“But that you could reply to me like that frightens me in another way. If I gave you cause for such a reply, maybe I am indeed behaving ambiguously, and am therefore also to blame before this woman for misleading her, and will have to apologize to her. I will do so as soon as she comes back from making the round of several nearby villages. The zemstvo, which previously existed only in provinces and districts, is now being introduced on a lower level, in village neighborhoods. Antipova went to help her acquaintance, a woman who works as an instructor in these legislative innovations.

“It is remarkable that, living in the same house with Antipova, I am unaware to this day of where her room is, and I’ve never been interested in finding out.”

3

Two main roads went east and west from Meliuzeevo. One, a forest dirt road, led to Zybushino, a grain trading post, administratively subordinate to Meliuzeevo, but far ahead of it in all respects. The other, paved with gravel, was laid across swampy meadows that dried up in the summer and went to Biriuchi, a railway junction not far from Meliuzeevo.

That June in Zybushino the independent republic of Zybushino, which lasted for two weeks, was proclaimed by the local miller Blazheiko.

The republic was supported by deserters from the 212th infantry regiment, who, weapons in hand, abandoned their positions and came through Biriuchi to Zybushino at the moment of the coup.

The republic did not recognize the authority of the Provisional Government² and separated itself from the rest of Russia. The sectarian Blazheiko, who as a young man had corresponded with Tolstoy, proclaimed a new thousand-year kingdom in Zybushino, communalized labor and property, and renamed the local administration an apostolate.

Zybushino had always been a source of legends and exaggerations. It stood in the deep forest, was mentioned in documents from the Time of Troubles,³ and in later times its environs swarmed with robbers. The prosperity of its merchants and the fantastic fertility of its soil were on everyone’s lips. Some of the beliefs, customs, and peculiarities of speech that distinguished this western sector of the front line came precisely from Zybushino.

Now the same sort of tall tales were told about Blazheiko’s chief assistant. It was maintained that he was deaf and dumb from birth, acquired the gift of speech under inspiration, and lost it again when the illumination expired.

In July the Zybushino republic fell. A unit loyal to the Provisional Government entered the place. The deserters were driven out of Zybushino and withdrew to Biriuchi.

There, beyond the tracks, for a few miles around, stood a cleared forest, with stumps sticking up overgrown with wild strawberry, stacks of old, undelivered firewood, half of which had been stolen, and the dilapidated mud huts of the seasonal woodcutters who had once worked there. It was here that the deserters lodged themselves.

4

The hospital in which the doctor had been a patient, and had then worked, and which he was now preparing to leave, was housed in the mansion of the countess Zhabrinskaya, which the owner had donated for the care of the wounded at the beginning of the war.

The two-story mansion occupied one of the best locations in Meliuzeevo. It stood at the intersection of the main street with the central square of the town, the so-called “platz,” on which soldiers formerly performed their drills and meetings now took place in the evenings.

Its position at the intersection gave the mansion good views on several sides. Besides the main street and the square, one could see the next-door neighbors’ yard—a poor provincial property, in no way different from a villager’s. One could also see the countess’s old garden behind the back wall of the house.

The mansion had never had any independent value for Countess Zhabrinskaya. Razdolnoe, a large estate in the district, belonged to her, and the house in town served only as a pied-à-terre for business visits, and also as a gathering place for guests who came to the estate from all sides in the summer.

Now there was a hospital in the house, and the owner had been arrested in Petersburg, her place of permanent residence.

Of the former staff, two curious women remained in the mansion, Mademoiselle Fleury, the old governess of the countess’s daughters (now married), and the countess’s former first cook, Ustinya.

The gray-haired and ruddy-cheeked old woman, Mademoiselle Fleury, shuffling her slippers, in a loose, shabby jacket, slovenly and disheveled, strolled about the whole hospital, where she was now on familiar terms with everyone, as once with the Zhabrinsky family, and told something or other in broken language, swallowing the endings of the Russian words in French fashion. She struck a pose, swung her arms, and at the end of her babble burst into hoarse laughter, which turned into a prolonged, irrepressible coughing.

Mademoiselle knew all about the nurse Antipova. It seemed to her that the doctor and the nurse simply must like each other. Yielding to the passion for matchmaking deeply rooted in the Latin nature, Mademoiselle was glad when she found them together, shook her finger at them meaningfully, and winked mischievously. Antipova was perplexed, the doctor was angry, but Mademoiselle, like all eccentrics, greatly valued her delusions and would not part with them for anything.

Ustinya presented a still more curious nature. She was a woman of a figure tapering awkwardly upward, which gave her the look of a brooding hen. Ustinya was dry and sober to the point of venom, but with that rationality she combined an unbridled fantasy with regard to superstitions.

Ustinya knew a great many folk charms, and never stepped out without putting a spell against fire on the stove and whispering over the keyhole to keep the unclean spirit from slipping in while she was gone. She was a native of Zybushino. They said she was the daughter of the local sorcerer.

Ustinya could be silent for years, but once the first fit came and she burst out, there was no stopping her. Her passion was standing up for justice.

After the fall of the Zybushino republic, the executive committee of Meliuzeevo launched a campaign against the anarchic tendencies coming from there. Every evening on the platz peaceful and poorly attended meetings sprang up of themselves, to which the unoccupied Meliuzeevans would trickle in, as in past times they used to sit together in summer under the open sky by the gates of the fire station. The Meliuzeevo cultural committee encouraged these meetings and sent their own or visiting activists to them in the quality of guides for the discussion. They considered the talking deaf-mute the most crying absurdity of all the tales told about Zybushino, and referred to him especially often in their exposures. But the small artisans of Meliuzeevo, the soldiers’ wives, and the former servants of the nobility were of a different opinion. The talking deaf-mute did not seem to them the height of nonsense. They defended him.

Among the disjointed cries coming from the crowd in his defense, Ustinya’s voice was often heard. At first she did not dare to come forward; womanly modesty held her back. But, gradually plucking up courage, she began ever more boldly to attack the orators, whose opinions were not favored in Meliuzeevo. Thus inconspicuously she became a real speaker from the rostrum.

Through the open windows of the mansion, the monotonous hum of voices on the square could be heard, and on especially quiet evenings even fragments of some of the speeches. Often, when Ustinya spoke, Mademoiselle would run into the room, insist that those present listen, and, distorting the words, imitate her good-naturedly:

“Raspou! Raspou! Sar’s diamon! Zybush! Deaf-mute! Trease! Trease!”⁴

Mademoiselle was secretly proud of this sharp-tongued virago. The two women had a tender attachment to each other and grumbled at each other endlessly.

5

Yuri Andreevich was gradually preparing for departure, went to homes and offices where he had to say good-bye to someone, and obtained the necessary papers.

Just then a new commissar of that sector of the front stopped in town on his way to the army. The story went that he was still nothing but a boy.

Those were days of preparation for a major new offensive. There was an effort to achieve a change of morale in the mass of soldiers. The troops were tightened up. Military-revolutionary courts were established, and the recently abolished death penalty was reinstated.⁵

Before departure the doctor had to register with the commandant, whose duties in Meliuzeevo were fulfilled by the military superior—“the district,” as he was known for short.

Ordinarily there was jostling in his quarters. There was not room enough for the babel in the front hall and the yard, and it filled half the street in front of the office windows. It was impossible to push through to the desks. In the noise of hundreds of people, no one understood anything.

On that day there was no reception. In the empty and quiet offices, the clerks, displeased by the ever more complicated procedures, wrote silently, exchanging ironic glances. From the chief’s office came merry voices, as if, having unbuttoned their tunics, they were taking some cool refreshment.

Galiullin came out to the common room, saw Zhivago, and, with a movement of the whole torso, as if preparing to break into a run, invited the doctor to share in the animation that reigned inside.

The doctor had to go to the office anyway for the superior’s signature. He found everything there in the most artistic disorder.

The village sensation and hero of the day, the new commissar, instead of proceeding to his appointed goal, turned up there, in the office, which had no relation to the vital sections of headquarters or operative questions, turned up before the administrators of the military paper kingdom, stood before them, and held forth.

“And here is another of our stars,” said the district, introducing the doctor to the commissar, who did not even glance at him, totally absorbed in himself, while the district, changing his pose only in order to sign the paper the doctor held out to him, assumed it again and, with a courteous movement of the hand, showed Zhivago to the low, soft pouffe that stood in the middle of the room.

Of all those present, only the doctor settled himself in the study like a human being. The others sat one more oddly and casually than the other. The district, his head propped on his hand, reclined Pechorin-like⁶ at the desk; facing him, his assistant heaped himself up on a bolster of the couch, tucking his legs under as if riding sidesaddle. Galiullin sat astride a reversed chair, embracing the back and laying his head on it, while the young commissar first swung himself up by the arms into the embrasure of the windowsill, then jumped down from it, and, like a spinning top, never for a moment falling silent and moving all the time, paced the office with small, rapid steps. He talked nonstop. The subject was the Biriuchi deserters.

The rumors about the commissar proved true. He was thin and slender, a still quite unfledged youth, who burned like a little candle with the loftiest ideals. He was said to be from a good family, maybe even the son of a senator, and in February had been one of the first to lead his company to the State Duma.⁷ His last name was Gintze or Gintz; they pronounced it unclearly when he and the doctor were introduced. The commissar had a correct Petersburg enunciation, as distinct as could be, with a slight hint of the Baltic.

He wore a very tight field jacket. He was probably embarrassed at being so young, and, in order to seem older, he made a wry, peevish face and put on an affected stoop. For that he thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his riding breeches and hunched his shoulders in their new, stiff epaulettes, which in fact gave his figure a simplified cavalryman’s look, so that it could have been drawn from shoulders to feet in two lines converging downwards.

“There’s a Cossack regiment stationed on the railway line several stops from here. Red, devoted. Call them in, the rebels will be surrounded, and that will be the end of it. The commander of the corps insists they should be speedily disarmed,” the district informed the commissar.

“Cossacks? Never!” the commissar flared up. “That’s some sort of 1905, some prerevolutionary reminiscence! Here we’re at opposite poles from you, here your generals have outsmarted themselves!”

“Nothing’s been done yet. It’s all just a plan, a suggestion.”

“We have an agreement with the military command not to interfere in operational instructions. I don’t cancel the Cossacks. Let it be. But I for my part will undertake the steps prompted by good sense. Do they have a bivouac there?”

“Hard to say. A camp, in any case. Fortified.”

“Excellent. I want to go to them. Show me this menace, these forest bandits. They may be rebels, even deserters, but they’re the people, gentlemen, that’s what you forget. And the people are children, you must know that, you must know their psychology. Here a special approach is needed. You must know how to touch their best, most sensitive strings, so that they begin to sound. I’ll go to them in their clearing and have a heart-to-heart talk with them. You’ll see in what exemplary order they return to their abandoned positions. Want to bet? You don’t believe me?”

“It’s doubtful. But God grant it.”

“I’ll tell them: ‘Brothers, look at me. See how I, an only son, the hope of the family, with no regrets, sacrificed my name, my position, my parents’ love, in order to gain freedom for you, the like of which no other people in the world enjoys. I did it, and so did many young men, to say nothing of the old guard of our glorious predecessors, of the hard-labor populists and the People’s Will Schlüsselburgers.⁸ Were we doing it for ourselves? Did we need that? You’re no longer rank-and-file soldiers as before, but warriors of the world’s first revolutionary army. Ask yourselves honestly, are you worthy of that lofty title? At a time when your motherland, bleeding profusely, makes a last effort to shake off the enemy that has twined around her like a hydra, you let yourselves be stupefied by a gang of obscure adventurers and turned into irresponsible riffraff, a mob of unbridled scoundrels, glutted with freedom, for whom whatever they’re given is always too little, just like that pig—sit him at a table and he’ll put his feet on it—oh, I’ll get to them, I’ll shame them!”

“No, no, it’s risky,” the district tried to object, furtively exchanging meaningful glances with his assistant.

Galiullin tried to talk the commissar out of his insane plan. He knew the daredevils of the 212th from the division their regiment belonged to, in which he had once served himself. But the commissar would not listen to him.

Yuri Andreevich kept trying all the while to get up and leave. The commissar’s naïveté embarrassed him. But the sly knowingness of the district and his assistant, two jeering and underhanded finaglers, was not much better. The foolishness and the craftiness were worthy of each other. And all of it—superfluous, nonexistent, lackluster, which life itself so longs to avoid—spewed out in a torrent of words.

Oh, how one wants sometimes to go from such giftlessly high-flown, cheerless human wordiness into the seeming silence of nature, into the arduous soundlessness of long, persistent labor, into the wordlessness of deep sleep, of true music, and of a quiet, heartfelt touch grown mute from fullness of soul!

The doctor remembered that he still faced a talk with Antipova, unpleasant in any case. He was glad of the necessity to see her, even at that price. But it was unlikely that she had come back yet. Taking advantage of the first appropriate moment, the doctor got up and inconspicuously left the office.

6

As it happened, she was already at home. The doctor was informed of her arrival by Mademoiselle, who added that Larissa Fyodorovna had come back tired, quickly eaten supper, and gone to her room, asking not to be disturbed.

“But knock at her door,” Mademoiselle advised. “She’s probably not asleep yet.”

“And how do I find her?” asked the doctor, causing unutterable astonishment in Mademoiselle with the question.

It turned out that Antipova was lodged at the end of the upstairs corridor, next to the rooms where all of Zhabrinskaya’s belongings were locked away, and where the doctor had never been.

Meanwhile it was quickly getting dark. The streets contracted. Houses and fences huddled together in the evening darkness. From the depths of the courtyards, trees came up to the windows, to the light of the burning lamps. It was a hot and sultry night. Every movement made one break into a sweat. Strips of kerosene light, falling into the yard, ran down the tree trunks in streams of dirty perspiration.

At the last step, the doctor stopped. He thought that even to knock at the door of a person tired out from traveling was awkward and importunate. It would be better to put off the talk until the next day. In distraction, which always accompanies a change of mind, he walked to the other end of the corridor. There was a window there that gave onto the neighboring courtyard. The doctor leaned out.

The night was filled with soft, mysterious sounds. Close by in the corridor, water was dripping from a washstand, measuredly, with pauses. There was whispering somewhere behind a window. Somewhere, where the kitchen garden began, beds of cucumbers were being watered, water was being poured from one bucket into another, with a clink of the chain drawing it from the well.

It smelled of all the flowers in the world at once, as if the earth had lain unconscious during the day and was now coming to consciousness through all these scents. And from the countess’s centuries-old garden, so littered with windfallen twigs and branches that it had become impassable, there drifted, as tall as the trees, enormous as the wall of a big house, the dusty, thickety fragrance of an old linden coming into bloom.

Shouts came from the street beyond the fence to the right. A soldier on leave was acting up there, doors slammed, snippets of some song beat their wings.

Beyond the crow’s nests of the countess’s garden appeared a blackish purple moon of monstrous dimensions. At first it looked like the brick steam mill in Zybushino; then it turned yellow like the Biriuchi railway pump house.

And below, in the courtyard under the window, the scent of showy four o’clocks mingled with the sweet smell of fresh hay, like tea with flowers. Earlier a cow, bought in a far-off village, had been brought here. She had been led all day, was tired, missed the herd she had left, and refused to take food from the hands of her new mistress, whom she had not yet grown used to.

“Now, now, don’t be naughty, Bossie, I’ll teach you to butt, you devil,” the mistress admonished her in a whisper, but the cow either tossed her head angrily or stretched her neck and mooed rendingly and pitifully, while beyond the black sheds of Meliuzeevo the stars twinkled, and from them to the cow stretched threads of invisible compassion, as if they were the cattle yards of other worlds, where she was pitied.

Everything around fermented, grew, and rose on the magic yeast of being. The rapture of life, like a gentle wind, went in a broad wave, not noticing where, over the earth and the town, through walls and fences, through wood and flesh, seizing everything with trembling on its way. To stifle the effect of this current, the doctor went to the platz to listen to the talk at the meeting.

7

The moon was already high in the sky. Everything was flooded by its light, thick as spilled white lead.

By the porches of the official stone buildings with columns that surrounded the square, their wide shadows lay on the ground like black carpets.

The meeting was taking place on the opposite side of the square. If one wished, one could listen and make out everything that was being said across the platz. But it was the magnificence of the spectacle that fascinated the doctor. He sat down on a bench by the gates of the fire brigade, without paying attention to the voices heard across the street, and began to look around.

From all sides, obscure little streets flowed into the square. Deep down them one could see decrepit, lopsided little houses. The mud was as impassable in these little streets as in a village. From the mud long fences of woven willow withes stuck up, looking like nets thrown into a pond or baskets for catching crayfish.

In the little houses, the glass in the frames of the open windows gleamed weak-sightedly. From the front gardens, sweaty, fair-haired corn reached into the rooms, its silks and tassels gleaming as if they were oiled. From behind the sagging wattle fences, pale, lean mallows gazed solitarily into the distance, looking like farm women whom the heat had driven out of the stuffy cottages in their nightshirts for a breath of fresh air.

The moonlit night was astounding, like mercy or the gift of clairvoyance, and suddenly, into the silence of this bright, scintillating fairy tale, the measured, clipped sounds of someone’s voice, familiar, as if just heard, began to fall. The voice was beautiful, fervent, and breathed conviction. The doctor listened and at once recognized who it was. It was the commissar Gintz. He was speaking on the square.

The local powers had probably asked him to support them with his authority, and he, with great feeling, was reproaching the Meliuzeevans for being disorganized, for succumbing too easily to the corrupting influence of the Bolsheviks, the real perpetrators, he insisted, of the Zybushino events. In the same spirit as he had spoken at the military superior’s, he reminded them of the cruel and powerful enemy and the hour of trial that had struck for the motherland. Midway through his speech, he began to be interrupted.

Requests not to interrupt the speaker alternated with shouts of disagreement. The expressions of protest became louder and more frequent. Someone who accompanied Gintz and for the moment took upon himself the task of chairman shouted that remarks from the audience were not allowed and called for order. Some demanded that a citizeness from the crowd be given the floor, others hissed and asked them not to interfere.

A woman was making her way through the crowd towards the upside-down box that served as a platform. She had no intention of getting onto the box, but having squeezed her way there, she stood beside it. The woman was known. Silence fell. The woman held the attention of the crowding people. It was Ustinya.

“Zybushino, you were saying, comrade commissar, and then concerning eyes, you were saying, we must have eyes and not fall into deception, and yet you yourself, I listened to you, only know how to carp at us with your Bolsheviks and Mensheviks—Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, that’s all we hear from you.⁹ But that there’ll be no more war and everything will be like between brothers, that’s called God’s way and not the Mensheviks’, and that the mills and factories go to the poor, that again is not the Bolsheviks, but human pity. And the deaf-mute gets thrown in our faces without you, I’m sick of hearing it. What is he to you, really! Have you got something against him? That he went around mute all the time, and then suddenly up and spoke without asking anybody? Never saw the like, eh? Well, there’s been even better! That famous she-ass, for instance. ‘Balaam, Balaam,’ she says, ‘I ask you honestly, don’t go there, you’ll be sorry.’¹⁰ Well, sure enough, he didn’t listen and went. Like you saying, ‘A deaf-mute.’ He thinks, ‘Why listen to her—she’s an ass, an animal.’ He scorned the brute. And how he repented later. But you surely know how it ended.”

“How?” someone in the public became curious.

“All right!” barked Ustinya. “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.”

“No, that’s no good. Tell us how.” The same voice would not quiet down.

“How, how—you stick like a thistle! He turned into a pillar of salt.”

“Nice try, dearie! That was Lot. Lot’s wife,”¹¹ shouts rang out. Everyone laughed. The chairman called the assembly to order. The doctor went to bed.

8

The next day he saw Antipova. He found her in the butler’s pantry. Before Larissa Fyodorovna lay a pile of laundry. She was ironing.

The pantry was one of the back rooms on the upper floor, and it gave onto the garden. In it samovars were prepared, food delivered on the dumbwaiter from the kitchen was put on plates, dirty dishes were sent down to be washed. In the pantry the material accounts of the hospital were kept. In it dishes and linen were checked against the lists, people rested during their time off and arranged meetings with each other.

The windows on the garden were open. The pantry smelled of linden blossoms, the caraway bitterness of dry twigs, as in old parks, and slightly of coal gas from the two irons, which Larissa Fyodorovna used alternately, putting now one, now the other into the ventilation pipe to fire them up again.

“Why didn’t you knock on my door yesterday? Mademoiselle told me. Anyhow, you did the right thing. I was already in bed and couldn’t have let you in. Well, hello. Be careful, don’t get yourself dirty. There’s coal spilled here.”

“You’re obviously ironing for the whole hospital?”

“No, a lot of it is mine. So you’ve been teasing me that I’ll never get out of here. But this time I’m serious. See, I’m getting ready, packing. I’ll pack up—and be off. I to the Urals, and you to Moscow. And then one day they’ll ask Yuri Andreevich: ‘Have you ever heard of the little town of Meliuzeevo?’ ‘Not that I recall.’ ‘And who is this Antipova?’ ‘I have no idea.’ ”

“Well, that’s unlikely. How was your trip around the rural areas? Is it nice in the country?”

“I can’t put it in a couple of words. How quickly the irons get cold! Give me a new one, please, if you don’t mind. There, sticking in the ventilation pipe. And this one goes back into the pipe. So. Thank you. Villages differ. It all depends on the inhabitants. In some the people are hardworking, industrious. There it’s all right. But in others there must be nothing but drunkards. There it’s desolation. It’s frightening to look at.”

“Don’t be silly. What drunkards? A lot you understand. There’s simply nobody there, the men have all been taken as soldiers. Well, all right. And how is the zemstvo, the new revolutionary one?”

“You’re not right about the drunkards, I disagree with you. And the zemstvo? There will be a long torment with the zemstvo. The instructions are inapplicable, there’s nobody to work with in the rural areas. At the moment all the peasants are interested in is the land question.¹² I went to Razdolnoe. What beauty! You should go there. In the spring there was a bit of burning and looting. A barn burned down, the fruit trees got charred, part of the façade is damaged by soot. I didn’t get to Zybushino, didn’t have time. But everywhere they assure you that the deaf-mute isn’t made up. They describe his appearance. They say he’s young, educated.”

“Last night Ustinya laid herself out for him on the platz.”

“I only just came back, and again there was a whole cartload of junk from Razdolnoe. I’ve begged them so many times to leave us in peace. As if we don’t have enough of our own! And this morning guards came from the commandant’s with a note from the district. They desperately need the countess’s silver tea service and crystal. Just for one evening, to be returned. We know their ‘to be returned.’ Half of the things will be missing. For a party, they say. Some sort of visitor.”

“Ah, I can guess who. A new frontline commissar has come. I saw him by chance. He’s preparing to take on the deserters, surround them and disarm them. The commissar is still quite green, an infant in practical matters. The locals suggest using Cossacks, but he thinks he can take them with tears. He says the people are children, and so on, and he thinks it’s all children’s games. Galiullin begs him, says don’t awaken the sleeping beast, leave it to us, but you can’t argue with such a man once something’s lodged in his head. Listen. Leave your irons for a moment and listen. There’s going to be an unimaginable scramble here soon. It’s not in our power to prevent it. How I wish you’d be gone before the mess begins!”

“Nothing will happen. You’re exaggerating. Besides, I am leaving. But it can’t be just like that: snip-snap and good luck to you. I have to turn over the inventory with a list, otherwise it will look as if I’ve stolen something. And who am I to turn it over to? That’s the question. I’ve suffered so much with this inventory, and the only reward is reproaches. I registered Zhabrinsky’s property as the hospital’s, because that was the sense of the decree. And now it comes out that I did it as a pretense, in order to keep things for the owner. How vile!”

“Ah, spit on the rugs and china, let it all perish. As if there was anything to be upset about! Yes, yes, it’s vexing in the highest degree that we didn’t see each other yesterday. I was so inspired! I’d have explained all of heavenly mechanics for you, and answered all the accursed questions!¹³ No, no joking, I really was longing to speak myself out. To tell about my wife, my son, my life. Devil take it, can’t a grown-up man talk with a grown-up woman without the immediate suspicion that there’s something ‘behind’ it? Brr! To the devil with all these fronts and behinds!

“Iron, iron, please—I mean, iron the laundry and pay no attention to me, and I’ll talk. I’ll talk for a long time.

“Just think what a time it is now! And you and I are living in these days! Only once in eternity do such unprecedented things happen. Think: the roof over the whole of Russia has been torn off, and we and all the people find ourselves under the open sky. And there’s nobody to spy on us. Freedom! Real, not just in words and demands, but fallen from the sky, beyond all expectation. Freedom by inadvertence, by misunderstanding.

“And how perplexedly enormous everyone is! Have you noticed? As if each of them is crushed by himself, by the revelation of his own heroic might.

“No, go on ironing. Keep still. You’re not bored? I’ll change the iron for you.

“I watched a meeting last night. An astounding spectacle. Mother Russia has begun to move, she won’t stay put, she walks and never tires of walking, she talks and can’t talk enough. And it’s not as if only people are talking. Stars and trees come together and converse, night flowers philosophize, and stone buildings hold meetings. Something gospel-like, isn’t it? As in the time of the apostles. Remember, in Paul? ‘Speak in tongues and prophesy. Pray for the gift of interpretation.’ ”¹⁴

“About the meetings of the trees and stars I understand. I know what you want to say. The same has happened to me.”

“The war did half of it, the rest was completed by the revolution. The war was an artificial interruption of life, as if existence could be postponed for a time (how absurd!). The revolution broke out involuntarily, like breath held for too long. Everyone revived, was reborn, in everyone there are transformations, upheavals. You might say that everyone went through two revolutions, one his own, personal, the other general. It seems to me that socialism is a sea into which all these personal, separate revolutions should flow, the sea of life, the sea of originality. The sea of life, I said, the life that can be seen in paintings, life touched by genius, life creatively enriched. But now people have decided to test it, not in books, but in themselves, not in abstraction, but in practice.”

The unexpected tremor in his voice betrayed the doctor’s incipient agitation. Interrupting her ironing for a moment, Larissa Fyodorovna gave him a serious and surprised look. He became confused and forgot what he was talking about. After a short pause, he began to talk again. Rushing headlong, he poured out God knows what. He said:

“In these days one longs so much to live honestly and productively! One wants so much to be part of the general inspiration! And then, amidst the joy that grips everyone, I meet your mysteriously mirthless gaze, wandering no one knows where, in some far-off kingdom, in some far-off land. What wouldn’t I give for it not to be there, for it to be written on your face that you are pleased with your fate and need nothing from anyone. So that somebody close to you, your friend or husband (best if he were a military man), would take me by the hand and ask me not to worry about your lot and not to burden you with my attention. And I would tear my hand free, swing, and … Ah, I’ve forgotten myself! Forgive me, please.”

The doctor’s voice failed him again. He waved his hand and with the feeling of an irreparable blunder got up and went to the window. He stood with his back to the room, propped his cheek in his hand, leaning his elbow on the windowsill, and, in search of pacification, directed his absentminded, unseeing gaze into the depths of the garden shrouded in darkness.

Going around the ironing board that rested on the table and on the edge of the other window, Larissa Fyodorovna stopped a few steps away from the doctor, behind him, in the middle of the room.

“Ah, how I’ve always been afraid of this!” she said softly, as if to herself. “What a fatal error! Stop, Yuri Andreevich, you mustn’t. Ah, look what I’ve done because of you!” she exclaimed loudly and ran to the board, where a thin stream of acrid smoke was rising from a blouse burned through under the iron forgotten on it. “Yuri Andreevich,” she went on, banging the iron down angrily on the burner. “Yuri Andreevich, be a good boy, go to Mademoiselle for a moment, drink some water, dearest, and come back here the way I’m used to you and would like to see you. Do you hear, Yuri Andreevich? I know you can do it. Please, I beg you.”

Such talks between them were not repeated again. A week later Larissa Fyodorovna left.

9

A short time later Zhivago began to prepare for the road. The night before his departure, there was a terrible storm in Meliuzeevo.

The noise of the hurricane merged with the noise of the downpour, which now fell vertically on the roofs, now, under the pressure of the shifting wind, moved down the street, its lashing torrents as if winning step by step.

Peals of thunder followed one another without pause, becoming one uniform rumbling. Frequent flashes of lightning showed the street running away into the distance, with trees bending over and running in the same direction.

During the night, Mademoiselle Fleury was awakened by an anxious knocking at the front door. Frightened, she sat up in bed and listened. The knocking did not stop.

Can it be that in the whole hospital not a soul will be found to come out and open the door, she thought, and that she alone, a wretched old woman, must do it all for them, only because nature had made her honest and endowed her with a sense of duty?

Well, all right, the Zhabrinskys were rich people, aristocrats. But the hospital is theirs, the people’s. Why did they abandon it? It would be curious to know, for instance, where the orderlies have vanished to. Everybody’s scattered, there are no directors, no nurses, no doctors. And there are still wounded in the house, two with amputated legs upstairs in the surgical section, where the drawing room used to be, and the storeroom downstairs, next to the laundry, is full of dysentery cases. And that she-devil Ustinya has gone visiting somewhere. The foolish woman could see the storm gathering, why the deuce did she have to go? Now she’s got a good excuse for staying the night.

Well, they’ve stopped, thank God, they’ve quieted down. They saw no one will open and they waved their hand and left. What the devil are they doing out in such weather? But maybe it’s Ustinya? No, she has her own key. My God, how frightening, they’re knocking again!

But, all the same, what swinishness! I suppose you can’t expect anything from Zhivago. He’s leaving tomorrow, and in his thoughts he’s already in Moscow or on his way. But what about Galiullin? How can he snore away or lie quiet, hearing such knocking, and count on her, a weak and defenseless old woman, to get up in the end and go to open the door to some unknown person, on this dreadful night, in this dreadful country?

“Galiullin!” She suddenly caught herself. “What Galiullin?” No, only half-awake could such an absurdity occur to her! What Galiullin, if even his tracks are cold? Didn’t she herself, together with Zhivago, hide him and change him into civilian clothes, and then explain about the roads and villages in the area, so he’d know where to escape to, when that dreadful lynching took place at the station and they killed Commissar Gintz, and chased Galiullin from Biriuchi as far as Meliuzeevo, shooting after him and searching for him all over town? Galiullin!

If those fellows hadn’t come rolling in, there’d be no stone left upon stone in the town. An armored division happened to be passing through. They stood up for the inhabitants and curbed the scoundrels.

The thunderstorm was weakening, moving away. The thunderclaps came from a distance, more rare and muffled. The rain stopped intermittently, but water continued to trickle down with a soft splashing from the leaves and gutters. Soundless glimmers of lightning came into Mademoiselle’s room, lit it up, and lingered there for an extra moment, as if searching for something.

Suddenly the knocking at the door, which had ceased for a long time, started again. Someone needed help and was knocking desperately and rapidly. The wind picked up again. More rain poured down.

“One moment!” Mademoiselle cried out, not knowing to whom, and frightened herself with her own voice.

An unexpected surmise dawned on her. Lowering her feet from the bed and putting on her slippers, she threw her house robe over her and ran to awaken Zhivago, so as not to feel so frightened alone. But he, too, had heard the knocking and was himself coming down to meet her with a candle. They had made the same assumptions.

“Zhivagó, Zhivagó! There’s knocking at the outside door, I’m afraid to open it by myself,” she cried in French, and added in Russian: “ ’Ave a luke. Ees Lar or Lieutenant Gaioul.”

Yuri Andreevich had also been awakened by the knocking, and thought that it must be someone they knew, either Galiullin, be hidden by something and coming back to the refuge where he could hide, or the nurse Antipova, forced by some difficulties to turn back from her journey.

In the front hall, the doctor handed Mademoiselle the candle, while he turned the key in the door and unbolted it. A gust of wind tore the door from his hand, blew out the candle, and showered them both with a cold spray of rain from outside.

“Who’s there? Who’s there? Is anybody there?” Mademoiselle and the doctor called out in turn into the darkness, but nobody answered. Suddenly they heard the former knocking in another place, from the back entrance, or, as it now seemed to them, at the window to the garden.

“It’s evidently the wind,” said the doctor. “But for the sake of a clear conscience, go to the back door anyway, to make sure, and I’ll wait here, so that we don’t cross each other, if it really is someone, and not from some other cause.”

Mademoiselle went off into the depths of the house, and the doctor went outside under the roof of the porch. His eyes, growing accustomed to the darkness, made out signs of the coming dawn.

Over the town, like halfwits, clouds raced swiftly, as if escaping pursuit. Their tatters flew so low that they almost caught in the trees leaning in the same direction, so that it looked as if someone were sweeping the sky with them, as if with bending besoms. Rain lashed at the wooden wall of the house, turning it from gray to black.

“Well?” the doctor asked Mademoiselle when she came back.

“You’re right. There’s nobody.” And she told him that she had gone around the whole house. In the butler’s pantry a window had been broken by a piece of a linden branch that struck the glass, and there were huge puddles on the floor, and it was the same in the room Lara had left behind, a sea, a veritable sea, a whole ocean.

“And here’s a shutter torn loose and beating against the window frame. You see? That’s the whole explanation.”

They talked a little more, locked the door, and went their ways to bed, both sorry that the alarm had proved false.

They had been certain that they would open the front door and the woman they knew so well would come in, wet to the skin and freezing, and they would bombard her with questions while she shook herself off. And then, having changed her clothes, she would come to dry herself by the lingering heat of the stove in the kitchen and would tell them about her countless misadventures, smoothing her hair and laughing.

They were so certain of it that, when they locked the door, the traces of their certainty remained by the corner of the house outside, in the form of the woman’s watermark or image, which continued to appear to them from around the turning.

10

The one considered to be indirectly responsible for the soldiers’ riot at the station was the Biriuchi telegraphist Kolya Frolenko.

Kolya was the son of a well-known Meliuzeevo watchmaker. He had been known in Meliuzeevo from the cradle. As a boy, he had visited someone among the Razdolnoe house staff and, under the surveillance of Mademoiselle, had played with her two charges, the countess’s daughters. Mademoiselle knew Kolya well. It was then that he had begun to understand a little French.

People in Meliuzeevo were used to seeing Kolya lightly dressed in any weather, without a hat, in canvas summer shoes, on a bicycle. Letting go of the handlebars, his body thrown back and his arms crossed on his chest, he rolled down the main street and around town and glanced at the poles and wires, checking the state of the network.

Some houses in town were connected with the station through a branch line of the railway telephone. The management of this line was in Kolya’s hands at the station control room.

There he was up to his ears in work: the railway telegraph, the telephone, and occasionally, in moments of the station chief Povarikhin’s brief absences, the signals and the block system, the apparatus for which was also in the control room.

The necessity of keeping an eye on the operation of several mechanisms at once made Kolya develop a special manner of speaking, obscure, abrupt, and full of riddles, to which Kolya resorted when he had no wish to answer someone or get into conversation. The word was that he had made too broad a use of this right on the day of the disorders.

By his omissions he had, in fact, deprived of force all of Galiullin’s good intentions in his phone calls from town, and, perhaps against his will, had given a fatal turn to the subsequent events.

Galiullin had asked to speak to the commissar, who was somewhere at the station or nearby, in order to tell him that he would soon come to join him at the clearing and to ask that he wait for him and undertake nothing without him. Kolya had refused Galiullin’s request to call Gintz to the phone, on the pretext that he had the line busy transmitting signals to the train approaching Biriuchi, while he himself was at the same time trying by hook or by crook to hold the train, which was bringing the summoned Cossacks to Biriuchi, at the previous junction.

When the troop train arrived after all, Kolya could not hide his displeasure.

The engine slowly crept under the dark roof of the platform and stopped just in front of the huge window of the control room. Kolya opened wide the heavy railway station curtains of dark blue broadcloth with railway monograms woven into the borders. On the stone windowsill stood a huge carafe of water and a thick, simply cut glass on a big tray. Kolya poured water into the glass, took several gulps, and looked out the window.

The engineer noticed Kolya and gave him a friendly nod from the cab. “Ooh, you stinking trash, you wood louse!” Kolya thought with hatred, stuck his tongue out at the engineer, and shook his fist at him. The engineer not only understood Kolya’s miming, but, by shrugging his shoulders and turning his head in the direction of the carriages, was able to convey: “What can I do? Try it yourself. He’s in charge.” “You’re trash and filth all the same,” Kolya mimed back.

They began leading the horses out of the freight cars. They balked, refusing to move. The hollow thud of hooves on the wooden gangways changed to the clanging of horseshoes against the stone of the platform. The rearing horses were led across several lines of tracks.

They ended up by two rows of discarded cars on two pairs of rusty rails overgrown with grass. The degradation of the wood, stripped of paint by the rain and rotted by worms and dampness, had restored to these broken-down cars their original kinship with the damp forest that began on the other side of the tracks, with the tinder fungus that ailed the birches, with the clouds piling up over it.

At the edge of the forest, the Cossacks mounted up on command and rode to the clearing.

The mutineers of the 212th were surrounded. Horsemen always look taller and more imposing among trees than in the open. They impressed the soldiers, though they had rifles in their dugouts. The Cossacks drew their sabers.

Inside the ring of horses, Gintz jumped onto a pile of stacked and leveled firewood and addressed a speech to the surrounded soldiers.

Again, as was usual with him, he spoke of military duty, the importance of the motherland, and many other lofty subjects. His notions met with no sympathy here. The mob was too numerous. It consisted of men who had suffered much during the war, had become coarse and weary. The words Gintz uttered had long since stuck in their ears. Four months of ingratiation from the right and the left had corrupted this crowd. The simple folk who made it up gave a cool reception to the orator’s non-Russian name and Baltic accent.

Gintz felt that he was speaking too long, and was vexed with himself, but thought he was doing it for the sake of greater accessibility to his listeners, who, instead of gratitude, paid him back with expressions of indifference and hostile boredom. Becoming more and more annoyed, he decided to address his audience in stiffer terms and make use of the threats he was keeping in reserve. Not hearing the rising murmur, he reminded the soldiers that revolutionary courts-martial had been introduced and were functioning, and demanded on pain of death that they lay down their weapons and hand over the instigators. If they did not do so, Gintz said, it would prove that they were lowdown traitors, irresponsible riffraff, conceited boors. These people were no longer accustomed to such a tone.

A roar of hundreds of voices arose. “You’ve had your say. Enough. All right,” some cried in bass voices and almost without malice. But there were hysterical outcries from the trebles overstrained with hatred. They were listened to. They shouted:

“Do you hear how he lays it on, comrades? Just like the old days! They haven’t shed their officer’s habits! So we’re the traitors! And where do you come from, Your Honor? Why dance around him? You can see, can’t you, he’s a German, an infiltrator. Hey, blue blood, show us your papers! And what are you pacifiers gaping at? Here we are, put the ropes on us, eat us up!”

But the Cossacks also had less and less liking for Gintz’s unfortunate speech. “It’s all boors and swine. The little squire!” they exchanged in whispers. First singly, then in greater numbers, they began to sheath their sabers. One after another they got off their horses. When enough of them had dismounted, they moved in disorder towards the center of the clearing to meet the 212th. Everything became confused. Fraternization began.

“You’d better quietly disappear somehow,” the worried Cossack officers said to Gintz. “Your car is near the junction. We’ll send word that it should be brought closer. Get away quickly.”

Gintz did so, but since he found it undignified to sneak off, he headed for the station without the necessary caution, almost openly. He walked in terrible agitation, forcing himself out of pride to go calmly and unhurriedly.

It was not far to the station; the forest was just next to it. At the edge, already within sight of the tracks, he looked back for the first time. Behind him walked soldiers with guns. “What do they want?” thought Gintz and quickened his pace.

His pursuers did the same. The distance between him and the chase did not change. The double wall of broken-down cars appeared ahead. Once behind them, Gintz broke into a run. The train that had delivered the Cossacks had been taken to the depot. The tracks were clear. Gintz crossed them at a run.

He made a running leap onto the high platform. At that moment the soldiers chasing him ran from behind the broken-down cars. Povarikhin and Kolya shouted something to Gintz and made signs for him to come inside the station, where they could save him.

But again the sense of honor bred over generations, urban, sacrificial, and inapplicable here, barred his way to safety. By an inhuman effort of will, he tried to control the trembling of his runaway heart. “I must call out to them: ‘Brothers, come to your senses, what kind of spy am I?’ ” he thought. “Something sobering, heartfelt, that will stop them.”

In recent months the sense of heroic deeds, of the soul’s outcry, had unconsciously become connected with rostrums and tribunes, with chairs that one could jump up on and hurl some call, something fiery, to the throng.

By the door of the station, under the signal bell, stood a tall firefighting barrel. It was tightly covered. Gintz jumped onto the lid and addressed to the approaching men several soul-wrenching words, inhuman and incoherent. The insane boldness of his address, two steps from the thrown-open doors of the station, where he could so easily have run, stunned them and rooted them to the spot. The soldiers lowered their guns.

But Gintz stepped on the edge of the lid and turned it under. One of his legs went into the water, the other hung down the side of the barrel. He wound up sitting astride the edge.

The soldiers met this clumsiness with an explosion of guffaws and the first one killed the unfortunate man with a point-blank shot in the neck, while the others rushed to stab the dead body with their bayonets.

11

Mademoiselle called Kolya on the telephone and told him to settle the doctor comfortably on the train, threatening him otherwise with disclosures that he would find unpleasant.

While answering Mademoiselle, Kolya was as usual conducting some other telephone conversation and, judging by the decimals that peppered his speech, was telegraphing something in ciphers to a third place.

“Pskov, north line, do you hear me? What rebels? What hand? What is it, Mam’selle? Nonsense, mumbo jumbo. Get off, hang up the phone, you’re bothering me. Pskov, north line, Pskov. Thirty-six comma zero zero fifteen. Ah, curse it all, the tape broke off! What? What? I don’t hear. Is that you again, Mam’selle? I told you in plain Russian, it’s impossible, I can’t. Ask Povarikhin. Nonsense, mumbo jumbo. Thirty-six … ah, the devil … Get off, don’t bother me, Mam’selle.”

And Mademoiselle was saying:

“Don’t throw dust in my eye, mumbo jumbo, Pskov, Pskov, mumbo jumbo, I see right through you and back again, you put the doctor in car tomorrow, and I won’t more speak with any murderer and little Judas-traitor.”

12

It was sultry when Yuri Andreevich left. A thunderstorm was gathering, as two days earlier.

The clay huts and geese in the settlement around the station, all scattered with spat-out husks of sunflower seeds, sat white and frightened under the immobile gaze of the black, menacing sky.

Bordering the station building was a wide clearing that stretched far to both sides. The grass on it was trampled down, and it was entirely covered by an immense crowd of people, who had spent weeks waiting for trains in the various directions each needed.

There were old men in the crowd, dressed in coarse gray kaftans, who went from group to group under the scorching sun gathering rumors and information. Silent adolescents around fourteen years old lay on their sides, propped on an elbow with a leafless switch in their hands, as if tending cattle. Their younger brothers and sisters darted underfoot, their shirts pulling up, exposing their pink bottoms. Their mothers sat on the ground, their tightly joined legs stretched out, with nursing babies swaddled crookedly under their brown homespun coats.

“They all scattered like sheep when the shooting began. Didn’t like it at all!” the stationmaster Povarikhin was saying with hostility as he and the doctor zigzagged their way among the rows of bodies lying next to each other outside the doors and inside on the floor of the station.

“The lawn was suddenly empty! We could see the ground again. What a joy! For four months we hadn’t seen it under this Gypsy camp—forgot what it looked like. Here’s where he lay. Amazing thing, I’ve seen all sorts of horrors during the war, it’s time I got used to them. But here I was seized by such pity! Above all—the senselessness. For what? What harm had he done them? Can they be human beings? They say he was the family favorite. And now to the right, here, here, this way, please, to my office. Don’t even think of getting on this train, you’ll be crushed to death. I’ll put you on another one, a local one. We’re making it up ourselves, it’s going to be formed right now. Only not a word till you get on, not to anyone! If you let it slip, they’ll tear it apart even before it’s coupled. You’ll have to change in Sukhinichi during the night.”

13

When the secret train was formed and started backing into the station from behind the depot, all the people crowded on the lawn rushed to intercept the slowly moving cars. People came rolling off the hillocks like peas and ran up the embankment. Pushing each other aside, they leaped onto the buffers and footboards in motion, while others climbed through the windows and onto the roofs of the cars. The still-moving train was filled up in no time, and when it reached the platform it was jam packed and hung from top to bottom with passengers.

By a miracle, the doctor squeezed himself onto a rear platform and then, in a still more incomprehensible way, penetrated into the corridor of the car.

And in the corridor he remained throughout the entire trip, and got to Sukhinichi sitting on his things on the floor.

The storm clouds had long since dispersed. Over the fields flooded by the burning rays of the sun, the ceaseless chirring of grasshoppers rolled from end to end, drowning out the noise of the train’s movement.

The passengers standing at the windows blocked the light for all the others. They cast long shadows, folded double and triple on the floor, the benches, the partitions. The shadows did not fit into the car. They were pushed out the windows opposite and ran skipping along the other side of the embankment, together with the shadow of the whole rolling train.

All around people jabbered, bawled songs, cursed, and played cards. At the stops, the bedlam inside was joined by the noise of the crowd besieging the train from outside. The din of voices reached the deafening level of a sea storm. And, as at sea, in the middle of a stop there would suddenly fall an inexplicable silence. One could hear hurried steps on the platform along the whole length of the train, scurrying about and arguing by the baggage car, separate words spoken by people seeing someone off in the distance, the quiet clucking of hens, and the rustling of trees in the station’s front garden.

Then, like a telegram received on the way, or like greetings from Meliuzeevo, a fragrance floated through the window, familiar, as if addressed to Yuri Andreevich. It manifested itself with quiet superiority somewhere to one side and came from a height unusual for wild or garden flowers.

The doctor could not get to the window owing to the crush. But even without looking, he could see those trees in his imagination. They probably grew quite nearby, calmly reaching towards the roofs of the cars with their spreading branches, the foliage dusty from railroad commotion and thick as night, finely sprinkled with the waxy little stars of glimmering flower clusters.

This was repeated for the whole way. Everywhere there were noisy crowds. Everywhere there were blossoming lindens.

The ubiquitous wafting of this smell seemed to precede the northbound train, like a rumor spread to all junctions, watch houses, and little stations, which the travelers found everywhere, already established and confirmed.

14

At night in Sukhinichi an obliging porter of the old stamp took the doctor to some unlit tracks and put him through the rear door of a second-class car of some train that had just arrived and did not figure on the schedule.

The porter had no sooner opened the rear door with a pass key and thrown the doctor’s things onto the platform, than he had to face a brief fight with the conductor, who immediately wanted to get rid of them, but, mollified by Yuri Andreevich, he effaced himself and vanished into thin air.

The mysterious train was of special purpose and went rather quickly, with brief stops and some sort of guard. The cars were quite vacant.

The compartment Zhivago entered was brightly lit by a guttering candle on a little table, its flame wavering in the stream of air from a half-lowered window.

The candle belonged to the sole passenger in the compartment. He was a fair-haired youth, probably very tall, judging by his long arms and legs. They flexed extremely freely at the joints, like poorly fastened component parts of folding objects. The young man was sitting on the seat by the window, leaning back casually. When Zhivago appeared, he politely rose and changed his half-reclining position to a more appropriate sitting one.

Under his seat lay something like a floor rag. Suddenly the end of the rag moved and a flop-eared hound bustled herself up and came out. She sniffed Yuri Andreevich, looked him over, and started running from corner to corner of the compartment, her legs flexing as freely as her lanky master’s when he crossed them. Soon, at the latter’s command, she bustled herself back under the seat and assumed her former look of a crumpled floor-polishing cloth.

Only then did Yuri Andreevich notice a double-barreled shotgun in a case, a leather cartridge belt, and a game bag tightly stuffed with shot birds, hanging on hooks in the compartment.

The young man was a hunter.

He was distinguished by an extreme garrulousness and with an amiable smile hastened to get into conversation with the doctor. As he did so he looked the doctor in the mouth all the while, not figuratively but in the most direct sense.

The young man turned out to have an unpleasantly high voice, at its highest verging on a metallic falsetto. Another oddity: by all tokens a Russian, he pronounced one vowel, namely the u, in a most peculiar way. He softened it like the French u or the German ü. Moreover, this defective u was very hard for him to get out; he articulated its sound more loudly than all the others, straining terribly, with a slight shriek. Almost at the very beginning, he took Yuri Andreevich aback with the following phrase:

“Only yesterday morning I was shüting wüdcock.”

At moments, when he obviously watched himself more carefully, he overcame this irregularity, but he had only to forget himself and it would creep in again.

“What is this bedevilment?” thought Zhivago. “It’s something familiar, I’ve read about it. As a doctor, I ought to know, but it’s skipped my mind. Some phenomenon of the brain that provokes a speech defect. But this mewling is so funny, it’s hard to remain serious. Conversation is utterly impossible. I’d better climb up and get in bed.”

And so the doctor did. When he began to settle himself on the upper berth, the young man asked if he should put out the candle, which might bother Yuri Andreevich. The doctor gratefully accepted the offer. His neighbor put out the light. It became dark.

The window in the compartment was half lowered.

“Shouldn’t we close the window?” asked Yuri Andreevich. “Aren’t you afraid of thieves?”

His neighbor made no reply. Yuri Andreevich repeated the question very loudly, but again the man did not respond.

Then Yuri Andreevich lit a match so as to see what his neighbor was up to, whether he had left the compartment in such a brief space of time, or was asleep, which would be still more incredible.

But no, he was sitting open-eyed in his place and smiled when the doctor hung his head down.

The match went out. Yuri Andreevich lit another and by its light repeated for the third time what he wished to ascertain.

“Do as you think best,” the hunter answered at once. “I’ve got nothing worth stealing. However, it would be better not to close it. It’s stuffy.”

“Fancy that,” thought Zhivago. “The strange fellow’s apparently used to talking only in full light. And how clearly he pronounced it all just now, without his irregularities! Inconceivable to the mind!”

15

The doctor felt broken by the events of the past week, the agitation before departure, the preparations for the road, and boarding the train in the morning. He thought he would fall asleep the moment he stretched out in a comfortable place. Not so. Excessive exhaustion made him sleepless. He dozed off only towards morning.

Chaotic as was the whirlwind of thoughts swarming in his head during those long hours, there were, essentially speaking, two spheres of them, two persistent balls, which kept winding up and then unwinding.

One sphere consisted of thoughts of Tonya, home, and the former smooth-running life, in which everything down to the smallest details was clothed in poetry and imbued with warmth and purity. The doctor worried about that life and wished it to be preserved intact, and, flying through the night on the speeding train, he longed impatiently to be back in that life after more than two years of separation.

Faithfulness to the revolution and admiration for it also belonged to that sphere. This was the revolution in the sense in which it was taken by the middle classes, and in that understanding imparted to it by the student youth of the year 1905, who worshipped Blok.

To that sphere, intimate and habitual, also belonged those signs of the new, those promises and presages, which had appeared on the horizon before the war, between the years 1912 and 1914, in Russian thought, Russian art, and Russian destiny, the destiny of all Russia and of himself, Zhivago.

After the war, he wanted to go back to that spirit, to its renewal and continuation, just as he longed to be back home after his absence.

The new was likewise the subject of his thoughts in the second sphere, but how differently, how distinctly new! This was not his own habitual new, prepared for by the old, but a spontaneous, irrevocable new, prescribed by reality, sudden as a shock.

To this new belonged the war, its blood and horrors, its homelessness and savagery. To this new belonged the trials and the wisdom of life taught by the war. To this new belonged the remote towns the war brought you to and the people you ran into. To this new belonged the revolution, not as idealized by university intellectuals in 1905, but this present-day one, born of the war, bloody, a soldiers’ revolution, reckless of everything, led by connoisseurs of this element, the Bolsheviks.

To this new belonged the nurse Antipova, flung God knows where by the war, with a life completely unknown to him, who reproached no one for anything and was almost plaintive in her muteness, mysterious in her laconism, and so strong in her silence. To this new belonged Yuri Andreevich’s honest trying with all his might not to love her, just as he had tried all his life to treat all people with love, not to mention his family and close friends.

The train raced along at full steam. The head wind coming through the lowered window tousled and blew dust in Yuri Andreevich’s hair. During the stops at night the same thing went on as during the day, the crowds raged and the lindens rustled.

Sometimes out of the depths of the night carts and gigs rolled up with a clatter to the station. Voices and the rumbling of wheels mixed with the sound of the trees.

In those moments one seemed to understand what made these night shadows rustle and bend to each other and what they whispered together, barely stirring their sleep-laden leaves, as if with thick, lisping tongues. It was the same thing Yuri Andreevich thought about as he stirred on his upper berth: the news of Russia gripped by ever-widening disturbances, the news of the revolution, the news of her fatal and difficult hour, of her probable ultimate grandeur.

16

The next day the doctor woke up late. It was past eleven. “Marquise, Marquise!” his neighbor was restraining his growling dog in a half whisper. To Yuri Andreevich’s surprise, he and the hunter remained alone in the compartment; no one had joined them on the way. The names of the stations were now familiar from childhood. The train had left the province of Kaluga and cut deep into Moscow province.

Having performed his traveling ablutions in prewar comfort, the doctor returned to the compartment for breakfast, offered him by his curious companion. Now Yuri Andreevich had a better look at him.

The distinctive features of this personage were extreme garrulousness and mobility. The stranger liked to talk, and the main thing for him was not communication and the exchange of thoughts, but the activity of speech itself, the pronouncing of words and the uttering of sounds. While talking, he bounced up and down on the seat as if on springs, guffawed deafeningly and causelessly, rubbed his hands briskly with pleasure, and when this proved insufficient to express his delight, slapped his knees with his palms, laughing to the point of tears.

The conversation resumed with all the previous day’s oddities. The stranger was astonishingly inconsistent. Now he would make confessions to which no one had prompted him; now, without batting an eye, he would leave the most innocent questions unanswered.

He poured out a whole heap of the most fantastic and incoherent information about himself. Sad to say, he probably fibbed a little. He was undoubtedly aiming at the effect of the extremity of his views and the denial of all that was generally accepted.

It was all reminiscent of something long familiar. The nihilists of the last century had talked in the spirit of such radicalism, and some of Dostoevsky’s heroes a little later, and then still quite recently their direct continuation, that is, the whole of educated provincial Russia, often going ahead of the capitals, thanks to a thoroughness preserved in the backwoods, which in the capitals had become dated and unfashionable.

The young man told him that he was the nephew of a well-known revolutionary, while his parents, on the contrary, were incorrigible reactionaries—mastodons, as he put it. They had a decent estate in one of the areas near the front. It was there that the young man had grown up. His parents had been at daggers drawn with his uncle all their lives, but the young man felt no rancor and now his influence had spared them many an unpleasantness.

He himself, in his convictions, had taken after his uncle, the garrulous subject informed him—extremist and maximalist in everything: in questions of life, politics, and art. Again there was a whiff of Petenka Verkhovensky, not in the leftist sense, but in the sense of depravity and hollow verbiage. “Next he’ll recommend himself as a Futurist,” thought Yuri Andreevich, and indeed the talk turned to the Futurists.¹⁵ “And next he’ll start talking about sports,” the doctor went on second-guessing, “horse races or skating rinks or French wrestling.” And in fact the conversation turned to hunting.

The young man said that he had just been hunting in his native region, and boasted that he was an excellent shot, and if it were not for his physical defect, which kept him from being a soldier, he would have distinguished himself in war by his marksmanship.

Catching Zhivago’s questioning glance, he exclaimed:

“What? You mean you haven’t noticed anything? I thought you’d guessed about my deficiency.”

And he took two cards from his pocket and gave them to Yuri Andreevich. One was his visiting card. He had a double last name. He was Maxim Aristarkhovich Klintsov-Pogorevshikh—or just Pogorevshikh, as he asked to be called in honor of his uncle, who called himself precisely by that name.

The other card had on it a table divided into squares showing pictures of variously joined hands with their fingers composed in various ways. It was sign language for deaf-mutes. Suddenly everything became clear.

Pogorevshikh was a phenomenally gifted pupil of either Hartmann’s or Ostrogradsky’s school, that is, a deaf-mute who had learned with incredible perfection to speak not from hearing, but from looking at the throat muscles of his teacher, and who understood his interlocutor’s speech in the same way.

Then, putting together in his mind where he was from and in what parts he had been hunting, the doctor asked:

“Forgive my indiscretion, and you needn’t answer—but, tell me, did you have anything to do with the Zybushino republic and its creation?”

“But how do you … Excuse me … So you knew Blazheiko? … I did have, I did! Of course I did!” Pogorevshikh rattled out joyfully, laughing, swaying his whole body from side to side, and slapping himself furiously on the knees. And the phantasmagoria went on again.

Pogorevshikh said that Blazheiko had been a pretext for him and Zybushino an indifferent point for applying his own ideas. It was hard for Yuri Andreevich to follow his exposition of them. Pogorevshikh’s philosophy consisted half of the theses of anarchism and half of sheer hunter’s humbug.

In the imperturbable tone of an oracle, Pogorevshikh predicted ruinous shocks in the nearest future. Yuri Andreevich inwardly agreed that they might be inevitable, but the authoritative calm with which this unpleasant boy mouthed his predictions exasperated him.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he objected timorously. “That all may be so. But in my opinion it’s not the time for such risky experiments, in the midst of our chaos and breakdown, in the face of enemy pressure. The country must be allowed to come to its senses and catch its breath after one upheaval, before venturing upon another. We must wait for some calm and order, however relative.”

“That’s naïve,” said Pogorevshikh. “What you call breakdown is as normal a phenomenon as your much-praised and beloved order. Such destruction is a natural and preliminary part of a vaster constructive project. Society has not yet broken down enough. It must fall apart completely, and then the real revolutionary power will piece it back together on totally different principles.”

Yuri Andreevich felt ill at ease. He went out to the corridor.

The train, gathering speed, raced through the Moscow outskirts. Every moment, birch groves with dachas standing close together ran up to the windows and went racing by. Narrow, roofless platforms flew past, with summer residents, men and women, standing on them, who flew far off to one side in the cloud of dust raised by the train and twirled around as on a carousel. The train gave whistle after whistle, and the empty, pipelike, hollow forest echo breathlessly carried its whistles far away.

Suddenly, for the first time in all those days, Yuri Andreevich understood with full clarity where he was, what was happening to him, and what would meet him in a little more than an hour or two.

Three years of changes, uncertainty, marches, war, revolution, shocks, shootings, scenes of destruction, scenes of death, blown-up bridges, ruins, fires—all that suddenly turned into a vast empty place, devoid of content. The first true event after the long interruption was this giddy train ride towards his home, which was intact and still existed in the world, and where every little stone was dear to him. This was what life was, this was what experience was, this was what the seekers of adventure were after, this was what art had in view—coming to your dear ones, returning to yourself, the renewing of existence.

The woods ended. The train burst from leafy thickets into freedom. A sloped clearing went off into the distance on a wide hillock rising from a ravine. It was entirely covered lengthwise with rows of dark green potato plants. At the top of the clearing, at the end of the potato field, glass frames pulled from hothouses lay on the ground. Facing the clearing, behind the tail of the moving train, taking up half the sky, stood an enormous black-purple cloud. The rays of sun breaking from behind it spread wheel-like in all directions, catching at the hothouse frames on their way, flashing on their glass with an unbearable brilliance.

Suddenly out of the cloud a heavy mushroom rain¹⁶ poured down obliquely, sparkling in the sun. It fell in hasty drops at the same tempo as the speeding train clacked its wheels and rattled its bolts, as if trying to catch up with it or afraid of lagging behind.

The doctor had barely turned his attention to that, when the cathedral of Christ the Savior appeared from beyond the hill, and the next moment—the cupolas, the roofs, the houses and chimneys of the whole city.

“Moscow,” he said, returning to the compartment. “Time to get ready.”

Pogorevshikh jumped up, began rummaging in his game bag, and chose one of the larger ducks.

“Take it,” he said. “In remembrance. I’ve spent the whole day in such pleasant company.”

No matter how the doctor protested, nothing worked.

“Well, all right,” he was forced to accept, “I’ll take it from you as a present for my wife.”

“For your wife! For your wife! A present for your wife!” Pogorevshikh joyfully repeated, as if hearing the word for the first time, and he began to twitch all over and laughed so much that Marquise came leaping out to share in his joy.

The train was approaching the platform. It became dark as night in the car. The deaf-mute handed the doctor a wild drake wrapped in a scrap of some printed proclamation.