Doctor Zhivago

Part Six

THE MOSCOW ENCAMPMENT

1

On the way, as a result of sitting motionless in a narrow compartment, it had seemed that only the train was moving, while time stood still, and that it was as yet only noon.

But night was already falling when the cab bringing the doctor and his things emerged with difficulty, at a walk, from the numberless multitude of people crowding around the Smolensky market.

It may have been so, or it may have been that layers of experience from later years were added to the doctor’s impression of that time, but afterwards, in his memory, it seemed to him that even then people bunched together only out of habit, and there was no reason for them to crowd around, because the awnings of the empty stands were lowered and not even fastened with padlocks, and there was nothing to sell on the filthy square, which was no longer swept of dirt and refuse.

And it seemed to him that even then he had seen thin, decently dressed old women and men huddled on the sidewalks, standing as a mute reproach to passersby, silently offering to sell something that no one took and no one had need of: artificial flowers, round spirit lamps for boiling coffee, with glass lid and whistle, evening gowns of black gauze, the uniforms of abolished departments.

A public of a simpler sort traded in more essential things: the prickly, quickly stale crusts of rationed black bread; the dirty, wet ends of sugarloaves; and two-ounce packets of shag tobacco cut in half through the wrapper.

And all over the market some sort of mysterious junk circulated, increasing in price as it passed through everyone’s hands.

The cab turned into one of the lanes adjacent to the square. The sun was setting behind them and hit them in the back. In front of them rumbled a drayman on his bouncing, empty cart. He raised pillars of dust that burned like bronze in the rays of the setting sun.

They finally managed to get ahead of the drayman who was blocking their way. They drove faster. The doctor was struck by the piles of old newspapers and posters torn from the houses and fences scattered everywhere on the streets and sidewalks. The wind dragged them to one side, and the hooves, wheels, and feet of those driving and walking to the other.

Soon, after several intersections, his own house appeared at the corner of two lanes. The cab stopped.

Yuri Andreevich’s breath was taken away and his heart began to beat loudly, when, getting down from the droshky, he went to the front door and rang. The bell had no effect. Yuri Andreevich rang again. When nothing came of this attempt either, he began, with increasing alarm, to ring again and again at short intervals. Only at the fourth time was there a rattle of the hook and the chain inside, and, along with the front door moving aside, he saw Antonina Alexandrovna holding it wide open. The unexpectedness left them both dumbfounded for the first moment, and they did not hear themselves cry out. But as Antonina Alexandrovna’s arm holding the door wide open presented half of a wide-open embrace, this brought them out of their dumbfoundedness, and they threw themselves madly onto each other’s necks. A moment later they both began talking at once, interrupting each other.

“First of all, is everyone well?”

“Yes, yes, don’t worry. Everything’s all right. I wrote foolish things to you. Forgive me. But we’ll have to talk. Why didn’t you send a telegram? Markel will carry your things. Ah, I understand, you got alarmed because it wasn’t Egorovna who opened the door? Egorovna’s in the country.”

“And you’ve lost weight. But so young and slender! I’ll go and dismiss the cabby.”

“Egorovna went to get flour. The rest have been let go. Now there’s only one new girl, you don’t know her, Nyusha, to take care of Sashenka, and no one else. Everyone’s been told you’d be coming, they’re all impatient. Gordon, Dudorov, everyone.”

“How’s Sashenka?”

“He’s all right, thank God. He just woke up. If you hadn’t just come from the road, we could go to him now.”

“Is papa home?”

“Didn’t we write to you? He’s at the district duma from morning till late at night. As chairman. Yes, imagine. Did you pay the cabby? Markel! Markel!”

They were standing with the wicker hamper and suitcase in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking the way, and the passersby, going around them, looked them up and down and gaped for a long time at the departing cab and the wide-open front door, waiting to see what would happen next.

Meanwhile Markel, in a waistcoat over a calico shirt, with his porter’s cap in his hand, came running from the gateway to his young masters, shouting as he ran:

“Heavens above, can it be Yurochka? Well, of course! Here he is, our little falcon! Yuri Andreevich, light of our lives, you haven’t forgotten us who pray for you, you’ve kindly come to visit your own fireside! And what do you all want? Eh? What’s there to see?” he snarled at the curious ones. “Move on, my worthies. Bugging your eyes out!”

“Hello, Markel, let me embrace you. Do put your cap on, you funny man. What’s the good news? How are your wife and daughters?”

“They’re doing all right. Growing apace. Thanks be for that. As for news—while you’ve been about your mighty deeds there, you see, we haven’t let things slide either. We’ve got such pot-housing and bedlant going on, it makes the devils sick, brother, can’t figure out what’s what! Streets not swept, houses and roofs not repaired, bellies clean as in Lent, without annexates and contributses.”¹

“I’ll complain about you to Yuri Andreevich, Markel. He’s always like this, Yurochka. I can’t bear his stupid tone. And of course he’s trying hard for your sake, thinking to please you. But meanwhile he keeps his own counsel. Enough, enough, Markel, don’t justify yourself. You’re a shady person, Markel. It’s time you got smart. Seems you don’t live with grain dealers.”

When Markel had taken the things to the entryway and slammed the front door, he went on softly and confidingly:

“Antonina Alexandrovna’s cross with me, I could hear just now. And it’s always like that. You, Markel, she says, are all black inside, same as soot in the chimney. Now, she says, not just some little child, now maybe even pugs or lapdogs are learning a bit of sense. There’s no disputing that, of course, only, Yurochka, maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not, but there’s knowing people saw a book, some Mason cometh, a hundred and forty years it lay under a stone, and now such is my opinion, we’ve been sold, Yurochka, sold for a penny, for a copper penny, for a whiff of tobacco. Look, Antonina Alexandrovna won’t let me say a word, see, she’s waving me away again.”

“What else can I do? Well, all right. Put the things down and, thank you, you can go, Markel. If need be, Yuri Andreevich will send for you again.”

2

“Alone at last, and good riddance. Trust him, go ahead. It’s sheer clowning. With others he keeps playing the little fool, but in secret he’s got his knife sharpened just in case. Though he hasn’t decided for whom yet, poor orphan.”

“No, you’re going too far! I think he’s simply drunk, and so he plays the buffoon, that’s all.”

“And tell me, when is he ever sober? Ah, to hell with him, really. My fear is that Sashenka may fall asleep again. If it weren’t for that typhus on the railways … Do you have lice?”

“I don’t think so. I traveled in comfort, like before the war. Though maybe I should wash a little? Slapdash, anyhow. And later more thoroughly. But where are you going? Why not through the drawing room? Do you go upstairs another way now?”

“Ah, yes! You don’t know anything. Papa and I thought and thought, and gave part of the downstairs to the Agricultural Academy. Otherwise in winter we won’t be able to heat it ourselves. And there’s more than enough room upstairs as well. We offered it to them. So far they haven’t accepted. They have all sorts of scientific rooms here, herbariums, seed collections. If only they don’t attract rats. It’s grain, after all. But so far they’ve kept the rooms neat. It’s now known as living space. This way, this way. How slow-witted you are! Around by the back stairs. Understand? Follow me, I’ll show you.”

“You did very well to give up the rooms. I worked in a hospital that was also stationed in a manor house. Endless suites, parquet intact in some places. Palm trees in tubs spread their fingers over the cots at night like phantoms. Seasoned soldiers, wounded in battle, would get frightened and cry out on waking up. Not quite normal ones, though—shell-shocked. The palm trees had to be taken away. I mean to say that there was, in fact, something unhealthy in the life of well-to-do people. No end of superfluity. Superfluous furniture and superfluous rooms in the houses, superfluous refinement of feelings, superfluous expressions. You did very well to make room. But it’s not enough. We must do more.”

“What have you got sticking out of that package? A bird’s beak, a duck’s head. How beautiful! A wild drake! Where did you get it? I can’t believe my eyes! These days it’s a whole fortune!”

“It was given to me on the train. A long story, I’ll tell you later. What’s your advice, shall I unwrap it and leave it in the kitchen?”

“Yes, of course. I’ll send Nyusha now to pluck it and gut it. There are predictions of all sorts of horrors towards winter—hunger, cold.”

“Yes, there’s talk about it everywhere. Just now I was looking out the window of the train and thinking. What can be higher than peace in the family and work? The rest isn’t in our power. It’s apparently true that there are misfortunes in store for many people. Some think of saving themselves in the south, in the Caucasus, of trying to get somewhere further away. That’s not in my rule book. A grown-up man must grit his teeth and share the fate of his native land. In my opinion, that’s obvious. You are a different matter. How I’d like to protect you from calamities, to send you to some safer place, to Finland or somewhere. But if we stand for half an hour on each step like this, we’ll never get upstairs.”

“Wait. Listen. There’s news. And what news! I forgot. Nikolai Nikolaevich has come.”

“What Nikolai Nikolaevich?”

“Uncle Kolya.”

“Tonya! It can’t be! How on earth?”

“Well, so it is. From Switzerland. In a roundabout way by London. Through Finland.”

“Tonya! You’re not joking? Have you seen him? Where is he? Can’t we get him here at once, this minute?”

“Such impatience! He’s outside the city in someone’s dacha. Promised to come back the day after tomorrow. He’s very changed, you’ll be disappointed. Got stuck and Bolshevized passing through Petersburg. Papa argues with him till he’s hoarse. But why, indeed, do we stop at every step? Come on. So you’ve also heard that there’s nothing good coming, only difficulties, dangers, uncertainty?”

“I think so myself. Well, what then. We’ll fight. It’s not necessarily the end for everybody. Let’s see how others do.”

“They say we’ll be without firewood, without water, without light. Money will be abolished. There will be no supplies. And again we’ve stopped. Come on. Listen. They praise the flat cast-iron stoves from a workshop on the Arbat. You can cook supper on a fire of newspapers. I’ve got the address. We should buy one before they’re all snapped up.”

“Right. Let’s buy one. Smart girl, Tonya! But Uncle Kolya, Uncle Kolya! Just think! I can’t get over it!”

“Here is my plan. We’ll choose some out-of-the-way corner upstairs and live there with papa, Sashenka, and Nyusha, say in two or three rooms, connecting, of course, somewhere at the end of the floor, and give up the rest of the house completely. Close ourselves in, as if from the street. We’ll put one of those cast-iron stoves in the middle room, with a pipe through the window. The laundry, the cooking, dinners, receiving guests, will all be done there, to justify the heating, and, who knows, maybe, God willing, we’ll survive the winter.”

“What else? Of course we’ll survive. Beyond any doubt. You’ve thought it out excellently. Good girl. And you know what? Let’s celebrate our acceptance of your plan. We’ll roast my duck and invite Uncle Kolya to the housewarming.”

“Splendid. And I’ll ask Gordon to bring some alcohol. He gets it from some laboratory. And now look. Here’s the room I was talking about. Here’s what I’ve chosen. Do you approve? Put the suitcase down and go back for the wicker hamper. Besides uncle and Gordon, we can also invite Innokenty and Shura Schlesinger. You don’t object? You haven’t forgotten where our bathroom is? Spray yourself with something disinfecting. And I’ll go to Sashenka, send Nyusha downstairs, and when I can, I’ll call you.”

3

The main news for him in Moscow was this boy. Sashenka had only just been born when Yuri Andreevich was called up. What did he know about his son?

Once, when he was already mobilized, Yuri Andreevich came to the clinic to visit Tonya before his departure. He came at the moment when the babies were being fed. They would not let him see her.

He sat down to wait in the anteroom. Just then the far-off children’s corridor, which went at right angles to the delivery corridor, and along which the mothers’ rooms were located, was filled with a weeping chorus of ten or fifteen infant voices, and the nurses, so as not to expose the swaddled newborn babies to the cold, hurriedly began carrying them under their arms, two at a time, like big shopping parcels, to their mothers to be fed.

“Wah, wah,” the babies squealed on one note, almost without feeling, as if performing a duty, and only one voice stood out from this unison. The infant also cried “wah, wah,” and also without a trace of suffering, but, as it seemed, not by obligation, but with some sort of bass-voiced, deliberate, sullen hostility.

Yuri Andreevich had already decided then to call his son Alexander, in honor of his father-in-law. For no apparent reason he imagined that it was his boy who was crying like that, because it was a weeping with a physiognomy, already containing the future character and destiny of the person, a weeping with a tone color that included in itself the name of the boy, the name Alexander, as Yuri Andreevich imagined.

Yuri Andreevich was not mistaken. As it turned out later, that had indeed been Sashenka crying. That was the first thing he knew about his son.

His next acquaintance with him Yuri Andreevich drew from photographs, in letters sent to him at the front. In them a merry, chubby, pretty boy with a big head and pursed lips stood bowlegged on a spread-out blanket and, raising both arms, seemed to be doing a squatting dance. He was one year old then, he was learning to walk; now he was almost two and was beginning to talk.

Yuri Andreevich picked the suitcase up from the floor, undid the straps, and laid it on a card table by the window. What room was this before? The doctor did not recognize it. Tonya must have taken the furniture out or hung some new wallpaper in it.

The doctor opened the suitcase in order to take out his shaving kit. A bright full moon appeared between the columns of the church bell tower that rose up just opposite the window. When its light fell into the suitcase on the linen, books, and toilet articles lying on top, the room lit up somehow differently, and the doctor recognized it.

It was a vacated storeroom of the late Anna Ivanovna. In former times, she used to pile broken tables and chairs and unnecessary old waste paper in it. Here was her family archive; here, too, were the trunks in which winter things were put away for the summer. When the late woman was alive, every corner of the room was heaped up to the ceiling, and ordinarily no one was allowed into it. But for big holidays, on days of crowded children’s gatherings, when they were allowed to horse around and run all over the upper floor, this room, too, was unlocked, and they played robbers in it, hid under the tables, painted their faces with burnt cork, and dressed up in costumes.

For some time the doctor stood recalling all this, and then he went down to the entryway for the wicker hamper he had left there.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Nyusha, a timid and bashful girl, squatting down, was plucking the duck over a spread-out newspaper in front of the stove. At the sight of Yuri Andreevich with a heavy thing in his hands, she turned bright red, straightened up in a supple movement, shaking off the feathers stuck to her apron, and, having greeted him, offered her help. But the doctor thanked her and said he would carry the hamper himself.

He had just entered Anna Ivanovna’s former storeroom, when, from two or three rooms away, his wife called to him:

“You can come, Yura!”

He went to Sashenka.

The present nursery was situated in his and Tonya’s former schoolroom. The boy in the little bed turned out to be not at all as pretty as the photos portrayed him, but on the other hand he was the very image of Yuri Andreevich’s mother, the late Marya Nikolaevna Zhivago, a striking copy of her, resembling her more than any of the surviving portraits.

“This is papa, this is your papa, wave to papa,” Antonina Alexandrovna kept saying, as she lowered the side of the bed so that the father could more easily embrace the boy and pick him up.

Sashenka allowed the unfamiliar and unshaven man, who probably frightened and repelled him, to come close, and when he bent down, abruptly stood up, clutched his mother’s blouse, swung and angrily slapped him in the face. His own boldness so terrified Sashenka that he immediately threw himself onto his mother’s breast, buried his face in her dress, and burst into bitter, inconsolable child’s tears.

“Pooh, pooh,” Antonina Alexandrovna chided him. “You mustn’t do that, Sashenka. Papa will think Sasha bad, Sasha no-no. Show papa how you kiss. Kiss him. Don’t cry, you mustn’t cry, what is it, silly?”

“Leave him alone, Tonya,” the doctor asked. “Don’t torment him, and don’t be upset yourself. I know what kind of foolishness gets into your head. That it’s not by chance, that it’s a bad sign. It’s all such nonsense. And so natural. The boy’s never seen me. Tomorrow he’ll get used to me, there’ll be no tearing him away from me.”

But he himself left the room quite downcast, with a sense of foreboding.

4

In the course of the next few days it became clear how alone he was. He did not blame anyone for that. Evidently he himself had wanted it and achieved it.

His friends had become strangely dull and colorless. None of them had held on to his own world, his own opinion. They were much brighter in his memories. Apparently he had overestimated them earlier.

As long as the order of things had allowed the well-to-do to be whimsical and eccentric at the expense of the deprived, how easy it had been to mistake for a real face and originality that whimsicality and the right to idleness which the minority enjoyed while the majority suffered!

But as soon as the lower strata arose and the privileges of the upper strata were abolished, how quickly everyone faded, how unregretfully they parted with independent thinking, which none of them, evidently, had ever had!

Now the only people who were close to Yuri Andreevich were those without phrases and pathos—his wife and father-in-law, and two or three fellow doctors, humble toilers, ordinary workmen.

The evening with the duck and the alcohol had taken place in its time, as planned, on the second or third day after his arrival, once he had had time to see everyone invited, so that it was not their first meeting.

The fat duck was an unheard-of luxury in those already hungry times, but there was no bread to go with it, and that made the magnificence of the food pointless, so that it was even irritating.

Gordon brought the alcohol in a pharmaceutical bottle with a ground-glass stopper. Alcohol was a favorite medium of exchange for black marketeers. Antonina Alexandrovna did not let the bottle out of her hands and diluted the alcohol in small quantities, as it was needed, by inspiration, making it now too strong, now too weak. It turned out that an uneven drunkenness from changing concentrations was much worse than from a strong but consistent one. That, too, was annoying.

The saddest thing of all was that their party represented a deviation from the conditions of the time. It was impossible to imagine that in the houses across the lane people were eating and drinking in the same way at such an hour. Beyond the window lay mute, dark, hungry Moscow. Her food stores were empty, and people had even forgotten to think of such things as game and vodka.

And thus it turned out that the only true life is one that resembles the life around us and drowns in it without leaving a trace, that isolated happiness is not happiness, so that a duck and alcohol, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are even not alcohol and a duck at all. That was the most distressing thing.

The guests also brought on joyless reflections. Gordon had been fine as long as he had thought heavily and explained things morosely and incoherently. He had been Yuri Andreevich’s best friend. He had been liked in high school.

But now he had come to dislike himself and had begun to introduce unfortunate corrections in his moral image. He bucked himself up, played the merry fellow, told stories all the time with a pretense to wit, and often said “How entertaining” and “How amusing”—words not in his vocabulary, because Gordon had never understood life as a diversion.

Before Dudorov’s arrival he told a funny—as it seemed to him—story about Dudorov’s marriage, which circulated among friends. Yuri Andreevich did not know it.

It turned out that Dudorov had been married for about a year, and then separated from his wife. The unlikely salt of the adventure consisted in the following.

Dudorov had been drafted into the army by mistake. While he served and waited for the misunderstanding to be clarified, he was most often on punishment duty for gawkishness and for not saluting officers in the street. Long after he was discharged, his arm would jerk up at the sight of an officer, and he went around as if dazzled, seeing epaulettes everywhere.

In that period, he did everything out of place, committed various blunders and false steps. Precisely at that time he supposedly made the acquaintance, on a Volga landing, of two girls, sisters, who were waiting for the same boat, and, as if absentmindedly, owing to the multitude of officers flashing about, with vestiges of his soldierly saluting still alive, not watching himself, he fell in love by oversight and hastily made the younger sister a proposal. “Amusing, isn’t it?” asked Gordon. But he had to cut short his description. The voice of the story’s hero was heard outside the door. Dudorov came into the room.

With him the opposite change had taken place. The former unstable and extravagant featherbrain had turned into a concentrated scholar.

When he was expelled from school in his youth for participating in the preparation of a political escape, he spent some time wandering through various art schools, but in the end washed up on the classical shore. Dudorov finished university later than his peers, during wartime, and was kept on in two departments, Russian and general history. For the first he was writing something about the land policy of Ivan the Terrible, for the second some research about Saint-Just.²

He now reasoned about everything amiably, in a low voice, as if he had a cold, staring dreamily at one spot, and not raising or lowering his eyes, as one reads a lecture.

By the end of the evening, when Shura Schlesinger burst in with her attacks, and everyone, heated up enough without that, was shouting simultaneously, Innokenty, whom Yuri Andreevich had addressed formally since their schooldays, asked him several times:

“Have you read War and Peace and The Backbone Flute?”³

Yuri Andreevich had long since told him what he thought on the subject, but Dudorov had not heard him because of the rousing general argument, and therefore, a little later, he asked once more:

“Have you read The Backbone Flute and Man?”

“But I answered you, Innokenty. It’s your fault if you didn’t hear me. Well, have it your way. I’ll say it again. I’ve always liked Mayakovsky. It’s some sort of continuation of Dostoevsky. Or, more rightly, it’s lyric verse written by one of his young, rebellious characters, like Ippolit, Raskolnikov, or the hero of The Adolescent.⁴ Such all-devouring force of talent! How it’s said once and for all, implacably and straight out! And above all, with what bold sweep it’s all flung in the face of society and somewhere further out into space!”

But the big hit of the evening was certainly the uncle. Antonina Alexandrovna was mistaken in saying that Nikolai Nikolaevich was at a dacha. He came back on the day of his nephew’s arrival and was in town. Yuri Andreevich had already seen him two or three times and had managed to talk a lot with him, to laugh a lot, to “oh” and “ah” a lot.

Their first meeting took place in the evening of a gray, overcast day. Light rain drizzled down in a fine watery dust. Yuri Andreevich came to Nikolai Nikolaevich’s hotel room. Hotels were already accepting people only at the insistence of the city authorities. But Nikolai Nikolaevich was known everywhere. He still had his old connections.

The hotel gave the impression of a madhouse abandoned by its fleeing administration. Emptiness, chaos, the rule of chance on the stairways and corridors.

Into the big window of the untidied room gazed the vast, peopleless square of those mad days, somehow frightening, as if it had been dreamed of in sleep at night, and was not in fact lying before their eyes under the hotel window.

It was an astounding, unforgettable, portentous meeting! The idol of his childhood, the ruler of his youthful thoughts, stood before him again, alive, in the flesh.

Gray hair was very becoming to Nikolai Nikolaevich. His loose foreign suit fitted him well. He was still very young for his age and handsome to look at.

Of course, he lost much next to the enormity of what was going on. Events overshadowed him. But it had never occurred to Yuri Andreevich to measure him with such a measure.

He was surprised by Nikolai Nikolaevich’s calmness, by the cool, bantering tone in which he talked on political themes. His social bearing exceeded Russian possibilities of the day. This feature bespoke a newcomer. It struck the eye, seemed old-fashioned, and caused a certain awkwardness.

Ah, it was not at all that, not that which filled the first hours of their meeting, made them throw themselves into each other’s arms, weep, and, breathless with excitement, interrupt the rush and fervor of their initial conversation with frequent pauses.

This was a meeting of two creative characters, bound by family ties, and, though the past arose and began to live a second life, memories came in a flood, and circumstances surfaced that had occurred during their time of separation; still, as soon as the talk turned to what was most important, to things known to people of a creative cast, all ties disappeared except that single one, there was neither uncle nor nephew, nor any difference in age, and there remained only the closeness of element to element, energy to energy, principle to principle.

Over the last decade, Nikolai Nikolaevich had had no occasion to speak of the fascination of authorship and the essence of the creative vocation in such conformity with his own thoughts and so deservedly apropos as now. On the other hand, Yuri Andreevich had never happened to hear opinions that were so perceptively apt and so inspiringly captivating as this analysis.

The two men constantly exclaimed and rushed about the room, clutching their heads from the faultlessness of each other’s conjectures, or went to the window and silently drummed on the glass with their fingers, amazed at the proofs of mutual understanding.

So it was at their first meeting, but later the doctor saw Nikolai Nikolaevich several times in company, and among people he was different, unrecognizable.

He was aware of being a visitor in Moscow and had no wish to part with that awareness. Whether he considered Petersburg or some other place his home remained unclear. He was flattered by the role of political fine talker and society charmer. He may have imagined that political salons would be opened in Moscow as in Paris at Mme Roland’s before the Convention.⁵

He called on his lady friends, hospitable dwellers in quiet Moscow lanes, and most sweetly mocked them and their husbands for their halfway thinking and backwardness, for the habit of judging everything by their own parochial standards. And he now flaunted his newspaper erudition, just as he once had with the Apocrypha and Orphic texts.

It was said that he had left a new young passion behind in Switzerland, half-finished business, a half-written book, and that he would merely dip himself into the stormy whirlpool of the fatherland, and then, if he came up unharmed, would flit off to his Alps again and be seen no more.

He was for the Bolsheviks and often mentioned two left SR names⁶ as being of one mind with him: the journalist writing under the pseudonym of Miroshka Pomor, and the essayist Sylvia Coterie.

Alexander Alexandrovich grumblingly reproached him:

“It’s simply dreadful how low you’ve sunk, Nikolai Nikolaevich! These Miroshkas of yours. What a pit! And then you’ve got this Lydia Could-be.”

“Coterie,” Nikolai Nikolaevich corrected. “And it’s Sylvia.”

“Well, it’s all the same. Could-be or Potpourri, we won’t stick at words.”

“Sorry, but all the same it’s Coterie,” Nikolai Nikolaevich patiently insisted. He and Alexander Alexandrovich exchanged such speeches as:

“What are we arguing about? It’s simply a shame to have to demonstrate such truths. It’s like ABC. The main mass of people have led an unthinkable existence for centuries. Take any history book. Whatever it’s called, feudalism, or serfdom, or capitalism and factory industry, the unnaturalness and injustice of such an order have long been noted, and the revolution has long been prepared that will lead the people towards the light and put everything in its place.

“You know that a partial renovation of the old is unsuitable here, what’s needed is to break it radically. Maybe that will cause the building to collapse. Well, what of it? Just because it’s frightening, it doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. It’s a question of time. How can you argue against that?”

“Eh, that’s not the point. I’m not talking about that, am I?” Alexander Alexandrovich would get angry and the argument would flare up.

“Your Potpourris and Miroshkas are people without conscience. They say one thing and do another. And then, too, where’s the logic here? There’s no coherence. No, wait, I’ll show you right now.”

And he would start looking for some magazine with a contrary article, pulling open his desk drawers and slamming them shut, and rousing his eloquence with this noisy fussing about.

Alexander Alexandrovich liked to be hampered by something when he talked, so that the impediment would justify his mumbling pauses, his hems and haws. Loquaciousness would come over him while he was searching for something he had lost, for instance, when he was looking for his second galosh in the semidarkness of the front hall, or when he was standing on the bathroom threshold with a towel over his shoulder, or as he was passing a heavy platter across the table, or while he was pouring glasses of wine for his guests.

Yuri Andreevich listened to his father-in-law with delight. He adored the old Moscow singsong speech he knew so well, with the Gromekos’ soft, slightly guttural rs, like a cat’s purring.

Alexander Alexandrovich’s upper lip with its trim little mustache protruded slightly over the lower one. The bow tie stood out on his chest in the same way. There was something in common between the lip and the tie, and it lent Alexander Alexandrovich a certain touching, trustfully childish quality.

Late at night, just before the guests’ departure, Shura Schlesinger appeared. She came straight from some meeting, in a jacket and worker’s visored cap, walked into the room with resolute strides, shook everyone’s hand in turn, and in the same motion abandoned herself to reproaches and accusations.

“Hello, Tonya. Hello, Sanechka. Anyhow it’s swinishness, you must agree. I hear from everywhere, he’s here, the whole of Moscow is talking about it, and I’m the last to learn it from you. Well, to hell with you. Obviously, I don’t deserve it. Where is he, the long-awaited one? Let me through. You’re standing around him like a wall. Well, hello! Good for you, good for you. I’ve read it. I don’t understand a thing, but it’s brilliant. You can see it straight off. Hello, Nikolai Nikolaevich. I’ll come back to you at once, Yurochka. I must have a big, special talk with you. Hello, young people. Ah, Gogochka, you’re here, too? Goosey Goosey Gander, whither do you wander?”

The last exclamation referred to the Gromekos’ distant relation Gogochka, a zealous admirer of all the rising powers, who for being silly and laughter-prone was known as Goosey, and for being tall and skinny—the Tapeworm.

“So you’re all eating and drinking here? I’ll catch up with you right away. Ah, ladies and gentlemen! You know nothing, you suspect nothing! What’s going on in the world! Such things are happening! Go to some real local meeting with nonfictional workers, with nonfictional soldiers, not out of books. Try to make a peep there about war to a victorious conclusion. You’ll get your victorious conclusion!⁷ I was just listening to a sailor! Yurochka, you’d go out of your mind! Such passion! Such integrity!”

Shura Schlesinger was interrupted. They all shouted with no rhyme or reason. She sat down beside Yuri Andreevich, took him by the hand, and, bringing her face close to his, so as to outshout the others, shouted without raising or lowering her voice, as through a speaking trumpet:

“Come with me some day, Yurochka. I’ll show you the people. You must, you must touch the earth, remember, like Antaeus. Why are you goggling your eyes? It seems I surprise you? I’m an old warhorse, an old Bestuzhevist,⁸ didn’t you know, Yurochka? I’ve known preliminary detention, I’ve fought at the barricades. Of course! What did you think? Oh, we don’t know the people! I’ve come straight from there, from the thick of them. I’m setting up a library for them.”

She had already taken a drop and was obviously getting tipsy. But Yuri Andreevich also had a clamor in his head. He did not notice how Shura Schlesinger turned up at one end of the room and he at the other, at the head of the table. He was standing and, by all tokens, beyond his own expectations, speaking. He did not obtain silence all at once.

“Ladies and gentlemen … I want … Misha! Gogochka! … But what else can I do, Tonya, when they don’t listen? Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to say a couple of words. Something unheard-of, something unprecedented is approaching. Before it overtakes us, here is my wish for you. When it comes, God grant that we do not lose each other and do not lose our souls. Gogochka, you can shout hurrah afterwards. I haven’t finished. Stop talking in the corners and listen carefully.

“By the third year of the war a conviction has been formed in the people that sooner or later the boundary between the front and the rear will be effaced, the sea of blood will come to everyone and flood those who sat it out and entrenched themselves. That flood is the revolution.

“In the course of it, it might seem to you, as to us at the war, that life has ceased, everything personal is over, nothing happens in the world any more except killing and dying, and if we survive till there are notes and memoirs of this time, and we read those recollections, we will realize that in these five or ten years we have lived through more than some do in a whole century.

“I don’t know if the people themselves will rise and move like a wall, or if everything will be done in their name. An event of such enormity does not call for dramatic proofs. I’ll believe it without that. It’s petty to rummage around for the causes of cyclopean events. They don’t have any. Domestic squabbles have their genesis, and after so much pulling each other’s hair and smashing of dishes, no one can figure out who first began it. But everything truly great is without beginning, like the universe. It does not emerge, but is suddenly there, as if it always existed or fell from the sky.

“I also think that Russia is destined to become the first realm of socialism since the existence of the world. When that happens, it will stun us for a long time, and, coming to our senses, we will no longer get back the memory we have lost. We will forget part of the past and will not seek explanations for the unprecedented. The new order will stand around us, with the accustomedness of the forest on the horizon or the clouds over our heads. It will surround us everywhere. There will be nothing else.”

He said something more and by then had sobered up completely. But, as before, he did not hear very well what was being said around him, and his answers were beside the point. He saw manifestations of general love for him, but was unable to drive away the sorrow that made him not himself. And so he said:

“Thank you, thank you. I see your feelings. I don’t deserve them. But you shouldn’t love so sparingly and hurriedly, as if fearing you’ll have to love more strongly later.”

They all laughed and applauded, taking it for a deliberate witticism, while he did not know where to escape from the sense of impending misfortune, from the awareness of his powerlessness over the future, despite all his thirst for the good and capacity for happiness.

The guests were leaving. They all had long faces from fatigue. Yawning opened and closed their jaws, making them look like horses.

As they were saying good-bye, they drew the window curtain aside. Threw open the window. A yellowish dawn appeared, a wet sky covered with dirty, sallow clouds.

“There must have been a thunderstorm while we were blathering,” somebody said.

“I got caught in the rain on my way here. Barely made it,” confirmed Shura Schlesinger.

In the deserted and still-dark lane they could hear the sound of drops dripping from the trees, alternating with the insistent chirping of drenched sparrows.

There was a roll of thunder, like a plow drawing a furrow across the whole of the sky, and everything grew still. But then four resounding, belated booms rang out, like big potatoes dumped from a shovelful of loose soil in autumn.

The thunder cleared the space inside the dusty, smoke-filled room. Suddenly, like electrical elements, the component parts of existence became tangible—water and air, the desire for joy, earth, and sky.

The lane became filled with the voices of the departing guests. They went on loudly discussing something outside, exactly as they had just been wrangling about it in the house. The voices moved off, gradually dying down and dying out.

“So late,” said Yuri Andreevich. “Let’s go to bed. Of all the people in the world, I love only you and papa.”

5

August passed, September was coming to an end. The unavoidable was imminent. Winter was drawing near, and so, in the human world, was the foreordained, like winter’s swoon, which hung in the air and was on everyone’s lips.

They had to prepare for the cold, stock up on food, firewood. But in the days of the triumph of materialism, matter turned into a concept, food and firewood were replaced by the provision and fuel question.

People in the cities were helpless as children in the face of the approaching unknown, which overturned all established habits in its way and left devastation behind it, though it was itself a child of the city and the creation of city dwellers.

All around there was self-deception, empty verbiage. Humdrum life still limped, floundered, hobbled bow-legged somewhere out of old habit. But the doctor saw life unvarnished. Its condemnation could not be concealed from him. He considered himself and his milieu doomed. They faced ordeals, perhaps even death. The numbered days they had left melted away before his eyes.

He would have gone out of his mind, if it had not been for everyday trifles, labors, and cares. His wife, his child, the need to earn money, were his salvation—the essential, the humble, the daily round, going to work, visiting patients.

He realized that he was a pygmy before the monstrous hulk of the future; he feared it, he loved this future and was secretly proud of it, and for the last time, as if in farewell, with the greedy eyes of inspiration, he gazed at the clouds and trees, at the people walking down the street, at the big Russian city trying to weather misfortune, and was ready to sacrifice himself to make things better, and could do nothing.

The sky and the passersby he most often saw from the middle of the street, when crossing the Arbat by the pharmacy of the Russian Medical Society, at the corner of Starokoniushenny Lane.

He went back to work at his old hospital. By old memory it was still called Krestovozdvizhensky, though the community of that name had been disbanded. But they had not yet invented a new name for it at the hospital.

Differentiations had already begun there. To the moderates, whose dull-wittedness provoked the doctor’s indignation, he seemed dangerous; to politically advanced people, he seemed insufficiently red. Thus he found himself neither here nor there, having left one bank and not reached the other.

In the hospital, besides his immediate duties, the director charged him with looking after the general statistical accounting. How many forms, questionnaires, and blanks he had to go over, how many orders he had to fill out! Mortality rates, sick rates, the property status of the employees, the level of their civic consciousness and participation in elections, the unsatisfiable needs for fuel, provisions, medications—the central office of statistics was interested in all of it, and answers had to be provided for it all.

The doctor busied himself with all this at his old desk by the window of the interns’ room. Stacks of ruled paper of various forms and patterns lay before him, pushed to one side. Sometimes by snatches, besides periodic notes for his medical work, he wrote here his Playing at People, a gloomy diary or journal of those days, consisting of prose, verse, and miscellanea, suggested by the awareness that half of the people had stopped being themselves and were acting out who knows what.

The bright, sunny interns’ room with its white painted walls was flooded with the cream-colored sunlight of golden autumn, which distinguishes the days following the Dormition,⁹ when the first morning frosts set in, and winter chickadees and magpies flit among the motley and bright colors of the thinning woods. On such days the sky rises to its utmost height and a dark blue, icy clarity breathes from the north through the transparent column of air between it and the earth. The visibility and audibility of everything in the world are enhanced. Distances transmit sounds in a frozen ringing, distinctly and separately. What is far away becomes clear, as if opening out a view through all of life for many years ahead. This rarefaction would be impossible to bear if it were not so short-termed and did not come at the end of a short autumn day on the threshold of early twilight.

Such light bathed the interns’ room, the light of the early-setting autumn sun, juicy, glassy, and watery, like a ripe golden apple.

The doctor sat at the desk, dipping his pen in the ink, pondering and writing, and some quiet birds flew close by the big windows, casting soundless shadows into the room, over the doctor’s moving hands, the table with its ruled paper, the floor and walls, and just as soundlessly disappeared.

“The maple’s losing its leaves,” said the prosector, coming in. Once a stout man, his skin had become baggy from loss of weight. “The rain poured down on it, the wind tore at it, and they couldn’t defeat it. But see what one morning frost has done!”

The doctor raised his head. Indeed, the mysterious birds flitting past the window turned out to be the wine and flame leaves of the maple, which flew off, floated smoothly through the air, and, like convex orange stars, settled away from the tree on the grass of the hospital lawn.

“Have you sealed the windows?” asked the prosector.

“No,” said Yuri Andreevich, and he went on writing.

“Why not? It’s time.”

Yuri Andreevich did not reply, absorbed in writing.

“Eh, no Tarasiuk,” the prosector went on. “He was solid gold. Could mend boots. And watches. And do everything. And supply anything in the world. It’s time to seal them. Have to do it yourself.”

“There’s no putty.”

“Make some. Here’s the recipe.” And the prosector explained how to prepare putty from linseed oil and chalk. “Well, forget it. I’m bothering you.”

He went to the other window and busied himself with his vials and preparations. It was getting dark. After a minute, he said:

“You’ll ruin your eyes. It’s dark. And they won’t give us any light. Let’s go home.”

“I’ll work a little longer. Twenty minutes or so.”

“His wife’s here as a nurse’s aide.”

“Whose?”

“Tarasiuk’s.”

“I know.”

“But where he is, nobody knows. He roams the wide earth. Came to visit a couple of times in the summer. Stopped by the hospital. Now he’s somewhere in the country. Founding the new life. He’s one of those Bolshevik soldiers you meet on the boulevards and on trains. And do you want to know the answer? To Tarasiuk’s riddle, for instance? Listen. He’s a jack-of-all-trades. Can’t do a bad piece of work. Whatever he turns his hand to goes without a hitch. The same thing happened to him in the war. He studied it like any other trade. Turned out to be a crack shot. In the trenches, at a listening post. His eye, his hand—first class! He got all his decorations, not for bravery, but for never missing. Well. Every job becomes a passion for him. He fell in love with military things. He sees that a weapon is power, that he can use it. He wanted to become power himself. An armed man is no longer simply a man. In the old days his kind went from the sharpshooters to the robbers. Try taking his rifle from him now. And suddenly there comes the call: ‘Bayonets, about face!’ and so on. And he about-faced. That’s the whole story for you. And the whole of Marxism.”

“And the most genuine besides, straight from life. What do you think?”

The prosector stepped over to his window, pottered a little with his vials. Then asked:

“Well, how’s the stove man?”

“Thanks for recommending him. A very interesting man. We spent around an hour talking about Hegel and Benedetto Croce.”¹⁰

“Well, what else! He has a doctorate in philosophy from Heidelberg University. And the stove?”

“Don’t talk about it.”

“Smokes?”

“Nothing but trouble.”

“He installed the pipe wrong. He should have built it into the Dutch stove, but he probably stuck it through the vent window.”

“No, he set it into the stove. But it smokes.”

“That means he didn’t find the smokestack and put it through the ventilation duct. Or into the airway. Eh, no Tarasiuk! But be patient. Moscow wasn’t built in a day. Using a stove isn’t like playing piano. It takes learning. Laid in firewood?”

“Where can I get it?”

“I’ll send you the churchwarden. He’s a firewood thief. Takes fences apart for fuel. But I warn you. You’ve got to haggle. He asks a lot. Or there’s the exterminator woman.”

They went down to the porter’s lodge, put their coats on, went out.

“Why the exterminator?” asked the doctor. “We don’t have bedbugs.”

“What have bedbugs got to do with it? I’m talking apples and you’re talking oranges. Not bedbugs, but firewood. The woman’s set it all up on a commercial footing. Buys up houses and framing for firewood. A serious supplier. Watch out, don’t stumble, it’s really dark. Once I could have gone through this neighborhood blindfolded. I knew every little stone. I was born in Prechistenka. But they started taking down the fences, and even with open eyes I don’t recognize anything, like in a foreign city. What little corners they’ve uncovered, though! Little Empire houses in the bushes, round garden tables, half-rotten benches. The other day I walked past a little vacant lot like that, at the intersection of three lanes. I see a hundred-year-old woman poking the ground with her stick. ‘God help you, granny,’ I say. ‘Digging worms for fishing?’ As a joke, of course. And she says very seriously: ‘No, dearie—champignons.’ And it’s true, the city’s getting to be the same as a forest. Smells of rotten leaves, mushrooms.”

“I know that place. It’s between Serebryany and Molchanovka, isn’t it? Unexpected things keep happening to me when I pass it. Either I meet somebody I haven’t seen for twenty years, or I find something. And they say there have been robberies at the corner. Well, no wonder. It’s a crossroads. There’s a whole network of passages to thieves’ dens that are still there around the Smolensky market. You’re robbed, stripped, and, poof, go chase the wind.”

“And the streetlights shine so weakly. It’s not for nothing they call a black eye a shiner. You’re bound to get one.”

6

Indeed, all sorts of chance things happened to the doctor at the above-mentioned place. Late in the fall, not long before the October fighting,¹¹ on a dark, cold evening, at that corner, he ran into a man lying unconscious across the sidewalk. The man lay with his arms spread, his head leaning on a hitching post, and his legs hanging into the roadway. Every now and then he moaned weakly. In response to the loud questions of the doctor, who was trying to bring him back to consciousness, he murmured something incoherent and again passed out for a time. His head was bruised and bloody, but on cursory examination, the bones of the skull turned out to be intact. The fallen man was undoubtedly the victim of an armed robbery. “Briefcase. Briefcase,” he whispered two or three times.

Using the telephone of a pharmacy nearby on the Arbat, the doctor sent for an old cabby attached to the Krestovozdvizhensky Hospital and took the unknown man there.

The victim turned out to be a prominent politician. The doctor treated him and in his person acquired a protector for long years to come, who saved him in that time filled with suspicion and distrust from many misunderstandings.

7

It was Sunday. The doctor was free. He did not have to go to work. In their house in Sivtsev, they had already settled in three rooms for the winter, as Antonina Alexandrovna had proposed.

It was a cold, windy day with low snow clouds, dark, very dark.

They lit the stove in the morning. It began to smoke. Antonina Alexandrovna, who knew nothing about stoves, gave confused and harmful advice to Nyusha, who was struggling with the damp wood that refused to burn. The doctor, seeing it and understanding what needed to be done, tried to intervene, but his wife gently took him by the shoulders and sent him away with the words:

“Go to your room. You have a habit of butting in with your advice, when my head’s in a whirl without that and everything’s jumbled up. How can you not understand that your remarks only pour oil on the fire.”

“Oh, Tonechka, that would be excellent—oil! The stove would blaze up in an instant. The trouble is that I don’t see either oil or fire.”

“This is no time for puns. There are moments, you understand, when they simply won’t do.”

The failure with the stove ruined their Sunday plans. They had all hoped to finish the necessary tasks before dark and be free by evening, but now that was out of the question. Dinner had to be put off, as did someone’s wish to wash their hair with hot water, and other such intentions.

Soon it became so smoky that it was impossible to breathe. A strong wind blew the smoke back into the room. A cloud of black soot hung in it like a fairy-tale monster in the midst of a dense pine forest.

Yuri Andreevich drove them all to the other rooms and opened the vent window. He took half the wood out of the stove and made space among the rest for little chips and birch-bark kindling.

Fresh air burst through the vent window. The curtain swayed and billowed up. A few papers flew off the desk. The wind slammed some far-off door and, whirling in all the corners, began, like a cat after a mouse, to chase what was left of the smoke.

The wood caught fire, blazed up, and began to crackle. The little stove choked on the flames. Red-hot circles glowed on its iron body like the rosy spots on a consumptive’s cheeks. The smoke in the room thinned out and then disappeared altogether.

The room became brighter. The windows, which Yuri Andreevich had recently sealed on the prosector’s instructions, began to weep. The putty gave off a wave of warm, greasy smell. The firewood sawed into small pieces and drying around the stove also gave off a smell: of bitter, throat-chafing, tarry fir bark, and damp, fresh aspen, fragrant as toilet water.

Just then, as impetuously as the wind through the vent, Nikolai Nikolaevich burst into the room with news:

“There’s fighting in the streets. Military action is going on between the junkers who support the Provisional Government and the garrison soldiers who are for the Bolsheviks. There are skirmishes at almost every step, there’s no counting the centers of the uprising. I fell into scraps two or three times on my way here, once at the corner of Bolshaya Dmitrovka, and again by the Nikitsky Gate. There’s no direct route anymore, you have to go roundabout. Hurry, Yura! Get dressed and let’s go. You’ve got to see this. It’s history. It happens once in a lifetime.”

But he himself went on babbling for about two hours, then they sat down to dinner, and when he got ready to go home and was dragging Yuri Andreevich with him, Gordon’s arrival prevented them. He came flying in just as Nikolai Nikolaevich had done, with the same news.

But meanwhile events had moved ahead. There were new details. Gordon spoke about the intensified gunfire and the killing of passersby, accidentally struck by stray bullets. According to his words, traffic in the city had come to a standstill. By a miracle, he had gotten through to their lane, but the way back had closed behind him.

Nikolai Nikolaevich would not listen and tried to poke his nose outside, but came back after a minute. He said you could not go out into the lane, that there were bullets whistling through it, knocking bits of brick and plaster off the corners. There was not a soul in the streets; communication by the sidewalks was broken.

During those days Sashenka caught a cold.

“I’ve told you a hundred times not to put the child near the hot stove,” Yuri Andreevich said angrily. “Overheating is forty times more harmful than cold.”

Sashenka had a sore throat and developed a high fever. His distinctive quality was a supernatural, mystical fear of nausea and vomiting, the approach of which he imagined every moment.

Pushing aside Yuri Andreevich’s hand with the laryngoscope, he would not let him put it down his throat, closed his mouth, shouted and choked. No persuading or threatening worked. Suddenly by inadvertence Sashenka yawned widely and sweetly, and the doctor profited from the moment, with a lightning movement put the spoon into his son’s mouth, pressed his tongue down, and managed to get a glimpse of Sashenka’s raspberry-colored throat and swollen tonsils covered with white spots. Yuri Andreevich was alarmed by the look of them.

A little later, by way of a similar sleight of hand, the doctor managed to take a smear from Sashenka’s throat. Alexander Alexandrovich had his own microscope. Yuri Andreevich took it and carried out a makeshift analysis. Luckily, it was not diphtheria.

But on the third night, Sashenka had an attack of false croup. He was burning up and suffocating. Yuri Andreevich could not look at the poor child, powerless as he was to save him from suffering. Antonina Alexandrovna thought the boy was dying. They took him in their arms, carried him about the room, and he became better.

They had to get milk, mineral water, or soda for him to drink. But it was the height of the street fighting. The gunfire, as well as artillery fire, did not cease for a minute. Even if Yuri Andreevich were to risk his life and venture to make his way through the limits of the area crisscrossed by shooting, beyond the line of fire he would also not find any life, because it had come to a standstill throughout the city until the situation finally defined itself.

But it was already clear. Rumors came from all sides that the workers were gaining the upper hand. There was still resistance from isolated groups of junkers, which were cut off from each other and had lost touch with their commanders.

The Sivtsev neighborhood was within the circle of action of the units of soldiers pressing towards the center from the Dorogomilovo Gate. The soldiers from the German front and adolescent workers sitting in a trench dug in the lane already knew the inhabitants of the nearby houses and exchanged neighborly jokes with them when they peeked through the gates or came outside. Circulation in that part of the city was being restored.

Then Gordon and Nikolai Nikolaevich, who had been stuck at the Zhivagos’ for three days, left their captivity. Yuri Andreevich was glad of their presence during the difficult days of Sashenka’s illness, and Antonina Alexandrovna forgave them the muddle they introduced on top of the general disorder. But in gratitude for the hospitality, both had considered it their duty to entertain the hosts with endless talk, and Yuri Andreevich was so tired of that three-day pouring from empty into void that he was happy to part with them.

8

There was information that they had reached home safely, but precisely this test showed that the talk of a general cessation of hostilities was premature. Military action still went on in various places, it was impossible to cross through various neighborhoods, and the doctor was still unable to get to his hospital, which he had begun to miss and where his Playing at People and scientific writings lay in a drawer in the interns’ room.

Only within separate neighborhoods did people go out in the mornings a short distance from home to buy bread, stopping people carrying milk in bottles and crowding around them, asking where they had gotten it.

Occasionally the shooting resumed all over the city, scattering the public again. Everyone suspected that some sort of negotiations were going on between the sides, the successful or unsuccessful course of which was reflected in the intensifying or weakening of the shrapnel fire.

Once at the end of the old October, around ten o’clock in the evening, Yuri Andreevich was walking quickly down the street, going with no particular need to see a colleague who lived nearby. Those parts, usually lively, were now deserted. He met almost no one.

Yuri Andreevich walked quickly. The first thin snow was dusting down, with a strong and ever-strengthening wind that transformed it before Yuri Andreevich’s eyes into a snowstorm.

Yuri Andreevich was turning from one lane into another and had already lost count of the turns he had made, when the snow suddenly poured down very thickly and a blizzard set in, the kind of blizzard that skims shriekingly over the ground in an open field, and in the city thrashes about in a blind alley like a lost person.

Something similar was taking place in the moral world and in the physical, nearby and far away, on the ground and in the air. Somewhere, in little islands, the last volleys of the broken resistance rang out. Somewhere on the horizon, the weak glow of extinguished fires swelled and popped like bubbles. And the same rings and funnels, driven and whirled by the blizzard, smoked under Yuri Andreevich’s feet on the wet streets and sidewalks.

At one intersection he was overtaken by a paperboy running past with the shout “Latest news!” and carrying a big bundle of freshly printed sheets under his arm.

“Keep the change,” said the doctor. The boy barely managed to separate the damp page stuck to the bundle, thrust it into the doctor’s hands, and vanished into the blizzard as instantly as he had emerged from it.

The doctor went over to a street lamp burning two steps away to look through the headlines at once, without putting it off.

The special issue, printed on one side only, contained an official communiqué from Petersburg about the forming of the Soviet of People’s Commissars, the establishment of soviet power in Russia, and the introduction of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Then came the first decrees of the new power and the publication of various news items transmitted by telegraph and telephone.

The blizzard lashed at the doctor’s eyes and covered the printed lines of the newspaper with gray and rustling granular snow. But that did not hinder his reading. The grandeur and eternity of the moment astounded him and would not let him come to his senses.

Still, in order to finish reading the communiqué, he began to look around in search of some lighted place sheltered from the snow. It turned out that he had again ended up at his charmed intersection and was standing at the corner of Serebryany and Molchanovka, outside a tall five-story house with a glassed-in porch and a spacious, electric-lit entrance.

The doctor went in and, standing under an electric light in the front hall, became absorbed in the telegrams.

Above his head came the sound of footsteps. Someone was coming down the stairs, stopping frequently as if in some hesitation. Indeed, the descending person suddenly changed his mind, turned, and ran back upstairs. Somewhere a door was opened, and two voices poured out in a wave, made so formless by the echo that it was impossible to tell whether they were men’s or women’s. After that the door slammed and the person who had been coming down earlier now started running down much more resolutely.

Yuri Andreevich, who was completely absorbed in his reading, had his eyes lowered to the newspaper. He did not intend to raise them and examine a stranger. But having run all the way down, the latter stopped running. Yuri Andreevich raised his head and looked at him.

Before him stood an adolescent of about eighteen, in a stiff coat of reindeer hide with the fur side out, as they wear them in Siberia, and a hat of the same fur. The boy had a swarthy face with narrow Kirghiz eyes. There was something aristocratic in his face, that fleeting spark, that hidden fineness that seems brought from far away and occurs in people with complex, mixed blood.

The boy was obviously in error, taking Yuri Andreevich for someone else. He looked at the doctor with shy perplexity, as if he knew who he was and simply could not make up his mind to speak. To put an end to this misunderstanding, Yuri Andreevich looked him up and down with a cold gaze, fending off any urge to approach.

The boy became embarrassed and went to the exit without a word. There, glancing back once more, he opened the heavy, shaky door and went out, slamming it with a bang.

About ten minutes later, Yuri Andreevich went out after him. He forgot about the boy and about the colleague he was going to see. He was full of what he had read and headed for home. On his way another circumstance, a mundane trifle, which in those days had immeasurable importance, attracted and absorbed his attention.

A short distance from his house, in the darkness, he stumbled upon a huge heap of boards and logs, dumped across his way on the sidewalk by the edge of the road. Here in the lane there was some institution to which a supply of government fuel had probably been delivered in the form of some dismantled log house from the outskirts. There had not been enough room in the courtyard and so they had also cluttered up the street in front of it. The pile was being guarded by a sentry with a rifle, who paced the yard and from time to time came out into the lane.

Without thinking twice, Yuri Andreevich seized a moment when the sentry turned into the yard and the blizzard whirled an especially thick cloud of snow up in the air. He went around the heap of beams to the side where it was dark and the light of the street lamp did not fall, and, moving it from side to side, slowly freed a heavy log that was lying on the very bottom. Pulling it from under the pile with difficulty and heaving it onto his shoulder, he stopped feeling its weight (one’s own burden is not heavy), and stealthily, keeping to the shadows of the walls, lugged it home to Sivtsev.

It was timely, the firewood was running out at home. The log was sawed up and split into a pile of small chunks. Yuri Andreevich squatted down to start the stove. He sat silently in front of the trembling and rattling doors. Alexander Alexandrovich rolled the armchair up to the stove and sat in it, warming himself. Yuri Andreevich took the newspaper out of the side pocket of his jacket and handed it to his father-in-law, saying:

“Seen this? Have a look. Read it.”

Still squatting down and stirring the wood in the stove with a small poker, Yuri Andreevich talked to himself out loud.

“What magnificent surgery! To take and at one stroke artistically cut out the old, stinking sores! Simply, without beating around the bush, to sentence age-old injustice, which was used to having people bow and scrape and curtsey before it.

“The fact that it was so fearlessly carried out has something nationally intimate, long familiar about it. Something of Pushkin’s unconditional luminosity, of Tolstoy’s unswerving faithfulness to facts.”

“Pushkin? What did you say? Wait. I’ll finish right now. I can’t both read and listen,” Alexander Alexandrovich interrupted his son-in-law, mistakenly taking as addressed to him the monologue Yuri Andreevich was speaking to himself under his breath.

“Above all, where does the genius lie? If anyone were given the task of creating a new world, of beginning a new chronology, he would surely need to have a corresponding space cleared for him first. He would wait first of all for the old times to end, before he set about building the new, he would need a round number, a new paragraph, a blank page.

“But now, take it and like it. This unprecedented thing, this miracle of history, this revelation comes bang in the very thick of the ongoing everydayness, with no heed to its course. It begins not from the beginning but from the middle, without choosing the dates beforehand, on the first weekday to come along, at the very peak of tramways plying the city. That’s real genius. Only what is greatest can be so inappropriate and untimely.”

9

Winter came, precisely as had been predicted. It was not yet as scary as the two that followed it, but was already of their kind, dark, hungry, and cold, all a breaking up of the habitual and a rebuilding of the foundations of existence, all an inhuman effort to hold on to life as it slipped away.

There were three of them in a row, these dreadful winters, one after another, and not all that now seems to have happened in the year of 1917 to 1918 actually happened then, but may have taken place later. These successive winters merged together and it was hard to tell one from another.

The old life and the new order did not yet coincide. There was no sharp hostility between them, as a year later in the time of the civil war,¹² but there was insufficient connection. They were two sides, standing apart, one facing the other, and not overlapping each other.

Administrative re-elections were held everywhere: in house committees, in organizations, at work, in public service institutions. Their makeup was changing. Commissars with unlimited power were appointed everywhere, people of iron will, in black leather jackets, armed with means of intimidation and with revolvers, who rarely shaved and still more rarely slept.

They were well acquainted with the petty bourgeois breed, the average holder of small government bonds, the groveling conformist, and never spared him, talking to him with a Mephistophelean smirk, as with a pilferer caught in the act.

These people controlled everything as the program dictated, and enterprise after enterprise, association after association became Bolshevik.

The Krestovozdvizhensky Hospital was now called the Second Reformed. Changes took place in it. Some of the personnel were fired, but many left on their own, finding the job unprofitable. These were well-paid doctors with a fashionable practice, darlings of society, phrase mongers and fine talkers. They did not fail to present their leaving out of mercenary considerations as a demonstration from civic motives, and they began to behave slightingly towards those who stayed, all but to boycott them. Zhivago was one of those scorned ones who stayed.

In the evenings the following conversations would take place between husband and wife:

“Don’t forget to go to the basement of the Medical Society on Wednesday for frozen potatoes. There are two sacks there. I’ll find out exactly what time I’ll be free, so that I can help you. We must do it together on a sled.”

“All right. There’s no rush, Yurochka. You should go to bed quickly. It’s late. The chores won’t all get done anyway. You need rest.”

“There’s a widespread epidemic. General exhaustion weakens resistance. It’s frightening to look at you and papa. Something must be done. Yes, but what precisely? We’re not cautious enough. We must be more careful. Listen. Are you asleep?”

“No.”

“I’m not afraid for myself, I’m sturdy enough, but if, contrary to all expectation, I should come down with something, please don’t be silly and keep me at home. Take me to the hospital instantly.”

“What are you saying, Yurochka! God help you. Why croak of doom?”

“Remember, there are neither honest people nor friends anymore. Still less anyone knowledgeable. If something happens, trust only Pichuzhkin. If he himself stays in one piece, of course. Are you asleep?”

“No.”

“The devils, they went where the rations are better, and now it turns out it was civic feelings, principles. We meet, and they barely shake hands. ‘You work with them?’ And they raise their eyebrows. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘and don’t take it amiss, but I’m proud of our privations, and I respect the people who honor us by subjecting us to these privations.’ ”

10

For a long period the invariable food of the majority was boiled millet and fish soup made from herring heads. The bodies of the herring were fried as a second course. People ate unground rye and wheat. They boiled the grain into a porridge.

A professor’s wife whom Antonina Alexandrovna knew taught her to bake boiled dough bread on the bottom of a Dutch heating stove, partly for sale, so that the extra and the income from it would justify using the tile stove as in the old days. This would enable them to give up the tormenting iron stove, which smoked, heated poorly, and did not retain its warmth at all.

Antonina Alexandrovna baked very good bread, but nothing came of her commerce. She had to sacrifice her unrealizable plans and bring the dismissed little stove back into action. The Zhivagos lived in want.

One morning Yuri Andreevich left for work as usual. There were two pieces of wood left in the house. Putting on a little winter coat, in which she shivered from weakness even in warm weather, Antonina Alexandrovna went out “for booty.”

She spent about half an hour wandering the nearby lanes, where muzhiks sometimes turned up from their suburban villages with vegetables and potatoes. You had to catch them. Peasants carrying loads were arrested.

She soon came upon the goal of her search. A stalwart young fellow in a peasant coat, walking in company with Antonina Alexandrovna beside a light, toylike sleigh, warily led it around the corner to the Gromekos’ courtyard.

In the bast body of the sleigh, under a mat, lay a small heap of birch rounds, no thicker than the old-fashioned banisters in photographs from the last century. Antonina Alexandrovna knew what they were worth—birch in name only, it was stuff of the worst sort, freshly cut, unsuitable for heating. But there was no choice, she could not argue.

The young peasant made five or six trips upstairs carrying the wretched logs, and in exchange dragged Antonina Alexandrovna’s small mirrored wardrobe downstairs and loaded it on the sleigh as a present for his young wife. In passing, as they made future arrangements about potatoes, he asked the price of the piano standing by the door.

On his return, Yuri Andreevich did not discuss his wife’s purchase. To chop the given-away wardrobe to splinters would have been more profitable and expedient, but they could not have brought themselves to do it.

“Did you see the note on the desk?” asked his wife.

“From the head of the hospital? They spoke to me, I know about it. It’s a call to a sick woman. I’ll certainly go. I’ll just rest a little and go. It’s quite far. Somewhere by the Triumphal Arch. I wrote down the address.”

“They’re offering a strange honorarium. Did you see? Read it anyway. A bottle of German cognac or a pair of lady’s stockings for the visit. Some enticement! Who can it be? Bad tone, and total ignorance of our present-day life. Nouveaux riches of some sort.”

“Yes, a state purveyor.”

Along with concessionaires and authorized agents, this title was used to designate small private entrepreneurs, for whom the state authorities, having abolished private trade, made small allowances at moments of economic crisis, concluding contracts and deals with them for various provisions.

Their number did not include the fallen heads of old firms, proprietors on a grand scale. They never recovered from the blow they received. Into this category fell the ephemeral dealers, stirred up from the bottom by war and revolution, new and alien people without roots.

After drinking boiled water with saccharine, whitened by milk, the doctor went to the sick woman.

The sidewalks and roadways were buried under deep snow, which covered the streets from one row of houses to the other. In places the covering of snow reached the ground-floor windows. Across the whole width of this space moved silent, half-alive shadows, lugging some sort of meager provisions on their backs or pulling them on sleds. Almost no one drove.

On houses here and there old signboards still remained. The grocery shops and cooperatives placed under them, with no relation to their content, stood locked, their windows barred or boarded up, and empty.

They were locked and empty not only owing to the lack of goods, but because the reorganization of all sides of life, embracing trade as well, was still being carried out in the most general terms, and these boarded-up shops, as minute particulars, had not yet been touched by it.

11

The house that the doctor had been called to turned out to be at the end of Brestskaya Street, near the Tver Gate.

It was a barracklike brick building of antediluvian construction, with an inner courtyard and wooden galleries running in three tiers around the inside walls of the structure.

The tenants were holding a previously arranged general meeting with the participation of a woman representative of the district soviet, when a military commission suddenly appeared on a round to inspect permits to keep arms and confiscate those without permit. The leader of the round asked the delegate not to leave, assuring her that the search would not take much time, the tenants who had been checked would gradually come back, and the interrupted meeting would soon be able to resume.

The round was nearing its end, and the turn had just come for the apartment where the doctor was awaited when he came to the gate of the house. A soldier with a rifle on a string, who was standing guard by one of the stairways leading to the galleries, flatly refused to let Yuri Andreevich pass, but the commander of the detachment interfered in their dispute. He said the doctor should not be hindered and agreed to hold up the search until he had examined the sick woman.

The doctor was met by the owner of the apartment, a courteous young man with a dull, swarthy complexion and dark, melancholy eyes. He was upset by many circumstances: his wife’s illness, the impending search, and the supernatural respect he nursed for medicine and its representatives.

To spare the doctor work and time, the owner tried to speak as briefly as he could, but precisely this haste made his speech long and confused.

The apartment, with a mixture of luxury and cheapness, was furnished with things bought slapdash with the aim of investing money in something stable. Furniture in incomplete sets was supplemented by single objects that were missing a second to make up the pair.

The owner of the apartment thought his wife had some sort of nervous ailment from fright. With many irrelevant digressions, he told how they had bought for next to nothing an old, broken clock with musical chimes, which had not worked for a long time. They had bought it only as a curiosity of clock-making craftsmanship, as a rarity (the sick woman’s husband took the doctor to the next room to show it to him). They even doubted it could be fixed. And suddenly the clock, which had not been wound for years, started up by itself, started up, rang out an intricate minuet on its little bells, and stopped. His wife was terrified, the young man said, decided that her last hour had struck, and now she lies there, raves, doesn’t eat, doesn’t drink, doesn’t recognize him.

“So you think it’s nervous shock?” Yuri Andreevich asked with doubt in his voice. “Take me to the patient.”

They went into the next room with its porcelain chandelier and two mahogany bed tables on either side of a wide double bed. At the edge of it, the blanket pulled up over her chin, lay a small woman with big, dark eyes. Seeing the men coming in, she waved them away, freeing an arm from under the blanket, on which the wide sleeve of a robe slid up to the armpit. She did not recognize her husband and, as if there were no one in the room, started singing in a soft voice the beginning of a sad little song, which moved her so much that she burst into tears and, sobbing like a child, began asking to be taken home somewhere. The doctor tried to approach her from different sides, but she resisted examination and each time turned her back on him.

“She does need to be examined,” said Yuri Andreevich. “But, all the same, I can see quite clearly. It’s typhus, and a very grave form of it at that. She’s suffering greatly, poor thing. I’d advise putting her in the hospital. It’s not a matter of comfort, which you could provide for her, but of constant medical attention, which is necessary during the first weeks of the illness. Can you find some sort of transportation, hire a cab or at least a cart, to take the patient, making sure that she’s well wrapped up beforehand? I’ll write an order for you.”

“I can. I’ll try. But wait. Can it really be typhus? How terrible!”

“Unfortunately.”

“I’m afraid to lose her if I let her go from here. Isn’t there some way you could treat her at home, visiting her as often as possible? I’ll pay whatever fee you like.”

“I’ve already explained to you. The important thing is that she have constant attention. Listen. I’m giving you good advice. Dig up a cab somewhere, and I’ll write out an accompanying note for her. It would be best to do it through your house committee. The order will have to have the house seal, and there will be some other formalities.”

12

Having gone through the interrogation and search, the tenants returned one after another, in warm shawls and coats, to the unheated quarters of the former egg storage, now occupied by the house committee.

At one end of the room stood an office desk and several chairs, though not enough to seat so many people. Therefore, in addition to them, long, empty egg crates, turned upside down, were placed around them like benches. A mountain of such crates was piled up to the ceiling at the other end of the room. There in a corner was a swept-up heap of frozen wood shavings stuck together in lumps by the spilt insides of broken eggs. Rats noisily messed about in this heap, occasionally running out to the open space of the stone floor and hiding again in the shavings.

Each time this happened, a loud and fat-bloated woman jumped up on one of the crates with a shriek. She pulled up the corner of her skirt with coquettishly splayed fingers, rapidly stamped her feet in fashionable ladies’ high boots, and in a deliberately hoarse voice, affecting drunkenness, shouted:

“Olka, Olka, you’ve got rats running around here. Ooh, away, you vile thing! Aha, he understands, the scum! He’s angry. Ay-yay-yay, he’s climbing up the crate! Don’t let him get under my skirt! Oh, I’m afraid, I’m afraid! Turn your heads, gentlemen. Sorry, I forgot, you’re not gentlemen now, you’re comrade citizens.”

The noisy female was wearing an unbuttoned astrakhan sack. Under it her double chin, ample bosom, and belly in a tight silk dress undulated in three layers, like quivering custard. Clearly, she had once passed for a lioness among third-rate shopkeepers and their clerks. She could barely open the slits of her piglike eyes with their swollen eyelids. In time immemorial some rival had thrown a vial of acid at her, but had missed, and only two or three drops had etched light traces on her left cheek and the left corner of her mouth, almost seductive in their inconspicuousness.

“Don’t yell, Khrapugina. It’s simply impossible to work,” said the woman at the desk, the representative of the district soviet, elected to chair the meeting.

She was well-known from long ago to the old-timers of the house, and she knew them well herself. Before the start of the meeting, she had an unofficial, half-whispered conversation with Fatima, the old caretaker of the house, who had once been cooped up with her husband and children in the dirty basement, but now had moved with her daughter to two bright rooms on the second floor.

“Well, how are things, Fatima?” asked the chairwoman.

Fatima complained that managing such a big and densely populated house was too much for her alone, and there was no help from anywhere, because nobody observed the obligations of tidying the courtyard and the street, which were distributed by apartment.

“Don’t worry, Fatima, we’ll blunt their horns, I assure you. What kind of committee is that? Is it conceivable? Hidden criminal elements, dubious morals living without registration. We’ll give them the boot and elect another one. I’ll get you made house manager, only don’t start kicking.”

The caretaker begged the chairwoman not to do that, but the latter was not even listening. She looked around the room, found that enough people had gathered, called for silence, and opened the meeting with a short introductory speech. After condemning the inactivity of the former house committee, she proposed the nominating of candidates for the election of a new one and went on to other questions. On finishing that, she said incidentally:

“Well, so that’s that, comrades. Let’s speak frankly. Your building’s roomy, suitable for a hostel. It happens, when delegates come for a conference, there’s nowhere to put people up. It has been decided to place the building at the disposal of the district soviet as a house for visitors and give it the name of Comrade Tiverzin, who lived in this house before his exile, which is a well-known fact. Do you have any objections? Now to the schedule for vacating the house. It’s not an urgent measure, you still have a year’s time. Working people will be relocated to lodgings provided for them, nonworkers are put on notice that they must find their own, and are given a term of twelve months.”

“But who here is a nonworker? We have no nonworkers! We’re all workers,” came cries from all sides, and one strained voice especially: “That’s great-power chauvinism! All nationalities are equal now! I know what you’re hinting at!”

“Not all at once! I simply don’t know who to answer. What nationalities? What have nationalities got to do with it, Citizen Valdyrkin? For instance, Khrapugina’s no nationality, but she’ll also be evicted.”

“Evicted! We’ll see how you evict me. Flattened old couch! Ten-jobs!” Khrapugina shouted out the senseless nicknames she gave to the woman delegate in the heat of the quarrel.

“What a viper! What a hellcat! You have no shame!” The caretaker became indignant.

“Don’t mix into it, Fatima, I can stand up for myself. Stop, Khrapugina. Reach you a hand, and you bite it off. Shut up, I said, or I’ll turn you over to the organs immediately and not wait till they pick you up for making moonshine and running a dive.”

The noise reached the limit. No one was given a chance to speak. Just then the doctor came into the storeroom. He asked the first man he ran into by the door to point out someone from the house committee. The man put his hands to his mouth like a megaphone and, above the noise and racket, shouted syllable by syllable:

“Ga-li-ul-li-na! Come here. Somebody’s asking for you.”

The doctor could not believe his ears. A thin, slightly stooping woman, the caretaker, came over. The doctor was struck by the resemblance of mother and son. But he did not yet give himself away. He said:

“One of your tenants here has come down with typhus” (he gave the woman’s name). “Precautions must be taken to keep the infection from spreading. Besides, the sick woman will have to be taken to the hospital. I’ll write out a document, which the house committee will have to certify. How and where can I do it?”

The caretaker understood the question as referring to transporting the sick woman, not to writing out the accompanying document.

“A droshky will come from the district soviet to pick up Comrade Demina,” said Galiullina. “Comrade Demina’s a kind person, I’ll tell her, she’ll give it up to you. Don’t worry, comrade doctor, we’ll transport your sick woman.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that! I just need a corner where I can write out an order. But if there’ll be a droshky … Excuse me, but are you the mother of Lieutenant Galiullin, Osip Gimazetdinovich? I served with him at the front.”

The caretaker shuddered all over and turned pale. Seizing the doctor’s hand, she said:

“Let’s step outside. We can talk in the courtyard.”

As soon as they crossed the threshold, she began hurriedly:

“Shh. God forbid anyone hears. Don’t ruin me. Yusupka’s gone bad. Judge for yourself, who is Yusupka? Yusupka was an apprentice, a workman. Yusup should understand, simple people are much better off now, a blind man can see that, there’s nothing to talk about. I don’t know what you think, maybe you can do it, but for Yusupka it’s wrong, God won’t forgive it. Yusup’s father died a soldier, killed, and how—no face left, no arms, no legs.”

She was unable to go on speaking and, waving her hand, waited for her agitation to subside. Then she continued:

“Let’s go. I’ll arrange the droshky for you now. I know who you are. He was here for two days, he told me. He said you know Lara Guisharova. She was a nice girl. She came here to see us, I remember. But who knows what she’s like now. Can it be that the masters go against the masters? But for Yusupka it’s wrong. Let’s go and ask for the droshky. Comrade Demina will let us have it. And do you know who Comrade Demina is? Olya Demina, who used to work as a seamstress for Lara Guisharova’s mother. That’s who she is. Also from here. From this house. Let’s go.”

13

It was already growing quite dark. Night lay all around. Only the white circle of light from Demina’s pocket flashlight leaped some five steps ahead of them from one snowdrift to another, and confused more than lit up the way for the walkers. Night lay all around, and the house stayed behind, where so many people had known her, where she used to come as a girl, where, as the story went, her future husband, Antipov, was brought up as a boy.

Demina addressed him with patronizing jocularity:

“Will you really get further without the flashlight? Eh? Otherwise I’ll give it to you, comrade doctor. Yes. Once I was badly smitten with her, I loved her to distraction, when we were girls. They had a sewing establishment here, a workshop. I lived with them as an apprentice. I saw her this year. Passing through. She was passing through Moscow. I say to her, where are you going, fool? Stay here. We’ll live together, you’ll find work. No way! She doesn’t want to. That’s her business. She married Pashka with her head, not her heart, and since then she’s been a bit off. She left.”

“What do you think of her?”

“Careful. It’s slippery here. How many times have I told them not to pour slops in front of the door—like sand against the wind. What do I think of her? What do you mean, think? What’s there to think? I have no time. Here’s where I live. I concealed it from her: her brother, who was in the army, has likely been shot. But her mother, my former boss, I’ll probably save, I’m interceding for her. Well, I go in here, good-bye.”

And so they parted. The beam of Demina’s flashlight poked into the narrow stone stairway and ran ahead, lighting the soiled walls of the dirty way up, and darkness surrounded the doctor. To the right lay Sadovaya-Triumphalnaya Street, to the left Sadovaya-Karetnaya. In the black distance over the black snow, these were no longer streets in the ordinary sense of the word, but like two forest clearings in the dense taiga of stretched-out stone buildings, as in the impassable thickets of the Urals or Siberia.

At home there was light, warmth.

“Why so late?” asked Antonina Alexandrovna, and, not letting him reply, she went on:

“A curious thing happened while you were gone. An inexplicable oddity. I forgot to tell you. Yesterday papa broke the alarm clock and was in despair. The last clock in the house. He tried to repair it, poked at it, poked, with no result. The clockmaker at the corner asked three pounds of bread—an unheard-of price. What to do? Papa was completely downcast. And suddenly, imagine, an hour ago comes a piercing, deafening ring. The alarm clock! You see, it upped and started!”

“So my typhus hour has struck,” joked Yuri Andreevich, and he told his family about the sick woman and her chimes.

14

But he came down with typhus much later. In the meantime, the distress of the Zhivago family reached the limit. They were in want and were perishing. Yuri Andreevich sought out the party man he had once saved, the robbery victim. He did all he could for the doctor. However, the civil war had begun. His protector was traveling all the time. Besides, in accordance with his convictions, the man considered the hardships of the time natural and concealed the fact that he himself was starving.

Yuri Andreevich tried turning to the purveyor by the Tver Gate. But in the months that had passed, even his tracks had grown cold, and of his wife, who had recovered, there was nothing to be heard. The complement of tenants in the house had changed. Demina was at the front, the manager Galiullina was not there when Yuri Andreevich came.

Once by means of a coupon he received firewood at the official price, but had to transport it from the Vindava Station. He accompanied the driver and his nag, hauling this unexpected wealth down the endless Meshchanskaya Street. Suddenly the doctor noticed that Meshchanskaya had ceased somehow to be Meshchanskaya, that he was reeling and his legs would not support him. He realized that he was in for it, things were bad, and it was typhus. The driver picked up the fallen man. The doctor did not remember how they brought him home, somehow placed on top of the firewood.

15

He was delirious for two weeks with some breaks. He dreamed that Tonya put the two Sadovaya streets on his desk, Sadovaya-Karetnaya to the left and Sadovaya-Triumphalnaya to the right, and moved his desk lamp close to them, hot, searching, orange. The streets became light. He could work. And now he is writing.

He is writing heatedly and with extraordinary success something he had always wanted to write and should long ago have written, but never could, and now it is coming out well. And only occasionally is he hindered by a boy with narrow Kirghiz eyes, in an unbuttoned reindeer coat like they wear in Siberia or the Urals.

It is perfectly clear that this boy is the spirit of his death, or, to put it simply, is his death. But how can he be death, when he is helping him to write a poem, can there be any benefit from death, can there be any help from death?

He is writing a poem not about the Resurrection and not about the Entombment, but about the days that passed between the one and the other. He is writing the poem “Disarray.”

He had always wanted to describe how, in the course of three days, a storm of black, wormy earth besieges, assaults the immortal incarnation of love, hurling itself at him with its clods and lumps, just as the breaking waves of the sea come rushing at the coast and bury it. How for three days the black earthy storm rages, advances, and recedes.

And two rhymed lines kept pursuing him: “Glad to take up” and “Have to wake up.”

Hell, and decay, and decomposition, and death are glad to take up, and yet, together with them, spring, and Mary Magdalene,¹³ and life are also glad to take up. And—have to wake up. He has to wake up and rise. He has to resurrect.

16

He began to recover. At first, blissfully, he sought no connections between things, he admitted everything, remembered nothing, was surprised at nothing. His wife fed him white bread and butter, gave him tea with sugar, made him coffee. He forgot that this was impossible now and was glad of the tasty food, as of poetry and fairy tales, which were lawful and admissible in convalescence. But when he began to reflect for the first time, he asked his wife:

“Where did you get it?”

“All from your Granya.”

“What Granya?”

“Granya Zhivago.”

“Granya Zhivago?”

“Why, yes, your brother Evgraf, from Omsk. Your half brother. While you were lying unconscious, he kept visiting us.”

“In a reindeer coat?”

“Yes, yes. So you noticed him through your unconsciousness? He ran into you on the stairs of some house, I know, he told me. He knew it was you and wanted to introduce himself, but you put a scare into him! He adores you, can’t read enough of you. He digs up such things! Rice, raisins, sugar! He’s gone back to his parts. And he’s calling us there. He’s so strange, mysterious. I think he has some sort of love affair with the authorities. He says we should leave the big city for a year or two, ‘to sit on the earth.’ I asked his advice about the Krügers’ place. He strongly recommends it. So that we could have a kitchen garden and a forest nearby. We can’t just perish so obediently, like sheep.”

In April of that year the whole Zhivago family set out for the far-off Urals, to the former estate of Varykino near the town of Yuriatin.