Doctor Zhivago

Part Seven

ON THE WAY

1

The last days of March came, days of the first warmth, false harbingers of spring, after which each year an intense cold spell sets in.

In the Gromeko house hurried preparations were being made for the journey. To the numerous inhabitants, whose density in the house was now greater than that of sparrows in the street, this bustle was explained as a general cleaning before Easter.

Yuri Andreevich was against the trip. He did not interfere with the preparations, because he considered the undertaking unfeasible and hoped that at the decisive moment it would fall through. But the thing moved ahead and was near completion. The time came to talk seriously.

He once again expressed his doubts to his wife and father-in-law at a family council especially organized for that purpose.

“So you think I’m not right, and, consequently, we’re going?” he concluded his objections. His wife took the floor:

“You say, weather it out for a year or two, during that time new land regulations will be established, it will be possible to ask for a piece of land near Moscow and start a kitchen garden. But how to survive in the meantime, you don’t suggest. Yet that is the most interesting thing, that is precisely what it would be desirable to hear.”

“Absolute raving,” Alexander Alexandrovich supported his daughter.

“Very well, I surrender,” Yuri Andreevich agreed. “The only thing that pulls me up short is the total uncertainty. We set out, eyes shut, for we don’t know where, not having the least notion of the place. Of three persons who lived in Varykino, two, mama and grandmother, are no longer alive, and the third, Grandfather Krüger, if he’s alive, is being held hostage and behind bars.

“In the last year of the war, he did something with the forests and factories, sold them for the sake of appearances to some straw man, or to some bank, or signed them away conditionally to someone. What do we know about that deal? Whose land is it now—that is, not in the sense of property, I don’t care, but who is responsible for it? What department? Are they cutting the forest? Are the factories working? Finally, who is in power there, and who will be by the time we get there?

“For you, the safety anchor is Mikulitsyn, whose name you like so much to repeat. But who told you that the old manager is still alive and still in Varykino? And what do we know about him, except that grandfather had difficulty pronouncing his name, which is why we remember it?

“But why argue? You’re set on going. I’m with you. We must find out how it’s done now. There’s no point in putting it off.”

2

Yuri Andreevich went to the Yaroslavsky train station to make inquiries about it.

The flow of departing people was contained by a boardwalk with handrails laid across the halls, on the stone floors of which lay people in gray overcoats, who tossed and turned, coughed and spat, and when they talked to each other, each time it was incongruously loudly, not taking into account the force with which their voices resounded under the echoing vaults.

For the most part they were patients who had been sick with typhus. In view of the overcrowding of the hospitals, they were discharged the day after the crisis. As a doctor, Yuri Andreevich had run into such necessity himself, but he did not know that these unfortunates were so many and that the train stations served them as shelters.

“Get sent on an official mission,” a porter in a white apron told him. “You have to come and check every day. Trains are a rarity now, a matter of chance. And of course it goes without saying …” (the porter rubbed his thumb against his first two fingers). “Some flour or whatever. To grease the skids. Well, and this here …” (he upended an invisible shot glass) “… is a most sacred thing.”

3

Around that time Alexander Alexandrovich was invited to the Supreme Council of National Economy for several special consultations, and Yuri Andreevich to a gravely ill member of the government. Both were remunerated in the best form of that time—coupons to the first closed distribution center then established.¹

It was located in some garrison warehouse by the St. Simon monastery. The doctor and his father-in-law crossed two inner courtyards, the church’s and the garrison’s, and straight from ground level, with no threshold, entered under the stone vault of a deep, gradually descending cellar. Its widening far end was partitioned crosswise by a long counter, at which a calm, unhurried storekeeper weighed and handed over provisions, occasionally going back to the storeroom for something, and crossing out items on a list with a broad stroke of the pencil as he handed them over.

There were few customers.

“Your bags,” the storekeeper said to the professor and the doctor, glancing fleetingly at their invoices. The two men’s eyes popped out as flour, grain, macaroni, and sugar poured into the covers for little ladies’ cushions and the bigger pillow cases they held open, along with lard, soap, and matches, and also a piece each of something wrapped in paper, which later, at home, turned out to be Caucasian cheese.

Son-in-law and father-in-law hastened to tie the multitude of small bundles into two big knapsacks as quickly as they could, so that their ungrateful pottering would not offend the eyes of the storekeeper, who had overwhelmed them with his magnanimity.

They came out of the cellar into the open air drunk not with animal joy, but with the consciousness that they, too, were not living in this world for nothing, that they were not just blowing smoke, and at home they would deserve the praise and recognition of the young mistress of the house, Tonya.

4

While the men disappeared into various institutions, soliciting missions and permanent residency papers for the rooms they were leaving, Antonina Alexandrovna was busy selecting things to be packed.

She walked anxiously about the three rooms of the house now assigned to the Gromeko family, and endlessly weighed each little trifle in her hand before placing it in the general pile of things destined to be packed.

Only an insignificant portion of their belongings went as the travelers’ personal luggage; the rest was kept in reserve as a means of exchange, necessary for the journey and on their arrival in the place.

Spring air came through the open vent window, tasting of a freshly bitten French loaf. Outside, cocks crowed and the voices of playing children were heard. The more they aired the room, the clearer became the smell of camphor, given off by the winter stuff removed from the trunks.

Concerning what ought to be taken and what renounced, there existed a whole theory worked out by those who had left earlier, whose observations had spread in the circle of their acquaintances who stayed behind.

These precepts, shaped into brief, indisputable instructions, were lodged with such distinctness in Antonina Alexandrovna’s head that she fancied she heard them from outside, together with the chirping of the sparrows and the noise of the playing children, as if some secret voice from the street were prompting her.

“Cloth, cloth,” said these considerations, “best of all in lengths, but there are inspections along the way, and it’s dangerous. Cut pieces quickly tacked together are more prudent. Fabric in general, textiles, clothes are acceptable, preferably outer wear, not too worn. As little rubbish as possible, no heavy things. Given the frequent need to carry it all yourselves, forget about hampers and trunks. After sorting them a hundred times, tie a few things into bundles light enough for a woman or a child. Salt and tobacco are expedient, as practice has shown, though the risk is considerable. Money in kerenki.² Documents are hardest of all.” And so on and so forth.

5

On the eve of departure a snowstorm arose. The wind swept gray clouds of spinning snowflakes up into the sky, and they came back to earth in a white whirl, flew into the depths of the dark street, and spread a white shroud over it.

Everything in the house was packed. The supervision of the rooms and the belongings remaining in them was entrusted to an elderly married couple, Egorovna’s Moscow relations, whom Antonina Alexandrovna had met the preceding winter, when she arranged through them to exchange old things, clothes and unneeded furniture, for firewood and potatoes.

It was impossible to rely on Markel. At the police station, which he chose as his political club, he did not complain that the former house owners, the Gromekos, sucked his blood, but he reproached them after the fact for keeping him in the darkness of ignorance, deliberately concealing from him that the world descended from the apes.

Antonina Alexandrovna took this couple, Egorovna’s relations, a former commercial employee and his wife, around the rooms for a last time, showed them which keys fitted which locks and what had been put where, unlocked and locked the doors of the cupboards together with them, taught them everything and explained everything.

The tables and chairs in the rooms were pushed up against the walls, the bundles for the journey were dragged to one side, the curtains were taken down from all the windows. The snowstorm, more unhindered than in the setting of winter coziness, peeped through the bared windows into the empty rooms. It reminded each of them of something. For Yuri Andreevich it was his childhood and his mother’s death; for Antonina Alexandrovna and Alexander Alexandrovich, it was the death and funeral of Anna Ivanovna. It kept seeming to them that this was their last night in the house, which they would never see again. In that respect they were mistaken, but under the influence of the delusion, which they did not confide to each other, so as not to upset each other, they each went over the life they had spent under that roof and fought back the tears that kept coming to their eyes.

That did not prevent Antonina Alexandrovna from observing social conventions in front of strangers. She kept up an incessant conversation with the woman to whose supervision she was entrusting everything. Antonina Alexandrovna exaggerated the significance of the service rendered her. So as not to repay the favor with black ingratitude, she apologized every other minute, went to the next room, and came back with a present for this person of a scarf, or a little blouse, or a length of cotton or gauze. And all the materials were dark with white checks or polka dots, just as the dark, snowy outside was speckled with white, looking through the bare, curtainless windows on that farewell evening.

6

They were leaving for the station early in the morning. The inhabitants of the house were not up yet at that hour. The tenant Zevorotkina, the usual ringleader of all concerted actions, together now and heave-ho, ran around to the sleeping lodgers, knocking on their doors and shouting: “Attention, comrades! It’s good-bye time! Look lively, look lively! The former Garumekovs are leaving.”

They came pouring out to the hall and porch of the back entrance (the front entrance was now boarded up year-round) and covered its steps like an amphitheater, as if preparing for a group photograph.

The yawning tenants stooped so that the skimpy coats thrown over their shoulders would not fall off, hunched up, and shifted their chilled bare feet hastily thrust into loose felt boots.

Markel had contrived to get plastered on something lethal in that alcohol-less time, and kept toppling against the banisters, which threatened to break under him. He volunteered to carry the things to the station and was offended that his help was rejected. They had a hard time getting rid of him.

It was still dark outside. In the windless air, the snow fell more thickly than the evening before. Big, shaggy flakes floated down lazily and, nearing the ground, seemed to tarry longer, as if hesitating whether to lie down on it or not.

When they came out from their lane to the Arbat, it was a little lighter. Falling snow veiled everything down to the ground with its white, billowing curtain, the hanging fringe of which tangled under the walkers’ feet, so that the sensation of movement was lost and it seemed to them that they were marching in place.

There was not a soul in the street. The travelers from Sivtsev met no one on their way. Soon they were overtaken by an empty cab, the cabby all covered with snow as if he had been dragged through batter, driving a snow-blanched nag, and for a fabulous sum in those years, amounting to less than a kopeck, took all of them and their things into the droshky, except for Yuri Andreevich, who at his own request, light, without luggage, was allowed to go to the station on foot.

7

At the station, Antonina Alexandrovna and her father were already standing in a numberless line, squeezed between the barriers of wooden fences. Boarding was now done not from the platforms, but a good half mile down the tracks, by the exit semaphore, because there were not enough hands to clean the approach to the platforms, half of the station area was covered with ice and refuse, and the trains could not get that far.

Nyusha and Shurochka were not in the crowd with the mother and grandfather. They strolled freely under the enormous overhanging roof of the entrance, only rarely coming to see if it was time to join the adults. They smelled strongly of kerosene, which had been heavily applied to their ankles, wrists, and necks as protection against typhus lice.

Seeing her husband approaching, Antonina Alexandrovna beckoned to him with her hand, but, not letting him come nearer, she called out from a distance to tell him at which window mandates for official missions were stamped. He went there.

“Show me what kind of seals they gave you,” she asked when he came back. The doctor handed her a wad of folded papers over the barrier.

“That’s a travel warrant for the delegates’ car,” Antonina Alexandrovna’s neighbor said behind her, making out over her shoulder the stamp on the document. The neighbor in front, one of those formalist legalists who in every circumstance know all the rules in the world, explained in more detail:

“With that seal you have the right to demand seats in a first-class, in other words, in a passenger coach, if there are any on the train.”

The case was subjected to discussion by the whole line. Voices arose:

“Go find any first-class coaches. That’d be too fat. Nowadays you can say thank you if you get a seat on a freight car buffer.”

“Don’t listen to them, you’re on official business. Here, I’ll explain to you. At the present time separate trains have been canceled, and there’s one combined one, which is for the military, and for convicts, and for cattle, and for people. The tongue can say whatever it likes—it’s pliable. But instead of confusing somebody with talk, you ought to explain so he’ll understand.”

“So you’ve explained. What a smart one we’ve got here. A warrant for the delegates’ car is only half the matter. Take a look at them first, and then talk. What are you going to do with such striking faces in the delegates’ car? The delegates’ car is full of our likes. The sailor’s got a sharp eye, and he’s got a pistol on a cord. He sees straight off—propertied class, and what’s more a doctor, from the former masters. The sailor grabs his pistol and swats him like a fly.”

It is not known where the sympathy for the doctor and his family would have led, had it not been for a new circumstance.

People in the crowd had for some time been casting glances through the thick plate glass of the wide station windows. The long roofs of the platform, stretching into the distance, removed to the last degree the spectacle of the snow falling on the tracks. At such a distance, it seemed that the snowflakes hung in the air almost without moving, slowly sinking into it the way soggy bread crumbs fed to fish sink into the water.

People in groups and singly had long been going off into that depth. While they were few in number, these figures, indistinct through the quivering net of the snow, had been taken for railway workers walking over the ties in the line of duty. But now a whole throng of them came along. In the depths they were heading for, an engine began to smoke.

“Open the doors, you crooks!” people shouted in the line. The crowd heaved and surged towards the doors. The ones in back pushed those in front.

“Look what’s going on! Here we’re barred by the wall, and there they cut ahead without lining up. The cars will be crammed full, and we stand here like sheep! Open up, you devils, or we’ll break it down! Hey, boys, all together, heave!”

“The fools don’t know who they’re envying,” the all-knowing legalist said. “They’ve been mobilized, drafted as labor conscripts from Petrograd.³ They were sent first to Vologda, to the northern front, and now they’re being driven to the eastern front. Not of their own will. Under escort. To dig trenches.”

8

They had already been traveling for three days, but had not gone far from Moscow. The landscape along the way was wintry: the tracks, the fields, the forests, the roofs of the villages—everything lay under snow.

The Zhivago family had found themselves by luck on the left corner of the upper front bunk, by a dim, elongated window just under the ceiling, where they settled in a family circle, not breaking up their company.

Antonina Alexandrovna was traveling in a freight car for the first time. When they were getting on the train in Moscow, Yuri Andreevich had lifted the women up to the level of the car floor, along the edge of which rolled a heavy sliding door. Further on, the women got the knack of it and climbed into the car by themselves.

At first the cars had seemed to Antonina Alexandrovna like cattle sheds on wheels. These pens, in her opinion, were bound to fall apart at the first jolt or shake. But it was already the third day that they were being thrown forward or back or sideways on turns or as the momentum changed, and the third day that the axles went on knocking rapidly under the floor, like the sticks of a wind-up toy drum, and the trip went very well, and Antonina Alexandrovna’s apprehensions proved unjustified.

The long train, consisting of twenty-three cars (the Zhivagos were in the fourteenth), stretched only some one part of itself—the head, the tail, the middle—along the short platforms of the stations.

The front cars were for the military, in the middle rode the free public, at the end those mobilized by labor conscription.

There were about five hundred passengers of this category, people of all ages and the most diverse ranks and occupations.

The eight cars that this public occupied presented a motley spectacle. Alongside well-dressed rich people, Petersburg stockbrokers and lawyers, one could see—also recognized as belonging to the class of exploiters—cabdrivers, floor polishers, bathhouse attendants, Tartar junkmen, runaway madmen from disbanded asylums, small shopkeepers, and monks.

The first sat around the red-hot stoves without their jackets, on short, round blocks stood upright, telling each other something and laughing loudly. They were people with connections. They were not dejected. At home influential relations were interceding for them. In any case, they could buy themselves off further along the way.

The second, wearing boots and unbuttoned kaftans, or long, loose shirts over their pants and going barefoot, bearded or beardless, stood by the slid-open doors of the stuffy cars, holding on to the doorposts and the bars across the opening, looked sullenly at the area by the wayside and its inhabitants, and talked to no one. They did not have the necessary acquaintances. They had nothing to hope for.

Not all these people were placed in the cars authorized for them. A portion had been tucked into the middle of the train, mixed with the free public. There were people of that sort in the fourteenth car.

9

Usually, when the train approached some station, Antonina Alexandrovna, who was lying on the upper level, raised herself to the uncomfortable position she was forced into by the low ceiling, which prevented her from straightening up, hung her head over the side, and, through the chink of the slightly opened door, determined whether the place presented any interest from the point of view of barter and whether it was worthwhile getting down from the bunk and going outside.

And so it was now. The slowing pace of the train brought her out of her drowsiness. The multitude of switches over which the freight car jolted with increasingly loud bumps spoke for the importance of the station and the length of the forthcoming stop.

Antonina Alexandrovna sat bent over, rubbed her eyes, smoothed her hair, and, thrusting her hand into the knapsack, rummaged around and pulled out a towel embroidered with roosters, little figures, yokes, and wheels.

Just then the doctor woke up, jumped down from the berth first, and helped his wife climb down to the floor.

Meanwhile, past the open door of the car, following the switchmen’s boxes and lampposts, there already floated the trees of the station, weighed down by whole layers of snow, which looked like a welcome offering for the train, and the first to jump down from the still quickly moving train onto the pristine snow of the platform were the sailors, who, to get ahead of everyone, went running around the station building, where, in the shelter of the side wall, women selling forbidden food usually hid.

The sailors’ black uniforms, the flying ribbons of their peakless caps, and their bell-bottomed trousers lent a dash and impetuosity to their steps and made everyone give way before them, as before downhill skiers or skaters racing at top speed.

Around the corner of the station, hiding behind one another and as nervous as if they were telling fortunes, peasant women from the nearby villages lined up with cucumbers, cottage cheese, boiled beef, and rye cheesecakes, which, under the quilted covers they were brought in, kept their aroma and warmth even in the cold. The women and girls, in kerchiefs tucked under their winter jackets, blushed like poppies at some of the sailors’ jokes, and at the same time feared them worse than fire, because it was mostly of sailors that all sorts of detachments were formed for combating speculation and forbidden free trade.

The peasant women’s confusion did not last long. The train was coming to a stop. Other passengers were arriving. The public intermingled. Trade became brisk.

Antonina Alexandrovna was making the rounds of the women, the towel thrown over her shoulder, looking as if she were going behind the station to wash with snow. She had already been called to from the lines several times:

“Hey, you, city girl, what are you asking for the towel?”

But Antonina Alexandrovna, without stopping, walked on further with her husband.

At the end of the line stood a woman in a black kerchief with free crimson designs. She noticed the embroidered towel. Her bold eyes lit up. She glanced sideways, made sure that danger did not threaten from anywhere, quickly went up close to Antonina Alexandrovna, and, throwing back the cover of her goods, whispered in a heated patter:

“Looky here. Ever seen the like? Aren’t you tempted? Well, don’t think too long—it’ll be snapped up. Give me the towel for the halfy.”

Antonina Alexandrovna did not catch the last word. She thought the woman had said something about a calf.

“What’s that, my dear?”

By a halfy the peasant woman meant half a hare, split in two and roasted from head to tail, which she was holding in her hands. She repeated:

“I said give me the towel for a halfy. Why are you looking at me? It’s not dog meat. My husband’s a hunter. It’s a hare, a hare.”

The exchange was made. Each side thought she had made a great gain and the opposite side was as great a loser. Antonina Alexandrovna was ashamed to have fleeced the poor woman so dishonestly. But the woman, pleased with the deal, hastened to put sin behind her and, calling the woman next to her, who was all traded out, strode home with her down a narrow path trampled in the snow, which led to somewhere far away.

Just then there was a commotion in the crowd. Somewhere an old woman shouted:

“Where are you off to, young sir? And the money? When did you give it to me, you shameless liar? Ah, you greedy gut, I shout at him, and he walks off and doesn’t look back. Stop, I said, stop, mister comrade! Help! Thief! Robbery! There he is, there, hold him!”

“Which one?”

“Him walking there, with the shaved mug, laughing.”

“The one with a hole on his elbow?”

“Yes, yes. Hold him, the heathen!”

“The one with the patched sleeve?”

“Yes, yes. Ah, dear God, I’ve been robbed!”

“What’s the story here?”

“He was buying pies and milk from this old woman, stuffed himself full, and pffft! She’s here, howling her head off.”

“It can’t be left like that. He’s got to be caught.”

“Go on, catch him. He’s all belts and cartridges. He’ll do the catching.”

10

In freight car 14 there were several men rounded up for the labor army. They were guarded by the convoy soldier Voroniuk. Three of them stood out for different reasons. They were: Prokhor Kharitonovich Pritulyev, known as “casheteer” in the car, a former cashier in a state wine shop in Petrograd; the sixteen-year-old Vasya Brykin, a boy from a hardware store; and the gray-haired revolutionary cooperator Kostoed-Amursky, who had been in all the forced labor camps of the old times and had opened a new series of them in the new time.

These recruits were all strangers to each other, picked up here and there, and gradually got to know each other during the trip. From their conver-sations it was learned that the cashier Pritulyev and the shopkeeper’s apprentice Vasya Brykin were fellow countrymen, both from Vyatka, and moreover were both born in places that the train was supposed to pass through sometime or other.

The tradesman Pritulyev from Malmyzh was a squat man with a brush cut, pockmarked and ugly. His gray jacket, black from sweat under the armpits, fitted him tightly, like the upper part of a sarafan on the fleshy bust of a woman. He was silent as a block of wood and, brooding about something for hours, picked the warts on his freckled hands until they bled and began to fester.

A year back he had been walking down Nevsky Prospect in the fall and at the corner of Liteiny had happened upon a street roundup. They had asked for his documents. He turned out to be the holder of a ration card of the fourth category, prescribed for nonlaboring elements, with which he had never obtained anything. He had been picked up by that token and, together with many others arrested in the street on the same grounds, had been sent to barracks under guard. The party assembled in that way, on the example of one previously put together, which was now digging trenches at the Arkhangelsk front, was first supposed to be moved to Vologda, but was turned back halfway and sent through Moscow to the eastern front.

Pritulyev had a wife in Luga, where he had been working in the pre-war years, before his job in Petersburg. Having learned of his misfortune by hearsay, his wife rushed to look for him in Vologda, to deliver him from the labor army. But the path of the detachment differed from that of her search. Her efforts came to naught. Everything was confused.

In Petersburg, Pritulyev had cohabited with Pelageya Nilovna Tyagunova. He was stopped at the corner of Nevsky just at the moment when he had taken leave of her and was going another way on business, and in the distance, among the passersby flashing along Liteiny, he could still see her back, which soon disappeared.

This Tyagunova, a full-bodied, stately tradeswoman with beautiful hands and a thick braid, which, with a deep sigh, she kept tossing now over one shoulder, now over the other, onto her breast, accompanied Pritulyev on the troop train of her own free will.

It was not clear what good the women who clung to Pritulyev found in such a block of wood as he. Besides Tyagunova, in another car of the train, several cars closer to the engine, rode another acquaintance of Pritulyev, the towheaded and skinny girl Ogryzkova, to whom Tyagunova gave the abusive titles of “the nostril” and “the syringe,” among other insulting nicknames.

The rivals were at daggers drawn and avoided each other’s eye. Ogryzkova never showed herself in their car. It was a mystery where she managed to see the object of her adoration. Perhaps she was content to contemplate him from afar, at the general loading of wood and coal by the forces of all the passengers.

11

Vasya’s story was something else again. His father had been killed in the war. His mother had sent Vasya from the village to apprentice with his uncle in Petrograd.

That winter the uncle, who owned a hardware store in the Apraksin Arcade, was summoned to the soviet for explanations. He went through the wrong door and, instead of the room indicated on the summons, landed in the one next to it. By chance it was the anteroom of the commission for labor conscription. There were a great many people there, appearing in that section on subpoena. When enough of them had accumulated, Red Army soldiers came, surrounded them, and took them for the night to the Semyonovsky barracks, and in the morning dispatched them to the station, to be put on the train to Vologda.

The news of the detention of so great a number of inhabitants spread through the city. The next day a host of relations came to bid farewell to their dear ones at the station. Among them were Vasya and his aunt, who came to see the uncle off.

At the station the uncle started begging the sentry to let him out for a minute to see his wife. This sentry was Voroniuk, who was now escorting the group in freight car 14. Voroniuk refused to let the uncle out without a sure guarantee that he would come back. The uncle and aunt offered to leave their nephew under guard as such a guarantee. Voroniuk agreed. Vasya was taken inside the fence, the uncle was taken outside. The uncle and aunt never came back.

When the hoax was discovered, Vasya, who had not suspected any fraud, burst into tears. He fell at Voroniuk’s feet and kissed his hands, begging him to let him go, but nothing helped. The convoy guard was implacable, not out of cruelty of character. This was a troubled time, the order was strict. The convoy guard was answerable with his life for the number entrusted to his charge, which was established by roll call. That was how Vasya ended up in the labor army.

The cooperator Kostoed-Amursky, who enjoyed the respect of all the jailers under both the tsar and the present government, and who was always on a personal footing with them, more than once drew the attention of the head of the convoy to Vasya’s intolerable situation. The man acknowledged that it was indeed a blatant error, but that formal difficulties did not allow for touching upon this tangle during the journey, and he hoped to disentangle it once they arrived.

Vasya was a pretty young boy with regular features, like portrayals of the tsar’s bodyguards and God’s angels on popular prints. He was unusually pure and unspoiled. His favorite amusement was to sit on the floor at the feet of the adults, clasping his knees with both arms and throwing his head back, and listen to their talk and stories. The content of it could be reconstructed from the play of the facial muscles with which he held back the tears that were about to flow or fought with the laughter that was choking him. The subject of the conversation was reflected in the impressionable boy’s face as in a mirror.

12

The cooperator Kostoed was sitting up above as a guest of the Zhivagos and sucking with a whistle on the shoulder of hare they had offered him. He feared drafts and chills. “How it blows! Where’s it coming from?” he asked and kept changing his place, seeking a sheltered spot. At last he settled himself so that he felt no cold wind and said: “Now it’s good,” finished gnawing the shoulder, licked his fingers, wiped them with a handkerchief, and, having thanked his hosts, observed:

“It’s coming from the window. You should stop it up. However, let’s get back to the subject of the argument. You’re wrong, doctor. Roasted hare is a splendid thing. But, forgive me, to conclude from it that the countryside is flourishing is bold, to say the least. It’s a very risky leap.”

“Oh, come now!” Yuri Andreevich objected. “Look at these stations. The trees haven’t been cut down. The fences are intact. And the markets! The peasant women! Just think, how satisfying! There’s life somewhere. Somebody’s glad. Not everybody groans. That justifies everything.”

“It would be good if it were so. But it’s not. Where did you get all that? Go fifty miles from the railway. There are ceaseless peasant revolts everywhere. Against whom, you ask? Against the Whites and against the Reds, depending on who’s in power. You say, aha, the muzhik is the enemy of all order, he doesn’t know what he wants himself. Excuse me, but it’s too early to be triumphant. He knows it better than you, but what he wants is not at all what you and I want.

“When the revolution woke him up, he decided that his age-old dream was coming true, of life on his own, of anarchic farmstead existence by the labor of his own hands, with no dependence and no obligation to anyone at all. But, from the vise grip of the old, overthrown state, he’s fallen under the still heavier press of the revolutionary superstate. And now the countryside is thrashing about and finds no peace anywhere. And you say the peasants are flourishing. You know nothing, my dear man, and, as far as I can see, you don’t want to know.”

“Well, so, it’s true I don’t want to. Perfectly right. Ah, go on! Why should I know everything and lay myself out for everything? The times take no account of me and impose whatever they like on me. So allow me to ignore the facts. You say my words don’t agree with reality. But is there any reality in Russia now? In my opinion, it’s been so intimidated that it has gone into hiding. I want to believe that the countryside has benefitted and is prospering. If that, too, is a delusion, what am I to do, then? What am I to live by, who am I to obey? And I have to live, I’m a family man.”

Yuri Andreevich waved his hand and, leaving it to Alexander Alexandrovich to bring the argument with Kostoed to an end, moved closer to the edge of the berth and, hanging his head over, began to look at what was happening below.

A general conversation was going on there between Pritulyev, Voroniuk, Tyagunova, and Vasya. Seeing that they were nearing their native places, Pritulyev recalled how they were connected, what station you had to get to, where to get off, how to move further on, afoot or with horses, and Vasya, at the mention of familiar villages or hamlets, jumped with lit-up eyes and delightedly repeated their names, because listing them sounded to him like an enchanting fairy tale.

“You get off at Dry Ford?” he asked breathlessly. “Well, of course! That’s our junction! Our station! And then most likely you go down to Buiskoe?”

“Then down the Buiskoe road.”

“That’s what I said—Buiskoe. The village of Buiskoe. As if I don’t know! That’s our turnoff. To get from there to us you keep bearing to the right, to the right. Towards Veretenniki. And to you, Uncle Kharitonych, it must be to the left, away from the river? You’ve heard of the river Pelga? Well, so! That’s our river! And to us you go by the bank, by the bank. And on that same river, a bit higher up the Pelga, our village! Our Veretenniki. Right up on the cliff! The bank’s ste-e-ep! We call it ‘the counter.’ When you’re standing on top, it’s scary to look down, it’s so steep. For fear of falling. By God, it’s true. They cut stone there. For millstones. And my mama’s there in Veretenniki. And two little sisters. My sister Alenka. And Arishka, my other sister. My mama, Auntie Palasha, Pelageya Nilovna, she’s like you, I’d say, young, fair. Uncle Voroniuk! Uncle Voroniuk! I beg you, in Christ’s name … Uncle Voroniuk!”

“Well, what? What are you saying it over and over for, like a cuckoo bird? ‘Uncle Voroniuk! Uncle Voroniuk!’ Don’t I know I’m not an aunt? What do you want, what do you need? Want me to let you slip away? Is that what you’re saying? You clear off, and I go to the wall for it, and amen?”

Pelageya Tyagunova absentmindedly gazed off somewhere to the side and said nothing. She stroked Vasya’s head and, thinking about something, fingered his blond hair. Every once in a while she nodded her head and made signs to the boy with her eyes and her smiles, the meaning of which was that he should not be silly and talk to Voroniuk out loud about such things. Just wait, she meant, everything will take care of itself, don’t worry.

13

When they left the Central Russian region and made their way east, unexpected things came thick and fast. They began to cross troubled areas, districts ruled by armed bands, places where uprisings had recently been quelled.

Stops in the middle of the fields, inspections of the cars by antiprofiteering units, searches of luggage, verifications of papers became more frequent.

Once the train got stuck somewhere during the night. No one looked into the cars, no one was awakened. Wondering if there had been an accident, Yuri Andreevich jumped down from the freight car.

It was a dark night. For no apparent reason, the train was standing at some chance milepost on an ordinary, fir-lined stretch of track in the middle of a field. Yuri Andreevich’s neighbors, who had jumped down earlier and were dawdling around in front of the freight car, told him that, according to their information, nothing had happened, but it seemed the engineer himself had stopped the train under the pretext that it was a dangerous place and, until the good condition of the tracks was verified by handcar, he refused to take the train any further. It was said that representatives of the passengers had been sent to entreat him and, in case of necessity, to grease his palm. According to rumor, the sailors were mixing into it. They would bring him around.

While this was being explained to Yuri Andreevich, the snowy smoothness down the tracks near the engine kept being lit up by flashes of fire from the smokestack and the vent under the engine’s firebox, like the breathing reflections of a bonfire. Suddenly one of these tongues brightly lit up a piece of the snowy field, the engine, and a few black figures running along the edge of the engine’s chassis.

Ahead of them, apparently, flashed the engineer. Having reached the end of the footboard, he leaped up and, flying over the buffer bar, disappeared from sight. The sailors pursuing him made the same movements. They, too, ran to the end of the grid, leaped, flashed in the air, and vanished from sight.

Drawn by what they had seen, Yuri Andreevich and a few of the curious walked towards the engine.

In the free part of the line ahead of the train, the following sight presented itself to them. To one side of the tracks, the vanished engineer stuck halfway out of the untouched snow. Like beaters around their game, the sailors surrounded him in a semicircle, buried, like him, waist-deep in the snow.

The engineer shouted:

“Thanks a lot, you stormy petrels!⁴ I’ve lived to see it! Coming with a revolver against your brother, a worker! Why did I say the train would go no further? Comrade passengers, be my witnesses, what sort of country this is. Anybody who wants to hangs around, unscrewing nuts. Up yours and your mother’s, what’s that to me? Devil stick you in the ribs, I’m not talking about me, I’m talking about you, so they don’t pull some job on you. And see what I get for my cares. Well, so shoot me, mine layers! Comrade passengers, be my witnesses, I’m right here—I’m not hiding.”

Various voices were heard from the group on the railway embankment. Some exclaimed, taken aback:

“What’s with you? … Forget it … As if we … Who’d let them? They’re just … To put a scare …”

Others loudly egged him on:

“That’s right, Gavrilka! Don’t give up, old Steam-traction!”

A sailor, who was the first to free himself from the snow and turned out to be a red-haired giant with such an enormous head that it made his face look flat, quietly turned to the crowd and in a soft bass, with Ukrainianisms like Voroniuk, spoke a few words, funny for their perfect calm in those extraordinary night circumstances:

“Beg pardon, but what’s all this hullabaloo? You’re like to get sick in this wind, citizens. Go back to your cars out of the cold!”

When the crowd began to disperse, gradually returning to their freight cars, the red-haired sailor went up to the engineer, who had not quite come to his senses yet, and said:

“Enough throwing hysterics, comrade engineer. Leave that hole. Let’s get going.”

14

The next day, at a quiet pace, with slowdowns every moment, fearing to run off the slightly snow-powdered and unswept rails, the train stopped at a life-forsaken waste, in which they could not immediately recognize the remains of a station destroyed by fire. On its sooty façade the inscription “Nizhni Kelmes” could be made out.

It was not only the train station that kept the traces of a fire. Behind the station a deserted and snow-covered village could be seen, which had obviously shared its sorry fate.

The end house of the village was charred, the one next to it had several beams knocked loose at the corner and turned butt end in; everywhere in the street lay pieces of broken sledges, fallen-down fences, torn sheet metal, smashed household crockery. The snow, dirty with ashes and soot, had bare black patches showing through it, and was spread with frozen swill and charred logs, traces of the fire and its extinguishing.

The depopulation of the village and the station was incomplete. There were individual living souls in it here and there.

“Did the whole village burn down?” the train master asked sympathetically, jumping down onto the platform, when the station master came out from behind the ruins to meet him.

“Greetings. Glad you’ve arrived safely. Burn we did, but it’s something worse than a fire.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Better not go into it.”

“You mean Strelnikov?”

“Himself.”

“What did you do wrong?”

“It wasn’t us. The railroad was just tacked on. It was our neighbors. We got it at the same time. See that village over there? They’re the culprits. The village of Nizhni Kelmes of the Ust-Nemda district. It’s all because of them.”

“And what did they do?”

“Nearly all the seven deadly sins. They disbanded their poor peasants’ committee, that’s one for you; they opposed the decree on supplying horses to the Red Army—and, notice, they’re all Tartars, horse people, that’s two; and they didn’t obey the order about the mobilization, that’s three—so you can see.”

“Yes, yes. It’s all clear, then. And for that they got it from the artillery?”

“Precisely.”

“From an armored train?”

“Naturally.”

“Regrettable. Deserving of pity. However, it’s none of our business.”

“Besides, it’s a thing of the past. But my news won’t gladden you any. You’ll be staying here for a day or two.”

“Stop joking. I’m not here for just anything at all: I’ve got draft reinforcements for the front. I’m not used to standing around.”

“This is no joke. It’s a snowdrift, you’ll see for yourself. A blizzard raged for a week along this whole section. Buried it. And there’s nobody to shovel. Half the village has run away. I’ve set the rest to work, but they don’t manage.”

“Ah, confound you all! I’m finished, finished! Well, what to do now?”

“We’ll clear it somehow and you’ll go on.”

“Big drifts?”

“Not very, I wouldn’t say. For stretches. The blizzard went slantwise, at an angle to the tracks. The hardest part’s in the middle. There’s a mile and a half of hollow. We’ll really suffer there. The place is packed solid. But further on it’s not bad, taiga—the forest sheltered it. The same before the hollow, there’s an open stretch, nothing terrible. The wind blew it away.”

“Ah, devil take you all! What a nightmare! I’ll get the whole train on their feet, they can all help.”

“I thought the same thing.”

“Only don’t touch the sailors and the Red Army soldiers. There’s a whole trainload of labor conscripts. Along with freely traveling people, it’s as much as seven hundred.”

“That’s more than enough. As soon as the shovels are delivered, we’ll set them to it. There aren’t enough shovels. We’ve sent to the neighboring villages. There’ll be some.”

“God, what a disaster! Do you think we’ll manage?”

“Sure. Pull together, they say, and you take cities. It’s the railway. An artery. For pity’s sake.”

15

Clearing the line took three days. All the Zhivagos, including Nyusha, took an active part in it. This was the best time of their trip.

The country had something reserved, not fully told, about it. It gave off a breath of Pugachevism, in Pushkin’s perception of it, of Asiatic, Aksakovian description.⁵

The mysteriousness of the corner was completed by the destruction and by the reticence of the few remaining inhabitants, who were frightened, avoided the passengers on the train, and did not communicate with each other for fear of denunciations.

People were led out to work by categories, not all kinds simultaneously. The work area was cordoned off by the guards.

The line was cleared from both ends at once, by separate brigades set up in different places. Between the freed sections there remained to the very end piles of untouched snow, which separated the adjacent groups from each other. These piles were removed only at the last moment, once the clearing had been completed over the whole required stretch.

Clear, frosty days set in. They spent them in the open air, returning to the car only for the night. They worked in short shifts, which caused no fatigue, because there were too many workers and not enough shovels. The untiring work afforded nothing but pleasure.

The place where the Zhivagos went to dig was open, picturesque. The country at this point first descended to the east of the tracks, and then went up in an undulating slope as far as the horizon.

On a hill stood a solitary house, exposed on all sides. It was surrounded by a garden, which probably bushed out in the summer, but now its spare, frost-covered tracery did not protect the building.

The shroud of snow leveled and rounded everything. But, judging by the main irregularities of the slope, which it was unable to conceal with its drifts, in spring a brook, flowing into the pipe of the viaduct under the railway, probably ran from above down the meandering gully, now thickly covered by the deep snow, like a child hiding its head under the heap of a down coverlet.

Was anyone living in the house, or was it standing empty and falling to ruin, set down on a list by the local or district land committee? Where were its former inhabitants, and what had happened to them? Had they escaped abroad? Had they perished at the hands of the peasants? Or, having earned a good name, had they settled in the district town as educated experts? Had Strelnikov spared them, if they stayed until recently, or had they been included in his summary justice along with the kulaks?⁶

The house on the hill piqued his curiosity and kept mournfully silent. But questions were not asked then, and no one answered them. And the sun lit up the snowy smoothness with a blinding white brilliance. How regular were the pieces the shovel cut from it! What dry, diamond-like sparkles spilled from the cuts! How it reminded him of the far-off days of childhood, when, in a light-colored hood trimmed with braid and a lambskin coat with hooks tightly sewn into the black, curly wool, little Yura had cut pyramids and cubes, cream cakes, fortresses, and cave dwellings from the snow in the courtyard, which was just as blinding. Ah, how tasty it was to live in the world then, how delightful and delicious everything around him was!

But even this three-day life in the open air produced an impression of satiety. And not without reason. In the evening the workers were allotted hot, freshly baked white bread, brought from no one knew where, on no one knew whose orders. The bread had a delicious glazed crust that was cracked on the sides, and a thick, superbly browned bottom crust with little bits of coal baked into it.

16

They came to love the ruins of the station, as one can grow attached to a temporary shelter during an excursion in the snowy mountains. They kept the memory of its situation, the external appearance of the buildings, certain details of the damage.

They returned to the station in the evening, when the sun was setting. As if out of faithfulness to the past, it continued to set in the same place, behind the old birch that grew just by the telegraphist’s office window.

The outer wall at that place had collapsed inward and blocked up the room. But the cave-in had not harmed the back corner of the room, facing an intact window. There everything was preserved: the coffee-colored wallpaper, the tile stove with a round vent under a brass cover on a chain, and a list of the inventory in a black frame on the wall.

Having sunk to the ground, the sun, just as before the disaster, reached the tiles of the stove, lit up the coffee-colored wallpaper with a russet heat, and hung the shadows of birch branches on the wall like a woman’s shawl.

In another part of the building, there was a boarded-up door to a waiting room with an inscription of the following content, done probably in the first days of the February revolution or shortly before it:

“In view of medications and bandaging supplies, our respected patients are asked not to worry temporarily. For the reason observed, I am sealing the door, of which I hereby give notice. Senior medical assistant of Ust-Nemda so-and-so.”

When the last snow, which had been left in mounds between the cleared sections, was shoveled away, the whole railway opened out and became visible, straight, like an arrow flying off into the distance. Along the sides of it lay white heaps of cleared snow, bordered for the entire length by two walls of black pine forest.

As far as the eye could see, groups of people with shovels stood in various places along the rails. They were seeing each other in full muster for the first time and were surprised at their great numbers.

17

It became known that the train would leave in a few hours, even though it was late and night was approaching. Before its departure, Yuri Andreevich and Antonina Alexandrovna went for the last time to admire the beauty of the cleared line. There was no one on the tracks now. The doctor and his wife stood for a while, looked into the distance, exchanged two or three remarks, and turned back to their freight car.

On the way back they heard the angry, raucous cries of two quarreling women. They recognized them at once as the voices of Ogryzkova and Tyagunova. The two women were walking in the same direction as the doctor and his wife, from the head to the tail of the train, but along the opposite side of it, facing the station, while Yuri Andreevich and Antonina Alexandrovna were walking on the forest side. Between the two pairs, concealing them from each other, stretched the unbroken wall of cars. The women almost never came abreast of the doctor and Antonina Alexandrovna, but either got way ahead of them or lagged far behind.

Both were in great agitation. Their strength failed them every moment. As they went, their legs probably either sank deep in the snow or gave way under them, judging by their voices, which, owing to the unevenness of their gait, now rose to a shout, now fell to a whisper. Evidently, Tyagunova was chasing Ogryzkova and, overtaking her, may have brought her fists into play. She showered her rival with choice abuse, which, on the melodious lips of such a peahen and grande dame sounded a hundred times more shameless than coarse and unmusical male abuse.

“Ah, you whore, ah, you slattern,” shouted Tyagunova. “You can’t take a step but she’s there, swishing her skirts on the floor, goggling her eyes! So my oaf’s not enough for you, you bitch, you’ve got to gawk at a child’s soul, spreading your tail, you’ve got to corrupt a young one.”

“So it means you’re Vasenka’s lawful one, too?”

“I’ll show you who’s lawful, you gob, you plague! You won’t escape me alive, don’t lead me into sin!”

“Hey, hey, stop swinging! Keep your hands to yourself, hellcat! What do you want from me?”

“I want you to drop dead, you lousy trollop, mangy she-cat, shameless eyes!”

“There’s no talking about me. Sure, I’m a bitch and a she-cat, everybody knows that. But you, you’ve got you a title. Born in a ditch, married in a gateway, made pregnant by a rat, gave birth to a hedgehog … Help, help, good people! Aie, aie, she’ll do me to death, the murderous hag! Aie, save a poor girl, protect an orphan …”

“Quick, let’s go. I can’t listen, it’s disgusting,” Antonina Alexandrovna began hurrying her husband. “It won’t end well.”

18

Suddenly everything changed, the place and the weather. The plain ended, the road went between mountains, through hills and high country. The north wind that had blown all the time recently ceased. Warmth breathed from the south, as from a stove.

The forests here grew in terraces on the hillsides. When the path of the railway crossed them, the train first had to go up steeply, then change in the middle to a sloping descent. The train crept groaning into the dense forest and barely dragged itself along, like an old forester on foot leading a crowd of passengers who look around on all sides and observe everything.

But there was nothing to look at yet. In the depths of the forest there were sleep and peace, as in winter. Only rarely did some bushes and trees, with a rustle, free their lower branches from the gradually subsiding snow, as if taking off a yoke or unbuttoning a collar.

Yuri Andreevich was overcome by sleepiness. All those days he lay on his upper berth, slept, woke up, reflected, and listened. But as yet there was nothing to listen to.

19

While Yuri Andreevich slept his fill, spring thawed and melted all the masses of snow that had fallen on Moscow the day of their departure and had gone on falling throughout the journey; all the snow that they had spent three days digging and shoveling in Ust-Nemda and that lay in immense and thick layers over thousand-mile expanses.

At first the snow melted from inside, quietly and secretively. But when the Herculean labors were half done, it became impossible to conceal them any longer. The miracle came to light. Water ran from under the shifted shroud of snow and set up a clamor. Impassable forest thickets roused themselves. Everything in them awoke.

The water had room for a spree. It rushed down the cliffs, overflowed the ponds, flooded vast areas. The forest was soon filled with its noise, steam, and haze. Streams snaked their way through the thickets, getting mired down and sinking into the snow that cramped their movement, flowed hissing over the flat places, and dropped down, scattering in a watery spray. The earth could not absorb any more moisture. From a dizzying height, almost from the clouds, it was drunk up by the roots of age-old firs, at whose feet it was churned into puffs of brownish white foam, drying like beer foam on a drinker’s lips.

The intoxication of spring went to the sky’s head, and it grew bleary from fumes and covered itself with clouds. Low, feltlike clouds with drooping edges drifted over the forest, and warm cloudbursts, smelling of dirt and sweat, poured down through them, washing the last pieces of pierced, black, icy armor from the earth.

Yuri Andreevich woke up, pulled himself over to the square window, from which the frame had been removed, propped himself on his elbow, and began to listen.

20

With the approach of the mining region, the country became more populated, the stages shorter, the stations more frequent. The passengers changed less rarely. More people got on and off at small intermediate stops. Those who were traveling for shorter distances did not settle for long and did not go to sleep, but found places at night somewhere by the doors in the middle of the freight car, talked among themselves in low voices about local affairs, comprehensible only to them, and got off at the next junction or way station.

From some remarks dropped by the local public, who had replaced each other in the freight car over the past three days, Yuri Andreevich concluded that the Whites were gaining the upper hand in the north and either had taken or were about to take Yuriatin. Besides, if his hearing had not deceived him and it was not some namesake of his comrade in the Meliuzeevo hospital, the White forces in that direction were under the command of Galiullin, who was well-known to Yuri Andreevich.

Yuri Andreevich did not say a word to his family about this talk, so as not to upset them uselessly while the rumors remained unconfirmed.

21

Yuri Andreevich woke up at the beginning of the night from a vague feeling of happiness welling up in him, which was so strong that it roused him. The train was standing at some night stop. The station was surrounded by the glassy twilight of a white night. This bright darkness was saturated with something subtle and powerful. It bore witness to the vastness and openness of the place. It suggested that the junction was situated on a height with a wide and free horizon.

On the platform, talking softly, shadows went past the freight car with inaudible steps. That also touched Yuri Andreevich. He perceived in the careful steps and voices a respect for the hour of night and a concern for the sleepers on the train as might have been in the old days, before the war.

The doctor was mistaken. There was the same hubbub and stamping of boots on the platform as everywhere else. But there was a waterfall in the vicinity. Its breathing out of freshness and freedom extended the limits of the white night. It had filled the doctor with a feeling of happiness in his sleep. The constant, never ceasing noise of its falling water reigned over all the sounds at the junction and imparted to them a deceptive semblance of silence.

Not divining its presence, but lulled by the mysterious resilience of the air of the place, the doctor fell fast asleep again.

Two men were talking below in the freight car. One asked the other:

“Well, so, have you calmed them down? Twisted their tails?”

“The shopkeepers, you mean?”

“Yes, the grain dealers.”

“We’ve pacified them. Like silk now. We knocked off a few as an example, and the rest got quiet. We collected a contribution.”

“How much did you take from the area?”

“Forty thousand.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Why should I kid you?”

“Holy cow, forty thousand!”

“Forty thousand bushels.”

“Well, there’s no flies on you! Good boys, good boys!”

“Forty thousand milled fine.”

“I suppose it’s no wonder. This area’s first class. Heart of the meal trade. Here along the Rynva and up to Yuriatin, village after village, it’s landings, grain depots. The Sherstobitov brothers, Perekatchikov and sons, wholesaler after wholesaler!”

“Don’t shout. You’ll wake people up.”

“All right.”

The speaker yawned. The other suggested:

“How about a little snooze? Looks like we’ll be starting.”

Just then a deafening noise came rolling from behind, swiftly growing, covering the roar of the waterfall, and an old-fashioned express train raced at full steam down the second track of the junction past their train, which stood without moving, hooted, roared, and, blinking its lights for the last time, vanished into the distance without a trace.

The conversation below resumed.

“Well, that’s it now. We’ll sit it out.”

“It won’t be soon now.”

“Must be Strelnikov. Armored, special purpose.”

“It’s him, then.”

“When it comes to counterrevolutionists, he’s ferocious.”

“It’s him racing against Galeev.”

“Who’s that?”

“The ataman Galeev. They say he’s standing with his Czechs covering Yuriatin. Seized control of the landings, blast him, and he’s holding them. The ataman Galeev.”⁷

“Prince Galileev, maybe. I forget.”

“There’s no such prince. Must be Ali Kurban. You got mixed up.”

“Kurban, maybe.”

“That’s another story.”

22

Towards morning Yuri Andreevich woke up a second time. Again he had dreamed something pleasant. The feeling of bliss and liberation that had filled him did not end. Again the train was standing, maybe at a new station, or maybe at the old one. Again there was the noise of a waterfall, most likely the same one, but possibly another.

Yuri Andreevich began to fall asleep at once and through his dozing fancied running feet and turmoil. Kostoed grappled with the head of the convoy, and the two shouted at each other. Outside it was still better than before. There was a breath of something new that had not been there earlier. Something magical, something springlike, black-and-white, flimsy, loose, like the coming of a snowstorm in May, when the wet, melting flakes on the ground make it not white but blacker still. Something transparent, black-and-white, strong scented. “Bird cherry!” Yuri Andreevich guessed in his sleep.

23

In the morning Antonina Alexandrovna said:

“Still, you’re an amazing man, Yura. A tissue of contradictions. Sometimes a fly flies by, you wake up and can’t close your eyes till morning, and here there’s noise, arguments, commotion, and you can’t manage to wake up. During the night the cashier Pritulyev and Vasya Brykin ran off. Yes, just think! And Tyagunova and Ogryzkova. Wait, that’s still not all. And Voroniuk. Yes, yes, ran off, ran off. Yes, imagine. Now listen. How they got away, together or separately, and in what order, is an absolute mystery. Well, let’s allow that this Voroniuk, naturally, decided to save himself from the responsibility on finding that the others had escaped. But the others? Did they all vanish of their own free will, or was one of them forcibly eliminated? For instance, suspicion falls on the women. But who killed whom, Tyagunova Ogryzkova or Ogryzkova Tyagunova, nobody knows. The head of the convoy runs from one end of the train to the other. ‘How dare you give the whistle for departure,’ he shouts. ‘In the name of the law, I demand that you hold the train until the escapees are caught.’ But the train master doesn’t yield. ‘You’re out of your mind,’ he says. ‘I’ve got draft reinforcements for the front, an urgent first priority. I should wait for your lousy crew! What a thing to come up with!’ And both of them, you understand, fall on Kostoed with reproaches. How is it that he, a cooperator, a man of understanding, was right there and didn’t keep the soldier, a benighted, unconscious being, from the fatal step. ‘And you a populist,’ they say. Well, Kostoed, of course, doesn’t let it go at that. ‘Interesting!’ he says. ‘So according to you a prisoner should look after a convoy soldier? Yes, sure, when a hen crows like a cock!’ I nudged you in the side and shoulder. ‘Yura,’ I shout, ‘wake up, an escape!’ Forget it! Cannon shots wouldn’t have roused you … But forgive me, of that later. And meanwhile … No, I can’t … Papa, Yura, look, how enchanting!”

Beyond the opening of the window, by which they lay with their heads thrust forward, spread a flooded area with no beginning or end. Somewhere a river had overflowed, and the waters of its side branch had come up close to the railway embankment. In foreshortening, brought about by looking from the height of the berth, it seemed as if the smoothly rolling train was gliding right over the water.

Its glassy smoothness was covered in a very few places by a ferrous blueness. Over the rest of the surface, the hot morning drove mirrory, oily patches of light, like a cook smearing the crust of a hot pie with a feather dipped in oil.

In this seemingly boundless backwater, along with meadows, hollows, and bushes, the pillars of white clouds were drowned, their piles reaching to the bottom.

Somewhere in the middle of the backwater a narrow strip of land was visible, with double trees suspended upwards and downwards between sky and earth.

“Ducks! A brood!” cried Alexander Alexandrovich, looking in that direction.

“Where?”

“By the island. Not there. To the right, to the right. Ah, damn, they flew away, got frightened.”

“Ah, yes, I see. There’s something I must talk with you about, Alexander Alexandrovich. Some other time. But our labor army and the ladies did well to get away. And it was peaceful, I think, without doing anybody harm. They simply ran off, the way water runs.”

24

The northern white night was ending. Everything was visible, but stood as if not believing itself, like something made up: mountain, copse, and precipice.

The copse had barely begun to turn green. In it several bird cherry bushes were blooming. The copse grew under the sheer of the mountain, on a narrow ledge that also broke off some distance away.

Nearby was a waterfall. It could not be seen from everywhere, but only from the other side of the copse, at the edge of the precipice. Vasya got tired going there to gaze at the waterfall for the experience of terror and admiration.

There was nothing around equal to the waterfall, nothing to match it. It was fearsome in this singularity, which turned it into something endowed with life and consciousness, into a fairy-tale dragon or giant serpent of those parts, who exacted tribute from the people and devastated the countryside.

Halfway down, the waterfall struck a protruding jag of rock and divided in two. The upper column of water was almost motionless, but in the two lower ones a barely perceptible movement from side to side never ceased for a moment, as if the waterfall kept slipping and straightening up, slipping and straightening up, and however often it lurched, it always kept its feet.

Vasya, spreading his sheepskin under him, lay down at the edge of the copse. When the dawn became more noticeable, a big, heavy-winged bird flew down from the mountain, glided in a smooth circle around the copse, and alighted at the top of a silver fir near the spot where Vasya lay. He raised his head, looked at the blue throat and blue-gray breast of the roller, and, spellbound, whispered aloud its Urals name: “Ronzha.” Then he got up, took the sheepskin from the ground, threw it on, and, crossing the clearing, came over to his companion. He said to her:

“Come on, auntie. See, you’re chilled, your teeth are chattering. Well, what are you staring at like you’re so scared? I’m talking human speech to you, we’ve got to go. Enter into the situation, we’ve got to keep to the villages. In a village they won’t harm their own kind, they’ll hide us. We haven’t eaten for two days, we’ll starve to death like this. Uncle Voroniuk must have raised hell looking for us. We’ve got to get out of here, Auntie Palasha, clear off, to put it simply. You’re such a pain to me, auntie, you haven’t said a word the whole day! Grief’s got your tongue, by God. What are you pining over? There was no wrong in you pushing Auntie Katya, Katya Ogryzkova, off the train. You just brushed against her with your side, I saw it myself. She got up from the grass unhurt, got up and ran. And the same with Uncle Prokhor, Prokhor Kharitonych. They’re catching up with us, we’ll be together again, don’t you think? The main thing is you mustn’t grieve, then your tongue’ll start working again.”

Tyagunova got up from the ground and, giving Vasya her hand, said softly:

“Come on, dovey.”

25

Creaking all over, the cars went uphill along the high embankment. Under it grew a mixed young forest, the tops of which did not reach its level. Below were meadows from which the water had just receded. The grass, mixed with sand, was covered with logs for ties, which lay randomly in all directions. They had probably been prepared for rafting at some nearby woodlot, and had been washed away and carried here by the high water.

The young forest below the embankment was still almost bare, as in winter. Only in the buds, which were spattered all over it like drops of wax, was something superfluous setting in, some disorder, a sort of dirt or swelling, and this superfluous thing, this disorder and dirt, was life, enveloping the first opening trees of the forest in the green flame of foliage.

Here and there birches stood straight as martyrs, pierced by the cogs and arrows of twin, just unfolded leaves. What they smelled of could be told by eye. They smelled of the same thing they shone with. They smelled of wood spirit, from which varnish is made.

Soon the railway came up to the place from which the logs might have been washed. At a turn in the forest, a clearing appeared, strewn with sawdust and chips, with a heap of twenty-foot logs in the middle. The engineer braked by the cutting area. The train shuddered and stopped in the position it assumed, slightly inclined on the high arc of a big curve.

The engine gave several short, barking whistles and someone shouted something. The passengers knew even without the signals: the engineer had stopped the train to take on fuel.

The doors of the freight cars slid open. Out onto the tracks poured the goodly population of a small town, excluding the mobilized men from the front cars, who were always exempt from deckhands’ work and did not take part in it now.

The pile of stove wood in the clearing was not enough to load the tender. In addition they were required to cut up a certain number of the twenty-foot logs.

The engine team had saws in its outfit. They were handed out among volunteers, who broke up into pairs. The professor and his son-in-law also received a saw.

From the open doors of the military freight cars, merry mugs stuck out. Adolescents who had never been under fire, naval cadets from the senior classes, mistakenly intruded into the wagon, as it seemed, among stern workers, family men, who had also never smelled powder and had only just finished military training, deliberately made noise and played the fool with the older sailors, so as not to start thinking. Everyone felt that the hour of trial was at hand.

The jokers accompanied the sawyers, men and women, with loud banter:

“Hey, grandpa! Tell them—I’m a nursling, my mama hasn’t weaned me, I can’t do physical labor. Hey, Mavra, see you don’t saw your skirt off, it’ll be drafty! Hey, girl, don’t go to the forest, better marry me instead!”

26

In the forest there were several sawhorses made from stakes tied crosswise, their ends driven into the ground. One turned out to be free. Yuri Andreevich and Alexander Alexandrovich set themselves to sawing on it.

It was that time of spring when the earth comes out from under the snow looking almost the same as when it went under the snow six months earlier. The forest exuded dampness and was all littered with last year’s leaves, like an untidied room in which people had torn up receipts, letters, and notices for many years of their lives and had had no time to sweep them away.

“Not so fast, you’ll get tired,” the doctor said to Alexander Alexandrovich, making the saw go more slowly and measuredly, and suggested that they rest.

The forest was filled with the hoarse ringing of other saws going back and forth, now all in rhythm, now discordantly. Somewhere far, far away the first nightingale was testing its strength. A blackbird whistled at still longer intervals, as if blowing through a clogged flute. Even the steam from the engine’s piston rose into the sky with a singsong burble, as if it were milk coming to the boil over a spirit lamp in a nursery.

“You wanted to talk about something,” Alexander Alexandrovich reminded the doctor. “You haven’t forgotten? It was like this: we were passing a flooded field, ducks were flying, you fell to thinking and said: ‘I must talk with you.’ ”

“Ah, yes. I don’t know how to put it briefly. You see, we’re going ever deeper … The whole region here is in ferment. We’ll arrive soon. It’s not known what we’ll find at our destination. Just in case, we must come to an agreement. I’m not talking about convictions. It would be absurd to find them out or establish them in a five-minute talk in a spring forest. We know each other well. The three of us—you, I, and Tonya—along with many others in our time, make up a single world, differing from each other only in the degree of our comprehension. I’m not talking about that. That’s an ABC. I’m talking about something else. We must agree beforehand on how to behave under certain circumstances, so as not to blush for each other and not to put the stain of disgrace on each other.”

“Enough. I understand. I like the way you pose the question. You’ve found precisely the necessary words. Here’s what I’ll tell you. Do you remember the night when you brought the leaflet with the first decrees, in winter, during a blizzard? Do you remember how incredibly unconditional it was? That straightforwardness was winning. But these things live in their original purity only in the heads of their creators, and then only on the first day of their proclamation. The very next day the Jesuitism of politics turns them inside out. What can I say to you? This philosophy is alien to me. This power is against us. They didn’t ask me to consent to this breakup. But they trusted me, and my actions, even if I was forced into them, placed me under obligation.

“Tonya asks if we’ll come in time to start a vegetable garden, if we’ll miss the time for planting. What can I answer? I don’t know the local soil. What are the climatic conditions? The summer’s too short. Does anything at all ripen here?

“Yes, but can we be going such a distance to take up gardening? Even the old saying, ‘Why walk a mile for a pint of beer,’ is impossible here, because there are, unfortunately, two or three thousand of those miles. No, frankly speaking, we’re dragging ourselves so far with a totally different purpose. We’re going to try to vegetate in the contemporary way and somehow get in on squandering grandfather’s former forests, machinery, and inventory. Not on restoring his property, but on wasting it, on the socialized blowing of thousands in order to exist on a kopeck, and like everybody else, to be sure, in a contemporary, incomprehensibly chaotic form. Shower me with gold, I still wouldn’t take the factory on the old basis even as a gift. It would be as wild as starting to run around naked or forgetting how to read and write. No, the history of property in Russia is over. And personally, we Gromekos already lost the passion for money grubbing in the previous generation.”

27

It was so hot and stuffy that it was impossible to sleep. The doctor’s head was bathed in sweat on the sweat-soaked pillow.

He carefully got down from the edge of the berth and quietly, so as not to waken anyone, slid the car door aside.

Dampness breathed in his face, sticky, as when your face runs into a spiderweb in a cellar. “Mist,” he guessed. “Mist. The day will probably be sultry, scorching. That’s why it’s so hard to breathe and there’s such an oppressive heaviness on the heart.”

Before getting down on the tracks, the doctor stood for a while in the doorway, listening all around.

The train was standing in some very big station of the junction category. Besides the silence and the mist, the cars were immersed in some sort of nonbeing and neglect, as if they had been forgotten—a sign that the train was standing in the very back of the yard, and that between it and the far-off station building there was a great distance, occupied by an endless network of tracks.

Two sorts of sounds rang out faintly in the distance.

Behind, where they had come from, could be heard a measured slapping, as if laundry were being rinsed or the wind were flapping the wet cloth of a flag against the wood of a flagpole.

From ahead came a low rumble, which made the doctor, who had been at war, shudder and strain his ears.

“Long-range cannon,” he decided, listening to the even, calmly rolling noise on a low, restrained note.

“That’s it. We’ve come right to the front,” the doctor thought, shook his head, and jumped down from the car to the ground.

He went several steps forward. After the next two cars, the train ended. It stood without an engine, which had gone somewhere with the detached front cars.

“That’s why they showed such bravado yesterday,” thought the doctor. “They clearly felt that, once they arrived, they’d be thrown right into the fire on the spot.”

He went around the end of the train, intending to cross the tracks and find the way to the station. At the corner of the car, a sentry with a rifle surged up as if out of the ground. He snapped softly:

“Where are you going? Your pass!”

“What station is this?”

“No station. Who are you?”

“I’m a doctor from Moscow. Traveling with my family on this train. Here are my papers.”

“Your papers are crap. Think I’m fool enough to go reading in the dark and ruin my eyes? There’s mist, see? I can tell what kind of doctor you are a mile away without any papers. That’s your doctors there, banging away from twelve-inchers. You really ought to be knocked off, but it’s too early. Back with you, while you’re still in one piece.”

“I’m being taken for someone else,” thought the doctor. To get into an argument with the sentry was meaningless. It truly was better to withdraw before it was too late. The doctor turned in the opposite direction.

The cannon fire behind his back died down. That direction was the east. There in the haze of the mist the sun rose and peeped dimly between the scraps of floating murk, the way naked people in a bathhouse flash through clouds of soapy steam.

The doctor walked along the cars of the train. He passed them all and went on walking further. With each step, his feet sank ever deeper into the loose sand.

The sounds of measured slapping came closer. The ground sloped down. After a few steps the doctor stopped in front of outlines that the mist endowed with incongruously large dimensions. Another step, and the sterns of boats pulled up onto the bank emerged from the murk. He was standing on the bank of a wide river, its lazy ripples slowly and wearily lapping against the sides of fishermen’s boats and the planks of the docks on shore.

“Who gave you permission to hang around here?” another sentry asked, detaching himself from the bank.

“What river is this?” the doctor shot back against his own will, though with all the forces of his soul he was determined not to ask anything after his recent experience.

Instead of an answer, the sentry put a whistle between his teeth, but he had no time to use it. The first sentry, whom he had intended to summon by his whistling, and who, as it turned out, had been inconspicuously following behind Yuri Andreevich, came up to his comrade himself. The two began to talk.

“Nothing to think about here. You can tell the bird by its flight. ‘What station is this? What river is this?’ Thought he’d distract our attention by it. What do you think—straight to the jetty, or to the car first?”

“To the car, I suppose. Whatever the chief says. Your identity papers,” barked the second sentry, and he grabbed the wad of papers the doctor handed him.

“Keep an eye on him,” he said to some unknown person, and together with the first sentry, he went down the tracks towards the station.

Then, to clarify the situation, a man lying on the sand, evidently a fisherman, grunted and stirred:

“Lucky for you they want to take you to the man himself. It may be your salvation. Only don’t blame them. It’s their duty. The time of the people. Maybe it’s for the best. But meanwhile, don’t say anything. You see, they mistook you for somebody. They’ve been hunting and hunting for some man. So they thought it was you. Here he is, they think, the enemy of the workers’ power—we’ve caught him. A mistake. In case of something, you should insist on seeing the chief. Don’t let these two have you. These class-conscious ones are a disaster, God help us. It wouldn’t cost them a cent to do you in. They’ll say, ‘Let’s go,’ but don’t go. You say, ‘I want to see the chief.’ ”

From the fisherman Yuri Andreevich learned that the river he was standing beside was the famous navigable river Rynva, that the station by the river was Razvilye, the riverside factory suburb of the city of Yuriatin. He learned that Yuriatin itself, which lay a mile or two further up, kept being fought over, and now seemed finally to have been won away from the Whites. The fisherman told him that there had been disorders in Razvilye as well, and they also seemed to have been put down, and there reigned such silence all around, because the area adjacent to the station had been cleared of civilian inhabitants and surrounded by a strict cordon. He learned, finally, that among the trains standing on the tracks with various military institutions housed in them, there was the special train of the regional army commissar Strelnikov, to whose car the doctor’s papers were taken.

From there a new sentry came after some time to fetch the doctor, one unlike his predecessors in that he dragged his rifle butt on the ground or set it down in front of him, as if carrying a drunken friend under the arm, who otherwise would have fallen down. He led the doctor to the army commissar’s car.

28

In one of the two saloon cars, connected by a leather passageway, which the sentry, having given the guard the password, climbed into with the doctor, laughter and movement could be heard, which instantly ceased on their appearance.

The sentry led the doctor down a narrow corridor to the wide middle section. Here there was silence and order. In the clean, comfortable room, neat, well-dressed people were working. The doctor had quite a different picture of the headquarters of the nonparty military specialist who in a short period of time had become the glory and terror of the whole region.

But the center of his activity was probably not here, but somewhere ahead, at frontline headquarters, closer to the scene of military activity, while here were his personal quarters, his small home office, and his mobile camp bed.

That was why it was quiet here, like the corridors of hot sea baths, laid with cork and rugs on which attendants in soft shoes step inaudibly.

The middle section of the car was a former dining room, carpeted over and turned into a dispatch room. There were several desks in it.

“One moment,” said a young officer who was sitting closest to the entrance. After that everyone at the desks thought it their right to forget about the doctor and stop paying attention to him. The same officer dismissed the sentry with an absentminded nod, and the man withdrew, the butt of his rifle clanking against the metal crossbars of the corridor.

The doctor saw his papers from the threshold. They lay on the edge of the last desk, in front of a more elderly officer of the old colonel type. He was some sort of military statistician. Humming something under his breath, he glanced at reference books, scrutinized army maps, compared, juxtaposed, cut out, and glued in something. He passed his gaze over all the windows in the room, one after the other, and said: “It’s going to be hot today,” as if he had drawn this conclusion from surveying all the windows, and it was not equally clear from each of them.

A military technician was crawling over the floor among the desks, fixing some broken wires. When he crawled under the young officer’s desk, the man got up so as not to hinder him. Next to him a girl, a copying clerk, in a man’s khaki jacket, was struggling over a broken typewriter. The carriage had gone too far to the side and gotten stuck in the frame. The young officer stood behind her stool and, together with her, studied the cause of the breakage from above. The military technician crawled over to the typist and examined the lever and gears from below. Getting up from his place, the commander of the colonel type went over to them. Everyone became occupied with the typewriter.

This reassured the doctor. It was impossible to suppose that people better initiated than he into his probable destiny would give themselves so lightheartedly to trifles in the presence of a doomed man.

“Though who knows about them?” he thought. “Where does their serenity come from? Beside them cannons boom, people are killed, and they make a forecast of a hot day, not in the sense of hot fighting, but of hot weather. Or have they seen so much that everything has gone dull in them?”

And, having nothing else to do, he began looking from his place across the entire room through the windows opposite.

29

In front of the train on this side stretched the rest of the tracks, and the Razvilye station could be seen on a hill in the suburb of the same name.

An unpainted wooden stairway with three landings led from the tracks up to the station.

The railway tracks on this side seemed to be a great engine graveyard. Old locomotives without tenders, with smokestacks shaped like cups or boot tops, stood turned stack to stack amidst piles of scrapped cars.

The engine graveyard below and the graveyard of the suburb, the crumpled iron on the tracks and the rusty roofs and signboards of the city’s outskirts, merged into one spectacle of abandonment and decrepitude under the white sky scalded by the early morning heat.

In Moscow, Yuri Andreevich forgot how many signboards there were in cities and what a great portion of the façades they occupied. The local signboards reminded him of it. Half of them were written in such big letters that they could be read from the train. They came down so low over the crooked little windows of the lopsided one-story buildings that the squatty houses disappeared under them, like peasant boys’ heads with their fathers’ caps pulled down over them.

By that time the mist had dispersed completely. Traces of it remained only on the left side of the sky, far to the east. But now they, too, stirred, moved, and parted like a theater curtain.

There, some two miles from Razvilye, on a hill higher than the suburbs, appeared a large city, a district or provincial capital. The sun lent its colors a yellowish tinge, the distance simplified its lines. It clung to the elevation in tiers, like Mount Athos or a hermits’ skete in a cheap print, house above house, street above street, with a big cathedral in the middle on its crown.

“Yuriatin!” the doctor realized with emotion. “The subject of the late Anna Ivanovna’s memories and of the nurse Antipova’s frequent remarks! How many times did I hear the name of the city from them, and it’s in such circumstances that I’m seeing it for the first time!”

At that moment the attention of the military bent over the typewriter was attracted by something outside the window. They turned their heads there. The doctor also followed their gaze.

Several captured or arrested men were being led up the stairs to the station, among them a high school boy who was wounded in the head. He had been bandaged somewhere, but blood seeped from under the bandage, and he smeared it with his hand over his sunburnt, sweaty face.

The student, between two Red Army men who wound up the procession, caught one’s attention not only by the resolution that his handsome face breathed, but by the pity evoked by such a young rebel. He and his two escorts attracted one’s gaze by the senselessness of their actions. They constantly did the opposite of what they should.

The cap kept falling off the student’s bandaged head. Instead of taking it off and carrying it in his hand, he would straighten it and pull it down further, to the detriment of his dressed wound, and the two Red Army men readily helped him.

In this absurdity, contrary to common sense, there was something symbolic. And, yielding to its significance, the doctor also wanted to run out to the landing and stop the student with a ready phrase that was bursting from him. He wanted to cry out both to the boy and to the people in the car that salvation lay not in faithfulness to forms, but in liberation from them.

The doctor shifted his gaze aside. In the middle of the room stood Strelnikov, who had just come in with straight, impetuous strides.

How could he, the doctor, amidst such a host of indefinite acquaintances, not have known up to now such definiteness as this man? How had life not thrown them together? How had their paths not crossed?

For some unknown reason it became clear at once that this man represented the consummate manifestation of will. He was to such a degree what he wanted to be that everything on him and in him inevitably seemed exemplary: his proportionately constructed and handsomely placed head, and the impetuousness of his stride, and his long legs in high boots, which may have been dirty but seemed polished, and his gray flannel tunic, which may have been wrinkled but gave the impression of ironed linen.

Thus acted the presence of giftedness, natural, knowing no strain, feeling itself in the saddle in any situation of earthly existence.

This man must have possessed some gift, not necessarily an original one. The gift that showed in all his movements might be the gift of imitation. They all imitated someone then. The glorious heroes of history. Figures seen at the front or in the days of disturbances in the cities and who struck the imagination. The most acknowledged authorities among the people. Comrades who came to the fore. Or simply each other.

Out of courtesy, he did not show that the presence of a stranger surprised or embarrassed him. On the contrary, he addressed everyone with such an air as if he included the doctor, too, in their company. He said:

“Congratulations. We’ve driven them off. This seems like a war game, and not the real thing, because they’re Russians as we are, only with a folly in them that they don’t want to part with and that we’ll have to knock out of them by force. Their commander used to be my friend. He’s of still more proletarian origin than I am. We grew up in the same courtyard. He did a lot for me in my life, I’m obliged to him. But I’m glad I’ve thrust him back across the river and maybe further. Repair the connection quickly, Guryan. We can’t go on with just messengers and the telegraph. Have you noticed how hot it is? I slept for an hour and a half even so. Ah, yes …” he recalled and turned to the doctor. He remembered the cause of his waking up. He had been awakened by some nonsense, by force of which this detainee was standing here.

“This one?” thought Strelnikov, measuring the doctor from head to foot with a searching look. “No resemblance. What fools!” He laughed and said to Yuri Andreevich:

“I beg your pardon, comrade. You’ve been taken for someone else. My sentries got it wrong. You’re free. Where’s the comrade’s work book? Ah, here are your papers. Excuse my indiscretion, I’ll allow myself a passing glance. Zhivago … Zhivago … Doctor Zhivago … Something to do with Moscow … You know, all the same let’s go to my place for a minute. This is the secretariat, and my car is the next one. If you please. I won’t keep you long.”

30

Who was this man, though? It was astonishing that a nonparty man, whom no one knew, because, though born in Moscow, he had left after finishing the university to teach in the provinces, then had been held prisoner for a long time during the war, had been missing until recently and presumed dead, could advance to such posts and hold on to them.

The progressive railway worker Tiverzin, in whose family Strelnikov had been brought up as a boy, had recommended him and vouched for him. The people upon whom appointments depended at that time trusted him. In days of excessive pathos and the most extreme views, Strelnikov’s revolutionism, which stopped at nothing, stood out by its genuineness, its fanaticism, not borrowed from another man’s singing, but prepared by the whole of his life and not accidentally.

Strelnikov had justified the trust put in him.

His service record in the recent period included the affairs at Ust-Nemda and Nizhni Kelmes, the affair of the Gubasovo peasants, who had shown armed resistance to a supply detachment, and the affair of the robbery of a supply train by the fourteenth infantry regiment at the Medvezhaya Poima station. In his service book was the affair of the Razinsky regiment, who raised a rebellion in the town of Turkatuy and, arms in hand, went over to the side of the White Guard, and the affair of a soldiers’ riot at the river wharf of Chirkin Us, with its murder of a commander who remained loyal to soviet power.

In all these places, he appeared like a bolt from the blue, judged, sentenced, carried out the sentences, quickly, severely, dauntlessly.

His traveling about on the train had put an end to the general desertion in the area. The revision of the recruiting organizations changed everything. The Red Army levy went successfully. The selection committees got to work feverishly.

Finally, in recent days, when the Whites began pushing from the north and the situation was acknowledged as threatening, Strelnikov was charged with new tasks, essentially military, strategic and operational. The results of his intervention were not slow in telling.

Strelnikov knew that rumor had nicknamed him Rasstrelnikov, “the Executioner.” He calmly took it in stride, he feared nothing.

He was a native of Moscow and the son of a worker who had taken part in the revolution of 1905 and had suffered for it. He himself had kept away from the revolutionary movement in those years because of his youth, and in the following years, when he was studying at the university, because young people from a poor milieu, when they got to do advanced studies, valued it more and studied more assiduously than the children of the rich. The ferment among the well-to-do students had not touched him. He had left the university with a vast amount of knowledge. He had, by his own efforts, supplemented his historico-philological education with a mathematical one.

By law he was not obliged to go into the army, but he had gone to war as a volunteer, had been taken prisoner as a lieutenant, and at the end of the year 1917 had escaped, on learning that there was revolution in Russia.

Two features, two passions, distinguished him.

He thought with outstanding clarity and correctness. And he possessed a rare degree of moral purity and fairness, was a man of warm and noble feelings.

But for the activity of a scientist laying out new paths, his mind lacked the gift of unexpectedness, that power which, with unforeseen discoveries, disrupts the fruitless harmony of empty foresight.

And for doing good, he, a man of principle, lacked the unprincipledness of the heart, which knows no general cases, but only particular ones, and which is great in doing small things.

From an early age Strelnikov had striven for the highest and brightest. He considered life an enormous arena in which people, honorably observing the rules, compete in the attainment of perfection.

When it turned out that this was not so, it never entered his head that he was wrong in simplifying the world order. Having driven the offense inside for a long time, he began to cherish the thought of one day becoming an arbiter between life and the dark principles that distort it, of stepping forth to its defense and avenging it.

Disappointment embittered him. The revolution armed him.

31

“Zhivago, Zhivago,” Strelnikov went on repeating to himself in his car, to which they had passed. “From merchants. Or the nobility. Well, yes: a doctor from Moscow. To Varykino. Strange. From Moscow and suddenly to such a godforsaken hole.”

“Precisely with that purpose. In search of quiet. In a remote corner, in the unknown.”

“How poetic. Varykino? I know the area. Krüger’s former factories. His little relatives, by any chance? His heirs?”

“Why this mocking tone? What have ‘heirs’ got to do with it? Though, in fact, my wife …”

“Aha, you see. Pining for the Whites? I must disappoint you. It’s too late. The area’s been cleared.”

“You go on jeering?”

“And then—a doctor. An army doctor. And it’s a time of war. Just my line. A deserter. The Greens⁸ also seclude themselves in the forests. Seeking quiet. What grounds?”

“Twice wounded and discharged as unfit.”

“Now you’re going to present a letter from the People’s Commissariat of Education or the People’s Commissariat of Health, recommending you as ‘a completely soviet man,’ as a ‘sympathizer,’ and attesting to your ‘loyalty.’ We’re now having the Last Judgment on earth, my dear sir, we have apocalyptic beings with swords and winged beasts, and not fully sympathizing and loyal doctors. However, I’ve told you that you’re free, and I won’t go back on my word. But only this time. I have a presentiment that we’ll meet again, and then, watch out, the talk will be different.”

The threat and the challenge did not disturb Yuri Andreevich. He said:

“I know everything you think about me. For your part, you’re absolutely right. But the argument you want to draw me into is one I have mentally conducted all my life with an imaginary accuser, and I should think I’ve had time to come to some conclusion. It can’t be put in a couple of words. Allow me to leave without explaining, if I am indeed free, and if not—dispose of me. I have no need to justify myself before you.”

They were interrupted by the buzzing of the telephone. The connection was restored.

“Thank you, Guryan,” said Strelnikov, picking up the receiver and blowing into it several times. “Send someone to accompany Comrade Zhivago, my dear boy. So that nothing happens again. And get me Razvilye on the squawk box, please, the Cheka⁹ transport office in Razvilye.”

Left alone, Strelnikov telephoned the station:

“They’ve brought in a boy, he pulls his cap over his ears, but his head’s bandaged, it’s disgraceful. Yes. Give him medical aid, if necessary. Yes, like the apple of your eye, you’ll answer to me personally. A ration, if it’s needed. Right. And now about business. I’m speaking, I haven’t finished. Ah, the devil, some third person’s cut in. Guryan! Guryan! Disconnected.”

“He could be from my primary school class,” he thought, setting aside for a moment the attempt to finish the talk with the station. “He grew up and rebels against us.” Strelnikov mentally counted up the years of his teaching, and the war, and his captivity, to see if the sum would fit the boy’s age. Then, through the car window, he began searching the panorama visible on the horizon for that neighborhood above the river, at the exit from Yuriatin, where their lodgings had been. And what if his wife and daughter were still there? Go to them! Now, this minute! Yes, but is that thinkable? That was from a completely different life. He must first finish this new one, before going back to that interrupted one. Someday, someday it would happen. Yes, but when, when?