Doctor Zhivago

Part Eight

ARRIVAL

1

The train that had brought the Zhivago family to this place still stood on the back tracks of the station, screened by other trains, but there was a feeling that the connection with Moscow, which had stretched over the whole journey, had broken, had ended that morning.

From here on another territorial zone opened out, a different, provincial world, drawn to a center of gravity of its own.

The local people knew each other more intimately than in the capital. Though the area around the Yuriatin–Razvilye railway had been cleared of unauthorized persons and cordoned off by Red Army troops, local suburban passengers made their way to the line in some incomprehensible way—“infiltrated,” as they would say now. The cars were already packed with them, they crowded the doorways of the freight cars, they walked on the tracks alongside the train and stood on the embankments by the entrances to their cars.

All these people to a man were acquainted with each other, conversed from afar, greeted each other when they came near. They dressed and talked slightly differently than in the capitals, did not eat the same things, had other habits.

It was curious to learn what they lived by, what moral and material resources nourished them, how they struggled with difficulties, how they evaded the laws.

The answer was not slow to appear in the most vivid form.

2

Accompanied by the sentry who dragged his gun on the ground and propped himself up on it as on a staff, the doctor went back to his train.

It was sultry. The sun scorched the rails and the roofs of the cars. The ground, black with oil, burned with a yellow gleam, as if gilded.

The sentry furrowed the dust with his rifle butt, leaving a trail in the sand behind him. The gun knocked against the ties. The sentry was saying:

“The weather’s settled. It’s the perfect time for sowing the spring crops—oats, summer wheat, or, say, millet. It’s too early for buckwheat. We sow buckwheat on St. Akulina’s day.¹ We’re from Morshansk, in Tambov province, not from here. Eh, comrade doctor! If it wasn’t for this civil hydra right now, this plague of counterrevolutionists, would I be lost in foreign parts at a time like this? It’s run among us like a black cat, this class war, and see what it does!”

3

“Thanks. I’ll do it myself,” Yuri Andreevich declined the offered aid. People bent down from the freight car and stretched their hands out to him to help him get in. He pulled himself up and jumped into the car, got to his feet, and embraced his wife.

“At last. Well, thank God, thank God it all ended like this,” Antonina Alexandrovna kept saying. “However, this happy outcome is no news to us.”

“How do you mean, no news?”

“We know everything.”

“From where?”

“The sentries kept telling us. Otherwise how could we have borne the uncertainty? Papa and I nearly lost our minds as it was. There he sleeps, you can’t wake him. He collapsed from anxiety as if he were cut down—you can’t rouse him. There are new passengers. I’m going to have you meet someone now. But first listen to what they’re saying all around. The whole car congratulates you on your happy deliverance. See what a husband I’ve got!” She suddenly changed the subject, turned her head, and, over her shoulder, introduced him to one of the newly arrived passengers, squeezed by his neighbors back in the rear of the car.

“Samdevyatov,” was heard from there, a soft hat rose above the mass of people’s heads, and the owner of the name began pushing his way towards the doctor through the thick of the bodies pressed against him.

“Samdevyatov,” Yuri Andreevich reflected meanwhile. “Something old Russian, I thought, folk epic, broad bushy beard, peasant tunic, studded belt. But here’s some sort of society for lovers of art, graying curls, mustache, goatee.”

“Well, so, did Strelnikov give you a fright? Confess.”

“No, why? The conversation was serious. In any case, he’s a strong, substantial man.”

“That he is. I have some notion of this person. He’s not native to us. He’s yours, a Muscovite. The same as our novelties of recent times. Also yours, imported from the capital. Our own minds would never have come up with them.”

“This is Anfim Efimovich, Yurochka—all-knowing, omniscient. He’s heard about you, about your father, knows my grandfather, everybody, everybody. Get acquainted.” And Antonina Alexandrovna asked in passing, without expression: “You probably also know the local teacher Antipova?” To which Samdevyatov replied just as expressionlessly: “What do you want with Antipova?”

Yuri Andreevich heard it and did not enter into the conversation. Antonina Alexandrovna went on:

“Anfim Efimovich is a Bolshevik. Watch out, Yurochka. Keep your ears pricked up with him.”

“No, really? I’d never have thought it. By the looks of him, it’s sooner something artistic.”

“My father kept an inn. Had seven troikas running around for him. But I am of higher education. And, in fact, a Social Democrat.”²

“Listen to what Anfim Efimovich says, Yurochka. Incidentally, don’t be angry, but your name and patronymic are a tongue twister. Yes, so listen to what I’m saying, Yurochka. We’re really terribly lucky. The city of Yuriatin isn’t taking us. There are fires in the city, and the bridge has been blown up, we can’t get in. The train will be transferred by a connecting track to another line, and it’s just the one we need, Torfyanaya is on it. Just think! And there’s no need to change and drag ourselves across the city with our luggage from one station to the other. Instead we’ll get a good knocking about before we make it anywhere. We’ll maneuver for a long time. Anfim Efimovich explained it all to me.”

4

Antonina Alexandrovna’s predictions came true. Hitching and unhitching its cars and adding new ones, the train rode endlessly back and forth on congested lines, along which other trains were also moving, for a long time obstructing its way out into the open fields.

The city was half lost in the distance, concealed by the slopes of the terrain. Only rarely did the roofs of its houses, the tips of factory chimneys, the crosses of belfries appear over the horizon. One of its suburbs was burning. The smoke of the fire was borne on the wind. Its streaming horse’s mane spread all across the sky.

The doctor and Samdevyatov sat on the floor of the car at the edge, their legs hanging over the doorway. Samdevyatov kept explaining things to Yuri Andreevich, pointing into the distance. At times the rumble of the rolling freight car drowned him out, so that it was impossible to hear anything. Yuri Andreevich asked him to repeat it. Anfim Efimovich put his face close to the doctor’s and, straining, shouted what he had said right into his ears.

“That’s the Giant picture house on fire. The junkers ensconced themselves there. But they already surrendered earlier. Generally, the battle isn’t over yet. Do you see those black dots on the belfry? That’s our boys. They’re removing the Czechs.”

“I don’t see anything. How can you make all that out?”

“And that’s Khokhriki burning, the artisans’ quarter. And Kolodeevo, where the shopping arcades are, is to the side. Why does that interest me? Our place is in the arcades. It’s not a big fire. The center hasn’t been touched yet.”

“Repeat that. I didn’t hear.”

“The center, I said, the city center. The cathedral, the library. Our family name, Samdevyatov, is San Donato altered in Russian style. We supposedly come from the Demidovs.”³

“Again I couldn’t make anything out.”

“I said Samdevyatov is a transformed San Donato. We supposedly come from the Demidovs. The princes Demidov San Donato. Maybe it’s just a pack of lies. A family legend. And this spot is called Spirka’s Bottom. Dachas, amusements, promenades. Strange name, isn’t it?”

Before them stretched a field. It was crisscrossed in various directions by branch lines. Telegraph poles went off across it with seven-mile strides, dropping below the skyline. A wide, paved road wound out its ribbon, rivaling the railways in beauty. First it disappeared beyond the horizon, then momentarily showed the wavy arc of a turn. And vanished again.

“Our famous highway. Laid across the whole of Siberia. Much sung by convicts. Base for the local partisans. Generally, it’s not bad here. You’ll settle in, get used to it. Come to love our town’s curiosities. Our water hydrants. At the intersections. Women’s clubs in winter under the open sky.”

“We won’t be staying in town. In Varykino.”

“I know. Your wife told me. Never mind. You’ll come to town on errands. I guessed who she was at first sight. The eyes. The nose. The forehead. The image of Krüger. Her grandfather all over. In these parts everybody remembers Krüger.”

Tall, round-sided oil tanks showed red at the ends of the field. Industrial billboards perched on tall posts. One of them, which twice crossed the doctor’s eye, had written on it: “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers.”

“It was a solid firm. Produced excellent agricultural implements.”

“I didn’t hear. What did you say?”

“The firm, I said. Understand? The firm. Produced agricultural implements. A joint-stock company. My father was a shareholder.”

“You said he kept an inn.”

“An inn’s an inn. The one doesn’t interfere with the other. And he was no fool, he placed his money in the best enterprises. Invested in the Giant picture house.”

“It seems you’re proud of it?”

“Of my father’s shrewdness? What else!”

“And what about your social democracy?”

“What’s that got to do with it, may I ask? Where is it said that a man who reasons as a Marxist has to be a mush-minded driveler? Marxism is a positive science, a teaching about reality, a philosophy of the historical situation.”

“Marxism and science? To argue about that with a man I hardly know is imprudent, to say the least. But come what may. Marxism has too little control of itself to be a science. Sciences are better balanced. Marxism and objectivity? I don’t know of a movement more isolated within itself and further from the facts than Marxism. Each of us is concerned with testing himself by experience, but people in power, for the sake of the fable of their own infallibility, turn away from the truth with all their might. Politics says nothing to me. I don’t like people who are indifferent to truth.”

Samdevyatov considered the doctor’s words the whimsicalities of a witty eccentric. He merely chuckled and did not contradict him.

Meanwhile the train was being shunted. Each time it reached the exit switch by the semaphore, an elderly switchwoman with a milk jug tied to her belt shifted the knitting she was doing from one hand to the other, bent down, turned the disk of the shunting switch, and made the train back up. While it slowly moved backwards, she straightened up and shook her fist at it.

Samdevyatov took her movement to his own account. “Who is she doing it to?” he fell to thinking. “There’s something familiar. Isn’t she Tuntseva? Looks like her. But what’s with me? It’s hardly her. She’s too old for Glasha. And what have I got to do with it? There are upheavals in Mother Russia, confusion on the railways, the dear heart’s probably having a hard time, and it’s my fault, I get a fist shaken at me. Ah, well, devil take her, why should I rack my brains over her!”

Finally, after waving the flag and shouting something to the engineer, the switchwoman let the train pass the semaphore and go freely on its way, and when the fourteenth freight car sped by her, she stuck her tongue out at the babblers on the floor of the car, who were such an eyesore to her. And again Samdevyatov fell to thinking.

5

When the environs of the burning city, the cylindrical tanks, the telegraph poles and advertisements dropped behind and disappeared and other views came along, woods, hills, between which the windings of the highway frequently appeared, Samdevyatov said:

“Let’s get up and go our ways. I get off soon. And you, too, one stop later. Watch out you don’t miss it.”

“You must know this area thoroughly?”

“Prodigiously. A hundred miles around. I’m a lawyer. Twenty years of practice. Cases. Travels.”

“And up to the present?”

“What else.”

“What sort of cases can be tried now?”

“Anything you like. Old unfinished deals, operations, unfulfilled obligations—up to the ears, it’s terrible.”

“Haven’t such relations been abolished?”

“Nominally, of course. But in reality there’s a need at the same time for mutually exclusive things. The nationalization of enterprises, and fuel for the city soviet, and wagon transport for the provincial council of national economy. And along with all that everybody wants to live. Peculiarities of the transitional period, when theory doesn’t coincide with practice yet. Here there’s a need for quick-witted, resourceful people with my kind of character. Blessed is the man who walketh not, who takes a heap and ignores the lot.⁴ And a punch in the nose, and so it goes, as my father used to say. Half the province feeds off me. I’ll be coming to see you on the matter of wood supplies. By horse, naturally, once he’s on his feet. My last one went lame. If he was healthy, I wouldn’t be jolting around on this old junk. It drags along, curse it, an engine in name only. I’ll be of use to you when you get to Varykino. I know your Mikulitsyns like the palm of my hand.”

“Do you know the purpose of our trip, our intentions?”

“Approximately. I can guess. I have a notion. Man’s eternal longing for the land. The dream of living by the work of your own hands.”

“And so? It seems you don’t approve? What do you say?”

“A naïve, idyllic dream. But why not? God help you. But I don’t believe in it. Utopian. Homemade.”

“How will Mikulitsyn treat us?”

“He won’t let you cross the threshold, he’ll drive you out with a broom, and he’ll be right. He’s got bedlam there even without you, a thousand and one nights, factories idle, workers scattered, not a blessed thing in terms of means of existence, no fodder, and suddenly—oh, joy—the deuce brings you along. If he killed you, I wouldn’t blame him.”

“There, you see—you’re a Bolshevik and you yourself don’t deny that this isn’t life, but something unprecedented, phantasmagorical, incongruous.”

“Of course. But it’s a historical inevitability. We have to go through it.”

“Why an inevitability?”

“What, are you a little boy, or are you pretending? Did you drop from the moon or something? Gluttons and parasites rode on the backs of starving laborers, drove them to death, and it should have stayed that way? And the other forms of outrage and tyranny? Don’t you understand the legitimacy of the people’s wrath, their wish to live according to justice, their search for the truth? Or does it seem to you that a radical break could have been achieved in the dumas, by parliamentary ways, and that it can be done without dictatorship?”

“We’re talking about different things, and if we were to argue for a hundred years, we wouldn’t agree on anything. I used to be in a very revolutionary mood, but now I think that we’ll gain nothing by violence. People must be drawn to the good by the good. But that’s not the point. Let’s go back to Mikulitsyn. If that is most likely what awaits us, why should we go there? We ought to swing around.”

“What nonsense. First of all, are the Mikulitsyns the only light in the window? Second, Mikulitsyn is criminally kind, kind in the extreme. He’ll make noise, get his hackles up, then go soft, give you the shirt off his back, share his last crust of bread with you.” And Samdevyatov told this story.

6

“Twenty-five years ago, Mikulitsyn, a student at the Technological Institute, arrived from Petersburg. He was exiled here under police surveillance. Mikulitsyn arrived, got a job as manager at Krüger’s, and married. We had four Tuntsev sisters here, one more than in Chekhov—all the students in Yuriatin courted them—Agrippina, Evdokia, Glafira, and Serafima Severinovna. In a paraphrase of their patronymic, the girls were nicknamed ‘severyanki,’ or ‘northern girls.’ Mikulitsyn married the eldest severyanka.

“Soon a son was born to the couple. As a worshipper of the idea of freedom, the fool of a father christened the boy with the rare name of Liberius. Liberius—Libka in common parlance—grew up a madcap, showing versatile and outstanding abilities. War broke out. Libka faked the date on his birth certificate and, at the age of fifteen, ran off to the front as a volunteer. Agrafena Severinovna, who was generally sickly, could not bear the blow, took to her bed, never got up again, and died two winters ago, just before the revolution.

“The war ended. Liberius returned. Who is he? A heroic lieutenant with three medals, and, well, of course, a thoroughly propagandized Bolshevik delegate from the front. Have you heard of the Forest Brotherhood?”

“No, sorry.”

“Then there’s no sense in telling you. Half the effect is lost. There’s no need to go staring out of the car at the highway. What’s it noted for? At the present time, for the partisans. What are the partisans? The chief cadres of the civil war. Two sources went to make up this force. The political organization that took upon itself the guiding of the revolution, and the low-ranking soldiers, who, after the war was lost, refused to obey the old regime. From the combining of these two things came the partisan army. It’s of motley composition. They’re mostly middle peasants. But alongside them you’ll meet anyone you like. There are poor folk, and defrocked monks, and the sons of kulaks at war with their fathers. There are ideological anarchists, and passportless ragamuffins, and overgrown dunces thrown out of school old enough to get married. There are Austro-German prisoners of war seduced by the promise of freedom and returning home. And so, one of the units of this people’s army of many thousands, known as the Forest Brotherhood, is commanded by Comrade Forester, Libka, Liberius Averkievich, the son of Averky Stepanovich Mikulitsyn.”

“What are you saying?”

“Just what you heard. But to continue. After his wife’s death, Averky Stepanovich married a second time. His new wife, Elena Proklovna, was a schoolgirl, brought straight from the classroom to the altar. Naïve by nature, but also playing at naïveté out of calculation, a young thing, but already playing at being young. To that end she chirps, twitters, poses as an ingénue, a little fool, a lark of the fields. The moment she sees you, she starts testing you: ‘In what year was Suvorov born?’⁵ ‘List the cases of the equality of triangles.’ And she’s exultant if you fail and put your foot in it. But you’ll be seeing her in a few hours and can check on my description.

“ ‘Himself’ has other weaknesses: his pipe, seminary archaisms: ‘in this wise,’ ‘suffer it to be so,’ ‘all things whatsoever.’ His calling was to have been the sea. At the institute, he was in the shipbuilding line. He retained it in his appearance and habits. He’s clean-shaven, doesn’t take the pipe out of his mouth the whole day, speaks through his teeth, amiably, unhurriedly. The jutting lower jaw of a smoker, cold, gray eyes. Ah, yes, I nearly forgot one detail: an SR, elected from the region to the Constituent Assembly.”⁶

“But that’s very important. It means father and son are at daggers drawn? Political enemies?”

“Nominally, of course. Though in reality the taiga doesn’t make war on Varykino. But to continue. The other Tuntsev girls, Averky Stepanovich’s sisters-in-law, are in Yuriatin to this day. Eternal virgins. Times have changed, and so have the girls.

“The oldest of the remaining ones, Avdotya Severinovna, is the librarian in the city reading room. A sweet, dark-haired girl, bashful in the extreme. Blushes like a peony for no reason at all. The silence in the reading room is sepulchral, tense. She’s attacked by a chronic cold, sneezes up to twenty times, is ready to fall through the floor from shame. What are you to do? From nervousness.

“The middle one, Glafira Severinovna, is the blessing among the sisters. A sharp girl, a wonder of a worker. Doesn’t scorn any task. The general opinion, with one voice, is that the partisan leader Forester took after this aunt. You see her there in a sewing shop or as a stocking maker. Before you can turn around, she’s already a hairdresser. Did you pay attention to the switchwoman at the Yuriatin train station, shaking her fist and sticking her tongue out at us? Well, I thought, fancy that, Glafira got herself hired as a watchman on the railroad. But it seems it wasn’t her. Too old for Glafira.

“The youngest, Simushka, is the family’s cross, its trial. An educated girl, well-read. Studied philosophy, loved poetry. But then, in the years of the revolution, under the influence of the general elation, street processions, speeches from a platform on the square, she got touched in the head, fell into a religious mania. The sisters leave for work, lock the door, and she slips out the window and goes roaming the streets, gathering the public, preaching the Second Coming, the end of the world. But here I’m talking away and we’re coming to my station. Yours is the next one. Get ready.”

When Anfim Efimovich got off the train, Antonina Alexandrovna said:

“I don’t know how you look at it, but I think this man was sent to us by fate. It seems to me he’ll play some beneficial role in our existence.”

“That may well be, Tonechka. But I’m not glad that you’re recognized by your resemblance to your grandfather and that he’s so well remembered here. And Strelnikov, too, as soon as I mentioned Varykino, put in caustically: ‘Varykino? Krüger’s factories? His little relatives, by any chance? His heirs?’

“I’m afraid we’ll be more visible here than in Moscow, which we fled from in search of inconspicuousness.

“Of course, there’s nothing to be done now. No use crying over spilt milk. But it will be better not to show ourselves, to lie low, to behave more modestly. Generally, I have bad presentiments. Let’s wake up the others, pack our things, tie the belts, and prepare to get off.”

7

Antonina Alexandrovna stood on the platform in Torfyanaya counting people and things innumerable times to make sure nothing had been forgotten in the car. She felt the trampled sand under her feet, and yet the fear of somehow missing the stop did not leave her, and the rumble of the moving train went on sounding in her ears, though her eyes convinced her that it was standing motionless by the platform. This kept her from seeing, hearing, and understanding.

Her companions on the long journey said good-bye to her from above, from the height of the car. She did not notice them. She did not notice the train leaving and discovered its disappearance only after she noticed the second track, revealed after its departure, with a green field and blue sky beyond it.

The station building was of stone. By its entrance stood two benches, one on each side. The Moscow travelers from Sivtsev were the only passengers to get off at Torfyanaya. They put down their things and sat on one of the benches.

The newcomers were struck by the silence at the station, the emptiness, the tidiness. It seemed unusual to them that there was no crowding around, no swearing. Life was delayed in this out-of-the-way place, it lagged behind history. It had yet to catch up with the savagery of the capital.

The station was hidden in a birch grove. It became dark in the train as it approached it. The moving shadows cast by its barely swaying tops shifted over hands and faces and over the clean, damp yellow sand of the platform. The whistling of birds in the grove suited its freshness. As undisguisedly pure as ignorance, the full sounds echoed throughout the wood and permeated it. The grove was crosscut by two roads, the railway and the country track, and it curtained both with its flung-out, low-hanging branches, like the ends of wide, floor-length sleeves.

Suddenly Antonina Alexandrovna’s eyes and ears were opened. She became aware of everything at once. The ringing birdcalls, the purity of the forest solitude, the serenity of the peace all around her. In her mind she had composed a phrase: “I couldn’t believe we would arrive unharmed. You understand, your Strelnikov might play at magnanimity before you and let you go, but telegraph orders here to have us all detained when we got off. I don’t believe in their nobility, my dear. It’s all only for show.” Instead of these prepared words, she said something different. “How delightful!” escaped her when she saw the loveliness around her. She could not say any more. Tears began to choke her. She burst into loud sobs.

Hearing her weeping, a little old man, the stationmaster, came out of the building. With rapid little steps he trotted over to the bench, put his hand politely to the visor of his red-topped uniform cap, and asked:

“Perhaps the young lady needs some drops of calmative? From the station medicine chest?”

“It’s nothing. Thank you. It will pass.”

“The cares and anxieties of travel. A well-known, widespread thing. Besides, there’s this African heat, rare in our latitudes. And, on top of that, the events in Yuriatin.”

“We watched the fire from the train as we passed.”

“So you’d be coming from Russia, if I’m not mistaken?”

“From our White-Stoned Mother.”⁷

“Muscovites? Then no wonder the lady’s nerves are upset. They say there’s no stone left upon stone?”

“They’re exaggerating. But it’s true we’ve seen all kinds of things. This is my daughter, this is my son-in-law. This is their little boy. And this is our young nanny, Nyusha.”

“How do you do. How do you do. Very pleased. I’ve been partly forewarned. Anfim Efimovich Samdevyatov rang up on the railway phone from the Sakma junction. Doctor Zhivago and family from Moscow, he says, please render them all possible assistance. So you must be that same doctor?”

“No, this is Doctor Zhivago, my son-in-law, and I’m in a different sector, in agriculture—Gromeko, professor of agronomy.”

“Sorry, my mistake. Forgive me. Very glad to make your acquaintance.”

“So, judging by your words, you know Samdevyatov?”

“Who doesn’t know that magician! Our hope and provider. Without him we’d all have turned our toes up long ago. Yes, he says, render them all possible assistance. Yes, sir, I say. I promised. So you’ll have a horse, if need be, or anything else I can do to help. Where are you headed for?”

“Varykino. Is it far from here?”

“Varykino? That’s why I keep thinking who on earth your daughter reminds me of so much. So you’re headed for Varykino! Then everything’s explained. Ivan Ernestovich and I built that road together. I’ll get busy and fit you out. We’ll call a man, get hold of a cart. Donat! Donat! Here are the things, take them to the waiting room meanwhile. And what about a horse? Run over to the tea room, brother, and ask if there isn’t one. Seems like Vakkh was hanging around here this morning. Ask if he maybe hasn’t gone. Tell them there’s four people to be taken to Varykino, with no luggage to speak of. Newcomers. Look lively. And some fatherly advice for you, madam. I’m purposely not asking you about the degree of your relation to Ivan Ernestovich, but be careful on that account. Don’t go unbuttoning yourself to just anybody. Think what times these are.”

At the name of Vakkh, the travelers glanced at each other in amazement. They still remembered the late Anna Ivanovna’s stories about the legendary blacksmith who forged indestructible iron guts for himself, and other local tall tales and fables.

8

A lop-eared, white-haired, shaggy old man was driving them behind a white, just foaled mare. Everything on him was white for different reasons. His new bast shoes had not yet darkened from wear, and his pants and shirt had grown faded and bleached with time.

Behind the white mare, kicking up his wobbly, soft-boned legs, ran a curly-headed foal, black as night, looking like a hand-carved toy.

Sitting at the sides of the cart, which jolted over the potholes in the road, the travelers clung to the edges so as not to fall. There was peace in their souls. Their dream was coming true, they were nearing the goal of their journey. With generous largesse and luxury, the pre-evening hours of the wonderful, clear day lingered, delayed.

The road went now through forest, now through open clearings. In the forest, the bumping over snags threw the travelers into a heap, and they huddled, frowned, pressed close to each other. In the open places, where it was as if space itself doffed its hat out of fullness of feeling, they straightened up, settled more freely, shook their heads.

It was mountainous country. The mountains, as always, had their own look, their physiognomy. They stood dark in the distance, mighty, arrogant shadows, silently scrutinizing the people in the cart. A comforting rosy light followed the travelers across the field, reassuring them and giving them hope.

They liked everything, were surprised at everything, and most of all at the incessant babble of their whimsical old driver, in which traces of vanished old Russian forms, Tartar layers, and regional peculiarities were mixed with unintelligibilities of his own invention.

When the foal lagged behind, the mare stopped and waited for him. He smoothly overtook her in wavy, splashing leaps. With awkward steps of his long, close-set legs, he came to the cart from the side and, thrusting his tiny head on its long neck behind the shaft, sucked at his mother.

“I still don’t understand,” Antonina Alexandrovna shouted to her husband, her teeth chattering from the jolts, spacing out the words so as not to bite off the tip of her tongue at an unforeseen bump. “Is it possible that this is the same Vakkh mama told us about? Well, you remember, all sorts of balderdash. A blacksmith, his guts hurt in a fight, fashioned new ones for himself. In short, the blacksmith Vakkh Iron Belly. I understand it’s all just a tall tale. But can it be a tale about him? Can he be the same one?”

“Of course not. First of all, you say yourself it’s just a tall tale, folklore. Second, in mama’s time this folklore was already over a hundred years old, as she said. But why so loud? The old man will hear and get offended.”

“He won’t hear anything—he’s hard of hearing. And if he does hear, he won’t make sense of it—he’s a bit off.”

“Hey, Fyodor Nefyodych!” the old man urged the mare on, addressing her with a masculine name for no apparent reason, knowing perfectly well, and better than his passengers, that she was a mare. “What anathematic heat! Like the Hebrew youths in the Persian furnace! Hup, you unpastured devil. I’m talking to you, Mazeppa!”⁸

He would unexpectedly strike up snatches of popular songs composed in the local factories in former times.

Farewell to the central office,

Farewell to the pit yard and boss,

I’m sick to death of the master’s bread,

I’ve drunk my fill of stagnant water.

A swan goes swimming by the shore,

Paddling the water with his feet.

It isn’t wine that makes me tipsy,

Vanya’s been taken for a soldier.

But me, Masha, I’m a bright one,

But me, Masha, I’m no fool.

I’ll go off to Selyaba town,

Get hired by the Sentetyurikha.

“Hey, little sod, you’ve forgotten God! Look, people, at this carrion of a beast! You give her the whip, she gives you the slip. Hup, Fedya-Nefedya, where’ll that get ya? This here forest’s called the taiga, there’s no end to it. There’s a force of peasant folk in it, ho, ho! There’s the Forest Brotherhood in it. Hey, Fedya-Nefedya, stopped again, you devil, you goblin!”

Suddenly he turned around and, looking point-blank at Antonina Alexandrovna, said:

“What notion’s got into you, young’un, think I don’t sense where you come from? You’re a simple one, ma’am, I must say. Let the earth swallow me up, but I recognize you! That I do! Couldn’t believe my blinkers, a live Grigov!” (The old man called eyes “blinkers” and Krüger “Grigov.”) “You wouldn’t happen to be his granddaughter? Ain’t I got an eye for Grigov? I spent my whole life around him, broke my teeth on him. In all kinds of handiwork, all the jobs. As a pit-prop man, a winch man, a stable man. Hup, shake a leg! She’s stopped again, the cripple! Angels in China-land, I’m talking to you, ain’t I?

“Here you’re asking what Vakkh is he, that blacksmith maybe? You’re real simple, ma’am, such a big-eyed lady, but a fool. Your Vakkh, he was Postanogov by name. Postanogov Iron Belly, it’s fifty years he’s been in the ground, between the boards. And us now, on the contrary, we’re Mekhonoshin. Same name, namesakes, but the last name’s different—Efim, but not him.”

The old man gradually told his passengers in his own words what they already knew about the Mikulitsyns from Samdevyatov. He called him Mikulich and her Mikulichna. The manager’s present wife he called the second-wed, and of “the little first, the deceased one,” he said that she was a honey-woman, a white cherub. When he got on to the partisan leader Liberius and learned that his fame had not yet reached Moscow, that seemed incredible to him:

“You haven’t heard? Haven’t heard of Comrade Forester? Angels in China-land, what’s Moscow got ears for?”

Evening was beginning to fall. The travelers’ own shadows, growing ever longer, raced ahead of them. Their way lay across a wide empty expanse. Here and there, sticking up high, grew woody stalks of goosefoot, thistles, loosestrife, in solitary stands, with clusters of flowers at their tips. Lit from below, from the ground, by the rays of the sunset, their outlines rose up ghostly, like motionless mounted sentinels posted thinly across the field.

Far ahead, at the end, the plain came up against the transverse ridge of a rising height. It stood across the road like a wall, at the foot of which a ravine or river could be surmised. As if the sky there were surrounded by a fence, with the country road leading to its gates.

At the top of the rise appeared the elongated form of a white, one-story house.

“See the lookout on the knob?” Vakkh asked. “That’s your Mikulich and Mikulichna. And under them there’s a split, a ravine, it’s called Shutma.”

Two gunshots, one after the other, rang out from that direction, generating multiple fragmented echoes.

“What’s that? Can it be partisans, grandpa? Shooting at us?”

“Christ be with you. What partizhans? It’s Stepanych scarifying wolves in Shutma.”

9

The first meeting of the new arrivals with the hosts took place in the yard of the director’s little house. A painful scene, at first silent, then confusedly noisy and incoherent, was played out.

Elena Proklovna was returning to the yard from her evening walk in the forest. The sun’s evening rays stretched behind her from tree to tree across the whole forest, almost the same color as her golden hair. Elena Proklovna was dressed in light summer clothes. She was red-cheeked and was wiping her face, flushed from walking, with a handkerchief. Her open neck was crossed in front by an elastic band, which held the hanging straw hat thrown behind her back.

Her husband was coming home from the opposite direction with a gun, climbing up from the ravine and intending to see at once to the cleaning of the sooty barrels, in view of the defects he had noticed in the discharge.

Suddenly, out of the blue, over the stones of the paved driveway, Vakkh drove up dashingly and loudly with his surprise.

Very soon, having climbed out of the cart with all the rest, Alexander Alexandrovich, falteringly, taking off his hat, then putting it on again, gave the first explanations.

The genuine, unaffected stupefaction of the nonplussed hosts and the unfeigned, sincere embarrassment of the wretched guests, burning with shame, lasted for several moments. The situation was clear without explanations, not only to the participants, Vakkh, Nyusha, and Shurochka. The oppressive feeling communicated itself to the mare and the colt, to the golden rays of the sun, and to the mosquitoes circling around Elena Proklovna and settling on her face and neck.

“I don’t understand,” Averky Stepanovich finally broke the silence. “I don’t understand, don’t understand a thing and never will. What have we got here, the south, the Whites, the land of plenty? Why did your choice fall precisely on us? Why have you come here, here, why on earth to us?”

“I wonder if you’ve thought of what a responsibility it is for Averky Stepanovich?”

“Lenochka, don’t interrupt. Yes, precisely. She’s perfectly right. Have you thought of what a burden it is for me?”

“For God’s sake. You haven’t understood us. What are we talking about? About a very small thing, a nothing. There’s no encroachment on you, on your peace. A corner in some empty, dilapidated building. A spot of land nobody needs, gone to waste, for a vegetable garden. And a load of firewood from the forest when nobody’s looking. Is that so much to ask, is it some sort of infringement?”

“Yes, but the world is wide. What have we to do with it? Why is this honor bestowed precisely on us and not on somebody else?”

“We knew about you and hoped you had heard about us. That we’re no strangers to you and will not be coming to strangers ourselves.”

“Ah, so it’s a matter of Krüger, of you being his relatives? How can you open your mouth and acknowledge such things in our time?”

Averky Stepanovich was a man with regular features, wore his hair thrown back, stepped broadly on his whole foot, and in summer belted his Russian shirt with a tasseled strip of braid. In older times such men went and became river pirates; in modern times they constituted the type of the eternal student, the lesson-giving dreamer.

Averky Stepanovich gave his youth to the liberation movement, the revolution, and only feared that he would not live to see it or that, once it broke out, its moderation would not satisfy his radical and bloody lust. And then it came, overturning all his boldest suppositions, and he, a born and steadfast lover of the workers, who had been among the first to found a factory workers’ committee at the “Mighty Sviatogor” and set up workers’ control in it, was left with nothing for his trouble, excluded, in an empty village, deserted by the workers, who here mostly followed the Mensheviks. And now this absurdity, these uninvited last remnants of the Krügers, seemed to him a mockery of fate, a purposely mean trick, and they made the cup of his patience run over.

“No, that’s beyond me. Inconceivable. Do you realize what a danger you are to me, what position you put me in? I really must be going out of my mind. I don’t understand anything and never will.”

“I wonder if you can conceive of what a volcano we’re sitting on here even without you?”

“Wait, Lenochka. My wife is perfectly right. It’s no sweet time even without you. A dog’s life, a madhouse. Between two fires all the time, and no way out. Some hang it on us that we’ve got such a red son, a Bolshevik, a people’s darling. Others don’t like it that I myself was elected to the Constituent Assembly. Nobody’s pleased, so just flounder about. And now you. How very merry to go and get shot over you!”

“What are you saying! Come to your senses! For God’s sake!”

After a while, exchanging wrath for mercy, Mikulitsyn said:

“Well, we’ve been yelping in the yard, and enough. We can continue in the house. Of course, I don’t see anything good ahead, but these be the dark waters in the clouds, the shadow-scripted murk of secrecy.⁹ However, we’re not Janissaries, not heathens. We won’t drive you into the forest as a meal for Bruin the bear. I think, Lenok, they’ll be best off in the palm room, next to the study. And then we’ll discuss where they can settle. I think we’ll install them in the park. Please come in. Welcome. Bring the things in, Vakkh. Give the newcomers a hand.”

In carrying out the order, Vakkh merely sighed:

“Unwedded Mother! Wanderers have as much stuff. Just little bundles. Not a single sweetcase!”

10

A cold night set in. The newcomers washed. The women got busy turning the room allotted to them into night lodgings. Shurochka, who was unconsciously accustomed to having adults receive his infantile utterances in baby talk with delight, and who therefore, adapting himself to their taste, was pouring out his twaddle animatedly and zealously, felt disconcerted. Today his babble had no success, no one paid any attention to him. He was displeased that the black colt had not been brought into the house, and, when they told him to be quiet, he burst into tears, afraid that, being a bad and unsuitable boy, he would be sent back to the baby shop, from which, as he thought, he had been delivered to his parents when he was born. He loudly voiced his genuine fears to all around him, but his sweet absurdities did not make the usual impression. Constrained by staying in a strange house, the adults moved about more hurriedly than usual and were silently immersed in their cares. Shurochka felt hurt and blubbered, as nannies say. He was given something to eat and, with some trouble, put to bed. At last he fell asleep. Mikulitsyn’s Ustinya took Nyusha to her room, to give her supper and initiate her into the mysteries of the house. Antonina Alexandrovna and the men were invited to evening tea.

Alexander Alexandrovich and Yuri Andreevich asked permission to absent themselves for a moment and went out to the porch for a breath of fresh air.

“So many stars!” said Alexander Alexandrovich.

It was dark. Standing two steps apart on the porch, the son- and father-in-law could not see each other. But behind them, from around the corner of the house, the light of a lamp fell from the window into the ravine. In its column, bushes, trees, and some other vague objects showed mistily in the damp air. The bright strip did not take in the conversing men and made the darkness around them still thicker.

“Tomorrow morning we’ll have to examine the outbuilding he intends for us, and if it’s fit to live in, start repairing it at once. While we’re getting that corner in shape, the soil will thaw, the earth will warm up. Then, without losing a moment, we’ll get to the garden beds. Between words in the conversation, I thought I heard him promise to help us with seed potatoes. Or did I hear wrong?”

“He promised, he promised. And other seed. I heard it with my own ears. And the corner he’s offering us we saw in passing as we crossed the park. You know where? It’s the rear of the manor house, drowning in nettles. It’s made of wood, but the house itself is stone. I showed you from the cart, remember? I’d dig the beds there. I think it’s the remains of a flower garden. It seemed so to me from a distance. Maybe I’m mistaken. The paths will have to be avoided, passed over, but the soil of the old flower beds was probably well manured and rich in humus.”

“We’ll see tomorrow. I don’t know. The ground is probably terribly overgrown with grass and hard as a rock. The manor must have had a kitchen garden. Maybe the plot’s still there and lying fallow. It will all become clear tomorrow. There are probably still morning frosts here. There will certainly be a frost during the night. How fortunate that we’re already here, in place. We can congratulate each other on that. It’s good here. I like it.”

“Very nice people. He especially. She’s a bit affected. She’s displeased with herself, there’s something in her she doesn’t like. Hence this tireless, fussily false garrulousness. As if she’s hastening to distract attention from her appearance, to forestall an unfavorable impression. And that she forgets to take her hat off and carries it on her shoulders is not absentmindedness either. It really becomes her.”

“Anyhow, let’s go in. We got stuck out here too long. It’s awkward.”

On their way to the lighted dining room, where, at a round table under a hanging lamp, the hosts and Antonina Alexandrovna were sitting by the samovar and drinking tea, the father- and son-in-law passed through the director’s dark study.

In it there was a wide, single-pane window across the whole wall, high above the ravine. From the window, as the doctor had managed to notice earlier, while it was still light, the view opened onto the distance far beyond the ravine and the plain across which Vakkh had taken them. By the window stood a planning or drafting table, wide, also across the whole wall. On it a big fowling piece lay lengthwise, leaving empty space to right and left, and thereby emphasizing the great width of the table.

Now, passing by the study, Yuri Andreevich again noted enviously the window with its panoramic view, the size and position of the table, and the spaciousness of the well-furnished room, and this was the first thing that escaped him in the form of an exclamation to his host, when he and Alexander Alexandrovich, on entering the dining room, went to the tea table.

“What a wonderful spot you have here. And what an excellent study, conducive to work, inspiring.”

“In a glass or in a cup? And how do you like it, weak or strong?”

“Look, Yurochka, what a stereoscope Averky Stepanovich’s son made for himself when he was little.”

“He still hasn’t grown up, hasn’t settled down, though he wins over district after district for Soviet power from the Komuch.”

“The what?”

“The Komuch.”

“What is that?”

“It’s the army of the Siberian government, which is for the restoration of power to the Constituent Assembly.”

“All day we’ve heard ceaseless praise of your son. You have every right to be proud of him.”

“These are views of the Urals, double, stereoscopic, also made by him and taken by a camera he made himself.”

“Are these cookies made with saccharine? They’re excellent.”

“Oh, come now! Such a backwoods and saccharine? Hardly! Real, honest sugar. I put some in your tea from the sugar bowl. Didn’t you notice?”

“Yes, in fact. I was looking at the photographs. And it seems the tea is also natural?”

“With flower petals. It goes without saying.”

“From where?”

“The magic tablecloth. An acquaintance. A modern-day activist. Of very leftist convictions. An official representative of the local economic council. He hauls our timber to town, and through acquaintances gets grain, butter, and flour for us. Siverka.” (So she called her Averky.) “Siverka, move the biscuit plate closer to me. And now I wonder if you can answer, what was the year of Griboedov’s death?”¹⁰

“He was born, I think, in 1795. I don’t remember exactly when he was killed.”

“More tea?”

“No, thank you.”

“And now something else. Tell me when and between what countries was the peace of Nimwegen concluded?”

“Don’t torment them, Lenochka. Let the people recover from the trip.”

“Now here’s what interests me. List for me, please, the kinds of magnifying glasses and what images they produce in each case: actual, inverted, direct, or imaginary.”

“Where did you get such a knowledge of physics?”

“We had an excellent mathematician here in Yuriatin. He taught in two schools, the boys’ and ours. How he explained things, oh, how he explained things! Like a god! He’d chew it all and put it in your mouth. Antipov. He was married to a teacher here. The girls lost their minds over him, they were all in love with him. He went to war as a volunteer and never came back. He was killed. It’s alleged that our scourge of God and punishment from heaven, Commissar Strelnikov, is Antipov come back to life. A legend, of course. And it’s not like him. Who knows, though. Anything’s possible. Another little cup?”