Doctor Zhivago

Part Nine

VARYKINO

1

In the winter, when there was more time, Yuri Andreevich began to take various kinds of notes. He noted for himself:

“How often during the summer I wanted to say together with Tyutchev:¹

What a summer, ah, what a summer!

In truth it’s something magical.

And how, I ask, was it given to us,

Just so, for no reason at all?

“What happiness to work for yourself and your family, from dawn to dusk, to construct a shelter, to till the soil for the sake of subsistence, to create your own world like Robinson Crusoe, imitating our Maker in creating the universe, following your own mother in bringing yourself again and again into the world!

“So many thoughts go through your consciousness, you think so much that is new, while your hands are busy with the muscular, corporeal work of digging or carpentry; while you set yourself reasonable, physically solvable tasks, which reward you at their completion with joy and success; while for six hours in a row you trim something with an axe or dig the earth under the open sky, which scorches you with its beneficent breath. And that these thoughts, surmises, and juxtapositions are not set down on paper, but are forgotten in all their passing transience, is not a loss, but a gain. You city recluse, whipping up your sagging nerves and imagination with strong black coffee or tobacco, you don’t know the most powerful drug, which consists in unfeigned need and sound health.

“I go no further than what I’ve said, I do not preach Tolstoyan simplification and return to the earth, I do not invent my own amendment to socialism on agrarian questions. I merely establish the fact and do not erect our accidentally befallen fate into a system. Our example is questionable and not suitable for drawing conclusions. Our housekeeping is of too heterogeneous a composition. We owe only a small part of it—the store of vegetables and potatoes—to the work of our hands. All the rest comes from another source.

“Our use of the land is illegal. It is arbitrarily concealed from the accounting established by the state authorities. Our cutting of wood is theft, not excusable by the fact that we are stealing from the state pocket—formerly Krüger’s. We are protected by the connivance of Mikulitsyn, who lives by approximately the same means; we are saved by the distances, by being far from the city, where for now, fortunately, they know nothing of our tricks.

“I have given up medicine and keep quiet about being a doctor, so as not to trammel my freedom. But some good soul from the back of beyond always finds out that a doctor has settled in Varykino, and drags himself from twenty miles away for advice, one with a chicken, another with eggs, another with a bit of butter or something else. No matter how I dodge the honoraria, it’s impossible to fend them off, because people don’t believe in the effectiveness of unpaid-for, freely given advice. And so my medical practice brings me something. But our main support, and Mikulitsyn’s, is Samdevyatov.

“It is inconceivable what opposites this man unites in himself. He is sincerely for the revolution and fully deserves the trust that the Yuriatin City Council has vested in him. With his almighty powers, he could requisition and transport the entire forest of Varykino without even telling us and the Mikulitsyns, and we wouldn’t bat an eye. On the other hand, if he wished to steal from the state, he could most calmly pocket whatever and however much he wanted, and nobody would make a peep. He has no one to divide with and no one to butter up. What, then, induces him to look after us, help the Mikulitsyns, and support everybody around, such as, for example, the stationmaster in Torfyanaya? He’s on the go all the time, fetching and bringing things, and he analyzes and interprets Dostoevsky’s Demons and the Communist Manifesto² with equal enthusiasm, and it seems to me that if he didn’t needlessly complicate his life so wastefully and obviously, he would die of boredom.”

2

A little later the doctor noted:

“We’re settled in the back part of the old manor house, in the two rooms of the wooden extension, which in Anna Ivanovna’s childhood years was intended for the select among Krüger’s servants—the live-in seamstress, the housekeeper, and the retired nanny.

“This corner was fairly decrepit. We repaired it rather quickly. With the help of knowledgeable people, we relaid the stove that heats the two rooms in a new way. With the present position of the flue, it gives more heat.

“In this part of the park, the traces of the former layout had disappeared under the new growth that filled everything. Now, in winter, when everything around is dormant and the living does not obscure the dead, the snow-covered outlines of former things stand out more clearly.

“We’ve been lucky. The autumn happened to be dry and warm. We managed to dig the potatoes before the rain and cold set in. Minus what we owed and returned to the Mikulitsyns, we have up to twenty sacks, and it is all in the main bin of the cellar, covered above, over the floor, with straw and old, torn blankets. Down there, under the floor, we also put two barrels of Tonya’s salted cucumbers and another two of cabbage she has pickled. The fresh cabbage is hung from the crossbeams, head to head, tied in pairs. The supply of carrots is buried in dry sand. As is a sufficient amount of harvested black radishes, beets, and turnips, and upstairs in the house there is a quantity of peas and beans. The firewood stored up in the shed will last till spring. I like the warm smell of the underground in winter, which hits your nose with roots, earth, and snow as soon as you lift the trapdoor of the cellar, at an early hour, before the winter dawn, with a weak, ready to go out, barely luminous light in your hand.

“You come out of the shed, day has not broken yet. The door creaks, or you sneeze unexpectedly, or the snow simply crunches under your foot, and from the far-off vegetable patch, where cabbage stumps stick up from under the snow, hares pop up and go pelting off, scrawling tracks that furrow the snow around far and wide. And in the neighborhood, one after another, the dogs set up a long barking. The last cocks already crowed earlier, they will not start now. And it begins to grow light.

“Besides hare tracks, the vast snowy plain is crossed by lynx tracks, hole after hole, strung neatly on a drawn-out thread. A lynx walks like a cat, one paw in front of the other, covering many miles a night, as people maintain.

“They set snares for them, ‘sloptsy,’ as they call them here. Instead of lynxes, poor hares fall into the traps, and are taken out frozen stiff and half covered with snow.

“At first, in spring and summer, it was very hard. We were exhausted. Now, in the winter evenings, we rest. We gather around the lamp, thanks to Anfim, who provides us with kerosene. The women sew or knit, I or Alexander Alexandrovich reads aloud. The stove is burning, I, as the long-recognized stoker, keep an eye on it, so as to close the damper in time and not lose any heat. If a smoldering log hampers the heating, I take it out all smoky, run outside with it, and throw it far off into the snow. Scattering sparks, it flies through the air like a burning torch, lighting up the edge of the black, sleeping park with its white quadrangles of lawn, lands in a snowdrift, hisses, and goes out.

“We endlessly reread War and Peace, Evgeny Onegin and all the poems, we read The Red and the Black by Stendhal, A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, and the short stories of Kleist.”

3

Closer to spring, the doctor wrote:

“I think Tonya is expecting. I told her so. She does not share my supposition, but I am sure of it. Until more unquestionable signs appear, I cannot be deceived by the preceding, less perceptible ones.

“A woman’s face changes. It cannot be said that she loses her good looks. But her appearance, which before was entirely under her supervision, now escapes her control. She is at the disposal of the future, which will come out of her and is no longer her. This escape of her appearance from under her surveillance wears a look of physical perplexity, in which her face becomes dull, her skin more coarse, and her eyes begin to shine differently, not as she would like, as if she could not manage it all and let it go.

“Tonya and I have never had any distance from each other. But this year of work has brought us closer still. I’ve noticed how efficient, strong, and untiring she is, how quick-witted in lining up tasks, so that in moving from one to the other she loses as little time as possible.

“It has always seemed to me that every conception is immaculate, that this dogma concerning the Mother of God expresses the general idea of motherhood.

“On every woman giving birth there lies the same reflection of solitude, of being abandoned, left to her own resources. The man is excluded from things to such a degree now, at this most essential of moments, that it is as if he had never been there and everything had fallen from the sky.

“A woman herself brings her progeny into the world, herself retires with him into the background of existence, where it is more quiet and where she can put the cradle without fear. She herself, in silent humility, nurses him and rears him.

“People ask the Mother of God: ‘Pray fervently to your Son and your God!’ They put fragments of a psalm into her mouth: ‘And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. For He has regarded the low estate of His handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.’ She says this about her infant, he will exalt her (‘For he who is mighty has done great things for me’), he is her glory.³ Every woman can say the same. Her god is in her child. Mothers of great people should be familiar with that feeling. But decidedly all mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.”

4

“We endlessly reread Evgeny Onegin and the poems. Anfim was here yesterday and brought presents. We regale ourselves, we have light. Endless conversations about art.

“My long-standing thought that art is not the name of a category or sphere that embraces a vast multitude of notions and ramified phenomena, but, on the contrary, is something narrow and concentrated, the designation of a principle that enters into the composition of an artistic work, the name of the force applied or the truth worked out in it. And to me art has never seemed a subject or an aspect of form, but rather a mysterious and hidden part of content. To me it is clear as day, I feel it with my every fiber, but how express and formulate this thought?

“Works speak through many things: themes, situations, plots, heroes. But most of all they speak through the art contained in them. The presence of art in the pages of Crime and Punishment is more astounding than Raskolnikov’s crime.

“Primitive art, Egyptian, Greek, our own, is surely one and the same art in the course of the millennia and always remains in the singular. It is some thought, some assertion about life, which, in its all-embracing breadth, cannot be broken down into separate words, and when a grain of that force enters into the composition of some more complex mixture, this admixture of art outweighs the significance of all the rest and turns out to be the essence, the soul, and the foundation of what is depicted.”

5

“A slight cold, a cough, and probably a small fever. All day I’ve been catching my breath somewhere at the level of the throat, as if there is a lump there. Things are bad for me. It’s the aorta. The first warnings of heredity from my poor mama’s side, a lifelong story of heart ailment. Can it be true? So early? In that case, I’m not long for this world.

“It is a bit fumy in the room. Smells of ironing. Someone’s ironing and keeps adding hot, flaming coals from the still-burning stove to the coal iron, which clacks its lid like teeth. It reminds me of something. I can’t remember what. A sick man’s forgetfulness.

“Overjoyed that Anfim brought some nut-oil soap, they flew into a general laundering, and Shurochka hasn’t been looked after for two days. When I write, he gets under the table, sits on the crossbar between the legs, and, imitating Anfim, who takes him for a sleigh ride each time he comes, pretends that he’s also driving me in a sledge.

“When I get better, I must go to town to read up on the ethnography of the region and its history. I’m assured there is an excellent town library, put together from several rich donations. I want to write. I must hurry. Before I turn around, spring will be here. Then there will be no bothering with reading and writing.

“My headache keeps getting worse. I didn’t sleep well. I had a confused dream, one of those that you forget on the spot when you wake up. The dream left my head, in my consciousness there remained only the cause of my waking up. I was awakened by a woman’s voice, which I heard in my sleep, which in my sleep resounded in the air. I remembered its sound and, reproducing it in my memory, mentally went through all the women I know, searching for which of them might be the owner of that chesty, moist voice, soft from heaviness. It did not belong to any. I thought that my excessive habituation to Tonya might stand between us and dull my hearing in relation to her. I tried to forget she was my wife and moved her image further off, to a distance sufficient for clarifying the truth. No, it was not her voice either. So it remained unclarified.

“Incidentally, about dreams. It is an accepted notion that we tend to dream at night of something that has strongly impressed us in the daytime, when we were awake. My observations are the opposite.

“I’ve noticed more than once that it is precisely things we have barely noticed in the daytime, thoughts not brought to clarity, words spoken without feeling and left without attention, that return at night clothed in flesh and blood, and become the subjects of dreams, as if in compensation for our neglect of them in the daytime.”

6

“A clear, frosty night. Extraordinary brightness and wholeness of the visible. Earth, air, moon, stars, fettered together, riveted by frost. In the park, the distinct shadows of trees lie across the alleys, seeming carved in relief. It seems all the time as if some dark figures are ceaselessly crossing the path in various places. Big stars like blue mica lamps hang in the forest among the branches. The whole sky is strewn with little stars like a summer meadow with chamomile.

“Our evening talks about Pushkin continue. We discussed his lycée poems in the first volume. How much depended on the choice of meter!

“In the poems with long lines, his youthful ambition did not go beyond the limits of Arzamas, the wish not to fall behind his elders, to blow smoke in his uncle’s eyes with mythologisms, pomposity, affected depravity and epicureanism, and premature, feigned sober-mindedness.

“But as soon as the young man, after his imitations of Ossian or Parny or the ‘Reminiscences in Tsarskoe Selo,’ hit upon the short lines of ‘The Little Town’ or ‘Epistle to My Sister,’ or ‘To My Inkstand’ from the later Kishinev period, or upon the rhythms of the ‘Letter to Yudin,’ the whole future Pushkin awakened in the adolescent.⁴

“Light and air, the noise of life, things, essences burst from outside into the poem as into a room through an open window. Objects from the external world, everyday objects, nouns, thronging and pressing, took over the lines, ousting the less definite parts of speech. Objects, objects, objects lined up in a rhymed column along the edge of the poem.

“As if this later celebrated Pushkinian tetrameter was a sort of metrical unit of Russian life, its yardstick, as if it was a measure taken from the whole of Russian existence, as when the form of a foot is outlined to make the pattern for a shoe, or when you give the size so as to find a glove to fit your hand.

“So later the rhythms of talking Russia, the chant of her colloquial speech, were expressed metrically in Nekrasov’s trimeters and dactylic rhymes.”⁵

7

“How I would like, along with having a job, working the earth, or practicing medicine, to nurture something lasting, fundamental, to write some scholarly work or something artistic.

“Everyone is born a Faust, to embrace everything, experience everything, express everything. The fact that Faust was a scientist was seen to by the mistakes of his predecessors and contemporaries. A step forward in science is made by the law of repulsion, with the refutation of reigning errors and false theories.

“That Faust was an artist was seen to by the infectious example of his teachers. A step forward in art is made by the law of attraction, with the imitation, following, and veneration of beloved predecessors.

“What then prevents me from working, treating, and writing? I think it is not privations and wanderings, not instability and frequent change, but the reigning spirit of bombastic phrases so widespread in our day—such as: the dawn of the future, the building of the new world, the lights of mankind. You hear that and at first you think—what breadth of imagination, what wealth! But in reality it is pompous precisely in its lack of talent.

“Only the ordinary is fantastic, once the hand of genius touches it. The best lesson in this respect is Pushkin. What a glorification of honest labor, duty, habitual everyday things! With us ‘bourgeois’ and ‘philistine’ have now come to sound reproachful. That reproof was forestalled by lines from ‘Genealogy’:

I am a bourgeois, a bourgeois.

“And from ‘Onegin’s Journey’:

My ideal now is a housewife,

My desire is for peace,

A pot of soup, and my fine self.⁶

“Of all things Russian I now love most the Russian childlikeness of Pushkin and Chekhov, their shy unconcern with such resounding things as the ultimate goals of mankind and their own salvation. They, too, understood all these things, but such immodesties were far from them—not their business, not on their level! Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky prepared for death, were anxious, sought meaning, summed things up, but these two till the end were distracted by the current particulars of their artistic calling, and in their succession lived their lives inconspicuously, as one such particular, personal, of no concern to anyone, and now that particular has become common property and, like still unripe apples picked from the tree, is ripening in posterity, filling more and more with sweetness and meaning.”

8

“The first heralds of spring, a thaw. The air smells of pancakes and vodka, as during the week before Lent, when nature herself seems to rhyme with the calendar. Somnolent, the sun in the forest narrows its buttery eyes; somnolent, the forest squints through its needles like eyelashes; the puddles at noontime have a buttery gleam. Nature yawns, stretches herself, rolls over on the other side, and falls asleep again.

“In the seventh chapter of Evgeny Onegin—spring, the manor house empty after Onegin’s departure, Lensky’s grave down by the water, under the hill.

And there the nightingale, spring’s lover,

Sings all night long. The wild rose flowers.

“Why ‘lover’? Generally speaking, the epithet is natural, appropriate. Indeed he is a lover. Besides that, it’s needed for the rhyme. But in terms of sound, do we not also have here the epic Nightingale the Robber?⁷

“In the folk epic he is called Nightingale the Robber, son of Odikhmanty. How well it speaks of him!

From him and from his nightingale whistle,

From him and from his wild beast cry,

All the grassy masses shrink and shrivel,

All the sky-blue flowers wither and die,

The dark woods all bow down their heads,

And if there are people, they all lie dead.

“We arrived at Varykino in early spring. Soon everything began to turn green, especially in Shutma, as the ravine under Mikulitsyn’s house is called—bird cherry, alder, hazel. Several nights later the nightingales began to trill.

“And again, as if hearing them for the first time, I was amazed at how this song stands out from the calls of all other birds, what a leap, without gradual change, nature performs to the richness and singularity of this trilling. So much variety in changing figures and such force of distinct, far-reaching sound! In Turgenev somewhere⁸ there is a description of these whistlings, the wood demon’s piping, the larklike drumming. Two turns stood out particularly. The quick, greedy, and luxurious ‘tiokh, tiokh, tiokh,’ sometimes with three beats, sometimes countless, in response to which the thicket, all in dew, shook itself, preened itself, flinching as if it had been tickled. And another falling into two syllables, calling out, soul-felt, entreating, like a plea or an exhortation: ‘A-wake! A-wake! A-wake!’ ”

9

“Spring. We’re getting ready for farmwork. So no more diary. But it has been pleasant to take these notes. I’ll have to set them aside till winter.

“The other day, this time indeed during the week before Lent, the season of bad roads, a sick peasant drives his sled into the yard over water and mud. Naturally, I refuse to receive him. ‘Forgive me, my dear fellow, I’ve stopped doing that—I have neither a real choice of medicines, nor the necessary equipment.’ But there was no getting rid of him. ‘Help me. My skin’s going scant. Have mercy. A bodily ailment.’

“What to do? I don’t have a heart of stone. I decided to receive him. ‘Get undressed.’ I examined him. ‘You’ve got lupus.’ I busy myself with him, glancing sidelong towards the windowsill, at the bottle of carbolic acid. (Good God, don’t ask me where I got it, and another thing or two, the most necessary! It’s all from Samdevyatov.) I look—another sled drives into the yard, with a new patient, as it seems to me at first. And my brother Evgraf drops as if from the clouds. For a while he is at the disposal of the household, Tonya, Shurochka, Alexander Alexandrovich. Afterwards, when I’m free, I join the others. Questions begin—how, from where? As usual, he dodges, evades, not one direct answer, smiles, wonders, riddles.

“He was our guest for about two weeks, often going by himself to Yuriatin, and suddenly he vanished as if he’d fallen through the earth. During that time I was able to notice that he was still more influential than Samdevyatov, yet his doings and connections were still less explicable. Where does he come from? Where does his power come from? What is he engaged in? Before his disappearance, he promised to lighten our farmwork, so that Tonya would have free time to bring up Shura, and I for medical and literary pursuits. We asked curiously what he intended to do towards that end. Again silence and smiles. But he did not deceive us. There are signs that the conditions of our life will indeed change.

“Astonishing thing! He is my half brother. He has the same last name. And yet, strictly speaking, I know him least of all.

“This is already the second time that he has irrupted into my life as a good genius, a deliverer who resolves all difficulties. Perhaps the composition of every biography, along with the cast of characters acting in it, also calls for the participation of a mysterious unknown power, an almost symbolic person, appearing to help without being called, and the role of this beneficent and hidden mainspring is played in my life by my brother Evgraf?”

With that the notes of Yuri Andreevich ended. He never continued them.

10

Yuri Andreevich was looking over the books he had ordered in the Yuriatin city reading room. The many-windowed reading room for a hundred persons was set with several rows of long tables, their narrow ends towards the windows. The reading room closed with the coming of darkness. In springtime the city was not lighted in the evening. But Yuri Andreevich never sat until dusk anyway, and did not stay in the city past dinnertime. He would leave the horse that the Mikulitsyns gave him at Samdevyatov’s inn, spend the whole morning reading, and at midday return home on horseback to Varykino.

Before these raids on the library, Yuri Andreevich had rarely been to Yuriatin. He had no particular business in the city. He knew it poorly. And when the room gradually filled before his eyes with Yuriatin’s citizens, who would seat themselves now far from him, now right next to him, Yuri Andreevich felt as if he was becoming acquainted with the city, standing at one of its populous intersections, and as if what poured into the room were not Yuriatin’s readers, but the houses and streets they lived in.

However, the actual Yuriatin, real and not imagined, could be seen through the windows of the room. Near the middle window, the biggest of them, stood a tank of boiled water. Readers, by way of taking a break, went out to the stairway to smoke, surrounded the tank, drank water, pouring what was left into a basin, and crowded by the window, admiring the view of the city.

There were two kinds of readers: old-timers from the local intelligentsia—they were the majority—and those from simple people.

The first, most of whom were women, poorly dressed, neglectful of themselves and gone to seed, had unhealthy, drawn faces, puffy for various reasons—hunger, biliousness, dropsy. These were the habitués of the reading room, personally acquainted with the library workers and feeling themselves at home there.

Those from the people, with beautiful, healthy faces, dressed neatly, festively, came into the room embarrassed and timid, as into church, and made their appearance more noisily than was customary, not from ignorance of the rules, but owing to their wish to enter perfectly noiselessly and their inability to adjust their healthy steps and voices.

Opposite the windows there was a recess in the wall. In this niche, on a podium, separated from the rest of the room by a high counter, the reading room staff, the senior librarian and his two female assistants, were busy with their tasks. One of them, angry, wearing a woollen shawl, constantly took off her pince-nez and then perched it back on her nose, guided, apparently, not by the needs of vision, but by the changes of her inner state. The other, in a black silk blouse, was probably suffering from chest congestion, because she almost never took the handkerchief from her mouth and nose, and talked and breathed into it.

The library staff had the same swollen faces, elongated and puffy, as half the readers, the same slack skin, sallow shot with green, the color of a pickle covered with gray mold, and the three of them took turns doing one and the same thing, explaining in a whisper to novices the rules for using books, sorting out order slips, handing over books, and receiving the returned ones, and in between worked on putting together some sort of annual report.

And, strangely, by some incomprehensible coupling of ideas, in the faces of the real city outside the window and the imaginary one in the room, and also by some likeness caused by the general deathly puffiness, as if they were all sick with goiter, Yuri Andreevich recalled the displeased switchwoman on the tracks of Yuriatin the morning of their arrival, and the general panorama of the city in the distance, and Samdevyatov beside him on the floor of the car, and his explanations. And Yuri Andreevich wanted to connect those explanations, given far outside the limits of the place, at a great distance, with everything he now saw close up, in the heart of the picture. But he did not remember Samdevyatov’s designations, and nothing came of it.

11

Yuri Andreevich was sitting at the far end of the room, surrounded by books. Before him lay periodicals on local zemstvo statistics and several works on the ethnography of the region. He tried to request two more works on the history of Pugachev, but the librarian in the black silk blouse, whispering through the handkerchief pressed to her lips, observed to him that they did not give out so many books at once into the same hands, and that to obtain the works that interested him, he would have to return some of the reference books and periodicals he had taken.

Therefore Yuri Andreevich began more assiduously and hurriedly to acquaint himself with the as yet unsorted books, so as to select and keep the most necessary out of the pile and exchange the rest for the historical works that interested him. He quickly leafed through the collections and ran his eyes over the tables of contents, undistracted by anything and not looking to either side. The many people in the room did not disturb or divert him. He had studied his neighbors well and saw them with his mental gaze to right and left of him without raising his eyes from the book, with the feeling that their complement would not change before he left, any more than the churches and buildings of the city seen through the window would move from their place.

Meanwhile the sun did not stand still. It moved all the while around the eastern corner of the library. Now it was shining through the windows on the southern side, blinding those who sat close to them and preventing them from reading.

The librarian with a cold came down from her fenced-off elevation and headed for the windows. They had festoon curtains of white fabric, which pleasantly softened the light. The librarian lowered them on all the windows but one. That one, at the end, in the shade, she left uncurtained. Pulling the cord, she opened the vent pane and went into a fit of sneezing.

When she had sneezed for the tenth or twelfth time, Yuri Andreevich guessed that she was Mikulitsyn’s sister-in-law, one of the Tuntsevs, of whom Samdevyatov had told him. Along with other readers, Yuri Andreevich raised his head and looked in her direction.

Then he noticed that a change had taken place in the room. At the opposite end a new visitor had been added. Yuri Andreevich recognized Antipova at once. She was sitting with her back turned to the front tables, at one of which the doctor had placed himself, and talking in a low voice with the sick librarian, who stood bending towards Larissa Fyodorovna and exchanged whispers with her. This conversation must have had a beneficial influence on the librarian. She was instantly cured not only of her annoying cold, but also of her nervous apprehension. Casting a warm, grateful glance at Antipova, she took away the handkerchief that she kept pressed to her lips all the time and, putting it in her pocket, went back to her place behind the counter, happy, confident, and smiling.

This scene marked by touching details did not escape some of those present. From all sides of the room, people looked sympathetically at Antipova and also smiled. By these insignificant signs, Yuri Andreevich ascertained how well-known and loved she was in the city.

12

Yuri Andreevich’s first intention was to get up and go over to Larissa Fyodorovna. But then the constraint and lack of simplicity, foreign to his nature but established in him in relation to her, got the upper hand. He decided not to bother her, and also not to interrupt his own work. To shield himself from the temptation to look in her direction, he placed the chair sideways to the table, almost back to the readers, and immersed himself in his books, holding one in his hand in front of him and another open on his knees.

However, his thoughts wandered a thousand miles away from the subject of his studies. Outside of any connection with them, he suddenly realized that the voice he had once heard in his sleep on a winter night in Varykino had been Antipova’s voice. He was struck by this discovery and, attracting the attention of those around him, he abruptly put his chair back in its former position, so as to see Antipova from where he sat, and began to look at her.

He saw her almost from behind, her back half turned. She was wearing a light-colored checkered blouse tied with a belt, and was reading eagerly, with self-abandon, as children do, her head slightly inclined towards her right shoulder. Now and then she lapsed into thought, raising her eyes to the ceiling or narrowing them and peering somewhere far ahead of her, and then again, propped on her elbow, her head resting on her hand, in a quick, sweeping movement she penciled some notes in her notebook.

Yuri Andreevich tested and confirmed his former observations in Meliuzeevo. “She doesn’t want to be admired,” he thought, “to be beautiful, captivating. She scorns that side of a woman’s nature, and it is as if she punishes herself for being so good-looking. And that proud hostility to herself increases her irresistibility tenfold.

“How good is everything she does. She reads as if it were not man’s highest activity, but the simplest of things, accessible to animals. As if she were carrying water or peeling potatoes.”

These reflections calmed the doctor. A rare peace descended into his soul. His thoughts stopped scattering and jumping from subject to subject. He smiled involuntarily. Antipova’s presence had the same effect on him as on the nervous librarian.

Not bothering about how his chair stood, and fearing no hindrances or distractions, he worked for an hour or an hour and a half still more assiduously and concentratedly than before Antipova’s arrival. He went through the tall stack of books in front of him, selected the most necessary ones, and even managed in passing to gulp down the two important articles he came across in them. Deciding to be satisfied with what he had done, he started gathering up the books in order to take them to the librarian’s desk. All extraneous considerations, derogatory to his consciousness, abandoned him. With a clear conscience, and with no second thoughts, he decided that his honestly done work had earned him the right to meet with an old and good acquaintance and that he had legitimate grounds for allowing himself this joy. But when he stood up and looked around the reading room, he did not find Antipova; she was no longer there.

On the counter to which the doctor carried his tomes and brochures, the literature returned by Antipova still lay unshelved. It was all manuals on Marxism. She was probably requalifying herself to be a teacher, as before, going through political retraining on her own at home.

Larissa Fyodorovna’s catalogue requests lay in the books. The ends of the slips were showing. On them Larissa Fyodorovna’s address was written. It could easily be read. Yuri Andreevich wrote it down, surprised by the strangeness of the designation. “Kupecheskaya Street, opposite the house with figures.”

On the spot, having asked someone, Yuri Andreevich learned that the expression “house with figures” was as current in Yuriatin as the naming of neighborhoods by parish churches in Moscow or the name Five Corners in Petersburg.

It was the name of a dark gray, steel-colored house with caryatids and statues of Greek muses with tambourines, lyres, and masks in their hands, built in the last century by a theater-loving merchant as his private theater. The merchant’s heirs sold this house to the Merchants’ Association, which gave its name to the street on the corner of which the house stood. The whole area around it was named for this house with figures. Now the house with figures accommodated the city’s party committee, and the wall of its slanting basement, running obliquely downhill, where theater and circus posters hung in former times, was now covered with government decrees and resolutions.

13

It was a cold, windy day at the beginning of May. Having wandered around town on errands, and looked into the library for a moment, Yuri Andreevich suddenly canceled all his plans and went in search of Antipova.

The wind often stopped him on his way, blocking his path by raising clouds of sand and dust. The doctor turned away, squinted his eyes, lowered his head, waiting for the dust to sweep past, and went further on.

Antipova lived at the corner of Kupecheskaya and Novosvalochny Lane, opposite the dark, verging on blue, house with figures, which the doctor now saw for the first time. The house indeed corresponded to its nickname and made a strange, disturbing impression.

The whole top was surrounded by female mythological caryatids half again human size. Between two gusts of wind that hid its façade, the doctor fancied for a moment that the entire female population of the house had come out to the balcony and was leaning over the balustrade looking at him and at Kupecheskaya spread out below.

There were two entrances to Antipova’s, the front one from the street and one through the courtyard from the lane. Not knowing about the existence of the first, Yuri Andreevich took the second.

When he turned through the gate from the lane, the wind whirled dirt and litter from the whole yard up into the sky, screening the yard from the doctor. Hens rushed clucking from under his feet behind this black curtain, trying to save themselves from the rooster pursuing them.

When the cloud scattered, the doctor saw Antipova by the well. The whirlwind had surprised her with water already drawn in both buckets and the yoke over her left shoulder. Her head was covered with a kerchief, hastily knotted on her forehead, so as not to get dust in her hair, and she was holding the billowing skirt of her coat to keep it from being lifted by the wind. She started towards the house, carrying the water, but stopped, held back by a new gust of wind, which tore the kerchief from her head, started blowing her hair about, and carried the kerchief towards the far end of the fence, to the still clucking hens.

Yuri Andreevich ran after the kerchief, picked it up, and handed it to the taken-aback Antipova by the well. Ever faithful to her naturalness, she did not betray how amazed and perplexed she was by any exclamation. The only thing that escaped her was:

“Zhivago!”

“Larissa Fyodorovna!”

“By what miracle? By what chance?”

“Put your buckets down. I’ll carry them.”

“I never turn back halfway, never abandon what I’ve started. If you’ve come to me, let’s go.”

“And to whom else?”

“Who knows with you?”

“Anyway, let me take the yoke from your shoulders. I can’t stand idle while you work.”

“Work, is it! I won’t let you. You’ll splash water all over the stairs. Better tell me what wind blew you here. You’ve been around for more than a year, and still couldn’t decide, couldn’t find time?”

“How do you know?”

“Word gets around. And I saw you, finally, in the library.”

“Why didn’t you call out to me?”

“You won’t make me believe you didn’t see me yourself.”

Following Larissa Fyodorovna, who was swaying slightly under the swaying buckets, the doctor stepped under the low archway. This was the back entrance to the ground floor. Here, quickly squatting down, Larissa Fyodorovna set the buckets on the dirt floor, freed her shoulders from the yoke, straightened up, and began to wipe her hands with a little handkerchief she took from no one knows where.

“Come, I’ll take you, there’s an inner passage to the front entrance. It’s light there. You can wait there. And I’ll take the water up the back way, tidy things upstairs a little, change my clothes. See what sort of stairs we’ve got. Cast-iron steps with an openwork design. You can see everything through them from above. It’s an old house. It got jolted a bit during the days of the shelling. There was artillery fire. See, the stones have separated. There are holes, openings between the bricks. Katenka and I put the key to the apartment into this hole and cover it with a brick when we leave. Keep that in mind. You may come one day and not find me here, and then you’re welcome to open the door, come in, make yourself at home. And meanwhile I’ll come back. It’s here now, the key. But I don’t need it. I’ll go in from the back and open the door from inside. The one trouble is the rats. Hordes and hordes, there’s no getting rid of them. They jump all over us. The structure’s decrepit, the walls are shaky, there are cracks everywhere. Where I can, I plug them, I fight. It doesn’t do much good. Maybe someday you’ll come by and help me? Together we can bush up the floors and plinths. Hm? Well, stay on the landing, think about something. I won’t let you languish long, I’ll call you soon.”

Waiting to be called, Yuri Andreevich let his eyes wander over the peeling walls of the entrance and the cast-iron steps of the stairs. He was thinking: “In the reading room I compared the eagerness of her reading with the passion and ardor of actually doing something, of physical work. And, on the contrary, she carries water lightly, effortlessly, as if she were reading. She has this facility in everything. As if she had picked up the momentum for life way back in her childhood, and now everything is done with that momentum, of itself, with the ease of an ensuing consequence. She has it in the line of her back when she bends over, and in the smile that parts her lips and rounds her chin, and in her words and thoughts.”

“Zhivago!” rang out from the doorway of an apartment on the upper landing. The doctor went upstairs.

14

“Give me your hand and follow me obediently. There will be two rooms here where it’s dark and things are piled to the ceiling. You’ll stumble and hurt yourself.”

“True, it’s a sort of labyrinth. I wouldn’t find my way. Why’s that? Are you redoing the apartment?”

“Oh, no, not at all. It’s somebody else’s apartment. I don’t even know whose. We used to have our own, a government one, in the school building. When the building was taken over by the housing office of the Yuriatin City Council, they moved me and my daughter into part of this abandoned one. There were leftovers from the former owners. A lot of furniture. I don’t need other people’s belongings. I put all their things in these two rooms and whitewashed the windows. Don’t let go of my hand or you’ll get lost. That’s it. To the right. Now the jungle’s behind us. This is my door. There’ll be more light. The threshold. Don’t trip.”

When Yuri Andreevich went into the room with his guide, there turned out to be a window in the wall facing the door. The doctor was struck by what he saw through it. The window gave onto the courtyard of the house, onto the backs of the neighboring houses and the vacant lots by the river. Sheep and goats were grazing on them, sweeping the dust with their long wool as if with the skirts of unbuttoned coats. Besides, there was on them, facing the window, perched on two posts, a billboard familiar to the doctor: “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers.”

Under the influence of seeing the billboard, the doctor began from the first word to describe for Larissa Fyodorovna his arrival in the Urals with his family. He forgot about the rumor that identified Strelnikov with her husband and, without thinking, told her about his encounter with the commissar on the train. This part of the story made a special impression on Larissa Fyodorovna.

“You’ve seen Strelnikov?!” she asked quickly. “I won’t tell you any more right now. But how portentous! Simply some sort of predestination that you had to meet. I’ll explain to you after a while, you’ll simply gasp. If I’ve understood you rightly, he made a favorable impression on you rather than otherwise?”

“Yes, perhaps so. He ought to have repelled me. We passed through the areas of his reprisals and destructions. I expected to meet a brutal soldier or a murderous revolutionary maniac, and found neither the one nor the other. It’s good when a man deceives your expectations, when he doesn’t correspond to the preconceived notion of him. To belong to a type is the end of a man, his condemnation. If he doesn’t fall under any category, if he’s not representative, half of what’s demanded of him is there. He’s free of himself, he has achieved a grain of immortality.”

“They say he’s not a party member.”

“Yes, so it seems. What makes him so winning? He’s a doomed man. I think he’ll end badly. He’ll pay for the evil he’s brought about. The arbitrariness of the revolutionaries is terrible not because they’re villains, but because it’s a mechanism out of control, like a machine that’s gone off the rails. Strelnikov is as mad as they are, but he went crazy not from books, but from something he lived and suffered through. I don’t know his secret, but I’m certain he has one. His alliance with the Bolsheviks is accidental. As long as they need him, they’ll tolerate him, they’re going the same way. But the moment that need passes, they’ll cast him aside with no regret and trample on him, like so many military specialists before him.”

“You think so?”

“Absolutely.”

“But is there really no salvation for him? In flight, for instance?”

“Where to, Larissa Fyodorovna? That was before, under the tsars. Try doing it now.”

“Too bad. Your story has made me feel sympathy for him. But you’ve changed. Before, your judgment of the revolution wasn’t so sharp, so irritated.”

“That’s just the point, Larissa Fyodorovna, that there are limits to everything. There’s been time enough for them to arrive at something. But it turns out that for the inspirers of the revolution the turmoil of changes and rearrangements is their only native element, that they won’t settle for less than something on a global scale. The building of worlds, transitional periods—for them this is an end in itself. They haven’t studied anything else, they don’t know how to do anything. And do you know where this bustle of eternal preparations comes from? From the lack of definite, ready abilities, from giftlessness. Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. And life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so thrillingly serious! Why then substitute for it a childish harlequinade of immature inventions, these escapes of Chekhovian schoolboys to America?⁹ But enough. Now it’s my turn to ask. We were approaching the city on the morning of your coup. Was it a big mess for you then?”

“Oh, what else! Of course. Fires all around. We almost burned down ourselves. The house, I told you, got so shaken! There’s still an unexploded shell in the yard by the gate. Looting, bombardment, outrage. As always with a change of power. By then we’d already learned, we were used to it. It wasn’t the first time. And what went on under the Whites! Covert killings for personal revenge, extortions, bacchanalias! But I haven’t told you the main thing. Our Galiullin! He turned up here as the most important bigwig with the Czechs. Something like a governor-general.”

“I know. I heard. Did you see him?”

“Very often. I saved so many people thanks to him! Hid so many! He has to be given credit. He behaved irreproachably, chivalrously, not like the small fry, all those Cossack chiefs and police officers. But the tone was set then precisely by the small fry, not the decent people. Galiullin helped me in many ways, I’m thankful to him. We’re old acquaintances. As a little girl, I often came to the courtyard where he grew up. Railroad workers lived in that house. In my childhood I saw poverty and labor close up. That makes my attitude towards the revolution different from yours. It’s closer to me. There’s much in it that is dear to me. And suddenly he becomes a colonel, this boy, the yard porter’s son. Or even a White general. I come from a civilian milieu and don’t know much about ranks. By training I’m a history teacher. Yes, that’s how it is, Zhivago. I helped many people. I went to him. We spoke of you. I have connections and protectors in all the governments, and griefs and losses under all regimes. It’s only in bad books that living people are divided into two camps and don’t communicate. In reality everything’s so interwoven! What an incorrigible nonentity one must be to play only one role in life, to occupy only one place in society, to always mean one and the same thing!

“Ah, so you’re here?”

A girl of about eight with two tightly plaited braids came into the room. Her narrow, wide-set eyes slanting upwards gave her a mischievous and sly look. She raised them when she laughed. She had already discovered outside the door that her mother had a guest, but, appearing on the threshold, she considered it necessary to show an inadvertent astonishment on her face, curtsied, and turned to the doctor the unblinking, fearless eye of a precociously thoughtful child growing up in solitude.

“Kindly meet my daughter Katenka.”

“You showed me pictures of her in Meliuzeevo. How she’s grown and changed!”

“So it turns out you’re at home? And I thought you were outside. I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I took the key from the hole, and there was a rat this big! I screamed and backed away. I thought I’d die of fear.”

Katenka made the sweetest faces when she talked, rolling her sly eyes and forming her little mouth into a circle, like a fish taken out of the water.

“Well, go to your room. I’ll persuade the nice man to stay for dinner, take the kasha from the oven, and call you.”

“Thank you, but I’m forced to decline. Because of my visits to the city, our dinners are served at six. I’m used to not being late, and it’s over a three-hour ride, if not all of four. That’s why I came early—forgive me—I’ll get up and go soon.”

“Just half an hour more.”

“With pleasure.”

15

“And now—frankness for frankness. Strelnikov, whom you told about, is my husband Pasha, Pavel Pavlovich Antipov, whom I went to the front in search of and in whose imaginary death I so rightly refused to believe.”

“I’m not shocked and have been prepared. I’ve heard that fable and consider it nonsense. That’s why I forgot myself to such an extent that I spoke to you so freely and incautiously about him, as if this gossip didn’t exist. But these rumors are senseless. I saw the man. How could he be connected with you? What do you have in common?”

“And all the same it’s so, Yuri Andreevich. Strelnikov is Antipov, my husband. I agree with the general opinion. Katenka also knows it and is proud of her father. Strelnikov is his assumed name, a pseudonym, as with all revolutionary activists. For certain considerations, he must live and act under a different name.

“He took Yuriatin, poured shells on us, knew that we were here, never once asked if we were alive, so as not to violate his secret. That was his duty, of course. If he had asked us how to act, we would have advised him to do the same. You could also say that my immunity, the acceptable living quarters given me by the city council, and so on, are indirect proofs of his secret caring for us! All the same, you won’t persuade me of it. To be right here and resist the temptation to see us! My mind refuses to grasp that, it’s beyond my understanding. It’s something inaccessible to me—not life, but some Roman civic valor, one of the clever notions of today. But I’m falling under your influence and beginning to sing your tune. I wouldn’t want that. You and I are not of one mind. We may understand some elusive, optional thing in the same way. But in matters of broad significance, in philosophy of life, it’s better for us to be opponents. But let’s get back to Strelnikov. He’s in Siberia now, and you’re right, information about criticism of him, which chills my heart, has reached me, too. He’s in Siberia, at one of our advanced positions, in the process of defeating his courtyard friend and later frontline comrade, poor Galiullin, for whom his name and his marriage to me are no secret, and who, in his priceless delicacy, has never let me feel it, though he storms and rages and goes out of his mind at the mention of Strelnikov. Yes, well, so he’s now in Siberia.

“And while he was here (he spent a long time here and lived on the railway, in the car of a train, where you saw him), I kept trying to run into him accidentally, unexpectedly. He sometimes went to headquarters, housed where the military command of the Komuch, the army of the Constituent Assembly, used to be. And—strange trick of fate—the entrance to the headquarters was in the same wing where Galiullin used to receive me when I came to solicit for others. For instance, there was an incident in the cadet corps that made a lot of noise, the cadets began to ambush and shoot objectionable teachers on the pretext of their adherence to Bolshevism. Or when the persecution and slaughter of the Jews began. By the way. If we’re city dwellers and people doing intellectual work, half of our acquaintances are from their number. And in such periods of pogroms, when these horrors and abominations begin, we’re hounded, not only by indignation, shame, and pity, but by an oppressive feeling of duplicity, that our sympathy is half cerebral, with an unpleasant, insincere aftertaste.

“The people who once delivered mankind from the yoke of paganism, and have now devoted themselves in such great numbers to freeing it from social evil, are powerless to free themselves from themselves, from being faithful to an outlived, antediluvian designation, which has lost its meaning; they cannot rise above themselves and dissolve without a trace among others, whose religious foundations they themselves laid, and who would be so close to them if only they knew them better.

“Persecution and victimization probably oblige them to adopt this useless and ruinous pose, this shamefaced, self-denying isolation, which brings nothing but calamities, but there is also an inner decrepitude in it, many centuries of historical fatigue. I don’t like their ironic self-encouragement, humdrum poverty of notions, timorous imagination. It’s as irritating as old people talking about old age and sick people about sickness. Do you agree?”

“I haven’t thought about it. I have a friend, a certain Gordon, who is of the same opinion.”

“So I went there to watch for Pasha. In hopes of his coming or going. The governor-general’s office used to be in the wing. Now there’s a plaque on the door: ‘Complaints Bureau.’ Maybe you’ve seen it? It’s the most beautiful place in the city. The square in front of the door is paved with cut stone. Across the square is the city garden. Viburnums, maples, hawthorns. I stood on the sidewalk in the group of petitioners and waited. Naturally, I didn’t try to force my way in, I didn’t tell them I was his wife. Anyway, our last names aren’t the same. What has the voice of the heart got to do with it? Their rules are completely different. For instance, his own father, Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov, a worker and a former political exile, works in the court here, somewhere quite close by, just down the highway. In the place of his earlier exile. So does his friend Tiverzin. They’re members of the revolutionary tribunal. And what do you think? The son doesn’t reveal himself to the father either, and the father accepts it as proper, does not get offended. If the son is a cipher, it means nothing doing. They’re flint, not people. Principles. Discipline.

“And, finally, if I proved that I was his wife, it’s no big deal! What have wives got to do with it? Is it the time for such things? The world proletariat, the remaking of the universe—that’s something else, that I understand. But an individual biped of some wifely sort, pah! It’s just some last little flea or louse!

“An adjutant went around asking questions. He let a few people in. I didn’t tell him my last name, and to the question about my business answered that it was personal. You could tell beforehand that it was a lost cause, a nonsuit. The adjutant shrugged his shoulders and looked at me suspiciously. So I never saw him even once.

“And you think he disdains us, doesn’t love us, doesn’t remember? Oh, on the contrary! I know him too well! He planned it this way from an excess of feeling! He needs to lay all these military laurels at our feet, so as not to come back empty-handed, but all in glory, a conqueror! To immortalize, to bedazzle us! Like a child!”

Katenka came into the room again. Larissa Fyodorovna took the bewildered little girl in her arms, began to rock her, tickle her, kiss her, and smothered her in her embrace.

16

Yuri Andreevich was returning on horseback from the city to Varykino. He had passed these places countless times. He was used to the road, had grown insensitive to it, did not notice it.

He was nearing the intersection in the forest where a side road to the fishing village of Vassilievskoe, on the Sakma River, branched off from the straight way to Varykino. At the place where they divided stood the third post in the area displaying an agricultural advertisement. Near this crossroads, the doctor was usually overtaken by the sunset. Now, too, night was falling.

It was over two months since, on one of his visits to town, he had not returned home in the evening, but had stayed with Larissa Fyodorovna, and said at home that he had been kept in town on business and had spent the night at Samdevyatov’s inn. He had long been on familiar terms with Antipova and called her Lara, though she called him Zhivago. Yuri Andreevich was deceiving Tonya and was concealing ever more grave and inadmissible things from her. This was unheard-of.

He loved Tonya to the point of adoration. The peace of her soul, her tranquillity, were dearer to him than anything in the world. He stood staunchly for her honor, more than her own father or than she herself. In defense of her wounded pride he would have torn the offender to pieces with his own hands. And here that offender was he himself.

At home, in his family circle, he felt like an unexposed criminal. The ignorance of the household, their habitual affability, killed him. In the midst of a general conversation, he would suddenly remember his guilt, freeze, and no longer hear or understand anything around him.

If this happened at the table, the swallowed bite stuck in his throat, he set his spoon aside, pushed the plate away. Tears choked him. “What’s the matter?” Tonya would ask in perplexity. “You must have found out something bad in the city? Somebody’s been sent to prison? Or shot? Tell me. Don’t be afraid of upsetting me. You’ll feel better.”

Had he betrayed Tonya, had he preferred someone else to her? No, he had not chosen anyone, had not compared. Ideas of “free love,” words like “the rights and demands of feeling,” were foreign to him. To talk and think of such things seemed vulgar to him. In his life he had never gathered any “flowers of pleasure,” had not counted himself among the demigods or supermen, had demanded no special benefits or advantages for himself. He was breaking down under the burden of an unclean conscience.

“What will happen further on?” he sometimes asked himself and, finding no answer, hoped for something unfeasible, for the interference of some unforeseen circumstances that would bring a resolution.

But now it was not so. He had decided to cut this knot by force. He was bringing home a ready solution. He had decided to confess everything to Tonya, to beg her forgiveness, and not to see Lara anymore.

True, not everything was smooth here. It remained insufficiently clear, as it now seemed to him, that he was breaking with Lara forever, for all eternity. That morning he had announced to her his wish to reveal everything to Tonya and the impossibility of further meetings, but he now had the feeling that he had said it to her too mildly, not resolutely enough.

Larissa Fyodorovna had not wanted to upset Yuri Andreevich with painful scenes. She understood how much he was suffering even without that. She tried to listen to his news as calmly as possible. Their talk took place in the empty room of the former owners, unused by Larissa Fyodorovna, which gave onto Kupecheskaya. Unfelt, unbeknownst to her, tears flowed down Lara’s cheeks, like the rainwater that now poured down the faces of the stone statues opposite, on the house with figures. Sincerely, without affected magnanimity, she repeated quietly: “Do what’s better for you, don’t think about me. I’ll get over it all.” And she did not know she was crying, and did not wipe her tears.

At the thought that Larissa Fyodorovna had misunderstood him and that he had left her in delusion, with false hopes, he was ready to turn and gallop back to the city, to finish what had been left unsaid, and above all to take leave of her much more ardently and tenderly, in greater accordance with what was to be a real parting for their whole lives, forever. He barely controlled himself and continued on his way.

As the sun went down, the forest became filled with cold and darkness. It began to smell of the leafy dampness of a steamed besom, as on going into a bathhouse. Motionless in the air, like floats on the water, spread hanging swarms of mosquitoes, whining in high-pitched unison, all on one note. Yuri Andreevich swatted countless numbers of them on his forehead and neck, and the resounding slaps of his palm on his sweaty body responded amazingly to the other sounds of his riding: the creaking of the saddle girths, the ponderous thud of hooves glancing, swiping, through the squelching mud, and the dry, popping salvos emitted by the horse’s guts. Suddenly, in the distance, where the sunset had gotten stuck, a nightingale began to trill.

“A-wake! A-wake!” it called and entreated, and it sounded almost like before Easter: “My soul, my soul! Arise, why are you sleeping!”¹⁰

Suddenly a very simple thought dawned on Yuri Andreevich. What’s the hurry? He would not go back on the word he had given himself. The exposure would be made. But where was it said that it must take place today? Nothing had been declared to Tonya yet. It was not too late to put off the explanation till next time. Meanwhile he would go to the city once more. The conversation with Lara would be brought to an end, with the depth and sincerity that redeem all suffering. Oh, how good! How wonderful! How astonishing that it had not occurred to him before!

The assumption that he would see Antipova once more made Yuri Andreevich mad with joy. His heart began to beat rapidly. He lived it all over in anticipation.

The log-built back streets of the outskirts, the wood-paved sidewalks. He is going to her. Now, in Novosvalochny, the vacant lots and wooden part of the city will end and the stone part will begin. The little houses of the suburb race by like the pages of a quickly leafed-through book, not when you turn them with your index finger, but when you flip through them all with the soft part of your thumb, making a crackling noise. It takes your breath away! She lives there, at that end. Under the white gap in the rainy sky that has cleared towards evening. How he loves these familiar little houses on the way to her! He could just pick them up from the ground and kiss them all over! These one-eyed mezzanines pulled down over the roofs! The little berries of lights and oil lamps reflected in the puddles! Under that white strip of rainy street sky. There again he will receive from the hands of the Creator the gift of this God-made white loveliness. The door will be opened by a figure wrapped in something dark. And the promise of her intimacy, restrained, cold as the pale night of the north, no one’s, belonging to nobody, will come rolling towards him like the first wave of the sea, which you run to in the darkness over the sand of the coast.

Yuri Andreevich dropped the reins, leaned forward in the saddle, embraced his horse’s neck, and buried his face in its mane. Taking this tenderness for an appeal to its full strength, the horse went into a gallop.

At a smooth, flying gallop, in the intervals between the rare, barely noticeable contacts of the horse with the earth, which kept tearing away from its hoofs and flying backward, Yuri Andreevich, besides the beating of his heart, which stormed with joy, also heard some shouts, which he thought he was imagining.

A shot close by deafened him. The doctor raised his head, seized the reins, and pulled at them. The racing horse made several clumsy leaps sideways, backed up, and began to lower his croup, preparing to rear.

Ahead the road divided in two. Beside it the billboard “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers” glowed in the rays of the setting sun. Across the road, barring it, stood three armed horsemen. A high school student in a uniform cap and a jacket crisscrossed with machine-gun cartridge belts, a cavalryman in an officer’s greatcoat and a Cossack hat, and a strange fat man, as if dressed for a masquerade, in quilted trousers, a padded jacket, and a broad-brimmed priest’s hat pulled down low.

“Don’t move, comrade doctor,” the oldest of the three, the cavalryman in the Cossack hat, said evenly and calmly. “If you obey, we guarantee you complete safety. Otherwise—no hard feelings—we’ll shoot you. The medic in our detachment got killed. We mobilize you forcibly as a medical worker. Get off your horse and hand the reins over to our younger comrade. I remind you. At the least thought of escape, we won’t stand on ceremony.”

“Are you the Mikulitsyns’ son Liberius, Comrade Forester?”

“No, I’m his chief liaison officer, Kamennodvorsky.”