Doctor Zhivago

Part Ten

ON THE HIGH ROAD

1

There stood towns, villages, settlements. The town of Krestovozdvizhensk, the Cossack settlement of Omelchino, Pazhinsk, Tysiatskoe, the hamlet of Yaglinskoe, the township of Zvonarskaya, the settlement of Volnoe, Gurtovshchiki, the Kezhemskaya farmstead, the settlement of Kazeevo, the township of Kuteiny Posad, the village of Maly Ermolai.

The highway passed through them—old, very old, the oldest in Siberia, the ancient post road. It cut through towns like bread with the knife of the main street, and flew through villages without looking back, scattering the lined-up cottages far behind it or bending them in the curve or hook of a sudden turn.

Long ago, before the railway came to Khodatskoe, stagecoaches raced down the road. Wagon trains of tea, bread, and wrought iron went one way, and in the other parties of convicts were driven on foot under convoy to the next halting place. They marched in step, their iron chains clanking in unison, lost, desperate men, scary as lightning from the sky. And the forests rustled around them, dark, impenetrable.

The highway lived as one family. Town knew and fraternized with town, village with village. In Khodatskoe, at the railway crossing, there were locomotive repair shops, machine shops servicing the railways; wretches lived miserably, crowded into barracks, fell sick, died. Political prisoners with some technical knowledge, having served their term at hard labor, became foremen here and settled down.

Along all this line, the initial Soviets had long since been overthrown. For some time the power of the Siberian Provisional Government had held out, but now it had been replaced throughout the region by the power of the Supreme Ruler, Kolchak.¹

2

At one stretch the road went uphill for a long time. The field of vision opened out ever more widely into the distance. It seemed there would be no end to the ascent and the increasing view. And just when the horses and people got tired and stopped to catch their breath, the ascent ended. Ahead the swift river Kezhma threw itself under a roadway bridge.

Across the river, on a still steeper height, appeared the brick wall of the Vozdvizhensky Monastery. The road curved around the foot of the monastery hillside and, after several twists among outlying backyards, made its way into the town.

There it once more skirted the monastery grounds on the main square, onto which the green-painted iron gates of the monastery opened. The icon on the arch of the entrance was half wreathed by a gilt inscription: “Rejoice, lifegiving Cross, invincible victory of Orthodoxy.”

It was the departure of winter. Holy Week, the end of the Great Lent.² The snow on the roads was turning black, indicating the start of the thaw, but on the roofs it was still white and hung there in dense, tall hats.

To the boys who climbed up to the ringers in the Vozdvizhensky bell tower, the houses below seemed like little boxes or chests clustered together. Little black men the size of dots went up to the houses. Some could be recognized from the bell tower by the way they moved. They were reading the decree of the Supreme Ruler, pasted on the walls, about the conscription of the next three age groups into the army.

3

Night brought much that was unforeseen. It became warm, unusually so for the time of year. A fine-beaded rain drizzled down, so airy that it seemed to diffuse through the air in a misty, watery dust without reaching the earth. But that was an illusion. Its warm, streaming water was enough to wash the earth clean of snow and leave it all black now, glistening as if with sweat.

Stunted apple trees, all covered with buds, miraculously sent their branches from the gardens over the fences into the streets. Drops, tapping discordantly, fell from them onto the wooden sidewalks. Their random drumming resounded all over town.

The puppy Tomik, chained up in the photographers’ yard since morning, barked and whined. Perhaps annoyed by his barking, a crow in the Galuzins’ garden cawed for the whole town to hear.

In the lower part of town, three cartloads of goods were delivered to the merchant Lyubeznov. He refused to accept them, saying it was a mistake and he had never ordered these goods. Pleading the lateness of the hour, the stalwart carters asked him to let them spend the night. The merchant shouted at them, told them to go away, and would not open the gates. Their altercation could also be heard all over town.

At the seventh hour by church time,³ and by common reckoning at one o’clock in the morning, a wave of soft, dark, and sweet droning separated from the heaviest, barely moving bell of the Vozdvizhenye and floated away, mixing with the dark moisture of the rain. It pushed itself from the bell as a mass of soil washed away by flooding water is torn from the bank and sinks, dissolving in the river.

This was the night of Holy Thursday, the day of the Twelve Gospels.⁴ In the depths behind the netlike veil of rain, barely distinguishable little lights, and the foreheads, noses, and faces lit up by them, set out and went floating along. The faithful were going to matins.

A quarter of an hour later, steps were heard coming from the monastery along the boards of the sidewalk. This was the shopkeeper Galuzina returning home from the just-begun service. She walked irregularly, now hastening, now stopping, a kerchief thrown over her head, her fur coat unbuttoned. She had felt faint in the stuffy church and had gone outside for a breath of air, and now she was ashamed and regretted that she had not stood through the service and for the second year had not gone to communion. But that was not the cause of her grief. During the day she had been upset by the mobilization order posted everywhere, which concerned her poor, foolish son Teresha. She had tried to drive this unpleasantness from her head, but the white scrap of the announcement showing everywhere in the darkness had reminded her of it.

Her house was around the corner, within arm’s reach, but she felt better outside. She wanted to be in the open air, she did not feel like going home to more stuffiness.

She was beset by sad thoughts. If she had undertaken to think them aloud, in order, she would not have had words or time enough before morning. But here in the street these joyless reflections fell upon her in whole lumps, and she could have done with them all in a few moments, in two or three turns from the corner of the monastery to the corner of the square.

The bright feast is at hand, and there’s not a living soul in the house, they’ve all gone off, leaving her alone. What, isn’t she alone? Of course she’s alone. Her ward, Ksiusha, doesn’t count. Who is she, anyway? There’s no looking into another’s heart. Maybe she’s a friend, maybe an enemy, maybe a secret rival. She came as an inheritance from her husband’s first marriage, as Vlasushka’s adopted daughter. Or maybe not adopted, but illegitimate? And maybe not a daughter at all, but from a completely different opera! Can you climb into a man’s soul? Though there’s nothing to be said against the girl. Intelligent, beautiful, well-behaved. Way smarter than the little fool Tereshka and her adoptive father.

So here she is alone on the threshold of the Holy Feast, abandoned, they’ve all flown off this way and that.

Her husband Vlasushka had gone down the high road to make speeches to the new recruits, as a send-off to their feats of arms. The fool would have done better to look after his own son, to protect him from mortal danger.

The son, Teresha, also couldn’t help himself and took to his heels on the eve of the great feast. Buzzed off to Kuteiny Posad to some relatives, to have fun, to comfort himself after what he’d gone through. The boy had been expelled from high school. Repeated half the classes and nobody said anything, but in the eighth year they lost patience and threw him out.

Ah, what anguish! Oh, Lord! Why has it turned out so bad? You just lose heart. Everything drops from your hands, you don’t want to live! Why has it turned out like this? Is it the force of the revolution? No, ah, no! It’s all because of the war. All the flower of manhood got killed, and what was left was worthless, good-for-nothing rot.

A far cry from her father’s home—her father the contractor. Her father didn’t drink, he was literate, the family lived in plenty. There were two sisters, Polya and Olya. The names went so nicely together, just as the two of them suited each other, a pair of beauties. And the head carpenters who called on their father were distinguished, stately, fine-looking. Then suddenly they took it into their heads—there was no want in the house—took it into their heads to knit scarves out of six kinds of wool. And what then? They turned out to be such knitters, their scarves became famous throughout the district. And everything used to give joy by its richness and shapeliness—church services, dances, people, manners—even though the family was from simple folk, tradesmen, from peasants and workers. And Russia, too, was a young girl, and she had real suitors, real protectors, not like nowadays. Now everything’s lost its sheen, there’s nothing but the civilian trash of lawyers and Yids, chewing words tirelessly, day and night, choking on words. Vlasushka and his retinue hope to lure the old golden times back with champagne and good wishes. Is that any way to win back a lost love? You’ve got to overturn stones for that, move mountains, dig up the earth!

4

More than once already, Galuzina had gone as far as the marketplace, the central square of Krestovozdvizhensk. From there her house was to the left. But she changed her mind each time, turned around, and again went deep into the back alleys adjacent to the monastery.

The marketplace was the size of a big field. On market days in former times, peasants had covered it all over with their carts. One end of it lay against the end of Eleninskaya Street. The other end was built up along a curved line with small one- or two-story houses. They were all used as storage spaces, offices, trading premises, and artisans’ workshops.

Here, in quiet times, on a chair by the threshold of his very wide, four-leaf iron door, reading the Penny Daily, the woman-hater Briukhanov used to sit, a boorish bear in spectacles and a long-skirted frock coat, a dealer in leather, tar, wheels, horse harness, oats, and hay.

Here, displayed in a dim little window, gathering dust for many years, stood several cardboard boxes of paired wedding candles, decorated with ribbons and little bunches of flowers. Behind the little window, in an empty little room without furniture and with almost no sign of goods, unless one counted several rounds of wax piled one on top of the other, deals in the thousands for mastic, wax, and candles were concluded by no one knew what agents of a candle millionaire who lived no one knew where.

Here, in the middle of the shop-lined street, was the big colonial shop of the Galuzins with its three-window façade. In it the splintery, unpainted floor was swept three times a day with the used leaves of the tea which the shopkeepers and owner drank without moderation all day long. Here the owner’s young wife had often and willingly kept the till. Her favorite color was purple, violet, the color of especially solemn church vestments, the color of unopened lilacs, the color of her best velvet dress, the color of her wineglasses. The color of happiness, the color of memories, the color of the long-vanished maidenhood of prerevolutionary Russia also seemed to her to be pale lilac. And she liked keeping the till at the shop, because the violet dusk of the premises, fragrant with starch, sugar, and deep purple black-currant candies in their glass jar, matched her favorite color.

Here, at the corner, next to the lumberyard, stood an old, gray, two-story wooden house, sagging on four sides like a secondhand coach. It consisted of four apartments. There were two entrances to them, at either end of the façade. The left half of the ground floor was occupied by Zalkind’s pharmacy, the right by a notary’s office. Over the pharmacy lived old Shmulevich, a ladies’ tailor, with his numerous family. Across from the tailor, over the notary, huddled many tenants, whose professions were announced on the signs and plaques that covered the whole front door. Here watches were repaired and a cobbler took in orders. Here the partners Zhuk and Shtrodakh kept a photography studio, here were the premises of the engraver Kaminsky.

In view of the crowdedness of the overfilled apartment, the photographers’ young assistants, the retoucher Senya Magidson and the student Blazhein, built themselves a sort of laboratory in the yard, in the front office of the woodshed. They were apparently busy there now, judging by the angry eye of the developing lamp blinking nearsightedly in the little window of the office. It was under this window that the little dog Tomka was chained up, yelping for the whole of Eleninskaya Street to hear.

“The whole kahal’s bunched up in there,” thought Galuzina, walking past the gray house. “A den of misery and filth.” But she decided at once that Vlas Pakhomovich was wrong in his Judaeophobia. These people aren’t such big wheels as to mean anything in the destiny of the state. However, if you ask old Shmulevich why the trouble and disorder, he’ll cringe, pull a twisted mug, and say with a grin: “That’s Leibochka’s little tricks.”⁵

Ah, but what, what is she thinking about, what is her head stuffed with? Is that really the point? Is that where the trouble is? The trouble is the cities. Russia doesn’t stand on them. People got seduced by education, trailed after the city folk, and couldn’t pull it off. Left their own shore and never reached the other.

Or maybe, on the contrary, the whole trouble is ignorance. A learned man can see through a stone wall, he figures everything out beforehand. And we go looking for our hat when our head’s been cut off. Like in a dark forest. I suppose they’re not having a sweet time of it either, the educated ones. Lack of bread drives them from the cities. Well, just try sorting it out. The devil himself would break a leg.

But even so, aren’t our country relations something else again? The Selitvins, the Shelaburins, Pamphil Palykh, the brothers Nestor and Pankrat Modykh? Their own masters, their own heads, good farmers. New farmsteads along the high road, admirable. Each has some forty acres sown, plus horses, sheep, cows, pigs. Enough grain stocked up for three years ahead. The inventory—a feast for the eyes. Harvesting machines. Kolchak fawns on them, invites them to him, commissars entice them to the forest militia. They came back from the war covered with medals and were snapped up at once as instructors. With epaulettes, or without. If you’re a man with know-how, you’re in demand everywhere. You won’t perish.

But it’s time to go home. It’s simply improper for a woman to walk about for so long. It would be all right in my own garden. But it’s all soggy there, you could sink into the mud. Seems I feel a bit better.

And having gotten definitively entangled in her reasoning and lost the thread, Galuzina came to her house. But before crossing the threshold, she lingered for a moment in front of the porch, her mental gaze taking in many different things.

She remembered the present-day ringleaders in Khodatskoe, of whom she had a good notion, political exiles from the capitals, Tiverzin, Antipov, the anarchist Vdovichenko, called the Black Banner, the local locksmith Gorshenia the Rabid. These were all people who kept their own counsel. They had caused a lot of trouble in their day; they’re sure to be plotting and preparing something again. They couldn’t do without it. Their lives had been spent with machines, and they themselves are merciless, cold, like machines. They go around in short jackets with sweaters under them, smoke cigarettes in bone holders so as not to pick up an infection, drink boiled water. Vlasushka won’t get anywhere with them, they’ll turn everything around, they’ll always have it their way.

And she fell to thinking about herself. She knew that she was a nice and original woman, well-preserved and intelligent, a not-bad person. Not one of these qualities met with recognition in this godforsaken hole, or anywhere else, maybe. And the indecent couplets about foolish Sentetyurikha, known all over the Trans-Urals, of which only the first two lines could be quoted:

Sentetyurikha sold her cart

And bought herself a balalaika,

because further on they turned scabrous, were sung in Krestovozdvizhensk, she suspected, with a hint at her.

And, sighing bitterly, she went into the house.

5

Not stopping in the front hall, she went in her fur coat to the bedroom. The windows of the room gave onto the garden. Now, at night, the heaped-up shadows in front of the windows inside and beyond the windows outside almost repeated each other. The hanging sacks of the draped window curtains were almost like the hanging sacks of the trees in the yard, bare and black, with vague outlines. The taffeta darkness of this night at the end of winter was being warmed in the garden by the black violet heat of approaching spring breaking through the ground. Inside the room approximately the same combination was made up by two similar elements, and the dusty stuffiness of the poorly beaten curtains was softened and brightened by the deep violet heat of the coming feast.

The Holy Virgin on the icon freed her narrow, upturned, swarthy palms from the silver casing. She was holding in them, as it were, the first and last letters of her Byzantine title: Meter Theou, the Mother of God. Enclosed in a golden lamp holder, the icon lamp of garnet-colored glass, dark as an inkwell, cast on the bedroom rug a star-shaped glimmer, broken up by the lacy edge of the cup.

Throwing off her kerchief and fur coat, Galuzina turned awkwardly, and again felt a stitch in her side and a throb in her shoulder blade. She cried out, frightened, and began to murmur: “Great Intercessor for those in sorrow, most pure Virgin, Swift Defender, Protectress of the world”—and burst into tears. Then, after waiting for the pain to subside, she began to undress. The hooks behind the collar and on the back slipped from her fingers and hid in the wrinkles of the smoke-colored fabric. She had trouble feeling for them.

Her ward, Ksiusha, came into the room, awakened by her arrival.

“Why are you in the dark, mama? Would you like me to bring you a lamp?”

“Don’t bother. I can see like this.”

“Mama dear, Olga Nilovna, let me undo it. You needn’t suffer.”

“My fingers don’t obey me, I could just cry. The mangy Yid didn’t have brains enough to sew the hooks on like a human being, the blind bat. I’d like to rip it off all the way down and shove the whole flap in his mug.”

“They sang well in the Vozdvizhenye. A quiet night. It carried here through the air.”

“The singing was good. But I feel bad, my dear. I’ve got stitches here and here. Everywhere. That’s the misery of it. I don’t know what to do.”

“The homeopath Stydobsky used to help you.”

“His advice was always impossible to follow. A horse doctor your homeopath turned out to be. Neither fish nor fowl. That’s the first thing. And second, he’s gone away. Gone away, gone away. And not him alone. Before the feast everybody went rushing out of the city. Are they expecting an earthquake or something?”

“Well, then that captured Hungarian doctor’s treatment did you good.”

“More poppycock with sugar on top. I’m telling you, there’s nobody left, everybody’s scattered. Kerenyi Lajos and the other Magyars wound up behind the demarcation line. They forced the dear fellow into service. Took him into the Red Army.”

“Anyhow, you’re overanxious about your health. Neurosis of the heart. A simple folk charm can work wonders here. Remember, the army wife whispered it away for you quite successfully. Like it was never there. What’s her name, that army wife? I forget.”

“No, you decidedly consider me an ignorant fool. You sing ‘Sentetyurikha’ about me behind my back, for all I know.”

“God forbid! It’s sinful to say such things, mama. Better remind me of the army wife’s name. It’s on the tip of my tongue. I won’t have any peace until I remember it.”

“She’s got more names than skirts. I don’t know which one you want. They call her Kubarikha, and Medvedikha, and Zlydarikha.⁶ And a dozen more nicknames. She’s not around anymore. The ball’s over, go look for wind in the clover. They locked up the servant of God in the Kezhem prison. For exterminating a fetus and for some sort of powders. But she, look you, rather than languish behind bars, buggered off from prison to somewhere in the Far East. I’m telling you, everybody’s scattered. Vlas Pakhomych, Teresha, Aunt Polya with her yielding heart. The only honest women left in the whole town are you and me—two fools, I’m not joking. And no medical help. If anything happens, it’s the end, call and nobody’ll hear you. They say there’s a celebrity from Moscow in Yuriatin, a professor, the son of a suicide, a Siberian merchant. While I was making up my mind to invite him, they set up twenty Red cordons on the road, there’s no room to sneeze. But now about something else. Go to bed, and I’ll try to lie down. The student Blazhein has turned your head. No use denying it. You won’t hide it anyway, you’re red as a lobster. Your wretched student is toiling over prints on a holy night, developing and printing my photographs. They don’t sleep themselves and won’t let others sleep. Their Tomik barks his head off for the whole town to hear. And the nasty crow is cawing in our apple tree, must be I’m not to sleep all night. Why are you offended, miss touch-me-not? Students are there for the girls to like them.”

6

“Why is the dog carrying on like that? We must go and see what’s the matter. He wouldn’t bark for nothing. Wait, Lidochka, blast you, shut up for a minute. We’ve got to clarify the situation. A posse may descend on us any minute. Don’t leave, Ustin. And you stay put, Sivobluy. They’ll get along without you.”

Not hearing the request to stop and wait a little, the representative from the center went on wearily in an oratorical patter:

“The bourgeois military power existing in Siberia by its politics of robbery, taxation, violence, executions, and torture should open the eyes of the deluded. It is hostile not only to the working class, but, by the essence of things, to all the laboring peasantry as well. The laboring peasantry of Siberia and the Urals should understand that only in union with the urban proletariat and the soldiers, in union with the Kirghiz and Buryat poor …”⁷

Finally he caught the fact that he was being interrupted and stopped, wiping his sweaty face, wearily lowered his puffy eyelids, and closed his eyes.

Those standing near him said in a half whisper:

“Rest a bit. Have a sip of water.”

The anxious partisan leader was told:

“What are you worried about? Everything’s all right. The signal lamp is in the window. The lookout, to put it picturesquely, devours space with his eyes. I think we can resume the lecturer’s talk. Speak, Comrade Lidochka.”

The interior of the big shed had been freed of firewood. In the cleared space an illegal meeting was going on. The firewood piled to the ceiling served to screen off the meeting, separating this emptied half from the front desk and the entrance. In case of danger, the assembled men were provided with a way down into the basement and an underground exit to the overgrown backyard of the Konstantinovsky Impass beyond the monastery wall.

The speaker, in a black cotton cap that covered his completely bald head, with a matte, pale olive complexion and a black beard up to his ears, suffered from nervous perspiration and sweated profusely all the time. He greedily relighted his unfinished butt in the stream of hot air over the kerosene lamp burning on the table, and bent low to the scraps of paper scattered in front of him. He ran his nearsighted little eyes over them nervously and quickly, as if he were sniffing them, and went on in a dull and weary voice:

“This union of the urban and village poor can be realized only through the soviets. Like it or not, the Siberian peasantry will now strive towards the same thing for which the Siberian workers have long since begun to fight. Their common goal is the overthrow of the autocracy of admirals and atamans, hateful to the people, and the establishment of the power of the peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets by means of a nationwide armed insurrection. For that, their struggle against the Cossack-officer hirelings of the bourgeoisie, who are armed to the teeth, will have to be conducted as a regular frontline war, persistent and prolonged.”

Again he stopped, wiped his forehead, and closed his eyes. Contrary to the rules, someone stood up, raised his hand, and wished to put in a comment.

The partisan leader, or, more precisely, the commander of the Kezhem formation of the Trans-Ural partisans, was sitting right in front of the speaker’s nose in a defiantly casual posture and kept rudely interrupting him, without showing him any respect. It was hard to believe that such a young soldier, almost a boy, was in command of whole armies and formations, and was obeyed and held in awe. He was sitting with his hands and feet covered by the skirts of his cavalry greatcoat. The flung-off top and sleeves of the greatcoat, thrown over the back of the chair, revealed his body in a tunic with dark spots where the lieutenant’s epaulettes had been ripped off.

At his sides stood two silent stalwarts of his guard, the same age as he, in white sheepskin vests that had had time to turn gray, with curly lambswool showing at the edges. Their handsome, stony faces showed nothing but blind devotion to their superior and a readiness for anything for his sake. They remained indifferent to the meeting, the questions touched upon at it, the course of the debate, did not speak, and did not smile.

Besides these people, there were another ten or fifteen men in the shed. Some stood, others sat on the floor with their legs stretched out or their knees sticking up, leaning against the wall and its roundly projecting caulked logs.

For the guests of honor, chairs had been provided. They were occupied by three or four workers, former participants in the first revolution, among them the sullen, changed Tiverzin and his friend, old Antipov, who always yessed him. Counted among the divinities at whose feet the revolution laid all its gifts and sacrifices, they sat like silent, stern idols in whom political arrogance had exterminated everything alive and human.

There were other figures worthy of attention in the shed. Not knowing a moment’s peace, getting up from the floor and sitting down again, pacing the shed and stopping in the middle of it, was the pillar of Russian anarchism, Vdovichenko the Black Banner, a fat giant with a big head, a big mouth, and a leonine mane, an officer, if not in the last Russo-Turkish War, then at least in the Russo-Japanese War, a dreamer eternally absorbed in his ravings.

By reason of his boundless good nature and gigantic height, which kept him from noticing events of unequal and smaller size, he treated all that was happening with insufficient attention and, misunderstanding everything, took opposite opinions for his own and agreed with everybody.

Next to his place on the floor sat his acquaintance, the forest hunter and trapper Svirid. Though Svirid did not live as a peasant, his earthy, soil-tilling essence showed through the opening of his dark broadcloth shirt, which he bunched up at the collar together with his cross and scraped and drove over his body, scratching his chest. He was a half-Buryat muzhik, amiable and illiterate, with hair that lay in flat strands, sparse mustaches, and a still more sparse beard of a few hairs. His face, puckering all the time in a sympathetic smile, looked aged because of its Mongolian features.

The lecturer, who was traveling around Siberia with military instructions from the Central Committee, wandered in his mind over the vast spaces he was still to cover. He regarded the majority of those present at the meeting with indifference. But, a revolutionary and lover of the people from early on, he looked with adoration at the young general who sat facing him. He not only forgave the boy all his rudeness, which the old man took for the voice of an ingrained, latent revolutionism, but regarded with admiration his casual sallies, as a woman in love may like the insolent unceremoniousness of her lord and master.

The partisan leader was Mikulitsyn’s son Liberius; the lecturer from the center was the former cooperative laborist Kostoed-Amursky, connected in the past with the Social Revolutionaries.⁸ Recently he had reconsidered his position, recognized the mistakenness of his platform, offered his repentance in several detailed declarations, and had not only been received into the Communist Party, but soon after joining it had been sent on such a responsible assignment.

Though by no means a military man, he had been entrusted with this assignment out of respect for his revolutionary record, for his ordeals and terms in prison, and also on the assumption that, as a former cooperator, he must be well acquainted with the mood of the peasant masses in rebellion-gripped western Siberia. And in the given matter, this supposed familiarity was more important than military knowledge.

The change of political convictions had made Kostoed unrecognizable. It had altered his appearance, movements, manners. No one remembered that he was ever bald and bearded in former times. But maybe it was all false? The party prescribed strict secrecy for him. His underground nicknames were Berendey and Comrade Lidochka.

When the noise raised by Vdovichenko’s untimely announcement of his agreement with the read-out points of the instructions subsided, Kostoed went on:

“With the aim of the fullest possible involvement of the growing movement of the peasant masses, it is necessary to establish connections immediately with all partisan detachments located in the area of the provincial committee.”

Further on, Kostoed spoke of arranging meeting places, passwords, ciphers, and means of communication. Then he again passed on to details.

“Inform the detachments of those points where the White institutions and organizations have supplies of arms, clothing, and food, where they keep large sums of money and the system of their keeping.

“There is need to work out in full detail the questions of the internal organization of the detachments, of leadership, of military-comradely discipline, of conspiracy, of the connection of the detachments with the outside world, of relations with the local populace, of the military-revolutionary field court, of the tactics of sabotage on enemy territory, such as the destruction of bridges, railway lines, steamboats, barges, stations, workshops and their technical equipment, the telegraph, mines, food supplies.”

Liberius listened, listened, and finally could not bear it. All this seemed like dilettantish nonsense to him, with no relation to reality. He said:

“A beautiful lecture. I’ll make note of it. Obviously, it must all be accepted without objection, so as not to lose the support of the Red Army.”

“Naturally.”

“But, blast it all, what am I to do with your childish little crib, my most excellent Lidochka, when my forces, consisting of three regiments including artillery and cavalry, have long been on the march and are splendidly beating the enemy?”

“What charm! What strength!” thought Kostoed.

Tiverzin interrupted the argument. He did not like Liberius’s disrespectful tone. He said:

“Excuse me, comrade lecturer. I’m not sure. I may have written down one of the points of the instructions incorrectly. I’ll read it. I want to make certain: ‘It is highly desirable to involve former frontline troops in the committee, men who were at the front during the revolution and took part in the soldiers’ organizations. It is desirable to have one or two noncommissioned officers and a military technician on the committee.’ Have I written that down correctly, Comrade Kostoed?”

“Yes, correctly. Word for word. Yes.”

“In that case allow me to make the following observation. This point about military specialists disturbs me. We workers who took part in the revolution of 1905 are not used to trusting army men. Counterrevolution always worms its way in with them.”

Voices rang out all around:

“Enough! The resolution! The resolution! It’s time to break up. It’s late.”

“I agree with the opinion of the majority,” Vdovichenko inserted in a rumbling bass. “To put it poetically, it’s precisely like this. Civil institutions should grow from below, on democratic foundations, the way tree layers are set in the ground and take root. They can’t be hammered in from above like fenceposts. That was the mistake of the Jacobin dictatorship, which is why the Convention was crushed by the Thermidorians.”⁹

“It’s clear as day,” Svirid supported the friend of his wanderings, “a little child could understand it. We should have thought earlier, but now it’s too late. Now our business is to fight and smash our way through. Groan and bend. Otherwise what is it, you swing and back away? You cooked it, you eat it. You’ve jumped in the water, don’t shout that you’re drowning.”

“The resolution! The resolution!” demands came from all sides. There was a little more talk, with less and less observable coherence, with no rhyme or reason, and at dawn the meeting was closed. They went off one by one with all precaution.

7

There was a picturesque place on the highway. Situated on steep banks and separated by the swift river Pazhinka, the town of Kuteiny Posad descending from above and the motley-looking village of Maly Ermolai below almost touched each other. In Kuteiny they were seeing off new recruits taken into the service; in Maly Ermolai, under the chairmanship of Colonel Strese, the selection committee went on with its work, after the Easter break, certifying the young men of the village and some adjacent areas liable to be called up. On the occasion of the levy, there were mounted militia and Cossacks in the village.

It was the third day of the unseasonably late Easter and the unseasonably early spring, quiet and warm. Tables with refreshments for the departing recruits stood outside in Kuteiny, under the open sky, along the edge of the road, so as not to hinder traffic. They were put together not quite in a straight line, and stretched out like a long, irregular gut under white tablecloths that went down to the ground.

The new conscripts were treated to potluck. The main food was leftovers from the Easter table: two smoked hams, several kulichi, two or three paschas.¹⁰ Down the whole length of the table stood bowls of salted mushrooms, cucumbers, and pickled cabbage, plates of homemade, thickly sliced village bread, wide platters of colored eggs piled up high. They were mostly pink and light blue.

The grass around the tables was littered with picked-off eggshells—light blue, pink, and, on the inside, white. Light blue and pink were the boys’ shirts showing from under their suit jackets. Light blue and pink were the young girls’ dresses. Light blue was the sky. Pink were the clouds floating across the sky, as slowly and orderly as if the sky were floating with them.

Pink was the shirt, tied with a silk sash, on Vlas Pakhomovich Galuzin, when he—briskly stamping the heels of his boots and kicking his feet to left and right—ran down the high porch steps of the Pafnutkins’ house to the tables—the Pafnutkins’ house stood on a little hill above the tables—and began:

“This glass of the people’s home brew I drink to you, dear lads, in place of champagne. Many years to you, many years to you departing young men!¹¹ Gentlemen recruits! I wish to congratulate you on many other points and respects. Give me your attention. The way of the cross that stretches like a long road before you is to staunchly defend the motherland from violators who have flooded the motherland’s fields with fratricidal blood. The people cherished bloodless discussions of the conquests of the revolution, but the Bolshevik Party being servants of foreign capital, its sacred dream, the Constituent Assembly, is dispersed by the crude force of the bayonet, and blood flows in a defenseless stream. Young departing men! Raise higher the violated honor of Russian arms, as being indebted to our honorable allies, we have covered ourselves in shame, observing, in the wake of the Reds, Germany and Austria again insolently raising their heads. God is with us, dear lads,” Galuzin was still saying, but already shouts of “Hurrah” and demands that Vlas Pakhomovich be carried in triumph drowned out his words. He put his glass to his lips and began taking small sips of the raw, poorly distilled liquid. The drink did not afford him any pleasure. He was used to grape wines of a more delicate bouquet. But the consciousness of the sacrifice offered to society filled him with a sense of satisfaction.

“Your old man’s an eagle. Such a fierce, flaming talker! Like some Miliukov in the Duma.¹² By God,” Goshka Ryabykh, with a half-drunken tongue, amidst the drunken hubbub that had arisen, praised the father of his friend and companion at the table, Terenty Galuzin. “I tell you true—an eagle. Obviously not for nothing. Wants his tongue to solicit you out of going for a soldier.”

“Come on, Goshka! Shame on you. To think up that ‘solicit out.’ I’ll get a notice the same day as you, for all his soliciting out. We’ll wind up in the same unit. Now they’ve kicked me out of school, the scum. My mother’s crushed. It’ll be a good thing if I don’t wind up with the volumpeers. Get sent to the ranks. And as for formal speeches, papa really is unbeatable, no disputing it. A master. The main thing is, where’d he get it? It’s natural. He has no systematic education.”

“Did you hear about Sanka Pafnutkin?”

“Yes. Is it really so nasty?”

“For life. He’ll waste away in the end. It’s his own fault. He was warned not to go there. The main thing is who you get tangled up with.”

“What’ll happen to him now?”

“A tragedy. He wanted to shoot himself. Today he’s being examined by the commission in Ermolai. They’ll probably take him. ‘I’ll go to the partisans,’ he says. ‘I’ll avenge the sores of society.’ ”

“Listen, Goshka. You say it’s so nasty. But if you don’t go to them, you can get sick with something else.”

“I know what you’re getting at. You must be doing it. That’s not a sickness, it’s a secret vice.”

“I’ll punch your face in for such words, Goshka. Don’t you dare offend a comrade, you rotten liar!”

“Calm down, I was joking. I wanted to tell you something. I went to Pazhinsk for the Easter meal. In Pazhinsk an itinerant lecturer talked about ‘The Emancipation of the Person.’ Very interesting. I liked the thing. I’ll damn well sign up with the anarchists. There’s a force inside us, he says. Sex and character, he says, that’s the awakening of animal electricity. Eh? Quite a wunderkind. But I’m really plastered. And they’re shouting all around, jabber-jabber, it’s deafening. I can’t stand it, Tereshka, be quiet. You son of a bitch, you little mama’s boy, shut up, I said.”

“Just tell me this, Goshka. I still don’t know all the words about socialism. Saboteur, for instance. What kind of expression is that? What’s it about?”

“I’m a real professor in these words, but like I told you, Tereshka, leave off, I’m drunk. A saboteur is somebody who’s in the same band as others. Once they say soboater, it means you’re in the same boat with them. Get it, blockhead?”

“I also thought it was a swearword. But about electric force, you’re right. I decided from an advertisement to order an electric truss from Petersburg. To step up the activity. C.O.D. But then suddenly there’s a new upheaval. Trusses are out.”

Terenty did not finish. The din of drunken voices was drowned out by the thundering burst of a nearby explosion. The noise at the table momentarily ceased. A minute later it started up again with still more disorderly force. Some jumped up from their seats. The steadier ones stayed on their feet. Others, staggering, wanted to make off somewhere, but gave way and, collapsing under the table, immediately began to snore. Women shrieked. A commotion began.

Vlas Pakhomovich glanced around, looking for the culprit. At first he thought the bang came from somewhere in Kuteiny, quite near, maybe even very close to the tables. He strained his neck, his face turned purple, he bawled at the top of his lungs:

“What Judas has wormed his way into our ranks to commit outrages? What mother’s son is playing with grenades here? Whoever he is, even if he’s my own, I’ll strangle the vermin! We won’t suffer such jokes, citizens! I demand that we make a roundup. Let’s surround Kuteiny Posad! Let’s catch the provocator! Don’t let the son of a bitch escape!”

At first he was listened to. Then attention was distracted by the column of black smoke slowly rising into the sky from the local council building in Maly Ermolai. Everybody ran to the bank to see what was going on there.

Several undressed recruits came running out of the burning Ermolai council building, one completely barefoot and naked, just pulling on his trousers, along with Colonel Strese and the other military who had been carrying out the selective service examination. Mounted Cossacks and militiamen rushed back and forth in the village, swinging their whips and stretching out their bodies and arms on their horses, themselves stretched out like writhing snakes. They were searching for someone, chasing someone. A great many people were running down the road to Kuteiny. In pursuit of the running people came the rapid and anxious ringing of the alarm from the Ermolai bell tower.

Events developed further with terrible swiftness. At dusk, continuing his search, Strese and his Cossacks went up from the village to neighboring Kuteiny. Surrounding it with patrols, they began searching each house, each farmstead.

By that time half of the merrymakers were done in and, drunk as lords, lay in a deep sleep, resting their heads on the edges of the tables or sprawled on the ground under them. When it became known that the militia had come to the village, it was already dark.

Several lads, fleeing the militia, rushed to the backyards of the village and, urging each other on with kicks and shoves, got under the siding of the first storehouse they came to, which did not reach the ground. In the darkness it was impossible to tell whose it was, but, judging by the smell of fish and kerosene, it must have been the crawl space of the grocery cooperative.

The hiders had nothing on their conscience. It was a mistake for them to conceal themselves. Most of them had done it in haste, drunkenly, foolishly. Some had acquaintances who seemed blameworthy to them and might, as they thought, be the ruin of them. Now everything had been given a political coloring. Mischief and hooliganism were counted as signs of the Black Hundred¹³ in Soviet areas; in White Guard areas ruffians were taken for Bolsheviks.

As it turned out, the lads who slipped under the cottage had predecessors. The space between the ground and the storehouse floor was full of people. Several men from Kuteiny and Ermolai were hiding there. The former were dead drunk. Some were snoring with moaning undertones, grinding their teeth and whining; others were sick and throwing up. It was pitch-dark under the storehouse, stuffy and stinking. Those who crawled in last filled the opening they had come through from inside with earth and stones, so that the hole would not give them away. Soon the snoring and moaning of the drunk ceased entirely. There was total silence. They all slept quietly. Only in one corner was there quiet whispering between the particularly restless ones, the scared-to-death Terenty Galuzin and the Ermolai fistfighter Koska Nekhvalenykh.

“Pipe down, you son of a bitch, you’ll be the end of us all, you snotty devil. You hear, Strese’s men are on the prowl—sneaking around. They turned at the village gate, they’re coming down the row, they’ll be here soon. That’s them. Freeze, don’t breathe, I’ll strangle you! Well, you’re in luck—they’re gone. Passed us by. What devil brought you here? And hiding, too, you blockhead! Who’d lay a finger on you?”

“I heard Goshka shouting, ‘Take cover, you slob!’ So I slipped in.”

“Goshka’s another matter. The whole Ryabykh family is being eyed as untrustworthy. They’ve got relations in Khodatskoe. Artisans, worker stock. Don’t twitch like that, you lunkhead, lie quiet. They’ve crapped and puked all around here. If you move, you’ll smear yourself with shit, and me, too. Can’t you smell the stench? Why do you think Strese’s rushing around the village? He’s looking for men from Pazhinsk. Outsiders.”

“How did all this come about, Koska? Where did it begin?”

“Sanka sparked the whole thing off, Sanka Pafnutkin. We’re standing naked in line for the examination. Sanka’s time came, it’s Sanka’s turn. He won’t undress. Sanka was a bit drunk, he came to the office tipsy. The clerk looks him over. ‘Get undressed, please,’ he says. Politely. Addresses Sanka formally. A military clerk. And Sanka answers him rudely: ‘I won’t. I ain’t gonna show everybody my private parts.’ As if he’s embarrassed. And he sidles up to the clerk, like he’s going to haul off and punch him in the jaw. Yes. And what do you think? Before you could bat an eye, Sanka bends over, grabs the little office desk by the leg, and dumps it and everything on it, the inkstand, the army lists, on the floor! From the boardroom door, Strese shouts: ‘I won’t tolerate excesses. I’ll show you your bloodless revolution and disrespect for the law in a government office. Who’s the instigator?’

“But Sanka’s at the window. ‘Help!’ he shouts. ‘Grab your clothes! It’s all up for us, comrades!’ I grabbed my clothes, got dressed on the run, and went over to Sanka. Sanka smashed the window with his fist and, whoop, he’s outside, try catching the wind. And me after him. And some others as well. Running our legs off. And there’s already hallooing after us, the chase is on. But if you ask me what it was all about? Nobody understands anything.”

“And the bomb?”

“What about the bomb?”

“Who threw the bomb? Well, bomb, grenade, whatever?”

“Lord, you don’t think it was us?”

“But who, then?”

“How should I know? Somebody else. He saw the turmoil, thought, I could blow up the council on the sly. They’ll think it was other people. Somebody political. There’s a lot of politicals from Pazhinsk here. Quiet. Shut up. Voices. You hear, Strese’s men are coming back. Well, we’re lost. Freeze, I said.”

The voices came closer. Boots creaked, spurs jangled.

“Don’t argue. You can’t fool me. I’m not that kind. There was definitely talking somewhere,” boomed the domineering, all-distinct Petersburg voice of the colonel.

“You may have imagined it, Your Excellency,” reasoned the village headman of Maly Ermolai, the old fishmonger Otviazhistin. “And no wonder if there’s talking, since it’s a village. Not a cemetery. Maybe they were talking somewhere. They’re not dumb beasts in the houses. Or maybe a hobgoblin’s choking somebody in his sleep …”

“Enough! I’ll teach you to play the holy fool, pretending you’re a poor orphan! Hobgoblin! You’ve grown too free and easy here! You’ll get the international on you with your cleverness, then it’ll be too late. Hobgoblin!”

“Good gracious, Your Excellency, mister colonel, sir! What international! They’re thick-headed oafs, impenetrable darkness. Stumble over the old prayer books. What do they want with revolution?”

“You all talk that way till the first evidence. Search the premises of the cooperative from top to bottom. Shake all the coffers, look under the counters. Search the adjoining buildings.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

“Get Pafnutkin, Ryabykh, Nekhvalenykh, dead or alive. From the ends of the earth. And that Galuzin pup. Never mind that his papa delivers patriotic speeches, he won’t fine-talk us. On the contrary. We’re not lulled by it. Once a shopkeeper starts orating, it means something’s wrong. It’s suspicious. It’s contrary to nature. There’s secret information that there are political exiles hidden in their courtyard in Krestovozdvizhensk, that secret meetings are held. Catch the boy. I haven’t decided yet what to do with him, but if something’s uncovered, I’ll hang him without pity as a lesson to the rest.”

The searchers moved on. When they had gone far enough away, Koska Nekhvalenykh asked Tereshka Galuzin, who was dead with fright:

“Did you hear?”

“Yes,” the boy whispered in a voice not his own.

“For you and me, and Sanka, and Goshka, the only road now is to the forest. I don’t say forever. Till they get reasonable. And when they come to their senses, then we’ll see. Maybe we’ll come back.”