Doctor Zhivago

Part Fourteen

IN VARYKINO AGAIN

1

Winter settled in. Snow fell in big flakes. Yuri Andreevich came home from the hospital.

“Komarovsky’s come,” Lara said in a failing, husky voice, coming to meet him. They stood in the front hall. She had a lost look, as if she had been beaten.

“Where? To whom? Is he here?”

“No, of course not. He was here in the morning and wanted to come in the evening. He’ll show up soon. He needs to talk with you.”

“Why has he come?”

“I didn’t understand all he said. He says he was passing through on his way to the Far East and purposely made a detour and turned off at Yuriatin in order to see us. Mainly for your sake and Pasha’s. He talked a lot about you both. He insists that all three of us, that is, you, Patulia, and I, are in mortal danger, and that only he can save us, if we listen to him.”

“I’ll leave. I don’t want to see him.”

Lara burst into tears, tried to fall on her knees before the doctor, embrace his legs, and press her face to them, but he prevented her, holding her back by force.

“Stay for my sake, I implore you. I’m not at all afraid of finding myself face-to-face with him. But it’s hard. Spare me from meeting him alone. Besides, he’s a practical man, he’s been around. Maybe he really will give us some advice. Your loathing for him is natural. But I beg you, overcome yourself. Stay.”

“What’s the matter, my angel? Calm yourself. What are you doing? Don’t throw yourself on your knees. Stand up. Be cheerful. Drive away this obsession that pursues you. He’s frightened you for life. I’m with you. If need be, if you tell me to, I’ll kill him.”

Half an hour later evening fell. It became completely dark. For six months already, the holes in the floor had been stopped up everywhere. Yuri Andreevich watched for the forming of new ones and blocked them in time. They acquired a large, fluffy cat, who spent his time in immobile, mysterious contemplation. The rats did not leave the house, but they became more cautious.

In expectation of Komarovsky, Larissa Fyodorovna cut up the black rationed bread and put a plate with a few boiled potatoes on the table. They intended to receive the guest in the previous owners’ dining room, which had kept its purpose. In it stood a big oak dining table and a big, heavy sideboard of the same dark oak. On the table, castor oil burned in a vial with a wick in it—the doctor’s portable lamp.

Komarovsky came in from the December darkness all covered with the snow that was falling heavily outside. Snow fell in thick layers from his fur coat, hat, and galoshes, and melted, forming puddles on the floor. The snow that stuck to his mustaches and beard, which Komarovsky used to shave but now had let grow, made them look clownish, buffoonish. He was wearing a well-preserved jacket and vest and well-creased striped trousers. Before greeting them or saying anything, he spent a long time combing his damp, flattened hair with a pocket comb and wiping and smoothing his wet mustaches and eyebrows with a handkerchief. Then silently, with an expression of great significance, he held out his two hands simultaneously, the left to Larissa Fyodorovna and the right to Yuri Andreevich.

“Let’s consider ourselves acquaintances,” he addressed Yuri Andreevich. “I was on such good terms with your father—you probably know. He gave up the ghost in my arms. I keep looking closely at you, searching for a resemblance. No, clearly you didn’t take after your papa. He was a man of an expansive nature. Impulsive, impetuous. Judging by appearances, you are more like your mother. She was a gentle woman. A dreamer.”

“Larissa Fyodorovna asked me to hear you out. She says you have some business with me. I yielded to her request. Our conversation has been forced upon me against my will. I would not seek your acquaintance by my own inclination, and I do not consider us acquainted. Therefore let’s get down to business. What do you want?”

“Greetings, my good ones. I feel everything, decidedly everything, and understand everything thoroughly, to the end. Forgive my boldness, but you’re awfully well suited to each other. A harmonious couple in the highest degree.”

“I must interrupt you. I ask you not to interfere in things that do not concern you. No one has asked for your sympathy. You forget yourself.”

“Don’t you flare up at once like that, young man. No, perhaps you’re like your father after all. The same pistol and powder. Yes, so with your permission, I congratulate you, my children. Unfortunately, however, you are children not only in my expression, but in fact, who don’t know anything, who don’t reflect on anything. I’ve been here for only two days and have learned more about you than you yourselves suspect. You’re walking on the edge of an abyss without thinking of it. If the danger isn’t somehow averted, the days of your freedom, and maybe even of your lives, are numbered.

“There exists a certain Communist style. Few people measure up to it. But no one so clearly violates that way of living and thinking as you do, Yuri Andreevich. I don’t understand—why stir up a hornets’ nest? You’re a mockery of that world, an insult to it. It would be fine if it were your secret. But there are influential people from Moscow here. They know you inside and out. You’re both terribly distasteful to the local priests of Themis. Comrades Antipov and Tiverzin are sharpening their claws for Larissa Fyodorovna and you.

“You are a man—a free Cossack, or whatever it’s called. Madcap behavior, playing with your own life, is your sacred right. But Larissa Fyodorovna is not a free person. She’s a mother. She has a young life, a child’s destiny, in her hands. She’s in no position to fantasize, to live in the clouds.

“I wasted a whole morning talking to her, persuading her to take the local situation more seriously. She refuses to listen to me. Use your authority, influence Larissa Fyodorovna. She has no right to toy with Katenka’s safety, she should not disregard my arguments.”

“Never in my life have I tried to persuade or compel anyone. Especially people close to me. Larissa Fyodorovna is free to listen to you or not. That’s her business. Besides, I have no idea what you’re talking about. What you call your arguments are unknown to me.”

“No, you remind me more and more of your father. Just as intractable. So, then, let’s go on to the main thing. But since it’s a rather complex matter, arm yourselves with patience. I beg you to listen and not to interrupt.

“Big changes are being prepared at the top. No, no, I have it from the most reliable sources, you can trust me. They have in mind a switch to more democratic tracks, concessions to general legality, and that in the very near future.

“But precisely as a result of that, the punitive institutions liable to abolition will become all the more ferocious towards the end and will hasten to settle their local accounts. You are next in line to be annihilated, Yuri Andreevich. Your name is on the list. I’m not joking when I say it, I saw it myself, believe me. Think about saving yourself, otherwise it will be too late.

“But this is all a preface so far. I go on to the essence of the matter.

“In Primorye, on the Pacific Ocean, a gathering of political forces that have remained loyal to the deposed Provisional Government and the disbanded Constituent Assembly is taking place. Members of the Duma, social figures, the most prominent of the former zemstvo activists, businessmen, industrialists are coming together. The generals of the volunteer armies are concentrating what remains of their forces there.

“The Soviet government turns a blind eye to the emergence of the Far Eastern republic. The existence of such a formation on its outskirts is advantageous to it as a buffer between Red Siberia and the outside world. The government of the republic will be mixed. Moscow has negotiated more than half the seats for Communists, so that with their aid, at the right time, they can carry out a coup and take the republic in hand. The scheme is perfectly transparent, and the only thing is to be able to take advantage of the remaining time.¹

“Before the revolution I used to conduct the affairs of the Arkharov brothers, the Merkulovs, and other trading and banking houses in Vladivostok. I’m known there. An unofficial emissary of the forming government brought me, half secretly, half with official Soviet connivance, an invitation to enter the Far Eastern government as minister of justice. I accepted and am on my way there. All this, as I’ve just said, is happening with the knowledge and silent consent of Soviet power, though not so openly, and there should be no noise about it.

“I can take you and Larissa Fyodorovna with me. From there you can easily make your way to your family by sea. Of course, you already know about their deportation. A story that made noise, the whole of Moscow is talking about it. I promised Larissa Fyodorovna to ward off the blow hanging over Pavel Pavlovich. As a member of an independent and recognized government, I’ll seek out Strelnikov in eastern Siberia and assist in his transfer to our autonomous region. If he doesn’t manage to flee, I’ll suggest that he be exchanged for some person detained by the allies who is of value for the central power in Moscow.”

Larissa Fyodorovna had difficulty following the content of the conversation, the meaning of which often escaped her. But at Komarovsky’s last words, concerning the safety of the doctor and Strelnikov, she came out of her state of pensive nonparticipation, pricked up her ears, and, blushing slightly, put in:

“You understand, Yurochka, how important these plans are for you and Pasha?”

“You’re too trusting, my dear friend. One can hardly take things promised for things performed. I’m not saying that Viktor Ippolitovich is consciously pulling our leg. But it’s all still in the air! And now, Viktor Ippolitovich, a few words from me. I thank you for your attention to my fate, but can you possibly think I’ll let you arrange it? As for your taking care of Strelnikov, Lara has to think it over.”

“What are you driving at? Either we go with him, as he suggests, or we don’t. You know perfectly well that I won’t go without you.”

Komarovsky sipped frequently from the diluted alcohol Yuri Andreevich had brought from the dispensary and set on the table, munched the potatoes, and gradually became tipsy.

2

It was already late. Relieved now and then of its snuff, the wick of the lamp flared up with a crackle, brightly lighting the room. Then everything sank into darkness again. The hosts wanted to sleep and had to talk things over alone. But Komarovsky would not leave. His presence was wearying, like the oppressive sight of the heavy oak sideboard and the dispiriting, icy December darkness outside the window.

He looked not at them, but somewhere over their heads, fixing his drunken, rounded eyes on that distant point, and with a sleepy, thick tongue ground away at something endlessly boring, all about one and the same thing. His hobbyhorse was now the Far East. He chewed his cud about it, developing before Lara and the doctor his reflections on the political significance of Mongolia.

Yuri Andreevich and Larissa Fyodorovna had not caught the point at which the conversation had landed on this Mongolia. The fact that they had missed how he skipped over to it increased the tiresomeness of the alien, extraneous subject.

Komarovsky was saying:

“Siberia—truly a New America, as they call it—conceals in itself the richest possibilities. It is the cradle of the great Russian future, the pledge of our democratization, prosperity, political health. Still more fraught with alluring possibilities is the future of Mongolia, Outer Mongolia, our great Far Eastern neighbor. What do you know about it? You’re not ashamed to yawn and blink with inattention, and yet it has a surface of over a million square miles, unexplored minerals, a country in a state of prehistoric virginity, which the greedy hands of China, Japan, and America are reaching for, to the detriment of our Russian interests, recognized by all our rivals under any division of spheres of interest in this remote corner of the globe.

“China takes advantage of the feudal and theocratic backwardness of Mongolia, influencing its lamas and khutukhtas. Japan leans on local serf-owning princes—khoshuns in Mongolian. Red Communist Russia finds an ally in the person of the khamdzhils, in other words, the revolutionary association of rebellious Mongolian shepherds. As for me, I would like to see Mongolia really prosperous, under the rule of freely elected khurultai. Personally, we ought to be concerned with the following. One step across the Mongolian border, and the world is at your feet, and you’re free as a bird.”

This verbose reasoning on an intrusive subject that had no relation to them exasperated Larissa Fyodorovna. Driven to the point of exhaustion by the boredom of the prolonged visit, she resolutely held out her hand to Komarovsky in farewell and, without beating around the bush, said with unconcealed hostility:

“It’s late. Time for you to go. I want to sleep.”

“I hope you won’t be so inhospitable as to put me out at such an hour. I’m not sure I’ll find my way at night in a strange, unlit town.”

“You should have thought of that earlier and not gone on sitting. Nobody was keeping you.”

“Oh, why do you speak so sharply with me? You didn’t even ask whether I have anywhere to stay here.”

“Decidedly uninteresting. No doubt you can stick up for yourself. If you’re inviting yourself to spend the night, I won’t put you in our bedroom, where we sleep together with Katenka. And in the others there’ll be no dealing with the rats.”

“I’m not afraid of them.”

“Well, as you like.”

3

“What’s wrong, my angel? You haven’t slept for so many nights now, you don’t touch your food at the table, you go around as if in a daze. And you keep thinking, thinking. What’s haunting you? You shouldn’t give such free rein to troubling thoughts.”

“The hospital caretaker Izot was here again. He’s carrying on with a laundress in the house. So he stopped by to cheer me up. ‘A terrible secret,’ he says. ‘Your man can’t avoid the clink. He’ll be put away any day now, so be ready. And you, hapless girl, after him.’ ‘Where did you get that, Izot?’ I asked. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says, ‘you can count on it. People from the hexcom told me.’ ‘Hexcom,’ as you may have guessed, is his version of ‘excom,’ the executive committee.”

Larissa Fyodorovna and the doctor burst out laughing.

“He’s quite right. The danger is ripe and at our doorstep. We must disappear at once. The only question is where exactly. There’s no use thinking about going to Moscow. The preparations are too complicated, and they’ll attract attention. It has to be done hush-hush, so that nobody notices anything. You know what, my joy? I think we’ll avail ourselves of your idea. We have to drop from sight for a while. Let the place be Varykino. We’ll go there for two weeks, a month.”

“Thank you, my dearest, thank you. Oh, how glad I am! I realize how everything in you must go against such a decision. But I wasn’t talking about your house. Life in it would really be unthinkable for you. The sight of the empty rooms, the reproaches, the comparisons. As if I don’t understand? To build happiness on another’s suffering, to trample on what is dear and sacred to your heart. I could never accept such a sacrifice from you. But that’s not the point. Your house is such a ruin that it would hardly be possible to make the rooms fit to live in. I was sooner thinking of the Mikulitsyns’ abandoned place.”

“All that is true. Thank you for your sensitivity. But wait a minute. I keep wanting to ask and keep forgetting. Where is Komarovsky? Is he here, or has he already left? Since I quarreled with him and kicked him out, I’ve heard nothing more of him.”

“I don’t know anything either. But let him be. What do you want with him?”

“I keep coming back to the thought that we should have treated his suggestion differently. We’re not in the same position. You have a daughter to look after. Even if you wanted to perish with me, you’d have no right to allow yourself to do it.

“But let’s get back to Varykino. Naturally, to go to that wild backwoods in harsh winter, with no supplies, with no strength, with no hopes, is the maddest madness. But let’s be mad, my heart, if there’s nothing left us but madness. Let’s humble ourselves once more. Let’s beg Anfim to give us a horse. Let’s ask him, or not even him but the dealers who work for him, to lend us some flour and potatoes, as a debt not justifiable by any credit. Let’s persuade him not to buy back the good service he has rendered us by coming to visit right away, at once, but to come only at the end, when he needs the horse back. Let’s stay alone for a little while. Let’s go, my heart. In a week we’ll cut and burn a whole stand of trees, which would be enough for an entire year of conscientious housekeeping.

“And again, again. Forgive me for the confusion that keeps breaking through my words. How I’d like to talk to you without this foolish pathos! But we really have no choice. Call it what you like, death really is knocking at our door. The days at our disposal are numbered. Let’s use them in our own way. Let’s spend them on taking leave of life, on a last coming together before separation. Let’s bid farewell to all that was dear to us, to our habitual notions, to how we dreamed of living and to what our conscience taught us, bid farewell to hopes, bid farewell to each other. Let’s say once more to each other our secret night words, great and pacific as the name of the Asian ocean. It’s not for nothing that you stand at the end of my life, my secret, my forbidden angel, under a sky of wars and rebellions, just as you once rose up under the peaceful sky of childhood at its beginning.

“On that night, a girl in the last year of high school, in a coffee-colored uniform, in the semidarkness behind the partition of a hotel room, you were exactly as you are now, and as stunningly beautiful.

“Often, later in life, I tried to define and name that light of enchantment that you poured into me then, that gradually dimming ray and fading sound that suffused my whole existence ever after and became, owing to you, the key for perceiving everything else in the world.

“When you, a shadow in a schoolgirl’s uniform, stepped out of the darkness of the hotel room’s depths, I, a boy who knew nothing about you, understood with all the torment of a force that answered yours: this slight, skinny girl is charged to the utmost, as with electricity, with all conceivable femininity in the world. If you go near her or touch her with your finger, a spark will light up the room and either kill you on the spot or electrify you for your whole life with a magnetically attractive, plaintive craving and sorrow. I was all filled with wandering tears, all my insides glittered and wept. I felt a mortal pity for the boy I was, and still more pity for the girl you were. My whole being was astonished and asked: If it’s so painful to love and absorb electricity, how much more painful it is to be a woman, to be the electricity, to inspire love.

“Here at last I’ve spoken it out. It could make you lose your mind. And the whole of me is in it.”

Larissa Fyodorovna was lying on the edge of the bed, dressed and feeling unwell. She was curled up and had covered herself with a shawl. Yuri Andreevich was sitting on a chair next to her and speaking quietly, with long pauses. At times Larissa Fyodorovna raised herself on her elbow, propped her chin in her hand, and gazed open-mouthed at Yuri Andreevich. At times she pressed herself to his shoulder and, not noticing her tears, wept quietly and blissfully. She finally drew towards him, hanging over the edge of the bed, and whispered joyfully:

“Yurochka! Yurochka! How intelligent you are! You know everything, you guess about everything. Yurochka, you are my fortress, my refuge, and my foundation—God forgive my blasphemy. Oh, how happy I am! Let’s go, let’s go, my dear. Once we’re there, I’ll tell you what’s troubling me.”

He decided that she was hinting at her supposed pregnancy, probably imaginary, and said:

“I know.”

4

They drove out of town in the morning of a gray winter day. It was a weekday. People walked down the streets about their business. They frequently met acquaintances. At bumpy intersections, next to the old pump houses, women who had no wells near their houses lined up with their buckets and yokes set aside, waiting their turn to draw water. The doctor reined in Savraska, a smoky yellow, curly-haired Viatka horse, who was straining forward, and steered him carefully to avoid the crowding housewives. The sleigh picked up speed, slid sideways off the humpbacked, water-splashed, and icy pavement, rode onto the sidewalks, the bumpers hitting lampposts and hitching posts.

At full speed they overtook Samdevyatov walking down the street, flew past him, and did not look back to see if he recognized them and his horse and shouted anything after them. In another place, similarly, without any greeting, they left Komarovsky behind, having ascertained in passing that he was still in Yuriatin.

Glafira Tuntseva shouted all the way across the street from the opposite sidewalk:

“And they said you left yesterday. Go trusting people after that. Off to fetch potatoes?”—and, with a gesture showing that she had not heard their answer, she waved good-bye behind them.

For Sima’s sake they tried to pull up on a hillside, in an awkward place, where it was hard to stop. The horse had to be held back all the time without that, by tugging tightly on the reins. Sima was wrapped from head to foot in two or three shawls, which lent her figure the rigidity of a round log. With straight, unbending steps she came to the sleigh in the middle of the pavement and said good-bye, wishing them a safe journey.

“We must finish our talk when you get back, Yuri Andreevich.”

They finally drove out of town. Though Yuri Andreevich had occasionally ridden on this road in winter, he mainly remembered it as it was in summer and now did not recognize it.

The sacks of provisions and other luggage were placed deep in the hay at the front of the sleigh, under the dashboard, and tied securely. Yuri Andreevich drove either kneeling on the bottom of the broad sleigh, in local parlance a koshovka, or sitting sideways, his feet in Samdevyatov’s felt boots hanging over the edge.

In the afternoon, when winter’s deceptiveness made it seem that the day was coming to an end long before sunset, Yuri Andreevich started whipping Savraska mercilessly. She shot off like an arrow. The koshovka flew up and down like a boat, bobbing over the unevenness of the much-used road. Katya and Lara were wearing fur coats, which hindered their movements. As the sleigh leaned or jolted, they shouted and laughed their heads off, rolling from one side of the sleigh to the other and burying themselves in the hay like unwieldly sacks. At times, for the fun of it, the doctor purposely rode one runner over the snowbank on the edge of the road, turning the sleigh on its side and throwing Lara and Katya out into the snow without doing them any harm. After being dragged by the reins a few steps along the road, he would stop Savraska, set the sleigh back on both runners, and get a scolding from Lara and Katya, who would shake themselves off and climb into the sleigh, laughing and pouting.

“I’ll show you the place where the partisans stopped me,” the doctor promised, when they had driven far enough from town, but he was unable to keep his promise, because the winter bareness of the forest, the deathly calm and emptiness all around, changed the place beyond recognition. “Here it is!” he soon cried, mistaking the first Moreau and Vetchinkin billboard, which stood in a field, for the second one in the forest, where he had been taken. When they raced past this second one, which was still in its former place, in the woods by the Sakma intersection, the billboard could not be made out through the scintillating lattice of thick hoarfrost, which turned the forest into a filigree of silver and niello. And they did not notice the billboard.

They flew into Varykino while it was still light and stopped at the Zhivagos’ old house, since it was the first on the road, closer than the Mikulitsyns’. They burst into the room hurriedly, like robbers—it would soon be dark. Inside it was already dark. In his haste, Yuri Andreevich did not make out half the destruction and filth. Some of the familiar furniture was intact. In deserted Varykino there was no one left to carry through the destruction that had been begun. Of their household things Yuri Andreevich found nothing. But he had not been there at his family’s departure, he did not know what they had taken with them and what they had left behind. Meanwhile Lara was saying:

“We must hurry. Night is coming. There’s no time to reflect. If we settle here, then the horse must be put in the barn, the provisions in the front hall, and we here in this room. But I’m against such a decision. We’ve talked enough about it. It will be painful for you and therefore for me. What’s this, your bedroom? No, the nursery. Your son’s little bed. Too small for Katya. On the other hand, the windows are intact, no cracks in the walls or ceiling. And a magnificent stove besides, I already admired it on my last visit. And if you insist that we stay here after all, though I’m against it, then—off with my coat and straight to work. The heating first of all. Heat, heat, heat. Day and night nonstop to begin with. But what’s the matter, my dear? You don’t answer anything.”

“Just a moment. It’s nothing. Forgive me, please. No, you know, we’d really better have a look at the Mikulitsyns’.”

And they drove further on.

5

The Mikulitsyns’ house was locked with a padlock hanging from the eye of the door bar. Yuri Andreevich pried at it for a long time and ripped it off, with splintered wood clinging to the screws. As in the previous house, they barged in hurriedly and went through the rooms with their coats, hats, and felt boots on.

Their eyes were immediately struck by the stamp of order on the objects in certain parts of the house—for instance, in Averky Stepanovich’s study. Someone had been living here, and quite recently. But who precisely? If it was the owners or some one of them, what had become of them, and why had they locked the outside door with a padlock instead of the lock in the door? Besides, if it was the owners, and they had been living there long and permanently, the house would have been in order throughout and not in separate parts. Something told the intruders that it was not the Mikulitsyns. But in that case who was it? The doctor and Lara were not troubled by the uncertainty. They did not start racking their brains over it. As if there were not enough abandoned dwellings now with half the furniture pilfered? Or enough fugitives in hiding? “Some White officer being pursued,” they agreed unanimously. “If he comes, we’ll live together, we’ll work things out.”

And again, as once before, Yuri Andreevich stood as if rooted to the threshold of the study, admiring its spaciousness and astonished at the width and convenience of the desk by the window. And again he thought how such austere comfort probably disposes one and gives one a taste for patient, fruitful work.

Among the outbuildings in the Mikulitsyns’ yard there was a stable built right onto the barn. But it was locked, and Yuri Andreevich did not know what state it was in. So as not to lose time, he decided to put the horse in the easily opened, unlocked barn for the first night. He unharnessed Savraska, and when she cooled down, he gave her water that he brought from the well. Yuri Andreevich wanted to give her some hay from the bottom of the sleigh, but the hay had turned to dust under the passengers and was unfit for horse feed. Luckily, he found enough hay along the walls and in the corners of the wide hayloft over the barn and stable.

They slept that night under their fur coats, without undressing, blissfully, deeply, and sweetly, as children sleep after a whole day of running about and playing pranks.

6

When they got up in the morning, Yuri Andreevich began to gaze admiringly at the tempting desk by the window. His hands were itching to get to work over a sheet of paper. But he chose to enjoy that right in the evening, when Lara and Katenka had gone to bed. And meanwhile he had his hands full just putting two rooms in order.

In dreaming of his evening’s work, he did not set himself any important goals. A simple passion for ink, an attraction to the pen and the occupation of writing, possessed him.

He wanted to scribble, to set down lines. At first he would be satisfied with recalling and writing down something old, unrecorded, only so as to warm up his faculties, which had been standing inactive and drowsing in the interim. And later, he hoped, he and Lara would manage to stay on there longer, and he would have plenty of time to take up something new and significant.

“Are you busy? What are you doing?”

“Heating and heating. Why?”

“I need a tub.”

“If we keep the place this warm, we won’t have wood enough for more than three days. We’ve got to go and look in our former Zhivago shed. What if there’s more there? If there’s enough left, I’ll make several trips and bring it here. Tomorrow I’ll see to it. You asked for a tub. Imagine, my eye fell on one somewhere, but where—it’s gone clean out of my head, I can’t place it.”

“It’s the same with me. I saw one somewhere and forgot. Probably not in the right place, that’s why I’ve forgotten. But let it be. Mind you, I’m heating a lot of water for cleaning. What’s left I’ll use to do some laundry for me and Katya. Let me have all your dirty things at the same time. In the evening, when we’ve put the place in order and can see what else needs to be done, we’ll wash ourselves before going to bed.”

“I’ll collect my laundry right now. Thanks. I’ve moved the wardrobes and heavy things away from the walls, as you asked.”

“Good. Instead of a tub, I’ll wash it in the dish basin. Only it’s very greasy. I’ll have to scrub the fat off the sides.”

“Once the stove is heated, I’ll close it and go back to sorting the remaining drawers. At each step I find new things in the desk and chest. Soap, matches, pencils, paper, writing materials. And also unexpected things in plain sight. For instance, a lamp on the desk, filled with kerosene. It’s not the Mikulitsyns’, that I know. It’s from some other source.”

“Amazing luck! It’s all him, our mysterious lodger. Like out of Jules Verne. Ah, well, how do you like that, really! We’re babbling and chattering away, and my cauldron’s boiling over.”

They were bustling, rushing here and there about the rooms, their hands full, busy, bumping into each other or running into Katenka, who kept getting in the way and under their feet. The girl wandered from corner to corner, hindering their cleaning, and pouted when they told her so. She was chilled and complained of the cold.

“Poor modern-day children, victims of our gypsy life, unmurmuring little participants in our wanderings,” thought the doctor, while saying to the girl:

“Well, forgive me, my sweet, but there’s nothing to shiver about. Stuff and nonsense. The stove is red-hot.”

“The stove may be hot, but I’m cold.”

“Then bear with it, Katyusha. In the evening I’ll heat it a second time hot as can be, and mama says she’ll also give you a bath, do you hear? And meanwhile—here, catch!” And he poured out on the floor a heap of Liberius’s old toys from the cold storeroom, broken or intact, building blocks, cars, railroad engines, and pieces of ruled cardboard, colored and with numbers in the squares, for games with chips and dice.

“Well, how can you, Yuri Andreevich!” Katenka became offended like a grown-up. “It’s all somebody else’s. And for little kids. And I’m big.”

But a minute later she was settled comfortably in the middle of the rug, and under her hands the toys of all sorts turned into building materials, from which Katenka constructed a home for her doll Ninka, brought with her from town, with greater sense and more permanence than those strange, changing shelters she was dragged through.

“What domestic instinct, what ineradicable striving for a nest and order!” said Larissa Fyodorovna, watching her daughter’s play from the kitchen. “Children are unconstrainedly sincere and not ashamed of the truth, while we, from fear of seeming backward, are ready to betray what’s most dear, to praise the repulsive, and to say yes to the incomprehensible.”

“The tub’s been found,” the doctor interrupted, coming in with it from the dark front hall. “In fact, it wasn’t in the right place. It’s been sitting on the floor under a leak in the ceiling, evidently since autumn.”

7

For dinner, prepared for three days ahead from their freshly started provisions, Larissa Fyodorovna served unheard-of things—potato soup and roast lamb with potatoes. Katenka relished it, could not eat enough, laughed merrily and frolicked, and then, full and languid from the heat, covered herself with her mother’s plaid and fell fast asleep on the sofa.

Larissa Fyodorovna, straight from the stove, tired, sweaty, half asleep like her daughter, and satisfied with the impression produced by her cooking, was in no rush to clear the table and sat down to rest. Having made sure that the girl was asleep, she said, leaning her breast on the table and propping her head with her hand:

“I’d spare no strength and I’d find happiness in it, if only I knew that it’s not in vain and is leading to some goal. You must remind me every moment that we’re here to be together. Encourage me and don’t let me come to my senses. Because, strictly speaking, if you look at it soberly, what is it we’re doing, what’s going on with us? We raid someone else’s home, break in, take charge, and urge ourselves on all the while so as not to see that this is not life, it’s a theatrical production, not serious but ‘pretend,’ as children say, a puppet comedy, a farce.”

“But, my angel, you yourself insisted on this journey. Remember how long I resisted and did not agree.”

“Right. I don’t argue. So now it’s my fault. You can hesitate, ponder, but for me everything must be consistent and logical. We went into the house, you saw your son’s little bed and felt ill, you almost swooned from the pain. You have the right to that, but for me it’s not allowed, my fear for Katenka, my thoughts about the future must give way before my love for you.”

“Larusha, my angel, come to your senses. It’s never too late to think better of it, to change your mind. I was the first to advise you to take Komarovsky’s words more seriously. We have a horse. If you want, we can fly off to Yuriatin tomorrow. Komarovsky is still there, he hasn’t left. We saw him in the street from the sleigh, and I don’t think he noticed us. We’ll probably find him.”

“I’ve said almost nothing, and you already have displeased tones in your voice. But tell me, am I not right? We could hide just as insecurely, at random, in Yuriatin. And if we were seeking salvation, then it should have been for certain, with a thought-out plan, as, in the end, was suggested by that well-informed and sober, though repulsive, man. While here I simply don’t know how much closer we are to danger than anywhere else. A boundless, windswept plain. And we’re alone as can be. We may get snowbound overnight and be unable to dig ourselves out in the morning. Or our mysterious benefactor who visits the house may drop in, turn out to be a robber, and put his knife in us. Do you have any sort of weapon? No, you see. I’m frightened of your lightheartedness, which you’ve infected me with. It muddles my thinking.”

“But in that case what do you want? What do you order me to do?”

“I don’t know myself how to answer you. Keep me in submission all the time. Constantly remind me that I’m your blindly loving, unreasoning slave. Oh, I’ll tell you. Our families, yours and mine, are a thousand times better than we are. But is that the point? The gift of love is like any other gift. It may be great, but without a blessing it will not manifest itself. And with us it’s as if we were taught to kiss in heaven and then sent as children to live in the same time, so as to test this ability on each other. A crown of concord, no sides, no degrees, no high, no low, equivalence of the whole being, everything gives joy, everything becomes soul. But in this wild tenderness, lying in wait every moment, there is something childishly untamed, illicit. It’s a self-willed, destructive element, hostile to peace in the home. My duty is to fear it and not to trust it.”

She threw her arms around his neck and, fighting back her tears, finished:

“You understand, we’re in different positions. Wings were given you so as to fly beyond the clouds, and to me, a woman, so as to press myself to the ground and shield my fledgling from danger.”

He terribly liked everything she said, but did not show it, so as not to fall into excessive sweetness. Restraining himself, he remarked:

“Our bivouac life really is false and overwrought. You’re profoundly right. But we didn’t invent it. A frantic casting about is everybody’s lot, it’s the spirit of the time.

“I myself have been thinking today, since morning, about approximately the same thing. I’d like to make every effort to stay on here longer. I can’t tell you how much I miss work. I don’t mean agricultural work. Once our whole household here threw itself into it, and it succeeded. But I wouldn’t be able to repeat that again. It’s not what I have in mind.

“Life on all sides is gradually being put in order. Maybe someday books will be published again.

“Here’s what I’ve been thinking over. Couldn’t we arrange it with Samdevyatov, on conditions profitable for him, to keep us supplied for six months, on the pledge of a work I would promise to write during that time, a textbook on medicine, let’s suppose, or something artistic, a book of poems, for example. Or let’s say I undertake to translate some world-famous foreign book. I have a good knowledge of languages, I recently read an advertisement from a big Petersburg publisher who specializes in bringing out works in translation. Work like that would probably acquire an exchange value that could be turned into money. I’d be happy to busy myself with something of that sort.”

“Thank you for reminding me. I was also thinking of something like that today. But I don’t believe we can hold out here. On the contrary, I have a presentiment that we’ll soon be carried somewhere further on. But while this stopover is at our disposal, I have something to ask you. Sacrifice a few hours for me during the next few nights and, please, write down everything you’ve recited to me from memory at various times. Half of it has been lost, the other half has never been written down, and I’m afraid you’ll forget it all afterwards and it will perish, as you say has often happened to you before.”

8

By the end of the day they had all washed with hot water, left over in abundance from the laundry. Lara bathed Katenka. Yuri Andreevich, with a blissful feeling of cleanness, sat at the desk by the window with his back to the room in which Lara, fragrant, wrapped in a bathrobe, her wet hair wound turbanlike in a Turkish towel, was putting Katenka to bed and settling for the night. All immersed in the foretaste of impending concentration, Yuri Andreevich perceived everything that was going on through a veil of softened and all-generalizing attention.

It was one o’clock in the morning when Lara, who until then had been pretending, actually fell asleep. The changed linen on her, on Katenka, and on the bed shone, clean, ironed, lacy. Even in those years Lara somehow contrived to starch it.

Yuri Andreevich was surrounded by blissful silence, filled with happiness and breathing sweetly with life. The light of the lamp cast its calm yellowness on the white sheets of paper, and its golden patches floated on the surface of the ink in the inkstand. The frosty winter night shone pale blue outside the window. Yuri Andreevich stepped into the next room, cold and unlit, from which he could better see outside, and looked through the window. The light of the full moon bound the snowy clearing with the tangible viscosity of egg white or white sizing. The luxuriance of the winter night was inexpressible. There was peace in the doctor’s soul. He went back to the bright, warmly heated room and got down to writing.

In a sweeping script, taking care that the appearance of the writing conveyed the living movement of his hand and did not lose its personality, becoming soulless and dumb, he recalled and wrote out in gradually improving versions, deviating from the previous ones, the most fully formed and memorable poems, “The Star of the Nativity,” “Winter Night,” and quite a few others of a similar kind, afterwards forgotten, mislaid, and never found again by anyone.

Then, from settled and finished things, he went on to things once begun and abandoned, entered into their tone, and began to sketch out their continuation, without the least hope of finishing them now. Then he warmed up, got carried away, and went on to new things.

After two or three easily poured-out stanzas and several similes that he was struck by himself, the work took possession of him, and he felt the approach of what is known as inspiration. The correlation of forces that control creative work is, as it were, stood on its head. The primacy no longer belongs to man and the state of his soul, for which he seeks expression, but to the language in which he wants to express it. Language, the homeland and receptacle of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in terms of external, audible sounds, but in terms of the swiftness and power of its inner flow. Then, like the rolling mass of a river’s current, which by its very movement polishes the stones of the bottom and turns the wheels of mills, flowing speech itself, by the force of its own laws, on its way, in passing, creates meter and rhyme and thousands of other forms and constructions, still more important, but as yet unrecognized, unconsidered, unnamed.

In such moments Yuri Andreevich felt that the main work was done not by him, but by what was higher than him, by what was above him and guided him, namely: the state of world thought and poetry, and what it was destined for in the future, the next step it was to take in its historical development. And he felt himself only the occasion and fulcrum for setting it in motion.

He was delivered from self-reproach; self-dissatisfaction, the feeling of his own nonentity, left him for a while. He looked up, he looked around him.

He saw the heads of the sleeping Lara and Katenka on the snow-white pillows. The cleanness of the linen, the cleanness of the rooms, the purity of their profiles, merging with the purity of the night, the snow, the stars, and the moon into one equisignificant wave, passed through the doctor’s heart, making him exult and weep from the feeling of the triumphant purity of existence.

“Lord! Lord!” he was ready to whisper. “And all this for me! How have I deserved so much? How have You allowed me to approach You, how have You let me wander onto Your priceless earth, under Your stars, to the feet of this reckless, luckless, unmurmuring, beloved woman?”

It was three o’clock in the morning when Yuri Andreevich raised his eyes from the desk and the paper. From the detached concentration he had gone into over his head, he was returning to himself, to reality, happy, strong, at peace. Suddenly, in the silence of the distant expanses that spread beyond the window, he heard a mournful, dismal sound.

He went into the unlit next room to look out the window from there. During the hours he had spent writing, the windowpanes had become thickly frosted over, and he could see nothing through them. Yuri Andreevich pulled away the rolled-up rug placed at the bottom of the front door to stop the draft, threw his coat over his shoulders, and went out to the porch.

The white fire with which the snowy expanse was enveloped and blazing in the light of the moon blinded him. At first he could not focus his eyes and saw nothing. But after a moment he heard a drawn-out, hollow, whining howl, muffled by the distance, and then he noticed at the edge of the clearing, beyond the ravine, four elongated shadows no bigger than little dashes.

The wolves were standing side by side, their muzzles turned towards the house, and, raising their heads, were howling at the moon or at its silver reflection in Mikulitsyn’s windows. For a few moments they stood motionless, but as soon as Yuri Andreevich realized they were wolves, they lowered their behinds like dogs and trotted away from the clearing as if the doctor’s thought had reached them. The doctor had no time to figure out in which direction they had vanished.

“Unpleasant news!” he thought. “That’s all we needed. Can they have a lair somewhere nearby, quite close to us? Maybe even in the ravine? How frightening! And unfortunately there’s also Samdevyatov’s Savraska in the stable. It’s probably the horse they scented.”

He decided for the time being to say nothing to Lara, so as not to frighten her, went in, locked the front door, closed the hall doors connecting the cold and warm parts of the house, stopped all the cracks and openings, and went to the desk.

The lamp was burning as brightly and welcomingly as before. But he no longer felt like writing. He could not calm down. Nothing but wolves and other threatening complications went through his mind. And he was also tired. At that moment Lara woke up.

“And you’re still burning and glimmering, my dear, bright candle!” Lara said softly in a moist, sleep-congested whisper. “Sit here next to me for a minute. I’ll tell you the dream I had.”

And he put out the lamp.

9

Again a day went by in quiet madness. A child’s sled turned up in the house. Flushed Katenka, in her little fur coat, laughing loudly, came sliding onto the uncleared paths of the front garden from the ice hill the doctor had made for her, packing the snow down tightly with a shovel and pouring water over it. A smile fixed on her face, she endlessly climbed back up the hill, pulling her sled on a string.

It was freezing cold and getting noticeably colder. Outside it was sunny. The snow turned yellow under the noontime rays, and into its honey yellowness poured a sweet sediment of orange thickness from the early-falling evening.

With yesterday’s laundry and bathing, Lara had filled the house with dampness. The windows were covered with crumbly hoarfrost, the steam-dampened wallpaper was covered from floor to ceiling with black streaks. The rooms became dark and cheerless. Yuri Andreevich carried firewood and water, continued the unfinished examination of the house with unceasing discoveries all the time, and helped Lara, who had been busy since morning with constantly emerging household chores.

Time and again in the heat of some task their hands came together and remained that way, the load picked up to be carried was set down before it reached its destination, and a haze of invincible tenderness rushed to disarm them. Time and again everything dropped from their hands and left their heads. Minutes passed and turned into hours, and it was getting late, and they both came to their senses, horrified, remembering the neglected Katenka or the unfed and unwatered horse, and they rushed headlong to make up for and amend what had been left undone, and suffered from remorse.

The doctor’s head throbbed from lack of sleep. It was filled with a sweet haze, like a hangover, and there was an aching, blissful weakness in his whole body. He waited impatiently for evening to go back to his interrupted night’s work.

The preliminary half of the work was performed for him by that sleepy mist that filled him, and covered everything around him, and enwrapped his thoughts. The general diffuseness it imparted to everything went in the direction that preceded the exactness of the final embodiment. Like the vagueness of first drafts, the languid idleness of the whole day served as a necessary preparation for a laborious night.

The idleness of fatigue left nothing untouched, untransformed. Everything underwent changes and acquired a different look.

Yuri Andreevich felt that his dreams of a more settled life in Varykino were not to be realized, that the hour of his separation from Lara was at hand, that he would inevitably lose her, and after that the incentive to live, and maybe even life itself. Anguish gnawed at his heart. But still greater was his longing for the coming of evening and the desire to weep out this anguish in expressions that would make everyone weep.

The wolves he had been remembering all day were no longer wolves in the snow under the moon, but became the theme of wolves, the representation of a hostile power that had set itself the goal of destroying the doctor and Lara or driving them from Varykino. The idea of this hostility, developing, attained such force by evening as if the tracks of an antediluvian monster had been discovered in Shutma and a fairy-tale dragon of gigantic proportions, thirsting for the doctor’s blood and hungering for Lara, were lying in the ravine.

Evening came. As he had yesterday, the doctor lit the lamp on the desk. Lara and Katenka went to bed earlier than the day before.

What he had written during the previous night fell into two categories. The familiar things, in newly revised versions, were written out in clean, calligraphic copies. The new things were sketched out with abbreviations and ellipses, in an illegible scrawl.

In deciphering these daubs, the doctor felt the usual disappointment. Last night these fragmentary drafts had moved him to tears and astounded him by the unexpectedness of certain strokes of luck. Now it was just these imaginary strokes of luck that stopped him and upset him, standing out sharply as too forced.

All his life he had dreamed of an originality that was smoothed over and muted, externally unrecognizable and hidden under the cover of conventional and habitual form; all his life he had striven to elaborate this restrained, unpretentious style, through which the reader and listener would grasp the content without noticing what enabled them to do so. All his life he had worked for this inconspicuous style, which would attract no one’s attention, and kept being horrified at how far he still was from this ideal.

In yesterday’s sketches he had wanted, using means of a simplicity verging on prattle and reaching the intimacy of the lullaby, to express his mixed mood of love and fear and anguish and courage, so as to have it pour out as if apart from words, by itself.

Now, the next day, looking through these trials, he found that they lacked a supporting plot that would join the disconnecting lines together. Gradually reworking what he had written, Yuri Andreevich began in the same lyrical manner to tell the legend of Egory the Brave.² He started with a sweeping pentameter that allowed for great scope. But the euphony characteristic of this meter, regardless of content, annoyed him by its conventional, false melodiousness. He abandoned the pompous meter with its caesura, cramming his lines into four feet, the way one struggles against verbosity in prose. Writing became more difficult and more alluring. The work went at a livelier pace, but still some superfluous garrulity got into it. He forced himself to shorten the lines still more. The words were crowded into trimeters, the last traces of sleepiness fell from the writer, he awakened, took fire, the narrowness of the available space itself told him how to fill it. Subjects barely named in words began to stand out in relief within the frame of reference. He heard the pace of a horse stepping over the surface of the poem, as one can hear the clop of a horse’s amble in one of Chopin’s ballades. St. George galloped on horseback across the boundless expanse of the steppe; Yuri Andreevich saw him from behind growing smaller as he moved away. Yuri Andreevich wrote with feverish haste, barely managing to set down the words and lines arriving all in their place and apropos.

He did not notice how Lara got out of bed and came over to the desk. She seemed delicate and slender and taller than she really was in her floor-length nightgown. Yuri Andreevich gave a start when she unexpectedly rose up beside him, pale, afraid, and, stretching out her arm, asked in a whisper:

“Do you hear? A dog is howling. Two, even. Ah, how frightening, what a bad omen! Let’s wait somehow till morning, and then leave, leave. I won’t stay here a moment longer.”

An hour later, after much persuasion, Larissa Fyodorovna calmed down and went back to sleep. Yuri Andreevich went out to the porch. The wolves were closer than the night before and vanished still more quickly. And again Yuri Andreevich had no time to make out which way they went. They stood in a group, he had no time to count them. He fancied there were more of them.

10

The thirteenth day of their stay in Varykino arrived, in its circumstances no different from the previous ones. Wolves had howled in the same way in the evening, after disappearing for a time in the middle of the week. Again taking them for dogs, Larissa Fyodorovna had resolved in the same way to leave the next morning, frightened by the bad omen. In the same way states of equilibrium alternated in her with fits of anguished uneasiness, natural in a hardworking woman unaccustomed to daylong outpourings of the heart and the idle, impermissible luxury of immoderate caresses.

Everything repeated itself exactly, so that when, on that morning of the second week, Larissa Fyodorovna again, as so many times before, began preparing for the return trip, one might have thought the week and a half they had lived through in the interim had never been.

Again it was damp in the rooms, which were dark owing to the bleakness of the gray, overcast day. The cold had lessened; at any moment snow might start pouring from the dark sky covered with low clouds. Yuri Andreevich was succumbing to the mental and physical fatigue caused by a continual lack of sleep. His thoughts were confused, his strength was undermined, weakness made him feel chilled, and, shivering and rubbing his hands, he paced the unheated room, not knowing what Larissa Fyodorovna would decide and what, according to her decision, he would have to undertake.

Her intentions were not clear. Right then she would have given half her life for the two of them not to be so chaotically free, but forced to submit to any strict order, established once and for all, for them to go to work, to have duties, to be able to live sensibly and honestly.

She began her day as usual, made the beds, tidied up and swept the rooms, made breakfast for the doctor and Katya. Then she began to pack and asked the doctor to hitch up the horse. She had taken a firm and inflexible decision to leave.

Yuri Andreevich did not try to dissuade her. Their return to town in the heat of the arrests there after their recent disappearance was completely foolhardy. But it was scarcely more reasonable to sit there alone and unarmed in the midst of this dreadful winter desert, full of its own menace.

Besides that, the last armloads of hay, which the doctor had raked up in the nearby sheds, were coming to an end, and there were no more to be expected. Of course, had it been possible to settle here more permanently, the doctor would have made the rounds of the neighborhood and seen to replenishing the stock of fodder and provisions. But for a brief and problematic stay, it was not worthwhile starting such reconnoitering. And, waving his hand at it all, the doctor went to harness up.

He was not skillful at it. Samdevyatov had taught him how. Yuri Andreevich kept forgetting his instructions. With inexperienced hands he nevertheless did all that was needed. Having fastened the bow to the shafts with a studded leather strap, he tied its metal-tipped end in a knot on one of the shafts, winding it around several times, then, placing his leg against the horse’s side, he pulled and tightened the ends of the collar, after which, having finished the rest, he brought the horse to the porch, tethered her, and went to tell Lara that they could make ready.

He found her in extreme disarray. She and Katenka were dressed to leave, everything was packed, but Larissa Fyodorovna was wringing her hands and, holding back tears and asking Yuri Andreevich to sit down for a moment, throwing herself into the armchair, then getting up, and—frequently interrupting herself with the exclamation “Right?”—spoke very quickly, in an incoherent patter, on a high, singsong, and plaintive note:

“It’s not my fault. I myself don’t know how this came about. But we really can’t go now. It will be dark soon. Night will find us on the road. There in your dreadful forest. Right? I’ll do what you tell me, but myself, of my own will, I can’t decide on it. Something’s holding me back. My heart isn’t in it. Do as you know best. Right? Why are you silent, why don’t you say something? We lolled around all morning, spent half the day on God knows what. Tomorrow it won’t be the same, we’ll be more careful, right? Maybe we should stay one more day? We’ll get up early tomorrow and set out at daybreak, at seven or even six in the morning. What do you think? You’ll heat the stove, do some writing here for one extra evening, we’ll spend one more night here. Ah, it would be so incomparable, so magical! Why don’t you answer? Again I’m at fault for something, wretch that I am!”

“You’re exaggerating. It’s still long before dark. It’s quite early. But let it be your way. Very well. Let’s stay. Only calm yourself. Look how agitated you are. Really, let’s unpack, take our coats off. Here Katenka says she’s hungry. We’ll have a bite to eat. You’re right, leaving today would be too unprepared, too sudden. Only don’t fret and don’t cry, for God’s sake. I’ll start the stove right now. But first, since the horse is harnessed and the sleigh is at the porch, I’ll go and fetch the last firewood from the Zhivagos’ shed, there’s not a stick left here. Don’t cry. I’ll be back soon.”

11

In the snow in front of the shed there were several circles of sleigh tracks from Yuri Andreevich’s former comings and turnings. The snow by the porch was trampled and littered from his carrying wood two days earlier.

The clouds that had covered the sky in the morning had scattered. It became clear. Cold. The Varykino park, which surrounded these parts at various distances, was close to the shed, as if in order to peer into the doctor’s face and remind him of something. The snow lay deep that winter, higher than the doorstep of the shed. It was as if the lintel lowered itself, the shed seemed to be hunched over. A slab of accumulated snow hung from the roof almost down to the doctor’s head, like the cap of a giant mushroom. Directly above the slope of the roof, its sharp end as if stuck into the snow, burning with a gray heat all around its semicircular outline, stood the young, just-born crescent moon.

Though it was daytime and quite light, the doctor had a feeling as if he were standing on a late evening in the dark, dense forest of his life. There was such gloom in his soul, so sad he felt. And the young moon, a foreboding of separation, an image of solitude, burned before him almost on the level of his face.

Yuri Andreevich was falling off his feet with fatigue. Flinging wood through the door of the shed into the sleigh, he seized fewer pieces at a time than he usually did. In such cold, to touch the icy logs with snow clinging to them was painful, even through mittens. His brisk movements did not warm him up. Something had stopped inside him and snapped. He roundly cursed his talentless fate and prayed to God to keep and safeguard the life of this wondrous beauty, sad, submissive, and simple-hearted. And the crescent moon went on standing over the shed, burning without heat and shining without light.

Suddenly the horse, turning in the direction she had been brought from, raised her head and neighed, first softly and timidly, then loudly and confidently.

“What’s she doing?” the doctor wondered. “Why on earth? It can’t be from fear. Horses don’t neigh from fear, what stupidity. She’s not such a fool as to give herself away to the wolves with her voice, if she can scent them. And so cheerfully. It must be in anticipation of home. She wants to go home. Wait, we’ll set off at once.”

In addition to the load of firewood, Yuri Andreevich took some chips from the shed for kindling and a big piece of birch bark that fell whole from a log, rolled up like a boot top. He covered the wood pile with a bast mat, tied it down with rope, and, striding beside the sleigh, drove it all back to the Mikulitsyns’ shed.

The horse neighed again, in response to the clear neigh of a horse somewhere in the distance, in the other direction. “Where is that from?” the doctor wondered, rousing himself. “We thought Varykino was deserted. It means we were mistaken.” It could not have entered his head that they had visitors, that the horse’s neighing was coming from the direction of the Mikulitsyns’ porch, from the garden. He led Savraska in a roundabout way through backyards, towards the outbuildings of the factory’s farmsteads, and from behind the hillocks, which hid the house, could not see the front part.

Without haste (why should he be in a hurry?), he dumped the firewood in the shed, unhitched the horse, left the sleigh in the shed, and led the horse to the cold, empty stable beside it. He put her in the right corner stall, where it was less drafty, and bringing several armloads of the remaining hay from the shed, piled it onto the slanted grating of the manger.

He walked towards the house with a troubled soul. By the porch stood a well-fed black stallion hitched to a very wide peasant sleigh with a comfortable body. An unfamiliar fellow in a fine jacket, as smooth and well-fed as the horse, strolled around the horse, patting him on the sides and examining his fetlocks.

Noise could be heard in the house. Unwilling to eavesdrop and unable to hear anything, Yuri Andreevich involuntarily slowed his pace and stood as if rooted to the spot. He could not make out the words, but he recognized the voices of Komarovsky, Lara, and Katenka. They were probably in the front room, by the entrance. Komarovsky was arguing with Lara, and, judging by the sound of her replies, she was agitated, weeping, and now sharply objected to him, now agreed with him. By some indefinable sign, Yuri Andreevich imagined that Komarovsky had just then brought the talk around precisely to him, presumably in the sense that he was an untrustworthy man (“a servant of two masters,” Yuri Andreevich fancied), that it was not clear who was dearer to him, his family or Lara, and that Lara could not rely on him, because by entrusting herself to him, she would be “chasing two hares and falling between two stools.” Yuri Andreevich went into the house.

In the front room, indeed, still in a floor-length fur coat, stood Komarovsky. Lara was holding Katenka by the collar of her coat, trying to pull it together and failing to get the hook through the eye. She was cross with the girl, shouting that she should stop fidgeting and struggling, while Katenka complained: “Gently, mama, you’re choking me.” They all stood dressed and ready to leave. When Yuri Andreevich came in, Lara and Viktor Ippolitovich rushed simultaneously to meet him.

“Where did you disappear to? We need you so much!”

“Greetings, Yuri Andreevich! Despite the rudenesses we exchanged last time, I’ve come again, as you see, without invitation.”

“Greetings, Viktor Ippolitovich.”

“Where did you disappear to for so long? Listen to what he says and decide quickly for yourself and me. There’s no time. We must hurry.”

“Why are we standing? Sit down, Viktor Ippolitovich. Where did I disappear to, Larochka? But you know I went to fetch wood, and then I saw to the horse. Viktor Ippolitovich, I beg you to sit down.”

“Aren’t you struck? How is it you don’t show any surprise? We were sorry that this man left and we hadn’t seized upon his offers, and now he’s here before you and you’re not surprised. But still more striking is his fresh news. Tell him, Viktor Ippolitovich.”

“I don’t know what Larissa Fyodorovna has in mind, but for my part I’ll say the following. I purposely spread the rumor that I had left, and stayed for a few more days, to give you and Larissa Fyodorovna time to rethink the questions we had touched upon and on mature reflection perhaps come to a less reckless decision.”

“But we can’t put it off any longer. Now is the most convenient time for leaving. Tomorrow morning—but better let Viktor Ippolitovich tell you himself.”

“One moment, Larochka. Excuse me, Viktor Ippolitovich. Why are we standing here in our coats? Let’s take them off and sit down. This is a serious conversation. We can’t do it harum-scarum. Forgive me, Viktor Ippolitovich. Our disagreement touches upon certain delicate matters. To analyze these subjects is ridiculous and awkward. I never even thought of going with you. Larissa Fyodorovna is another matter. On those rare occasions when our anxieties were separable and we remembered that we were not one being but two, with two different destinies, I thought that Lara should consider your plans more attentively, especially for Katya’s sake. And she constantly did just that, coming back again and again to those possibilities.”

“But only on condition that you come, too.”

“We have the same difficulty imagining our separation, but perhaps we must overcome ourselves and make this sacrifice. Because there can be no talk of my going.”

“But you don’t know anything yet. First listen. Tomorrow morning … Viktor Ippolitovich!”

“Clearly, Larissa Fyodorovna has in mind the information I brought and have already told her. An official train of the Far Eastern government is standing under steam on the tracks at Yuriatin. It arrived yesterday from Moscow and tomorrow it continues on its way. It’s the train of our Ministry of Transportation. It is half made up of international sleeping cars.

“I must be on that train. Places have been put at my disposal for persons invited to join my working team. We’ll roll along in full comfort. Such an occasion will not present itself again. I know you don’t throw words to the wind and will not change your refusal to come with us. You’re a man of firm decisions, I know. But all the same. Bend yourself for Larissa Fyodorovna’s sake. You heard, she won’t go without you. Come with us, if not to Vladivostok, at least to Yuriatin. And there we’ll see. But in that case we have to hurry. We mustn’t lose a minute. I have a man with me, I’m a poor driver. The five of us, counting him, won’t fit into my sleigh. If I’m not mistaken, you have Samdevyatov’s horse. You said you drove her to fetch firewood. Is she still harnessed up?”

“No, I unhitched her.”

“Then hitch her up again quickly. My driver will help you. Though, you know … Well, devil take the second sleigh. We’ll make it in mine somehow. Only for God’s sake be quick. Take the most necessary things for the road, whatever you’ve got at hand. Let the house stay as it is, unlocked. We must save the child’s life, not go looking for locks and keys.”

“I don’t understand you, Viktor Ippolitovich. You talk as if I had agreed to come. Go with God, if Lara wants it that way. And don’t worry about the house. I’ll stay, and after your departure I’ll tidy things and lock up.”

“What are you saying, Yura? Why this deliberate nonsense, which you don’t believe yourself? ‘If Larissa Fyodorovna has decided.’ He himself knows perfectly well that without his participation in the trip, there is no Larissa Fyodorovna in the works and none of her decisions. Then what are these phrases for: ‘I’ll tidy the house and take care of everything.’ ”

“So you’re implacable. Then I have another request. With Larissa Fyodorovna’s permission, may I have a couple of words with you in private, if possible?”

“Very well. If it’s so necessary, let’s go to the kitchen. You don’t object, Larusha?”

12

“Strelnikov has been seized, given a capital sentence, and the sentence has been carried out.”

“How terrible. Can it be true?”

“So I’ve heard. I’m sure of it.”

“Don’t tell Lara. She’ll go out of her mind.”

“Of course I won’t. That’s why I invited you to another room. After this execution, she and her daughter are in direct, imminent danger. Help me to save them. Do you flatly refuse to accompany us?”

“I told you so. Of course.”

“But she won’t go without you. I simply don’t know what to do. In that case I’ll ask you for help of another sort. Pretend in words, deceitfully, that you’re ready to give in, that you may be persuaded. I can’t picture your parting to myself. Neither here on the spot, nor at the station in Yuriatin, if you really were to go to see us off. We must make it so that she believes you’re also coming. If not now, along with us, then sometime later, when I offer you a new opportunity, which you will promise to make use of. You must be able to give her a false oath on it. But these are not empty words on my part. I assure you on my honor that, at the first expression of your desire, I will undertake to deliver you from here to us and send you further on, wherever you like. Larissa Fyodorovna must be certain that you’re accompanying us. Convince her of it with all your power of persuasion. Let’s say you pretend that you’re running to hitch up the horse and insist that we set out at once, without waiting, while you harness up and overtake us on the road.”

“I’m shaken by the news of Pavel Pavlovich’s execution and can’t come to my senses. I’m having trouble following your words. But I agree with you. After Strelnikov has been dealt with, by our present-day logic, the lives of Larissa Fyodorovna and Katya are also in danger. One of us is certain to be deprived of freedom, and therefore, one way or the other, we’ll be separated. It’s true, then, that it’s better if you separate us and take them somewhere far away, to the ends of the earth. Right now, as I say this to you, things are going your way anyhow. I probably won’t be able to bear it and, surrendering my pride and self-love, will obediently come crawling to you to receive her from your hands, and life, and a way by sea to my family, and my own salvation. But let me sort it all out. The news you’ve reported has stunned me. I’m overwhelmed by suffering, which deprives me of the ability to think and reason. Maybe by obeying you I’m committing a fatal, irrevocable error that will horrify me all my life, but in the fog of pain that robs me of strength the only thing I can do now is mechanically agree with you and obey you blindly and will-lessly. And so, for the sake of her good, I’ll pretend now and tell her that I’m going to hitch up the horse and overtake you, and I’ll stay here alone by myself. Only one small thing. How are you going to go now, with night falling? It’s a forest road, there are wolves around, you must be careful.”

“I know. I have a rifle and a revolver. Don’t worry. And, incidentally, I brought a bit of alcohol along in case of cold. A good amount. Want some?”

13

“What have I done? What have I done? Given her away, renounced her, surrendered her. Run headlong after them, overtake them, bring her back. Lara! Lara!

“They can’t hear. The wind’s against me. And they’re probably talking loudly. She has every reason to be cheerful, calm. She’s let herself be deceived and doesn’t suspect the delusion she’s in.

“These are probably her thoughts. She’s thinking. Everything has turned out in the best possible way, just as she wanted. Her Yurochka, a fantastic and obstinate man, has finally softened, praise God, and is now setting out with her for some safe place, to people wiser than they, under the protection of law and order. Even if, to stand on his mettle and show his character, he turns pigheaded and refuses to get on their train tomorrow, Viktor Ippolitovich will send another one for him in the nearest future.

“And now, of course, he’s already in the stable hitching up Savraska, his confused, disobedient hands trembling with agitation and haste, and will immediately whip her up to full speed behind them, so as to overtake them while they’re still in the fields, before they get into the forest.”

That was probably what she was thinking. And they had not even said good-bye properly. Yuri Andreevich had only waved his hand and turned away, trying to swallow the pain that stuck like a lump in his throat, as if he were choking on a piece of apple.

The doctor, his coat thrown over one shoulder, was standing on the porch. With his free hand, not covered by the coat, he squeezed the neck of a turned porch post just under the ceiling with such force as if he were trying to strangle it. With all his consciousness he was riveted to a distant point in space. There, a short stretch of the road could be seen, going uphill between a few scattered birches. On that open space the light of the low, already setting sun was falling at that moment. There, into that lit-up strip, the racing sleigh should come at any moment out of the shallow depression they had dipped into for a short time.

“Farewell, farewell,” the doctor repeated soundlessly, senselessly, in anticipation of that moment, forcing the nearly breathless sounds from his chest into the frosty evening air. “Farewell, my only beloved, lost forever!”

“Here they come! Here they come!” his white lips whispered with impetuous dryness, when the sleigh shot up from below like an arrow, passing one birch after another, and began to slow down and—oh, joy!—stopped by the last one.

Oh, how his heart pounded, oh, how his heart pounded, his legs gave way under him, and he became all soft as felt from agitation, like the coat that was slipping from his shoulder! “Oh, God, it seems You have decided to return her to me? What’s happened there? What’s going on there on that distant line of sunset? Where is the explanation? Why are they standing there? No. All is lost. They’ve set off. Racing. She probably asked to stop for a moment for a farewell look at the house. Or maybe she wanted to see whether Yuri Andreevich had already set out and was speeding after them? They’re gone. Gone.

“If they have time, if the sun doesn’t set beforehand” (he wouldn’t be able to see them in the darkness), “they’ll flash by one more time, the last one now, on the other side of the ravine, in the clearing where the wolves stood two nights ago.”

And now this moment came and went. The dark crimson sun still rounded over the blue line of the snowdrifts. The snow greedily absorbed the pineapple sweetness the sun poured into it. And now they appeared, swept by, raced off. “Farewell, Lara, till we meet in the other world, farewell, my beauty, farewell, my fathomless, inexhaustible, eternal joy.” And now they vanished. “I’ll never see you again, never, never in my life, I’ll never see you again.”

Meanwhile, it was getting dark. The crimson-bronze patches of light the sunset scattered over the snow were swiftly fading, going out. The ashen softness of the expanses quickly sank into the lilac twilight, which was turning more and more purple. Their gray mist merged with the fine, lacy handwriting of the birches along the road, tenderly traced against the pale pink of the sky, suddenly grown shallow.

The grief in his soul sharpened Yuri Andreevich’s perceptions. He grasped everything with tenfold distinctness. His surroundings acquired the features of a rare uniqueness, even the air itself. The winter evening breathed an unprecedented concern, like an all-sympathizing witness. It was as if there had never been such a nightfall until now, and evening came for the first time only today, to comfort the orphaned man plunged into solitude. It was as if the woods around stood on the hillocks, back to the horizon, not simply as a girdling panorama, but had just placed themselves there, having emerged from under the ground to show sympathy.

The doctor almost waved away this tangible beauty of the hour, like a crowd of importunate commiserators; he was almost ready to whisper to the sunset’s rays reaching out to him: “Thanks. Don’t bother.”

He went on standing on the porch, his face to the closed door, turning away from the world. “My bright sun has set,” something within him repeated and re-echoed. He had no strength to utter this sequence of words aloud without convulsive spasms in the throat interrupting them.

He went into the house. A double monologue, two sorts of monologue, started and played out in him: a dry, seemingly businesslike one with respect to himself, and an expansive, boundless one addressed to Lara. This is how his thoughts went: “Now I’ll go to Moscow. The first thing is to survive. Not to surrender to insomnia. Not to fall asleep. To work at night to the point of stupefaction, until I drop from fatigue. And another thing. To heat the bedroom at once, so as not to be needlessly cold at night.”

But he also talked to himself like this: “My unforgettable delight! As long as the crooks of my arms remember you, as long as you’re still on my hands and lips, I’ll be with you. I’ll shed tears about you in something worthy, abiding. I’ll write down my memory of you in a tender, tender, achingly sorrowful portrayal. I’ll stay here until I’ve done it. And then I’ll leave myself. This is how I’ll portray you. I’ll set your features on paper, as, after a terrible storm that churns the sea to its bottom, the traces of the strongest, farthest-reaching wave lie on the sand. In a broken, meandering line the sea heaps up pumice stones, bits of cork, shells, seaweed, the lightest, most weightless things it could lift from the bottom. This is the line of the highest tide stretching endlessly along the shore. So the storm of life cast you up to me, my pride. And so I will portray you.”

He went into the house, locked the door, took off his coat. When he went into the room that Lara had tidied up so well and with such care in the morning, and in which everything had now been turned upside down again by her hasty departure, when he saw the rumpled, unmade bed and things lying about in disorder, thrown on the floor and chairs, he sank to his knees before the bed like a little boy, leaned his whole breast against its hard edge, and, burying his face in the hanging end of the coverlet, wept with a childish ease and bitterness. This did not go on for long. Yuri Andreevich stood up, quickly wiped his tears, looked around with a distractedly astonished and wearily absent gaze, took out the bottle Komarovsky had left, uncorked it, poured half a glass, added water, mixed in some snow, and with a pleasure almost equal to his just-shed, inconsolable tears, began drinking this mixture in slow, greedy gulps.

14

Something incongruous was taking place in Yuri Andreevich. He was slowly losing his mind. He had never yet led such a strange existence. He neglected the house, stopped looking after himself, turned nights into days, and lost count of the time that had passed since Lara’s departure.

He drank and wrote things devoted to her, but the Lara of his verses and notes, as he struck out and replaced one word with another, kept moving further away from her true prototype, Katenka’s living mother, who was now traveling with Katya.

Yuri Andreevich did this crossing out from considerations of precision and power of expression, but it also answered to the promptings of inner restraint, which did not allow him to reveal personal experiences and unfictitious happenings too openly, so as not to wound or offend the direct participants in what had been written and lived through. Thus what was visceral, still pulsing and warm, was forced out of the poems, and instead of the bleeding and noxious, a serene breadth appeared in them, raising the particular case to a generality familiar to all. He did not strive for this goal, but this breadth came of itself like a comfort sent to him personally by the traveler, like a distant greeting from her, like her appearance in a dream, or like the touch of her hand on his brow. And he loved this ennobling stamp on his verses.

With this lament for Lara, he also finished scribbling down his stuff from various periods about all sorts of things, about nature, about everyday life. As had always happened to him before as well, a multitude of thoughts about personal life and the life of society descended upon him while he worked, simultaneously and in passing.

He again thought that his notion of history, of what is known as the course of history, was not at all the same as the accepted one, and that he pictured it as similar to the life of the vegetable kingdom. In winter, under snow, the bare branches of a deciduous forest are as scraggly and pathetic as the hairs on an old man’s wart. In spring the forest is transformed in a few days, rises to the clouds; one can lose oneself, hide oneself in its leafy maze. This transformation is achieved by a movement that surpasses in speed the movements of animals, since animals do not grow as quickly as plants, and that can never be observed. A forest does not move; we cannot catch it, cannot surprise it changing place. We always find it immobile. And it is in the same immobility that we find the eternally growing, eternally changing life of society, history, in its unobservable transformations.

Tolstoy did not carry his thought through to the end when he denied the role of initiators to Napoleon, to rulers, to generals.³ He thought precisely the same, but he did not voice it with full clarity. No one makes history, it is not visible, just as it is impossible to see grass grow. Wars, revolutions, tsars, Robespierres—these are its organic stimulants, its fermenting yeast. Revolutions are produced by men of action, one-sided fanatics, geniuses of self-limitation. In a few hours or days they overturn the old order. The upheavals last for weeks, for years at the most, and then for decades, for centuries, people bow down to the spirit of limitation that led to the upheavals as to something sacred.

With his lament for Lara, he also lamented that far-off summer in Meliuzeevo, when the revolution was a god come down from heaven to earth, the god of that time, that summer, and each one went mad in his own way, and the life of each existed by itself and not as an explanatory illustration confirming the rightness of superior politics.

With this sketching out of various odds and ends, he again verified and noted down that art always serves beauty, and beauty is the happiness of having form, while form is the organic key to existence, for every living thing must have form in order to exist, and thus art, including tragic art, is an account of the happiness of existing. These reflections and notes also brought him happiness, so tragic and filled with tears that his head grew weary and ached from it.

Anfim Efimovich came to call on him. He also brought vodka and told him about the departure of Antipova with her daughter and Komarovsky. Anfim Efimovich came by rail on a handcar. He scolded the doctor for not taking proper care of the horse and took her back, despite Yuri Andreevich’s request to bear with him for three or four more days. Instead he promised to come in person and fetch the doctor after that time and remove him from Varykino for good.

Sometimes, writing away, working away, Yuri Andreevich suddenly remembered the departed woman in all distinctness and lost his head from tenderness and the keenness of deprivation. As once in childhood, amidst the splendor of summer nature, he had fancied that he heard the voice of his dead mother in the trilling of the birds, so his hearing, accustomed to Lara, grown used to her voice, now sometimes deceived him. “Yurochka,” he sometimes heard in an auditory hallucination from the next room.

Other sensory deceptions also befell him during that week. At the end of it, in the night, he suddenly woke up after an oppressive, absurd dream about a dragon’s lair under the house. He opened his eyes. Suddenly the bottom of the ravine was lit up with fire and resounded with the crack and boom of someone firing a gun. Surprisingly, a moment after this extraordinary occurrence, the doctor fell back to sleep, and in the morning he decided that he had dreamed it all.

15

Here is what happened a little later during one of those days. The doctor finally heeded the voice of reason. He said to himself that if one has set oneself the goal of doing oneself in at all costs, one could find a more effective and less tormenting way. He promised himself that as soon as Anfim Efimovich came for him, he would immediately leave the place.

Before evening, while it was still light, he heard the loud crunch of someone’s footsteps on the snow. Someone was calmly walking towards the house with brisk, resolute strides.

Strange. Who could it be? Anfim Efimovich would have come with a horse. There were no passersby in deserted Varykino. “It’s for me,” Yuri Andreevich decided. “A summons or a request to come to town. Or to arrest me. But how will they take me? And then there should be two of them. It’s Mikulitsyn, Averky Stepanovich,” he surmised, rejoicing, recognizing his guest, as he thought, by his gait. The man, who was still a riddle, paused for a moment at the door with the broken-off bar, not finding the expected padlock on it, and then moved on with assured steps and knowing movements, opening the doors before him and closing them carefully, in a proprietary way.

These strangenesses found Yuri Andreevich at his desk, where he sat with his back to the entrance. While he was getting up from his chair and turning his face to the door so as to receive the visitor, the man was already standing on the threshold, stopped as if rooted to the spot.

“Whom do you want?” escaped from the doctor with an unconsciousness that did not oblige him to anything, and when no answer followed, Yuri Andreevich was not surprised.

The man who had come in was strong and well-built, with a handsome face. He was wearing a short fur jacket, fur-lined trousers, and warm goatskin boots, and had a rifle slung over his shoulder on a leather strap.

Only the moment of the stranger’s appearance was unexpected for the doctor, not his coming. His findings in the house and other tokens had prepared Yuri Andreevich for this meeting. The man who had come in was obviously the one to whom the supplies in the house belonged. In appearance he seemed to be someone the doctor had already seen and knew. The visitor had probably also been forewarned that the house was not empty. He was not surprised enough to find it inhabited. Maybe he had been told whom he would meet inside. Maybe he himself knew the doctor.

“Who is he? Who is he?” The doctor painfully searched his memory. “Lord help me, where have I seen him before? Can it be? A hot May morning in some immemorial year. The railway junction in Razvilye. The ill-omened carriage of the commissar. Clarity of notions, straightforwardness, strictness of principles, rightness, rightness, rightness. Strelnikov!”

16

They had been talking for a long time already, several hours straight, as only Russians in Russia talk, in particular those who are frightened and anguished, and those who are distraught and frenzied, as all people were then. Evening was coming. It was getting dark.

Besides the uneasy talkativeness that Strelnikov shared with everybody, he also talked incessantly for some other reason of his own.

He could not have enough of talking and clung with all his might to the conversation with the doctor, so as to avoid solitude. Did he fear pangs of conscience or sad memories that pursued him, or was he tormented by dissatisfaction with himself, which makes a man unbearable and hateful to himself and ready to die of shame? Or had he taken some dreadful, irrevocable decision, with which he did not want to be left alone, and the fulfillment of which he kept postponing as long as possible by chatting with the doctor and being in his company?

However it was, Strelnikov was hiding some important secret that weighed on him, while giving himself in all the rest to the most lavish outpourings of the heart.

This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver. On the slightest pretext, a rage of self-castigating imagination would play itself out to the uttermost limits. People fantasized, denounced themselves, not only under the effect of fear, but also drawn on by a destructively morbid inclination, of their own free will, in a state of metaphysical trance and passion for self-condemnation that, once set loose, could not be stopped.

How much of this evidence, written and oral, given on the point of death, had been read and heard in his time by the prominent military, and sometimes also court-martial, figure Strelnikov. Now he himself was possessed by a similar fit of self-exposure, re-evaluated himself entirely, put a bottom line to everything, saw everything in a feverish, distorted, delirious misinterpretation.

Strelnikov was telling it all without order, jumping from confession to confession.

“It was near Chitá. Were you struck by the curiosities I stuffed the cupboards and drawers in this house with? It’s all from war requisitions, which we carried out when the Red Army occupied eastern Siberia. Naturally, I didn’t drag it on my back myself. Life always pampered me with loyal, devoted people. These candles, matches, coffee, tea, writing materials, and all the rest are partly from Czech military property, partly Japanese and English. Wonders of the world, right? ‘Right?’ was my wife’s favorite expression, as you’ve probably noticed. I didn’t know whether to tell you this at once, but now I’ll confess. I came to see her and our daughter. I wasn’t told in time that they were here. And now I’m too late. When I learned about your intimacy with her from gossip and reports, and the name Doctor Zhivago was first uttered, I remembered in some inconceivable way, out of the thousands of faces that have flashed past me in these years, a doctor of that name who was once brought to me for interrogation.”

“And you were sorry you didn’t have him shot?”

Strelnikov let this remark go unnoticed. Perhaps he did not even hear his interlocutor interrupt his monologue with his own insertion. He went on distractedly and pensively.

“Of course, I was jealous of you, and I’m jealous now. How could it be otherwise? I’ve been hiding in these parts only in recent months, after my other covers failed far to the east. I was supposed to be court-martialed on a false accusation. The outcome was easy to predict. I didn’t know myself to be guilty of anything. There was a hope that I might vindicate myself and defend my good name in the future under better circumstances. I decided to quit the field in good time, before I was arrested, and meanwhile to hide, wander about, live like a hermit. Maybe I would have saved myself in the end. A young rascal who wormed his way into my confidence did me a bad turn.

“I was going west through Siberia on foot, in winter, hiding, starving. I buried myself in the snow, spent nights in snow-covered trains, of which there were endless chains standing under the snow then along the Siberian main line.

“In my wanderings, I ran into a vagabond boy who supposedly had survived after being shot by the partisans in a line of other men executed at the same time. He supposedly crawled from under the pile of corpses, caught his breath, recovered, and then began moving about from one lair to another, like myself. At least that’s what he told me. A scoundrelly adolescent, full of vices, backward, one of those dunces who get thrown out of school for inability.”

The more details Strelnikov gave, the better the doctor recognized the boy.

“First name Terenty, last name Galuzin?”

“Yes.”

“Then all that about the partisans and the execution is true. He didn’t invent any of it.”

“The only good feature the boy had was that he madly adored his mother. His father had perished as a hostage. He learned that his mother was in prison and would share the father’s lot, and decided to do anything to free her. In the provincial Cheka, where he came pleading guilty and offering his services, they agreed to forgive him everything for the price of some important information. He pointed out the place where I was hiding. I managed to forestall his betrayal and disappear in time.

“With fantastic efforts, with thousands of adventures, I crossed Siberia and came here, to places where I’m known to everybody and am least of all expected to appear, such boldness not being presumed on my part. And indeed they spent a long time searching for me around Chitá, while I was hiding in this house or some other refuge in the area. But now it’s the end. They’ve tracked me down here, too. Listen. It’s getting dark. I don’t like the time that’s coming, because I lost my sleep long ago. You know what a torment that is. If you haven’t burned up all my candles—excellent stearine candles, right?—let’s talk a bit longer. Let’s talk as long as you can, with every luxury, all night long, with candles burning.”

“There are candles. Only one pack has been opened. I burned the kerosene I found here.”

“Do you have any bread?”

“No.”

“What did you live on? However, I’m asking a stupid question. On potatoes. I know.”

“Yes. There’s all you could want here. The owners of the place were experienced and provident. They knew how to store them. They’re all safe in the cellar. Didn’t rot or freeze.”

Suddenly Strelnikov began talking about the revolution.

17

“All this is not for you. You won’t understand it. You grew up differently. There was the world of the city’s outskirts, a world of railroad tracks and workmen’s barracks. Filth, overcrowding, destitution, the degradation of man in the laborer, the degradation of women. There was the gleeful, unpunished impudence of depravity, of mama’s boys, well-heeled students, and little merchants. The tears and complaints of the robbed, the injured, the seduced were dismissed with a joke or an outburst of scornful vexation. This was the olympianism of parasites, remarkable only in that they did not trouble themselves about anything, never sought anything, neither gave nor left the world anything!

“But we took up life like a military campaign, we moved mountains for the sake of those we loved. And though we brought them nothing but grief, we did not offend them in the least, because we turned out to be even greater martyrs than they were.

“Before I go on, though, it is my duty to tell you this. The point is the following. You must leave here without delay, if you hold your life dear. The roundup is closing in on me, and whatever its end may be, you’ll be implicated with me, you’re already part of my affair by the fact of our conversation. Besides, there are a lot of wolves here, I shot at them the other day.”

“Ah, so that was you shooting?”

“Yes. You, of course, heard it? I was on my way to another refuge, but before I came to it, I realized by various signs that it had been discovered and the people there had probably been killed. I won’t stay long with you, I’ll just spend the night and leave in the morning. So, then, with your permission, I’ll go on.

“But could it be that Tverskaya-Yamskaya Streets⁴ and fops in cocked caps and trousers with foot straps racing about with their girls in dashing cabs existed only in Moscow, only in Russia? The street, the evening street, the evening street of that age, the trotters, the dapple grays, existed everywhere. What unified the epoch, what shaped the nineteenth century into a single historical segment? The birth of socialist thought. Revolutions took place, selfless young men mounted the barricades. Publicists racked their brains over how to curb the brutal shamelessness of money and raise up and defend the human dignity of the poor man. Marxism appeared. It discovered what the root of the evil was and where the cure lay. It became the mighty force of the age. All this was the Tverskaya-Yamskaya of the age, and the filth, and the shining of sanctity, and the depravity, and the workers’ quarters, the leaflets and barricades.

“Ah, how beautiful she was as a young schoolgirl! You have no idea. She often visited her girlfriend in a house inhabited by workers of the Brest railway. That’s how the railway was named originally, before several subsequent renamings. My father, presently a member of the Yuriatin tribunal, worked then as a trackman on the station section. I visited that house and met her there. She was a young girl, a child, but the apprehensive thought, the anxiety of the age, could already be read on her face, in her eyes. All the themes of the time, all its tears and injuries, all its impulses, all its stored-up revenge and pride, were written on her face and in her posture, in the mixture of her girlish modesty and bold shapeliness. An accusation of the age could be pronounced on her behalf, with her mouth. You’ll agree, that’s not a trifling thing. It’s a sort of predestination, a marking out. One must have it from nature, one must have the right to it.”

“You speak wonderfully about her. I saw her at that time, just as you describe her. The schoolgirl was united in her with the heroine of an unchildish mystery. Her shadow flattened itself on the wall in a movement of apprehensive self-defense. That’s how I saw her. That’s how I remember her. You’ve put it strikingly well.”

“You saw and remember? But what did you do about it?”

“That’s another question entirely.”

“So, you see, all this nineteenth century, with all its revolutions in Paris, several generations of Russian emigration, starting with Herzen,⁵ all the plotted regicides, realized and unrealized, all the workers’ movements of the world, all the Marxism in the parliaments and universities of Europe, all the new system of ideas, the novelty and hastiness of its conclusions, the mockery, all the additional pitilessness developed in the name of pity, all this was absorbed and in a generalized way expressed by Lenin, so as to fall upon the old in a personified retribution for what had been done.

“Beside him rose the unforgettably immense image of Russia, which suddenly blazed up in the eyes of all the world like a candle of atonement for all the woes and adversities of mankind. But why am I saying all this to you? For you it’s a clanging cymbal,⁶ empty sounds.

“For the sake of this girl I went to the university, for her sake I became a teacher and came to work in this Yuriatin, which was as yet unknown to me. I swallowed stacks of books and acquired a mass of knowledge, to be useful to her and to be at hand in case she needed my help. I went to war, so as to conquer her again after three years of marriage, and then, after the war and my return from captivity, I took advantage of my being considered dead and, under an assumed name, immersed myself totally in the revolution, to pay back in full for everything she had suffered, to wash clean these sad memories, so that there would be no return to the past, so that Tverskaya-Yamskaya would be no more. And they, she and my daughter, were next door, right here! What effort it cost me to suppress the desire to rush to them, to see them! But I wanted first to carry my life’s work to its conclusion. Oh, what I’d give now for just one look at them! When she came into a room, it was as if a window was thrown open, the room was filled with light and air.”

“I know how dear she was to you. But, forgive me, do you have any idea of how she loved you?”

“Sorry. What did you say?”

“I said, do you have any idea to what extent you were dear to her, dearer than anyone in the world?”

“Where did you get that?”

“She said it to me herself.”

“She? To you?”

“Yes.”

“Forgive me. I suppose this request is unrealizable, but if it is permissible within the bounds of modesty, if it is within your power, please recall as far as possible precisely what she said to you.”

“Very willingly. She called you an exemplary man, whose equal she had never seen, of a uniquely high authenticity, and said that if the vision of the home she once shared with you glimmered again on the far horizon, she would crawl to its doorstep on her knees from anywhere at all, even the ends of the earth.”

“Sorry. If this does not encroach on something inviolable for you, can you remember when and in what circumstances she told you that?”

“She was tidying this room. Then she went outside to shake out the rug.”

“Forgive me, but which one? There are two here.”

“The larger one.”

“She couldn’t do it alone. Did you help her?”

“Yes.”

“You held opposite ends of the rug, and she threw herself back, waving her arms high, as on a swing, and turned away from the flying dust, squinting and laughing. Right? How well I know her habits! And then you started walking towards each other, folding the heavy rug first in two, then in four, and she joked and pulled all sorts of antics while you did it. Right? Right?”

They got up, walked over to different windows, started looking in different directions. After some silence, Strelnikov went up to Yuri Andreevich. Catching hold of his hands and pressing them to his breast, he went on with the former hastiness:

“Forgive me, I understand that I’m touching something dear, cherished. But, if I may, I’ll ask more questions. Only don’t go away. Don’t leave me alone. I’ll soon go away myself. Think, six years of separation, six years of inconceivable self-restraint. But it seemed to me that not all of freedom had been conquered yet. I would achieve that first, and then I would belong wholly to them, my hands would be unbound. And now all my constructions have come to nothing. Tomorrow they’ll seize me. You’re close and dear to her. Maybe you’ll see her someday. But no, what am I asking? It’s madness. They’ll seize me and won’t allow me to vindicate myself. They’ll fall upon me all at once, stopping my mouth with shouts and abuse. Don’t I know how it’s done?”

18

At last he would have a good night’s sleep. For the first time in a long while Yuri Andreevich did not notice how he fell asleep as soon as he stretched out on his bed. Strelnikov spent the night with him. Yuri Andreevich gave him a place to sleep in the next room. In those brief moments when Yuri Andreevich woke up to turn on his other side or pull up the blanket that had slipped to the floor, he felt the strengthening power of his healthy sleep and delightedly fell asleep again. During the second half of the night, he began to have short, quickly changing dreams from the time of his childhood, sensible and rich in detail, which it was easy to take for reality.

Thus, for instance, his mother’s watercolor of the Italian seacoast, which hung on the wall, suddenly tore off, fell on the floor, and the sound of breaking glass awakened Yuri Andreevich. He opened his eyes. No, it was something else. It must be Antipov, Lara’s husband, Pavel Pavlovich, whose last name is Strelnikov, scarifying wolves in Shutma again, as Vakkh would say. Ah, no, what nonsense. Of course, it was the painting falling off the wall. There it is in splinters on the floor, he confirmed, as his dream returned and continued.

He woke up with a headache from having slept too long. He could not figure out at first who and where in the world he was.

Suddenly he remembered: “Strelnikov spent the night with me. It’s already late. I must get dressed. He’s probably up already, and if not, I’ll rouse him, make coffee, we’ll have coffee together.”

“Pavel Pavlovich!”

No answer. “It means he’s still asleep. Fast asleep, though.” Yuri Andreevich unhurriedly got dressed and went into the next room. Strelnikov’s military papakha was lying on the table, but he himself was not in the house. “Must have gone for a walk,” thought the doctor. “Without his hat. To keep himself in shape. And I’ve got to put a cross on Varykino today and go to town. But it’s too late. I overslept again. Just like every morning.”

Yuri Andreevich started a fire in the stove, took the bucket, and went to the well for water. A few steps from the porch, obliquely across the path, having fallen and buried his head in a snowdrift, lay Pavel Pavlovich. He had shot himself. The snow under his left temple was bunched into a red lump, soaked in a pool of spilled blood. The small drops of blood spattered around had rolled up with the snow into little red balls that looked like frozen rowan berries.