Doctor Zhivago - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Boris Pasternak (ч. 23)

Part Fifteen

THE ENDING

It remains to tell the uncomplicated story of the last eight or nine years of Yuri Andreevich’s life, in the course of which he declined and went more and more to seed, losing his knowledge and skill as a doctor and as a writer, would emerge from this state of depression and despondency for a short time, become inspired, return to activity, and then, after a brief flash, again fall into prolonged indifference towards himself and everything in the world. During these years his longtime heart ailment, which he himself had diagnosed earlier, though he had no idea of the degree of its seriousness, advanced greatly.

He arrived in Moscow at the beginning of the NEP,¹ the most ambiguous and false of Soviet periods. He was more emaciated, overgrown, and wild than at the time of his return to Yuriatin from his partisan captivity. Along the way he had again gradually taken off everything of value and exchanged it for bread, plus some cast-off rags, so as not to be left naked. Thus, as he went, he ate up his second fur coat and his two-piece suit and appeared on the streets of Moscow in a gray papakha, foot cloths, and a threadbare soldier’s greatcoat, which, lacking its buttons, which had all been cut off, had turned into a wraparound prisoner’s robe. In this outfit, he was in no way distinguishable from the countless Red Army soldiers whose crowds flooded the squares, boulevards, and train stations of the capital.

He did not arrive in Moscow alone. A handsome peasant youth, dressed like himself in soldier’s clothes, had followed on his heels everywhere. In this guise they appeared in those surviving Moscow drawing rooms where Yuri Andreevich had spent his childhood, where he was remembered and received with his companion, following delicate inquiries into whether they had gone to the bathhouse after the trip—typhus was still raging—and where Yuri Andreevich was told, in the first days of his appearance, the circumstances of his family’s leaving Moscow for abroad.

They both shunned people, but from acute shyness they avoided the chance of appearing singly as guests, when it was impossible to be silent and one had to keep up the conversation. Usually their two lanky figures showed up at a gathering of their acquaintances, hid in some inconspicuous corner, and silently spent the evening without taking part in the general conversation.

In the company of his young comrade, the tall, thin doctor in homely clothes looked like a seeker of truth from the common people, and his constant attendant like an obedient, blindly devoted disciple and follower. Who was this young companion?

For the last part of the trip, closer to Moscow, Yuri Andreevich had gone by rail, but the first, much bigger part he had made on foot.

The sight of the villages he passed through was no better than what he had seen in Siberia and the Urals during his flight from forest captivity. Only then he had passed through that region in winter, and now it was the end of summer and the warm, dry autumn, which was much easier.

Half the villages he passed through were deserted, as after an enemy campaign, the fields abandoned and unharvested, and in fact these were the results of war, of civil war.

For two or three days at the end of September, his road followed the steep, high bank of a river. The river, flowing towards Yuri Andreevich, was on his right. To the left, from the road to the cloud-heaped skyline, unharvested fields spread far and wide. They were broken up here and there by deciduous forests, with a predominance of oaks, elms, and maples. The forests ran down to the river in deep ravines, and cut across the road with precipices and steep descents.

In the unharvested fields, the rye, not holding to the overripe ears, flowed and spilled from them. Yuri Andreevich filled his mouth with handfuls of the grain, which he had difficulty grinding with his teeth, and fed on it on those especially difficult occasions when the possibility did not present itself for boiling the grain into porridge. His stomach poorly digested the raw, barely chewed feed.

Yuri Andreevich had never in his life seen rye of such a sinister dark brown, the color of old, dull gold. Ordinarily, when reaped in time, it is much lighter.

These flame-colored fields, burning without fire, these fields calling for help with a silent cry, were bordered with cold tranquillity by the big sky, already turned towards winter, over which, like shadows over a face, long stratus snow clouds with black middles and white sides ceaselessly drifted.

And everything was in movement, slow, regular. The river flowed. The road went the opposite way. The doctor strode along it. The clouds drew on in the same direction as he. But the fields did not remain motionless either. Something was moving about on them; they were covered by a tiny, restless, disgusting swarming.

Mice had bred in the fields in unprecedented, as yet unheard-of numbers. They scurried over the doctor’s face and hands and ran up his trouser legs and sleeves when night overtook him in the fields and he had to lie down and sleep somewhere by a boundary. Swarms of the enormously multiplied, glutted mice darted underfoot on the road by day and turned into a slippery, squealing, slithering mush when stepped on.

Frightening, shaggy village mongrels gone wild, who exchanged looks among themselves as if holding a council on when to fall upon the doctor and tear him to pieces, trudged after him in a pack at a respectful distance. They fed on carrion, but did not scorn the mouse flesh teeming in the fields, and, glancing at the doctor from afar, confidently moved after him, expecting something all the time. Strangely, they would not enter the forest, and on approaching it would drop behind little by little, turn tail, and vanish.

Forest and fields were complete opposites then. The fields were orphaned without man, as if they had fallen under a curse in his absence. Delivered from man, the forests stood beautiful in their freedom, like released prisoners.

Usually people, mainly village children, do not let hazelnuts ripen fully, but break them off while they are still green. Now the wooded hillsides and ravines were completely covered with untouched, rough, golden foliage, as if dusty and coarsened from autumnal sunburn. Out of it stuck handsomely bulging clusters of nuts, three or four at a time, as if tied in knots or bows, ripe, ready to fall from their common stem, but still holding to it. Yuri Andreevich cracked and ate them endlessly on his way. His pockets were stuffed with them, his sack was filled with them. For a week nuts were his chief nourishment.

It seemed to the doctor that the fields he saw were gravely ill, in a feverish delirium, but the forests were in a lucid state of recovery, that God dwelt in the forests, but the devil’s mocking smile snaked over the fields.

In those same days, in that part of the journey, the doctor entered a burned-down village deserted by its inhabitants. Before the fire, it had been built in only one row, across the road from the river. The river side had remained unbuilt on.

In the village a few intact houses could be counted, blackened and scorched on the outside. But they, too, were empty, uninhabited. The other cottages had turned into heaps of coal from which black, sooty chimneys stuck up.

The steep banks of the riverside were pitted with holes where the villagers had extracted millstones, which had been their livelihood. Three such unfinished, round millstones lay on the ground across from the last cottage in the row, one of the intact ones. It was also empty, like all the rest.

Yuri Andreevich went into it. The evening was still, but it was as if a wind burst into the cottage as soon as the doctor stepped inside. On the floor wisps of hay and tow crawled in all directions, on the walls shreds of unstuck paper fluttered. Everything in the cottage moved, rustled. It was swarming with mice, like the whole area around, and they squeaked and scurried all over it.

The doctor left the cottage. The sun was going down behind the fields. The warm, golden glow of the sunset flooded the opposite bank, the separate bushes and backwaters stretching the glitter of their fading reflections into the middle of the river. Yuri Andreevich crossed the road and sat down to rest on one of the millstones that lay on the grass.

Above the edge of the bank a light brown, shaggy head appeared, then shoulders, then arms. Someone was coming up the path from the river with a bucket of water. The man saw the doctor and stopped, showing to the waist above the line of the bank.

“Want a drink, my good man? Don’t hurt me and I won’t touch you.”

“Thanks. Yes, I’ll have a drink. Come all the way up, don’t be afraid. Why should I touch you?”

The water carrier, having come up over the bank, turned out to be a young adolescent. He was barefoot, ragged, and disheveled.

Despite his friendly words, he fastened his anxious, piercing gaze on the doctor. For some inexplicable reason, the boy was strangely excited. In his excitement, he set the bucket down, suddenly rushed towards the doctor, stopped halfway, and began to murmur:

“It can’t be … It can’t be … No, it’s impossible, I’m dreaming. But I beg your pardon, comrade, allow me to ask you anyway. It seems to me that you’re somebody I knew once. Ah, yes! Yes! Uncle doctor?!”

“And who would you be?”

“You don’t recognize me?”

“No.”

“We were on the train from Moscow with you, in the same car. Herded off to labor camp. Under convoy.”

It was Vasya Brykin. He fell down before the doctor, started kissing his hands, and wept.

The burned-down place turned out to be Vasya’s native village Veretenniki. His mother was no longer living. When the village was raided and burned down, Vasya hid in an underground cave where a stone had been cut out, but his mother thought Vasya had been taken to town, went mad with grief, and drowned herself in that same river Pelga on the bank of which the doctor and Vasya now sat conversing. Vasya’s sisters, Alenka and Arishka, according to unconfirmed information, were in another district, in an orphanage. The doctor took Vasya with him to Moscow. On the way he told Yuri Andreevich all sorts of horrors.

“That’s last autumn’s winter crop spilling out. We’d just sowed it when the disasters began. When Auntie Polya left. Do you remember Auntie Palasha?”

“No. I never knew her. Who is she?”

“What do you mean, you don’t know Pelageya Nilovna! She was on the train with us. Tyagunova. Open face, plump, white.”

“The one who kept braiding and unbraiding her hair?”

“The braids, the braids! Yes! That’s it. The braids!”

“Ah, I remember. Wait. I met her afterwards in Siberia, in some town, in the street.”

“You don’t say! Auntie Palasha?”

“What is it, Vasya? You’re shaking my hands like a madman. Watch out, you’ll tear them off. And you’re blushing like a young maiden.”

“Well, how is she? Tell me quickly, quickly.”

“She was safe and sound when I saw her. Told me about you. That she stayed with you or visited you, as I recall. But maybe I’ve forgotten or confused something.”

“Well, sure, sure! With us, with us! Mama loved her like her own sister. Quiet. Hardworking. Good with her hands. While she lived with us, we were in clover. They hounded her out of Veretenniki, gave her no peace with their slander.

“There was a muzhik in the village, Rotten Kharlam. He played up to Polya. A noseless telltale. She didn’t even look at him. He bore me a grudge for that. Said bad things about us, me and Polya. So she left. He wore us out. And then it started.

“A terrible murder took place hereabouts. A lonely widow was murdered at a forest farmstead over by Buiskoe. She lived alone near the forest. She went around in men’s boots with tabs and rubber straps. A fierce dog ran around the farmstead chained to a wire. Named Gorlan. The farming, the land, she managed by herself, without helpers. Then suddenly winter came when nobody was expecting it. Snow fell early. Before the widow had her potatoes dug out. She comes to Veretenniki. ‘Help me,’ she says, ‘I’ll give you a share, or pay you.’

“I volunteered to dig her potatoes. I come to her farmstead, and Kharlam’s already there. He invited himself before me. She didn’t tell me. Well, it was nothing to fight over. We set to work together. The worst weather for digging. Rain and snow, sleet, muck. We dug and dug, burned potato greens to dry the potatoes with warm smoke. Well, we dug them all out, she paid us off honestly. She let Kharlam go, but winked at me, meaning she had more business with me, I should come later or else stay.

“I came to her another time. ‘I don’t want my potatoes confiscated as surplus by the state,’ she said. ‘You’re a good lad,’ she said, ‘you won’t give me away, I know. See, I’m not hiding from you. I could dig a pit myself and bury them, but look what’s going on outside. It’s winter—too late to think about it. I can’t manage by myself. Dig a pit for me, you won’t regret it. We’ll dry it, fill it up.’

“I dug her a pit the way a hiding place should be, wider at the bottom, like a jug, the narrow neck up. We dried and warmed the pit with smoke, too. Right in the middle of a blizzard. We hid the potatoes good and proper, covered the pit with dirt. Done to a tee. I keep mum about the pit, sure enough. Don’t tell a living soul. Not even mama or my little sisters. God forbid!

“Well, so. Hardly a month went by—there was a robbery at the farmstead. People walking past from Buiskoe told about it, the house wide open, everything cleaned out, the widow nowhere to be seen, the chain broken and the dog Gorlan gone.

“More time went by. During the first winter thaw, on New Year’s Day, the eve of St. Basil’s,² it was pouring rain, which washed the snow off the hillocks, melted through to the ground. Gorlan came and started scraping the dirt with his paws on the bare spot where the pit with the potatoes was. He dug away, scattered the top layer, and there were the mistress’s feet in their shoes with straps. See, what a frightful thing!

“Everybody in Veretenniki pitied the widow, talked about her. Nobody thought of blaming Kharlam. And how could they? Who’d think of such a thing? If it was him, where would he get the pluck to stay in Veretenniki and strut around like a peacock? He’d have made tracks for somewhere far away.

“The village kulaks, the ringleaders, were glad of this villainy at the farmstead. They began stirring up the village. See, they said, what townies come up with! There’s a lesson for you, a warning. Don’t hide bread, don’t bury potatoes. And these fools all keep at it—forest robbers, they dream up some kind of forest robbers at the farmstead. Simple folk! Go on listening to these townies. They’ll show you better than that, they’ll starve you to death. If you villagers know what’s good for you, you’ll follow us. We’ll teach you a thing or two. They’ll come to take what’s yours, earned with your own sweat, and you’ll say, what extra, we haven’t got a single grain of rye for ourselves. And if they try anything, go for the pitchfork. And anybody who’s against the community, look out! The old men made a buzz, started boasting, held meetings. And that was just what telltale Kharlam wanted. He snatched his hat and was off to town. And there psst-psst-psst. See what’s doing in the village, and you just sit and gawk? What’s needed there is a committee of the poor. Give the order, and I’ll set brother against brother in no time. And he hightailed it from these parts and never showed his face again.

“All that happened after that, happened of itself. Nobody set it up, nobody’s to blame. They sent Red Army soldiers from town. And an itinerant court. And got at me straight off. Kharlam blabbed. For escaping, and for avoiding labor, and for inciting the village to mutiny, and for murdering the widow. And they locked me up. Thanks be, I thought of taking up a floorboard and got away. I hid underground in a cave. The village was burning over my head—I didn’t see it. My dearest mama threw herself into a hole in the ice—I didn’t know it. It all happened of itself. The soldiers were put in a separate cottage and given drink, they were all dead drunk. During the night somebody got careless and set the house on fire, the ones next to it caught. The villagers jumped out of the burning houses, but the visitors, nobody set fire to them, they just got burned alive to a man, that’s clear. Those from Veretenniki weren’t driven from their burned-down places. They ran away themselves, frightened that something more might happen. Those cheating ringleaders told them again that every tenth man would be shot. I didn’t find anybody here, they’re all scattered, knocking about the world somewhere.”

The doctor and Vasya arrived in Moscow in the spring of 1922, at the beginning of the NEP. The days were warm and clear. Patches of sunlight reflected from the golden cupolas of the Church of the Savior fell on the cobbled square, where grass was growing in the cracks between cobbles.

The ban on private enterprise was lifted, and free trade was permitted within strict limits. Deals were done on the scale of commodity circulation among junkmen in a flea market. The dwarf scope of it encouraged speculation and led to abuse. The petty scrambling of the dealers produced nothing new, it added nothing material to the city’s desolation. Fortunes were made by pointlessly reselling the same things ten times over.

The owners of a few rather modest private libraries would bring the books from their bookcases to some one place. Would make application to the city council asking to open a bookselling cooperative. Would request space for same. Would obtain use of a shoe warehouse that had stood empty since the first months of the revolution or a florist’s greenhouse also closed since then, and under these spacious vaults would try to sell their meager and haphazard collections.

The wives of professors, who even earlier in difficult times had secretly baked white rolls for sale in defiance of the prohibition, now openly sold them in some place registered as a bicycle repair shop all those years. They changed landmarks,³ accepted the revolution, and began saying “You bet,” instead of “Yes” or “Very well.”

In Moscow Yuri Andreevich said:

“You’ll have to start doing something, Vasya.”

“I suppose I’ll study.”

“That goes without saying.”

“I also have a dream. I want to paint mama’s face from memory.”

“Very good. But for that you must know how to draw. Have you ever tried?”

“In Apraksin, when my uncle wasn’t looking, I fooled around with charcoal.”

“Well, all right. With any luck. We’ll give it a try.”

Vasya turned out to have no great ability at drawing, but an average one was enough to allow him to study applied art. Through connections, Yuri Andreevich got him enrolled in the general education program of the former Stroganov school, from which he was transferred to the department of polygraphy. There he studied lithographic techniques, typography and bookbinding, and graphic design.

The doctor and Vasya combined their efforts. The doctor wrote little books the size of one printer’s sheet on the most varied questions, and Vasya printed them at school as work counted for his examinations. The books, published in a small number of copies, were distributed through newly opened secondhand bookstores, founded by mutual acquaintances.

The books contained Yuri Andreevich’s philosophy, explanations of his medical views, his definitions of health and unhealth, his thoughts about transformism and evolution, about personality as the biological basis of the organism, his reflections on history and religion, close to his uncle’s and to Simushka’s, sketches of the Pugachev places he had visited, and his stories and poems.

His works were set forth accessibly, in spoken form, though far from the goals set by popularizers, because they contained disputable, arbitrary opinions, insufficiently verified, but always alive and original. The little books sold. Fanciers valued them.

At that time everything became a specialty, verse writing, the art of literary translation, theoretical studies were written about everything, institutes were created for everything. Various sorts of Palaces of Thought and Academies of Artistic Ideas sprang up. Yuri Andreevich was the staff doctor in half of these bogus institutions.

The doctor and Vasya were friends for a long time and lived together. During this period they took many rooms and half-ruined corners one after another, in various ways uninhabitable and uncomfortable.

Just after his arrival in Moscow, Yuri Andreevich visited his old house in Sivtsev, which, as he learned, his family had never stopped at in passing through Moscow. Their exile had changed everything. The rooms reserved for the doctor and his family had other tenants, and there was nothing left of his or his family’s belongings. People shied away from Yuri Andreevich as from a dangerous acquaintance.

Markel had risen in the world and no longer passed his time in Sivtsev. He had been transferred to Flour Town as a superintendent, one of the benefits of the job being a manager’s apartment for himself and his family. However, he preferred to live in the old porter’s lodge with a dirt floor, running water, and an enormous Russian stove that nearly filled the whole space. In all the buildings of the quarter, the water and heating pipes burst in winter, and only in the porter’s lodge was it warm and did the water not freeze.

At that time a cooling off took place in the relations between the doctor and Vasya. Vasya had become extraordinarily developed. He began to speak and think not at all as the barefoot and shaggy boy had spoken and thought in Veretenniki on the river Pelga. The obviousness, the self-evidence of the truths proclaimed by the revolution attracted him more and more. The doctor’s not entirely clear, figurative speech seemed to him the voice of error, condemned, aware of its weakness, and therefore evasive.

The doctor went around to various departments. He solicited for two causes: for the political rehabilitation of his family and their legal return to the motherland; and for a foreign passport for himself, with permission to go to Paris to fetch his wife and children.

Vasya was surprised at how lukewarm and limp this petitioning was. Yuri Andreevich was in too much of a hurry to establish ahead of time the failure of the efforts he made, announcing too confidently and almost with satisfaction the uselessness of any further attempts.

Vasya disapproved of the doctor more and more often. The latter did not take offense at his fair reproaches. But his relations with Vasya were deteriorating. Finally their friendship broke down and they parted ways. The doctor left Vasya the room they shared and moved to Flour Town, where the all-powerful Markel obtained for him the end of the Sventitskys’ former apartment. This end part consisted of the Sventitskys’ old out-of-use bathroom, a room with one window next to it, and a lopsided kitchen with a half-ruined and sagging back entrance. Yuri Andreevich moved there and after that abandoned medicine, grew unkempt, stopped seeing acquaintances, and started living in poverty.

It was a gray winter Sunday. The smoke from the chimneys did not rise in columns above the roofs, but seeped in black streams from the vent windows, through which, despite the prohibition, people continued to stick the iron pipes of their stoves. The city’s everyday life was still not settled. The inhabitants of Flour Town went about as unwashed slovens, suffered from boils, shivered, caught cold.

On the occasion of Sunday, the family of Markel Shchapov was all assembled.

The Shchapovs were having dinner at that same table on which, in the time of the distribution of bread by ration cards, in the mornings at dawn, they used to cut up the small bread coupons of all the tenants with scissors, sort them, count them, tie them in bundles or wrap them in paper by categories, and take them to the bakery, and then, on coming back, they would chop, cut, crumble, and weigh out the portions for the quarter’s inhabitants. Now all that had become a thing of the past. The rationing of provisions was replaced by other forms of accounting. Those sitting at the long table ate with appetite, smacking their lips, chewing and chomping.

Half of the porter’s lodge was taken up by the Russian stove towering in the middle, with the edge of a quilted coverlet hanging off its shelf.

On the front wall by the entrance there was a sink with a faucet for running water sticking out over it. There were benches along the sides of the lodge with chattels in sacks and trunks stuffed under them. The left side was occupied by the kitchen table. Over it, nailed to the wall, hung a cupboard for dishes.

The stove was burning. It was hot in the porter’s lodge. In front of the stove, her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, stood Markel’s wife, Agafya Tikhonovna, using long, far-reaching tongs to move the pots in the oven closer together or further apart at need. Her sweaty face was alternately lit up by the breathing fire of the stove, then veiled by steam from the cooking. Having pushed the pots aside, she took from the depths a meat pie on an iron sheet, with one deft movement flipped it bottom side up, and pushed it back to brown for a moment. Yuri Andreevich came into the lodge with two buckets.

“Enjoy your meal.”

“Welcome to you! Sit down, be our guest.”

“Thank you, I’ve had my dinner.”

“We know your dinners. Sit down and eat something hot. Don’t scorn it. There are potatoes baked in a clay pot. A savory pie. Wheat kasha.”

“No, really, thank you. Forgive me, Markel, for coming so often and making your place cold. I want to store up a lot of water at once. I scrubbed the zinc bathtub at the Sventitskys’ till it shines; I’ll fill it up, and the big pots as well. I’ll come some five times now, maybe ten, and after that I won’t bother you for a long time. Forgive me for coming so often, I have nobody else but you.”

“Help yourself, we won’t miss it. There’s no syrup, but as much water as you like. It’s free. We don’t deal in it.”

The people at the table guffawed.

When Yuri Andreevich came for the third time, for his fifth and sixth bucketful, the tone had changed slightly and the talk went differently.

“My sons-in-law are asking who you are. I tell them—they don’t believe me. Go ahead, take the water, don’t hesitate. Only don’t spill it on the floor, you gawk. See, the doorstep’s wet. It’ll freeze, and it won’t be you who breaks it up with a crowbar. And shut the door tighter, you lummox—there’s a draft from outside. Yes, I tell my sons-in-law who you are, and they don’t believe me. So much money gone to waste on you! You studied and studied, and what was the use?”

When Yuri Andreevich came for the fifth or sixth time, Markel frowned:

“Well, once more, if you please, and then basta. You’ve got to know the limits, brother. Marina here, our youngest one, defends you, otherwise I’d pay no attention to what a noble Freemason you are and lock the door. Do you remember Marina? There she is, at the end of the table, the dark-haired one. See, she’s getting red in the face. Don’t offend him, papa, she says. As if anybody’s bothering you. Marina’s a telegraph girl at the central telegraph, she understands when it’s foreign words. He’s miserable, she says. She’ll go through fire for you, she pities you so much. But is it my fault if you didn’t turn out? You shouldn’t have gone off to Siberia and abandoned your home in a time of danger. It’s your own fault. Here we sat out all this famine, all this White blockade, we didn’t waver, and we survived. The blame’s on you. You didn’t keep Tonka, so she’s wandering abroad. What is it to me? It’s your business. Only don’t get offended if I ask what you need all this water for. Were you hired to make a skating rink in the courtyard? Eh, I can’t even get angry at a sad sack like you.”

Again there was guffawing at the table. Marina glanced around at her family with a displeased look, blushed, and started reprimanding them. Yuri Andreevich heard her voice, was struck by it, but did not understand its secret yet.

“There’s a lot of cleaning to be done in the house, Markel. I have to tidy up. Wash the floors. Do some laundry.”

There was surprise at the table.

“Aren’t you ashamed even to say such things, let alone do them, as if you’re a Chinese laundry or something!”

“Yuri Andreevich, if you’ll allow me, I’ll send my daughter to you. She’ll come to your place, do the laundry, the scrubbing. If you need, she can mend things. Don’t be afraid of the gentleman, dear daughter. You see how well-breeded he is, not like some others. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“No, what are you saying, Agafya Tikhonovna, there’s no need. I’ll never agree that Marina should dirty and soil herself for me. Why should she work for me? I’ll see to it all myself.”

“You can dirty yourself, and I can’t? You’re so intractable, Yuri Andreevich. Why do you wave me away? And if I invite myself as a guest, will you really drive me out?”

Marina might have become a singer. She had a pure, melodious voice of great pitch and strength. Marina spoke softly, but in a voice that was stronger than conversation required and that did not merge with Marina, but could be conceived as separate from her. It seemed to come from another room, to be located behind her back. This voice was her defense, her guardian angel. One does not want to insult or sadden a woman with such a voice.

With this Sunday water carrying the doctor’s friendship with Marina began. She often came to help him around the house. One day she stayed with him and never went back to the porter’s lodge. Thus she became the third, not officially registered, wife of Yuri Andreevich, who was not divorced from the first. Children came along. Father and mother Shchapov, not without pride, began to call their daughter a doctor’s wife. Markel grumbled that Yuri Andreevich did not marry Marina in church or sign up in the registry office. “What, are you daft?” his wife protested. “With Antonina alive, what would that be? Bigamy?” “You’re a fool yourself,” replied Markel. “Why look at Tonka? Tonka’s the same as if she doesn’t exist. No law will defend her.”

Yuri Andreevich sometimes said jokingly that their intimacy was a novel of twenty buckets, as there are novels of twenty chapters or twenty letters.

Marina forgave the doctor his strange quirks, which had already formed by then, the whims of a man gone to seed and aware of his fall, and forgave the dirt and disorder that he spread around him. She put up with his grumbling, sharpness, irritability.

Her self-sacrifice went still further. When through his fault they fell into voluntary, self-created poverty, Marina, so as not to leave him alone in those intervals, would abandon her job, where she was so valued and where she was eagerly taken back after these forced interruptions. Submitting to Yuri Andreevich’s fantasy, she would go with him through the courtyards looking for odd jobs. They did woodcutting for tenants living on various floors. Some of them, particularly the speculators grown rich at the beginning of the NEP and people of science and art who were close to the government, began fixing up their apartments and furnishing them. One day Marina and Yuri Andreevich, stepping carefully on the rugs in their felt boots, so as not to track in sawdust from outside, brought a load of firewood to the study of an apartment owner, who was insultingly immersed in some reading and did not bestow so much as a glance on the sawyers. The lady of the house negotiated, gave orders, and paid them.

“What is the swine so riveted to?” The doctor became curious. “What is he marking up so furiously with his pencil?” Going around the desk with the firewood, he peeked over the reading man’s shoulder. On the desk lay Yuri Andreevich’s little books in Vasya’s early art school editions.

Marina and the doctor lived on Spiridonovka. Gordon was renting a room nearby on Malaya Bronnaya. Marina and the doctor had two girls, Kapka and Klashka. Kapitolina (Kapka) was going on seven; the recently born Klavdia was six months old.

The beginning of the summer of 1929 was hot. Acquaintances from two or three streets away ran to visit each other without hats or jackets.

Gordon’s room was strangely organized. In its place there used to be a fashionable dressmaker’s shop with two sections, a lower and an upper one. From the street, these two levels had a single plate-glass window. The gold inscription on the glass gave the dressmaker’s last name and the nature of his occupation. Inside, behind the glass, there was a spiral staircase from the lower to the upper section.

Now this space had been divided in three.

By means of an additional floor, the shop had gained an intermediary entresol, with a window strange for an inhabited room. It was a meter high and was at floor level. It was covered with remnants of the gold lettering. Through the spaces between them, the legs of those in the room could be seen up to the knees. Gordon lived in this room. Sitting with him were Zhivago, Dudorov, Marina and the children. Unlike the adults, the children filled the entire window frame. Soon Marina and the children left. The three men remained alone.

They were having a conversation, one of those lazy, unhurried summer conversations conducted among schoolmates whose friendship dates back countless years. How are they usually conducted?

There are some who possess a sufficient stock of words and are satisfied with it. They speak and think naturally and coherently. Only Yuri Andreevich was in that position.

His friends were lacking in necessary expressions. They did not possess the gift of speech. To make up for their poor vocabulary, they paced the room as they talked, smoked cigarettes, waved their arms, repeated the same thing several times. (“That’s dishonest, brother; dishonest is what it is; yes, yes, dishonest.”)

They were not aware that the excessive dramatics of their intercourse in no way signified ardor and breadth of character, but, on the contrary, expressed an insufficiency, a blank.

Gordon and Dudorov belonged to a good professional circle. They spent their lives among good books, good thinkers, good composers, good, always, yesterday and today, good and only good music, and they did not know that the calamity of mediocre taste is worse than the calamity of tastelessness.

Gordon and Dudorov did not know that even the reproaches that they showered on Zhivago were suggested to them not by devotion to their friend and the wish to influence him, but only by their inability to think freely and guide the conversation as they willed. The speeding cart of the conversation carried them where they had no wish to go. They were unable to turn it and in the end were bound to run into something and hit against something. And so, rushing at full speed, they smashed with all their sermons and admonitions into Yuri Andreevich.

He could see clearly the springs of their pathos, the shakiness of their sympathy, the mechanism of their reasonings. However, he could not very well say to them: “Dear friends, oh, how hopelessly ordinary you and the circle you represent, and the brilliance and art of your favorite names and authorities, all are. The only live and bright thing in you is that you lived at the same time as me and knew me.” But how would it be if one could make such declarations to one’s friends! And so as not to distress them, Yuri Andreevich meekly listened to them.

Dudorov had recently finished his first term of exile and come back. He was restored to his rights, of which he had been temporarily deprived. He received permission to resume his lectures and university occupations.

Now he initiated his friends into his feelings and state of soul in exile. He spoke with them sincerely and unhypocritically. His observations were not motivated by cowardice or extraneous considerations.

He said that the arguments of the prosecution, his treatment in prison and after leaving it, and especially his one-on-one interviews with the interrogator had aired out his brain and re-educated him politically, that his eyes had been opened to many things, that he had grown as a human being.

Dudorov’s reasonings were close to Gordon’s heart precisely in their triteness. He nodded his head sympathetically to Innokenty and agreed with him. The stereotyped character of what Dudorov said and felt was just what Gordon found especially moving. He took the imitativeness of these copybook sentiments for their universality.

Innokenty’s virtuous orations were in the spirit of the time. But it was precisely the conformity, the transparency of their hypocrisy that exasperated Yuri Andreevich. The unfree man always idealizes his slavery. So it was in the Middle Ages; it was on this that the Jesuits always played. Yuri Andreevich could not bear the political mysticism of the Soviet intelligentsia, which was its highest achievement, or, as they would have said then, the spiritual ceiling of the epoch. Yuri Andreevich concealed this feeling from his friends as well, so as not to quarrel.

But he was interested in something quite other, in Dudorov’s account of Vonifaty Orletsov, his cell mate, a priest and a follower of Tikhon.⁴ The arrested man had a six-year-old daughter, Christina. The arrest and subsequent trial of her beloved father were a shock to her. The words “servant of a cult” and “disenfranchised” and the like seemed to her a stain of dishonor. It may be that in her ardent child’s heart, she vowed to wash this stain from her father’s name someday. This goal, so far removed and set so early, burning in her as an inextinguishable resolution, made of her even then a childishly enthusiastic follower of everything that seemed to her most irrefutable in Communism.

“I’m leaving,” said Yuri Andreevich. “Don’t be angry with me, Misha. It’s stuffy in here, and hot outside. I don’t have enough air.”

“You can see the vent window on the floor is open. Forgive us for smoking. We always forget that we shouldn’t smoke in your presence. Is it my fault that it’s arranged so stupidly here? Find me another room.”

“Well, so I’m leaving, Gordosha. We’ve talked enough. I thank you for caring about me, dear comrades. It’s not a whimsy on my part. It’s an illness, sclerosis of the heart’s blood vessels. The walls of the heart muscle wear out, get thin, and one fine day can tear, burst. And I’m not forty yet. I’m not a drunkard, not a profligate.”

“It’s too early to be singing at your funeral. Nonsense. You’ll live a long while yet.”

“In our time the frequency of microscopic forms of cardiac hemorrhages has increased greatly. Not all of them are fatal. In some cases people survive. It’s the disease of our time. I think its causes are of a moral order. A constant, systematic dissembling is required of the vast majority of us. It’s impossible, without its affecting your health, to show yourself day after day contrary to what you feel, to lay yourself out for what you don’t love, to rejoice over what brings you misfortune. Our nervous system is not an empty sound, not a fiction. It’s a physical body made up of fibers. Our soul takes up room in space and sits inside us like the teeth in our mouth. It cannot be endlessly violated with impunity. It was painful for me to hear you tell about your exile, Innokenty, how you grew during it, and how it re-educated you. It’s as if a horse were to tell how it broke itself in riding school.”

“I’ll stand up for Dudorov. You’ve simply lost the habit of human words. They’ve ceased to reach you.”

“That may well be, Misha. In any case, excuse me, let me go. It’s hard for me to breathe. By God, I’m not exaggerating.”

“Wait. That’s nothing but dodging. We won’t let you go until you give us a straight, sincere answer. Do you agree that you’ve got to change, to mend your ways? What do you intend to do in that respect? You ought to clarify your relations with Tonya and with Marina. They’re living beings, women capable of suffering and feeling, and not some bodiless ideas hovering in your head in arbitrary combinations. Besides, it’s a shame that a man like you should go to waste uselessly. You must wake up from your sleep and indolence, rouse yourself, make out what’s around you without this unjustified haughtiness, yes, yes, without this inadmissible arrogance, find a job, take up practice.”

“Very well, I’ll answer you. I myself have often thought in that same spirit lately, and therefore I can promise you a thing or two without blushing for shame. It seems to me that everything will get settled. And quite soon. You’ll see. No, by God. Everything’s getting better. I have an incredible, passionate desire to live, and to live means always to push forward, towards higher things, towards perfection, and to achieve it.

“I’m glad, Gordon, that you defend Marina, as before you were always Tonya’s defender. But I have no dispute with them, I don’t make war on them or anybody else. You reproached me at first that she addresses me formally in response to my informality and calls me by my name and patronymic, as if it doesn’t weigh on me as well. But the deeper incoherence that underlies that unnaturalness has long been removed, everything’s smoothed over, and equality has been re-established.

“I can tell you some more good news. They’ve started writing to me from Paris again. The children have grown; they feel quite at ease among their French peers. Shura is finishing their primary school, école primaire. Manya is just beginning. I don’t know my daughter at all. For some reason I have the feeling that, despite their receiving French citizenship, they will soon return, and everything will be set right in some unknown way.

“By many tokens, my father-in-law and Tonya know about Marina and the girls. I didn’t write to them about it. These circumstances must have reached them from elsewhere. Alexander Alexandrovich is naturally offended in his paternal feelings; it’s painful for him on account of Tonya. That explains the nearly five-year break in our correspondence. I did correspond with them for a while after I came to Moscow. And suddenly they stopped answering. Everything stopped.

“Now, quite recently, I’ve begun to receive letters again from there. From all of them, even the children. Warm, tender letters. Something’s softened. Maybe there are changes with Tonya, some new friend. God grant it’s so. I don’t know. I also sometimes write to them. But I really can’t go on. I must leave or I’ll start suffocating. Good-bye.”

The next day Marina came running to Gordon more dead than alive. She had no one to leave the children with and carried the little one, Klasha, wrapped tightly in a blanket, pressing her to her breast with one hand, and with the other dragged the lagging and protesting Kapa by the hand.

“Is Yura here, Misha?” she asked in a voice not her own.

“Didn’t he spend the night at home?”

“No.”

“Well, then he’s at Innokenty’s.”

“I was there. Innokenty has classes at the university. But his neighbors know Yura. He didn’t show up there.”

“Then where is he?”

Marina placed the swaddled Klasha on the sofa. She became hysterical.

For two days Gordon and Dudorov never left Marina’s side. They took turns keeping watch on her, afraid of leaving her alone. In the intervals they went in search of the doctor. They ran around to all the places they supposed he might be wandering in, went to Flour Town and to the Sivtsev house, visited all the Palaces of Thought and Houses of Ideas that he had ever worked in, went to see all the old acquaintances they had any idea of and whose addresses they were able to find. The search yielded no results.

They did not inform the police, so as not to remind the authorities of a man who, though he was registered and had no criminal record, was, in the notions of that time, far from exemplary. They decided to put the police on his trail only in the last extremity.

On the third day, Marina, Gordon, and Dudorov received letters at different times from Yuri Andreevich. They were full of regrets regarding the anxieties and fears he had caused them. He begged them to forgive him and to calm themselves, and adjured them by all that was holy to stop their search for him, which in any case would lead to nothing.

He told them that with the aim of the speediest and fullest remaking of his life, he wanted to be left alone for a time, in order to go about his affairs in a concentrated way, and once he was somewhat set in his new pursuits and was convinced that, after the break that had taken place, there would be no return to the old ways, he would leave his hiding place and return to Marina and the children.

He told Gordon in his letter that he had transferred money for Marina to his name. He asked him to hire a nanny for the children, so as to free Marina to go back to work. He explained that he was wary of sending money directly to her address, for fear that the sum showing on the notice would expose her to the danger of being robbed.

The money soon came, far exceeding the doctor’s scale and the standards of his friends. A nanny was hired for the children. Marina was taken back at the telegraph. For a long time she could not calm down, but, being accustomed to Yuri Andreevich’s past oddities, she finally reconciled herself to this new escapade as well. Despite Yuri Andreevich’s pleas and warnings, his friends and Marina continued to search for him, and his prediction kept being confirmed. They did not find him.

And meanwhile he was living a few steps away from them, right under their noses and in full view, within the narrow circle of their search.

When he left Gordon’s on the day of his disappearance, it was still light. He went down Bronnaya, heading for his home in Spiridonovka, and at once, before going a hundred steps, ran into his half brother, Evgraf Zhivago, coming in the opposite direction. Yuri Andreevich had not seen him for more than three years and knew nothing about him. As it turned out, Evgraf was in Moscow by chance, having arrived quite recently. As usual, he dropped from the sky and was impervious to questions, getting off with silent little smiles and jokes. Instead, passing over petty everyday details, after two or three questions to Yuri Andreevich, he straightaway entered into all his sorrows and quandaries, and right there, at the narrow turns of the crooked lane, amidst the jostling of passersby going in both directions, he came up with a practical plan of how to help his brother and save him. Yuri Andreevich’s disappearance and remaining in hiding were Evgraf’s idea, his invention.

He rented a room for Yuri Andreevich in a lane that was then still called Kamergersky, next to the Art Theater. He provided him with money and took steps to have the doctor accepted at some hospital, in a good position that would open prospects for scientific work. He protected his brother in every way in all the aspects of his life. Finally, he gave his brother his word that his family’s unsettled position in Paris would be resolved in one way or another. Either Yuri Andreevich would go to them, or they would come to him. Evgraf promised to take all these matters upon himself and arrange everything. His brother’s support inspired Yuri Andreevich. As always before, the riddle of his power remained unexplained. Yuri Andreevich did not even try to penetrate this mystery.

The room faced south. Its two windows looked onto the roofs opposite the theater, beyond which, high above the Okhotny Ryad, stood the summer sun, leaving the pavement of the lane in shadow.

The room was more than a place of work for Yuri Andreevich, more than his study. In this period of devouring activity, when his plans and projects could not find enough room in the notes piled on his desk, and the images of his thoughts and visions hung in the air on all sides, as an artist’s studio is encumbered with a multitude of started works turned face to the wall, the doctor’s living room was a banquet hall of the spirit, a storeroom of ravings, a larder of revelations.

Fortunately, negotiations with the hospital authorities were taking a long time; the moment of starting work kept being put off to an indefinite future. He could take advantage of this opportune delay and write.

Yuri Andreevich began putting in order what had already been written, fragments he remembered, or what Evgraf found somewhere and brought to him, part of them in Yuri Andreevich’s own manuscripts, part in someone else’s typewritten copies. The chaotic state of the material made Yuri Andreevich squander his energy even more than his own nature predisposed him to do. He soon abandoned this work and, instead of reconstructing the unfinished, went on to writing new things, carried away by fresh sketches.

He composed rough drafts of articles, like those fleeting notes from the time of his first stay in Varykino, and wrote down separate pieces of poems that came to him, beginnings, ends, and middles all mixed up, unsorted. Sometimes he could barely manage his rushing thoughts; the first letters of words and the abbreviations of his swift handwriting could not keep up with them.

He hurried. When his imagination grew weary and the work began to lag, he speeded it and whipped it up with drawings in the margins. They represented forest clearings and city intersections with the billboard “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers” standing in the middle of them.

The articles and poems were on one theme. Their subject was the city.

Afterwards this note was found among his papers:

“In the year ’22, when I returned to Moscow, I found her emptied and half ruined. As she came out of the ordeals of the first years of the revolution, so she has remained to this day. Her population has thinned out, new houses are not built, the old ones are not renovated.

“But even in that state, she remains a big modern city, the only inspiration of a new, truly contemporary art.

“The disorderly listing of things and notions, which look incompatible and are placed side by side as if arbitrarily, in the symbolists, Blok, Verhaeren, Whitman, is not at all a stylistic caprice. It is a new order of impressions observed in life and copied from nature.

“Just as they drive sequences of images through their lines, so a busy city street of the end of the nineteenth century sails along and draws past us its crowds, coaches, and carriages, and then, at the beginning of the next century, the cars of its electric trams and subways.

“Pastoral simplicity has no source in these conditions. Its false artlessness is a literary counterfeit, an unnatural mannerism, a phenomenon of a bookish order, picked up not in the countryside, but from the bookshelves of academic libraries. The living language, live-formed and answering naturally to the spirit of today, is the language of urbanism.

“I live on a crowded city intersection. Summer Moscow, blinded by the sun, her asphalt courtyards scorching, the windows of the upper floors scattering reflections and breathing in the flowering of clouds and boulevards, whirls around me and makes my head spin and wants me, for her glory, to make the heads of others spin. To that end she has brought me up and given art into my hands.

“Constantly noisy, day and night, the street outside my wall is as closely connected with the contemporary soul as the opening overture is with the theater curtain, filled with darkness and mystery, still lowered, but already set aglow by the flames of the footlights. Ceaselessly stirring and murmuring outside the doors and windows, the city is a vastly enormous introduction to the life of each of us. It is just along these lines that I would like to write about the city.”

In the notebook of Zhivago’s poems that has been preserved, no such poems are to be found. Perhaps the poem “Hamlet” belonged to that category?

One morning at the end of August, Yuri Andreevich got on the tram at the stop on the corner of Gazetny Lane, to go up Nikitskaya from the university to Kudrinskaya Square. He was going for the first time to his job at the Botkin Hospital, which was then called Soldatenkovskaya. It was all but his first visit to it in an official capacity.

Yuri Andreevich was not in luck. He got on a defective car which was meeting with all kinds of disasters. First a cart with its wheels stuck in the grooves of the rails held it up by blocking the way. Then faulty insulation under the floor or on the roof of the car caused a short circuit and something crackled and burned.

The driver would stop the car and with wrenches in his hands would come down from the front platform and, going around the car, would crouch down and immerse himself in repairing its mechanism between the wheels and the rear platform.

The ill-fated car blocked traffic along the whole line. The street was filled with trams it had already made stop and newly arriving and gradually accumulating ones. Their line reached the Manège and stretched back further. Passengers from the cars behind came to the front one that was the cause of it all, hoping to gain something by it. On that hot morning, the jam-packed car was cramped and stifling. A black and purple cloud crept from behind the Nikitsky Gates, rising ever higher in the sky over the crowd of passengers running across the pavement. A thunderstorm was approaching.

Yuri Andreevich was sitting on a single seat on the left side of the car, squeezed up against the window. The left-hand sidewalk of Nikitskaya, where the Conservatory was, remained in his view all the time. Willy-nilly, with the dulled attention of a man thinking about something else, he stared at the people walking or riding on that side and did not miss a single one.

A gray-haired old lady in a light straw hat with cloth daisies and cornflowers, and in a tight-fitting old-fashioned lilac dress, puffing and fanning herself with a flat parcel she carried in her hand, trudged along that side. She was tightly corseted, weary from the heat, and, sweating profusely, kept wiping her wet lips and eyebrows with a small lace handkerchief.

Her path lay parallel to that of the tram. Yuri Andreevich had already lost sight of her several times when the repaired tram started up again and got ahead of her. And she returned to his field of vision several times, when a new breakdown stopped the tram and the lady caught up with it.

Yuri Andreevich recalled school problems on the calculation of the time and order of arrival of trains starting at different moments and moving at different speeds, and he wanted to recall the general method of solving them, but failed to do so and, without finishing, skipped from these memories to other, much more complicated reflections.

He thought about several existences developing side by side, moving next to each other at different speeds, and about one person’s fate getting ahead of another’s fate in life, and who outlives whom. He imagined something like a principle of relativity in the arena of life, but, getting thoroughly confused, he dropped these comparisons as well.

Lightning flashed, thunder rolled. The luckless tram got stuck yet again on the descent from Kudrinskaya to the Zoological Garden. The lady in purple appeared a little later in the frame of the window, went past the tram, began to move off. The first big drops of rain fell on the sidewalk and pavement, and on the lady. A gust of dusty wind dragged over the trees, brushing leaves against leaves, began tearing the lady’s hat off and tucking her skirts under, and suddenly died down.

The doctor felt a rush of debilitating nausea. Overcoming his weakness, he got up from the seat and began jerking the window straps up and down, trying to open the window. It did not yield to his efforts.

They shouted to the doctor that the frame was screwed permanently to the jamb, but, fighting against the attack and seized by some sort of anxiety, he did not take these shouts as addressed to him and did not grasp their meaning. He continued his attempts and again tugged at the frame in three different movements, up, down, and towards himself, and suddenly felt an unprecedented, irreparable pain inside, and realized that he had torn something internally, that he had committed something fatal, and that all was lost. At that moment the car began to move, but having gone a little way down Presnya, it stopped again.

By an inhuman effort of will, staggering and barely making his way through the congested throng standing in the aisle between the seats, Yuri Andreevich reached the rear platform. They snarled at him and would not let him pass. He fancied that the breath of air had refreshed him, that perhaps all was not lost yet, that he felt better.

He began to squeeze through the crowd on the rear platform, provoking more abuse, kicks, and anger. Paying no attention to the shouts, he broke through the crowd, climbed down from the standing tram onto the pavement, took one step, another, a third, collapsed on the cobbles, and did not get up again.

Noise, talk, arguments, advice arose. Several persons got down from the platform and surrounded the fallen man. They soon established that he was not breathing and that his heart had stopped. People from the sidewalks came over to the little group around the body, some reassured, others disappointed that the man had not been run over and that his death had no connection with the tram. The crowd grew. The lady in purple also came up to the group, stood for a while, looked at the dead man, listened to the talk, and went on. She was a foreigner, but she understood that some suggested carrying the body into the tram car and taking it to the hospital, while others said that the police must be called. She went on without waiting to see what decision they would come to.

The lady in purple was the Swiss subject Mademoiselle Fleury from Meliuzeevo, now very, very old. For twelve years she had been pleading in writing for the right to leave for her native country. Quite recently her efforts had been crowned with success. She had arrived in Moscow to obtain an exit visa. She was going that day to pick it up at the consulate, fanning herself with her documents tied with a ribbon. And she went on, getting ahead of the tram for the tenth time and, without knowing it in the least, went ahead of Zhivago and outlived him.

Through the doorway from the corridor one could see the corner of the room, with a table standing at an angle to it. From the table to the doorway peered the narrowing lower end of a crudely hollowed-out, boatlike coffin, with the dead man’s feet resting against it. This was the same table at which Yuri Andreevich used to write. There was no other in the room. The manuscripts had been put in the drawer, and the table had been put under the coffin. The pillows under the head had been plumped up high, the body in the coffin lay as if on the rising slope of a hill.

It was surrounded by a multitude of flowers, whole bushes of white lilacs, rare at that season, cyclamens, cineraria in pots and baskets. The flowers blocked the light from the windows. The light barely seeped through the flowers onto the dead man’s waxen face and hands, onto the wood and lining of the coffin. On the table lay a beautiful pattern of shadows that seemed as if it had just stopped swaying.

The custom of burning the dead in a crematorium was widespread by then.⁵ In hopes of obtaining a pension for the children, out of concern for their future at school, and from an unwillingness to damage Marina’s situation at work, they renounced a church funeral and decided to have nothing but a civil cremation. Application had been made to the relevant organizations. Representatives were expected.

In expectation of them, the room stood empty, as premises are vacated between the departure of old tenants and the moving in of new ones. The silence was broken only by the decorous tiptoeing and accidental shuffling of those who came for the leavetaking. They were few, but still far more than one might have expected. The news of the death of a man almost without name had spread all around their circle with miraculous speed. A good number of people turned up who had known the dead man at various periods of his life and at various times had lost track of or forgotten him. His scientific thought and his muse were found to have a still greater number of unknown friends, who had never seen the man they were drawn to, and who came to look at him for the first time and to give him a last parting glance.

In those hours when the general silence, not filled by any ceremony, became oppressive in that almost tangible lack, the flowers alone were a substitute for the missing singing and the absent rite.

They did not simply blossom and give off fragrance, but, as if in a chorus, perhaps hastening the corruption by it, poured out their perfume and, endowing everyone with their sweet-scented power, seemed to perform something.

The kingdom of plants so easily offers itself as the nearest neighbor to the kingdom of death. Here, in the earth’s greenery, among the trees of the cemetery, amidst the sprouting flowers rising up from the beds, are perhaps concentrated the mysteries of transformation and the riddles of life that we puzzle over. Mary did not at first recognize Jesus coming from the tomb and took him for the gardener walking in the cemetery. (“She, supposing him to be the gardener …”)⁶

When the dead man was brought to his last address in Kamergersky, his friends, informed of his death and shaken by the news, came running from the front entrance to the wide open door of the apartment with Marina, half-crazed by the terrible news. She was beside herself for a long time, thrashed on the floor, and beat her head against the edge of a long chest with a seat and back that stood in the front hall and on which the body was laid until the coffin came and the untidied room was put in order. She was bathed in tears and whispered and cried out, choking on the words, half of which escaped her against her will like the wailing of mourners. She babbled at random, the way simple people lament, not embarrassed by or noticing anyone. Marina clutched at the body and could not be torn away from it, so that the dead man could be transferred to the room, now tidied and freed of extra furniture, to be washed and placed in the delivered coffin. All that was yesterday. Today the violence of her suffering had eased, giving way to dull dejection, but she was still as beside herself as before, said nothing, and was oblivious of herself.

She had sat there through all the rest of the previous day and that night without going anywhere. Here Klava had been brought to her to be nursed and taken away, and Kapa had come with her young nanny and then gone.

She was surrounded by her own people, by Dudorov and Gordon, as grief-stricken as herself. Her father, Markel, quietly sobbing and deafeningly blowing his nose, came and sat with her on the bench. Here also came her weeping mother and sisters.

And there were two persons in this human flow, a man and a woman, who stood out from them all. They claimed no greater closeness to the dead man than those listed above. They did not vie in their grief with Marina, her daughters, and the dead man’s friends, and acknowledged their precedence. These two had no claims, but had some entirely special rights of their own to the deceased. These incomprehensible and undeclared powers with which the two were somehow invested were of concern to no one, and no one disputed them. Precisely these people had apparently taken upon themselves the cares of the funeral and its arrangement from the very beginning, and had seen it through with such unruffled calm as though it gave them satisfaction. This loftiness of spirit struck everyone’s eye and produced a strange impression. It seemed that these people were involved not only in the funeral, but in the death itself, not as perpetrators or indirect causes, but as persons who, after the fact, accepted this event, reconciled with it, and did not see it as having the greatest importance. Some knew these people, others guessed about them, still others, who were in the majority, had no idea who they were.

But when this man, whose keen, narrow Kirghiz eyes aroused curiosity, and this effortlessly beautiful woman came into the room where the coffin was, all who sat, stood, or moved about in it, not excepting Marina, without objection, as if by arrangement, cleared the premises, stepped aside, got up from the chairs and stools placed along the walls, and, crowding together, went out to the corridor and the front hall, leaving the man and woman alone behind the closed doors, like two initiates called to perform in silence, without hindrance and undisturbed, something immediately concerned with the burial and vitally important. That is what happened now. The two, left alone, sat on two stools by the wall and began to talk business.

“What have you learned, Evgraf Andreevich?”

“The cremation is this evening. In half an hour people from the medical trade union will come for the body and take it to the union’s club. The civil ceremony is scheduled for four. Not a single document was in order. His work record had expired, his old trade union card had not been exchanged, his dues hadn’t been paid for several years. All of that had to be settled. Hence the red tape and delay. Before the body is taken from the house—incidentally, the moment isn’t far off, we must be prepared—I’ll leave you alone, as you asked. Forgive me. Do you hear? The telephone. One minute.”

Evgraf Zhivago went out to the corridor, overflowing with unknown colleagues of the doctor’s, his schoolmates, minor hospital personnel, and publishing workers, and where Marina and the children, her arms around them, keeping them covered with the skirts of her coat (it was a cold day and there was a draft from the front door), sat on the edge of the bench waiting for the door to be opened again, the way a woman who has come to see an arrested man waits for the guard to let her into the prison reception room. It was crowded in the corridor. Some of those gathered could not get into it. The door to the stairway was open. Many stood, paced, and smoked in the front hall and on the landing. Those lower down the stairs talked the more loudly and freely the closer they were to the street. Straining his hearing on account of the subdued murmur, Evgraf, in a muffled voice, as decency required, covering the receiver with his palm, was giving answers over the telephone, probably about the order of the funeral and the circumstances of the doctor’s death. He returned to the room. The conversation continued.

“Please don’t disappear after the cremation, Larissa Fyodorovna. I have a great favor to ask of you. I don’t know where you’re staying. Don’t leave me in ignorance about where to find you. I want in the nearest future, tomorrow or the day after, to start going through my brother’s papers. I’ll need your help. You know so much, probably more than anyone else. You let drop in passing that it’s two days since you arrived from Irkutsk for a short stay in Moscow, and that you came up to this apartment by chance, knowing neither that my brother had been living here in recent months, nor what had happened here. Some of what you said I didn’t understand, and I’m not asking for explanations, but don’t disappear, I don’t know your address. It would be best to spend the few days devoted to sorting the manuscripts under the same roof, or not far from each other, maybe in two other rooms of the house. That could be arranged. I know the manager.”

“You say you didn’t understand me. What is there to understand? I arrived in Moscow, left my things at the checkroom, walked through the old Moscow without recognizing half of it—I’d forgotten. I walk and walk, go down Kuznetsky Most, up Kuznetsky Lane, and suddenly there’s something terribly familiar—Kamergersky Lane. My husband, Antipov, who was shot, rented a room here as a student, precisely this room where you and I are sitting. Well, I think, let’s have a look, maybe if I’m lucky the old owners are still alive. That there was no trace of them and everything was different, I learned later, the next day and today, gradually, from asking. But you were there, why am I telling you? I was thunderstruck, the street door was wide open, there were people in the room, a coffin, a dead man in the coffin. What dead man? I go in, go up to it, I thought—I’ve lost my mind, I’m dreaming. But you witnessed it all, right? Why am I telling you about it?”

“Wait, Larissa Fyodorovna, I must interrupt you. I’ve already told you that my brother and I did not suspect that so many amazing things were connected with this room. For example, that Antipov used to live in it. But still more amazing is an expression that just escaped you. I’ll tell you at once what it was—forgive me. At one time, at the beginning of the civil war, I heard much and often about Antipov, or Strelnikov in his military-revolutionary activity, almost every day in fact, and I saw him in person once or twice, without foreseeing how closely he would touch me one day for family reasons. But, excuse me, maybe I didn’t hear right, but I think you said, ‘Antipov, who was shot,’ in which case it’s a slip of the tongue. Surely you know that he shot himself?”

“There’s such a version going around, but I don’t believe it. Pavel Pavlovich was never a suicide.”

“But it’s completely trustworthy. Antipov shot himself in the little house from which, as my brother told me, you left for Yuriatin in order to continue on to Vladivostok. It happened soon after your departure with your daughter. My brother found him and buried him. Can it be that this information never reached you?”

“No. My information was different. So it’s true that he shot himself? Many people said so, but I didn’t believe it. In that same little house? It can’t be! What an important detail you’ve told me! Forgive me, but do you know whether he and Zhivago met? Did they talk?”

“According to the late Yuri, they had a long conversation.”

“Can it be true? Thank God. It’s better that way.” (Antipova slowly crossed herself.) “What an astounding, heaven-sent coincidence! Will you allow me to come back to it and ask you about all the details? Every little thing is precious to me here. But now I’m not able to. Right? I’m too agitated. I’ll be silent for a while, rest, collect my thoughts. Right?”

“Oh, of course, of course. Please do.”

“Right?”

“Surely.”

“Ah, I nearly forgot. You’ve asked me not to leave after the cremation. Very well. I promise. I won’t disappear. I’ll come back with you to this apartment and stay where you tell me to and for as long as necessary. We’ll start going through Yurochka’s manuscripts. I’ll help you. It’s true that I may be of use to you. That will be such a comfort to me! I feel all the nuances of his handwriting with my heart’s blood, with every fiber. Then I also have business with you, I may have need of you, right? It seems you’re a lawyer, or in any case have good knowledge of the existing practices, former and present. Besides, it’s so important to know which organization to address for which document. Not everybody knows these things, right? I’ll have need of your advice about one dreadful, oppressive thing. It has to do with a child. But I’ll tell you later, once we’re back from the crematorium. All my life I’ve been searching for somebody, right? Tell me, if in some imaginary case it was necessary to find the traces of a child, the traces of a child placed in the hands of strangers to be brought up, is there some sort of general, nationwide archive of existing children’s homes and have they made, have they undertaken a national census or registration of homeless children? But don’t answer me now, I beg you. Later, later. Oh, how frightening, how frightening! What a frightening thing life is, right? I don’t know how it will be later on, when my daughter comes, but for now I can stay in this apartment. Katyusha has shown extraordinary abilities, partly dramatic, but also musical, imitates everybody wonderfully and acts out whole scenes of her own invention, but, besides, she also sings whole parts of operas by ear—an astonishing child, right? I want to send her to the preparatory, beginning classes of a theater school or the Conservatory, wherever they take her, and place her in a boardinghouse, that’s why I’ve come without her now, to set everything up and then leave. One can’t tell everything, right? But about that later. And now I’m going to wait till my agitation calms down, I’ll be silent, collect my thoughts, try to drive my fears away. Besides, we’re keeping Yura’s family in the corridor a horribly long time. Twice I fancied there was knocking at the door. And there’s some movement, noise. Probably the people from the funeral organization have come. While I sit here and think, you open the door and let the public in. It’s time, right? Wait, wait. We need a little footstool beside the coffin, otherwise one can’t reach Yurochka. I tried on tiptoe, it was very difficult. Marina Markelovna and the children will need it. And besides, it’s required by the ritual. ‘And kiss me with the last kiss.’⁷ Oh, I can’t, I can’t. It’s so painful. Right?”

“I’ll let them all in presently. But first there’s this. You’ve said so many mysterious things and raised so many questions that evidently torment you, that it’s hard for me to answer you. One thing I want you to know. From the bottom of my heart, I willingly offer you my help in everything that worries you. And remember. Never, in any circumstances, must you despair. To hope and to act is our duty in misfortune. Inactive despair is a forgetting and failure of duty. I’ll now let the people in to take their leave. You’re right about the footstool. I’ll find one and bring it.”

But Antipova no longer heard him. She did not hear how Evgraf Zhivago opened the door to the room and the crowd from the corridor poured in through it, did not hear him talk with the funeral attendants and the chief mourners, did not hear the rustle of people’s movements, Marina’s sobbing, the men’s coughing, the women’s tears and cries.

The swirl of monotonous sounds lulled her and made her feel sick. She kept a firm grip on herself so as not to faint. Her heart was bursting, her head ached. Hanging her head, she immersed herself in surmises, considerations, recollections. She went into them, sank, was as if transported temporarily, for a few hours, to some future age, which she did not know she would live to see, which aged her by decades and made her an old woman. She plunged into reflections, as if falling into the very depths, to the very bottom of her unhappiness. She thought:

“Nobody’s left. One has died. The other killed himself. And only the one who should have been killed is left alive, the one she had tried to shoot but missed, that alien, useless nonentity who had turned her life into a chain of crimes unknown to her. And that monster of mediocrity hangs or hustles about the mythical byways of Asia, known only to stamp collectors, but none of my near and needed ones is left.

“Ah, but it was at Christmas, before her intended shooting of that horror of banality, that she had had a conversation with the boy Pasha in this room, and Yura, of whom they were now taking leave here, had not come into her life yet.”

And she began straining her memory to restore that Christmas conversation with Pashenka, but could recall nothing except the candle burning on the windowsill and the melted circle beside it in the icy crust of the windowpane.

Could she have thought that the dead man lying there on the table had seen that peephole from the street as he drove past and had paid attention to the candle? That from this flame seen from outside—“A candle burned on the table, a candle burned”—his destiny had come into his life?

Her thoughts strayed. She mused: “What a pity all the same that he won’t have a church funeral! The burial service is so majestic and solemn! Most of the dead aren’t worthy of it. But Yurochka was such a gratifying cause! He was so worthy of it all, he would so justify and repay that ‘making our funeral dirge the song: Alleluia’!”⁸

And she felt a wave of pride and relief, which always happened to her at the thought of Yuri and in the brief periods of her life close to him. The breath of freedom and lightheartedness that always issued from him came over her now. She impatiently got up from the stool she was sitting on. Something not quite comprehensible was going on in her. She wanted, with his help, to break free, if only for a short time, into the fresh air, out of the abyss of sufferings that entangled her, to experience, as she once had, the happiness of liberation. This happiness she dreamed, she imagined, as the happiness of taking leave of him, the occasion and the right to weep her fill over him, alone and unhindered. And with the haste of passion, she cast at the crowd a glance broken by pain, unseeing and filled with tears, as from burning eyedrops administered by an oculist, and they all stirred, blew their noses, began moving aside, and went out of the room, leaving her finally alone behind the closed door, and she, quickly crossing herself, went to the table and the coffin, stepped onto the footstool Evgraf had placed there, slowly made three big crosses over the body, and put her lips to the cold forehead and hands. She passed by the sensation that the cold forehead had become smaller, like a hand clenched into a fist; she managed not to notice it. She became still and for a few moments did not speak, did not think, did not weep, covering the middle of the coffin, the flowers, and the body with herself, her head, her breast, her soul, and her arms, as big as her soul.

She shook all over with repressed sobs. While she could, she fought them back, but suddenly it became beyond her strength, the tears burst from her and poured over her cheeks, her dress, her arms, and the coffin to which she pressed herself.

She said nothing and thought nothing. Successions of thoughts, generalities, facts, certainties, freely raced, sped through her, like clouds across the sky, as in the times of their former nighttime conversations. It was this that used to bring happiness and liberation. An uncerebral, ardent, mutually inspired knowledge. Instinctive, immediate.

She was filled with such knowledge now as well, an obscure, indistinct knowledge of death, a preparedness for it, an absence of perplexity before it. As if she had already lived twenty times in the world, had lost Yuri Zhivago countless times, and had accumulated a whole heart’s experience on that account, so that everything she felt and did by his coffin was apropos and to the point.

Oh, what love this was, free, unprecedented, unlike anything else! They thought the way other people sing.

They loved each other not out of necessity, not “scorched by passion,” as it is falsely described. They loved each other because everything around them wanted it so: the earth beneath them, the sky over their heads, the clouds and trees. Everything around them was perhaps more pleased by their love than they were themselves. Strangers in the street, the distances opening out during their walks, the rooms they lived or met in.

Ah, it was this, this was the chief thing that united them and made them akin! Never, never, even in moments of the most gratuitous, self-forgetful happiness, did that most lofty and thrilling thing abandon them: delight in the general mold of the world, the feeling of their relation to the whole picture, the sense of belonging to the beauty of the whole spectacle, to the whole universe.

They breathed only by that oneness. And therefore the exaltation of man over the rest of nature, the fashionable fussing over and worshipping of man, never appealed to them. Such false principles of social life, turned into politics, seemed to them pathetically homemade and remained incomprehensible.

And so she began to take leave of him in the simple, ordinary words of a brisk, informal conversation, which breaks up the framework of reality and has no meaning, as there is no meaning in the choruses and monologues of tragedies, in verse, in music, and in other conventions, justified only by the conventionality of emotion. The conventionality in the present case, which justified the tension of her light, unpreconceived talk, was her tears, in which her everyday, unfestive words plunged, bathed, floated.

It seemed that these words wet with tears stuck together of themselves in her tender and quick prattle, as the wind rustles silky and moist foliage tousled by a warm rain.

“So we’re together once more, Yurochka. This is how God granted that we meet again. How terrible, just think! Oh, I can’t! Oh Lord! I weep and weep! Just think! So again it’s something of our sort, from our arsenal. Your going, my end. Again something big, irrevocable. The riddle of life, the riddle of death, the enchantment of genius, the enchantment of nakedness—that, yes, if you please, that we understood. But petty worldly squabbles like recarving the globe—sorry, we pass, it’s not in our line.

“Farewell, my great and dear one, farewell, my pride, farewell, my swift, deep river, how I loved your daylong splashing, how I loved to throw myself into your cold waves.

“Remember how I said good-bye to you that time, there, in the snow? How you deceived me! Would I ever have gone without you? Oh, I know, I know, you forced yourself to do it, for the sake of my imaginary good. And then everything went to rack and ruin. Lord, what a cup I drank there, what I endured! But you don’t know anything. Oh, what have I done, Yura, what have I done! I’m such a criminal, you have no idea! But it wasn’t my fault. I was in the hospital for three months then, for one of them unconscious. Since then there’s been no life for me, Yura. There’s no peace for my soul from pity and torment. But I’m not telling, I’m not revealing the main thing. I can’t name it, I haven’t got strength enough. When I come to this point in my life, my hair stands on end from horror. And, you know, I can’t even swear I’m quite normal. But, you see, I don’t drink, as many do, I didn’t set out on that path, because a drunken woman is the end, it’s an unthinkable thing, right?”

And she said something more and wept and suffered. Suddenly she raised her head in surprise and looked around. There had long been people in the room, anxiousness, movement. She got down from the footstool and, staggering, stepped away from the coffin, passing her palm over her eyes, as if to squeeze out the remaining unwept tears and shake them onto the floor.

Some men went up to the coffin and lifted it on three cloths. The carrying out began.

Larissa Fyodorovna spent several days in Kamergersky Lane. The sorting of papers she had talked about with Evgraf Andreevich was begun with her participation, but not brought to an end. The conversation with Evgraf that she had asked for also took place. He learned something important from her.

One day Larissa Fyodorovna left the house and did not come back again. Evidently she was arrested on the street in those days and died or vanished no one knew where, forgotten under some nameless number on subsequently lost lists, in one of the countless general or women’s concentration camps in the north.