Doctor Zhivago (12 page)

To the left in the vestibule, before a mirror, stood a made-up lady, her plump face floury with powder. She was wearing a fur jacket, too airy for such weather. The lady was waiting for someone from upstairs and, turning her back to the mirror, glanced at herself now over her right, then over her left shoulder, to see how she looked from behind.

A chilled cabby poked himself through the front door. The shape of his kaftan resembled a cruller on a signboard, and the steam that billowed around him increased the likeness.

“Will it be soon now, mamzelle?” he asked the lady at the mirror. “Mixing with your kind’ll only get my horse frozen.”

The incident in number 24 was a minor thing among the ordinary everyday vexations of the staff. Bells jangled every moment and numbers popped
up in the long glass box on the wall, showing where and under which number someone had lost his mind and, not knowing what he wanted himself, gave the floor attendants no peace.

Now this foolish old Guichard woman was being pumped full in number 24, was being given an emetic and having her guts and stomach flushed out. The maid Glasha was run off her feet, mopping the floor and carrying out dirty buckets and bringing in clean ones. But the present storm in the servants’ quarters began long before that turmoil, when there was nothing to talk about yet and Tereshka had not been sent in a cab for the doctor and this wretched fiddle scraper, before Komarovsky arrived and so many unnecessary people crowded in the corridor outside the door, hindering all movement.

Today’s hullabaloo flared up in the servants’ quarters because in the afternoon someone turned awkwardly in the narrow passage from the pantry and accidentally pushed the waiter Sysoy at the very moment when he, flexing slightly, was preparing to run through the door into the corridor with a loaded tray on his raised right hand. Sysoy dropped the tray, spilled the soup, and broke the dishes—three bowls and one plate.

Sysoy insisted that it was the dishwasher, she was to blame, and she should pay for the damage. It was nighttime now, past ten o’clock, the shift was about to go off work, and they still kept exchanging fire on the subject.

“He’s got the shakes in his arms and legs, all he worries about is hugging a bottle day and night like a wife, his nose stuck in drink like a duck’s, and then—why’d they push him, smash the dishes, spill the fish soup! Who pushed you, you cross-eyed devil, you spook? Who pushed you, you Astrakhan rupture, you shameless gape?”

“I done told you, Matryona Stepanovna—watch your tongue.”

“Something else again, if it was worthwhile making noise and smashing dishes, but this fine thing, Missy Prissy, a boulevard touch-me-not, done so well she gobbled arsenic, retired innocence. We’ve lived in the Montenegro, we’ve seen these screwtails and randy old goats.”

Misha and Yura paced up and down the corridor outside the door of the room. Nothing came out as Alexander Alexandrovich had supposed. He had pictured to himself—a cellist, a tragedy, something clean and dignified. But this was devil knows what. Filth, something scandalous, and absolutely not for children.

The boys loitered about in the corridor.

“Go in to the missis, young sirs,” the floor attendant, coming up to the boys, urged them for the second time in a soft, unhurried voice. “Go in, don’t hang back. She’s all right, rest assured. She’s her whole self now. You
can’t stand here. We had a disaster here today, costly dishes got smashed. See—we’re serving, running, there’s no room. Go on in.”

The boys obeyed.

In the room, the lighted kerosene lamp had been taken from the holder in which it hung over the dining table and moved behind the wooden partition, which stank of bedbugs, to the other part of the room.

There was a sleeping nook there, separated from the front part and strangers’ eyes by a dusty curtain. Now, in the turmoil, they had forgotten to lower it. Its bottom end was thrown over the upper edge of the partition. The lamp stood on a bench in the alcove. This corner was lit up harshly from below, as if by theater footlights.

The poisoning was from iodine, not arsenic, as the dishwasher had mistakenly jibed. The room was filled with the sharp, astringent smell of young walnuts in unhardened green husks, which turn black at the touch.

Behind the partition, a maid was mopping the floor and a half-naked woman, wet with water, tears, and sweat, was lying on the bed, sobbing loudly, her head with strands of hair stuck together hanging over a basin. The boys at once averted their eyes, so embarrassing and indecent it was to look. But Yura had time to notice how, in certain uncomfortable, hunched-up poses, under the influence of strain and effort, a woman ceases to be the way she is portrayed in sculpture and comes to resemble a naked wrestler, with bulging muscles, in shorts for the match.

It finally occurred to someone behind the partition to lower the curtain.

“Fadei Kazimirovich, dear, where is your hand? Give me your hand,” the woman said, choking with tears and nausea. “Ah, I’ve been through such horror! I had such suspicions! Fadei Kazimirovich … I imagined … But fortunately it all turned out to be foolishness, my disturbed imagination, Fadei Kazimirovich, just think, such a relief! And as a result … And so … And so I’m alive.”

“Calm yourself, Amalia Karlovna, I beg you to calm yourself. How awkward this all is, my word, how awkward.”

“We’ll go home now,” Alexander Alexandrovich grunted, turning to the children.

Perishing with embarrassment, they stood in the dark entry, on the threshold of the unpartitioned part of the room, and, having nowhere to turn their eyes, looked into the depths of it, from which the lamp had been removed. The walls were hung with photographs, there was a bookcase with music scores, a desk littered with paper and albums, and on the other side of the dining table covered with a crocheted tablecloth, a girl slept sitting in an armchair, her arms around its back and her cheek pressed to it.
She must have been mortally tired, if the noise and movement around her did not keep her from sleeping.

Their arrival had been senseless, their further presence here was indecent.

“We’ll go now,” Alexander Alexandrovich repeated. “Once Fadei Kazimirovich comes out. I’ll say good-bye to him.”

But instead of Fadei Kazimirovich, someone else came from behind the partition. This was a stout, clean-shaven, imposing, and self-assured man. Above his head he carried the lamp that had been taken from the holder. He went to the table by which the girl was sleeping and put the lamp into the holder. The light woke the girl up. She smiled at the man who had come in, narrowed her eyes, and stretched.

At the sight of the stranger, Misha became all aroused and simply riveted his eyes on him. He tugged at Yura’s sleeve, trying to tell him something.

“Aren’t you ashamed to whisper in a stranger’s house? What will people think of you?” Yura stopped him and refused to listen.

Meanwhile a mute scene was taking place between the girl and the man. They did not say a word to each other and only exchanged glances. But their mutual understanding was frighteningly magical, as if he were a puppeteer and she a puppet, obedient to the movements of his hand.

The weary smile that appeared on her face made the girl half close her eyes and half open her lips. But to the man’s mocking glances she responded with the sly winking of an accomplice. Both were pleased that everything had turned out so well, the secret had not been discovered, and the woman who poisoned herself had remained alive.

Yura devoured them both with his eyes. From the semi-darkness, where no one could see him, he looked into the circle of lamplight, unable to tear himself away. The spectacle of the girl’s enslavement was inscrutably mysterious and shamelessly candid. Contradictory feelings crowded in his breast. Yura’s heart was wrung by their as yet untried power.

This was the very thing he had so ardently yammered about for a year with Misha and Tonya under the meaningless name of vulgarity, that frightening and alluring thing which they had dealt with so easily at a safe distance in words, and here was that force before Yura’s eyes, thoroughly tangible and dim and dreamlike, pitilessly destructive and pitiful and calling for help, and where was their childish philosophy, and what was Yura to do now?

“Do you know who that man is?” Misha asked when they went outside.
Yura was immersed in his thoughts and did not answer.

“It’s the same one who got your father to drink and destroyed him. Remember, on the train? I told you about it.”

Yura was thinking about the girl and the future, and not about his father and the past. For the first moment he did not even understand what Misha was telling him. It was hard to talk in the cold.

“Frozen, Semyon?” asked Alexander Alexandrovich.

They drove off.

Once in the winter Alexander Alexandrovich gave Anna Ivanovna an antique wardrobe. He had bought it by chance. The ebony wardrobe was of enormous proportions. It would not go through any doorway in one piece. It was delivered dismantled, brought into the house in sections, and they began thinking where to put it. It would not do in the downstairs rooms, where there was space enough, because its purpose was unsuitable, and it could not be put upstairs for lack of room. Part of the upper landing of the inside stairway was cleared for the wardrobe, by the door to the master bedroom.

The yard porter Markel came to put the wardrobe together. He brought along his six-year-old daughter Marinka. Marinka was given a stick of barley sugar. Marinka snuffed her nose and, licking the candy and her slobbery fingers, watched frowningly as her father worked.

For a while everything went smoothly. The wardrobe gradually grew before Anna Ivanovna’s eyes. Suddenly, when it only remained to attach the top, she decided to help Markel. She stood on the high bottom of the wardrobe and, tottering, bumped against the side, which was held together only by a mortise and tenon. The slipknot Markel had tied temporarily to hold the side came undone. Together with the boards that went crashing to the floor, Anna Ivanovna also fell on her back and hurt herself badly.

“Eh, dear mistress,” Markel murmured as he rushed to her, “why on earth did you go and do that, dear heart? Is the bone in one piece? Feel the bone. The bone’s the main thing, forget the soft part, the soft part’ll mend and, as they say, it’s only for ladies’ playzeer. Don’t you howl, you wicked thing,” he fell upon the weeping Marinka. “Wipe your snot and go to
mama. Eh, dear mistress, couldn’t I have managed this whole clothing antimony without you? You probably think, at first glance I’m a regular yard porter, but if you reason right, our natural state is cabinetmaking, what we did was cabinetmaking. You wouldn’t believe how much of that furniture, them wardrobes and cupboards, went through my hands, in the varnishing sense, or, on the contrary, some such mahogany wood or walnut. Or, for instance, what matches, in the rich bride sense, went floating, forgive the expression, just went floating right past my nose. And the cause of it all—the drinking article, strong drink.”

With Markel’s help, Anna Ivanovna got to the armchair, which he rolled up to her, and sat down, groaning and rubbing the hurt place. Markel set about restoring what had been demolished. When the top was attached, he said: “Well, now it’s just the doors, and it’ll be fit for exhibition.”

Anna Ivanovna did not like the wardrobe. In appearance and size it resembled a catafalque or a royal tomb. It inspired a superstitious terror in her. She gave the wardrobe the nickname of “Askold’s grave.” By this name she meant Oleg’s steed,
¹
a thing that brings death to its owner. Being a well-read woman in a disorderly way, Anna Ivanovna confused the related notions.

With this fall began Anna Ivanovna’s predisposition for lung diseases.

Anna Ivanovna spent the whole of November 1911 in bed. She had pneumonia.

Yura, Misha Gordon, and Tonya were to finish university and the Higher Women’s Courses in the spring. Yura would graduate as a doctor, Tonya as a lawyer, and Misha as a philologist in the philosophy section.

Everything in Yura’s soul was shifted and entangled, and everything was sharply original—views, habits, and predilections. He was exceedingly impressionable, the novelty of his perceptions not lending itself to description.

But greatly as he was drawn to art and history, Yura had no difficulty in choosing a career. He considered art unsuitable as a calling, in the same sense that innate gaiety or an inclination to melancholy could not be a profession. He was interested in physics and natural science, and held that in practical life one should be occupied with something generally useful. And so he chose medicine.

Four years back, during his first year, he had spent a whole semester in the university basement studying anatomy on corpses. He reached the cellar by a winding stair. Inside the anatomy theater disheveled students crowded in
groups or singly. Some ground away, laying out bones and leafing through tattered, rot-eaten textbooks; others silently dissected in a corner; still others bantered, cracked jokes, and chased the rats that scurried in great numbers over the stone floor of the mortuary. In its darkness, the corpses of unknown people glowed like phosphorus, striking the eye with their nakedness: young suicides of unestablished identity; drowned women, well preserved and still intact. Alum injections made them look younger, lending them a deceptive roundness. The dead bodies were opened up, taken apart, and prepared, and the beauty of the human body remained true to itself in any section, however small, so that the amazement before some mermaid rudely thrown onto a zinc table did not go away when diverted from her to her amputated arm or cut-off hand. The basement smelled of formalin and carbolic acid, and the presence of mystery was felt in everything, beginning with the unknown fate of all these stretched-out bodies and ending with the mystery of life and death itself, which had settled here in the basement as if in its own home or at its headquarters.