Doctor Zhivago (14 page)

It seemed there would be no end to it, but in spring, at one of the last classes of the school year, having reflected on how much more frequent this pestering would be in the summer, when there were no school studies, which were her last refuge against frequent meetings with Komarovsky, Lara quickly came to a decision that changed her life for a long time.

It was a hot morning, a thunderstorm was gathering. The classroom windows were open. The city was humming in the distance, always on the same note, like bees in an apiary. The shouts of playing children came from the courtyard. The grassy smell of earth and young greenery made your head ache, like the smell of vodka and pancakes in the week before Lent.
³

The history teacher was telling about Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition.
⁴
When he came to the landing at Fréjus, the sky turned black, cracked and split by lightning and thunder, and through the windows, along with the smell of freshness, columns of sand and dust burst into the room. Two class toadies rushed officiously to the corridor to call the janitor to shut the windows, and when they opened the door, the draft lifted the blotting paper from the notebooks on all the desks and blew it around the room.

The windows were shut. Dirty city rain mixed with dust poured down. Lara tore a page from her notebook and wrote to the girl sitting next to her at the desk, Nadya Kologrivova:

“Nadya, I must set up my life separately from mama. Help me to find well-paid lessons. You have many rich acquaintances.”

Nadya replied in the same way:

“We’re looking for a tutor for Lipa. Why don’t you come to us. That would be great! You know how papa and mama love you.”

For more than three years Lara lived with the Kologrivovs as if behind a stone wall. No attempts on her were made from anywhere, and even her mother and brother, from whom she felt greatly estranged, did not remind her of themselves.

Lavrenty Mikhailovich Kologrivov was a big entrepreneur, a practical man of the new fashion, talented and intelligent. He hated the moribund order with the double hatred of a fabulously wealthy man able to buy out the state treasury, and of a man from simple folk who had gone amazingly far. He hid fugitives from the law, hired lawyers to defend the accused in
political trials, and, as the joke went, overthrew himself as a proprietor by subsidizing revolution and organizing strikes at his own factory. Lavrenty Mikhailovich was a crack shot and a passionate hunter, and in the winter of 1905 had gone on Sundays to the Silver Woods and Moose Island to teach militiamen how to shoot.

He was a remarkable man. Serafima Filippovna, his wife, was a worthy match for him. Lara felt an admiring respect for them both. Everyone in the house loved her like their own.

In the fourth year of Lara’s carefree life her brother Rodya came to see her on business. Swaying foppishly on his long legs and, for greater importance, pronouncing the words through his nose and drawing them out unnaturally, he told her that the graduating cadets of his class had collected some money for a farewell gift to the head of the school, had given it to Rodya, and had entrusted him with choosing and purchasing the gift. And that two days ago he had gambled away all the money to the last kopeck. Having said this, he dropped his whole lanky figure into an armchair and burst into tears.

Lara went cold when she heard it. Sobbing, Rodya continued:

“Yesterday I went to see Viktor Ippolitovich. He refused to talk with me about the subject, but said that if you wished … He said that, though you don’t love us all anymore, your power over him is still so great … Larochka … One word from you is enough … Do you understand what a disgrace it is and how it stains the honor of an officer’s uniform? … Go to him—what will it cost you?—ask him … You won’t have me wash away this embezzlement with my blood.”

“Wash away with blood … Honor of an officer’s uniform,” Lara repeated indignantly, pacing the room in agitation. “And I’m not a uniform, I have no honor, and you can do anything you like with me. Do you realize what you’re asking, did you grasp what he’s offering you? Year after year the Sisyphean labor of building, raising up, not getting enough sleep, and then this one comes, it’s all the same to him, he’ll snap his fingers, and it will all be blown to smithereens! Devil take you. Shoot yourself, if you like. What do I care? How much do you need?”

“Six hundred and ninety-some rubles—let’s round it off to seven hundred,” said Rodya, faltering slightly.

“Rodya! No, you’re out of your mind! Do you realize what you’re saying? You gambled away seven hundred rubles? Rodya! Rodya! Do you know how long it would take an ordinary person like me to knock together a sum like that by honest labor?”

After a slight pause she added in a cold, estranged voice:

“All right. I’ll try. Come tomorrow. And bring the revolver you were going to shoot yourself with. You’ll turn it over to me. With a good supply of cartridges, don’t forget.”

She got the money from Mr. Kologrivov.

Working at the Kologrivovs’ did not prevent Lara from finishing high school, entering the higher courses, studying successfully in them, and approaching graduation, which for her would come in the following year, 1912.

In the spring of 1911 her pupil Lipochka finished high school. She already had a fiancé, the young engineer Friesendank, from a good and well-to-do family. Lipochka’s parents approved of her choice, but were against her marrying so early and advised her to wait. As a result, there were scenes. The spoiled and whimsical Lipochka, the family’s favorite, shouted at her father and mother, wept and stamped her feet.

In this rich home, where Lara was considered one of their own, they did not remember the debt she had incurred for Rodya and did not remind her of it.

Lara would have repaid this debt long ago, if she had not had permanent expenses, the destination of which she kept hidden.

In secret from Pasha, she sent money to his father, Antipov, who was living in exile, and helped his often ailing, peevish mother. Besides that, in still greater secrecy, she reduced the expenses of Pasha himself, paying some extra to his landlord for his room and board without his knowing it.

Pasha, who was slightly younger than Lara, loved her madly and obeyed her in everything. At her insistence, after finishing his progressive high school, he took additional Latin and Greek, in order to enter the university as a philologist. Lara’s dream was that in a year, after they passed the state examinations, she and Pasha would get married and go to teach, he in a boys’ high school and she in a girls’, in one of the provincial cities of the Urals.

Pasha lived in a room that Lara herself had found and rented for him from its quiet owners, in a newly built house on Kamergersky Lane, near the Art Theater.

In the summer of 1911, Lara visited Duplyanka for the last time with the Kologrivovs. She loved the place to distraction, more than the owners did themselves. That was well-known, and there existed a consensus concerning Lara on the occasion of these summer trips. When the hot and soot-blackened
train that brought them continued on its way and, amid the boundless, stupefying, and fragrant silence that succeeded it, the excited Lara lost the gift of speech, they allowed her to go alone on foot to the estate, while the luggage was carried from the little station and put onto a cart, and the Duplyanka driver, the sleeves of his red shirt thrust through the armholes of his coachman’s vest, told the masters the local news of the past season as they got into the carriage.

Lara walked beside the rails along a path beaten down by wanderers and pilgrims and turned off on a track that led across a meadow to the forest. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, breathed in the intricately fragrant air of the vast space around her. It was dearer to her than a father and mother, better than a lover, and wiser than a book. For an instant the meaning of existence was again revealed to Lara. She was here—so she conceived—in order to see into the mad enchantment of the earth, and to call everything by name, and if that was beyond her strength, then, out of love for life, to give birth to her successors, who would do it in her place.

That summer Lara arrived overtired from the excessive work she had heaped on herself. She was easily upset. A self-consciousness developed in her that had not been there before. This feature lent a certain pettiness to her character, which had always been distinguished by its breadth and lack of touchiness.

The Kologrivovs did not want to let her go. She was surrounded by the same affection as ever with them. But since Lipa was on her feet now, Lara considered herself superfluous in their house. She refused her salary. They made her take it. At the same time she needed money, and to earn an independent income while being a guest was awkward and practically unfeasible.

Lara considered her position false and untenable. It seemed to her that she was a burden to them all and they simply did not show it. She was a burden to herself. She wanted to flee from herself and the Kologrivovs wherever her feet would take her, but, according to her own notions, to do so she would have to repay the money to the Kologrivovs, and at the moment she had nowhere to get it. She felt herself a hostage on account of Rodya’s stupid embezzlement, and her impotent indignation gave her no peace.

She seemed to see signs of negligence in everything. If the Kologrivovs’ visiting acquaintances made much of her, it meant they were treating her as an uncomplaining “ward” and easy prey. But when she was left in peace, it proved that she was a nonentity and they did not notice her.

Her fits of hypochondria did not keep Lara from sharing in the amusements of the numerous company that visited Duplyanka. She bathed and
swam, went boating, took part in nighttime picnics across the river, set off fireworks, and danced. She acted in amateur theatricals and with particular passion competed in target shooting from short Mauser rifles, to which, however, she preferred Rodya’s light revolver. She came to fire it with great accuracy and jokingly regretted that she was a woman and the career of a swashbuckling duelist was closed to her. But the merrier Lara’s life was, the worse she felt. She did not know what she wanted herself.

This increased especially after her return to the city. Here to Lara’s troubles were added some slight disagreements with Pasha (Lara was careful not to quarrel seriously with him, because she considered him her last defense). Lately Pasha had acquired a certain self-confidence. The admonishing tones in his conversation upset her and made her laugh.

Pasha, Lipa, the Kologrivovs, money—it all started spinning in her head. Life became repugnant to Lara. She was beginning to lose her mind. She felt like dropping everything familiar and tested and starting something new. In that state of mind, around Christmastime of the year 1911, she came to a fateful decision. She decided to part from the Kologrivovs immediately and somehow build her life alone and independently, and to ask Komarovsky for the money needed for that. It seemed to Lara that after all that had happened and the subsequent years of her hard-won freedom, he should help her chivalrously, not going into any explanations, disinterestedly and without any filth.

With that aim she went, on December 27, to the Petrovsky neighborhood and, on the way out, put Rodya’s revolver, loaded and with the safety off, into her muff, intending to shoot Viktor Ippolitovich if he should refuse her, understand her perversely, or humiliate her in any way.

She walked in terrible perturbation along the festive streets, not noticing anything around her. The intended shot had already rung out in her soul, with total indifference to the one it had been aimed at. This shot was the only thing she was conscious of. She heard it all along the way, and it was fired at Komarovsky, at herself, at her own fate, and at the oak in Duplyanka with a target carved on its trunk.

“Don’t touch the muff,” she said to the oh-ing and ah-ing Emma Ernestovna when she reached out to help Lara take off her coat.

Viktor Ippolitovich was not at home. Emma Ernestovna went on persuading Lara to come in and take off her coat.

“I can’t. I’m in a hurry. Where is he?”

Emma Ernestovna said he was at a Christmas party. Address in hand,
Lara ran down the gloomy stairs with the stained glass coats of arms in the windows, which vividly reminded her of everything, and set out for the Sventitskys’ in Flour Town.

Only now, going out for the second time, did Lara look around properly. It was winter. It was the city. It was evening.

It was freezing cold. The streets were covered with black ice, thick as the glass bottoms of broken beer bottles. It was painful to breathe. The air was choked with gray hoarfrost, and it seemed to tickle and prickle with its shaggy stubble, just as the icy fur of Lara’s collar chafed her and got into her mouth. With a pounding heart Lara walked along the empty streets. Smoke came from the doorways of tearooms and taverns along the way. The frostbitten faces of passersby, red as sausage, and the bearded muzzles of horses and dogs hung with icicles emerged from the mist. Covered with a thick layer of ice and snow, the windows of houses were as if painted over with chalk, and the colorful reflections of lighted Christmas trees and the shadows of merrymakers moved over their opaque surface, as if the people outside were being shown shadow pictures from inside on white sheets hung before a magic lantern.

In Kamergersky Lara stopped. “I can’t do it anymore, I can’t stand it” burst from her almost aloud. “I’ll go up and tell him everything,” she thought, regaining control of herself, opening the heavy door of the imposing entrance.

Red from the effort, his tongue stuck in his cheek, Pasha struggled before the mirror, putting on his collar and trying to stick the recalcitrant stud through the overstarched buttonhole of his shirt front. He was getting ready to go out, and he was still so pure and inexperienced that he became embarrassed when Lara came in without knocking and found him in such a minor state of undress. He noticed her agitation at once. Her legs were giving way under her. She came in, pushing her dress ahead at each step as if crossing a ford.