Doctor Zhivago (15 page)

“What is it? What’s happened?” he asked in alarm, rushing to meet her.

“Sit down beside me. Sit down as you are. Don’t smarten yourself up. I’m in a hurry. I’ll have to leave at once. Don’t touch the muff. Wait. Turn away for a moment.”

He obeyed. Lara was wearing a two-piece English suit. She took the jacket off, hung it on a nail, and transferred Rodya’s revolver from the muff to the jacket pocket. Then, returning to the sofa, she said:

“Now you can look. Light a candle and turn off the electricity.”

Lara liked to talk in semidarkness with candles burning. Pasha always kept a spare unopened pack for her. He replaced the burned-down end in the candlestick with a new whole candle, placed it on the windowsill, and lit it. The flame choked on the stearine, shot crackling little stars in all directions, and sharpened into an arrow. The room filled with a soft light. The ice on the windowpane at the level of the candle began to melt, forming a black eyehole.

“Listen, Patulya,” said Lara. “I’m in difficulties. I need help to get out of them. Don’t be frightened and don’t question me, but part with the notion that we’re like everybody else. Don’t remain calm. I’m always in danger. If you love me and want to keep me from perishing, don’t put it off, let’s get married quickly.”

“But that’s my constant wish,” he interrupted her. “Quickly name the day, I’ll be glad to do it whenever you like. But tell me more simply and clearly, don’t torture me with riddles.”

But Lara distracted him, imperceptibly avoiding a direct answer. They talked for a long time on themes that had no relation to the subject of Lara’s grief.

That winter Yura was writing a scientific paper on the nervous elements of the retina in competition for a university gold medal. Though Yura would be graduating as a generalist, he knew the eye with the thoroughness of a future oculist.

This interest in the physiology of vision spoke for other sides of Yura’s nature—his creative gifts and his reflections on the essence of the artistic image and the structure of the logical idea.

Tonya and Yura were riding in a hired sleigh to the Christmas party at the Sventitskys’. The two had lived for six years side by side through the beginning of youth and the end of childhood. They knew each other in the smallest detail. They had habits in common, their own way of exchanging brief witticisms, their own way of snorting in response. And so they were riding now, keeping silent, pressing their lips from the cold, and exchanging brief remarks. And both thinking their own thoughts.

Yura recalled that the time for the contest was near and he had to hurry with the paper, and in the festive turmoil of the ending year that could be felt in the streets, he jumped from those thoughts to others.

In Gordon’s department a hectograph student magazine was published, and Gordon was the editor. Yura had long been promising them an article
on Blok.
⁵
The young people of both capitals were raving about Blok, he and Misha more than anyone.

But these thoughts did not remain long in Yura’s conscience. They rode on, tucking their chins into their collars and rubbing their freezing ears, and thought about differing things. But on one point their thoughts came together.

The recent scene at Anna Ivanovna’s had transformed them both. It was as if they had recovered their sight and looked at each other with new eyes.

Tonya, this old comrade, this person so clear that she needed no explanations, turned out to be the most unattainable and complex of all that Yura could imagine, turned out to be a woman. With a certain stretching of fantasy, Yura could picture himself as a hero climbing Ararat, a prophet, a conqueror, anything you like, but not a woman.

And now Tonya had taken this most difficult and all-surpassing task on her thin and weak shoulders (she suddenly seemed thin and weak to Yura, though she was a perfectly healthy girl). And he became filled with that burning compassion and timid amazement before her which is the beginning of passion.

The same thing, with corresponding modifications, happened to Tonya in relation to Yura.

Yura thought that in any case they had no business leaving the house. What if something should happen during their absence? And then he remembered. Learning that Anna Ivanovna was worse, they had gone to her, already dressed for the evening, and suggested that they stay. She had protested against it with all her former sharpness and insisted that they go to the party. Yura and Tonya went behind the draperies into the deep window niche to see what the weather was like. When they came out of the niche, the two parts of the tulle curtains clung to the still unworn fabric of their new clothes. The light, clinging stuff dragged for several steps behind Tonya like a wedding veil behind a bride. They all burst out laughing, so simultaneously did this resemblance strike the eye of everyone in the room without a word spoken.

Yura looked around and saw the same things that had caught Lara’s eye not long before. Their sleigh raised an unnaturally loud noise, which awakened an unnaturally long echo under the ice-bound trees of the gardens and boulevards. The frosted-over windows of houses, lit from inside, resembled precious caskets of laminated smoky topaz. Behind them glowed Moscow’s Christmas life, candles burned on trees, guests crowded, and clowning mummers played at hide-and-seek and pass-the-ring.

It suddenly occurred to Yura that Blok was the manifestation of Christmas
in all domains of Russian life, in the daily life of the northern city and in the new literature, under the starry sky of the contemporary street and around the lighted Christmas tree in a drawing room of the present century. It occurred to him that no article about Blok was needed, but one needed simply to portray a Russian adoration of the Magi, like the Dutch masters, with frost, wolves, and a dark fir forest.

They were driving down Kamergersky. Yura turned his attention to a black hole melted in the icy coating of one window. Through this hole shone the light of a candle, penetrating outside almost with the consciousness of a gaze, as if the flame were spying on the passersby and waiting for someone.

“A candle burned on the table. A candle burned …” Yura whispered to himself the beginning of something vague, unformed, in hopes that the continuation would come of itself, without forcing. It did not come.

From time immemorial the Christmas parties at the Sventitskys’ had been organized in the following fashion. At ten, when the children went home, the tree was lighted a second time for the young people and the adults, and the merrymaking went on till morning. The more elderly cut the cards all night in a three-walled Pompeian drawing room, which was an extension of the ballroom and was separated from it by a heavy, thick curtain on big bronze rings. At dawn the whole company had supper.

“Why are you so late?” the Sventitskys’ nephew Georges asked them in passing, as he ran through the front hall to his uncle and aunt’s rooms. Yura and Tonya also decided to go there to greet the hosts, and, on their way, while taking off their coats, looked into the ballroom.

Past the hotly breathing Christmas tree, girdled by several rows of streaming radiance, rustling their dresses and stepping on each other’s feet, moved a black wall of walkers and talkers, not taken up with dancing.

Inside the circle, the dancers whirled furiously. They were spun around, paired off, stretched out in a chain by Koka Kornakov, a lycée student, the son of a deputy prosecutor. He led the dancing and shouted at the top of his voice from one end of the room to the other:
“Grand rond! Chaîne chinoise!”
^*
—and it was all done according to his word.
“Une valse s’il vous
plaît!”
^*
he bawled to the pianist and led his lady at the head of the first turn
à trois temps, à deux temps
,
^*
ever slowing and shortening his step to a barely noticeable turning in place, which was no longer a waltz but only its dying echo. And everyone applauded, and the stirring, shuffling, and chattering crowd was served ice cream and refreshing drinks. Flushed young men and girls stopped shouting and laughing for a moment and hastily and greedily gulped down some cold cranberry drink or lemonade, and, having barely set the glass on the tray, renewed their shouting and laughing tenfold, as if they had snatched some exhilarating brew.

Without going into the ballroom, Tonya and Yura went on to the hosts’ rooms at the rear of the apartment.

The Sventitskys’ inner rooms were cluttered with superfluous things taken from the drawing room and ballroom to make space. Here was the hosts’ magic kitchen, their Christmas storehouse. It smelled of paint and glue, there were rolls of colored paper and piles of boxes with cotillion stars and spare Christmas tree candles.

The old Sventitskys were writing tags for the gifts, place cards for supper, and tickets for some lottery that was to take place. Georges was helping them, but he often confused the numbering and they grumbled irritably at him. The Sventitskys were terribly glad to see Yura and Tonya. They remembered them from when they were little, did not stand on ceremony with them, and with no further talk sat them down to work.

“Felitsata Semyonovna doesn’t understand that this ought to have been thought about earlier and not in the heat of things, when the guests are here. Ah, Georges, you ungodly muddler, again you’ve jumbled up the numbers! The agreement was that we’d put those for the boxes of dragées on the table and the blank ones on the sofa, and again you’ve got it all topsy-turvy and done it backwards.”

“I’m very glad Annette feels better. Pierre and I were so worried.”

“Yes, but you see, dearest, she happens to be worse, worse, you understand, you always get everything
devant-derrière.
”
^*

Yura and Tonya hung around backstage for half the festive night with Georges and the old folks.

All the while they were sitting with the Sventitskys, Lara was in the ballroom. Though she was not dressed for a ball and did not know anyone there, she now allowed Koka Kornakov to make a turn with her, passively, as if in sleep, now strolled aimlessly about the room, quite crestfallen.

Once or twice already, Lara had stopped irresolutely and hesitated on the threshold of the drawing room, hoping that Komarovsky, who sat facing the ballroom, would notice her. But he kept his eyes on his cards, which he held fanlike in his left hand, and either really did not see her or pretended not to. The affront took Lara’s breath away. Just then a girl Lara did not know went into the drawing room from the ballroom. Komarovsky gave the girl that glance Lara knew so well. The flattered girl smiled at Komarovsky, flushed and beamed happily. Lara almost cried out when she saw it. The color of shame rose high in her face; her forehead and neck turned red. “A new victim,” she thought. Lara saw as in a mirror her whole self and her whole story. But she still did not give up the idea of having a talk with Komarovsky and, having decided to put off the attempt to a more suitable moment, forced herself to calm down and went back to the ballroom.

Three more men were playing at the same table with Komarovsky. One of his partners, sitting next to him, was the father of the foppish lycée student who had invited Lara to waltz. Lara concluded as much from the two or three words she exchanged with him while they made a turn around the room. And the tall, dark-haired woman in black with the crazed, burning eyes and unpleasantly strained, snakelike neck, who kept going from the drawing room to the ballroom, the field of her son’s activity, and back to the drawing room and her card-playing husband, was Koka Kornakov’s mother. Finally, it became clear that the girl who had served as pretext for Lara’s complex feelings was Koka’s sister, and Lara’s conclusions had no grounds at all.

“Kornakov,” Koka had introduced himself to Lara at the very start. But then she had not caught it. “Kornakov,” he repeated at the last gliding turn, taking her to a chair and bowing out. This time Lara heard him. “Kornakov, Kornakov,” she fell to thinking. “Something familiar. Something unpleasant.” Then she remembered. Kornakov, the deputy prosecutor of the Moscow court. He had prosecuted the group of railway workers with whom Tiverzin had stood trial. At Lara’s request, Lavrenty Mikhailovich had gone to butter him up, so that he would not be so fierce at the trial, but could not make him bend. “So that’s how it is! Well, well, well. Curious. Kornakov. Kornakov.”

It was past twelve or one in the morning. Yura had a buzzing in his ears. After a break, during which tea and cookies were served in the dining room, the dancing began again. When the candles on the tree burned down, no one replaced them anymore.

Yura stood absentmindedly in the middle of the ballroom and looked at Tonya, who was dancing with someone he did not know. Gliding past Yura, Tonya tossed aside the small train of her too-long satin dress with a movement of her foot and, splashing it like a fish, disappeared into the crowd of dancers.

She was very excited. During the break, when they sat in the dining room, Tonya refused tea and quenched her thirst with mandarines, which she peeled in great number from their fragrant, easily separated skins. She kept taking from behind her sash or from her little sleeve a cambric handkerchief, tiny as a fruit tree blossom, and wiping the trickles of sweat at the edges of her lips and between her sticky fingers. Laughing and not interrupting the animated conversation, she mechanically tucked it back behind her sash or the frills of her bodice.

Now, dancing with an unknown partner and, as she turned, brushing against Yura, who was standing to the side and frowning, Tonya playfully pressed his hand in passing and smiled meaningfully. After one of these pressings, the handkerchief she was holding remained in Yura’s hand. He pressed it to his lips and closed his eyes. The handkerchief had the mingled smell of mandarine and of Tonya’s hot palm, equally enchanting. This was something new in Yura’s life, never before experienced, and its sharpness pierced him through. The childishly naïve smell was intimately reasonable, like a word whispered in the dark. Yura stood, covering his eyes and lips with the handkerchief in his palm and breathing it in. Suddenly a shot rang out in the house.