Doctor Zhivago (18 page)

“I’m dead tired,” said Lara, sitting beside her husband. “Did you manage to do everything you wanted?”

“Yes.”

“And even so I’m feeling remarkably well. I’m happy. And you?”

“Me, too. I feel good. But that’s a long story.”

As an exception, Komarovsky was admitted to the young people’s party. At the end of the evening, he wanted to say that he would be orphaned after his young friends’ departure, that Moscow would become a desert for him, a Sahara, but he was so deeply moved that he sobbed and had to repeat the
phrase interrupted by his agitation. He asked the Antipovs for permission to correspond with them and visit them in Yuriatin, their new place of residence, if he could not bear the separation.

“That is totally unnecessary,” Lara retorted loudly and carelessly.
“And generally it’s all pointless—correspondence, the Sahara, and all that. And don’t even think of visiting. With God’s help you’ll survive without us, we’re not such a rarity—right, Pasha? Maybe you’ll find somebody to replace your young friends.”

And totally forgetting whom she was talking with and about what, Lara remembered something and, hastily getting up, went behind the partition to the kitchen. There she dismantled the meat grinder and began stuffing the parts into the corners of the crate of dishes, layering them with tufts of straw. In the process she almost pricked her hand on a sharp splinter split from the edge.

While busy with that, she lost sight of the fact that she had guests, ceased to hear them, but they suddenly reminded her of themselves with a particularly loud burst of chatter behind the partition, and then Lara reflected on the diligence with which drunk people always like to imitate drunk people, and with all the more giftless and amateurish deliberateness the drunker they are.

At that moment quite another, special noise attracted her attention to the yard outside the open window. Lara drew the curtain and leaned out.

A hobbled horse was moving about the courtyard in halting leaps. It was an unknown horse and must have wandered into the yard by mistake. It was already completely light, but still long before sunrise. The sleeping and as if totally deserted city was sunk in the grayish purple coolness of early morning. Lara closed her eyes. God knows to what country remoteness and enchantment she was transported by this distinctive and quite incomparable stamping of shod horse hooves.

There was a ring from the stairway. Lara pricked up her ears. Someone left the table and went to open the door. It was Nadya! Lara rushed to meet her. Nadya had come straight from the train, fresh, bewitching, and as if all fragrant with Duplyanka lilies of the valley. The two friends stood there unable to speak a word, and only sobbed, embracing and all but choking each other.

Nadya brought Lara congratulations and wishes for a good journey from the whole household and a precious gift from her parents. She took from her bag a case wrapped in paper, unwrapped it, and, unclasping the lid, handed Lara a necklace of rare beauty.

There were ohs and ahs. One of the drunken guests, now somewhat sobered up, said:

“A pink jacinth. Yes, yes, pink, if you can believe it. A stone not inferior to the diamond.”

But Nadya insisted that they were yellow sapphires.

Seating her next to herself and giving her something to eat, Lara put the necklace near her place and could not tear her eyes from it. The stones, gathered into a little pile on the violet cushion of the case, burned iridescently, looking now like drops of moisture running together, now like a cluster of small grapes.

Some of those at the table had meanwhile managed to come to their senses. They again downed a glass to keep Nadya company. Nadya quickly got drunk.

The house soon turned into a sleeping kingdom. Most of the guests, anticipating the next day’s farewell at the station, stayed for the night. Half of them had long been snoring in various corners. Lara herself did not remember how she wound up fully dressed on the sofa beside the already sleeping Ira Lagodina.

Lara was awakened by a loud conversation just at her ear. They were the voices of some strangers who had come into the courtyard looking for the stray horse. Lara opened her eyes and was surprised. “How tireless this Pasha is, really, standing like a milepost in the middle of the room and endlessly poking about.” Just then the supposed Pasha turned his face to her, and she saw that it was not Pasha at all, but some pockmarked horror with a scar cutting across his face from temple to chin. Then she realized that a thief, a robber, had gotten into her apartment and wanted to shout, but it turned out that she could not utter a sound. Suddenly she remembered the necklace and, raising herself stealthily on her elbow, looked furtively at the dinner table.

The necklace lay in its place amidst the bread crumbs and gnawed caramels, and the slow-witted malefactor did not notice it in the heap of leftovers, but only rummaged in the hamper of linens and disturbed the order of Lara’s packing. The tipsy and half-asleep Lara, dimly aware of the situation, felt especially grieved about her work. In indignation, she again wanted to shout and again was unable to open her mouth and move her tongue. Then she gave Ira Lagodina, who was sleeping beside her, a strong nudge of the knee in the pit of the stomach, and when she cried out from pain in a voice not her own, Lara shouted along with her. The thief dropped the bundle of stolen things and hurtled headlong out of the room. Some of the men jumped up, barely understanding what was happening, and rushed after him, but the robber’s trail was already cold.

The commotion that had taken place and the collective discussion of it served as a signal for everyone to get up. The last traces of Lara’s tipsiness
vanished. Deaf to their entreaties to let them doze and lie about a little longer, Lara made all the sleepers get up, quickly gave them coffee, and sent them home until they were to meet again in the station
at the moment of the train’s departure.

When they were all gone, the work went at a boil. With a quickness peculiar to her, Lara rushed from bundle to bundle, stuffing in pillows, tightening straps, and only begging Pasha and the porter’s wife not to hinder her by helping.

Everything got done properly and on time. The Antipovs were not late. The train set off smoothly, as if imitating the movement of the hats waved to them in farewell. When the waving ceased and from afar came a triple roaring of something (probably “hurrah”), the train picked up speed.

For the third day there was foul weather. It was the second autumn of the war. After the successes of the first year, the failures began. Brusilov’s Eighth Army, concentrated in the Carpathians, ready to descend from the passes and invade Hungary, was withdrawing instead, pulled back by a general retreat. We were evacuating Galicia, occupied during the first months of military action.
⁵

Dr. Zhivago, who was formerly known as Yura, but whom people one after another now more often called by his name and patronymic, stood in the corridor of the maternity ward of the gynecological clinic, facing the door through which he had just brought his wife, Antonina Alexandrovna. He had taken his leave and was waiting for the midwife, so as to arrange with her how to inform him in case of need and how he could get in touch with her about Tonya’s health.

He had no time, he was hurrying to his own hospital, and before that had to make house calls on two patients, and here he was wasting precious moments gazing out the window at the oblique hatching of the rain, broken and deflected by a gusty autumnal wind, as wheat in a field is blown over and tangled by a storm.

It was not very dark yet. Yuri Andreevich’s eyes made out the backyard of the clinic, the glassed-in terraces of the mansions on Devichye Field, the line of the electric tramway that led to the rear entrance of one of the hospital buildings.

The rain poured down most disconsolately, not intensifying and not letting up, despite the fury of the wind, which seemed aggravated by the imperturbability of the water being dashed on the earth. Gusts of wind tore at the shoots of the wild grape vine that twined around one of the terraces. The wind seemed to want to tear up the whole plant, raised it into the air, shook it about, and threw it down disdainfully like a tattered rag.

A motorized wagon with two trailers came past the terrace to the clinic. Wounded men were taken out of it.

In the Moscow hospitals, filled to the utmost, especially after the Lutsk operation,
⁶
the wounded were now being put on the landings and in the corridors. The general overcrowding of the city’s hospitals began to tell on the situation in the women’s sections.

Yuri Andreevich turned his back to the window and yawned from fatigue. He had nothing to think about. Suddenly he remembered. In the surgical section of the Krestovozdvizhensky Hospital,
⁷
where he worked, a woman patient had died a couple of days ago. Yuri Andreevich had insisted that she had echinococcus of the liver. Everyone had disagreed with him. Today there would be an autopsy. The autopsy would establish the truth. But the prosector of their clinic was a hardened drunkard. God knows how he would go about it.

It quickly grew dark. It was now impossible to see anything outside the window. As if by the stroke of a magic wand, electricity lit up in all the windows.

From Tonya’s room, through a small vestibule that separated the ward from the corridor, the head doctor of the section came out, a mastodon of a gynecologist, who always responded to all questions by raising his eyes to the ceiling and shrugging his shoulders. These gestures of his mimic language meant that, however great the successes of knowledge, there are riddles, friend Horatio,
⁸
before which science folds.

He walked past Yuri Andreevich, bowing to him with a smile, performed several swimming movements with the fat palms of his plump hands, implying that one had to wait and be humble, and went down the corridor to smoke in the waiting room.

Then the assistant of the reticent gynecologist came out to Yuri Andreevich, in her garrulousness the total opposite of her superior.

“If I were you, I’d go home. I’ll phone you tomorrow at the Krestovozdvizhensky. It will hardly begin before then. I’m sure the delivery will be natural, without artificial interference. But, on the other hand, the somewhat narrow pelvis, the occipito-posterior position of the fetus, the absence of pain, and the insignificance of the contractions are cause for some apprehension. However, it’s too early to tell. It all depends on how she responds to the contractions once the delivery begins. And that the future will show.”

The next day, in answer to his telephone call, the hospital porter who
took the phone told him not to hang up, went to find out, left him hanging for some ten minutes, and brought the following information in a crude and incompetent form: “They told me to tell you, tell him, they said, you brought your wife too early, you have to take her back.” Furious, Yuri Andreevich demanded that someone better informed take the phone. “Symptoms can be deceptive,” a nurse told him. “The doctor shouldn’t be alarmed, he’ll have to wait a day or two.”

On the third day he learned that the delivery had begun during the night, the water had broken at dawn, and strong contractions had continued uninterruptedly since morning.

He rushed headlong to the clinic, and as he walked down the corridor, he heard, through the accidentally half-open door, Tonya’s screams, like the screams of accident victims with severed limbs when they are pulled from under the wheels of a train.

He was not allowed to go to her. Biting his bent finger till it bled, he went to the window, outside which oblique rain poured down, the same as yesterday and the day before.

A hospital nurse came out of the ward. The squealing of a newborn could be heard from there.

“Safe, safe,” Yuri Andreevich repeated joyfully to himself.

“A little son. A boy. Congratulations on the successful delivery,” the nurse said in a singsong voice. “You can’t go in now. We’ll show him to you in due time. Then you’ll have to loosen your purse strings for the new mother. She suffered all right. It’s her first. They always suffer with the first one.”

“Safe, safe,” Yuri Andreevich rejoiced, not understanding what the nurse was saying and that with her words she was including him as a participant in what had happened, though what did he have to do with it? Father, son—he saw no pride in this gratuitously obtained fatherhood, he felt nothing at this sonhood fallen from the sky. It all lay outside his consciousness. The main thing was Tonya, Tonya who had been exposed to mortal danger and had happily escaped it.

He had a patient who lived not far from the clinic. He went to see him and came back in half an hour. Both doors, from the corridor to the vestibule, and further on, from the vestibule to the ward, were again slightly open. Himself not knowing what he was doing, Yuri Andreevich slipped into the vestibule.

Spreading his arms, the mastodon-gynecologist in his white smock rose up before him as if from under the earth.

“Where are you going?” he stopped him in a breathless whisper, so that the new mother would not hear him. “Are you out of your mind? Lesions,
blood, antiseptics, not to mention the psychological shock. A good one you are! And a doctor at that.”

“But I didn’t … I only wanted a little peek. From here. Through the chink.”

“Ah, that’s a different matter. All right, then. But don’t you … ! Watch out! If she sees you, you’re dead, I won’t leave an ounce of life in you!”

In the ward, their backs to the door, stood two women in white smocks, the midwife and the nurse. On the nurse’s hand squirmed a squealing and tender human offspring, contracting and stretching like a piece of dark red rubber. The midwife was putting a ligature on the umbilical cord, to separate the baby from the placenta. Tonya lay in the middle of the ward on a surgical bed with an adjustable mattress. She lay rather high. Yuri Andreevich, who in his excitement exaggerated everything, thought she was lying approximately on the level of those desks one can write at standing up.