Doctor Zhivago (19 page)

Raised higher towards the ceiling than happens with ordinary mortals, Tonya was floating in the vapors of what she had suffered, she was as if steaming from exhaustion. She rose up in the middle of the ward, as a bark just moored and unloaded rides high in a bay, a bark that crosses the sea of death to the land of life with new souls, migrating here from no one knows where. She had just carried out the landing of one of these souls and now stood at anchor, resting with all the emptiness of her lightened hull. Along with her rested her broken and toil-worn rigging and planking, and her forgetfulness, her extinguished memory of where she had recently been, what she had crossed, and how she had moored.

And just as no one knew the geography of the country under whose flag she had dropped anchor, so no one knew in what language to address her.

At work they all vied with each other in congratulating him. “How quickly they found out!” Yuri Andreevich thought in surprise.

He went to the interns’ room, which was known as the pot-house and the garbage dump, because, owing to the crowdedness of the overburdened hospital, people now took their coats off there, came from outside in galoshes, forgot all sorts of things brought from elsewhere, littered it with cigarette butts and paper.

By the window of the interns’ room stood the bloated prosector, his arms raised, looking over his spectacles and examining against the light some cloudy liquid in a flask.

“Congratulations,” he said, continuing to look in the same direction and not even deigning to glance at Yuri Andreevich.

“Thank you. I’m touched.”

“No need to thank me, I had nothing to do with it. Pichuzhkin did the
autopsy. But everybody’s amazed. Echinococcus. There, they say, is a diagnostician! It’s all they talk about.”

Just then the head doctor of the clinic came in. He greeted the two men and said:

“Devil knows what this is. A public square, not an interns’ room, it’s outrageous! Ah, yes, Zhivago, imagine—it was echinococcus! We were wrong. Congratulations. And another thing—rather unpleasant. They’ve reviewed your category again. This time we won’t be able to keep you from it. There’s a terrible lack of medical personnel at the front. You’ll be getting a whiff of powder.”

Beyond all expectations, the Antipovs settled very well in Yuriatin. There was a good memory of the Guichards there. For Lara this lightened the difficulties attendant upon getting installed in a new place.

Lara was immersed in work and cares. The house and their little three-year-old Katenka fell to her. No matter how red-haired Marfutka, the Antipovs’ maid, tried, her help was not enough. Larissa Fyodorovna entered into all of Pavel Pavlovich’s affairs. She herself taught in the girls’ high school. She worked without respite and was happy. This was precisely the life she had dreamed of.

She liked it in Yuriatin. It was her native town. It stood on the big river Rynva, navigable in its middle and lower parts, and also on one of the Ural railway lines.

The approach of winter in Yuriatin was betokened by boat owners transporting their boats from the river to town on carts. There they conveyed them to their own courtyards, where the boats wintered over until spring under the open sky. The overturned boats, showing white on the ground at the far end of the yards, signified in Yuriatin the same thing as the fall migration of cranes or the first snow in other places.

Such a boat, under which Katenka played as under the domed roof of a garden gazebo, lay with its white bottom up in the courtyard of the house the Antipovs rented.

Larissa Fyodorovna liked the ways of the remote place, the local intelligentsia with their long northern
o
, their felt boots and warm gray flannel jackets, their naïve trustfulness. She was drawn to the earth and to simple people.

Strangely, it was Pavel Pavlovich, the son of a Moscow railway worker, who turned out to be an incorrigible capital dweller. His attitude towards
the people of Yuriatin was much more severe than his wife’s. He was annoyed by their wildness and ignorance.

Now in retrospect it became clear that he had an extraordinary ability to acquire and retain knowledge drawn from cursory reading. Even before, partly with Lara’s help, he had read a great deal. During these years of provincial solitude, he read so much that now even Lara seemed insufficiently informed to him. He was head and shoulders above the pedagogical milieu of his colleagues and complained that he felt stifled among them. In this time of war, their humdrum patriotism, official and slightly jingoist, did not correspond to the more complex forms of the same feeling that Antipov entertained.

Pavel Pavlovich had graduated in classics. He taught Latin and ancient history in the high school. But suddenly the almost extinguished passion for mathematics, physics, and the exact sciences awakened in him, the former progressive school student. By self-education he acquired a command of all these disciplines at a university level. He dreamed of passing examinations in them at the first opportunity in the district capital, of reorienting himself to some mathematical specialization, and being transferred with his family to Petersburg. Arduous studying at night undermined Pavel Pavlovich’s health. He began to suffer from insomnia.

His relations with his wife were good but lacking in simplicity. She overwhelmed him with her kindness and care, and he did not allow himself to criticize her. He was afraid that his most innocent observation might sound to her like some imaginary, hidden reproach, for instance, for being above him socially, or for having belonged to another before him. The fear that she might suspect him of some unjustly offensive absurdity introduced an artificiality into their life. They tried to outdo each other in nobility and that complicated everything.

The Antipovs had guests—several teachers, Pavel Pavlovich’s colleagues, the headmistress of Lara’s high school, a member of the court of arbitration in which Pavel Pavlovich had once acted as a conciliator, and others. From Pavel Pavlovich’s point of view, every man and woman of them was an utter fool. He was amazed at Lara, who was amiable with them all, and did not believe that she could sincerely like anyone there.

When the guests left, Lara spent a long time airing out and sweeping the rooms and washing dishes in the kitchen with Marfutka. Then, having made sure that Katenka was well tucked in and Pavel was asleep, she quickly undressed, put out the light, and lay down next to her husband with the naturalness of a child taken into its mother’s bed.

But Antipov was pretending to be asleep—he was not. He was having a
fit of the insomnia that had recently become usual with him. He knew he was going to lie sleepless like that for another three or four hours. To walk himself to sleep and get rid of the tobacco smoke left by the guests, he quietly got up and, in his hat and fur coat over nothing but his underwear, went outside.

It was a clear autumn night with frost. Fragile sheets of ice crunched loudly under Antipov’s feet. The starry night, like a flame of burning alcohol, cast its wavering pale blue glow over the black earth with its clods of frozen mud.

The house in which the Antipovs lived was on the opposite side of town from the docks. It was the last house on the street. Beyond it the fields began. They were cut across by the railway. Near the line stood a guardhouse. There was a level crossing over the rails.

Antipov sat down on the overturned boat and looked at the stars. Thoughts he had become used to in recent years seized him with alarming force. He imagined that sooner or later he would have to think them through to the end and that it would be better to do it now.

This can’t go on any longer, he thought. But it all could have been foreseen earlier; he had noticed it too late. Why had she allowed him as a child to admire her so much? Why had she done whatever she wanted with him? Why had he not been wise enough to renounce her in time, when she herself had insisted on it in the winter before their marriage? Doesn’t he understand that she loved not him but her noble task in relation to him, her exploit personified? What is there in common between this inspired and praiseworthy mission and real family life? Worst of all is that he loves her to this day as strongly as ever. She is maddeningly beautiful. But maybe what he feels is also not love, but a grateful bewilderment before her beauty and magnanimity? Pah, just try sorting it out! Here the devil himself would break a leg.

What’s to be done in that case? Free Lara and Katenka from this sham? That’s even more important than to free himself. Yes, but how? Divorce? Drown himself? “Pah, how vile!” He became indignant. “I’ll never go and do such a thing! Then why mention these spectacular abominations even to myself?”

He looked at the stars as if asking their advice. They glimmered, densely and sparsely, big and small, blue and iridescent. Suddenly, eclipsing their glimmer, the courtyard with the house, the boat, and Antipov sitting on it were lit up by a sharp, darting light, as if someone were running from the field to the gate waving a burning torch. It was a military train, throwing puffs of yellow, flame-shot smoke into the sky, going through the crossing to the west, as countless numbers had done day and night for the last year.

Pavel Pavlovich smiled, got up from the boat, and went to bed. The desired way out had been found.

Larissa Fyodorovna was stunned and at first did not believe her ears when she learned of Pasha’s decision. “Absurd. Another whim,” she thought. “Pay no attention, and he’ll forget all about it himself.”

But it turned out that her husband’s preparations had already begun two weeks ago, the papers were in the recruiting office, there was a replacement at school, and from Omsk notification had come of his admission to the military school there. The time of his departure was near.

Lara howled like a peasant woman and, seizing Antipov’s hands, fell at his feet.

“Pasha, Pashenka,” she cried, “why are you leaving me and Katenka? Don’t do it! Don’t! It’s not too late. I’ll straighten it all out. And you haven’t even been seen properly by a doctor. With your heart. You’re ashamed? And aren’t you ashamed to sacrifice your family to some sort of madness? As a volunteer! All your life you’ve made fun of banal Rodka, and suddenly you’re envious! You want to rattle a saber, to play the officer. What’s wrong with you, Pasha, I don’t recognize you! You’re like somebody else! What’s got into you? Kindly tell me, tell me honestly, for Christ’s sake, without ready-made phrases, is this what Russia needs?”

Suddenly she understood that this was not the point at all. Unable to make sense of the particulars, she grasped the main thing. She perceived that Patulya was mistaken about her attitude towards him. He did not appreciate the maternal feeling that she had mixed all her life with her tenderness towards him, and he did not perceive that such love was greater than ordinary woman’s love.

She bit her lip, all shrunken inwardly, as if she had been beaten, and, saying nothing and silently swallowing her tears, set about preparing her husband for the road.

When he left, it seemed to her that the whole town became silent and that there was even a smaller number of crows flying in the sky. “Mistress, mistress,” Marfutka called out to her unsuccessfully. “Mama, mama,” Katenka prattled endlessly, tugging at her sleeve. This was the most serious defeat in her life. Her best, her brightest hopes had collapsed.

Through his letters from Siberia, Lara knew all about her husband. Things soon became clearer to him. He missed his wife and daughter very much. In a few months, Pavel Pavlovich graduated early as a second lieutenant
and was just as unexpectedly assigned to active duty. He traveled with the utmost urgency far from Yuriatin and in Moscow had no time to see anyone.

His letters from the front began to come, more lively and not so sad as from the school in Omsk. Antipov wanted to distinguish himself, so that in reward for some military exploit or as the result of a slight wound he could ask for leave to see his family. The possibility of promotion presented itself. Following a recently accomplished breakthrough, which was later named for Brusilov, the army went on the offensive.
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Letters from Antipov ceased. At first that did not worry Lara. She explained Pasha’s silence by the unfolding military action and the impossibility of writing on the march.

In the fall the army’s advance came to a halt. The troops dug themselves in. But there was still no news from Antipov. Larissa Fyodorovna began to worry and made inquiries, first in Yuriatin and then by mail to Moscow and to the front, to the old field address of Pasha’s unit. No one knew anything, no reply came from anywhere.

Like many lady benefactresses in the district, from the beginning of the war Larissa Fyodorovna had helped as much as she could in the hospital set up in the community clinic of Yuriatin.

Now she began seriously to study the basics of medicine and passed an examination at the clinic to qualify as a nurse.

In that quality she asked for a six-month leave from her work at the school, left Marfutka in charge of the apartment in Yuriatin, and, taking Katenka with her, went to Moscow. There she installed her daughter with Lipochka, whose husband, the German subject Friesendank, along with other civilian prisoners, was interned in Ufa.

Convinced of the uselessness of her search from afar, Larissa Fyodorovna decided to transfer it to the scene of recent events. With that aim, she went to work as a nurse on a hospital train that was going through the town of Lisko to Mezo-Laborszh on the Hungarian border. That was the name of the place from which Pasha had written her his last letter.

A train-bathhouse, fitted out on donations from St. Tatiana’s committee for aid to the wounded,
¹⁰
arrived in staff headquarters at the front. In the first-class carriage of the long train composed of short, ugly freight cars, visitors arrived, activists from Moscow with gifts for the soldiers and officers. Among them was Gordon. He had learned that the division infirmary in
which, according to his information, his childhood friend Zhivago worked, was located in a nearby village.