Doctor Zhivago (25 page)

“Nothing will happen. You’re exaggerating. Besides, I am leaving. But it can’t be just like that: snip-snap and good luck to you. I have to turn over the inventory with a list, otherwise it will look as if I’ve stolen something. And who am I to turn it over to? That’s the question. I’ve suffered so much with this inventory, and the only reward is reproaches. I registered Zhabrinsky’s property as the hospital’s, because that was the sense of the decree. And now it comes out that I did it as a pretense, in order to keep things for the owner. How vile!”

“Ah, spit on the rugs and china, let it all perish. As if there was anything to be upset about! Yes, yes, it’s vexing in the highest degree that we didn’t see each other yesterday. I was so inspired! I’d have explained all of heavenly mechanics for you, and answered all the accursed questions!
¹³
No, no joking, I really was longing to speak myself out. To tell about my wife, my son, my life. Devil take it, can’t a grown-up man talk with a grown-up woman without the immediate suspicion that there’s something ‘behind’ it? Brr! To the devil with all these fronts and behinds!

“Iron, iron, please—I mean, iron the laundry and pay no attention to me, and I’ll talk. I’ll talk for a long time.

“Just think what a time it is now! And you and I are living in these days! Only once in eternity do such unprecedented things happen. Think: the roof over the whole of Russia has been torn off, and we and all the people find ourselves under the open sky. And there’s nobody to spy on us. Freedom! Real, not just in words and demands, but fallen from the sky, beyond all expectation. Freedom by inadvertence, by misunderstanding.

“And how perplexedly enormous everyone is! Have you noticed? As if each of them is crushed by himself, by the revelation of his own heroic might.

“No, go on ironing. Keep still. You’re not bored? I’ll change the iron for you.

“I watched a meeting last night. An astounding spectacle. Mother Russia has begun to move, she won’t stay put, she walks and never tires of walking, she talks and can’t talk enough. And it’s not as if only people are talking. Stars and trees come together and converse, night flowers philosophize, and
stone buildings hold meetings. Something gospel-like, isn’t it? As in the time of the apostles. Remember, in Paul? ‘Speak in tongues and prophesy. Pray for the gift of interpretation.’ ”
¹⁴

“About the meetings of the trees and stars I understand. I know what you want to say. The same has happened to me.”

“The war did half of it, the rest was completed by the revolution. The war was an artificial interruption of life, as if existence could be postponed for a time (how absurd!). The revolution broke out involuntarily, like breath held for too long. Everyone revived, was reborn, in everyone there are transformations, upheavals. You might say that everyone went through two revolutions, one his own, personal, the other general. It seems to me that socialism is a sea into which all these personal, separate revolutions should flow, the sea of life, the sea of originality. The sea of life, I said, the life that can be seen in paintings, life touched by genius, life creatively enriched. But now people have decided to test it, not in books, but in themselves, not in abstraction, but in practice.”

The unexpected tremor in his voice betrayed the doctor’s incipient agitation. Interrupting her ironing for a moment, Larissa Fyodorovna gave him a serious and surprised look. He became confused and forgot what he was talking about. After a short pause, he began to talk again. Rushing headlong, he poured out God knows what. He said:

“In these days one longs so much to live honestly and productively! One wants so much to be part of the general inspiration! And then, amidst the joy that grips everyone, I meet your mysteriously mirthless gaze, wandering no one knows where, in some far-off kingdom, in some far-off land. What wouldn’t I give for it not to be there, for it to be written on your face that you are pleased with your fate and need nothing from anyone. So that somebody close to you, your friend or husband (best if he were a military man), would take me by the hand and ask me not to worry about your lot and not to burden you with my attention. And I would tear my hand free, swing, and … Ah, I’ve forgotten myself! Forgive me, please.”

The doctor’s voice failed him again. He waved his hand and with the feeling of an irreparable blunder got up and went to the window. He stood with his back to the room, propped his cheek in his hand, leaning his elbow on the windowsill, and, in search of pacification, directed his absentminded, unseeing gaze into the depths of the garden shrouded in darkness.

Going around the ironing board that rested on the table and on the edge of the other window, Larissa Fyodorovna stopped a few steps away from the doctor, behind him, in the middle of the room.

“Ah, how I’ve always been afraid of this!” she said softly, as if to herself.
“What a fatal error! Stop, Yuri Andreevich, you mustn’t. Ah, look what I’ve done because of you!” she exclaimed loudly and ran to the board, where a thin stream of acrid smoke was rising from a blouse burned through under the iron forgotten on it. “Yuri Andreevich,” she went on, banging the iron down angrily on the burner. “Yuri Andreevich, be a good boy, go to Mademoiselle for a moment, drink some water, dearest, and come back here the way I’m used to you and would like to see you. Do you hear, Yuri Andreevich? I know you can do it. Please, I beg you.”

Such talks between them were not repeated again. A week later Larissa Fyodorovna left.

A short time later Zhivago began to prepare for the road. The night before his departure, there was a terrible storm in Meliuzeevo.

The noise of the hurricane merged with the noise of the downpour, which now fell vertically on the roofs, now, under the pressure of the shifting wind, moved down the street, its lashing torrents as if winning step by step.

Peals of thunder followed one another without pause, becoming one uniform rumbling. Frequent flashes of lightning showed the street running away into the distance, with trees bending over and running in the same direction.

During the night, Mademoiselle Fleury was awakened by an anxious knocking at the front door. Frightened, she sat up in bed and listened. The knocking did not stop.

Can it be that in the whole hospital not a soul will be found to come out and open the door, she thought, and that she alone, a wretched old woman, must do it all for them, only because nature had made her honest and endowed her with a sense of duty?

Well, all right, the Zhabrinskys were rich people, aristocrats. But the hospital is theirs, the people’s. Why did they abandon it? It would be curious to know, for instance, where the orderlies have vanished to. Everybody’s scattered, there are no directors, no nurses, no doctors. And there are still wounded in the house, two with amputated legs upstairs in the surgical section, where the drawing room used to be, and the storeroom downstairs, next to the laundry, is full of dysentery cases. And that she-devil Ustinya has gone visiting somewhere. The foolish woman could see the storm gathering, why the deuce did she have to go? Now she’s got a good excuse for staying the night.

Well, they’ve stopped, thank God, they’ve quieted down. They saw no
one will open and they waved their hand and left. What the devil are they doing out in such weather? But maybe it’s Ustinya? No, she has her own key. My God, how frightening, they’re knocking again!

But, all the same, what swinishness! I suppose you can’t expect anything from Zhivago. He’s leaving tomorrow, and in his thoughts he’s already in Moscow or on his way. But what about Galiullin? How can he snore away or lie quiet, hearing such knocking, and count on her, a weak and defenseless old woman, to get up in the end and go to open the door to some unknown person, on this dreadful night, in this dreadful country?

“Galiullin!” She suddenly caught herself. “What Galiullin?” No, only half-awake could such an absurdity occur to her! What Galiullin, if even his tracks are cold? Didn’t she herself, together with Zhivago, hide him and change him into civilian clothes, and then explain about the roads and villages in the area, so he’d know where to escape to, when that dreadful lynching took place at the station and they killed Commissar Gintz, and chased Galiullin from Biriuchi as far as Meliuzeevo, shooting after him and searching for him all over town? Galiullin!

If those fellows hadn’t come rolling in, there’d be no stone left upon stone in the town. An armored division happened to be passing through. They stood up for the inhabitants and curbed the scoundrels.

The thunderstorm was weakening, moving away. The thunderclaps came from a distance, more rare and muffled. The rain stopped intermittently, but water continued to trickle down with a soft splashing from the leaves and gutters. Soundless glimmers of lightning came into Mademoiselle’s room, lit it up, and lingered there for an extra moment, as if searching for something.

Suddenly the knocking at the door, which had ceased for a long time, started again. Someone needed help and was knocking desperately and rapidly. The wind picked up again. More rain poured down.

“One moment!” Mademoiselle cried out, not knowing to whom, and frightened herself with her own voice.

An unexpected surmise dawned on her. Lowering her feet from the bed and putting on her slippers, she threw her house robe over her and ran to awaken Zhivago, so as not to feel so frightened alone. But he, too, had heard the knocking and was himself coming down to meet her with a candle. They had made the same assumptions.

“Zhivagó, Zhivagó! There’s knocking at the outside door, I’m afraid to open it by myself,” she cried in French, and added in Russian: “ ’Ave a luke. Ees Lar or Lieutenant Gaioul.”

Yuri Andreevich had also been awakened by the knocking, and thought
that it must be someone they knew, either Galiullin, be hidden by something and coming back to the refuge where he could hide, or the nurse Antipova, forced by some difficulties to turn back from her journey.

In the front hall, the doctor handed Mademoiselle the candle, while he turned the key in the door and unbolted it. A gust of wind tore the door from his hand, blew out the candle, and showered them both with a cold spray of rain from outside.

“Who’s there? Who’s there? Is anybody there?” Mademoiselle and the doctor called out in turn into the darkness, but nobody answered. Suddenly they heard the former knocking in another place, from the back entrance, or, as it now seemed to them, at the window to the garden.

“It’s evidently the wind,” said the doctor. “But for the sake of a clear conscience, go to the back door anyway, to make sure, and I’ll wait here, so that we don’t cross each other, if it really is someone, and not from some other cause.”

Mademoiselle went off into the depths of the house, and the doctor went outside under the roof of the porch. His eyes, growing accustomed to the darkness, made out signs of the coming dawn.

Over the town, like halfwits, clouds raced swiftly, as if escaping pursuit. Their tatters flew so low that they almost caught in the trees leaning in the same direction, so that it looked as if someone were sweeping the sky with them, as if with bending besoms. Rain lashed at the wooden wall of the house, turning it from gray to black.

“Well?” the doctor asked Mademoiselle when she came back.

“You’re right. There’s nobody.” And she told him that she had gone around the whole house. In the butler’s pantry a window had been broken by a piece of a linden branch that struck the glass, and there were huge puddles on the floor, and it was the same in the room Lara had left behind, a sea, a veritable sea, a whole ocean.

“And here’s a shutter torn loose and beating against the window frame. You see? That’s the whole explanation.”

They talked a little more, locked the door, and went their ways to bed, both sorry that the alarm had proved false.

They had been certain that they would open the front door and the woman they knew so well would come in, wet to the skin and freezing, and they would bombard her with questions while she shook herself off. And then, having changed her clothes, she would come to dry herself by the lingering heat of the stove in the kitchen and would tell them about her countless misadventures, smoothing her hair and laughing.

They were so certain of it that, when they locked the door, the traces of
their certainty remained by the corner of the house outside, in the form of the woman’s watermark or image, which continued to appear to them from around the turning.

The one considered to be indirectly responsible for the soldiers’ riot at the station was the Biriuchi telegraphist Kolya Frolenko.

Kolya was the son of a well-known Meliuzeevo watchmaker. He had been known in Meliuzeevo from the cradle. As a boy, he had visited someone among the Razdolnoe house staff and, under the surveillance of Mademoiselle, had played with her two charges, the countess’s daughters. Mademoiselle knew Kolya well. It was then that he had begun to understand a little French.

People in Meliuzeevo were used to seeing Kolya lightly dressed in any weather, without a hat, in canvas summer shoes, on a bicycle. Letting go of the handlebars, his body thrown back and his arms crossed on his chest, he rolled down the main street and around town and glanced at the poles and wires, checking the state of the network.

Some houses in town were connected with the station through a branch line of the railway telephone. The management of this line was in Kolya’s hands at the station control room.

There he was up to his ears in work: the railway telegraph, the telephone, and occasionally, in moments of the station chief Povarikhin’s brief absences, the signals and the block system, the apparatus for which was also in the control room.

The necessity of keeping an eye on the operation of several mechanisms at once made Kolya develop a special manner of speaking, obscure, abrupt, and full of riddles, to which Kolya resorted when he had no wish to answer someone or get into conversation. The word was that he had made too broad a use of this right on the day of the disorders.

By his omissions he had, in fact, deprived of force all of Galiullin’s good intentions in his phone calls from town, and, perhaps against his will, had given a fatal turn to the subsequent events.