Doctor Zhivago (26 page)

Galiullin had asked to speak to the commissar, who was somewhere at the station or nearby, in order to tell him that he would soon come to join him at the clearing and to ask that he wait for him and undertake nothing without him. Kolya had refused Galiullin’s request to call Gintz to the phone, on the pretext that he had the line busy transmitting signals to the train approaching Biriuchi, while he himself was at the same time trying by
hook or by crook to hold the train, which was bringing the summoned Cossacks to Biriuchi, at the previous junction.

When the troop train arrived after all, Kolya could not hide his displeasure.

The engine slowly crept under the dark roof of the platform and stopped just in front of the huge window of the control room. Kolya opened wide the heavy railway station curtains of dark blue broadcloth with railway monograms woven into the borders. On the stone windowsill stood a huge carafe of water and a thick, simply cut glass on a big tray. Kolya poured water into the glass, took several gulps, and looked out the window.

The engineer noticed Kolya and gave him a friendly nod
from the cab. “Ooh, you stinking trash, you wood louse!” Kolya thought with hatred, stuck his tongue out at the engineer, and shook his fist at him. The engineer not only understood Kolya’s miming, but, by shrugging his shoulders and turning his head in the direction of the carriages, was able to convey: “What can I do? Try it yourself. He’s in charge.” “You’re trash and filth all the same,” Kolya mimed back.

They began leading the horses out of the freight cars. They balked, refusing to move. The hollow thud of hooves on the wooden gangways changed to the clanging of horseshoes against the stone of the platform. The rearing horses were led across several lines of tracks.

They ended up by two rows of discarded cars on two pairs of rusty rails overgrown with grass. The degradation of the wood, stripped of paint by the rain and rotted by worms and dampness, had restored to these broken-down cars their original kinship with the damp forest that began on the other side of the tracks, with the tinder fungus that ailed the birches, with the clouds piling up over it.

At the edge of the forest, the Cossacks mounted up on command and rode to the clearing.

The mutineers of the 212th were surrounded. Horsemen always look taller and more imposing among trees than in the open. They impressed the soldiers, though they had rifles in their dugouts. The Cossacks drew their sabers.

Inside the ring of horses, Gintz jumped onto a pile of stacked and leveled firewood and addressed a speech to the surrounded soldiers.

Again, as was usual with him, he spoke of military duty, the importance of the motherland, and many other lofty subjects. His notions met with no sympathy here. The mob was too numerous. It consisted of men who had suffered much during the war, had become coarse and weary. The words Gintz uttered had long since stuck in their ears. Four months of ingratiation from the right and the left had corrupted this crowd. The simple folk who made it up gave a cool reception to the orator’s non-Russian name and Baltic accent.

Gintz felt that he was speaking too long, and was vexed with himself, but thought he was doing it for the sake of greater accessibility to his listeners, who, instead of gratitude, paid him back with expressions of indifference and hostile boredom. Becoming more and more annoyed, he decided to address his audience in stiffer terms and make use of the threats he was keeping in reserve. Not hearing the rising murmur, he reminded the soldiers that revolutionary courts-martial had been introduced and were functioning, and demanded on pain of death that they lay down their weapons and hand over the instigators. If they did not do so, Gintz said, it would prove that they were lowdown traitors, irresponsible riffraff, conceited boors. These people were no longer accustomed to such a tone.

A roar of hundreds of voices arose. “You’ve had your say. Enough. All right,” some cried in bass voices and almost without malice. But there were hysterical outcries from the trebles overstrained with hatred. They were listened to. They shouted:

“Do you hear how he lays it on, comrades? Just like the old days! They haven’t shed their officer’s habits! So we’re the traitors! And where do you come from, Your Honor? Why dance around him? You can see, can’t you, he’s a German, an infiltrator. Hey, blue blood, show us your papers! And what are you pacifiers gaping at? Here we are, put the ropes on us, eat us up!”

But the Cossacks also had less and less liking for Gintz’s unfortunate speech. “It’s all boors and swine. The little squire!” they exchanged in whispers. First singly, then in greater numbers, they began to sheath their sabers. One after another they got off their horses. When enough of them had dismounted, they moved in disorder towards the center of the clearing to meet the 212th. Everything became confused. Fraternization began.

“You’d better quietly disappear somehow,” the worried Cossack officers said to Gintz. “Your car is near the junction. We’ll send word that it should be brought closer. Get away quickly.”

Gintz did so, but since he found it undignified to sneak off, he headed for the station without the necessary caution, almost openly. He walked in terrible agitation, forcing himself out of pride to go calmly and unhurriedly.

It was not far to the station; the forest was just next to it. At the edge, already within sight of the tracks, he looked back for the first time. Behind him walked soldiers with guns. “What do they want?” thought Gintz and quickened his pace.

His pursuers did the same. The distance between him and the chase did not change. The double wall of broken-down cars appeared ahead. Once behind them, Gintz broke into a run. The train that had delivered the Cossacks had been taken to the depot. The tracks were clear. Gintz crossed them at a run.

He made a running leap onto the high platform. At that moment the soldiers chasing him ran from behind the broken-down cars. Povarikhin and Kolya shouted something to Gintz and made signs for him to come inside the station, where they could save him.

But again the sense of honor bred over generations, urban, sacrificial, and inapplicable here, barred his way to safety. By an inhuman effort of will, he tried to control the trembling of his runaway heart. “I must call out to them: ‘Brothers, come to your senses, what kind of spy am I?’ ” he thought. “Something sobering, heartfelt, that will stop them.”

In recent months the sense of heroic deeds, of the soul’s outcry, had unconsciously become connected with rostrums and tribunes, with chairs that one could jump up on and hurl some call, something fiery, to the throng.

By the door of the station, under the signal bell, stood a tall firefighting barrel. It was tightly covered. Gintz jumped onto the lid and addressed to the approaching men several soul-wrenching words, inhuman and incoherent. The insane boldness of his address, two steps from the thrown-open doors of the station, where he could so easily have run, stunned them and rooted them to the spot. The soldiers lowered their guns.

But Gintz stepped on the edge of the lid and turned it under. One of his legs went into the water, the other hung down the side of the barrel. He wound up sitting astride the edge.

The soldiers met this clumsiness with an explosion of guffaws and the first one killed the unfortunate man with a point-blank shot in the neck, while the others rushed to stab the dead body with their bayonets.

Mademoiselle called Kolya on the telephone and told him to settle the doctor comfortably on the train, threatening him otherwise with disclosures that he would find unpleasant.

While answering Mademoiselle, Kolya was as usual conducting some other telephone conversation and, judging by the decimals that peppered his speech, was telegraphing something in ciphers to a third place.

“Pskov, north line, do you hear me? What rebels? What hand? What is it,
Mam’selle? Nonsense, mumbo jumbo. Get off, hang up the phone, you’re bothering me. Pskov, north line, Pskov. Thirty-six comma zero zero fifteen. Ah, curse it all, the tape broke off! What? What? I don’t hear. Is that you again, Mam’selle? I told you in plain Russian, it’s impossible, I can’t. Ask Povarikhin. Nonsense, mumbo jumbo. Thirty-six … ah, the devil … Get off, don’t bother me, Mam’selle.”

And Mademoiselle was saying:

“Don’t throw dust in my eye, mumbo jumbo, Pskov, Pskov, mumbo jumbo, I see right through you and back again, you put the doctor in car tomorrow, and I won’t more speak with any murderer and little Judas-traitor.”

It was sultry when Yuri Andreevich left. A thunderstorm was gathering, as two days earlier.

The clay huts and geese in the settlement around the station, all scattered with spat-out husks of sunflower seeds, sat white and frightened under the immobile gaze of the black, menacing sky.

Bordering the station building was a wide clearing that stretched far to both sides. The grass on it was trampled down, and it was entirely covered by an immense crowd of people, who had spent weeks waiting for trains in the various directions each needed.

There were old men in the crowd, dressed in coarse gray kaftans, who went from group to group under the scorching sun gathering rumors and information. Silent adolescents around fourteen years old lay on their sides, propped on an elbow with a leafless switch in their hands, as if tending cattle. Their younger brothers and sisters darted underfoot, their shirts pulling up, exposing their pink bottoms. Their mothers sat on the ground, their tightly joined legs stretched out, with nursing babies swaddled crookedly under their brown homespun coats.

“They all scattered like sheep when the shooting began. Didn’t like it at all!” the stationmaster Povarikhin was saying with hostility as he and the doctor zigzagged their way among the rows of bodies lying next to each other outside the doors and inside on the floor of the station.

“The lawn was suddenly empty! We could see the ground again. What a joy! For four months we hadn’t seen it under this Gypsy camp—forgot what it looked like. Here’s where he lay. Amazing thing, I’ve seen all sorts of horrors during the war, it’s time I got used to them. But here I was seized by such pity! Above all—the senselessness. For what? What harm had he done
them? Can they be human beings? They say he was the family favorite. And now to the right, here, here, this way, please, to my office. Don’t even think of getting on this train, you’ll be crushed to death. I’ll put you on another one, a local one. We’re making it up ourselves, it’s going to be formed right now. Only not a word till you get on, not to anyone! If you let it slip, they’ll tear it apart even before it’s coupled. You’ll have to change in Sukhinichi during the night.”

When the secret train was formed and started backing into the station from behind the depot, all the people crowded on the lawn rushed to intercept the slowly moving cars. People came rolling off the hillocks like peas and ran up the embankment. Pushing each other aside, they leaped onto the buffers and footboards in motion, while others climbed through the windows and onto the roofs of the cars. The still-moving train was filled up in no time, and when it reached the platform it was jam packed and hung from top to bottom with passengers.

By a miracle, the doctor squeezed himself onto a rear platform and then, in a still more incomprehensible way, penetrated into the corridor of the car.

And in the corridor he remained throughout the entire trip, and got to Sukhinichi sitting on his things on the floor.

The storm clouds had long since dispersed. Over the fields flooded by the burning rays of the sun, the ceaseless chirring of grasshoppers rolled from end to end, drowning out the noise of the train’s movement.

The passengers standing at the windows blocked the light for all the others. They cast long shadows, folded double and triple on the floor, the benches, the partitions. The shadows did not fit into the car. They were pushed out the windows opposite and ran skipping along the other side of the embankment, together with the shadow of the whole rolling train.

All around people jabbered, bawled songs, cursed, and played cards. At the stops, the bedlam inside was joined by the noise of the crowd besieging the train from outside. The din of voices reached the deafening level of a sea storm. And, as at sea, in the middle of a stop there would suddenly fall an inexplicable silence. One could hear hurried steps on the platform along the whole length of the train, scurrying about and arguing by the baggage car, separate words spoken by people seeing someone off in the distance, the quiet clucking of hens, and the rustling of trees in the station’s front garden.

Then, like a telegram received on the way, or like greetings from Meliuzeevo,
a fragrance floated through the window, familiar, as if addressed to Yuri Andreevich. It manifested itself with quiet superiority somewhere to one side and came from a height unusual for wild or garden flowers.

The doctor could not get to the window owing to the crush. But even without looking, he could see those trees in his imagination. They probably grew quite nearby, calmly reaching towards the roofs of the cars with their spreading branches, the foliage dusty from railroad commotion and thick as night, finely sprinkled with the waxy little stars of glimmering flower clusters.

This was repeated for the whole way. Everywhere there were noisy crowds. Everywhere there were blossoming lindens.

The ubiquitous wafting of this smell seemed to precede the northbound train, like a rumor spread to all junctions, watch houses, and little stations, which the travelers found everywhere, already established and confirmed.

At night in Sukhinichi an obliging porter of the old stamp took the doctor to some unlit tracks and put him through the rear door of a second-class car of some train that had just arrived and did not figure on the schedule.

The porter had no sooner opened the rear door with a pass key and thrown the doctor’s things onto the platform, than he had to face a brief fight with the conductor, who immediately wanted to get rid of them, but, mollified by Yuri Andreevich, he effaced himself and vanished into thin air.