Doctor Zhivago (27 page)

The mysterious train was of special purpose and went rather quickly, with brief stops and some sort of guard. The cars were quite vacant.

The compartment Zhivago entered was brightly lit by a guttering candle on a little table, its flame wavering in the stream of air from a half-lowered window.

The candle belonged to the sole passenger in the compartment. He was a fair-haired youth, probably very tall, judging by his long arms and legs. They flexed extremely freely at the joints, like poorly fastened component parts of folding objects. The young man was sitting on the seat by the window, leaning back casually. When Zhivago appeared, he politely rose and changed his half-reclining position to a more appropriate sitting one.

Under his seat lay something like a floor rag. Suddenly the end of the rag moved and a flop-eared hound bustled herself up and came out. She sniffed Yuri Andreevich, looked him over, and started running from corner to corner of the compartment, her legs flexing as freely as her lanky master’s when he crossed them. Soon, at the latter’s command, she bustled herself back
under the seat and assumed her former look of a crumpled floor-polishing cloth.

Only then did Yuri Andreevich notice a double-barreled shotgun in a case, a leather cartridge belt, and a game bag tightly stuffed with shot birds, hanging on hooks in the compartment.

The young man was a hunter.

He was distinguished by an extreme garrulousness and with an amiable smile hastened to get into conversation with the doctor. As he did so he looked the doctor in the mouth all the while, not figuratively but in the most direct sense.

The young man turned out to have an unpleasantly high voice, at its highest verging on a metallic falsetto. Another oddity: by all tokens a Russian, he pronounced one vowel, namely the
u
, in a most peculiar way. He softened it like the French
u
or the German
ü.
Moreover, this defective
u
was very hard for him to get out; he articulated its sound more loudly than all the others, straining terribly, with a slight shriek. Almost at the very beginning, he took Yuri Andreevich aback with the following phrase:

“Only yesterday morning I was shüting wüdcock.”

At moments, when he obviously watched himself more carefully, he overcame this irregularity, but he had only to forget himself and it would creep in again.

“What is this bedevilment?” thought Zhivago. “It’s something familiar, I’ve read about it. As a doctor, I ought to know, but it’s skipped my mind. Some phenomenon of the brain that provokes a speech defect. But this mewling is so funny, it’s hard to remain serious. Conversation is utterly impossible. I’d better climb up and get in bed.”

And so the doctor did. When he began to settle himself on the upper berth, the young man asked if he should put out the candle, which might bother Yuri Andreevich. The doctor gratefully accepted the offer. His neighbor put out the light. It became dark.

The window in the compartment was half lowered.

“Shouldn’t we close the window?” asked Yuri Andreevich. “Aren’t you afraid of thieves?”

His neighbor made no reply. Yuri Andreevich repeated the question very loudly, but again the man did not respond.

Then Yuri Andreevich lit a match so as to see what his neighbor was up to, whether he had left the compartment in such a brief space of time, or was asleep, which would be still more incredible.

But no, he was sitting open-eyed in his place and smiled when the doctor hung his head down.

The match went out. Yuri Andreevich lit another and by its light repeated for the third time what he wished to ascertain.

“Do as you think best,” the hunter answered at once. “I’ve got nothing worth stealing. However, it would be better not to close it. It’s stuffy.”

“Fancy that,” thought Zhivago. “The strange fellow’s apparently used to talking only in full light. And how clearly he pronounced it all just now, without his irregularities! Inconceivable to the mind!”

The doctor felt broken by the events of the past week, the agitation before departure, the preparations for the road, and boarding the train in the morning. He thought he would fall asleep the moment he stretched out in a comfortable place. Not so. Excessive exhaustion made him sleepless. He dozed off only towards morning.

Chaotic as was the whirlwind of thoughts swarming in his head during those long hours, there were, essentially speaking, two spheres of them, two persistent balls, which kept winding up and then unwinding.

One sphere consisted of thoughts of Tonya, home, and the former smooth-running life, in which everything down to the smallest details was clothed in poetry and imbued with warmth and purity. The doctor worried about that life and wished it to be preserved intact, and, flying through the night on the speeding train, he longed impatiently to be back in that life after more than two years of separation.

Faithfulness to the revolution and admiration for it also belonged to that sphere. This was the revolution in the sense in which it was taken by the middle classes, and in that understanding imparted to it by the student youth of the year 1905, who worshipped Blok.

To that sphere, intimate and habitual, also belonged those signs of the new, those promises and presages, which had appeared on the horizon before the war, between the years 1912 and 1914, in Russian thought, Russian art, and Russian destiny, the destiny of all Russia and of himself, Zhivago.

After the war, he wanted to go back to that spirit, to its renewal and continuation, just as he longed to be back home after his absence.

The new was likewise the subject of his thoughts in the second sphere, but how differently, how distinctly new! This was not his own habitual new, prepared for by the old, but a spontaneous, irrevocable new, prescribed by reality, sudden as a shock.

To this new belonged the war, its blood and horrors, its homelessness and
savagery. To this new belonged the trials and the wisdom of life taught by the war. To this new belonged the remote towns the war brought you to and the people you ran into. To this new belonged the revolution, not as idealized by university intellectuals in 1905, but this present-day one, born of the war, bloody, a soldiers’ revolution, reckless of everything, led by connoisseurs of this element, the Bolsheviks.

To this new belonged the nurse Antipova, flung God knows where by the war, with a life completely unknown to him, who reproached no one for anything and was almost plaintive in her muteness, mysterious in her laconism, and so strong in her silence. To this new belonged Yuri Andreevich’s honest trying with all his might not to love her, just as he had tried all his life to treat all people with love, not to mention his family and close friends.

The train raced along at full steam. The head wind coming through the lowered window tousled and blew dust in Yuri Andreevich’s hair. During the stops at night the same thing went on as during the day, the crowds raged and the lindens rustled.

Sometimes out of the depths of the night carts and gigs rolled up with a clatter to the station. Voices and the rumbling of wheels mixed with the sound of the trees.

In those moments one seemed to understand what made these night shadows rustle and bend to each other and what they whispered together, barely stirring their sleep-laden leaves, as if with thick, lisping tongues. It was the same thing Yuri Andreevich thought about as he stirred on his upper berth: the news of Russia gripped by ever-widening disturbances, the news of the revolution, the news of her fatal and difficult hour, of her probable ultimate grandeur.

The next day the doctor woke up late. It was past eleven. “Marquise, Marquise!” his neighbor was restraining his growling dog in a half whisper. To Yuri Andreevich’s surprise, he and the hunter remained alone in the compartment; no one had joined them on the way. The names of the stations were now familiar from childhood. The train had left the province of Kaluga and cut deep into Moscow province.

Having performed his traveling ablutions in prewar comfort, the doctor returned to the compartment for breakfast, offered him by his curious companion. Now Yuri Andreevich had a better look at him.

The distinctive features of this personage were extreme garrulousness and mobility. The stranger liked to talk, and the main thing for him was not communication and the exchange of thoughts, but the activity of speech
itself, the pronouncing of words and the uttering of sounds. While talking, he bounced up and down on the seat as if on springs, guffawed deafeningly and causelessly, rubbed his hands briskly with pleasure, and when this proved insufficient to express his delight, slapped his knees with his palms, laughing to the point of tears.

The conversation resumed with all the previous day’s oddities. The stranger was astonishingly inconsistent. Now he would make confessions to which no one had prompted him; now, without batting an eye, he would leave the most innocent questions unanswered.

He poured out a whole heap of the most fantastic and incoherent information about himself. Sad to say, he probably fibbed a little. He was undoubtedly aiming at the effect of the extremity of his views and the denial of all that was generally accepted.

It was all reminiscent of something long familiar. The nihilists of the last century had talked in the spirit of such radicalism, and some of Dostoevsky’s heroes a little later, and then still quite recently their direct continuation, that is, the whole of educated provincial Russia, often going ahead of the capitals, thanks to a thoroughness preserved in the backwoods, which in the capitals had become dated and unfashionable.

The young man told him that he was the nephew of a well-known revolutionary, while his parents, on the contrary, were incorrigible reactionaries—mastodons, as he put it. They had a decent estate in one of the areas near the front. It was there that the young man had grown up. His parents had been at daggers drawn with his uncle all their lives, but the young man felt no rancor and now his influence had spared them many an unpleasantness.

He himself, in his convictions, had taken after his uncle, the garrulous subject informed him—extremist and maximalist in everything: in questions of life, politics, and art. Again there was a whiff of Petenka Verkhovensky, not in the leftist sense, but in the sense of depravity and hollow verbiage. “Next he’ll recommend himself as a Futurist,” thought Yuri Andreevich, and indeed the talk turned to the Futurists.
¹⁵
“And next he’ll start talking about sports,” the doctor went on second-guessing, “horse races or skating rinks or French wrestling.” And in fact the conversation turned to hunting.

The young man said that he had just been hunting in his native region, and boasted that he was an excellent shot, and if it were not for his physical defect, which kept him from being a soldier, he would have distinguished himself in war by his marksmanship.

Catching Zhivago’s questioning glance, he exclaimed:

“What? You mean you haven’t noticed anything? I thought you’d guessed about my deficiency.”

And he took two cards from his pocket and gave them to Yuri Andreevich. One was his visiting card. He had a double last name. He was Maxim Aristarkhovich Klintsov-Pogorevshikh—or just Pogorevshikh, as he asked to be called in honor of his uncle, who called himself precisely by that name.

The other card had on it a table divided into squares showing pictures of variously joined hands with their fingers composed in various ways. It was sign language for deaf-mutes. Suddenly everything became clear.

Pogorevshikh was a phenomenally gifted pupil of either Hartmann’s or Ostrogradsky’s school, that is, a deaf-mute who had learned with incredible perfection to speak not from hearing, but from looking at the throat muscles of his teacher, and who understood his interlocutor’s speech in the same way.

Then, putting together in his mind where he was from and in what parts he had been hunting, the doctor asked:

“Forgive my indiscretion, and you needn’t answer—but, tell me, did you have anything to do with the Zybushino republic and its creation?”

“But how do you … Excuse me … So you knew Blazheiko? … I did have, I did! Of course I did!” Pogorevshikh rattled out joyfully, laughing, swaying his whole body from side to side, and slapping himself furiously on the knees. And the phantasmagoria went on again.

Pogorevshikh said that Blazheiko had been a pretext for him and Zybushino an indifferent point for applying his own ideas. It was hard for Yuri Andreevich to follow his exposition of them. Pogorevshikh’s philosophy consisted half of the theses of anarchism and half of sheer hunter’s humbug.

In the imperturbable tone of an oracle, Pogorevshikh predicted ruinous shocks in the nearest future. Yuri Andreevich inwardly agreed that they might be inevitable, but the authoritative calm with which this unpleasant boy mouthed his predictions exasperated him.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he objected timorously. “That all may be so. But in my opinion it’s not the time for such risky experiments, in the midst of our chaos and breakdown, in the face of enemy pressure. The country must be allowed to come to its senses and catch its breath after one upheaval, before venturing upon another. We must wait for some calm and order, however relative.”

“That’s naïve,” said Pogorevshikh. “What you call breakdown is as normal a phenomenon as your much-praised and beloved order. Such destruction is a natural and preliminary part of a vaster constructive project. Society has not yet broken down enough. It must fall apart completely, and then the real revolutionary power will piece it back together on totally different principles.”

Yuri Andreevich felt ill at ease. He went out to the corridor.

The train, gathering speed, raced through the Moscow outskirts. Every moment, birch groves with dachas standing close together ran up to the windows and went racing by. Narrow, roofless platforms flew past, with summer residents, men and women, standing on them, who flew far off to one side in the cloud of dust raised by the train and twirled around as on a carousel. The train gave whistle after whistle, and the empty, pipelike, hollow forest echo breathlessly carried its whistles far away.