Doctor Zhivago (28 page)

Suddenly, for the first time in all those days, Yuri Andreevich understood with full clarity where he was, what was happening to him, and what would meet him in a little more than an hour or two.

Three years of changes, uncertainty, marches, war, revolution, shocks, shootings, scenes of destruction, scenes of death, blown-up bridges, ruins, fires—all that suddenly turned into a vast empty place, devoid of content. The first true event after the long interruption was this giddy train ride towards his home, which was intact and still existed in the world, and where every little stone was dear to him. This was what life was, this was what experience was, this was what the seekers of adventure were after, this was what art had in view—coming to your dear ones, returning to yourself, the renewing of existence.

The woods ended. The train burst from leafy thickets into freedom. A sloped clearing went off into the distance on a wide hillock rising from a ravine. It was entirely covered lengthwise with rows of dark green potato plants. At the top of the clearing, at the end of the potato field, glass frames pulled from hothouses lay on the ground. Facing the clearing, behind the tail of the moving train, taking up half the sky, stood an enormous black-purple cloud. The rays of sun breaking from behind it spread wheel-like in all directions, catching at the hothouse frames on their way, flashing on their glass with an unbearable brilliance.

Suddenly out of the cloud a heavy mushroom rain
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poured down obliquely, sparkling in the sun. It fell in hasty drops at the same tempo as the speeding train clacked its wheels and rattled its bolts, as if trying to catch up with it or afraid of lagging behind.

The doctor had barely turned his attention to that, when the cathedral of Christ the Savior appeared from beyond the hill, and the next moment—the cupolas, the roofs, the houses and chimneys of the whole city.

“Moscow,” he said, returning to the compartment. “Time to get ready.”

Pogorevshikh jumped up, began rummaging in his game bag, and chose one of the larger ducks.

“Take it,” he said. “In remembrance. I’ve spent the whole day in such pleasant company.”

No matter how the doctor protested, nothing worked.

“Well, all right,” he was forced to accept, “I’ll take it from you as a present for my wife.”

“For your wife! For your wife! A present for your wife!” Pogorevshikh joyfully repeated, as if hearing the word for the first time, and he began to twitch all over and laughed so much that Marquise came leaping out to share in his joy.

The train was approaching the platform. It became dark as night in the car. The deaf-mute handed the doctor a wild drake wrapped in a scrap of some printed proclamation.

On the way, as a result of sitting motionless in a narrow compartment, it had seemed that only the train was moving, while time stood still, and that it was as yet only noon.

But night was already falling when the cab bringing the doctor and his things emerged with difficulty, at a walk, from the numberless multitude of people crowding around the Smolensky market.

It may have been so, or it may have been that layers of experience from later years were added to the doctor’s impression of that time, but afterwards, in his memory, it seemed to him that even then people bunched together only out of habit, and there was no reason for them to crowd around, because the awnings of the empty stands were lowered and not even fastened with padlocks, and there was nothing to sell on the filthy square, which was no longer swept of dirt and refuse.

And it seemed to him that even then he had seen thin, decently dressed old women and men huddled on the sidewalks, standing as a mute reproach to passersby, silently offering to sell something that no one took and no one had need of: artificial flowers, round spirit lamps for boiling coffee, with glass lid and whistle, evening gowns of black gauze, the uniforms of abolished departments.

A public of a simpler sort traded in more essential things: the prickly, quickly stale crusts of rationed black bread; the dirty, wet ends of sugarloaves; and two-ounce packets of shag tobacco cut in half through the wrapper.

And all over the market some sort of mysterious junk circulated, increasing in price as it passed through everyone’s hands.

The cab turned into one of the lanes adjacent to the square. The sun was setting behind them and hit them in the back. In front of them rumbled a drayman on his bouncing, empty cart. He raised pillars of dust that burned like bronze in the rays of the setting sun.

They finally managed to get ahead of the drayman who was blocking their way. They drove faster. The doctor was struck by the piles of old newspapers and posters torn from the houses and fences scattered everywhere on the streets and sidewalks. The wind dragged them to one side, and the hooves, wheels, and feet of those driving and walking to the other.

Soon, after several intersections, his own house appeared at the corner of two lanes. The cab stopped.

Yuri Andreevich’s breath was taken away and his heart began to beat loudly, when, getting down from the droshky, he went to the front door and rang. The bell had no effect. Yuri Andreevich rang again. When nothing came of this attempt either, he began, with increasing alarm, to ring again and again at short intervals. Only at the fourth time was there a rattle of the hook and the chain inside, and, along with the front door moving aside, he saw Antonina Alexandrovna holding it wide open. The unexpectedness left them both dumbfounded for the first moment, and they did not hear themselves cry out. But as Antonina Alexandrovna’s arm holding the door wide open presented half of a wide-open embrace, this brought them out of their dumbfoundedness, and they threw themselves madly onto each other’s necks. A moment later they both began talking at once, interrupting each other.

“First of all, is everyone well?”

“Yes, yes, don’t worry. Everything’s all right. I wrote foolish things to you. Forgive me. But we’ll have to talk. Why didn’t you send a telegram? Markel will carry your things. Ah, I understand, you got alarmed because it wasn’t Egorovna who opened the door? Egorovna’s in the country.”

“And you’ve lost weight. But so young and slender! I’ll go and dismiss the cabby.”

“Egorovna went to get flour. The rest have been let go. Now there’s only one new girl, you don’t know her, Nyusha, to take care of Sashenka, and no one else. Everyone’s been told you’d be coming, they’re all impatient. Gordon, Dudorov, everyone.”

“How’s Sashenka?”

“He’s all right, thank God. He just woke up. If you hadn’t just come from the road, we could go to him now.”

“Is papa home?”

“Didn’t we write to you? He’s at the district duma from morning till late
at night. As chairman. Yes, imagine. Did you pay the cabby? Markel! Markel!”

They were standing with the wicker hamper and suitcase in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking the way, and the passersby, going around them, looked them up and down and gaped for a long time at the departing cab and the wide-open front door, waiting to see what would happen next.

Meanwhile Markel, in a waistcoat over a calico shirt, with his porter’s cap in his hand, came running from the gateway to his young masters, shouting as he ran:

“Heavens above, can it be Yurochka? Well, of course! Here he is, our little falcon! Yuri Andreevich, light of our lives, you haven’t forgotten us who pray for you, you’ve kindly come to visit your own fireside! And what do you all want? Eh? What’s there to see?” he snarled at the curious ones. “Move on, my worthies. Bugging your eyes out!”

“Hello, Markel, let me embrace you. Do put your cap on, you funny man. What’s the good news? How are your wife and daughters?”

“They’re doing all right. Growing apace. Thanks be for that. As for news—while you’ve been about your mighty deeds there, you see, we haven’t let things slide either. We’ve got such pot-housing and bedlant going on, it makes the devils sick, brother, can’t figure out what’s what! Streets not swept, houses and roofs not repaired, bellies clean as in Lent, without annexates and contributses.”
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“I’ll complain about you to Yuri Andreevich, Markel. He’s always like this, Yurochka. I can’t bear his stupid tone. And of course he’s trying hard for your sake, thinking to please you. But meanwhile he keeps his own counsel. Enough, enough, Markel, don’t justify yourself. You’re a shady person, Markel. It’s time you got smart. Seems you don’t live with grain dealers.”

When Markel had taken the things to the entryway and slammed the front door, he went on softly and confidingly:

“Antonina Alexandrovna’s cross with me, I could hear just now. And it’s always like that. You, Markel, she says, are all black inside, same as soot in the chimney. Now, she says, not just some little child, now maybe even pugs or lapdogs are learning a bit of sense. There’s no disputing that, of course, only, Yurochka, maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not, but there’s knowing people saw a book, some Mason cometh, a hundred and forty years it lay under a stone, and now such is my opinion, we’ve been sold, Yurochka, sold for a penny, for a copper penny, for a whiff of tobacco. Look, Antonina Alexandrovna won’t let me say a word, see, she’s waving me away again.”

“What else can I do? Well, all right. Put the things down and, thank you, you can go, Markel. If need be, Yuri Andreevich will send for you again.”

“Alone at last, and good riddance. Trust him, go ahead. It’s sheer clowning. With others he keeps playing the little fool, but in secret he’s got his knife sharpened just in case. Though he hasn’t decided for whom yet, poor orphan.”

“No, you’re going too far! I think he’s simply drunk, and so he plays the buffoon, that’s all.”

“And tell me, when is he ever sober? Ah, to hell with him, really. My fear is that Sashenka may fall asleep again. If it weren’t for that typhus on the railways … Do you have lice?”

“I don’t think so. I traveled in comfort, like before the war. Though maybe I should wash a little? Slapdash, anyhow. And later more thoroughly. But where are you going? Why not through the drawing room? Do you go upstairs another way now?”

“Ah, yes! You don’t know anything. Papa and I thought and thought, and gave part of the downstairs to the Agricultural Academy. Otherwise in winter we won’t be able to heat it ourselves. And there’s more than enough room upstairs as well. We offered it to them. So far they haven’t accepted. They have all sorts of scientific rooms here, herbariums, seed collections. If only they don’t attract rats. It’s grain, after all. But so far they’ve kept the rooms neat. It’s now known as living space. This way, this way. How slow-witted you are! Around by the back stairs. Understand? Follow me, I’ll show you.”

“You did very well to give up the rooms. I worked in a hospital that was also stationed in a manor house. Endless suites, parquet intact in some places. Palm trees in tubs spread their fingers over the cots at night like phantoms. Seasoned soldiers, wounded in battle, would get frightened and cry out on waking up. Not quite normal ones, though—shell-shocked. The palm trees had to be taken away. I mean to say that there was, in fact, something unhealthy in the life of well-to-do people. No end of superfluity. Superfluous furniture and superfluous rooms in the houses, superfluous refinement of feelings, superfluous expressions. You did very well to make room. But it’s not enough. We must do more.”

“What have you got sticking out of that package? A bird’s beak, a duck’s head. How beautiful! A wild drake! Where did you get it? I can’t believe my eyes! These days it’s a whole fortune!”

“It was given to me on the train. A long story, I’ll tell you later. What’s your advice, shall I unwrap it and leave it in the kitchen?”

“Yes, of course. I’ll send Nyusha now to pluck it and gut it. There are predictions of all sorts of horrors towards winter—hunger, cold.”

“Yes, there’s talk about it everywhere. Just now I was looking out the window of the train and thinking. What can be higher than peace in the family and work? The rest isn’t in our power. It’s apparently true that there are misfortunes in store for many people. Some think of saving themselves in the south, in the Caucasus, of trying to get somewhere further away. That’s not in my rule book. A grown-up man must grit his teeth and share the fate of his native land. In my opinion, that’s obvious. You are a different matter. How I’d like to protect you from calamities, to send you to some safer place, to Finland or somewhere. But if we stand for half an hour on each step like this, we’ll never get upstairs.”

“Wait. Listen. There’s news. And what news! I forgot. Nikolai Nikolaevich has come.”

“What Nikolai Nikolaevich?”

“Uncle Kolya.”

“Tonya! It can’t be! How on earth?”

“Well, so it is. From Switzerland. In a roundabout way by London. Through Finland.”

“Tonya! You’re not joking? Have you seen him? Where is he? Can’t we get him here at once, this minute?”

“Such impatience! He’s outside the city in someone’s dacha. Promised to come back the day after tomorrow. He’s very changed, you’ll be disappointed. Got stuck and Bolshevized passing through Petersburg. Papa argues with him till he’s hoarse. But why, indeed, do we stop at every step? Come on. So you’ve also heard that there’s nothing good coming, only difficulties, dangers, uncertainty?”

“I think so myself. Well, what then. We’ll fight. It’s not necessarily the end for everybody. Let’s see how others do.”

“They say we’ll be without firewood, without water, without light. Money will be abolished. There will be no supplies. And again we’ve stopped. Come on. Listen. They praise the flat cast-iron stoves from a workshop on the Arbat. You can cook supper on a fire of newspapers. I’ve got the address. We should buy one before they’re all snapped up.”

“Right. Let’s buy one. Smart girl, Tonya! But Uncle Kolya, Uncle Kolya! Just think! I can’t get over it!”

“Here is my plan. We’ll choose some out-of-the-way corner upstairs and live there with papa, Sashenka, and Nyusha, say in two or three rooms, connecting,
of course, somewhere at the end of the floor, and give up the rest of the house completely. Close ourselves in, as if from the street. We’ll put one of those cast-iron stoves in the middle room, with a pipe through the window. The laundry, the cooking, dinners, receiving guests, will all be done there, to justify the heating, and, who knows, maybe, God willing, we’ll survive the winter.”