Doctor Zhivago (29 page)

“What else? Of course we’ll survive. Beyond any doubt. You’ve thought it out excellently. Good girl. And you know what? Let’s celebrate our acceptance of your plan. We’ll roast my duck and invite Uncle Kolya to the housewarming.”

“Splendid. And I’ll ask Gordon to bring some alcohol. He gets it from some laboratory. And now look. Here’s the room I was talking about. Here’s what I’ve chosen. Do you approve? Put the suitcase down and go back for the wicker hamper. Besides uncle and Gordon, we can also invite Innokenty and Shura Schlesinger. You don’t object? You haven’t forgotten where our bathroom is? Spray yourself with something disinfecting. And I’ll go to Sashenka, send Nyusha downstairs, and when I can, I’ll call you.”

The main news for him in Moscow was this
boy. Sashenka had only just been born when Yuri Andreevich was called up. What did he know about his son?

Once, when he was already mobilized, Yuri Andreevich came to the clinic to visit Tonya before his departure. He came at the moment when the babies were being fed. They would not let him see her.

He sat down to wait in the anteroom. Just then the far-off children’s corridor, which went at right angles to the delivery corridor, and along which the mothers’ rooms were located, was filled with a weeping chorus of ten or fifteen infant voices, and the nurses, so as not to expose the swaddled newborn babies to the cold, hurriedly began carrying them under their arms, two at a time, like big shopping parcels, to their mothers to be fed.

“Wah, wah,” the babies squealed on one note, almost without feeling, as if performing a duty, and only one voice stood out from this unison. The infant also cried “wah, wah,” and also without a trace of suffering, but, as it seemed, not by obligation, but with some sort of bass-voiced, deliberate, sullen hostility.

Yuri Andreevich had already decided then to call his son Alexander, in honor of his father-in-law. For no apparent reason he imagined that it was his boy who was crying like that, because it was a weeping with a physiognomy, already containing the future character and destiny of the person, a weeping with a tone color that included in itself the name of the boy, the name Alexander, as Yuri Andreevich imagined.

Yuri Andreevich was not mistaken. As it turned out later, that had indeed been Sashenka crying. That was the first thing he knew about his son.

His next acquaintance with him Yuri Andreevich drew from photographs, in letters sent to him at the front. In them a merry, chubby, pretty boy with a big head and pursed lips stood bowlegged on a spread-out blanket and, raising both arms, seemed to be doing a squatting dance. He was one year old then, he was learning to walk; now he was almost two and was beginning to talk.

Yuri Andreevich picked the suitcase up from the floor, undid the straps, and laid it on a card table by the window. What room was this before? The doctor did not recognize it. Tonya must have taken the furniture out or hung some new wallpaper in it.

The doctor opened the suitcase in order to take out his shaving kit. A bright full moon appeared between the columns of the church bell tower that rose up just opposite the window. When its light fell into the suitcase on the linen, books, and toilet articles lying on top, the room lit up somehow differently, and the doctor recognized it.

It was a vacated storeroom of the late Anna Ivanovna. In former times, she used to pile broken tables and chairs and unnecessary old waste paper in it. Here was her family archive; here, too, were the trunks in which winter things were put away for the summer. When the late woman was alive, every corner of the room was heaped up to the ceiling, and ordinarily no one was allowed into it. But for big holidays, on days of crowded children’s gatherings, when they were allowed to horse around and run all over the upper floor, this room, too, was unlocked, and they played robbers in it, hid under the tables, painted their faces with burnt cork, and dressed up in costumes.

For some time the doctor stood recalling all this, and then he went down to the entryway for the wicker hamper he had left there.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Nyusha, a timid and bashful girl, squatting down, was plucking the duck over a spread-out newspaper in front of the stove. At the sight of Yuri Andreevich with a heavy thing in his hands, she turned bright red, straightened up in a supple movement, shaking off the feathers stuck to her apron, and, having greeted him, offered her help. But the doctor thanked her and said he would carry the hamper himself.

He had just entered Anna Ivanovna’s former storeroom, when, from two or three rooms away, his wife called to him:

“You can come, Yura!”

He went to Sashenka.

The present nursery was situated in his and Tonya’s former schoolroom. The boy in the little bed turned out to be not at all as pretty as the photos portrayed him, but on the other hand he was the very image of Yuri Andreevich’s mother, the late Marya Nikolaevna Zhivago, a striking copy of her, resembling her more than any of the surviving portraits.

“This is papa, this is your papa, wave to papa,” Antonina Alexandrovna kept saying, as she lowered the side of the bed so that the father could more easily embrace the boy and pick him up.

Sashenka allowed the unfamiliar and unshaven man, who probably frightened and repelled him, to come close, and when he bent down, abruptly stood up, clutched his mother’s blouse, swung and angrily slapped him in the face. His own boldness so terrified Sashenka that he immediately threw himself onto his mother’s breast, buried his face in her dress, and burst into bitter, inconsolable child’s tears.

“Pooh, pooh,” Antonina Alexandrovna chided him. “You mustn’t do that, Sashenka. Papa will think Sasha bad, Sasha no-no. Show papa how you kiss. Kiss him. Don’t cry, you mustn’t cry, what is it, silly?”

“Leave him alone, Tonya,” the doctor asked. “Don’t torment him, and don’t be upset yourself. I know what kind of foolishness gets into your head. That it’s not by chance, that it’s a bad sign. It’s all such nonsense. And so natural. The boy’s never seen me. Tomorrow he’ll get used to me, there’ll be no tearing him away from me.”

But he himself left the room quite downcast, with a sense of foreboding.

In the course of the next few days it became clear how alone he was. He did not blame anyone for that. Evidently he himself had wanted it and achieved it.

His friends had become strangely dull and colorless. None of them had held on to his own world, his own opinion. They were much brighter in his memories. Apparently he had overestimated them earlier.

As long as the order of things had allowed the well-to-do to be whimsical and eccentric at the expense of the deprived, how easy it had been to mistake for a real face and originality that whimsicality and the right to idleness which the minority enjoyed while the majority suffered!

But as soon as the lower strata arose and the privileges of the upper strata were abolished, how quickly everyone faded, how unregretfully they parted with independent thinking, which none of them, evidently, had ever had!

Now the only people who were close to Yuri Andreevich were those without phrases and pathos—his wife and father-in-law, and two or three fellow doctors, humble toilers, ordinary workmen.

The evening with the duck and the alcohol had taken place in its time, as planned, on the second or third day after his arrival, once he had had time to see everyone invited, so that it was not their first meeting.

The fat duck was an unheard-of luxury in those already hungry times, but there was no bread to go with it, and that made the magnificence of the food pointless, so that it was even irritating.

Gordon brought the alcohol in a pharmaceutical bottle with a ground-glass stopper. Alcohol was a favorite medium of exchange for black marketeers. Antonina Alexandrovna did not let the bottle out of her hands and diluted the alcohol in small quantities, as it was needed, by inspiration, making it now too strong, now too weak. It turned out that an uneven drunkenness from changing concentrations was much worse than from a strong but consistent one. That, too, was annoying.

The saddest thing of all was that their party represented a deviation from the conditions of the time. It was impossible to imagine that in the houses across the lane people were eating and drinking in the same way at such an hour. Beyond the window lay mute, dark, hungry Moscow. Her food stores were empty, and people had even forgotten to think of such things as game and vodka.

And thus it turned out that the only true life is one that resembles the life around us and drowns in it without leaving a trace, that isolated happiness is not happiness, so that a duck and alcohol, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are even not alcohol and a duck at all. That was the most distressing thing.

The guests also brought on joyless reflections. Gordon had been fine as long as he had thought heavily and explained things morosely and incoherently. He had been Yuri Andreevich’s best friend. He had been liked in high school.

But now he had come to dislike himself and had begun to introduce unfortunate corrections in his moral image. He bucked himself up, played the merry fellow, told stories all the time with a pretense to wit, and often said “How entertaining” and “How amusing”—words not in his vocabulary, because Gordon had never understood life as a diversion.

Before Dudorov’s arrival he told a funny—as it seemed to him—story about Dudorov’s marriage, which circulated among friends. Yuri Andreevich did not know it.

It turned out that Dudorov had been married for about a year, and then separated from his wife. The unlikely salt of the adventure consisted in the following.

Dudorov had been drafted into the army by mistake. While he served and waited for the misunderstanding to be clarified, he was most often on punishment duty for gawkishness and for not saluting officers in the street. Long after he was discharged, his arm would jerk up at the sight of an officer, and he went around as if dazzled, seeing epaulettes everywhere.

In that period, he did everything out of place, committed various blunders and false steps. Precisely at that time he supposedly made the acquaintance, on a Volga landing, of two girls, sisters, who were waiting for the same boat, and, as if absentmindedly, owing to the multitude of officers flashing about, with vestiges of his soldierly saluting still alive, not watching himself, he fell in love by oversight and hastily made the younger sister a proposal. “Amusing, isn’t it?” asked Gordon. But he had to cut short his description. The voice of the story’s hero was heard outside the door. Dudorov came into the room.

With him the opposite change had taken place. The former unstable and extravagant featherbrain had turned into a concentrated scholar.

When he was expelled from school in his youth for participating in the preparation of a political escape, he spent some time wandering through various art schools, but in the end washed up on the classical shore. Dudorov finished university later than his peers, during wartime, and was kept on in two departments, Russian and general history. For the first he was writing something about the land policy of Ivan the Terrible, for the second some research about Saint-Just.
²

He now reasoned about everything amiably, in a low voice, as if he had a cold, staring dreamily at one spot, and not raising or lowering his eyes, as one reads a lecture.

By the end of the evening, when Shura Schlesinger burst in with her attacks, and everyone, heated up enough without that, was shouting simultaneously, Innokenty, whom Yuri Andreevich had addressed formally since their schooldays, asked him several times:

“Have you read
War and Peace
and
The Backbone Flute
?”
³

Yuri Andreevich had long since told him what he thought on the subject, but Dudorov had not heard him because of the rousing general argument, and therefore, a little later, he asked once more:

“Have you read
The Backbone Flute
and
Man
?”

“But I answered you, Innokenty. It’s your fault if you didn’t hear me. Well, have it your way. I’ll say it again. I’ve always liked Mayakovsky. It’s some sort of continuation of Dostoevsky. Or, more rightly, it’s lyric verse written by one of his young, rebellious characters, like Ippolit, Raskolnikov, or the hero of
The Adolescent.
⁴
Such all-devouring force of talent! How it’s said once and for all, implacably and straight out! And above all, with what bold sweep it’s all flung in the face of society and somewhere further out into space!”

But the big hit of the evening was certainly the uncle. Antonina Alexandrovna was mistaken in saying that Nikolai Nikolaevich was at a dacha. He came back on the day of his nephew’s arrival and was in town. Yuri Andreevich had already seen him two or three times and had managed to talk a lot with him, to laugh a lot, to “oh” and “ah” a lot.

Their first meeting took place in the evening of a gray, overcast day. Light rain drizzled down in a fine watery dust. Yuri Andreevich came to Nikolai Nikolaevich’s hotel room. Hotels were already accepting people only at the insistence of the city authorities. But Nikolai Nikolaevich was known everywhere. He still had his old connections.

The hotel gave the impression of a madhouse abandoned by its fleeing administration. Emptiness, chaos, the rule of chance on the stairways and corridors.

Into the big window of the untidied room gazed the vast, peopleless square of those mad days, somehow frightening, as if it had been dreamed of in sleep at night, and was not in fact lying before their eyes under the hotel window.

It was an astounding, unforgettable, portentous meeting! The idol of his childhood, the ruler of his youthful thoughts, stood before him again, alive, in the flesh.

Gray hair was very becoming to Nikolai Nikolaevich. His loose foreign suit fitted him well. He was still very young for his age and handsome to look at.

Of course, he lost much next to the enormity of what was going on. Events overshadowed him. But it had never occurred to Yuri Andreevich to measure him with such a measure.