Doctor Zhivago (31 page)

He realized that he was a pygmy before the monstrous hulk of the future; he feared it, he loved this future and was secretly proud of it, and for the last time, as if in farewell, with the greedy eyes of inspiration, he gazed at the clouds and trees, at the people walking down the street, at the big Russian city trying to weather misfortune, and was ready to sacrifice himself to make things better, and could do nothing.

The sky and the passersby he most often saw from the middle of the street, when crossing the Arbat by the pharmacy of the Russian Medical Society, at the corner of Starokoniushenny Lane.

He went back to work at his old hospital. By old memory it was still called Krestovozdvizhensky, though the community of that name had been disbanded. But they had not yet invented a new name for it at the hospital.

Differentiations had already begun there. To the moderates, whose dull-wittedness provoked the doctor’s indignation, he seemed dangerous; to politically advanced people, he seemed insufficiently red. Thus he found himself neither here nor there, having left one bank and not reached the other.

In the hospital, besides his immediate duties, the director charged him with looking after the general statistical accounting. How many forms, questionnaires, and blanks he had to go over, how many orders he had to fill out! Mortality rates, sick rates, the property status of the employees, the level of their civic consciousness and participation in elections, the unsatisfiable needs for fuel, provisions, medications—the central office of statistics was interested in all of it, and answers had to be provided for it all.

The doctor busied himself with all this at his old desk by the window of the interns’ room. Stacks of ruled paper of various forms and patterns lay before him, pushed to one side. Sometimes by snatches, besides periodic notes for his medical work, he wrote here his
Playing at People
, a gloomy diary or journal of those days, consisting of prose, verse, and miscellanea, suggested by the awareness that half of the people had stopped being themselves and were acting out who knows what.

The bright, sunny interns’ room with its white painted walls was flooded with the cream-colored sunlight of golden autumn, which distinguishes the days following the Dormition,
⁹
when the first morning frosts set in, and winter chickadees and magpies flit among the motley and bright colors of the thinning woods. On such days the sky rises to its utmost height and a dark blue, icy clarity breathes from the north through the transparent column of air between it and the earth. The visibility and audibility of everything in the world are enhanced. Distances transmit sounds in a frozen ringing, distinctly and separately. What is far away becomes clear, as if opening out a view through all of life for many years ahead. This rarefaction would be impossible to bear if it were not so short-termed and did not come at the end of a short autumn day on the threshold of early twilight.

Such light bathed the interns’ room, the light of the early-setting autumn sun, juicy, glassy, and watery, like a ripe golden apple.

The doctor sat at the desk, dipping his pen in the ink, pondering and writing, and some quiet birds flew close by the big windows, casting soundless shadows into the room, over the doctor’s moving hands, the table with its ruled paper, the floor and walls, and just as soundlessly disappeared.

“The maple’s losing its leaves,” said the prosector, coming in. Once a stout man, his skin had become baggy from loss of weight. “The rain poured down on it, the wind tore at it, and they couldn’t defeat it. But see what one morning frost has done!”

The doctor raised his head. Indeed, the mysterious birds flitting past the window turned out to be the wine and flame leaves of the maple, which flew off, floated smoothly through the air, and, like convex orange stars, settled away from the tree on the grass of the hospital lawn.

“Have you sealed the windows?” asked the prosector.

“No,” said Yuri Andreevich, and he went on writing.

“Why not? It’s time.”

Yuri Andreevich did not reply, absorbed in writing.

“Eh, no Tarasiuk,” the prosector went on. “He was solid gold. Could mend boots. And watches. And do everything. And supply anything in the world. It’s time to seal them. Have to do it yourself.”

“There’s no putty.”

“Make some. Here’s the recipe.” And the prosector explained how to prepare putty from linseed oil and chalk. “Well, forget it. I’m bothering you.”

He went to the other window and busied himself with his vials and preparations. It was getting dark. After a minute, he said:

“You’ll ruin your eyes. It’s dark. And they won’t give us any light. Let’s go home.”

“I’ll work a little longer. Twenty minutes or so.”

“His wife’s here as a nurse’s aide.”

“Whose?”

“Tarasiuk’s.”

“I know.”

“But where he is, nobody knows. He roams the wide earth. Came to visit a couple of times in the summer. Stopped by the hospital. Now he’s somewhere in the country. Founding the new life. He’s one of those Bolshevik soldiers you meet on the boulevards and on trains. And do you want to know the answer? To Tarasiuk’s riddle, for instance? Listen. He’s a jack-of-all-trades. Can’t do a bad piece of work. Whatever he turns his hand to goes without a hitch. The same thing happened to him in the war. He studied it like any other trade. Turned out to be a crack shot. In the trenches, at a listening post. His eye, his hand—first class! He got all his decorations, not for bravery, but for never missing. Well. Every job becomes a passion for him. He fell in love with military things. He sees that a weapon is power, that he can use it. He wanted to become power himself. An armed man is no longer simply a man. In the old days his kind went from the sharpshooters to the robbers. Try taking his rifle from him now. And suddenly there comes the call: ‘Bayonets, about face!’ and so on. And he about-faced. That’s the whole story for you. And the whole of Marxism.”

“And the most genuine besides, straight from life. What do you think?”

The prosector stepped over to his window, pottered a little with his vials. Then asked:

“Well, how’s the stove man?”

“Thanks for recommending him. A very interesting man. We spent around an hour talking about Hegel and Benedetto Croce.”
¹⁰

“Well, what else! He has a doctorate in philosophy from Heidelberg University. And the stove?”

“Don’t talk about it.”

“Smokes?”

“Nothing but trouble.”

“He installed the pipe wrong. He should have built it into the Dutch stove, but he probably stuck it through the vent window.”

“No, he set it into the stove. But it smokes.”

“That means he didn’t find the smokestack and put it through the ventilation duct. Or into the airway. Eh, no Tarasiuk! But be patient. Moscow wasn’t built in a day. Using a stove isn’t like playing piano. It takes learning. Laid in firewood?”

“Where can I get it?”

“I’ll send you the churchwarden. He’s a firewood thief. Takes fences apart for fuel. But I warn you. You’ve got to haggle. He asks a lot. Or there’s the exterminator woman.”

They went down to the porter’s lodge, put their coats on, went out.

“Why the exterminator?” asked the doctor. “We don’t have bedbugs.”

“What have bedbugs got to do with it? I’m talking apples and you’re talking oranges. Not bedbugs, but firewood. The woman’s set it all up on a commercial footing. Buys up houses and framing for firewood. A serious supplier. Watch out, don’t stumble, it’s really dark. Once I could have gone through this neighborhood blindfolded. I knew every little stone. I was born in Prechistenka. But they started taking down the fences, and even with open eyes I don’t recognize anything, like in a foreign city. What little corners they’ve uncovered, though! Little Empire houses in the bushes, round garden tables, half-rotten benches. The other day I walked past a little vacant lot like that, at the intersection of three lanes. I see a hundred-year-old woman poking the ground with her stick. ‘God help you, granny,’ I say. ‘Digging worms for fishing?’ As a joke, of course. And she says very seriously: ‘No, dearie—champignons.’ And it’s true, the city’s getting to be the same as a forest. Smells of rotten leaves, mushrooms.”

“I know that place. It’s between Serebryany and Molchanovka, isn’t it? Unexpected things keep happening to me when I pass it. Either I meet somebody I haven’t seen for twenty years, or I find something. And they say there have been robberies at the corner. Well, no wonder. It’s a crossroads. There’s a whole network of passages to thieves’ dens that are still there around the Smolensky market. You’re robbed, stripped, and, poof, go chase the wind.”

“And the streetlights shine so weakly. It’s not for nothing they call a black eye a shiner. You’re bound to get one.”

Indeed, all sorts of chance things happened to the doctor at the above-mentioned place. Late in the fall, not long before the October fighting,
¹¹
on a dark, cold evening, at that corner, he ran into a man lying unconscious across the sidewalk. The man lay with his arms spread, his head leaning on a hitching post, and his legs hanging into the roadway. Every now and then
he moaned weakly. In response to the loud questions of the doctor, who was trying to bring him back to consciousness, he murmured something incoherent and again passed out for a time. His head was bruised and bloody, but on cursory examination, the bones of the skull turned out to be intact. The fallen man was undoubtedly the victim of an armed robbery. “Briefcase. Briefcase,” he whispered two or three times.

Using the telephone of a pharmacy nearby on the Arbat, the doctor sent for an old cabby attached to the Krestovozdvizhensky Hospital and took the unknown man there.

The victim turned out to be a prominent politician. The doctor treated him and in his person acquired a protector for long years to come, who saved him in that time filled with suspicion and distrust from many misunderstandings.

It was Sunday. The doctor was free. He did not have to go to work. In their house in Sivtsev, they had already settled in three rooms for the winter, as Antonina Alexandrovna had proposed.

It was a cold, windy day with low snow clouds, dark, very dark.

They lit the stove in the morning. It began to smoke. Antonina Alexandrovna, who knew nothing about stoves, gave confused and harmful advice to Nyusha, who was struggling with the damp wood that refused to burn. The doctor, seeing it and understanding what needed to be done, tried to intervene, but his wife gently took him by the shoulders and sent him away with the words:

“Go to your room. You have a habit of butting in with your advice, when my head’s in a whirl without that and everything’s jumbled up. How can you not understand that your remarks only pour oil on the fire.”

“Oh, Tonechka, that would be excellent—oil! The stove would blaze up in an instant. The trouble is that I don’t see either oil or fire.”

“This is no time for puns. There are moments, you understand, when they simply won’t do.”

The failure with the stove ruined their Sunday plans. They had all hoped to finish the necessary tasks before dark and be free by evening, but now that was out of the question. Dinner had to be put off, as did someone’s wish to wash their hair with hot water, and other such intentions.

Soon it became so smoky that it was impossible to breathe. A strong wind blew the smoke back into the room. A cloud of black soot hung in it like a fairy-tale monster in the midst of a dense pine forest.

Yuri Andreevich drove them all to the other rooms and opened the vent window. He took half the wood out of the stove and made space among the rest for little chips and birch-bark kindling.

Fresh air burst through the vent window. The curtain swayed and billowed up. A few papers flew off the desk. The wind slammed some far-off door and, whirling in all the corners, began, like a cat after a mouse, to chase what was left of the smoke.

The wood caught fire, blazed up, and began to crackle. The little stove choked on the flames. Red-hot circles glowed on its iron body like the rosy spots on a consumptive’s cheeks. The smoke in the room thinned out and then disappeared altogether.

The room became brighter. The windows, which Yuri Andreevich had recently sealed on the prosector’s instructions, began to weep. The putty gave off a wave of warm, greasy smell. The firewood sawed into small pieces and drying around the stove also gave off a smell: of bitter, throat-chafing, tarry fir bark, and damp, fresh aspen, fragrant as toilet water.

Just then, as impetuously as the wind through the vent, Nikolai Nikolaevich burst into the room with news:

“There’s fighting in the streets. Military action is going on between the junkers who support the Provisional Government and the garrison soldiers who are for the Bolsheviks. There are skirmishes at almost every step, there’s no counting the centers of the uprising. I fell into scraps two or three times on my way here, once at the corner of Bolshaya Dmitrovka, and again by the Nikitsky Gate. There’s no direct route anymore, you have to go roundabout. Hurry, Yura! Get dressed and let’s go. You’ve got to see this. It’s history. It happens once in a lifetime.”

But he himself went on babbling for about two hours, then they sat down to dinner, and when he got ready to go home and was dragging Yuri Andreevich with him, Gordon’s arrival prevented them. He came flying in just as Nikolai Nikolaevich had done, with the same news.

But meanwhile events had moved ahead. There were new details. Gordon spoke about the intensified gunfire and the killing of passersby, accidentally struck by stray bullets. According to his words, traffic in the city had come to a standstill. By a miracle, he had gotten through to their lane, but the way back had closed behind him.

Nikolai Nikolaevich would not listen and tried to poke his nose outside, but came back after a minute. He said you could not go out into the lane, that there were bullets whistling through it, knocking bits of brick and plaster off the corners. There was not a soul in the streets; communication by the sidewalks was broken.