Doctor Zhivago (32 page)

During those days Sashenka caught a cold.

“I’ve told you a hundred times not to put the child near the hot stove,” Yuri Andreevich said angrily. “Overheating is forty times more harmful than cold.”

Sashenka had a sore throat and developed a high fever. His distinctive quality was a supernatural, mystical fear of nausea and vomiting, the approach of which he imagined every moment.

Pushing aside Yuri Andreevich’s hand with the laryngoscope, he would not let him put it down his throat, closed his mouth, shouted and choked. No persuading or threatening worked. Suddenly by inadvertence Sashenka yawned widely and sweetly, and the doctor profited from the moment, with a lightning movement put the spoon into his son’s mouth, pressed his tongue down, and managed to get a glimpse of Sashenka’s raspberry-colored throat and swollen tonsils covered with white spots. Yuri Andreevich was alarmed by the look of them.

A little later, by way of a similar sleight of hand, the doctor managed to take a smear from Sashenka’s throat. Alexander Alexandrovich had his own microscope. Yuri Andreevich took it and carried out a makeshift analysis. Luckily, it was not diphtheria.

But on the third night, Sashenka had an attack of false croup. He was burning up and suffocating. Yuri Andreevich could not look at the poor child, powerless as he was to save him from suffering. Antonina Alexandrovna thought the boy was dying. They took him in their arms, carried him about the room, and he became better.

They had to get milk, mineral water, or soda for him to drink. But it was the height of the street fighting. The gunfire, as well as artillery fire, did not cease for a minute. Even if Yuri Andreevich were to risk his life and venture to make his way through the limits of the area crisscrossed by shooting, beyond the line of fire he would also not find any life, because it had come to a standstill throughout the city until the situation finally defined itself.

But it was already clear. Rumors came from all sides that the workers were gaining the upper hand. There was still resistance from isolated groups of junkers, which were cut off from each other and had lost touch with their commanders.

The Sivtsev neighborhood was within the circle of action of the units of soldiers pressing towards the center from the Dorogomilovo Gate. The soldiers from the German front and adolescent workers sitting in a trench dug in the lane already knew the inhabitants of the nearby houses and exchanged neighborly jokes with them when they peeked through the gates or came outside. Circulation in that part of the city was being restored.

Then Gordon and Nikolai Nikolaevich, who had been stuck at the Zhivagos’ for three days, left their captivity. Yuri Andreevich was glad of their presence during the difficult days of Sashenka’s illness, and Antonina Alexandrovna forgave them the muddle they introduced on top of the general disorder. But in gratitude for the hospitality, both had considered it their duty to entertain the hosts with endless talk, and Yuri Andreevich was so tired of that three-day pouring from empty into void that he was happy to part with them.

There was information that they had reached home safely, but precisely this test showed that the talk of a general cessation of hostilities was premature. Military action still went on in various places, it was impossible to cross through various neighborhoods, and the doctor was still unable to get to his hospital, which he had begun to miss and where his
Playing at People
and scientific writings lay in a drawer in the interns’ room.

Only within separate neighborhoods did people go out in the mornings a short distance from home to buy bread, stopping people carrying milk in bottles and crowding around them, asking where they had gotten it.

Occasionally the shooting resumed all over the city, scattering the public again. Everyone suspected that some sort of negotiations were going on between the sides, the successful or unsuccessful course of which was reflected in the intensifying or weakening of the shrapnel fire.

Once at the end of the old October, around ten o’clock in the evening, Yuri Andreevich was walking quickly down the street, going with no particular need to see a colleague who lived nearby. Those parts, usually lively, were now deserted. He met almost no one.

Yuri Andreevich walked quickly. The first thin snow was dusting down, with a strong and ever-strengthening wind that transformed it before Yuri Andreevich’s eyes into a snowstorm.

Yuri Andreevich was turning from one lane into another and had already lost count of the turns he had made, when the snow suddenly poured down very thickly and a blizzard set in, the kind of blizzard that skims shriekingly over the ground in an open field, and in the city thrashes about in a blind alley like a lost person.

Something similar was taking place in the moral world and in the physical, nearby and far away, on the ground and in the air. Somewhere, in little islands, the last volleys of the broken resistance rang out. Somewhere on the horizon, the weak glow of extinguished fires swelled and popped like bubbles.
And the same rings and funnels, driven and whirled by the blizzard, smoked under Yuri Andreevich’s feet on the wet streets and sidewalks.

At one intersection he was overtaken by a paperboy running past with the shout “Latest news!” and carrying a big bundle of freshly printed sheets under his arm.

“Keep the change,” said the doctor. The boy barely managed to separate the damp page stuck to the bundle, thrust it into the doctor’s hands, and vanished into the blizzard as instantly as he had emerged from it.

The doctor went over to a street lamp burning two steps away to look through the headlines at once, without putting it off.

The special issue, printed on one side only, contained an official communiqué from Petersburg about the forming of the Soviet of People’s Commissars, the establishment of soviet power in Russia, and the introduction of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Then came the first decrees of the new power and the publication of various news items transmitted by telegraph and telephone.

The blizzard lashed at the doctor’s eyes and covered the printed lines of the newspaper with gray and rustling granular snow. But that did not hinder his reading. The grandeur and eternity of the moment astounded him and would not let him come to his senses.

Still, in order to finish reading the communiqué, he began to look around in search of some lighted place sheltered from the snow. It turned out that he had again ended up at his charmed intersection and was standing at the corner of Serebryany and Molchanovka, outside a tall five-story house with a glassed-in porch and a spacious, electric-lit entrance.

The doctor went in and, standing under an electric light in the front hall, became absorbed in the telegrams.

Above his head came the sound of footsteps. Someone was coming down the stairs, stopping frequently as if in some hesitation. Indeed, the descending person suddenly changed his mind, turned, and ran back upstairs. Somewhere a door was opened, and two voices poured out in a wave, made so formless by the echo that it was impossible to tell whether they were men’s or women’s. After that the door slammed and the person who had been coming down earlier now started running down much more resolutely.

Yuri Andreevich, who was completely absorbed in his reading, had his eyes lowered to the newspaper. He did not intend to raise them and examine a stranger. But having run all the way down, the latter stopped running. Yuri Andreevich raised his head and looked at him.

Before him stood an adolescent of about eighteen, in a stiff coat of reindeer hide with the fur side out, as they wear them in Siberia, and a hat of the
same fur. The boy had a swarthy face with narrow Kirghiz eyes. There was something aristocratic in his face, that fleeting spark, that hidden fineness that seems brought from far away and occurs in people with complex, mixed blood.

The boy was obviously in error, taking Yuri Andreevich for someone else. He looked at the doctor with shy perplexity, as if he knew who he was and simply could not make up his mind to speak. To put an end to this misunderstanding, Yuri Andreevich looked him up and down with a cold gaze, fending off any urge to approach.

The boy became embarrassed and went to the exit without a word. There, glancing back once more, he opened the heavy, shaky door and went out, slamming it with a bang.

About ten minutes later, Yuri Andreevich went out after him. He forgot about the boy and about the colleague he was going to see. He was full of what he had read and headed for home. On his way another circumstance, a mundane trifle, which in those days had immeasurable importance, attracted and absorbed his attention.

A short distance from his house, in the darkness, he stumbled upon a huge heap of boards and logs, dumped across his way on the sidewalk by the edge of the road. Here in the lane there was some institution to which a supply of government fuel had probably been delivered in the form of some dismantled log house from the outskirts. There had not been enough room in the courtyard and so they had also cluttered up the street in front of it. The pile was being guarded by a sentry with a rifle, who paced the yard and from time to time came out into the lane.

Without thinking twice, Yuri Andreevich seized a moment when the sentry turned into the yard and the blizzard whirled an especially thick cloud of snow up in the air. He went around the heap of beams to the side where it was dark and the light of the street lamp did not fall, and, moving it from side to side, slowly freed a heavy log that was lying on the very bottom. Pulling it from under the pile with difficulty and heaving it onto his shoulder, he stopped feeling its weight (one’s own burden is not heavy), and stealthily, keeping to the shadows of the walls, lugged it home to Sivtsev.

It was timely, the firewood was running out at home. The log was sawed up and split into a pile of small chunks. Yuri Andreevich squatted down to start the stove. He sat silently in front of the trembling and rattling doors. Alexander Alexandrovich rolled the armchair up to the stove and sat in it, warming himself. Yuri Andreevich took the newspaper out of the side pocket of his jacket and handed it to his father-in-law, saying:

“Seen this? Have a look. Read it.”

Still squatting down and stirring the wood in the stove with a small poker, Yuri Andreevich talked to himself out loud.

“What magnificent surgery! To take and at one stroke artistically cut out the old, stinking sores! Simply, without beating around the bush, to sentence age-old injustice, which was used to having people bow and scrape and curtsey before it.

“The fact that it was so fearlessly carried out has something nationally intimate, long familiar about it. Something of Pushkin’s unconditional luminosity, of Tolstoy’s unswerving faithfulness to facts.”

“Pushkin? What did you say? Wait. I’ll finish right now. I can’t both read and listen,” Alexander Alexandrovich interrupted his son-in-law, mistakenly taking as addressed to him the monologue Yuri Andreevich was speaking to himself under his breath.

“Above all, where does the genius lie? If anyone were given the task of creating a new world, of beginning a new chronology, he would surely need to have a corresponding space cleared for him first. He would wait first of all for the old times to end, before he set about building the new, he would need a round number, a new paragraph, a blank page.

“But now, take it and like it. This unprecedented thing, this miracle of history, this revelation comes bang in the very thick of the ongoing everydayness, with no heed to its course. It begins not from the beginning but from the middle, without choosing the dates beforehand, on the first weekday to come along, at the very peak of tramways plying the city. That’s real genius. Only what is greatest can be so inappropriate and untimely.”

Winter came, precisely as had been predicted. It was not yet as scary as the two that followed it, but was already of their kind, dark, hungry, and cold, all a breaking up of the habitual and a rebuilding of the foundations of existence, all an inhuman effort to hold on to life as it slipped away.

There were three of them in a row, these dreadful winters, one after another, and not all that now seems to have happened in the year of 1917 to 1918 actually happened then, but may have taken place later. These successive winters merged together and it was hard to tell one from another.

The old life and the new order did not yet coincide. There was no sharp hostility between them, as a year later in the time of the civil war,
¹²
but there was insufficient connection. They were two sides, standing apart, one facing the other, and not overlapping each other.

Administrative re-elections were held everywhere: in house committees,
in organizations, at work, in public service institutions. Their makeup was changing. Commissars with unlimited power were appointed everywhere, people of iron will, in black leather jackets, armed with means of intimidation and with revolvers, who rarely shaved and still more rarely slept.

They were well acquainted with the petty bourgeois breed, the average holder of small government bonds, the groveling conformist, and never spared him, talking to him with a Mephistophelean smirk, as with a pilferer caught in the act.

These people controlled everything as the program dictated, and enterprise after enterprise, association after association became Bolshevik.

The Krestovozdvizhensky Hospital was now called the Second Reformed. Changes took place in it. Some of the personnel were fired, but many left on their own, finding the job unprofitable. These were well-paid doctors with a fashionable practice, darlings of society, phrase mongers and fine talkers. They did not fail to present their leaving out of mercenary considerations as a demonstration from civic motives, and they began to behave slightingly towards those who stayed, all but to boycott them. Zhivago was one of those scorned ones who stayed.

In the evenings the following conversations would take place between husband and wife:

“Don’t forget to go to the basement of the Medical Society on Wednesday for frozen potatoes. There are two sacks there. I’ll find out exactly what time I’ll be free, so that I can help you. We must do it together on a sled.”