Doctor Zhivago (33 page)

“All right. There’s no rush, Yurochka. You should go to bed quickly. It’s late. The chores won’t all get done anyway. You need rest.”

“There’s a widespread epidemic. General exhaustion weakens resistance. It’s frightening to look at you and papa. Something must be done. Yes, but what precisely? We’re not cautious enough. We must be more careful. Listen. Are you asleep?”

“No.”

“I’m not afraid for myself, I’m sturdy enough, but if, contrary to all expectation, I should come down with something, please don’t be silly and keep me at home. Take me to the hospital instantly.”

“What are you saying, Yurochka! God help you. Why croak of doom?”

“Remember, there are neither honest people nor friends anymore. Still less anyone knowledgeable. If something happens, trust only Pichuzhkin. If he himself stays in one piece, of course. Are you asleep?”

“No.”

“The devils, they went where the rations are better, and now it turns out it was civic feelings, principles. We meet, and they barely shake hands. ‘You
work with them?’ And they raise their eyebrows. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘and don’t take it amiss, but I’m proud of our privations, and I respect the people who honor us by subjecting us to these privations.’ ”

For a long period the invariable food of the majority was boiled millet and fish soup made from herring heads. The bodies of the herring were fried as a second course. People ate unground rye and wheat. They boiled the grain into a porridge.

A professor’s wife whom Antonina Alexandrovna knew taught her to bake boiled dough bread on the bottom of a Dutch heating stove, partly for sale, so that the extra and the income from it would justify using the tile stove as in the old days. This would enable them to give up the tormenting iron stove, which smoked, heated poorly, and did not retain its warmth at all.

Antonina Alexandrovna baked very good bread, but nothing came of her commerce. She had to sacrifice her unrealizable plans and bring the dismissed little stove back into action. The Zhivagos lived in want.

One morning Yuri Andreevich left for work as usual. There were two pieces of wood left in the house. Putting on a little winter coat, in which she shivered from weakness even in warm weather, Antonina Alexandrovna went out “for booty.”

She spent about half an hour wandering the nearby lanes, where muzhiks sometimes turned up from their suburban villages with vegetables and potatoes. You had to catch them. Peasants carrying loads were arrested.

She soon came upon the goal of her search. A stalwart young fellow in a peasant coat, walking in company with Antonina Alexandrovna beside a light, toylike sleigh, warily led it around the corner to the Gromekos’ courtyard.

In the bast body of the sleigh, under a mat, lay a small heap of birch rounds, no thicker than the old-fashioned banisters in photographs from the last century. Antonina Alexandrovna knew what they were worth—birch in name only, it was stuff of the worst sort, freshly cut, unsuitable for heating. But there was no choice, she could not argue.

The young peasant made five or six trips upstairs carrying the wretched logs, and in exchange dragged Antonina Alexandrovna’s small mirrored wardrobe downstairs and loaded it on the sleigh as a present for his young wife. In passing, as they made future arrangements about potatoes, he asked the price of the piano standing by the door.

On his return, Yuri Andreevich did not discuss his wife’s purchase. To
chop the given-away wardrobe to splinters would have been more profitable and expedient, but they could not have brought themselves to do it.

“Did you see the note on the desk?” asked his wife.

“From the head of the hospital? They spoke to me, I know about it. It’s a call to a sick woman. I’ll certainly go. I’ll just rest a little and go. It’s quite far. Somewhere by the Triumphal Arch. I wrote down the address.”

“They’re offering a strange honorarium. Did you see? Read it anyway. A bottle of German cognac or a pair of lady’s stockings for the visit. Some enticement! Who can it be? Bad tone, and total ignorance of our present-day life. Nouveaux riches of some sort.”

“Yes, a state purveyor.”

Along with concessionaires and authorized agents, this title was used to designate small private entrepreneurs, for whom the state authorities, having abolished private trade, made small allowances at moments of economic crisis, concluding contracts and deals with them for various provisions.

Their number did not include the fallen heads of old firms, proprietors on a grand scale. They never recovered from the blow they received. Into this category fell the ephemeral dealers, stirred up from the bottom by war and revolution, new and alien people without roots.

After drinking boiled water with saccharine, whitened by milk, the doctor went to the sick woman.

The sidewalks and roadways were buried under deep snow, which covered the streets from one row of houses to the other. In places the covering of snow reached the ground-floor windows. Across the whole width of this space moved silent, half-alive shadows, lugging some sort of meager provisions on their backs or pulling them on sleds. Almost no one drove.

On houses here and there old signboards still remained. The grocery shops and cooperatives placed under them, with no relation to their content, stood locked, their windows barred or boarded up, and empty.

They were locked and empty not only owing to the lack of goods, but because the reorganization of all sides of life, embracing trade as well, was still being carried out in the most general terms, and these boarded-up shops, as minute particulars, had not yet been touched by it.

The house that the doctor had been called to turned out to be at the end of Brestskaya Street, near the Tver Gate.

It was a barracklike brick building of antediluvian construction, with an inner courtyard and wooden galleries running in three tiers around the inside walls of the structure.

The tenants were holding a previously arranged general meeting with the participation of a woman representative of the district soviet, when a military commission suddenly appeared on a round to inspect permits to keep arms and confiscate those without permit. The leader of the round asked the delegate not to leave, assuring her that the search would not take much time, the tenants who had been checked would gradually come back, and the interrupted meeting would soon be able to resume.

The round was nearing its end, and the turn had just come for the apartment where the doctor was awaited when he came to the gate of the house. A soldier with a rifle on a string, who was standing guard by one of the stairways leading to the galleries, flatly refused to let Yuri Andreevich pass, but the commander of the detachment interfered in their dispute. He said the doctor should not be hindered and agreed to hold up the search until he had examined the sick woman.

The doctor was met by the owner of the apartment, a courteous young man with a dull, swarthy complexion and dark, melancholy eyes. He was upset by many circumstances: his wife’s illness, the impending search, and the supernatural respect he nursed for medicine and its representatives.

To spare the doctor work and time, the owner tried to speak as briefly as he could, but precisely this haste made his speech long and confused.

The apartment, with a mixture of luxury and cheapness, was furnished with things bought slapdash with the aim of investing money in something stable. Furniture in incomplete sets was supplemented by single objects that were missing a second to make up the pair.

The owner of the apartment thought his wife had some sort of nervous ailment from fright. With many irrelevant digressions, he told how they had bought for next to nothing an old, broken clock with musical chimes, which had not worked for a long time. They had bought it only as a curiosity of clock-making craftsmanship, as a rarity (the sick woman’s husband took the doctor to the next room to show it to him). They even doubted it could be fixed. And suddenly the clock, which had not been wound for years, started up by itself, started up, rang out an intricate minuet on its little bells, and stopped. His wife was terrified, the young man said, decided that her last hour had struck, and now she lies there, raves, doesn’t eat, doesn’t drink, doesn’t recognize him.

“So you think it’s nervous shock?” Yuri Andreevich asked with doubt in his voice. “Take me to the patient.”

They went into the next room with its porcelain chandelier and two mahogany bed tables on either side of a wide double bed. At the edge of it,
the blanket pulled up over her chin, lay a small woman with big, dark eyes. Seeing the men coming in, she waved them away, freeing an arm from under the blanket, on which the wide sleeve of a robe slid up to the armpit. She did not recognize her husband and, as if there were no one in the room, started singing in a soft voice the beginning of a sad little song, which moved her so much that she burst into tears and, sobbing like a child, began asking to be taken home somewhere. The doctor tried to approach her from different sides, but she resisted examination and each time turned her back on him.

“She does need to be examined,” said Yuri Andreevich. “But, all the same, I can see quite clearly. It’s typhus, and a very grave form of it at that. She’s suffering greatly, poor thing. I’d advise putting her in the hospital. It’s not a matter of comfort, which you could provide for her, but of constant medical attention, which is necessary during the first weeks of the illness. Can you find some sort of transportation, hire a cab or at least a cart, to take the patient, making sure that she’s well wrapped up beforehand? I’ll write an order for you.”

“I can. I’ll try. But wait. Can it really be typhus? How terrible!”

“Unfortunately.”

“I’m afraid to lose her if I let her go from here. Isn’t there some way you could treat her at home, visiting her as often as possible? I’ll pay whatever fee you like.”

“I’ve already explained to you. The important thing is that she have constant attention. Listen. I’m giving you good advice. Dig up a cab somewhere, and I’ll write out an accompanying note for her. It would be best to do it through your house committee. The order will have to have the house seal, and there will be some other formalities.”

Having gone through the interrogation and search, the tenants returned one after another, in warm shawls and coats, to the unheated quarters of the former egg storage, now occupied by the house committee.

At one end of the room stood an office desk and several chairs, though not enough to seat so many people. Therefore, in addition to them, long, empty egg crates, turned upside down, were placed around them like benches. A mountain of such crates was piled up to the ceiling at the other end of the room. There in a corner was a swept-up heap of frozen wood shavings stuck together in lumps by the spilt insides of broken eggs. Rats noisily messed about in this heap, occasionally running out to the open space of the stone floor and hiding again in the shavings.

Each time this happened, a loud and fat-bloated woman jumped up on one of the crates with a shriek. She pulled up the corner of her skirt with
coquettishly splayed fingers, rapidly stamped her feet in fashionable ladies’ high boots, and in a deliberately hoarse voice, affecting drunkenness, shouted:

“Olka, Olka, you’ve got rats running around here. Ooh, away, you vile thing! Aha, he understands, the scum! He’s angry. Ay-yay-yay, he’s climbing up the crate! Don’t let him get under my skirt! Oh, I’m afraid, I’m afraid! Turn your heads, gentlemen. Sorry, I forgot, you’re not gentlemen now, you’re comrade citizens.”

The noisy female was wearing an unbuttoned astrakhan sack. Under it her double chin, ample bosom, and belly in a tight silk dress undulated in three layers, like quivering custard. Clearly, she had once passed for a lioness among third-rate shopkeepers and their clerks. She could barely open the slits of her piglike eyes with their swollen eyelids. In time immemorial some rival had thrown a vial of acid at her, but had missed, and only two or three drops had etched light traces on her left cheek and the left corner of her mouth, almost seductive in their inconspicuousness.

“Don’t yell, Khrapugina. It’s simply impossible to work,” said the woman at the desk, the representative of the district soviet, elected to chair the meeting.

She was well-known from long ago to the old-timers of the house, and she knew them well herself. Before the start of the meeting, she had an unofficial, half-whispered conversation with Fatima, the old caretaker of the house, who had once been cooped up with her husband and children in the dirty basement, but now had moved with her daughter to two bright rooms on the second floor.

“Well, how are things, Fatima?” asked the chairwoman.

Fatima complained that managing such a big and densely populated house was too much for her alone, and there was no help from anywhere, because nobody observed the obligations of tidying the courtyard and the street, which were distributed by apartment.

“Don’t worry, Fatima, we’ll blunt their horns, I assure you. What kind of committee is that? Is it conceivable? Hidden criminal elements, dubious morals living without registration. We’ll give them the boot and elect another one. I’ll get you made house manager, only don’t start kicking.”

The caretaker begged the chairwoman not to do that, but the latter was not even listening. She looked around the room, found that enough people had gathered, called for silence, and opened the meeting with a short introductory speech. After condemning the inactivity of the former house committee, she proposed the nominating of candidates for the election of a new one and went on to other questions. On finishing that, she said incidentally:

“Well, so that’s that, comrades. Let’s speak frankly. Your building’s roomy, suitable for a hostel. It happens, when delegates come for a conference, there’s nowhere to put people up. It has been decided to place the building at the disposal of the district soviet as a house for visitors and give it the name of Comrade Tiverzin, who lived in this house before his exile, which is a well-known fact. Do you have any objections? Now to the schedule for vacating the house. It’s not an urgent measure, you still have a year’s time. Working people will be relocated to lodgings provided for them, nonworkers are put on notice that they must find their own, and are given a term of twelve months.”