Doctor Zhivago (35 page)

For the most part they were patients who had been sick with typhus. In view of the overcrowding of the hospitals, they were discharged the day after the crisis. As a doctor, Yuri Andreevich had run into such necessity himself, but he did not know that these unfortunates were so many and that the train stations served them as shelters.

“Get sent on an official mission,” a porter in a white apron told him. “You have to come and check every day. Trains are a rarity now, a matter of chance. And of course it goes without saying …” (the porter rubbed his thumb against his first two fingers). “Some flour or whatever. To grease the skids. Well, and this here …” (he upended an invisible shot glass) “…  is a most sacred thing.”

Around that time Alexander Alexandrovich was invited to the Supreme Council of National Economy for several special consultations, and Yuri
Andreevich to a gravely ill member of the government. Both were remunerated in the best form of that time—coupons to the first closed distribution center then established.
¹

It was located in some garrison warehouse by the St. Simon monastery. The doctor and his father-in-law crossed two inner courtyards, the church’s and the garrison’s, and straight from ground level, with no threshold, entered under the stone vault of a deep, gradually descending cellar. Its widening far end was partitioned crosswise by a long counter, at which a calm, unhurried storekeeper weighed and handed over provisions, occasionally going back to the storeroom for something, and crossing out items on a list with a broad stroke of the pencil as he handed them over.

There were few customers.

“Your bags,” the storekeeper said to the professor and the doctor, glancing fleetingly at their invoices. The two men’s eyes popped out as flour, grain, macaroni, and sugar poured into the covers for little ladies’ cushions and the bigger pillow cases they held open, along with lard, soap, and matches, and also a piece each of something wrapped in paper, which later, at home, turned out to be Caucasian cheese.

Son-in-law and father-in-law hastened to tie the multitude of small bundles into two big knapsacks as quickly as they could, so that their ungrateful pottering would not offend the eyes of the storekeeper, who had overwhelmed them with his magnanimity.

They came out of the cellar into the open air drunk not with animal joy, but with the consciousness that they, too, were not living in this world for nothing, that they were not just blowing smoke, and at home they would deserve the praise and recognition of the young mistress of the house, Tonya.

While the men disappeared into various institutions, soliciting missions and permanent residency papers for the rooms they were leaving, Antonina Alexandrovna was busy selecting things to be packed.

She walked anxiously about the three rooms of the house now assigned to the Gromeko family, and endlessly weighed each little trifle in her hand before placing it in the general pile of things destined to be packed.

Only an insignificant portion of their belongings went as the travelers’ personal luggage; the rest was kept in reserve as a means of exchange, necessary for the journey and on their arrival in the place.

Spring air came through the open vent window, tasting of a freshly bitten
French loaf. Outside, cocks crowed and the voices of playing children were heard. The more they aired the room, the clearer became the smell of camphor, given off by the winter stuff removed from the trunks.

Concerning what ought to be taken and what renounced, there existed a whole theory worked out by those who had left earlier, whose observations had spread in the circle of their acquaintances who stayed behind.

These precepts, shaped into brief, indisputable instructions, were lodged with such distinctness in Antonina Alexandrovna’s head that she fancied she heard them from outside, together with the chirping of the sparrows and the noise of the playing children, as if some secret voice from the street were prompting her.

“Cloth, cloth,” said these considerations, “best of all in lengths, but there are inspections along the way, and it’s dangerous. Cut pieces quickly tacked together are more prudent. Fabric in general, textiles, clothes are acceptable, preferably outer wear, not too worn. As little rubbish as possible, no heavy things. Given the frequent need to carry it all yourselves, forget about hampers and trunks. After sorting them a hundred times, tie a few things into bundles light enough for a woman or a child. Salt and tobacco are expedient, as practice has shown, though the risk is considerable. Money in kerenki.
²
Documents are hardest of all.” And so on and so forth.

On the eve of departure a snowstorm arose. The wind swept gray clouds of spinning snowflakes up into the sky, and they came back to earth in a white whirl, flew into the depths of the dark street, and spread a white shroud over it.

Everything in the house was packed. The supervision of the rooms and the belongings remaining in them was entrusted to an elderly married couple, Egorovna’s Moscow relations, whom Antonina Alexandrovna had met the preceding winter, when she arranged through them to exchange old things, clothes and unneeded furniture, for firewood and potatoes.

It was impossible to rely on Markel. At the police station, which he chose as his political club, he did not complain that the former house owners, the Gromekos, sucked his blood, but he reproached them after the fact for keeping him in the darkness of ignorance, deliberately concealing from him that the world descended from the apes.

Antonina Alexandrovna took this couple, Egorovna’s relations, a former commercial employee and his wife, around the rooms for a last time, showed them which keys fitted which locks and what had been put where,
unlocked and locked the doors of the cupboards together with them, taught them everything and explained everything.

The tables and chairs in the rooms were pushed up against the walls, the bundles for the journey were dragged to one side, the curtains were taken down from all the windows. The snowstorm, more unhindered than in the setting of winter coziness, peeped through the bared windows into the empty rooms. It reminded each of them of something. For Yuri Andreevich it was his childhood and his mother’s death; for Antonina Alexandrovna and Alexander Alexandrovich, it was the death and funeral of Anna Ivanovna. It kept seeming to them that this was their last night in the house, which they would never see again. In that respect they were mistaken, but under the influence of the delusion, which they did not confide to each other, so as not to upset each other, they each went over the life they had spent under that roof and fought back the tears that kept coming to their eyes.

That did not prevent Antonina Alexandrovna from observing social conventions in front of strangers. She kept up an incessant conversation with the woman to whose supervision she was entrusting everything. Antonina Alexandrovna exaggerated the significance of the service rendered her. So as not to repay the favor with black ingratitude, she apologized every other minute, went to the next room, and came back with a present for this person of a scarf, or a little blouse, or a length of cotton or gauze. And all the materials were dark with white checks or polka dots, just as the dark, snowy outside was speckled with white, looking through the bare, curtainless windows on that farewell evening.

They were leaving for the station early in the morning. The inhabitants of the house were not up yet at that hour. The tenant Zevorotkina, the usual ringleader of all concerted actions, together now and heave-ho, ran around to the sleeping lodgers, knocking on their doors and shouting: “Attention, comrades! It’s good-bye time! Look lively, look lively! The former Garumekovs are leaving.”

They came pouring out to the hall and porch of the back entrance (the front entrance was now boarded up year-round) and covered its steps like an amphitheater, as if preparing for a group photograph.

The yawning tenants stooped so that the skimpy coats thrown over their shoulders would not fall off, hunched up, and shifted their chilled bare feet hastily thrust into loose felt boots.

Markel had contrived to get plastered on something lethal in that alcohol-less
time, and kept toppling against the banisters, which threatened to break under him. He volunteered to carry the things to the station and was offended that his help was rejected. They had a hard time getting rid of him.

It was still dark outside. In the windless air, the snow fell more thickly than the evening before. Big, shaggy flakes floated down lazily and, nearing the ground, seemed to tarry longer, as if hesitating whether to lie down on it or not.

When they came out from their lane to the Arbat, it was a little lighter. Falling snow veiled everything down to the ground with its white, billowing curtain, the hanging fringe of which tangled under the walkers’ feet, so that the sensation of movement was lost and it seemed to them that they were marching in place.

There was not a soul in the street. The travelers from Sivtsev met no one on their way. Soon they were overtaken by an empty cab, the cabby all covered with snow as if he had been dragged through batter, driving a snow-blanched nag, and for a fabulous sum in those years, amounting to less than a kopeck, took all of them and their things into the droshky, except for Yuri Andreevich, who at his own request, light, without luggage, was allowed to go to the station on foot.

At the station, Antonina Alexandrovna and her father were already standing in a numberless line, squeezed between the barriers of wooden fences. Boarding was now done not from the platforms, but a good half mile down the tracks, by the exit semaphore, because there were not enough hands to clean the approach to the platforms, half of the station area was covered with ice and refuse, and the trains could not get that far.

Nyusha and Shurochka were not in the crowd with the mother and grandfather. They strolled freely under the enormous overhanging roof of the entrance, only rarely coming to see if it was time to join the adults. They smelled strongly of kerosene, which had been heavily applied to their ankles, wrists, and necks as protection against typhus lice.

Seeing her husband approaching, Antonina Alexandrovna beckoned to him with her hand, but, not letting him come nearer, she called out from a distance to tell him at which window mandates for official missions were stamped. He went there.

“Show me what kind of seals they gave you,” she asked when he came back. The doctor handed her a wad of folded papers over the barrier.

“That’s a travel warrant for the delegates’ car,” Antonina Alexandrovna’s
neighbor said behind her, making out over her shoulder the stamp on the document. The neighbor in front, one of those formalist legalists who in every circumstance know all the rules in the world, explained in more detail:

“With that seal you have the right to demand seats in a first-class, in other words, in a passenger coach, if there are any on the train.”

The case was subjected to discussion by the whole line. Voices arose:

“Go find any first-class coaches. That’d be too fat. Nowadays you can say thank you if you get a seat on a freight car buffer.”

“Don’t listen to them, you’re on official business. Here, I’ll explain to you. At the present time separate trains have been canceled, and there’s one combined one, which is for the military, and for convicts, and for cattle, and for people. The tongue can say whatever it likes—it’s pliable. But instead of confusing somebody with talk, you ought to explain so he’ll understand.”

“So you’ve explained. What a smart one we’ve got here. A warrant for the delegates’ car is only half the matter. Take a look at them first, and then talk. What are you going to do with such striking faces in the delegates’ car? The delegates’ car is full of our likes. The sailor’s got a sharp eye, and he’s got a pistol on a cord. He sees straight off—propertied class, and what’s more a doctor, from the former masters. The sailor grabs his pistol and swats him like a fly.”

It is not known where the sympathy for the doctor and his family would have led, had it not been for a new circumstance.

People in the crowd had for some time been casting glances through the thick plate glass of the wide station windows. The long roofs of the platform, stretching into the distance, removed to the last degree the spectacle of the snow falling on the tracks. At such a distance, it seemed that the snowflakes hung in the air almost without moving, slowly sinking into it the way soggy bread crumbs fed to fish sink into the water.

People in groups and singly had long been going off into that depth. While they were few in number, these figures, indistinct through the quivering net of the snow, had been taken for railway workers walking over the ties in the line of duty. But now a whole throng of them came along. In the depths they were heading for, an engine began to smoke.

“Open the doors, you crooks!” people shouted in the line. The crowd heaved and surged towards the doors. The ones in back pushed those in front.

“Look what’s going on! Here we’re barred by the wall, and there they cut ahead without lining up. The cars will be crammed full, and we stand here like sheep! Open up, you devils, or we’ll break it down! Hey, boys, all together, heave!”

“The fools don’t know who they’re envying,” the all-knowing legalist said. “They’ve been mobilized, drafted as labor conscripts from Petrograd.
³
They were sent first to Vologda, to the northern front, and now they’re being driven to the eastern front. Not of their own will. Under escort. To dig trenches.”

They had already been traveling for three days, but had not gone far from Moscow. The landscape along the way was wintry: the tracks, the fields, the forests, the roofs of the villages—everything lay under snow.

The Zhivago family had found themselves by luck on the left corner of the upper front bunk, by a dim, elongated window just under the ceiling, where they settled in a family circle, not breaking up their company.

Antonina Alexandrovna was traveling in a freight car for the first time. When they were getting on the train in Moscow, Yuri Andreevich had lifted the women up to the level of the car floor, along the edge of which rolled a heavy sliding door. Further on, the women got the knack of it and climbed into the car by themselves.