Doctor Zhivago (37 page)

“It’s coming from the window. You should stop it up. However, let’s get back to the subject of the argument. You’re wrong, doctor. Roasted hare is a splendid thing. But, forgive me, to conclude from it that the countryside is flourishing is bold, to say the least. It’s a very risky leap.”

“Oh, come now!” Yuri Andreevich objected. “Look at these stations. The trees haven’t been cut down. The fences are intact. And the markets! The peasant women! Just think, how satisfying! There’s life somewhere. Somebody’s glad. Not everybody groans. That justifies everything.”

“It would be good if it were so. But it’s not. Where did you get all that? Go fifty miles from the railway. There are ceaseless peasant revolts everywhere. Against whom, you ask? Against the Whites and against the Reds, depending on who’s in power. You say, aha, the muzhik is the enemy of all order, he doesn’t know what he wants himself. Excuse me, but it’s too early to be triumphant. He knows it better than you, but what he wants is not at all what you and I want.

“When the revolution woke him up, he decided that his age-old dream was coming true, of life on his own, of anarchic farmstead existence by the labor of his own hands, with no dependence and no obligation to anyone at all. But, from the vise grip of the old, overthrown state, he’s fallen under the still heavier press of the revolutionary superstate. And now the countryside is thrashing about and finds no peace anywhere. And you say the peasants are flourishing. You know nothing, my dear man, and, as far as I can see, you don’t want to know.”

“Well, so, it’s true I don’t want to. Perfectly right. Ah, go on! Why should I know everything and lay myself out for everything? The times take no account of me and impose whatever they like on me. So allow me to ignore the facts. You say my words don’t agree with reality. But is there any reality
in Russia now? In my opinion, it’s been so intimidated that it has gone into hiding. I want to believe that the countryside has benefitted and is prospering. If that, too, is a delusion, what am I to do, then? What am I to live by, who am I to obey? And I have to live, I’m a family man.”

Yuri Andreevich waved his hand and, leaving it to Alexander Alexandrovich to bring the argument with Kostoed to an end, moved closer to the edge of the berth and, hanging his head over, began to look at what was happening below.

A general conversation was going on there between Pritulyev, Voroniuk, Tyagunova, and Vasya. Seeing that they were nearing their native places, Pritulyev recalled how they were connected, what station you had to get to, where to get off, how to move further on, afoot or with horses, and Vasya, at the mention of familiar villages or hamlets, jumped with lit-up eyes and delightedly repeated their names, because listing them sounded to him like an enchanting fairy tale.

“You get off at Dry Ford?” he asked breathlessly. “Well, of course! That’s our junction! Our station! And then most likely you go down to Buiskoe?”

“Then down the Buiskoe road.”

“That’s what I said—Buiskoe. The village of Buiskoe. As if I don’t know! That’s our turnoff. To get from there to us you keep bearing to the right, to the right. Towards Veretenniki. And to you, Uncle Kharitonych, it must be to the left, away from the river? You’ve heard of the river Pelga? Well, so! That’s our river! And to us you go by the bank, by the bank. And on that same river, a bit higher up the Pelga, our village! Our Veretenniki. Right up on the cliff! The bank’s ste-e-ep! We call it ‘the counter.’ When you’re standing on top, it’s scary to look down, it’s so steep. For fear of falling. By God, it’s true. They cut stone there. For millstones. And my mama’s there in Veretenniki. And two little sisters. My sister Alenka. And Arishka, my other sister. My mama, Auntie Palasha, Pelageya Nilovna, she’s like you, I’d say, young, fair. Uncle Voroniuk! Uncle Voroniuk! I beg you, in Christ’s name … Uncle Voroniuk!”

“Well, what? What are you saying it over and over for, like a cuckoo bird? ‘Uncle Voroniuk! Uncle Voroniuk!’ Don’t I know I’m not an aunt? What do you want, what do you need? Want me to let you slip away? Is that what you’re saying? You clear off, and I go to the wall for it, and amen?”

Pelageya Tyagunova absentmindedly gazed off somewhere to the side and said nothing. She stroked Vasya’s head and, thinking about something, fingered his blond hair. Every once in a while she nodded her head and made signs to the boy with her eyes and her smiles, the meaning of which was that
he should not be silly and talk to Voroniuk out loud about such things. Just wait, she meant, everything will take care of itself, don’t worry.

When they left the Central Russian region and made their way east, unexpected things came thick and fast. They began to cross troubled areas, districts ruled by armed bands, places where uprisings had recently been quelled.

Stops in the middle of the fields, inspections of the cars by antiprofiteering units, searches of luggage, verifications of papers became more frequent.

Once the train got stuck somewhere during the night. No one looked into the cars, no one was awakened. Wondering if there had been an accident, Yuri Andreevich jumped down from the freight car.

It was a dark night. For no apparent reason, the train was standing at some chance milepost on an ordinary, fir-lined stretch of track in the middle of a field. Yuri Andreevich’s neighbors, who had jumped down earlier and were dawdling around in front of the freight car, told him that, according to their information, nothing had happened, but it seemed the engineer himself had stopped the train under the pretext that it was a dangerous place and, until the good condition of the tracks was verified by handcar, he refused to take the train any further. It was said that representatives of the passengers had been sent to entreat him and, in case of necessity, to grease his palm. According to rumor, the sailors were mixing into it. They would bring him around.

While this was being explained to Yuri Andreevich, the snowy smoothness down the tracks near the engine kept being lit up by flashes of fire from the smokestack and the vent under the engine’s firebox, like the breathing reflections of a bonfire. Suddenly one of these tongues brightly lit up a piece of the snowy field, the engine, and a few black figures running along the edge of the engine’s chassis.

Ahead of them, apparently, flashed the engineer. Having reached the end of the footboard, he leaped up and, flying over the buffer bar, disappeared from sight. The sailors pursuing him made the same movements. They, too, ran to the end of the grid, leaped, flashed in the air, and vanished from sight.

Drawn by what they had seen, Yuri Andreevich and a few of the curious walked towards the engine.

In the free part of the line ahead of the train, the following sight presented itself to them. To one side of the tracks, the vanished engineer stuck halfway out of the untouched snow. Like beaters around their game, the
sailors surrounded him in a semicircle, buried, like him, waist-deep in the snow.

The engineer shouted:

“Thanks a lot, you stormy petrels!
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I’ve lived to see it! Coming with a revolver against your brother, a worker! Why did I say the train would go no further? Comrade passengers, be my witnesses, what sort of country this is. Anybody who wants to hangs around, unscrewing nuts. Up yours and your mother’s, what’s that to me? Devil stick you in the ribs, I’m not talking about me, I’m talking about you, so they don’t pull some job on you. And see what I get for my cares. Well, so shoot me, mine layers! Comrade passengers, be my witnesses, I’m right here—I’m not hiding.”

Various voices were heard from the group on the railway embankment. Some exclaimed, taken aback:

“What’s with you? … Forget it … As if we … Who’d let them? They’re just … To put a scare …”

Others loudly egged him on:

“That’s right, Gavrilka! Don’t give up, old Steam-traction!”

A sailor, who was the first to free himself from the snow and turned out to be a red-haired giant with such an enormous head that it made his face look flat, quietly turned to the crowd and in a soft bass, with Ukrainianisms like Voroniuk, spoke a few words, funny for their perfect calm in those extraordinary night circumstances:

“Beg pardon, but what’s all this hullabaloo? You’re like to get sick in this wind, citizens. Go back to your cars out of the cold!”

When the crowd began to disperse, gradually returning to their freight cars, the red-haired sailor went up to the engineer, who had not quite come to his senses yet, and said:

“Enough throwing hysterics, comrade engineer. Leave that hole. Let’s get going.”

The next day, at a quiet pace, with slowdowns every moment, fearing to run off the slightly snow-powdered and unswept rails, the train stopped at a life-forsaken waste, in which they could not immediately recognize the remains of a station destroyed by fire. On its sooty façade the inscription “Nizhni Kelmes” could be made out.

It was not only the train station that kept the traces of a fire. Behind the station a deserted and snow-covered village could be seen, which had obviously shared its sorry fate.

The end house of the village was charred, the one next to it had several beams knocked loose at the corner and turned butt end in; everywhere in the street lay pieces of broken sledges, fallen-down fences, torn sheet metal, smashed household crockery. The snow, dirty with ashes and soot, had bare black patches showing through it, and was spread with frozen swill and charred logs, traces of the fire and its extinguishing.

The depopulation of the village and the station was incomplete. There were individual living souls in it here and there.

“Did the whole village burn down?” the train master asked sympathetically, jumping down onto the platform, when the station master came out from behind the ruins to meet him.

“Greetings. Glad you’ve arrived safely. Burn we did, but it’s something worse than a fire.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Better not go into it.”

“You mean Strelnikov?”

“Himself.”

“What did you do wrong?”

“It wasn’t us. The railroad was just tacked on. It was our neighbors. We got it at the same time. See that village over there? They’re the culprits. The village of Nizhni Kelmes of the Ust-Nemda district. It’s all because of them.”

“And what did they do?”

“Nearly all the seven deadly sins. They disbanded their poor peasants’ committee, that’s one for you; they opposed the decree on supplying horses to the Red Army—and, notice, they’re all Tartars, horse people, that’s two; and they didn’t obey the order about the mobilization, that’s three—so you can see.”

“Yes, yes. It’s all clear, then. And for that they got it from the artillery?”

“Precisely.”

“From an armored train?”

“Naturally.”

“Regrettable. Deserving of pity. However, it’s none of our business.”

“Besides, it’s a thing of the past. But my news won’t gladden you any. You’ll be staying here for a day or two.”

“Stop joking. I’m not here for just anything at all: I’ve got draft reinforcements for the front. I’m not used to standing around.”

“This is no joke. It’s a snowdrift, you’ll see for yourself. A blizzard raged for a week along this whole section. Buried it. And there’s nobody to shovel. Half the village has run away. I’ve set the rest to work, but they don’t manage.”

“Ah, confound you all! I’m finished, finished! Well, what to do now?”

“We’ll clear it somehow and you’ll go on.”

“Big drifts?”

“Not very, I wouldn’t say. For stretches. The blizzard went slantwise, at an angle to the tracks. The hardest part’s in the middle. There’s a mile and a half of hollow. We’ll really suffer there. The place is packed solid. But further on it’s not bad, taiga—the forest sheltered it. The same before the hollow, there’s an open stretch, nothing terrible. The wind blew it away.”

“Ah, devil take you all! What a nightmare! I’ll get the whole train on their feet, they can all help.”

“I thought the same thing.”

“Only don’t touch the sailors and the Red Army soldiers. There’s a whole trainload of labor conscripts. Along with freely traveling people, it’s as much as seven hundred.”

“That’s more than enough. As soon as the shovels are delivered, we’ll set them to it. There aren’t enough shovels. We’ve sent to the neighboring villages. There’ll be some.”

“God, what a disaster! Do you think we’ll manage?”

“Sure. Pull together, they say, and you take cities. It’s the railway. An artery. For pity’s sake.”

Clearing the line took three days. All the Zhivagos, including Nyusha, took an active part in it. This was the best time of their trip.

The country had something reserved, not fully told, about it. It gave off a breath of Pugachevism, in Pushkin’s perception of it, of Asiatic, Aksakovian description.
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The mysteriousness of the corner was completed by the destruction and by the reticence of the few remaining inhabitants, who were frightened, avoided the passengers on the train, and did not communicate with each other for fear of denunciations.

People were led out to work by categories, not all kinds simultaneously. The work area was cordoned off by the guards.

The line was cleared from both ends at once, by separate brigades set up in different places. Between the freed sections there remained to the very end piles of untouched snow, which separated the adjacent groups from each other. These piles were removed only at the last moment, once the clearing had been completed over the whole required stretch.

Clear, frosty days set in. They spent them in the open air, returning to the
car only for the night. They worked in short shifts, which caused no fatigue, because there were too many workers and not enough shovels. The untiring work afforded nothing but pleasure.

The place where the Zhivagos went to dig was open, picturesque. The country at this point first descended to the east of the tracks, and then went up in an undulating slope as far as the horizon.

On a hill stood a solitary house, exposed on all sides. It was surrounded by a garden, which probably bushed out in the summer, but now its spare, frost-covered tracery did not protect the building.