Doctor Zhivago (38 page)

The shroud of snow leveled and rounded everything. But, judging by the main irregularities of the slope, which it was unable to conceal with its drifts, in spring a brook, flowing into the pipe of the viaduct under the railway, probably ran from above down the meandering gully, now thickly covered by the deep snow, like a child hiding its head under the heap of a down coverlet.

Was anyone living in the house, or was it standing empty and falling to ruin, set down on a list by the local or district land committee? Where were its former inhabitants, and what had happened to them? Had they escaped abroad? Had they perished at the hands of the peasants? Or, having earned a good name, had they settled in the district town as educated experts? Had Strelnikov spared them, if they stayed until recently, or had they been included in his summary justice along with the kulaks?
⁶

The house on the hill piqued his curiosity and kept mournfully silent. But questions were not asked then, and no one answered them. And the sun lit up the snowy smoothness with a blinding white brilliance. How regular were the pieces the shovel cut from it! What dry, diamond-like sparkles spilled from the cuts! How it reminded him of the far-off days of childhood, when, in a light-colored hood trimmed with braid and a lambskin coat with hooks tightly sewn into the black, curly wool, little Yura had cut pyramids and cubes, cream cakes, fortresses, and cave dwellings from the snow in the courtyard, which was just as blinding. Ah, how tasty it was to live in the world then, how delightful and delicious everything around him was!

But even this three-day life in the open air produced an impression of satiety. And not without reason. In the evening the workers were allotted hot, freshly baked white bread, brought from no one knew where, on no one knew whose orders. The bread had a delicious glazed crust that was cracked on the sides, and a thick, superbly browned bottom crust with little bits of coal baked into it.

They came to love the ruins of the station, as one can grow attached to a temporary shelter during an excursion in the snowy mountains. They kept the memory of its situation, the external appearance of the buildings, certain details of the damage.

They returned to the station in the evening, when the sun was setting. As if out of faithfulness to the past, it continued to set in the same place, behind the old birch that grew just by the telegraphist’s office window.

The outer wall at that place had collapsed inward and blocked up the room. But the cave-in had not harmed the back corner of the room, facing an intact window. There everything was preserved: the coffee-colored wallpaper, the tile stove with a round vent under a brass cover on a chain, and a list of the inventory in a black frame on the wall.

Having sunk to the ground, the sun, just as before the disaster, reached the tiles of the stove, lit up the coffee-colored wallpaper with a russet heat, and hung the shadows of birch branches on the wall like a woman’s shawl.

In another part of the building, there was a boarded-up door to a waiting room with an inscription of the following content, done probably in the first days of the February revolution or shortly before it:

“In view of medications and bandaging supplies, our respected patients are asked not to worry temporarily. For the reason observed, I am sealing the door, of which I hereby give notice. Senior medical assistant of Ust-Nemda so-and-so.”

When the last snow, which had been left in mounds between the cleared sections, was shoveled away, the whole railway opened out and became visible, straight, like an arrow flying off into the distance. Along the sides of it lay white heaps of cleared snow, bordered for the entire length by two walls of black pine forest.

As far as the eye could see, groups of people with shovels stood in various places along the rails. They were seeing each other in full muster for the first time and were surprised at their great numbers.

It became known that the train would leave in a few hours, even though it was late and night was approaching. Before its departure, Yuri Andreevich and Antonina Alexandrovna went for the last time to admire the beauty of the cleared line. There was no one on the tracks now. The doctor and his
wife stood for a while, looked into the distance, exchanged two or three remarks, and turned back to their freight car.

On the way back they heard the angry, raucous cries of two quarreling women. They recognized them at once as the voices of Ogryzkova and Tyagunova. The two women were walking in the same direction as the doctor and his wife, from the head to the tail of the train, but along the opposite side of it, facing the station, while Yuri Andreevich and Antonina Alexandrovna were walking on the forest side. Between the two pairs, concealing them from each other, stretched the unbroken wall of cars. The women almost never came abreast of the doctor and Antonina Alexandrovna, but either got way ahead of them or lagged far behind.

Both were in great agitation. Their strength failed them every moment. As they went, their legs probably either sank deep in the snow or gave way under them, judging by their voices, which, owing to the unevenness of their gait, now rose to a shout, now fell to a whisper. Evidently, Tyagunova was chasing Ogryzkova and, overtaking her, may have brought her fists into play. She showered her rival with choice abuse, which, on the melodious lips of such a peahen and grande dame sounded a hundred times more shameless than coarse and unmusical male abuse.

“Ah, you whore, ah, you slattern,” shouted Tyagunova. “You can’t take a step but she’s there, swishing her skirts on the floor, goggling her eyes! So my oaf’s not enough for you, you bitch, you’ve got to gawk at a child’s soul, spreading your tail, you’ve got to corrupt a young one.”

“So it means you’re Vasenka’s lawful one, too?”

“I’ll show you who’s lawful, you gob, you plague! You won’t escape me alive, don’t lead me into sin!”

“Hey, hey, stop swinging! Keep your hands to yourself, hellcat! What do you want from me?”

“I want you to drop dead, you lousy trollop, mangy she-cat, shameless eyes!”

“There’s no talking about me. Sure, I’m a bitch and a she-cat, everybody knows that. But you, you’ve got you a title. Born in a ditch, married in a gateway, made pregnant by a rat, gave birth to a hedgehog … Help, help, good people! Aie, aie, she’ll do me to death, the murderous hag! Aie, save a poor girl, protect an orphan …”

“Quick, let’s go. I can’t listen, it’s disgusting,” Antonina Alexandrovna began hurrying her husband. “It won’t end well.”

Suddenly everything changed, the place and the weather. The plain ended, the road went between mountains, through hills and high country. The north wind that had blown all the time recently ceased. Warmth breathed from the south, as from a stove.

The forests here grew in terraces on the hillsides. When the path of the railway crossed them, the train first had to go up steeply, then change in the middle to a sloping descent. The train crept groaning into the dense forest and barely dragged itself along, like an old forester on foot leading a crowd of passengers who look around on all sides and observe everything.

But there was nothing to look at yet. In the depths of the forest there were sleep and peace, as in winter. Only rarely did some bushes and trees, with a rustle, free their lower branches from the gradually subsiding snow, as if taking off a yoke or unbuttoning a collar.

Yuri Andreevich was overcome by sleepiness. All those days he lay on his upper berth, slept, woke up, reflected, and listened. But as yet there was nothing to listen to.

While Yuri Andreevich slept his fill, spring thawed and melted all the masses of snow that had fallen on Moscow the day of their departure and had gone on falling throughout the journey; all the snow that they had spent three days digging and shoveling in Ust-Nemda and that lay in immense and thick layers over thousand-mile expanses.

At first the snow melted from inside, quietly and secretively. But when the Herculean labors were half done, it became impossible to conceal them any longer. The miracle came to light. Water ran from under the shifted shroud of snow and set up a clamor. Impassable forest thickets roused themselves. Everything in them awoke.

The water had room for a spree. It rushed down the cliffs, overflowed the ponds, flooded vast areas. The forest was soon filled with its noise, steam, and haze. Streams snaked their way through the thickets, getting mired down and sinking into the snow that cramped their movement, flowed hissing over the flat places, and dropped down, scattering in a watery spray. The earth could not absorb any more moisture. From a dizzying height, almost from the clouds, it was drunk up by the roots of age-old firs, at whose feet it was churned into puffs of brownish white foam, drying like beer foam on a drinker’s lips.

The intoxication of spring went to the sky’s head, and it grew bleary from fumes and covered itself with clouds. Low, feltlike clouds with drooping edges drifted over the forest, and warm cloudbursts, smelling of dirt and sweat, poured down through them, washing the last pieces of pierced, black, icy armor from the earth.

Yuri Andreevich woke up, pulled himself over to the square window, from which the frame had been removed, propped himself on his elbow, and began to listen.

With the approach of the mining region, the country became more populated, the stages shorter, the stations more frequent. The passengers changed less rarely. More people got on and off at small intermediate stops. Those who were traveling for shorter distances did not settle for long and did not go to sleep, but found places at night somewhere by the doors in the middle of the freight car, talked among themselves in low voices about local affairs, comprehensible only to them, and got off at the next junction or way station.

From some remarks dropped by the local public, who had replaced each other in the freight car over the past three days, Yuri Andreevich concluded that the Whites were gaining the upper hand in the north and either had taken or were about to take Yuriatin. Besides, if his hearing had not deceived him and it was not some namesake of his comrade in the Meliuzeevo hospital, the White forces in that direction were under the command of Galiullin, who was well-known to Yuri Andreevich.

Yuri Andreevich did not say a word to his family about this talk, so as not to upset them uselessly while the rumors remained unconfirmed.

Yuri Andreevich woke up at the beginning of the night from a vague feeling of happiness welling up in him, which was so strong that it roused him. The train was standing at some night stop. The station was surrounded by the glassy twilight of a white night. This bright darkness was saturated with something subtle and powerful. It bore witness to the vastness and openness of the place. It suggested that the junction was situated on a height with a wide and free horizon.

On the platform, talking softly, shadows went past the freight car with inaudible steps. That also touched Yuri Andreevich. He perceived in the careful steps and voices a respect
for the hour of night and a concern for the sleepers on the train as might have been in the old days, before the war.

The doctor was mistaken. There was the same hubbub and stamping of boots on the platform as everywhere else. But there was a waterfall in the vicinity. Its breathing out of freshness and freedom extended the limits of the white night. It had filled the doctor with a feeling of happiness in his sleep. The constant, never ceasing noise of its falling water reigned over all the sounds at the junction and imparted to them a deceptive semblance of silence.

Not divining its presence, but lulled by the mysterious resilience of the air of the place, the doctor fell fast asleep again.

Two men were talking below in the freight car. One asked the other:

“Well, so, have you calmed them down? Twisted their tails?”

“The shopkeepers, you mean?”

“Yes, the grain dealers.”

“We’ve pacified them. Like silk now. We knocked off a few as an example, and the rest got quiet. We collected a contribution.”

“How much did you take from the area?”

“Forty thousand.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Why should I kid you?”

“Holy cow, forty thousand!”

“Forty thousand bushels.”

“Well, there’s no flies on you! Good boys, good boys!”

“Forty thousand milled fine.”

“I suppose it’s no wonder. This area’s first class. Heart of the meal trade. Here along the Rynva and up to Yuriatin, village after village, it’s landings, grain depots. The Sherstobitov brothers, Perekatchikov and sons, wholesaler after wholesaler!”

“Don’t shout. You’ll wake people up.”

“All right.”

The speaker yawned. The other suggested:

“How about a little snooze? Looks like we’ll be starting.”

Just then a deafening noise came rolling from behind, swiftly growing, covering the roar of the waterfall, and an old-fashioned express train raced at full steam down the second track of the junction past their train, which stood without moving, hooted, roared, and, blinking its lights for the last time, vanished into the distance without a trace.

The conversation below resumed.

“Well, that’s it now. We’ll sit it out.”

“It won’t be soon now.”

“Must be Strelnikov. Armored, special purpose.”

“It’s him, then.”

“When it comes to counterrevolutionists, he’s ferocious.”

“It’s him racing against Galeev.”

“Who’s that?”

“The ataman Galeev. They say he’s standing with his Czechs covering Yuriatin. Seized control of the landings, blast him, and he’s holding them. The ataman Galeev.”
⁷

“Prince Galileev, maybe. I forget.”

“There’s no such prince. Must be Ali Kurban. You got mixed up.”

“Kurban, maybe.”

“That’s another story.”

Towards morning Yuri Andreevich woke up a second time. Again he had dreamed something pleasant. The feeling of bliss and liberation that had filled him did not end. Again the train was standing, maybe at a new station, or maybe at the old one. Again there was the noise of a waterfall, most likely the same one, but possibly another.