Doctor Zhivago (39 page)

Yuri Andreevich began to fall asleep at once and through his dozing fancied running feet and turmoil. Kostoed grappled with the head of the convoy, and the two shouted at each other. Outside it was still better than before. There was a breath of something new that had not been there earlier. Something magical, something springlike, black-and-white, flimsy, loose, like the coming of a snowstorm in May, when the wet, melting flakes on the ground make it not white but blacker still. Something transparent, black-and-white, strong scented. “Bird cherry!” Yuri Andreevich guessed in his sleep.

In the morning Antonina Alexandrovna said:

“Still, you’re an amazing man, Yura. A tissue of contradictions. Sometimes a fly flies by, you wake up and can’t close your eyes till morning, and here there’s noise, arguments, commotion, and you can’t manage to wake up. During the night the cashier Pritulyev and Vasya Brykin ran off. Yes, just think! And Tyagunova and Ogryzkova. Wait, that’s still not all. And Voroniuk. Yes, yes, ran off, ran off. Yes, imagine. Now listen. How they got
away, together or separately, and in what order, is an absolute mystery. Well, let’s allow that this Voroniuk, naturally, decided to save himself from the responsibility on finding that the others had escaped. But the others? Did they all vanish of their own free will, or was one of them forcibly eliminated? For instance, suspicion falls on the women. But who killed whom, Tyagunova Ogryzkova or Ogryzkova Tyagunova, nobody knows. The head of the convoy runs from one end of the train to the other. ‘How dare you give the whistle for departure,’ he shouts. ‘In the name of the law, I demand that you hold the train until the escapees are caught.’ But the train master doesn’t yield. ‘You’re out of your mind,’ he says. ‘I’ve got draft reinforcements for the front, an urgent first priority. I should wait for your lousy crew! What a thing to come up with!’ And both of them, you understand, fall on Kostoed with reproaches. How is it that he, a cooperator, a man of understanding, was right there and didn’t keep the soldier, a benighted, unconscious being, from the fatal step. ‘And you a populist,’ they say. Well, Kostoed, of course, doesn’t let it go at that. ‘Interesting!’ he says. ‘So according to you a prisoner should look after a convoy soldier? Yes, sure, when a hen crows like a cock!’ I nudged you in the side and shoulder. ‘Yura,’ I shout, ‘wake up, an escape!’ Forget it! Cannon shots wouldn’t have roused you … But forgive me, of that later. And meanwhile … No, I can’t … Papa, Yura, look, how enchanting!”

Beyond the opening of the window, by which they lay with their heads thrust forward, spread a flooded area with no beginning or end. Somewhere a river had overflowed, and the waters of its side branch had come up close to the railway embankment. In foreshortening, brought about by looking from the height of the berth, it seemed as if the smoothly rolling train was gliding right over the water.

Its glassy smoothness was covered in a very few places by a ferrous blueness. Over the rest of the surface, the hot morning drove mirrory, oily patches of light, like a cook smearing the crust of a hot pie with a feather dipped in oil.

In this seemingly boundless backwater, along with meadows, hollows, and bushes, the pillars of white clouds were drowned, their piles reaching to the bottom.

Somewhere in the middle of the backwater a narrow strip of land was visible, with double trees suspended upwards and downwards between sky and earth.

“Ducks! A brood!” cried Alexander Alexandrovich, looking in that direction.

“Where?”

“By the island. Not there. To the right, to the right. Ah, damn, they flew away, got frightened.”

“Ah, yes, I see. There’s something I must talk with you about, Alexander Alexandrovich. Some other time. But our labor army and the ladies did well to get away. And it was peaceful, I think, without doing anybody harm. They simply ran off, the way water runs.”

The northern white night was ending. Everything was visible, but stood as if not believing itself, like something made up: mountain, copse, and precipice.

The copse had barely begun to turn green. In it several bird cherry bushes were blooming. The copse grew under the sheer of the mountain, on a narrow ledge that also broke off some distance away.

Nearby was a waterfall. It could not be seen from everywhere, but only from the other side of the copse, at the edge of the precipice. Vasya got tired going there to gaze at the waterfall for the experience of terror and admiration.

There was nothing around equal to the waterfall, nothing to match it. It was fearsome in this singularity, which turned it into something endowed with life and consciousness, into a fairy-tale dragon or giant serpent of those parts, who exacted tribute from the people and devastated the countryside.

Halfway down, the waterfall struck a protruding jag of rock and divided in two. The upper column of water was almost motionless, but in the two lower ones a barely perceptible movement from side to side never ceased for a moment, as if the waterfall kept slipping and straightening up, slipping and straightening up, and however often it lurched, it always kept its feet.

Vasya, spreading his sheepskin under him, lay down at the edge of the copse. When the dawn became more noticeable, a big, heavy-winged bird flew down from the mountain, glided in a smooth circle around the copse, and alighted at the top of a silver fir near the spot where Vasya lay. He raised his head, looked at the blue throat and blue-gray breast of the roller, and, spellbound, whispered aloud its Urals name: “Ronzha.” Then he got up, took the sheepskin from the ground, threw it on, and, crossing the clearing, came over to his companion. He said to her:

“Come on, auntie. See, you’re chilled, your teeth are chattering. Well, what are you staring at like you’re so scared? I’m talking human speech to you, we’ve got to go. Enter into the situation, we’ve got to keep to the villages. In a village they won’t harm their own kind, they’ll hide us. We
haven’t eaten for two days, we’ll starve to death like this. Uncle Voroniuk must have raised hell looking for us. We’ve got to get out of here, Auntie Palasha, clear off, to put it simply. You’re such a pain to me, auntie, you haven’t said a word the whole day! Grief’s got your tongue, by God. What are you pining over? There was no wrong in you pushing Auntie Katya, Katya Ogryzkova, off the train. You just brushed against her with your side, I saw it myself. She got up from the grass unhurt, got up and ran. And the same with Uncle Prokhor, Prokhor Kharitonych. They’re catching up with us, we’ll be together again, don’t you think? The main thing is you mustn’t grieve, then your tongue’ll start working again.”

Tyagunova got up from the ground and, giving Vasya her hand, said softly:

“Come on, dovey.”

Creaking all over, the cars went uphill along the high embankment. Under it grew a mixed young forest, the tops of which did not reach its level. Below were meadows from which the water had just receded. The grass, mixed with sand, was covered with logs for ties, which lay randomly in all directions. They had probably been prepared for rafting at some nearby woodlot, and had been washed away and carried here by the high water.

The young forest below the embankment was still almost bare, as in winter. Only in the buds, which were spattered all over it like drops of wax, was something superfluous setting in, some disorder, a sort of dirt or swelling, and this superfluous thing, this disorder and dirt, was life, enveloping the first opening trees of the forest in the green flame of foliage.

Here and there birches stood straight as martyrs, pierced by the cogs and arrows of twin, just unfolded leaves. What they smelled of could be told by eye. They smelled of the same thing they shone with. They smelled of wood spirit, from which varnish is made.

Soon the railway came up to the place from which the logs might have been washed. At a turn in the forest, a clearing appeared, strewn with sawdust and chips, with a heap of twenty-foot logs in the middle. The engineer braked by the cutting area. The train shuddered and stopped in the position it assumed, slightly inclined on the high arc of a big curve.

The engine gave several short, barking whistles and someone shouted something. The passengers knew even without the signals: the engineer had stopped the train to take on fuel.

The doors of the freight cars slid open. Out onto the tracks poured the
goodly population of a small town, excluding the mobilized men from the front cars, who were always exempt from deckhands’ work and did not take part in it now.

The pile of stove wood in the clearing was not enough to load the tender. In addition they were required to cut up a certain number of the twenty-foot logs.

The engine team had saws in its outfit. They were handed out among volunteers, who broke up into pairs. The professor and his son-in-law also received a saw.

From the open doors of the military freight cars, merry mugs stuck out. Adolescents who had never been under fire, naval cadets from the senior classes, mistakenly intruded into the wagon, as it seemed, among stern workers, family men, who had also never smelled powder and had only just finished military training, deliberately made noise and played the fool with the older sailors, so as not to start thinking. Everyone felt that the hour of trial was at hand.

The jokers accompanied the sawyers, men and women, with loud banter:

“Hey, grandpa! Tell them—I’m a nursling, my mama hasn’t weaned me, I can’t do physical labor. Hey, Mavra, see you don’t saw your skirt off, it’ll be drafty! Hey, girl, don’t go to the forest, better marry me instead!”

In the forest there were several sawhorses made from stakes tied crosswise, their ends driven into the ground. One turned out to be free. Yuri Andreevich and Alexander Alexandrovich set themselves to sawing on it.

It was that time of spring when the earth comes out from under the snow looking almost the same as when it went under the snow six months earlier. The forest exuded dampness and was all littered with last year’s leaves, like an untidied room in which people had torn up receipts, letters, and notices for many years of their lives and had had no time to sweep them away.

“Not so fast, you’ll get tired,” the doctor said to Alexander Alexandrovich, making the saw go more slowly and measuredly, and suggested that they rest.

The forest was filled with the hoarse ringing of other saws going back and forth, now all in rhythm, now discordantly. Somewhere far, far away the first nightingale was testing its strength. A blackbird whistled at still longer intervals, as if blowing through a clogged flute. Even the steam from the engine’s piston rose into the sky with a singsong burble, as if it were milk coming to the boil over a spirit lamp in a nursery.

“You wanted to talk about something,” Alexander Alexandrovich reminded the doctor. “You haven’t forgotten? It was like this: we were passing a flooded field, ducks were flying, you fell to thinking and said: ‘I must talk with you.’ ”

“Ah, yes. I don’t know how to put it briefly. You see, we’re going ever deeper … The whole region here is in ferment. We’ll arrive soon. It’s not known what we’ll find at our destination. Just in case, we must come to an agreement. I’m not talking about convictions. It would be absurd to find them out or establish them in a five-minute talk in a spring forest. We know each other well. The three of us—you, I, and Tonya—along with many others in our time, make up a single world, differing from each other only in the degree of our comprehension. I’m not talking about that. That’s an ABC. I’m talking about something else. We must agree beforehand on how to behave under certain circumstances, so as not to blush for each other and not to put the stain of disgrace on each other.”

“Enough. I understand. I like the way you pose the question. You’ve found precisely the necessary words. Here’s what I’ll tell you. Do you remember the night when you brought the leaflet with the first decrees, in winter, during a blizzard? Do you remember how incredibly unconditional it was? That straightforwardness was winning. But these things live in their original purity only in the heads of their creators, and then only on the first day of their proclamation. The very next day the Jesuitism of politics turns them inside out. What can I say to you? This philosophy is alien to me. This power is against us. They didn’t ask me to consent to this breakup. But they trusted me, and my actions, even if I was forced into them, placed me under obligation.

“Tonya asks if we’ll come in time to start a vegetable garden, if we’ll miss the time for planting. What can I answer? I don’t know the local soil. What are the climatic conditions? The summer’s too short. Does anything at all ripen here?

“Yes, but can we be going such a distance to take up gardening? Even the old saying, ‘Why walk a mile for a pint of beer,’ is impossible here, because there are, unfortunately, two or three thousand of those miles. No, frankly speaking, we’re dragging ourselves so far with a totally different purpose. We’re going to try to vegetate in the contemporary way and somehow get in on squandering grandfather’s former forests, machinery, and inventory. Not on restoring his property, but on wasting it, on the socialized blowing of thousands in order to exist on a kopeck, and like everybody else, to be sure, in a contemporary, incomprehensibly chaotic form. Shower me with gold, I still wouldn’t take the factory on the old basis even as a gift. It would
be as wild as starting to run around naked or forgetting how to read and write. No, the history of property in Russia is over. And personally, we Gromekos already lost the passion for money grubbing in the previous generation.”

It was so hot and stuffy that it was impossible to sleep. The doctor’s head was bathed in sweat on the sweat-soaked pillow.

He carefully got down from the edge of the berth and quietly, so as not to waken anyone, slid the car door aside.

Dampness breathed in his face, sticky, as when your face runs into a spiderweb in a cellar. “Mist,” he guessed. “Mist. The day will probably be sultry, scorching. That’s why it’s so hard to breathe and there’s such an oppressive heaviness on the heart.”