Doctor Zhivago (41 page)

Out of courtesy, he did not show that the presence of a stranger surprised or embarrassed him. On the contrary, he addressed everyone with such an air as if he included the doctor, too, in their company. He said:

“Congratulations. We’ve driven them off. This seems like a war game, and not the real thing, because they’re Russians as we are, only with a folly in them that they don’t want to part with and that we’ll have to knock out of them by force. Their commander used to be my friend. He’s of still more proletarian origin than I am. We grew up in the same courtyard. He did a lot for me in my life, I’m obliged to him. But I’m glad I’ve thrust him back across the river and maybe further. Repair the connection quickly, Guryan. We can’t go on with just messengers and the telegraph. Have you noticed how hot it is? I slept for an hour and a half even so. Ah, yes …” he recalled and turned to the doctor. He remembered the cause of his waking up. He had been awakened by some nonsense, by force of which this detainee was standing here.

“This one?” thought Strelnikov, measuring the doctor from head to foot with a searching look. “No resemblance. What fools!” He laughed and said to Yuri Andreevich:

“I beg your pardon, comrade. You’ve been taken for someone else. My sentries got it wrong. You’re free. Where’s the comrade’s work book? Ah, here are your papers. Excuse my indiscretion, I’ll allow myself a passing glance. Zhivago … Zhivago … Doctor Zhivago … Something to do with Moscow … You know, all the same let’s go to my place for a minute. This is the secretariat, and my car is the next one. If you please. I won’t keep you long.”

Who was this man, though? It was astonishing that a nonparty man, whom no one knew, because, though born in Moscow, he had left after finishing the university to teach in the provinces, then had been held prisoner for a long time during the war, had been missing until recently and presumed dead, could advance to such posts and hold on to them.

The progressive railway worker Tiverzin, in whose family
Strelnikov had been brought up as a boy, had recommended him and vouched for him. The people upon whom appointments depended at that time trusted him. In days of excessive pathos and the most extreme views, Strelnikov’s revolutionism, which stopped at nothing, stood out by its genuineness, its fanaticism, not borrowed from another man’s singing, but prepared by the whole of his life and not accidentally.

Strelnikov had justified the trust put in him.

His service record in the recent period included the affairs at Ust-Nemda and Nizhni Kelmes, the affair of the Gubasovo peasants, who had shown armed resistance to a supply detachment, and the affair of the robbery of a supply train by the fourteenth infantry regiment at the Medvezhaya Poima station. In his service book was the affair of the Razinsky regiment, who raised a rebellion in the town of Turkatuy and, arms in hand, went over to the side of the White Guard, and the affair of a soldiers’ riot at the river wharf of Chirkin Us, with its murder of a commander who remained loyal to soviet power.

In all these places, he appeared like a bolt from the blue, judged, sentenced, carried out the sentences, quickly, severely, dauntlessly.

His traveling about on the train had put an end to the general desertion in the area. The revision of the recruiting organizations changed everything. The Red Army levy went successfully. The selection committees got to work feverishly.

Finally, in recent days, when the Whites began pushing from the north and the situation was acknowledged as threatening, Strelnikov was charged with new tasks, essentially military, strategic and operational. The results of his intervention were not slow in telling.

Strelnikov knew that rumor had nicknamed him Rasstrelnikov, “the Executioner.” He calmly took it in stride, he feared nothing.

He was a native of Moscow and the son of a worker who had taken part in the revolution of 1905 and had suffered for it. He himself had kept away from the revolutionary movement in those years because of his youth, and in the following years, when he was studying at the university, because young people from a poor milieu, when they got to do advanced studies, valued it more and studied more assiduously than the children of the rich. The ferment among the well-to-do students had not touched him. He had left the university with a vast amount of knowledge. He had, by his own efforts, supplemented his historico-philological education with a mathematical one.

By law he was not obliged to go into the army, but he had gone to war as a volunteer, had been taken prisoner as a lieutenant, and at the end of the year 1917 had escaped, on learning that there was revolution in Russia.

Two features, two passions, distinguished him.

He thought with outstanding clarity and correctness. And he possessed a rare degree of moral purity and fairness, was a man of warm and noble feelings.

But for the activity of a scientist laying out new paths, his mind lacked the
gift of unexpectedness, that power which, with unforeseen discoveries, disrupts the fruitless harmony of empty foresight.

And for doing good, he, a man of principle, lacked the unprincipledness of the heart, which knows no general cases, but only particular ones, and which is great in doing small things.

From an early age Strelnikov had striven for the highest and brightest. He considered life an enormous arena in which people, honorably observing the rules, compete in the attainment of perfection.

When it turned out that this was not so, it never entered his head that he was wrong in simplifying the world order. Having driven the offense inside for a long time, he began to cherish the thought of one day becoming an arbiter between life and the dark principles that distort it, of stepping forth to its defense and avenging it.

Disappointment embittered him. The revolution armed him.

“Zhivago, Zhivago,” Strelnikov went on repeating to himself in his car, to which they had passed. “From merchants. Or the nobility. Well, yes: a doctor from Moscow. To Varykino. Strange. From Moscow and suddenly to such a godforsaken hole.”

“Precisely with that purpose. In search of quiet. In a remote corner, in the unknown.”

“How poetic. Varykino? I know the area. Krüger’s former factories. His little relatives, by any chance? His heirs?”

“Why this mocking tone? What have ‘heirs’ got to do with it? Though, in fact, my wife …”

“Aha, you see. Pining for the Whites? I must disappoint you. It’s too late. The area’s been cleared.”

“You go on jeering?”

“And then—a doctor. An army doctor. And it’s a time of war. Just my line. A deserter. The Greens
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also seclude themselves in the forests. Seeking quiet. What grounds?”

“Twice wounded and discharged as unfit.”

“Now you’re going to present a letter from the People’s Commissariat of Education or the People’s Commissariat of Health, recommending you as ‘a completely soviet man,’ as a ‘sympathizer,’ and attesting to your ‘loyalty.’ We’re now having the Last Judgment on earth, my dear sir, we have apocalyptic beings with swords and winged beasts, and not fully sympathizing and loyal doctors. However, I’ve told you that you’re free, and I won’t go
back on my word. But only this time. I have a presentiment that we’ll meet again, and then, watch out, the talk will be different.”

The threat and the challenge did not disturb Yuri Andreevich. He said:

“I know everything you think about me. For your part, you’re absolutely right. But the argument you want to draw me into is one I have mentally conducted all my life with an imaginary accuser, and I should think I’ve had time to come to some conclusion. It can’t be put in a couple of words. Allow me to leave without explaining, if I am indeed free, and if not—dispose of me. I have no need to justify myself before you.”

They were interrupted by the buzzing of the telephone. The connection was restored.

“Thank you, Guryan,” said Strelnikov, picking up the receiver and blowing into it several times. “Send someone to accompany Comrade Zhivago, my dear boy. So that nothing happens again. And get me Razvilye on the squawk box, please, the Cheka
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transport office in Razvilye.”

Left alone, Strelnikov telephoned the station:

“They’ve brought in a boy, he pulls his cap over his ears, but his head’s bandaged, it’s disgraceful. Yes. Give him medical aid, if necessary. Yes, like the apple of your eye, you’ll answer to me personally. A ration, if it’s needed. Right. And now about business. I’m speaking, I haven’t finished. Ah, the devil, some third person’s cut in. Guryan! Guryan! Disconnected.”

“He could be from my primary school class,” he thought, setting aside for a moment the attempt to finish the talk with the station. “He grew up and rebels against us.” Strelnikov mentally counted up the years of his teaching, and the war, and his captivity, to see if the sum would fit the boy’s age. Then, through the car window, he began searching the panorama visible on the horizon for that neighborhood above the river, at the exit from Yuriatin, where their lodgings had been. And what if his wife and daughter were still there? Go to them! Now, this minute! Yes, but is that thinkable? That was from a completely different life. He must first finish this new one, before going back to that interrupted one. Someday, someday it would happen. Yes, but when, when?

The train that had brought the Zhivago family to this place still stood on the back tracks of the station, screened by other trains, but there was a feeling that the connection with Moscow, which had stretched over the whole journey, had broken, had ended that morning.

From here on another territorial zone opened out, a different, provincial world, drawn to a center of gravity of its own.

The local people knew each other more intimately than in the capital. Though the area around the Yuriatin–Razvilye railway had been cleared of unauthorized persons and cordoned off by Red Army troops, local suburban passengers made their way to the line in some incomprehensible way—“infiltrated,” as they would say now. The cars were already packed with them, they crowded the doorways of the freight cars, they walked on the tracks alongside the train and stood on the embankments by the entrances to their cars.

All these people to a man were acquainted with each other, conversed from afar, greeted each other when they came near. They dressed and talked slightly differently than in the capitals, did not eat the same things, had other habits.

It was curious to learn what they lived by, what moral and material resources nourished them, how they struggled with difficulties, how they evaded the laws.

The answer was not slow to appear in the most vivid form.

Accompanied by the sentry who dragged his gun on the ground and propped himself up on it as on a staff, the doctor went back to his train.

It was sultry. The sun scorched the rails and the roofs of the cars. The ground, black with oil, burned with a yellow gleam, as if gilded.

The sentry furrowed the dust with his rifle butt, leaving a trail in the sand behind him. The gun knocked against the ties. The sentry was saying:

“The weather’s settled. It’s the perfect time for sowing the spring crops—oats, summer wheat, or, say, millet. It’s too early for buckwheat. We sow buckwheat on St. Akulina’s day.
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We’re from Morshansk, in Tambov province, not from here. Eh, comrade doctor! If it wasn’t for this civil hydra right now, this plague of counterrevolutionists, would I be lost in foreign parts at a time like this? It’s run among us like a black cat, this class war, and see what it does!”

“Thanks. I’ll do it myself,” Yuri Andreevich declined the offered aid. People bent down from the freight car and stretched their hands out to him to help him get in. He pulled himself up and jumped into the car, got to his feet, and embraced his wife.

“At last. Well, thank God, thank God it all ended like this,” Antonina Alexandrovna kept saying. “However, this happy outcome is no news to us.”

“How do you mean, no news?”

“We know everything.”

“From where?”

“The sentries kept telling us. Otherwise how could we have borne the uncertainty? Papa and I nearly lost our minds as it was. There he sleeps, you can’t wake him. He collapsed from anxiety as if he were cut down—you can’t rouse him. There are new passengers. I’m going to have you meet someone now. But first listen to what they’re saying all around. The whole car congratulates you on your happy deliverance. See what a husband I’ve got!” She suddenly changed the subject, turned her head, and, over her shoulder, introduced him to one of the newly arrived passengers, squeezed by his neighbors back in the rear of the car.

“Samdevyatov,” was heard from there, a soft hat rose above the mass of people’s heads, and the owner of the name began pushing his way towards the doctor through the thick of the bodies pressed against him.

“Samdevyatov,” Yuri Andreevich reflected meanwhile. “Something old Russian, I thought, folk epic, broad bushy beard, peasant tunic, studded
belt. But here’s some sort of society for lovers of art, graying curls, mustache, goatee.”

“Well, so, did Strelnikov give you a fright? Confess.”

“No, why? The conversation was serious. In any case, he’s a strong, substantial man.”

“That he is. I have some notion of this person. He’s not native to us. He’s yours, a Muscovite. The same as our novelties of recent times. Also yours, imported from the capital. Our own minds would never have come up with them.”

“This is Anfim Efimovich, Yurochka—all-knowing, omniscient. He’s heard about you, about your father, knows my grandfather, everybody, everybody. Get acquainted.” And Antonina Alexandrovna asked in passing, without expression: “You probably also know the local teacher Antipova?” To which Samdevyatov replied just as expressionlessly: “What do you want with Antipova?”

Yuri Andreevich heard it and did not enter into the conversation. Antonina Alexandrovna went on:

“Anfim Efimovich is a Bolshevik. Watch out, Yurochka. Keep your ears pricked up with him.”