Doctor Zhivago (47 page)

When she had sneezed for the tenth or twelfth time, Yuri Andreevich guessed that she was Mikulitsyn’s sister-in-law, one of the Tuntsevs, of whom Samdevyatov had told him. Along with other readers, Yuri Andreevich raised his head and looked in her direction.

Then he noticed that a change had taken place in the room. At the opposite end a new visitor had been added. Yuri Andreevich recognized Antipova at once. She was sitting with her back turned to the front tables, at one of which the doctor had placed himself, and talking in a low voice with the sick librarian, who stood bending towards Larissa Fyodorovna and exchanged whispers with her. This conversation must have had a beneficial influence on the librarian. She was instantly cured not only of her annoying cold, but also of her nervous apprehension. Casting a warm, grateful glance at Antipova, she took away the handkerchief that she kept pressed to her lips all the time and, putting it in her pocket, went back to her place behind the counter, happy, confident, and smiling.

This scene marked by touching details did not escape some of those present. From all sides of the room, people looked sympathetically at Antipova and also smiled. By these insignificant signs, Yuri Andreevich ascertained how well-known and loved she was in the city.

Yuri Andreevich’s first intention was to get up and go over to Larissa Fyodorovna. But then the constraint and lack of simplicity, foreign to his nature but established in him in relation to her, got the upper hand. He decided not to bother her, and also not to interrupt his own work. To shield himself from the temptation to look in her direction, he placed the chair sideways to the table, almost back to the readers, and immersed himself in his books, holding one in his hand in front of him and another open on his knees.

However, his thoughts wandered a thousand miles away from the subject of his studies. Outside of any connection with them, he suddenly realized that the voice he had once heard in his sleep on a winter night in Varykino had been Antipova’s voice. He was struck by this discovery and, attracting
the attention of those around him, he abruptly put his chair back in its former position, so as to see Antipova from where he sat, and began to look at her.

He saw her almost from behind, her back half turned. She was wearing a light-colored checkered blouse tied with a belt, and was reading eagerly, with self-abandon, as children do, her head slightly inclined towards her right shoulder. Now and then she lapsed into thought, raising her eyes to the ceiling or narrowing them and peering somewhere far ahead of her, and then again, propped on her elbow, her head resting on her hand, in a quick, sweeping movement she penciled some notes in her notebook.

Yuri Andreevich tested and confirmed his former observations in Meliuzeevo. “She doesn’t want to be admired,” he thought, “to be beautiful, captivating. She scorns that side of a woman’s nature, and it is as if she punishes herself for being so good-looking. And that proud hostility to herself increases her irresistibility tenfold.

“How good is everything she does. She reads as if it were not man’s highest activity, but the simplest of things, accessible to animals. As if she were carrying water or peeling potatoes.”

These reflections calmed the doctor. A rare peace descended into his soul. His thoughts stopped scattering and jumping from subject to subject. He smiled involuntarily. Antipova’s presence had the same effect on him as on the nervous librarian.

Not bothering about how his chair stood, and fearing no hindrances or distractions, he worked for an hour or an hour and a half still more assiduously and concentratedly than before Antipova’s arrival. He went through the tall stack of books in front of him, selected the most necessary ones, and even managed in passing to gulp down the two important articles he came across in them. Deciding to be satisfied with what he had done, he started gathering up the books in order to take them to the librarian’s desk. All extraneous considerations, derogatory to his consciousness, abandoned him. With a clear conscience, and with no second thoughts, he decided that his honestly done work had earned him the right to meet with an old and good acquaintance and that he had legitimate grounds for allowing himself this joy. But when he stood up and looked around the reading room, he did not find Antipova; she was no longer there.

On the counter to which the doctor carried his tomes and brochures, the literature returned by Antipova still lay unshelved. It was all manuals on Marxism. She was probably requalifying herself to be a teacher, as before, going through political retraining on her own at home.

Larissa Fyodorovna’s catalogue requests lay in the books. The ends of the
slips were showing. On them Larissa Fyodorovna’s address was written. It could easily be read. Yuri Andreevich wrote it down, surprised by the strangeness of the designation. “Kupecheskaya Street, opposite the house with figures.”

On the spot, having asked someone, Yuri Andreevich learned that the expression “house with figures” was as current in Yuriatin as the naming of neighborhoods by parish churches in Moscow or the name Five Corners in Petersburg.

It was the name of a dark gray, steel-colored house with caryatids and statues of Greek muses with tambourines, lyres, and masks in their hands, built in the last century by a theater-loving merchant as his private theater. The merchant’s heirs sold this house to the Merchants’ Association, which gave its name to the street on the corner of which the house stood. The whole area around it was named for this house with figures. Now the house with figures accommodated the city’s party committee, and the wall of its slanting basement, running obliquely downhill, where theater and circus posters hung in former times, was now covered with government decrees and resolutions.

It was a cold, windy day at the beginning of May. Having wandered around town on errands, and looked into the library for a moment, Yuri Andreevich suddenly canceled all his plans and went in search of Antipova.

The wind often stopped him on his way, blocking his path by raising clouds of sand and dust. The doctor turned away, squinted his eyes, lowered his head, waiting for the dust to sweep past, and went further on.

Antipova lived at the corner of Kupecheskaya and Novosvalochny Lane, opposite the dark, verging on blue, house with figures, which the doctor now saw for the first time. The house indeed corresponded to its nickname and made a strange, disturbing impression.

The whole top was surrounded by female mythological caryatids half again human size. Between two gusts of wind that hid its façade, the doctor fancied for a moment that the entire female population of the house had come out to the balcony and was leaning over the balustrade looking at him and at Kupecheskaya spread out below.

There were two entrances to Antipova’s, the front one from the street and one through the courtyard from the lane. Not knowing about the existence of the first, Yuri Andreevich took the second.

When he turned through the gate from the lane, the wind whirled dirt and
litter from the whole yard up into the sky, screening the yard from the doctor. Hens rushed clucking from under his feet behind this black curtain, trying to save themselves from the rooster pursuing them.

When the cloud scattered, the doctor saw Antipova by the well. The whirlwind had surprised her with water already drawn in both buckets and the yoke over her left shoulder. Her head was covered with a kerchief, hastily knotted on her forehead, so as not to get dust in her hair, and she was holding the billowing skirt of her coat to keep it from being lifted by the wind. She started towards the house, carrying the water, but stopped, held back by a new gust of wind, which tore the kerchief from her head, started blowing her hair about, and carried the kerchief towards the far end of the fence, to the still clucking hens.

Yuri Andreevich ran after the kerchief, picked it up, and handed it to the taken-aback Antipova by the well. Ever faithful to her naturalness, she did not betray how amazed and perplexed she was by any exclamation. The only thing that escaped her was:

“Zhivago!”

“Larissa Fyodorovna!”

“By what miracle? By what chance?”

“Put your buckets down. I’ll carry them.”

“I never turn back halfway, never abandon what I’ve started. If you’ve come to me, let’s go.”

“And to whom else?”

“Who knows with you?”

“Anyway, let me take the yoke from your shoulders. I can’t stand idle while you work.”

“Work, is it! I won’t let you. You’ll splash water all over the stairs. Better tell me what wind blew you here. You’ve been around for more than a year, and still couldn’t decide, couldn’t find time?”

“How do you know?”

“Word gets around. And I saw you, finally, in the library.”

“Why didn’t you call out to me?”

“You won’t make me believe you didn’t see me yourself.”

Following Larissa Fyodorovna, who was swaying slightly under the swaying buckets, the doctor stepped under the low archway. This was the back entrance to the ground floor. Here, quickly squatting down, Larissa Fyodorovna set the buckets on the dirt floor, freed her shoulders from the yoke, straightened up, and began to wipe her hands with a little handkerchief she took from no one knows where.

“Come, I’ll take you, there’s an inner passage to the front entrance. It’s
light there. You can wait there. And I’ll take the water up the back way, tidy things upstairs a little, change my clothes. See what sort of stairs we’ve got. Cast-iron steps with an openwork design. You can see everything through them from above. It’s an old house. It got jolted a bit during the days of the shelling. There was artillery fire. See, the stones have separated. There are holes, openings between the bricks. Katenka and I put the key to the apartment into this hole and cover it with a brick when we leave. Keep that in mind. You may come one day and not find me here, and then you’re welcome to open the door, come in, make yourself at home. And meanwhile I’ll come back. It’s here now, the key. But I don’t need it. I’ll go in from the back and open the door from inside. The one trouble is the rats. Hordes and hordes, there’s no getting rid of them. They jump all over us. The structure’s decrepit, the walls are shaky, there are cracks everywhere. Where I can, I plug them, I fight. It doesn’t do much good. Maybe someday you’ll come by and help me? Together we can bush up the floors and plinths. Hm? Well, stay on the landing, think about something. I won’t let you languish long, I’ll call you soon.”

Waiting to be called, Yuri Andreevich let his eyes wander over the peeling walls of the entrance and the cast-iron steps of the stairs. He was thinking: “In the reading room I compared the eagerness of her reading with the passion and ardor of actually doing something, of physical work. And, on the contrary, she carries water lightly, effortlessly, as if she were reading. She has this facility in everything. As if she had picked up the momentum for life way back in her childhood, and now everything is done with that momentum, of itself, with the ease of an ensuing consequence. She has it in the line of her back when she bends over, and in the smile that parts her lips and rounds her chin, and in her words and thoughts.”

“Zhivago!” rang out from the doorway of an apartment on the upper landing. The doctor went upstairs.

“Give me your hand and follow me obediently. There will be two rooms here where it’s dark and things are piled to the ceiling. You’ll stumble and hurt yourself.”

“True, it’s a sort of labyrinth. I wouldn’t find my way. Why’s that? Are you redoing the apartment?”

“Oh, no, not at all. It’s somebody else’s apartment. I don’t even know whose. We used to have our own, a government one, in the school building. When the building was taken over by the housing office of the Yuriatin City
Council, they moved me and my daughter into part of this abandoned one. There were leftovers from the former owners. A lot of furniture. I don’t need other people’s belongings. I put all their things in these two rooms and whitewashed the windows. Don’t let go of my hand or you’ll get lost. That’s it. To the right. Now the jungle’s behind us. This is my door. There’ll be more light. The threshold. Don’t trip.”

When Yuri Andreevich went into the room with his guide, there turned out to be a window in the wall facing the door. The doctor was struck by what he saw through it. The window gave onto the courtyard of the house, onto the backs of the neighboring houses and the vacant lots by the river. Sheep and goats were grazing on them, sweeping the dust with their long wool as if with the skirts of unbuttoned coats. Besides, there was on them, facing the window, perched on two posts, a billboard familiar to the doctor: “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers.”

Under the influence of seeing the billboard, the doctor began from the first word to describe for Larissa Fyodorovna his arrival in the Urals with his family. He forgot about the rumor that identified Strelnikov with her husband and, without thinking, told her about his encounter with the commissar on the train. This part of the story made a special impression on Larissa Fyodorovna.

“You’ve seen Strelnikov?!” she asked quickly. “I won’t tell you any more right now. But how portentous! Simply some sort of predestination that you had to meet.
I’ll explain to you after a while, you’ll simply gasp. If I’ve understood you rightly, he made a favorable impression on you rather than otherwise?”

“Yes, perhaps so. He ought to have repelled me. We passed through the areas of his reprisals and destructions. I expected to meet a brutal soldier or a murderous revolutionary maniac, and found neither the one nor the other. It’s good when a man deceives your expectations, when he doesn’t correspond to the preconceived notion of him. To belong to a type is the end of a man, his condemnation. If he doesn’t fall under any category, if he’s not representative, half of what’s demanded of him is there. He’s free of himself, he has achieved a grain of immortality.”

“They say he’s not a party member.”

“Yes, so it seems. What makes him so winning? He’s a doomed man. I think he’ll end badly. He’ll pay for the evil he’s brought about. The arbitrariness of the revolutionaries is terrible not because they’re villains, but because it’s a mechanism out of control, like a machine that’s gone off the rails. Strelnikov is as mad as they are, but he went crazy not from books, but from something he lived and suffered through. I don’t know his secret, but I’m certain he has one. His alliance with the Bolsheviks is accidental. As long as they need him, they’ll tolerate him, they’re going the same way. But the moment that need passes, they’ll cast him aside with no regret and trample on him, like so many military specialists before him.”