Doctor Zhivago (48 page)

“You think so?”

“Absolutely.”

“But is there really no salvation for him? In flight, for instance?”

“Where to, Larissa Fyodorovna? That was before, under the tsars. Try doing it now.”

“Too bad. Your story has made me feel sympathy for him. But you’ve changed. Before, your judgment of the revolution wasn’t so sharp, so irritated.”

“That’s just the point, Larissa Fyodorovna, that there are limits to everything. There’s been time enough for them to arrive at something. But it turns out that for the inspirers of the revolution the turmoil of changes and rearrangements is their only native element, that they won’t settle for less than something on a global scale. The building of worlds, transitional periods—for them this is an end in itself. They haven’t studied anything else, they don’t know how to do anything. And do you know where this bustle of eternal preparations comes from? From the lack of definite, ready abilities, from giftlessness. Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. And life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so thrillingly serious! Why then substitute for it a childish harlequinade of immature inventions, these escapes of Chekhovian schoolboys to America?
⁹
But enough. Now it’s my turn to ask. We were approaching the city on the morning of your coup. Was it a big mess for you then?”

“Oh, what else! Of course. Fires all around. We almost burned down ourselves. The house, I told you, got so shaken! There’s still an unexploded shell in the yard by the gate. Looting, bombardment, outrage. As always with a change of power. By then we’d already learned, we were used to it. It wasn’t the first time. And what went on under the Whites! Covert killings for personal revenge, extortions, bacchanalias! But I haven’t told you the main thing. Our Galiullin! He turned up here as the most important bigwig with the Czechs. Something like a governor-general.”

“I know. I heard. Did you see him?”

“Very often. I saved so many people thanks to him! Hid so many! He has to be given credit. He behaved irreproachably, chivalrously, not like the small fry, all those Cossack chiefs and police officers. But the tone was set then precisely by the small fry, not the decent people. Galiullin helped me in many ways, I’m thankful to him. We’re old acquaintances. As a little girl, I
often came to the courtyard where he grew up. Railroad workers lived in that house. In my childhood I saw poverty and labor close up. That makes my attitude towards the revolution different from yours. It’s closer to me. There’s much in it that is dear to me. And suddenly he becomes a colonel, this boy, the yard porter’s son. Or even a White general. I come from a civilian milieu and don’t know much about ranks. By training I’m a history teacher. Yes, that’s how it is, Zhivago. I helped many people. I went to him. We spoke of you. I have connections and protectors in all the governments, and griefs and losses under all regimes. It’s only in bad books that living people are divided into two camps and don’t communicate. In reality everything’s so interwoven! What an incorrigible nonentity one must be to play only one role in life, to occupy only one place in society, to always mean one and the same thing!

“Ah, so you’re here?”

A girl of about eight with two tightly plaited braids came into the room. Her narrow, wide-set eyes slanting upwards gave her a mischievous and sly look. She raised them when she laughed. She had already discovered outside the door that her mother had a guest, but, appearing on the threshold, she considered it necessary to show an inadvertent astonishment on her face, curtsied, and turned to the doctor the unblinking, fearless eye of a precociously thoughtful child growing up in solitude.

“Kindly meet my daughter Katenka.”

“You showed me pictures of her in Meliuzeevo. How she’s grown and changed!”

“So it turns out you’re at home? And I thought you were outside. I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I took the key from the hole, and there was a rat this big! I screamed and backed away. I thought I’d die of fear.”

Katenka made the sweetest faces when she talked, rolling her sly eyes and forming her little mouth into a circle, like a fish taken out of the water.

“Well, go to your room. I’ll persuade the nice man to stay for dinner, take the kasha from the oven, and call you.”

“Thank you, but I’m forced to decline. Because of my visits to the city, our dinners are served at six. I’m used to not being late, and it’s over a three-hour ride, if not all of four. That’s why I came early—forgive me—I’ll get up and go soon.”

“Just half an hour more.”

“With pleasure.”

“And now—frankness for frankness. Strelnikov, whom you told about, is my husband Pasha, Pavel Pavlovich Antipov, whom I went to the front in search of and in whose imaginary death I so rightly refused to believe.”

“I’m not shocked and have been prepared. I’ve heard that fable and consider it nonsense. That’s why I forgot myself to such an extent that I spoke to you so freely and incautiously about him, as if this gossip didn’t exist. But these rumors are senseless. I saw the man. How could he be connected with you? What do you have in common?”

“And all the same it’s so, Yuri Andreevich. Strelnikov is Antipov, my husband. I agree with the general opinion. Katenka also knows it and is proud of her father. Strelnikov is his assumed name, a pseudonym, as with all revolutionary activists. For certain considerations, he must live and act under a different name.

“He took Yuriatin, poured shells on us, knew that we were here, never once asked if we were alive, so as not to violate his secret. That was his duty, of course. If he had asked us how to act, we would have advised him to do the same. You could also say that my immunity, the acceptable living quarters given me by the city council, and so on, are indirect proofs of his secret caring for us! All the same, you won’t persuade me of it. To be right here and resist the temptation to see us! My mind refuses to grasp that, it’s beyond my understanding. It’s something inaccessible to me—not life, but some Roman civic valor, one of the clever notions of today. But I’m falling under your influence and beginning to sing your tune. I wouldn’t want that. You and I are not of one mind. We may understand some elusive, optional thing in the same way. But in matters of broad significance, in philosophy of life, it’s better for us to be opponents. But let’s get back to Strelnikov. He’s in Siberia now, and you’re right, information about criticism of him, which chills my heart, has reached me, too. He’s in Siberia, at one of our advanced positions, in the process of defeating his courtyard friend and later frontline comrade, poor Galiullin, for whom his name and his marriage to me are no secret, and who, in his priceless delicacy, has never let me feel it, though he storms and rages and goes out of his mind at the mention of Strelnikov. Yes, well, so he’s now in Siberia.

“And while he was here (he spent a long time here and lived on the railway, in the car of a train, where you saw him), I kept trying to run into him accidentally, unexpectedly. He sometimes went to headquarters, housed where the military command of the Komuch, the army of the Constituent Assembly, used to be. And—strange trick of fate—the entrance to the
headquarters was in the same wing where Galiullin used to receive me when I came to solicit for others. For instance, there was an incident in the cadet corps that made a lot of noise, the cadets began to ambush and shoot objectionable teachers on the pretext of their adherence to Bolshevism. Or when the persecution and slaughter of the Jews began. By the way. If we’re city dwellers and people doing intellectual work, half of our acquaintances are from their number. And in such periods of pogroms, when these horrors and abominations begin, we’re hounded, not only by indignation, shame, and pity, but by an oppressive feeling of duplicity, that our sympathy is half cerebral, with an unpleasant, insincere aftertaste.

“The people who once delivered mankind from the yoke of paganism, and have now devoted themselves in such great numbers to freeing it from social evil, are powerless to free themselves from themselves, from being faithful to an outlived, antediluvian designation, which has lost its meaning; they cannot rise above themselves and dissolve without a trace among others, whose religious foundations they themselves laid, and who would be so close to them if only they knew them better.

“Persecution and victimization probably oblige them to adopt this useless and ruinous pose, this shamefaced, self-denying isolation, which brings nothing but calamities, but there is also an inner decrepitude in it, many centuries of historical fatigue. I don’t like their ironic self-encouragement, humdrum poverty of notions, timorous imagination. It’s as irritating as old people talking about old age and sick people about sickness. Do you agree?”

“I haven’t thought about it. I have a friend, a certain Gordon, who is of the same opinion.”

“So I went there to watch for Pasha. In hopes of his coming or going. The governor-general’s office used to be in the wing. Now there’s a plaque on the door: ‘Complaints Bureau.’ Maybe you’ve seen it? It’s the most beautiful place in the city. The square in front of the door is paved with cut stone. Across the square is the city garden. Viburnums, maples, hawthorns. I stood on the sidewalk in the group of petitioners and waited. Naturally, I didn’t try to force my way in, I didn’t tell them I was his wife. Anyway, our last names aren’t the same. What has the voice of the heart got to do with it? Their rules are completely different. For instance, his own father, Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov, a worker and a former political exile, works in the court here, somewhere quite close by, just down the highway. In the place of his earlier exile. So does his friend Tiverzin. They’re members of the revolutionary tribunal. And what do you think?
The son doesn’t reveal himself to the father either, and the father accepts it as proper, does not get offended. If the son is a cipher, it means nothing doing. They’re flint, not people. Principles. Discipline.

“And, finally, if I proved that I was his wife, it’s no big deal! What have wives got to do with it? Is it the time for such things? The world proletariat, the remaking of the universe—that’s something else, that I understand. But an individual biped of some wifely sort, pah! It’s just some last little flea or louse!

“An adjutant went around asking questions. He let a few people in. I didn’t tell him my last name, and to the question about my business answered that it was personal. You could tell beforehand that it was a lost cause, a nonsuit. The adjutant shrugged his shoulders and looked at me suspiciously. So I never saw him even once.

“And you think he disdains us, doesn’t love us, doesn’t remember? Oh, on the contrary! I know him too well! He planned it this way from an excess of feeling! He needs to lay all these military laurels at our feet, so as not to come back empty-handed, but all in glory, a conqueror! To immortalize, to bedazzle us! Like a child!”

Katenka came into the room again. Larissa Fyodorovna took the bewildered little girl in her arms, began to rock her, tickle her, kiss her, and smothered her in her embrace.

Yuri Andreevich was returning on horseback from the city to Varykino. He had passed these places countless times. He was used to the road, had grown insensitive to it, did not notice it.

He was nearing the intersection in the forest where a side road to the fishing village of Vassilievskoe, on the Sakma River, branched off from the straight way to Varykino. At the place where they divided stood the third post in the area displaying an agricultural advertisement. Near this crossroads, the doctor was usually overtaken by the sunset. Now, too, night was falling.

It was over two months since, on one of his visits to town, he had not returned home in the evening, but had stayed with Larissa Fyodorovna, and said at home that he had been kept in town on business and had spent the night at Samdevyatov’s inn. He had long been on familiar terms with Antipova and called her Lara, though she called him Zhivago. Yuri Andreevich was deceiving Tonya and was concealing ever more grave and inadmissible things from her. This was unheard-of.

He loved Tonya to the point of adoration. The peace of her soul, her tranquillity,
were dearer to him than anything in the world. He stood staunchly for her honor, more than her own father or than she herself. In defense of her wounded pride he would have torn the offender to pieces with his own hands. And here that offender was he himself.

At home, in his family circle, he felt like an unexposed criminal. The ignorance of the household, their habitual affability, killed him. In the midst of a general conversation, he would suddenly remember his guilt, freeze, and no longer hear or understand anything around him.

If this happened
at the table, the swallowed bite stuck in his throat, he set his spoon aside, pushed the plate away. Tears choked him. “What’s the matter?” Tonya would ask in perplexity. “You must have found out something bad in the city? Somebody’s been sent to prison? Or shot? Tell me. Don’t be afraid of upsetting me. You’ll feel better.”

Had he betrayed Tonya, had he preferred someone else to her? No, he had not chosen anyone, had not compared. Ideas of “free love,” words like “the rights and demands of feeling,” were foreign to him. To talk and think of such things seemed vulgar to him. In his life he had never gathered any “flowers of pleasure,” had not counted himself among the demigods or supermen, had demanded no special benefits or advantages for himself. He was breaking down under the burden of an unclean conscience.

“What will happen further on?” he sometimes asked himself and, finding no answer, hoped for something unfeasible, for the interference of some unforeseen circumstances that would bring a resolution.

But now it was not so. He had decided to cut this knot by force. He was bringing home a ready solution. He had decided to confess everything to Tonya, to beg her forgiveness, and not to see Lara anymore.

True, not everything was smooth here. It remained insufficiently clear, as it now seemed to him, that he was breaking with Lara forever, for all eternity. That morning he had announced to her his wish to reveal everything to Tonya and the impossibility of further meetings, but he now had the feeling that he had said it to her too mildly, not resolutely enough.