Doctor Zhivago (50 page)

More than once already, Galuzina had gone as far as the marketplace, the central square of Krestovozdvizhensk. From there her house was to the left. But she changed her mind each time, turned around, and again went deep into the back alleys adjacent to the monastery.

The marketplace was the size of a big field. On market days in former times, peasants had covered it all over with their carts. One end of it lay against the end of Eleninskaya Street. The other end was built up along a curved line with small one- or two-story houses. They were all used as storage spaces, offices, trading premises, and artisans’ workshops.

Here, in quiet times, on a chair by the threshold of his very wide, four-leaf iron door, reading the
Penny Daily
, the woman-hater Briukhanov used to sit, a boorish bear in spectacles and a long-skirted frock coat, a dealer in leather, tar, wheels, horse harness, oats, and hay.

Here, displayed in a dim little window, gathering dust for many years, stood several cardboard boxes of paired wedding candles, decorated with ribbons and little bunches of flowers. Behind the little window, in an empty little room without furniture and with almost no sign of goods, unless one counted several rounds of wax piled one on top of the other, deals in the thousands for mastic, wax, and candles were concluded by no one knew what agents of a candle millionaire who lived no one knew where.

Here, in the middle of the shop-lined street, was the big colonial shop of the Galuzins with its three-window façade. In it the splintery, unpainted floor was swept three times a day with the used leaves of the tea which the shopkeepers and owner drank without moderation all day long. Here the owner’s young wife had often and willingly kept the till. Her favorite color was purple, violet, the color of especially solemn church vestments, the color of unopened lilacs, the color of her best velvet dress, the color of her wineglasses. The color of happiness, the color of memories, the color of the long-vanished maidenhood of prerevolutionary Russia also seemed to her to be pale lilac. And she liked keeping the till at the shop, because the violet dusk of the premises, fragrant with starch, sugar, and deep purple black-currant candies in their glass jar, matched her favorite color.

Here, at the corner, next to the lumberyard, stood an old, gray, two-story wooden house, sagging on four sides like a secondhand coach. It consisted of four apartments. There were two entrances to them, at either end of the façade. The left half of the ground floor was occupied by Zalkind’s pharmacy, the right by a notary’s office. Over the pharmacy lived old Shmulevich, a ladies’ tailor, with his numerous family. Across from the tailor, over
the notary, huddled many tenants, whose professions were announced on the signs and plaques that covered the whole front door. Here watches were repaired and a cobbler took in orders. Here the partners Zhuk and Shtrodakh kept a photography studio, here were the premises of the engraver Kaminsky.

In view of the crowdedness of the overfilled apartment, the photographers’ young assistants, the retoucher Senya Magidson and the student Blazhein, built themselves a sort of laboratory in the yard, in the front office of the woodshed. They were apparently busy there now, judging by the angry eye of the developing lamp blinking nearsightedly in the little window of the office. It was under this window that the little dog Tomka was chained up, yelping for the whole of Eleninskaya Street to hear.

“The whole kahal’s bunched up in there,” thought Galuzina, walking past the gray house. “A den of misery and filth.” But she decided at once that Vlas Pakhomovich was wrong in his Judaeophobia. These people aren’t such big wheels as to mean anything in the destiny of the state. However, if you ask old Shmulevich why the trouble and disorder, he’ll cringe, pull a twisted mug, and say with a grin: “That’s Leibochka’s little tricks.”
⁵

Ah, but what, what is she thinking about, what is her head stuffed with? Is that really the point? Is that where the trouble is? The trouble is the cities. Russia doesn’t stand on them. People got seduced by education, trailed after the city folk, and couldn’t pull it off. Left their own shore and never reached the other.

Or maybe, on the contrary, the whole trouble is ignorance. A learned man can see through a stone wall, he figures everything out beforehand. And we go looking for our hat when our head’s been cut off. Like in a dark forest. I suppose they’re not having a sweet time of it either, the educated ones. Lack of bread drives them from the cities. Well, just try sorting it out. The devil himself would break a leg.

But even so, aren’t our country relations something else again? The Selitvins, the Shelaburins, Pamphil Palykh, the brothers Nestor and Pankrat Modykh? Their own masters, their own heads, good farmers. New farmsteads along the high road, admirable. Each has some forty acres sown, plus horses, sheep, cows, pigs. Enough grain stocked up for three years ahead. The inventory—a feast for the eyes. Harvesting machines. Kolchak fawns on them, invites them to him, commissars entice them to the forest militia. They came back from the war covered with medals and were snapped up at once as instructors. With epaulettes, or without. If you’re a man with know-how, you’re in demand everywhere. You won’t perish.

But it’s time to go home. It’s simply improper for a woman to walk about
for so long. It would be all right in my own garden. But it’s all soggy there, you could sink into the mud. Seems I feel a bit better.

And having gotten definitively entangled in her reasoning and lost the thread, Galuzina came to her house. But before crossing the threshold, she lingered for a moment in front of the porch, her mental gaze taking in many different things.

She remembered the present-day ringleaders in Khodatskoe, of whom she had a good notion, political exiles from the capitals, Tiverzin, Antipov, the anarchist Vdovichenko, called the Black Banner, the local locksmith Gorshenia the Rabid. These were all people who kept their own counsel. They had caused a lot of trouble in their day; they’re sure to be plotting and preparing something again. They couldn’t do without it. Their lives had been spent with machines, and they themselves are merciless, cold, like machines. They go around in short jackets with sweaters under them, smoke cigarettes in bone holders so as not to pick up an infection, drink boiled water. Vlasushka won’t get anywhere with them, they’ll turn everything around, they’ll always have it their way.

And she fell to thinking about herself. She knew that she was a nice and original woman, well-preserved and intelligent, a not-bad person. Not one of these qualities met with recognition in this godforsaken hole, or anywhere else, maybe. And the indecent couplets about foolish Sentetyurikha, known all over the Trans-Urals, of which only the first two lines could be quoted:

because further on they turned scabrous, were sung in Krestovozdvizhensk, she suspected, with a hint at her.

And, sighing bitterly, she went into the house.

Not stopping in the front hall, she went in her fur coat to the bedroom. The windows of the room gave onto the garden. Now, at night, the heaped-up shadows in front of the windows inside and beyond the windows outside almost repeated each other. The hanging sacks of the draped window curtains were almost like the hanging sacks of the trees in the yard, bare and black, with vague outlines. The taffeta darkness of this night at the end of winter was being warmed in the garden by the black violet heat of approaching spring breaking through the ground. Inside the room approximately
the same combination was made up by two similar elements, and the dusty stuffiness of the poorly beaten curtains was softened and brightened by the deep violet heat of the coming feast.

The Holy Virgin on the icon freed her narrow, upturned, swarthy palms from the silver casing. She was holding in them, as it were, the first and last letters of her Byzantine title:
Meter Theou
, the Mother of God. Enclosed in a golden lamp holder, the icon lamp of garnet-colored glass, dark as an inkwell, cast on the bedroom rug a star-shaped glimmer, broken up by the lacy edge of the cup.

Throwing off her kerchief and fur coat, Galuzina turned awkwardly, and again felt a stitch in her side and a throb in her shoulder blade. She cried out, frightened, and began to murmur: “Great Intercessor for those in sorrow, most pure Virgin, Swift Defender, Protectress of the world”—and burst into tears. Then, after waiting for the pain to subside, she began to undress. The hooks behind the collar and on the back slipped from her fingers and hid in the wrinkles of the smoke-colored fabric. She had trouble feeling for them.

Her ward, Ksiusha, came into the room, awakened by her arrival.

“Why are you in the dark, mama? Would you like me to bring you a lamp?”

“Don’t bother. I can see like this.”

“Mama dear, Olga Nilovna, let me undo it. You needn’t suffer.”

“My fingers don’t obey me, I could just cry. The mangy Yid didn’t have brains enough to sew the hooks on like a human being, the blind bat. I’d like to rip it off all the way down and shove the whole flap in his mug.”

“They sang well in the Vozdvizhenye. A quiet night. It carried here through the air.”

“The singing was good. But I feel bad, my dear. I’ve got stitches here and here. Everywhere. That’s the misery of it. I don’t know what to do.”

“The homeopath Stydobsky used to help you.”

“His advice was always impossible to follow. A horse doctor your homeopath turned out to be. Neither fish nor fowl. That’s the first thing. And second, he’s gone away. Gone away, gone away. And not him alone. Before the feast everybody went rushing out of the city. Are they expecting an earthquake or something?”

“Well, then that captured Hungarian doctor’s treatment did you good.”

“More poppycock with sugar on top. I’m telling you, there’s nobody left, everybody’s scattered. Kerenyi Lajos and the other Magyars wound up behind the demarcation line. They forced the dear fellow into service. Took him into the Red Army.”

“Anyhow, you’re overanxious about your health. Neurosis of the heart.
A simple folk charm can work wonders here. Remember, the army wife whispered it away for you quite successfully. Like it was never there. What’s her name, that army wife? I forget.”

“No, you decidedly consider me an ignorant fool. You sing ‘Sentetyurikha’ about me behind my back, for all I know.”

“God forbid! It’s sinful to say such things, mama. Better remind me of the army wife’s name. It’s on the tip of my tongue. I won’t have any peace until I remember it.”

“She’s got more names than skirts. I don’t know which one you want. They call her Kubarikha, and Medvedikha, and Zlydarikha.
⁶
And a dozen more nicknames. She’s not around anymore. The ball’s over, go look for wind in the clover. They locked up the servant of God in the Kezhem prison. For exterminating a fetus and for some sort of powders. But she, look you, rather than languish behind bars, buggered off from prison to somewhere in the Far East. I’m telling you, everybody’s scattered. Vlas Pakhomych, Teresha, Aunt Polya with her yielding heart. The only honest women left in the whole town are you and me—two fools, I’m not joking. And no medical help. If anything happens, it’s the end, call and nobody’ll hear you. They say there’s a celebrity from Moscow in Yuriatin, a professor, the son of a suicide, a Siberian merchant. While I was making up my mind to invite him, they set up twenty Red cordons on the road, there’s no room to sneeze. But now about something else. Go to bed, and I’ll try to lie down. The student Blazhein has turned your head. No use denying it. You won’t hide it anyway, you’re red as a lobster. Your wretched student is toiling over prints on a holy night, developing and printing my photographs. They don’t sleep themselves and won’t let others sleep. Their Tomik barks his head off for the whole town to hear. And the nasty crow is cawing in our apple tree, must be I’m not to sleep all night. Why are you offended, miss touch-me-not? Students are there for the girls to like them.”

“Why is the dog carrying on like that? We must go and see what’s the matter. He wouldn’t bark for nothing. Wait, Lidochka, blast you, shut up for a minute. We’ve got to clarify the situation. A posse may descend on us any minute. Don’t leave, Ustin. And you stay put, Sivobluy. They’ll get along without you.”

Not hearing the request to stop and wait a little, the representative from the center went on wearily in an oratorical patter:

“The bourgeois military power existing in Siberia by its politics of
robbery, taxation, violence, executions, and torture should open the eyes of the deluded. It is hostile not only to the working class, but, by the essence of things, to all the laboring peasantry as well. The laboring peasantry of Siberia and the Urals should understand that only in union with the urban proletariat and the soldiers, in union with the Kirghiz and Buryat poor …”
⁷

Finally he caught the fact that he was being interrupted and stopped, wiping his sweaty face, wearily lowered his puffy eyelids, and closed his eyes.

Those standing near him said in a half whisper:

“Rest a bit. Have a sip of water.”

The anxious partisan leader was told:

“What are you worried about? Everything’s all right. The signal lamp is in the window. The lookout, to put it picturesquely, devours space with his eyes. I think we can resume the lecturer’s talk. Speak, Comrade Lidochka.”

The interior of the big shed had been freed of firewood. In the cleared space an illegal meeting was going on. The firewood piled to the ceiling served to screen off the meeting, separating this emptied half from the front desk and the entrance. In case of danger, the assembled men were provided with a way down into the basement and an underground exit to the overgrown backyard of the Konstantinovsky Impass beyond the monastery wall.

The speaker, in a black cotton cap that covered his completely bald head, with a matte, pale olive complexion and a black beard up to his ears, suffered from nervous perspiration and sweated profusely all the time. He greedily relighted his unfinished butt in the stream of hot air over the kerosene lamp burning on the table, and bent low to the scraps of paper scattered in front of him. He ran his nearsighted little eyes over them nervously and quickly, as if he were sniffing them, and went on in a dull and weary voice: