Doctor Zhivago (52 page)

“Listen, Goshka. You say it’s so nasty. But if you don’t go to them, you can get sick with something else.”

“I know what you’re getting at. You must be doing it. That’s not a sickness, it’s a secret vice.”

“I’ll punch your face in for such words, Goshka. Don’t you dare offend a comrade, you rotten liar!”

“Calm down, I was joking. I wanted to tell you something. I went to Pazhinsk for the Easter meal. In Pazhinsk an itinerant lecturer talked about ‘The Emancipation of the Person.’ Very interesting. I liked the thing. I’ll damn well sign up with the anarchists. There’s a force inside us, he says. Sex and character, he says, that’s the awakening of animal electricity. Eh? Quite a wunderkind. But I’m really plastered. And they’re shouting all around, jabber-jabber, it’s deafening. I can’t stand it, Tereshka, be quiet. You son of a bitch, you little mama’s boy, shut up, I said.”

“Just tell me this, Goshka. I still don’t know all the words about socialism. Saboteur, for instance. What kind of expression is that? What’s it about?”

“I’m a real professor in these words, but like I told you, Tereshka, leave off, I’m drunk. A saboteur is somebody who’s in the same band as others. Once they say soboater, it means you’re in the same boat with them. Get it, blockhead?”

“I also thought it was a swearword. But about electric force, you’re right. I decided from an advertisement to order an electric truss from Petersburg. To step up the activity. C.O.D. But then suddenly there’s a new upheaval. Trusses are out.”

Terenty did not finish. The din of drunken voices was drowned out by the thundering burst of a nearby explosion. The noise at the table momentarily ceased. A minute later it started up again with still more disorderly force. Some jumped up from their seats. The steadier ones stayed on their feet. Others, staggering, wanted to make off somewhere, but gave way and, collapsing under the table, immediately began to snore. Women shrieked. A commotion began.

Vlas Pakhomovich glanced around, looking for the culprit. At first he thought the bang came from somewhere in Kuteiny, quite near, maybe even very close to the tables. He strained his neck, his face turned purple, he bawled at the top of his lungs:

“What Judas has wormed his way into our ranks to commit outrages? What mother’s son is playing with grenades here? Whoever he is, even if he’s my own, I’ll strangle the vermin! We won’t suffer such jokes, citizens! I demand that we make a roundup. Let’s surround Kuteiny Posad! Let’s catch the provocator! Don’t let the son of a bitch escape!”

At first he was listened to. Then attention was distracted by the column of black smoke slowly rising into the sky from the local council building in Maly Ermolai. Everybody ran to the bank to see what was going on there.

Several undressed recruits came running out of the burning Ermolai council building, one completely barefoot and naked, just pulling on his trousers, along with Colonel Strese and the other military who had been carrying out the selective service examination. Mounted Cossacks and militiamen rushed back and forth in the village, swinging their whips and stretching out their bodies and arms on their horses, themselves stretched out like writhing snakes. They were searching for someone, chasing someone. A great many people were running down the road to Kuteiny. In pursuit of the running people came the rapid and anxious ringing of the alarm from the Ermolai bell tower.

Events developed further with terrible swiftness. At dusk, continuing his search, Strese and his Cossacks went up from the village to neighboring Kuteiny. Surrounding it with patrols, they began searching each house, each farmstead.

By that time half of the merrymakers were done in and, drunk as lords, lay in a deep sleep, resting their heads on the edges of the tables or sprawled on the ground under them. When it became known that the militia had come to the village, it was already dark.

Several lads, fleeing the militia, rushed to the backyards of the village and, urging each other on with kicks and shoves, got under the siding of the first storehouse they came to, which did not reach the ground. In the darkness it was impossible to tell whose it was, but, judging by the smell of fish and kerosene, it must have been the crawl space of the grocery cooperative.

The hiders had nothing on their conscience. It was a mistake for them to conceal themselves. Most of them had done it in haste, drunkenly, foolishly. Some had acquaintances who seemed blameworthy to them and might, as they thought, be the ruin of them. Now everything had been given a political coloring. Mischief and hooliganism were counted as signs of the Black Hundred
¹³
in Soviet areas; in White Guard areas ruffians were taken for Bolsheviks.

As it turned out, the lads who slipped under the cottage had predecessors. The space between the ground and the storehouse floor was full of people.
Several men from Kuteiny and Ermolai were hiding there. The former were dead drunk. Some were snoring with moaning undertones, grinding their teeth and whining; others were sick and throwing up. It was pitch-dark under the storehouse, stuffy and stinking. Those who crawled in last filled the opening they had come through from inside with earth and stones, so that the hole would not give them away. Soon the snoring and moaning of the drunk ceased entirely. There was total silence. They all slept quietly. Only in one corner was there quiet whispering between the particularly restless ones, the scared-to-death Terenty Galuzin and the Ermolai fistfighter Koska Nekhvalenykh.

“Pipe down, you son of a bitch, you’ll be the end of us all, you snotty devil. You hear, Strese’s men are on the prowl—sneaking around. They turned at the village gate, they’re coming down the row, they’ll be here soon. That’s them. Freeze, don’t breathe, I’ll strangle you! Well, you’re in luck—they’re gone. Passed us by. What devil brought you here? And hiding, too, you blockhead! Who’d lay a finger on you?”

“I heard Goshka shouting, ‘Take cover, you slob!’ So I slipped in.”

“Goshka’s another matter. The whole Ryabykh family is being eyed as untrustworthy. They’ve got relations in Khodatskoe. Artisans, worker stock. Don’t twitch like that, you lunkhead, lie quiet. They’ve crapped and puked all around here. If you move, you’ll smear yourself with shit, and me, too. Can’t you smell the stench? Why do you think Strese’s rushing around the village? He’s looking for men from Pazhinsk. Outsiders.”

“How did all this come about, Koska? Where did it begin?”

“Sanka sparked the whole thing off, Sanka Pafnutkin. We’re standing naked in line for the examination. Sanka’s time came, it’s Sanka’s turn. He won’t undress. Sanka was a bit drunk, he came to the office tipsy. The clerk looks him over. ‘Get undressed, please,’ he says. Politely. Addresses Sanka formally. A military clerk. And Sanka answers him rudely: ‘I won’t. I ain’t gonna show everybody my private parts.’ As if he’s embarrassed. And he sidles up to the clerk, like he’s going to haul off and punch him in the jaw. Yes. And what do you think? Before you could bat an eye, Sanka bends over, grabs the little office desk by the leg, and dumps it and everything on it, the inkstand, the army lists, on the floor! From the boardroom door, Strese shouts: ‘I won’t tolerate excesses. I’ll show you your bloodless revolution and disrespect for the law in a government office. Who’s the instigator?’

“But Sanka’s at the window. ‘Help!’ he shouts. ‘Grab your clothes! It’s all up for us, comrades!’ I grabbed my clothes, got dressed on the run, and went over to Sanka. Sanka smashed the window with his fist and, whoop, he’s outside, try catching the wind. And me after him. And some others as
well. Running our legs off. And there’s already hallooing after us, the chase is on.
But if you ask me what it was all about? Nobody understands anything.”

“And the bomb?”

“What about the bomb?”

“Who threw the bomb? Well, bomb, grenade, whatever?”

“Lord, you don’t think it was us?”

“But who, then?”

“How should I know? Somebody else. He saw the turmoil, thought, I could blow up the council on the sly. They’ll think it was other people. Somebody political. There’s a lot of politicals from Pazhinsk here. Quiet. Shut up. Voices. You hear, Strese’s men are coming back. Well, we’re lost. Freeze, I said.”

The voices came closer. Boots creaked, spurs jangled.

“Don’t argue. You can’t fool me. I’m not that kind. There was definitely talking somewhere,” boomed the domineering, all-distinct Petersburg voice of the colonel.

“You may have imagined it, Your Excellency,” reasoned the village headman of Maly Ermolai, the old fishmonger Otviazhistin. “And no wonder if there’s talking, since it’s a village. Not a cemetery. Maybe they were talking somewhere. They’re not dumb beasts in the houses. Or maybe a hobgoblin’s choking somebody in his sleep …”

“Enough! I’ll teach you to play the holy fool, pretending you’re a poor orphan! Hobgoblin! You’ve grown too free and easy here! You’ll get the international on you with your cleverness, then it’ll be too late. Hobgoblin!”

“Good gracious, Your Excellency, mister colonel, sir! What international! They’re thick-headed oafs, impenetrable darkness. Stumble over the old prayer books. What do they want with revolution?”

“You all talk that way till the first evidence. Search the premises of the cooperative from top to bottom. Shake all the coffers, look under the counters. Search the adjoining buildings.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

“Get Pafnutkin, Ryabykh, Nekhvalenykh, dead or alive. From the ends of the earth. And that Galuzin pup. Never mind that his papa delivers patriotic speeches, he won’t fine-talk us. On the contrary. We’re not lulled by it. Once a shopkeeper starts orating, it means something’s wrong. It’s suspicious. It’s contrary to nature. There’s secret information that there are political exiles hidden in their courtyard in Krestovozdvizhensk, that secret meetings are held. Catch the boy. I haven’t decided yet what to do with him, but if something’s uncovered, I’ll hang him without pity as a lesson to the rest.”

The searchers moved on. When they had gone far enough away, Koska Nekhvalenykh asked Tereshka Galuzin, who was dead with fright:

“Did you hear?”

“Yes,” the boy whispered in a voice not his own.

“For you and me, and Sanka, and Goshka, the only road now is to
the forest. I don’t say forever. Till they get reasonable. And when they come to their senses, then we’ll see. Maybe we’ll come back.”

It was the second year since Yuri Andreevich fell captive to the partisans. The limits of this bondage were very vague. The place of Yuri Andreevich’s imprisonment was not fenced in. He was not guarded, not watched over. The partisan troops were on the move all the time. Yuri Andreevich made the marches with them. The troops did not separate themselves, did not shut themselves off from the rest of the people, through whose settlements and regions they moved. They mixed with them, dissolved in them.

It seemed that this dependence, this captivity, did not exist, that the doctor was free and simply did not know how to take advantage of it. The doctor’s dependence, his captivity, in no way differed from other forms of constraint in life, equally invisible and intangible, which also seem like something nonexistent, a chimera and a fiction. Despite the absence of fetters, chains, and guards, the doctor was forced to submit to his unfreedom, which looked imaginary.

His three attempts to escape from the partisans ended in capture. They let him off for nothing, but it was playing with fire. He did not repeat them any more.

The partisan chief Liberius Mikulitsyn was indulgent towards him, had him sleep in his tent, liked his company. Yuri Andreevich was burdened by this imposed closeness.

This was the period of the almost continuous withdrawal of the partisans towards the east. At times this displacement was part of the general offensive plan for driving Kolchak out of western Siberia. At times, when the
Whites turned the partisans’ rear in an attempt to surround them, movement in the same direction was converted into a retreat. For a long time the doctor could not comprehend these subtleties.

The little towns and villages along the highway, most often parallel to which, but sometimes along which, the partisans made this withdrawal, varied between White and Red, depending on changing military fortunes. It was rarely possible to determine by their outward appearance who was in power in them.

In moments when the peasant militia passed through these small towns and villages, the main thing in them became precisely this army filing through them. The houses on both sides of the road seemed to be absorbed and drawn down into the ground, and the horsemen, horses, guns sloshing through the mud, and the tall, jostling riflemen with rolled-up greatcoats seemed to grow higher on the road than the houses.

Once, in one of these small towns, the doctor took over a supply of British medications abandoned during the retreat by officers of Kappel’s formation
¹
and seized as war booty.

It was a dark, rainy, two-colored day. All that was lit up seemed white, all that was not lit up—black. And in his soul there was the same gloom of simplification, without the softening of transitions and halftones.

The road, utterly destroyed by frequent troop movements, was a stream of black muck that could not be crossed everywhere on foot. The street could be crossed in a few places, very far from each other, to reach which one had to make big detours on both sides. It was in such conditions that the doctor met, in Pazhinsk, his onetime fellow traveler on the train, Pelageya Tyagunova.

She recognized him first. He could not at once determine who this woman with the familiar face was, who was casting ambiguous glances at him from across the road, as from one bank of a canal to the other, now fully resolved to greet him, if he recognized her, now showing a readiness to retreat.

After a moment he remembered everything. Together with images of the overcrowded freight car, the multitudes being driven to forced labor, their convoy, and the woman passenger with braids thrown over her breast, he saw his own people in the center of the picture. The details of the family trip of two years ago vividly crowded around him. The dear faces, for which he felt a mortal longing, stood before him as if alive.