Doctor Zhivago (55 page)

Here and there the forest was gaily colored with ripe berries of all sorts: the prettily pendant berries of lady’s-smock, brick-brown, flabby elderberries, the shimmering white-crimson clusters of the guelder rose. Dragonflies, their glassy wings tinkling, floated slowly through the air, speckled and transparent, like the fire and the forest.

Since childhood Yuri Andreevich had loved the evening forest shot through with the fire of sunset. In such moments it was as if he, too, let these shafts of light pass through him. As if the gift of the living spirit streamed into his breast, crossed through his whole being, and came out under his shoulder blades as a pair of wings. That youthful archetype, which is formed in every young man for the whole of life and serves him forever after and seems to him to be his inner face, his personality, awakened in him with its full primary force, and transformed nature, the forest, the evening glow, and all visible things into an equally primary and all-embracing likeness of a girl. “Lara!”—closing his eyes, he half whispered or mentally addressed his whole life, the whole of God’s earth, the whole sunlit expanse spread out before him.

But the immediate, the actual, went on, in Russia there was the October revolution, he was a prisoner of the partisans. And, without noticing it himself, he went up to Kamennodvorsky’s bonfire.

“Destroying the records? They’re still not burnt?”

“Far from it! There’s stuff enough for a long time yet.”

With the toe of his boot the doctor pushed and broke up one of the piles. It was the telegraph correspondence of White headquarters. The vague notion that he might run across the name of Rantsevich among the papers flashed in him, but he was disappointed. It was an uninteresting collection of last year’s ciphered communiqués in incomprehensible abbreviations, like the following: “Omsk genquasup first copy Omsk stareg map Omsky thirty miles Yenisei never received.” He scattered another pile with his foot. Out of it crawled the protocols of old partisan meetings. On top lay a paper: “Highly urgent. On furloughs. Re-election of members of the review committee.
Current business. In view of insufficient charges of the Ignatodvortsy schoolmistress, the army council thinks …”

Just then Kamennodvorsky took something from his pocket, handed it to the doctor, and said:

“Here’s the schedule for your medical unit when we come to breaking camp. The carts with the partisan families are already close by. The dissension in the camp will be settled today. We can expect to leave any day now.”

The doctor cast a glance at the paper and gasped:

“That’s less than they gave me last time. And there are so many more wounded! Those who are ambulant or bandaged can walk. But they’re an insignificant number. How am I to transport the badly wounded? And the medications, and the cots, the equipment?”

“Squeeze yourself in somehow. We’ve got to adjust to circumstances. Now about something else. There’s a general request to you from everybody. We have a seasoned, tried comrade here, devoted to the cause and an excellent fighter. Something’s gone wrong with him.”

“Palykh? Lajos told me.”

“Yes. Go and see him. Look into it.”

“Something mental?”

“I suppose so. Some sort of fleetlings, as he puts it. Apparently hallucinations. Insomnia. Headaches.”

“Very well. I’ll go at once. I have some free time now. When does the meeting begin?”

“I think they’re already gathering. But why you? You see, I’m not going. They’ll do without us.”

“Then I’ll go to Pamphil. Though I’m so sleepy I’m ready to drop. Liberius Averkievich likes to philosophize at night; he’s worn me out with talking. How do I get to Pamphil? Where is he quartered?”

“You know the young birch grove behind the filled-in pit? Birch saplings.”

“I’ll find it.”

“There are some commanders’ tents in a clearing. We assigned one to Pamphil. In expectation of his family. His wife and children are coming to him in the train. So he’s in one of the commanders’ tents. With the rights of a battalion commander. For his revolutionary merits.”

On the way to Pamphil the doctor felt that he could not go any further. He was overcome by fatigue. He could not fight off his sleepiness, the result of
a lack of sleep accumulated over several nights. He could go back for a nap in the dugout. But Yuri Andreevich was afraid to go there. Liberius could come at any moment and disturb him.

He lay down in one of the not overgrown places in the forest, all strewn with golden leaves that had fallen onto the clearing from the surrounding trees. The leaves lay crosshatched like a checkerboard in the clearing. The sun’s rays fell in the same way onto their golden carpet. This double, crisscrossed motleyness rippled in one’s eyes. It lulled one to sleep, like reading small print or murmuring something monotonous.

The doctor lay on the silkily rustling leaves, putting his hand under his head on the moss that covered the gnarled roots of a tree like a pillow. He dozed off instantly. The motley sun spots that put him to sleep covered his body stretched out on the ground with a checkered pattern and made him undiscoverable, indistinguishable in the kaleidoscope of rays and leaves, as if he had put on the cap of invisibility.

Very soon the overintensity of his wish and need to sleep woke him up. Direct causes work only within commensurate limits. Deviations from the measure produce the opposite effect. Finding no rest, his wakeful consciousness worked feverishly in idle. Fragments of thoughts raced and whirled in circles, almost knocking like a broken machine. This inner turmoil tormented and angered the doctor. “That scoundrel Liberius,” he thought indignantly. “It’s not enough for him that there are hundreds of reasons now for a man to go off his head. By his captivity, by his friendship and idiotic babble, he needlessly turns a healthy man into a neurasthenic. Someday I’ll kill him.”

A colorful folding and opening little scrap, a brown speckled butterfly, flew by on the sunny side. The doctor followed its flight with sleepy eyes. It alighted on what most resembled its coloring, the brown speckled bark of a pine tree, with which it merged quite indistinguishably. The butterfly imperceptibly effaced itself on it, just as Yuri Andreevich was lost without trace to an outsider’s eye under the net of sunlight and shadow playing over him.

The usual round of thoughts came over Yuri Andreevich. It was indirectly touched upon in many medical works. About will and expediency as the result of improving adaptation. About imitative and protective coloring. About the survival of the fittest, and that the path laid down by natural selection is perhaps also the path of the formation and birth of consciousness. What is a subject? What is an object? How give a definition of their identity? In the doctor’s reflections, Darwin met with Schelling,
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and the passing butterfly with modern painting, with impressionist art. He thought of creation, the creature, creativity, and mimicry.

And he fell back to sleep, and after a minute woke up again. He was awakened by soft, muffled talk not far away. The few words that reached him were enough for Yuri Andreevich to understand that something secret and illegal was being arranged. The conspirators obviously did not notice him, did not suspect his proximity. If he were to stir now and betray his presence, it would cost him his life. Yuri Andreevich kept quiet, froze, and began to listen.

Some of the voices he knew. These were the scum, the riffraff of the partisans, the hangers-on, the boys Sanka Pafnutkin, Goshka Ryabykh, Koska Nekhvalenykh, and Terenty Galuzin, who sided with them—the ringleaders of all nastiness and outrage. With them was also Zakhar Gorazdykh, a still shadier type, involved with the moonshine case, but temporarily left out of it for having betrayed the chief culprits. Yuri Andreevich was surprised by the presence of a partisan from the “silver company,” Sivobluy, who was one of the commander’s personal guards. By a tradition stemming from Razin and Pugachev,
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this retainer, owing to the trust Liberius put in him, was known as “the ataman’s ear.” So he, too, was in the conspiracy.

The conspirators were making arrangements with men sent from the enemy’s advance patrols. The parleyers could not be heard at all, they discussed things so softly with the traitors, and only by the pauses in the whispering of the accomplices could Yuri Andreevich guess that the enemy representatives were speaking.

The drunkard Zakhar Gorazdykh talked most of all, in a hoarse, rasping voice, using foul language all the time. He was probably the main instigator.

“Now listen, you guys. Above all it’s got to be on the quiet, in secret. If anybody drops out and rats, see this knife? With this knife here I’ll spill his guts. Understand? Now for us it’s not here, not there, whichever way we turn it’s the high oak tree. We’ve got to earn our pardon. We’ve got to pull a stunt like the whole world never saw, out of the old rut. They want him alive, tied up. We hear their chief, Gulevoy, is coming to this forest.” (They told him the right way to say it; he did not quite hear and corrected it to “General Galeev.”) “There won’t be no more chances like this. Here are their delegates. They’ll tell you everything. They say he’s got to be delivered tied up and alive, without fail. Ask the comrades yourselves. Speak up, you guys. Tell ’em something, brothers.”

The strangers, the ones sent, began to speak. Yuri Andreevich could not catch a single word. By the length of the general silence, the thoroughness of what was being said could be imagined. Again Gorazdykh spoke:

“You hear, brothers? Now you can see for yourselves what a little treasure, what a sweet little potion we’ve run into. Do we have to pay for it with
our lives? Is he a human being? He’s a freak, a holy fool, a sort of runt, or a hermit. I’ll teach you to guffaw, Tereshka! What are you baring your teeth for, you sin of Sodom? It’s not for your jeers I’m talking. Yes. He’s like a young hermit. Give in to him and he’ll make a total monk, a eunuch, out of you. What’s his talk all about? Driving from our midst, away with foul language, fight drunkenness, attitude towards women. Can we live like that? My final word. Tonight at the river crossing, where the stones are laid out. I’ll lure him into the open. We’ll fall on him in a heap. Is it so tricky to deal with him? Nothing to it. Where’s the hitch? They want him alive. Tied up. If I see it’s not coming off our way, I’ll take care of him myself, bump him off with my own hands. They’ll send their own men to help out.”

The speaker went on developing the plan for the conspiracy, but he began to move off with the others, and the doctor could not hear them anymore.

“They mean Liberius, the scoundrels!” Yuri Andreevich thought with horror and indignation, forgetting how many times he himself had cursed his tormentor and wished for his death. “The villains are going to hand him over to the Whites or kill him. How can I prevent it? Go up to the bonfire as if by chance and, without naming anybody, inform Kamennodvorsky. And somehow warn Liberius about the danger.”

Kamennodvorsky was no longer in his former place. The bonfire was going out. Kamennodvorsky’s assistant was there to see that the fire did not spread.

But the attempt did not take place. It was stopped. As it turned out, they knew about the conspiracy. That day it was fully uncovered and the conspirators were arrested. Sivobluy had played a double role in it, as sleuth and seducer. The doctor felt still more disgusted.

It became known that the fleeing women and children were now just two marches away. At Fox Point they were preparing to meet their families soon and after that to raise camp and move on. Yuri Andreevich went to see Pamphil Palykh.

The doctor found him at the entrance to his tent with an axe in his hand. In front of the tent was a tall pile of young birches cut down for poles. Pamphil had not yet trimmed them. Some had been cut right there and, falling heavily, had stuck the sharp ends of their broken branches into the damp soil. Others he had brought from not far away and piled on top. Trembling and swaying on the resilient branches crushed underneath, the birches lay neither on the ground nor on each other. It was as if they were warding off
Pamphil, who had cut them down, with their hands and barring the entrance of the tent to him with a whole forest of live greenery.

“In expectation of our dear guests,” said Pamphil, explaining what he was doing. “The tent will be too low for my wife and children. And it gets flooded when it rains. I want to prop up the top with stakes. I’ve cut some planks.”

“There’s no use thinking they’ll let your family live in the tent with you, Pamphil. Where have you ever seen nonmilitary, women and children, staying in the middle of an army? They’ll be placed somewhere at the edge, with the train. Go to see them in your free time, if you like. But to have them in a soldier’s tent is unlikely. But that’s not the point. They say you’ve grown thin, stopped eating and drinking, don’t sleep? Yet you look pretty good. Only a bit shaggy.”

Pamphil Palykh was a stalwart man with black tousled hair and beard and a bumpy forehead that gave the impression of being double, owing to a thickening of the frontal bone that went around his temples like a ring or a brass hoop. This gave Pamphil the unkindly and sinister appearance of a man looking askance or glancing from under his brows.

At the beginning of the revolution, when, after the example of the year 1905, it was feared that this time, too, the revolution would be a brief event in the history of the educated upper classes, and would not touch the lowest classes or strike root in them, everything possible was done to propagandize the people, to revolutionize them, alarm them, arouse and infuriate them.

In those first days, people like the soldier Pamphil Palykh, who, without any agitation, had a fierce, brutal hatred of the intelligentsia, the gentry, and the officers, seemed a rare find to the rapturous left-wing intelligentsia, and were greatly valued. Their inhumanity seemed a miracle of class consciousness, their barbarity a model of proletarian firmness and revolutionary instinct. Such was the established reputation of Pamphil. He was on the best standing with partisan chiefs and party leaders.