Doctor Zhivago (56 page)

To Yuri Andreevich this gloomy and unsociable strongman seemed a not quite normal degenerate, owing to his general heartlessness, and the monotony and squalor of whatever was close to him and could interest him.

“Let’s go into the tent,” Pamphil invited.

“No, why? Anyway, I can’t get in. It’s better in the open air.”

“All right. Have it your way. In fact, it’s a hole. We can chat sitting on these staves” (so he called the trees heaped lengthwise).

And they sat on the birch trunks, which moved springily under them.

“They say a tale’s quickly told, but doing’s
not quickly done. But my tale’s not quickly told either. In three years I couldn’t lay it all out. I don’t know where to begin.

“Well, so then. I was living with my wife. We were young. She saw to the house. I had no complaints, I did peasant work. Children. They took me as a soldier. Drove me flank-march to war. So, the war. What can I tell you about it? You saw it, comrade medic. So, the revolution. I began to see. The soldier’s eyes were opened. The German’s not the foreigner, the one from Germany, but one of our own. Soldiers of the world revolution, stick your bayonets in the ground, go home from the front, get the bourgeoisie! And stuff like that. You know it all yourself, comrade army medic. And so on. The civil war. I merge into the partisans. Now I’ll skip a lot, otherwise I’ll never finish. Now, to make a long story short, what do I see in the current moment? He, the parasite, has moved the first and second Stavropol regiments from the front, and the first Orenburg Cossack regiment as well. Am I a little kid not to understand? Didn’t I serve in the army? We’re in a bad way, army doctor, we’re cooked. What does the scoundrel want? He wants to fall on us with the whole lot of them. He wants to encircle us.

“Now at the present time I’ve got a wife and kids. If he overpowers us now, how will they get away from him? Is he going to make out that they’re not guilty of anything, that they’re not part of it? He’s not going to look into that. He’ll twist my wife’s arms, torment her, torture my wife and children on my account, tear their little joints and bones apart. Go on, eat and sleep after that. Say you’re made of iron, but you’ll still crack up.”

“You’re an odd bird, Pamphil. I don’t understand you. For years you’ve been doing without them, didn’t know about them, didn’t grieve. And now, when you may see them any day, instead of being glad, you sing a dirge for them.”

“That was then, but this is now—a big difference. The white-epauletted vermin are overpowering us. But I’m not the point. It’s the grave for me. Serves me right, clearly. But I can’t take my dear ones with me to the next world. They’ll fall into the foul one’s paws. He’ll bleed them drop by drop.”

“And that’s why you have these fleetlings? They say some sort of fleetlings appear to you.”

“Well, all right, doctor. I haven’t told you everything. Not the main thing. Well, all right, listen to my prickly truth, don’t begrudge me, I’ll tell it all straight in your face.

“I’ve done in a lot of your kind, there’s a lot of blood on my hands from the masters, the officers, and it’s nothing to me. I don’t remember numbers or names, it’s all flowed by like water. But one little bugger won’t get out of my head, I bumped off one little bugger and can’t forget him. Why did I
destroy the lad? He made me laugh, he was killingly funny. I shot him from laughter, stupidly. For no reason.

“It was during the February revolution. Under Kerensky. We were rioting. It happened at the railroad. They sent us a young agitator, to rouse us for the attack with his tongue. So we’d make war to a victorious conclusion. A little cadet comes to pacify us with his tongue. Such a puny fellow. He had this slogan: to a victorious conclusion. He jumped with his slogan onto a firefighting tub that was there at the station. So he jumped up on the tub to call us to battle from higher up, and suddenly the lid gave way under his feet and he fell into the water. A misstep. Oh, how funny! I just rolled with laughter. I thought I’d die. Oh, it was killing. And I had a gun in my hands. And I was laughing my head off, and that was it, no help for it. Same as if he was tickling me. Well, so I aimed and—bang—right on the spot. I don’t understand myself how it came out that way. As if somebody nudged my arm.

“So there’s my fleetlings. By night I seem to see that station. It was funny then, but now I’m sorry.”

“Was it in the town of Meliuzeevo, the Biriuchi station?”

“I forget.”

“Was it a riot with the people of Zybushino?”

“I forget.”

“What front was it? At what front? The western?”

“Something like that. It’s all possible. I forget.”

The families of the partisans had long been following the body of the army in carts, with their children and chattels.
At the tail of the refugee train, far behind, countless herds of cattle were driven, mostly cows, some several thousand of them.

Along with the partisans’ wives a new person appeared in the camp, an army wife, Zlydarikha or Kubarikha, a cattle doctor, a veterinarian, and secretly also a sorceress.

She went about in a forage cap cocked to one side and the gray-green greatcoat of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, from the British uniforms supplied to the Supreme Ruler, and assured people that she had had these things made from a prisoner’s hat and smock, and that the Reds had supposedly freed her from the jail in Kezhem, where Kolchak had held her for some unknown reason.

At that time the partisans were halted in a new place. It was assumed that this would be a brief halt, until the area was reconnoitered and a place was found for a long and settled wintering over. But later on circumstances took a different turn and forced the partisans to stay there and spend the winter.

This new halting place was in no way like the recently abandoned Fox Point. It was dense, impassable forest, the taiga. To one side, away from the road and the camp, there was no end to it. During the first days, while the army was setting up a new bivouac and preparing to live in it, Yuri Andreevich had more leisure. He went deep into the forest in several directions with the aim of exploring it and convinced himself that it would be very easy to get lost in it. Two spots caught his attention, and he remembered them from that first round.

At the way out of the camp and the forest, which was now autumnally bare and could be seen through, as if gates had been thrown open into its emptiness, there grew a solitary, beautiful, rusty-red-leafed rowan tree, the only one of all the trees to keep its foliage. It grew on a mound above a low, hummocky bog, and reached right up to the sky, into the dark lead of the prewinter inclemency, the flatly widening corymbs of its hard, brightly glowing berries. Small winter birds, bullfinches and tomtits, with plumage bright as frosty dawns, settled on the rowan tree, slowly and selectively pecked the larger berries, and, thrusting up their little heads and stretching their necks, swallowed them with effort.

Some living intimacy was established between the birds and the tree. As if the rowan saw it all, resisted for a long time, then surrendered, taking pity on the little birds, yielded, unbuttoned herself, and gave them the breast, like a nurse to a baby. “Well, what can I do with you? Go on, eat, eat me. Feed yourselves.” And she smiled.

The other place in the forest was still more remarkable.

It was on a height. This height, like a drumlin, ended on one side in a sheer drop. It seemed that below, under the drop, there should have been something other than what was above—a river, or a ravine, or an abandoned, unmowed meadow overgrown with grass. However, below there was a repetition of the same thing as above, only at a dizzying depth, on another level, where the treetops were low down under one’s feet. This was probably the result of a landslide.

It was as if this severe, cloud-propping, mighty forest had stumbled once, just as it was, and plunged down, and should have fallen through the earth into Tartarus, but at the decisive moment had miraculously kept itself on earth and now, safe and sound, could be seen rustling below.

But this forest height was remarkable not for that, but for another particularity. It was shut in all around its edge by vertical blocks of granite standing on end. They were like the flat-trimmed slabs of prehistoric dolmens. When Yuri Andreevich came to this platform for the first time, he was ready to swear that the place and its stones were not of natural origin at all, but bore the traces of human hands. Here in ancient times there might have been some sort of pagan shrine of unknown idol worshippers, the place of their rituals and sacrifices.

In this place on a cold, gray morning the death sentence was carried out on the eleven men found guilty of the conspiracy and the two moonshining orderlies.

Some twenty men from among the partisans most loyal to the revolution, with a core of special guards from headquarters, brought them here. The
convoy closed in on the condemned men in a semicircle and, pointing their rifles, at a quick, close-packed pace, pushed them, drove them into the rocky corner of the platform, from which they had no way out except to leap into the abyss.

The interrogations, the long imprisonment, and the humiliations they had been subjected to had deprived them of their human image. They were shaggy, blackened, exhausted, and frightful as ghosts.

They had been disarmed at the very beginning of the investigation. It did not occur to anyone to search them a second time before the execution. That seemed like an unnecessary meanness, a mockery of people in the face of death.

Suddenly Rzhanitsky, a friend of Vdovichenko’s, who was walking beside him and, like him, was an old ideological anarchist, fired three times at the line of the convoy, aiming at Sivobluy. Rzhanitsky was an excellent shot, but his hand shook from agitation and he missed. Again the same delicacy and pity for their former comrades kept the guards from falling upon Rzhanitsky or responding to his attempt by shooting ahead of time, before the general command. Rzhanitsky had three unspent shots left, but in his excitement, perhaps forgetting about them and vexed at having missed, he hurled his Browning against the stones. The blow fired off the Browning a fourth time, wounding the condemned Pachkolia in the foot.

The orderly Pachkolia cried out, clutched his foot, and fell, uttering quick shrieks of pain. Pafnutkin and Gorazdykh, who were nearest to him, picked him up, held him under the arms, and dragged him, so that he would not be trampled by his alarmed comrades, because they no longer knew what they were doing. Pachkolia went towards the stony edge, where the condemned men were being crowded, hopping, limping, unable to step on his wounded foot, and kept crying out. His inhuman howls were infectious. As if on signal, they all lost control of themselves. Something unimaginable began. Swearing poured out, prayers and entreaties were heard, curses resounded.

The adolescent Galuzin, throwing from his head the yellow-braided high school cap he was still wearing, sank to his knees and like that, without getting up
from them, crept backwards in the crowd towards the frightful stones. He bowed quickly to the ground in front of the convoy, cried and sobbed, pleading with them half unconsciously, in singsong:

“I’m guilty, brothers, have mercy on me, I won’t do it again. Don’t destroy me. Don’t kill me. I haven’t lived yet, I’m too young to die. I want to go on living, I want to see mama, my mama, one more time. Forgive me, brothers, have mercy. I’ll kiss your feet. I’ll carry water for you on my back. Ah, terrible, terrible—mama, mama, I’m lost.”

From the midst someone wailed, no one could see who:

“Dear, good comrades! How can it be? Come to your senses. We’ve shed blood together in two wars. We stood, we fought for the same cause. Have pity, let us go. We’ll never forget your kindness, we’ll earn it, we’ll prove it in action. Are you deaf that you don’t answer? Aren’t you Christians?”

To Sivobluy they shouted:

“Ah, you Judas, you Christ-seller! What sort of traitors are we compared to you? May you be throttled yourself, you dog, you three-time traitor! You swore an oath to your tsar and you killed your lawful tsar, you swore loyalty to us and you betrayed us. Go and kiss your Forester devil, till you betray him. And you will betray him.”

Vdovichenko remained true to himself even on the verge of the grave. Holding high his head with its gray, flying hair, he loudly addressed Rzhanitsky, like communard to communard, for everyone to hear:

“Don’t humiliate yourself, Boniface! Your protests won’t reach them. These new Oprichniki,
¹
these executioners of the new torture chambers, won’t understand you. Don’t lose heart. History will sort it all out. Posterity will nail the Bourbons of the commissarocracy and their black cause to the pillory. We die martyrs to ideas at the dawn of the world revolution. Long live the revolution of the spirit! Long live universal anarchy!”

A volley of twenty guns, produced on some soundless command caught only by the firing squad, mowed down half of the condemned men, most of whom fell dead. The rest were finished off with a second volley. The boy, Terenty Galuzin, twitched longer than anyone else, but in the end he, too, lay still, stretched out on the ground.

The idea of shifting camp for the winter to another place further east was not renounced at once. Reconnoitering and scouting out the area to the other side of the high road, along the watershed of the Vytsk-Kezhem, went on for a long time. Liberius often absented himself from camp to the taiga, leaving the doctor alone.

But it was already too late to move, and there was nowhere to move to. This was the time of greatest unsuccess for the partisans. Before their final collapse, the Whites decided to have done with the irregular forest units at one blow, once and for all, and, in a general effort on all fronts, surrounded them. The partisans were hemmed in on all sides. This would have been a catastrophe for them if the radius of the circle had been smaller. They were saved by the intangible vastness of the encirclement. On the doorstep of
winter, the enemy was unable to draw its flanks through the boundless, impassable taiga and surround the peasant troops more tightly.