Doctor Zhivago (59 page)

The wretched man was at his last gasp. He did not finish, cried out, and gave up the ghost. Somehow they all understood it at once and began taking their hats off and crossing themselves.

In the evening more news, much more horrible than this, spread through the camp.

Pamphil Palykh had been in the crowd that stood around the dying man. He had seen him, heard his story, read the inscription full of threats on the plank.

His constant fear for the fate of his family in case of his death came over him to an unprecedented degree. In imagination he already saw them handed over to slow torture, saw their faces disfigured by torment, heard their moans and calls for help. To deliver them from future sufferings and shorten his own, in a frenzy of anguish he finished them off himself. He cut down his wife and three children with that same razor-sharp axe with which he had carved wooden toys for the girls and his beloved son, Flenushka.
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It is astonishing that he did not lay hands on himself right after he did it. What was he thinking of? What could lie ahead for him? What prospects, what intentions? He was clearly deranged, an irrevocably finished being.

While Liberius, the doctor, and the members of the military council sat discussing what was to be done with him, he wandered freely about the camp, his head lolling on his chest, looking from under his brows with his dull yellow eyes and seeing nothing. A witless, vagrant smile of inhuman, invincible suffering never left his face.

No one pitied him. Everyone recoiled from him. Voices were raised calling for lynch law against him. They were not seconded.

There was nothing for him to do in the world. At dawn he disappeared from the camp, as an animal maddened by rabies flees from its own self.

Winter had long since come. It was freezing cold. Torn-up sounds and forms appeared with no evident connection from the frosty mist, stood, moved, vanished. Not the sun we are accustomed to on earth, but the crimson ball of some other substitute sun hung in the forest. From it, strainedly and slowly, as in a dream or a fairy tale, rays of amber yellow light, thick as honey, spread and on their way congealed in the air and froze to the trees.

Barely touching the ground with rounded soles, and at each step awakening a fierce creaking of the snow, invisible feet in felt boots moved in all directions, while the figures attached to them, in hoods and sheepskin jackets, floated through the air separately, like luminaries circling through the heavenly sphere.

Acquaintances stopped, got into conversation. They brought their faces close to each other, crimson as in a bathhouse, with frozen scrub brushes of
beards and mustaches. Billows of dense, viscous steam escaped in clouds from their mouths and in their enormity were incommensurate with the frugal, as if frostbitten, words of their laconic speech.

On a footpath Liberius and the doctor ran into each other.

“Ah, it’s you? Long time no see! I invite you to my dugout this evening. Spend the night. We’ll talk, just like the old days. There’s new information.”

“The messenger’s back? Any news of Varykino?”

“The report doesn’t make a peep about my family or yours. But I draw comforting conclusions precisely from that. It means they saved themselves in time. Otherwise there would have been mention of them. Anyhow, we’ll talk about it when we meet. So I’ll be waiting for you.”

In the dugout the doctor repeated his question:

“Just tell me, what do you know about our families?”

“Again you don’t want to look beyond your nose. Ours are evidently alive, in safety. But they’re not the point. There’s splendid news. Want some meat? Cold veal.”

“No, thanks. Don’t get side-tracked. Stick to business.”

“Big mistake. I’ll have a go at it. There’s scurvy in the camp. People have forgotten what bread and vegetables are. We should have done better at organizing the gathering of nuts and berries in the fall, while the refugee women were here. I was saying, our affairs are in splendid shape. What I’ve always predicted has come true. The ice has broken. Kolchak is retreating on all fronts. It’s a total, spontaneously unfolding defeat. You see? What did I say? And you kept whining.”

“When did I whine?”

“All the time. Especially when we were pressed by Vitsyn.”

The doctor recalled that past fall, the execution of the rebels, Palykh’s murder of his wife and children, the bloody carnage and human slaughter of which no end was in sight. The atrocities of the Whites and the Reds rivaled each other in cruelty, increasing in turns as if multiplied by each other. The blood was nauseating, it rose to your throat and got into your head, your eyes were swollen with it. This was not whining at all, it was something else entirely. But how explain it to Liberius?

There was a smell of fragrant smoke in the dugout. It settled on the palate, tickled the nose and throat. The dugout was lighted by paper-thin splinters set in an iron trivet on a tripod. When one went out, the burnt end fell into a bowl of water underneath, and Liberius set up and lit a new one.

“See what I’m burning. We’re out of oil. The wood’s too dry. The splinter burns up quickly. Yes, there’s scurvy in the camp. You categorically refuse the veal? Scurvy. Where are you looking, doctor? Why don’t you gather the
staff, shed light on the situation, give a lecture to the superiors about scurvy and the means of fighting it?”

“Don’t torment me, for God’s sake. Exactly what do you know about our families?”

“I’ve already told you that there’s no exact information about them. But I didn’t finish telling you what I know of the general military news. The civil war is over. Kolchak is utterly crushed. The Red Army is driving him down the railroad line, to the east, to throw him into the sea. Another part of the Red Army is hastening to join us, so that together we can start destroying his many scattered units in the rear. The south of Russia has been cleared. Why aren’t you glad? Isn’t that enough for you?”

“Not true. I am glad. But where are our families?”

“They’re not in Varykino, and that’s a great blessing. As I supposed, Kamennodvorsky’s summer legends—remember those stupid rumors about the invasion of Varykino by some mysterious race of people?—have not been confirmed, but the place is completely deserted. Something seems to have happened there after all, and it’s very good that both families got away in good time. Let’s believe they’re safe. According to my intelligence, that’s the assumption of the few people left.”

“And Yuriatin? What’s going on there? Whose hands is it in?”

“Also something incongruous. Undoubtedly a mistake.”

“What, precisely?”

“Supposedly the Whites are still there. It’s absolutely absurd, a sheer impossibility. I’ll make that obvious to you right now.”

Liberius set up a new splinter and, folding a crumpled, tattered, large-scale map so that the right section showed and unnecessary parts were turned back, began to explain, pencil in hand.

“Look. In all these sectors the Whites have been driven back. Here, and here, and here, all around. Are you following attentively?”

“Yes.”

“They can’t be towards Yuriatin. Otherwise,
with their communications cut, they’d inevitably fall into a trap. Their generals can’t fail to understand that, however giftless they are. You’re putting your coat on? Where are you going?”

“Excuse me for a moment. I’ll be right back. It smells of shag and wood fumes here. I don’t feel well. I’ll catch my breath outside.”

Climbing up and out of the dugout, the doctor used his mitten to brush the snow off the thick log placed by the entrance as a seat. He sat down on it, leaned forward, and, propping his head in both hands, fell to thinking. As if there had been no winter taiga, no forest camp, no eighteen months spent with the partisans. He forgot about them. Only his family stood there in his imagination. He made conjectures about them, one more terrible than the other.

Here is Tonya going across a field in a blizzard with Shurochka in her arms. She wraps him in a blanket, her feet sink into the snow, she barely manages to pull them out, and the snowstorm covers her, the wind throws her to the ground, she falls and gets up, too weak to stand on her legs, weakened and giving way under her. Oh, but he keeps forgetting, forgetting. She has two children, and she is nursing the younger one. Both her arms are taken up, like the refugee women of Chilimka who lost their minds from grief and a strain that was beyond their endurance.

Both her arms are taken up, and there is no one around who can help. No one knows where Shurochka’s papa is. He is far away, always far away, apart from them all his life, and is he a papa, are real papas like that? And where is her own father? Where is Alexander Alexandrovich? Where is Nyusha? Where are all the rest? Oh, better not to ask yourself these questions, better not to think, better not to go into it.

The doctor got up from the log, intending to go down into the dugout. Suddenly his thoughts took a different direction. He decided not to go back down to Liberius.

He had long ago stashed away some skis, a bag of rusks, and everything necessary for an escape. He had buried these things in the snow outside the guarded boundary of the camp, under a big silver fir, which he had also marked with a special notch to be sure. He headed there, down a footpath trampled in the snowdrifts. It was a clear night. A full moon was shining. The doctor knew where the guards were posted for the night and successfully avoided them. But by the clearing with the ice-covered rowan tree a sentry called to him from a distance and, standing straight on his skis as they gathered momentum, came gliding towards him.

“Stop or I’ll shoot! Who are you? Give the password.”

“What, are you out of your mind, brother? It’s me. Don’t you recognize me? I’m your Doctor Zhivago.”

“Sorry! Don’t be angry, Comrade Zhivak. I didn’t recognize you. But even though you’re Zhivak, I won’t let you go any further. Everything’s got to be done right.”

“Well, as you will. The password is ‘Red Siberia,’ and the response is ‘Down with the interventionists.’ ”

“That’s another story. Go wherever you like. Why the devil are you wandering about at night? Sick people?”

“I’m not sleepy, and I got thirsty. I thought I might stroll about and eat
some snow. I saw this rowan tree with frozen berries on it. I wanted to go and chew some.”

“There’s a squire’s whim for you, to go berrying in winter. Three years we’ve been beating and beating, and haven’t beaten it out of you. No consciousness. Go get your rowan berries, oddball. What do I care?”

And, picking up more and more speed, the sentry went off, standing straight on his long, whistling skis, and moved away over the untouched snow further and further beyond the bare winter bushes, skimpy as balding heads. And the footpath the doctor was following brought him to the just-mentioned rowan tree.

It was half covered with snow, half with frozen leaves and berries, and it stretched out two snowy branches to meet him. He remembered Lara’s big white arms, rounded, generous, and, taking hold of the branches, he pulled the tree towards him. As if in a conscious answering movement, the rowan showered him with snow from head to foot. He was murmuring, not realizing what he was saying, and unaware of himself:

“I shall see you, my beauty, my princess, my dearest rowan tree, my own heart’s blood.”

The night was clear. The moon was shining. He made his way deeper into the taiga, to his secret silver fir, dug up his things, and left the camp.

Bolshaya Kupecheskaya Street descended the crooked hill to Malaya Spasskaya and Novosvalochny. The houses and churches of the higher parts of the town peered down on it.

At the corner stood the dark gray house with figures. The huge quadrangular stones of its foundation, cut on a slant, were blackened with freshly pasted-up issues of government newspapers, government decrees and resolutions. Stopping for a long time on the sidewalk, small groups of passersby silently read this literature.

It was dry after the recent thaw. Turning cold. The frost was noticeably hardening. It was quite light at a time when, just recently, it would have been getting dark. Winter had recently departed. The emptiness of the vacated space was filled with light, which would not go away and lingered through the evenings. It stirred you, drew you into the distance, frightened and alerted you.

The Whites had recently left the town, surrendering it to the Reds. The shooting, the bloodshed, the military alarms were over. That, too, frightened and alerted you, like the departure of winter and the augmentation of the spring days.

The notice that the passersby in the street read by the light of the lengthened day announced:

“For the information of the populace. Work booklets for those eligible can be obtained for 50 rubles each in the Provisions Section of the Yuriatin City Council, at 5 Oktiabrskaya, formerly General-gubernatorskaya, Street, room 137.

“Nonpossession of a work booklet, or incorrect or, still more so, false
entries, will be punished with full wartime severity. Precise instructions for the use of work booklets are published in the B.Y.E.C., No. 86 (1013), of the current year and posted in the Provisions Section of the Yuriatin City Council, room 137.”

Another announcement reported on the sufficiency of food supplies available in the city, though they had supposedly been concealed by the bourgeoisie in order to disorganize distribution and sow chaos in the matter of provisioning. The announcement ended with the words:

“Those caught hoarding and concealing food supplies will be shot on the spot.”

A third announcement offered:

“In the interests of the correct organizing of food distribution, those not belonging to exploiter elements are to unite into consumers’ communes. Details can be obtained in the Provisions Section of the Yuriatin City Council, 5 Oktiabrskaya, formerly General-gubernatorskaya, Street, room 137.”

The military were warned:

“Those who have not surrendered their weapons or who carry them without a proper, newly issued permit, will be prosecuted with the full severity of the law. Permits can be exchanged in the Yuriatin Revolutionary Committee, 6 Oktiabrskaya, room 63.”