Doctor Zhivago (6 page)

He was not himself today and had not slept the previous night. He was going on fourteen. He was sick of being little. All night he had not slept and at dawn he left the cottage. The sun was rising, and the ground in the park was covered with the long, dewy, openwork shade of trees. The shade was not black, but of a dark gray color, like wet felt. The stupefying fragrance of morning seemed to come precisely from that damp shade on the ground, with its elongated light spots like a young girl’s fingers.

Suddenly a silvery little stream of mercury, just like the dewdrops on the grass, flowed a few steps away from him. The little stream flowed, flowed, not soaking into the ground. Then, with an unexpectedly abrupt movement, it darted to one side and vanished. It was a grass snake. Nika shuddered.

He was a strange boy. In a state of excitement, he talked to himself out loud. He imitated his mother in his predilection for lofty matters and paradoxes.

“How good it is in this world!” he thought. “But why does it always come out so painful? God exists, of course. But if He exists, then He—is me. I’m going to order it,” he thought, glancing at an aspen all seized with trembling from bottom to top (its wet, shimmering leaves seemed cut from tin), “I’m going to command it,” and, in an insane exceeding of his strength, he did not whisper but with all his being, with all his flesh and blood,
desired and thought: “Be still!” and the tree at once obediently froze in immobility. Nika laughed for joy and ran off to swim in the river.

His father, the terrorist Dementy Dudorov, was serving at hard labor, which by grace of the sovereign had replaced the hanging to which he had been sentenced. His mother, from the Georgian princely family of the Eristovs, was a whimsical and still young beauty, eternally passionate about something—rebellions, rebels, extreme theories, famous actors, poor failures.

She adored Nika and from his name, Innokenty, made a heap of inconceivably tender and foolish nicknames like Inochka or Nochenka, and took him to show to her relatives in Tiflis. There he was struck most of all by a splay-limbed tree in the courtyard of the house where they were staying. It was some sort of clumsy tropical giant. With its leaves, which resembled elephant’s ears, it shielded the courtyard from the scorching southern sky. Nika could not get used to the idea that this tree was a plant and not an animal.

It was dangerous for the boy to bear his father’s terrible name. With Nina Galaktionovna’s consent, Ivan Ivanovich was preparing to petition the sovereign about Nika adopting his mother’s family name.

While he lay under the bed, indignant at the way things went in the world, he thought about that along with everything else. Who is this Voskoboinikov to push his meddling so far? He’s going to teach them!

And this Nadya! If she’s fifteen, does that mean she has the right to turn up her nose and talk to him like a little boy? He’s going to show her! “I hate her,” he repeated to himself several times. “I’ll kill her! I’ll invite her for a boat ride and drown her.”

Mama’s a good one, too. Of course, she tricked him and Voskoboinikov when she was leaving. She didn’t go to any Caucasus, she quite simply turned north at the first junction and is most calmly shooting at the police along with the students in Petersburg. While he has to rot alive in this stupid hole. But he would outwit them all. He’d drown Nadya, quit school, and run off to his father in Siberia to raise a rebellion.

The edge of the pond was densely overgrown with water lilies. The boat cut into their thickness with a dry rustle. Where the growth was torn, the water of the pond showed like the juice of a watermelon in a triangular cutout.

The boy and girl started picking water lilies. They both took hold of the same tough, rubbery stem, which refused to snap. It pulled them together. The children bumped heads. The boat was drawn to the bank as if by a hook. The stems became entangled and shortened; the white flowers with
centers bright as egg yolk and blood sank underwater, then emerged with water streaming from them.

Nadya and Nika went on gathering flowers, heeling the boat over more and more and almost lying next to each other on the lowered side.

“I’m sick of studying,” said Nika. “It’s time to begin life, to earn money, to go among people.”

“And I was just going to ask you to explain quadratic equations to me. I’m so weak in algebra that it almost ended with me repeating the exam.”

Nika sensed some sort of barb in these words. Well, of course, she was putting him in his place, reminding him of how young he still was. Quadratic equations! And they had not even caught a whiff of algebra yet.

Without betraying how wounded he was, he asked with feigned indifference and realizing at the same moment how stupid it was:

“When you grow up, who are you going to marry?”

“Oh, that’s still so far off. Probably no one. I haven’t thought about it yet.”

“Please don’t imagine I’m all that interested.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“You’re a fool.”

They began to quarrel. Nika remembered his morning misogyny. He threatened Nadya that if she did not stop saying insolent things, he would drown her.

“Just try,” said Nadya.

He seized her around the waist. A fight started. They lost their balance and fell into the water.

They both knew how to swim, but the water lilies caught at their arms and legs, and they could not yet feel the bottom. Finally, sinking into the ooze, they clambered out on the bank. Water poured in streams from their shoes and pockets. Nika was particularly tired.

If this had happened still quite recently, no further back than that spring, then in the given situation, sitting together thoroughly soaked after such a crossing, they would surely have made noise, scolding or laughing.

But now they were silent and barely breathed, crushed by the absurdity of what had happened. Nadya was indignant and protested silently, while Nika hurt all over, as if his arms and legs had been broken by a stick and his ribs caved in.

Finally, like a grown-up, Nadya quietly murmured, “Madman!”—and he, in the same grown-up way, said, “Forgive me.”

They began to walk up towards the house, leaving wet trails behind them like two water barrels. Their way led up the dusty slope, swarming with
snakes, not far from the place where Nika had seen a grass snake in the morning.

Nika remembered the magic elation of the night, the dawn, and his morning omnipotence, when by his own will he had commanded nature. What should he order it to do now, he wondered. What did he want most of all? He fancied that he wanted most of all to fall into the pond again someday with Nadya, and he would have given a lot right then to know if it would ever happen or not.

The war with Japan was not over yet. It was unexpectedly overshadowed by other events. Waves of revolution rolled across Russia, each one higher and more prodigious than the last.
¹

At that time Amalia Karlovna Guichard, the widow of a Belgian engineer and herself a Russified Frenchwoman, came to Moscow from the Urals with two children, her son Rodion and her daughter Larissa. Her son she sent to the Cadet Corps, and her daughter to a girls’ high school, by chance the same one and in the same class in which Nadya Kologrivova was studying.

Mme Guichard’s husband had left her some savings in securities, which had been rising but now had begun to fall. To slow the melting away of her means and not sit with folded arms, Mme Guichard bought a small business, Levitskaya’s dressmaking shop near the Triumphal Arch, from the seamstress’s heirs, with the right to keep the old firm intact, with the circle of its former clients and all its modistes and apprentices.

Mme Guichard did this on the advice of the lawyer Komarovsky, her husband’s friend and her own mainstay, a cold-blooded businessman, who knew business life in Russia like the back of his hand. She corresponded with him about her move, he met them at the station, he took them across the whole of Moscow to the furnished rooms of the Montenegro in Oruzheiny Lane, where he had taken quarters for them, he insisted on sending Rodion to the corps and Lara to the high school he recommended, and he joked distractedly with the boy and fixed his gaze on the girl so that she blushed.

Before moving to the small three-room apartment that came with the shop, they lived for about a month at the Montenegro.

These were the most terrible parts of Moscow, slick cabbies and low haunts, whole streets given over to depravity, slums full of “lost creatures.”

The children were not surprised at the dirtiness of the rooms, the bedbugs, the squalor of the furnishings. After their father’s death, their mother had lived in eternal fear of destitution. Rodya and Lara were used to hearing that they were on the verge of ruin. They understood that they were not street children, but in them there was a deep-seated timidity before the rich, as in children from an orphanage.

A living example of this fear was given them by their mother. Amalia Karlovna was a plump blonde of about thirty-five, whose fits of heart failure alternated with fits of stupidity. She was a terrible coward and had a mortal fear of men. Precisely for that reason, being frightened and bewildered, she kept falling from one embrace into another.

In the Montenegro they occupied number 23, and in number 24, from the day the place was founded, the cellist Tyshkevich had been living, a kindly fellow, sweaty and bald, in a little wig, who folded his hands prayerfully and pressed them to his breast when he was persuading someone, and threw back his head and rolled up his eyes inspiredly when he played in society or appeared at concerts. He was rarely at home and went off for whole days to the Bolshoi Theater or the Conservatory. The neighbors became acquainted. Mutual favors brought them close.

Since the children’s presence occasionally hampered Amalia Karlovna during Komarovsky’s visits, Tyshkevich began leaving his key with her when he left, so that she could receive her friend. Soon Mme Guichard became so accustomed to his self-sacrifices that she knocked on his door several times in tears, asking him to defend her against her protector.

The house was of one story, not far from the corner of Tverskaya. The proximity of the Brest railway could be felt. Its realm began nearby, the company apartments of the employees, the engine depots and warehouses.

The place was home to Olya Demina, an intelligent girl, the niece of one of the employees of the Moscow Freight Yard.

She was a capable apprentice. The former owner had taken notice of her, and now the new one began to bring her closer. Olya Demina liked Lara very much.

Everything remained as it had been under Levitskaya. The sewing machines turned like mad under the pumping feet or fluttering hands of the weary seamstresses. One would be quietly sewing, sitting on a table and drawing her hand with the needle and long thread far out. The floor was littered with scraps. They had to talk loudly to outshout the rapping of the sewing machines and the modulated trills of Kirill Modestovich, a canary in a cage under the window’s arch, the secret of whose name the former owner had taken with her to the grave.

In the waiting room, ladies in a picturesque group surrounded a table with magazines. They stood, sat, or half reclined in the poses they saw in the pictures and, studying the models, discussed styles. At another table, in the director’s place, sat Amalia Karlovna’s assistant from among the senior cutters, Faïna Silantievna Fetisova, a bony woman with warts in the hollows of her wizened cheeks.

She held a bone cigarette holder with a cigarette in it between her yellowed teeth, squinted her eye with its yellow white, and let out a yellow stream of smoke from her nose and mouth as she wrote down measurements, receipt numbers, addresses, and the preferences of the crowding customers.

Amalia Karlovna was a new and inexperienced person in the shop. She did not feel herself the owner in the full sense. But the personnel were honest; Fetisova could be relied on. Nevertheless, it was a troubled time. Amalia Karlovna was afraid to think of the future. She would be seized by despair. Everything would drop from her hands.

Komarovsky visited them often. When Viktor Ippolitovich crossed the whole shop on his way to their apartment and in passing frightened the fancy ladies changing clothes, who hid behind the screen at his appearance and from there playfully parried his casual jokes, the seamstresses disapprovingly and mockingly whispered after him: “His Honor,” “Her’n,” “Amalka’s Heartthrob,” “Stud,” “Skirt-chaser.”

An object of still greater hatred was his bulldog Jack, whom he sometimes brought on a leash and who pulled him along with such violent tugs that Komarovsky would miss his step, lurch forward, and go after the dog with his arms stretched out, like a blind man following his guide.

Once in the spring Jack snapped at Lara’s leg and tore her stocking.

“I’ll do him in, the filthy devil,” Olya Demina whispered in Lara’s ear in a child’s hoarse voice.

“Yes, he’s really a disgusting dog. But how will you do it, silly girl?”

“Shh, don’t shout, I’ll tell you. You know those Easter eggs, the stone ones. Like your mother has on the chest of drawers …”

“Yes, of course, made of marble, of crystal.”

“Right! Bend down, I’ll whisper in your ear. You take one, dip it in lard, the lard sticks to it, the mangy mutt swallows it, stuffs his gut, the little Satan, and—basta! Paws up! It’s glass!”

Lara laughed and thought with envy: The girl lives in poverty, works hard. Young ones from the people develop early. But see how much there still is in her that is unspoiled, childlike. The eggs, Jack—where did she get it all? “Why is it my lot,” thought Lara, “to see everything and take it so to heart?”

“But for him mama is—what’s it called … He’s mama’s … whatever … They’re bad words, I don’t want to repeat them. But why in that case does he look at me with such eyes? I’m her daughter.”

She was a little over sixteen, but she was a fully formed young girl. They gave her eighteen or more. She had a clear mind and an easy character. She was very good-looking.