Doctor Zhivago (60 page)

A wild-looking man with a sack on his back and a stick in his hand, emaciated, long unwashed, which made him look swarthy, came up to the group of readers. His long hair had no gray in it yet, but his dark blond beard was turning gray. It was Doctor Yuri Andreevich Zhivago. His winter coat had probably long since been taken off him on the way, or else he had traded it for food. He was in someone else’s old clothes, with sleeves too short to keep him warm.

In his sack there remained an unfinished crust of bread, given him in the last outlying village he had passed through, and a hunk of lard. About an hour earlier, he had entered the city from the side of the railway, and it had taken him a whole hour of trudging to get from the city gates to this intersection, so weak he was and exhausted from walking the past few days. He stopped often and barely kept himself from falling to the ground and kissing the stones of the city, which he had had no hope of ever seeing again, and the sight of which delighted him as if it were a living being.

For a very long time, half his journey on foot, he had gone along the railroad tracks. It was all left in neglect and inactive, and all covered with snow.
His way had led him past whole trains of the White Army, passenger and freight, overtaken by snowdrifts, the general defeat of Kolchak, and the exhaustion of fuel supplies. These trains, stopped in their course, forever standing, and buried under snow, stretched in an almost unbroken ribbon for many dozens of miles. They served as strongholds for armed bands of highway robbers, a refuge for criminal and political fugitives in hiding, the involuntary vagabonds of that time, but most of all as common graves and collective burial sites for those who died of cold and the typhus that raged all along the railway line and mowed down whole villages in the area.

This time justified the old saying: Man is a wolf to man. A wayfarer turned aside at the sight of another wayfarer; a man would kill the man he met, so as not to be killed himself. There were isolated cases of cannibalism. The human laws of civilization ended. Those of beasts were in force. Man dreamed the prehistoric dreams of the caveman.

Solitary shadows, occasionally sneaking along the roadside, fearfully crossing the path far ahead, and whom Yuri Andreevich carefully avoided when he could, often seemed familiar to him, seen somewhere. He fancied they belonged to the partisan camp. In most cases he was mistaken, but once his eye did not deceive him. The adolescent who crawled out of the snowdrift that covered the body of an international sleeping car, and who, having satisfied his need, darted back into the drift, was in fact from the Forest Brotherhood. He was Terenty Galuzin, supposedly shot dead. He had not been killed, had lain in a deep faint, come to, crawled from the place of execution, hidden in the forest, recovered from his wounds, and now, secretly, under another name, was making his way to his family in Krestovozdvizhensk, hiding from people in snowbound trains as he went.

These pictures and spectacles made the impression of something outlandish, transcendent. They seemed like parts of some unknown, other-planetary existences, brought to earth by mistake. And only nature remained true to history and showed itself to the eye as the artists of modern times portrayed it.

There were some quiet winter evenings, light gray, dark pink. Against the pale sunset, black birch tops were outlined, fine as handwriting. Black streams flowed under a gray mist of thin ice, between banks of white heaped snow, moistened from beneath by dark river water. And now such an evening, frosty, transparently gray, tenderhearted as pussy-willow fluff, promised to settle in after an hour or two opposite the house with figures in Yuriatin.

The doctor was going up to the board of the Central Printing Office on the stone wall of the house to look over the official information. But his gaze
kept falling on the other side and up towards the several windows on the second floor of the house opposite. These windows giving onto the street had once been painted over with whitewash. In the two rooms inside, the owners’ furniture had been stored. Though frost covered the lower parts of the windowpanes with a thin, crystalline crust, he could see that the glass was now transparent and the whitewash had been removed. What did this change mean? Had the owners returned? Or had Lara gone away, and there were new tenants in the apartment, and everything in it was different now?

The uncertainty agitated the doctor. He was unable to control his agitation. He crossed the street, went into the hall through the front door, and began to go up the main stairs, so familiar and so dear to his heart. How often he had remembered, in the forest camp, the openwork pattern of the cast-iron steps, down to the last curlicue. At some turn of his ascent, as he looked through the openwork under his feet, he could see old buckets, tubs, and broken chairs piled up under the stairway. This repeated itself now, too. Nothing had changed, everything was as before. The doctor was almost grateful to the stairs for this faithfulness to the past.

Once there had been a doorbell. But it had broken and ceased to work already in former times, before the doctor’s forest captivity. He was about to knock on the door, but noticed that it was locked in a new way, with a heavy padlock hanging on rings, crudely screwed into the paneling of the old oaken door, with its fine trimming fallen off in places. Formerly such barbarity had not been allowed. Locks had been mortised into the doorway and had worked well, and if they broke, locksmiths had existed to repair them. This insignificant detail spoke in its own way of a general, greatly advanced deterioration.

The doctor was certain that Lara and Katenka were not at home, and perhaps were not in Yuriatin, and perhaps were not even in this world. He was prepared for the most terrible disappointments. Only for the sake of a clear conscience, he decided to feel in the hole that he and Katenka had been so afraid of, and he tapped his foot on the wall, so that his hand would not come upon a rat in the opening. He had no hope of finding anything in the prearranged place. The hole was stopped up with a brick. Yuri Andreevich removed the brick and stuck his hand inside. Oh, wonder! A key and a note. A rather long note on a big piece of paper. The doctor went over to the window on the landing. A still greater wonder, still more incredible! The note was written to him! He read quickly:

“Lord, what happiness! They say you’re alive and have turned up. They saw you in the neighborhood and came running to tell me. Supposing you’d hurry to Varykino first of all, I’m going there myself with Katenka. In any
case the key is in the usual place. Wait for me to come back, don’t go anywhere. Ah, yes, you don’t know, I’m now in the front part of the apartment, in the rooms that give onto the street. But you’ll figure that out yourself. The house is empty, there’s lots of room, I had to sell part of the owners’ furniture. I’m leaving some food, mostly boiled potatoes. Put an iron or something heavy on the lid of the pot, as I’ve done, to protect it from the rats. I’m out of my mind with joy.”

Here ended the front side of the note. The doctor did not notice that there was writing on the other side of the paper. He brought the page unfolded on his palm to his lips and then, without looking, folded it and put it in his pocket along with the key. A terrible, wounding pain was mixed with his mad joy. Since she had gone straight to Varykino, without any hesitation, it meant that his family was not there. Besides the anxiety this detail caused him, he also felt an unbearable pain and sadness for his family. Why did she not say a word about them and where they were, as if they did not exist at all?

But there was no time for thinking. It was beginning to get dark outside. He had to do many things while there was still light. Not the least concern was familiarizing himself with the decrees posted in the street. This was a serious time. Out of ignorance, you could pay with your life for violating some mandatory decree. And not opening the apartment and not taking the sack from his weary shoulder, he went down and outside and approached the wall pasted all over with printed matter.

This printed matter consisted of newspaper articles, the records of speeches at meetings, and decrees. Yuri Andreevich glanced cursorily at the titles. “On the Rules of the Requisition and Taxation of the Propertied Classes.” “On Workers’ Control.” “On Factory Committees.” These were the instructions of the new power that had come to the town to abolish the preceding order found there. They were a reminder of the immutability of its foundations, perhaps forgotten by the inhabitants during the temporary rule of the Whites. But Yuri Andreevich’s head began to spin from the endlessness of these monotonous repetitions. What year did these headlines belong to? The time of the first upheaval, or a later period, after some intervening rebellions of the Whites? What were these inscriptions? From last year? The year before last? At one time in his life he had admired the unconditional quality of this language and the directness of this thinking. Could it be that he had to pay for this imprudent admiration by never seeing anything
else in his life but these frenzied cries and demands, unchanging in the course of long years, becoming ever more impractical, incomprehensible, and unfeasible? Could it be that for a moment of too-broad sympathy he had enslaved himself forever?

He came upon a fragment from some report. He read:

“Information about famine testifies to the incredible inactivity of the local organizations. The facts of abuse are obvious, the speculation is monstrous, but what has been done by the bureau of the local trade union leaders, what has been done by the heads of municipal and regional factory committees? Unless we conduct massive searches in the warehouses of the Yuriatin freight station and along the Yuriatin–Razvilye and Razvilye–Rybalka lines, unless we take severe measures of terror, down to shooting speculators on the spot, there will be no escape from famine.”

“What enviable blindness!” thought the doctor. “What bread are they talking about, when there has long been none in nature? What propertied classes, what speculators, when they’ve long been abolished by the sense of previous decrees? What peasants, what villages, if they no longer exist? What obliviousness to their own designs and measures, which have long left no stone upon stone in life! What must one be, to rave year after year with delirious feverishness about nonexistent, long-extinct themes, and to know nothing, to see nothing around one!”

The doctor’s head was spinning. He fainted and fell unconscious on the sidewalk. When he came to his senses, people helped him to get up and offered to take him wherever he indicated. He thanked them and declined the help, explaining that he only had to go across the street.

He went up the stairs again and started opening the door to Lara’s apartment. It was still quite light on the landing, not a bit darker than when he had first gone up. He noted with grateful joy that the sun was not hurrying him.

The click of the unlocking door caused turmoil inside. The space left empty in the absence of people met him with the clanging and rattling of overturned and falling tin cans. Rats fell smack on the floor and scattered in all directions. The doctor felt ill at ease from a sense of helplessness before these loathsome creatures, which probably bred here by the thousand.

And before making any attempt to settle down for the night, he decided first of all to protect himself from this pestilence, and, finding some easily isolated and tightly closing door, to stop all the rat holes with broken glass and scraps of sheet metal.

From the front hall he turned left, to a part of the apartment unknown to him. Passing through a dark room, he found himself in a bright one, with two windows giving onto the street. Just opposite the windows, on the other side, the house with figures stood darkly. The lower part of its wall was pasted over with newspapers. Their backs to the windows, passersby stood reading the newspapers.

The light in the room and outside was one and the same, the young, unseasoned evening light of early spring. The commonality of the light inside and outside was so great that it was as if there were no separation between the room and the street. Only in one thing was there a slight difference. In Lara’s bedroom, where Yuri Andreevich was standing, it was colder than outside on Kupecheskaya.

When Yuri Andreevich was nearing town during his last march, and was walking through it an hour or two earlier, the immense increase of his weakness had seemed to him the sign of an imminently threatening illness, and it had frightened him.

Now the uniformity of light in the house and in the open delighted him for no reason. The column of cold air, one and the same outside and inside, made him akin to the passersby in the evening street, to the moods of the town, to life in the world. His fears went away. He no longer thought he would fall ill. The evening transparency of the all-pervading spring light seemed to him a pledge of distant and generous hopes. He believed that everything was for the better, that he would achieve everything in life, would find and reconcile everybody, would think everything through and express it. And he waited for the joy of seeing Lara as for the nearest proof.

Mad excitement and unbridled restlessness replaced his previously failing strength. This animation was a surer symptom of beginning illness than the recent weakness. Yuri Andreevich could not stay put. He was again drawn outside, and here is the reason why.

Before settling himself in here, he wanted to have his hair cut and his beard shaved. With that in mind, he looked into the windows of the former barbershops as he went through the city. Some of them were empty or occupied by other businesses. Others, which corresponded to their former purpose, were under lock and key. There was nowhere for him to have a shave and a haircut. Yuri Andreevich had no razor of his own. Scissors, if he could find Lara’s, might help him out of his difficulty. But, rummaging through everything in her dressing table with nervous haste, he did not find any scissors.

He remembered that there had once been a sewing shop on Malaya Spasskaya. He thought that, if the establishment had not ceased to exist and
still went on working, and if he managed to get there before they closed, he could ask one of the seamstresses for scissors. And he went out again.