Doctor Zhivago (62 page)

But his soul was tormented on all sides, and one pain came to replace another. He had no need to drive these suspicions away. His thoughts, without effort, of themselves, jumped from subject to subject. Reflections about his family, rushing upon him with renewed force, overshadowed his jealous fits for a time.

“So you’re in Moscow, my dear ones?” It already seemed to him that Tuntseva had certified their safe arrival for him. “Meaning that you repeated that long, difficult trip without me? How was the journey? What sort of business was Alexander Alexandrovich summoned for? Probably an invitation from the Academy to start teaching there again? What did you find at home? Come now, you don’t mean that home still exists? Oh, Lord, how difficult and painful! Oh, don’t think, don’t think! How confused my thoughts are! What’s wrong with me, Tonya? I seem to be falling ill. What will become of me and of you all, Tonya, Tonechka, Tonya, Shurochka, Alexander Alexandrovich? O Light that never sets, why hast Thou rejected me from Thy presence?
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Why are you borne away from me all my life? Why are we always apart? But we’ll soon be united, we’ll come together, right? I’ll reach you on foot, if it can’t be otherwise. We’ll see each other. Everything will go well again, right?

“But how can the earth not swallow me up, if I keep forgetting that Tonya was supposed to give birth and probably did give birth? It’s not the first time that I’ve shown this forgetfulness. How did her delivery go? How did she give birth? They stopped in Yuriatin on their way to Moscow. True, Lara doesn’t know them, but still this seamstress and hairdresser, a total stranger, wasn’t ignorant of their fate, yet Lara doesn’t say a word about them in her note. What strange inattention, smacking of indifference! As inexplicable as passing over in silence her relations with Samdevyatov.”

Here Yuri Andreevich looked around at the walls of the bedroom with a different, discerning eye. He knew that, of the things standing or hanging around him, not one belonged to Lara, and that the furnishings of the former owners, unknown and in hiding, in no way testified to Lara’s taste.

But all the same, be that as it may, he suddenly felt ill at ease among the men and women in enlarged photographs gazing from the walls. A spirit of hostility breathed on him from the crude furnishings. He felt himself foreign and superfluous in this bedroom.

And he, fool that he was, had remembered this house so many times, had missed it, and had entered this room, not as a space, but as his yearning for Lara! How ridiculous this way of feeling probably was from outside! Was this how strong, practical people like Samdevyatov, handsome males, lived and behaved and expressed themselves? And why should Lara prefer his spinelessness and the obscure, unreal language of his adoration? Did she have such need of this confusion? Did she herself want to be what she was for him?

And what was she for him, as he had just put it? Oh, to this question he always had the answer ready.

There outside is the spring evening. The air is all marked with sounds. The voices of children playing are scattered at various distances, as if to signify
that the space is alive throughout. And this expanse is Russia, his incomparable one, renowned far and wide, famous mother, martyr, stubborn, muddle-headed, whimsical, adored, with her eternally majestic and disastrous escapades, which can never be foreseen! Oh, how sweet it is to exist! How sweet to live in the world and to love life! Oh, how one always longs to say thank you to life itself, to existence itself, to say it right in their faces!

And that is what Lara is. It is impossible to talk to them, but she is their representative, their expression, the gift of hearing and speech, given to the voiceless principles of existence.

And untrue, a thousand times untrue, was all that he had said about her in a moment of doubt. How precisely perfect and irreproachable everything is in her!

Tears of admiration and repentance clouded his vision. He opened the door of the stove and stirred inside with a poker. He pushed the burning, pure heat to the very back of the firebox and moved the as yet unburnt logs towards the front, where the draft was stronger. For some time he did not close the door. He enjoyed feeling the play of warmth and light on his face and hands. The shifting glimmer of the flames finally sobered him. Oh, how he missed her now, how he needed at that moment something tangible that came from her!

He took her crumpled note from his pocket. He unfolded it the other side up, not the way he had read it earlier, and only now noticed that there was writing on the other side as well. Having smoothed out the crumpled paper, he read in the dancing light of the burning stove:

“About your family you know. They are in Moscow. Tonya gave birth to a daughter.” This was followed by several crossed-out lines. Then there was: “I crossed it out, because it’s silly in a note. We’ll talk our fill face-to-face. I’m in a hurry, running to get a horse. I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t get one. With Katenka it will be hard …” The end of the phrase was smudged and he could not make it out.

“She ran to get a horse from Anfim, and probably got it, since she’s gone,” Yuri Andreevich reflected calmly. “If her conscience weren’t completely clear on that account, she wouldn’t have mentioned that detail.”

When the fire burned out, the doctor closed the flue and had a bite to eat. After eating he was overcome by a fit of invincible drowsiness. He lay down on the sofa without undressing and fell fast asleep. He did not hear the deafening
and shameless uproar the rats raised outside the door and walls of the room. He had two oppressive dreams, one after the other.

He was in a room in Moscow, facing a glass door locked with a key, which, to make sure, he also held shut by pulling the door handle towards him. Outside the door, his boy Shurochka, in a child’s coat, sailor’s trousers and hat, pretty and miserable, thrashed and wept, asking to be let in. Behind the child, showering him and the door with spray, was a roaring and rumbling waterfall, either from burst pipes, an everyday phenomenon of that epoch, or perhaps there really was some wild mountain gorge coming right up to the door, with a furiously rushing stream and an age-old accumulation of cold and darkness.

The crash and roar of falling water frightened the boy to death. What he was crying could not be heard; the noise drowned out the boy’s cries. But Yuri Andreevich could see that his lips were forming the word “Papa! Papa!”

Yuri Andreevich’s heart was breaking. He wished with all his being to seize the boy in his arms, press him to his breast, and run off with him without looking back. But, flooding himself with tears, he pulled the handle of the locked door towards him, not letting the boy in, sacrificing him to falsely understood feelings of honor and duty before another woman, who was not the boy’s mother and who at any moment might come into the room from the other side.

Yuri Andreevich woke up in sweat and tears. “I have a fever. I’m falling ill,” he thought at once. “It’s not typhus. It’s some sort of heavy, dangerous fatigue that has taken the form of a sickness, some illness with a crisis, as in all serious infections, and the whole question is what will win out, life or death. But how I want to sleep!” And he fell asleep again.

He dreamed of a dark winter morning on a busy lit-up street in Moscow, by all tokens before the revolution, judging by the early street animation, the ringing of the first trams, the light of the street lamps that streaked with yellow the gray, predawn snow on the pavements.

He dreamed of a long, drawn-out apartment with many windows, all on one side, low over the street, probably on the second floor, with curtains lowered to the floor. In the apartment people in traveling clothes slept in various postures without undressing, and there was disorder, as on a train, leftover food on greasy, spread-out newspapers, gnawed bones of roast chicken, wings and legs, lay about, and on the floor in pairs, taken off for the night, stood the shoes of relatives and acquaintances, passersby and homeless people, come for a short stay. The hostess, Lara, in a hastily tied morning robe, rushed about the apartment from one end to the other,
bustling quickly and noiselessly, and he followed on her heels, being a nuisance, trying giftlessly and inappropriately to clarify something, and she no longer had a moment for him, and to all his explanations she merely responded in passing by turning her head to him, by quiet, perplexed glances and innocent bursts of her incomparable, silvery laughter, the only forms of intimacy still left to them. And how distant, cold, and attractive she was, to whom he had given everything, whom he preferred to everything, and in contrast to whom he diminished and depreciated everything!

Not he, but something more general than he, sobbed and wept in him with tender and bright words, which shone like phosphorus in the darkness. And together
with his weeping soul, he himself wept. He felt sorry for himself.

“I’m falling ill, I am ill,” he reflected in moments of lucidity, between the spells of sleep, feverish raving, and oblivion. “It’s some kind of typhus after all, not described in textbooks, which we didn’t study in medical school. I must prepare something, I must eat, otherwise I’ll die of hunger.”

But at the first attempt to raise himself on one elbow, he became convinced that he had no strength to stir, and either lay in a faint or fell asleep.

“How long have I been lying here, still dressed?” he reflected in one of these flashes. “How many hours? How many days? When I collapsed, spring was beginning. And now there’s frost on the window. So loose and dirty it makes the room dark.”

In the kitchen, rats overturned plates with a clatter, ran up the wall on the other side, let their heavy hulks drop to the floor, their weepy contralto voices squealing disgustingly.

And again he slept, and woke up to discover that the windows in the snowy net of frost were suffused with a rosy, burning glow, which shone in them like red wine poured in crystal glasses. And he did not know and asked himself what glow this was, of dawn or sunset?

Once he imagined human voices somewhere quite near, and he lost heart, deciding that this was the beginning of madness. With tears of pity for himself, he murmured against heaven in a voiceless whisper for having turned away from him and abandoned him. “O Light that never sets, why has Thou rejected me from Thy presence, and why has the alien darkness surrounded me, cursed as I am?”

And suddenly he realized that he was not dreaming and this was the fullest truth, that he was undressed and washed, and was lying in a clean shirt, not on the sofa, but on a freshly made bed, and that, mingling her hair with his and his tears with hers, Lara was weeping with him, and sitting by his bed, and leaning towards him. And he fainted from happiness.

In his recent delirium he had reproached heaven for its indifference, but now heaven in all its vastness had descended to his bed, and two big woman’s arms, white to the shoulders, reached out to him. His vision went dark with joy and, as one falls into oblivion, he dropped into bottomless bliss.

All his life he had been doing something, had been eternally busy, had worked about the house, had treated people, thought, studied, produced. How good it was to stop doing, striving, thinking, and to give himself for a time to this working of nature, to become a thing himself, a design, a work of her merciful, exquisite, beauty-lavishing hands!

Yuri Andreevich was recovering quickly. Lara nourished him, nursed him by her care, by her swan-white loveliness, by the moist-breathed, throaty whispering of her questions and answers.

Their hushed conversations, even the most trifling ones, were as filled with meaning as Plato’s dialogues.

Still more than by the communion of souls, they were united by the abyss that separated them from the rest of the world. They both had an equal aversion to all that was fatally typical in modern man, his studied rapturousness, his shrill elation, and that deadly winglessness which is assiduously spread by countless workers in the sciences and the arts, so that genius will go on being an extreme rarity.

Their love was great. But everyone loves without noticing the unprecedentedness of the feeling.

For them, however—and in this they were exceptional—those instants when the breath of passion flew like a breath of eternity into their doomed human existence, were moments of revelation and of learning ever new things about themselves and life.

“You absolutely must return to your family. I won’t keep you for a single extra day. But you see what’s going on. As soon as we merged with Soviet Russia, we were swallowed up by its devastation. Siberia and the East are plugging its holes. You don’t know anything. During your illness there have been such changes in town! The stores from our warehouses are being
transported to the center, to Moscow. For her it’s a drop in the ocean, these supplies disappear into her as into a bottomless barrel, while we’re left without provisions. The mails don’t work, passenger transportation has ceased, express trains loaded with grain are all that run. There’s murmuring in town again, as there was before the Gajda uprising,
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and again the Cheka rages in response to the signs of discontent.

“So where are you going to go like that, skin and bones, your soul barely keeping in your body? And on foot again? You won’t make it! Recover, get your strength back, then it’s another matter.

“I won’t venture to give advice, but in your place, before setting out for your family, I’d find a job for a while, in your specialty of course, they value that, I’d go to our board of health, for example. It’s still in the old medical center.

“Otherwise, judge for yourself. The son of a Siberian millionaire who blew his brains out, your wife the daughter of a local industrialist and landowner. Was with the partisans and ran away. Whatever you say, that’s quitting the military-revolutionary ranks, it’s desertion. In no case should you stay out of things, with no legal status. My situation isn’t very firm either. And I’m also going to work, I’m joining the provincial education department. The ground’s burning under my feet, too.”