Doctor Zhivago (67 page)

He looked not at them, but somewhere over their heads, fixing his drunken, rounded eyes on that distant point, and with a sleepy, thick tongue ground away at something endlessly boring, all about one and the same thing. His hobbyhorse was now the Far East. He chewed his cud about it, developing before Lara and the doctor his reflections on the political significance of Mongolia.

Yuri Andreevich and Larissa Fyodorovna had not caught the point at which the conversation had landed on this Mongolia. The fact that they had missed how he skipped over to it increased the tiresomeness of the alien, extraneous subject.

Komarovsky was saying:

“Siberia—truly a New America, as they call it—conceals in itself the richest possibilities. It is the cradle of the great Russian future, the pledge of our democratization, prosperity, political health. Still more fraught with alluring possibilities is the future of Mongolia, Outer Mongolia, our great Far Eastern neighbor. What do you know about it? You’re not ashamed to yawn and blink with inattention, and yet it has a surface of over a million square miles, unexplored minerals, a country in a state of prehistoric virginity,
which the greedy hands of China, Japan, and America are reaching for, to the detriment of our Russian interests, recognized by all our rivals under any division of spheres of interest in this remote corner of the globe.

“China takes advantage of the feudal and theocratic backwardness of Mongolia, influencing its lamas and
khutukhtas.
Japan leans on local serf-owning princes—
khoshuns
in Mongolian. Red Communist Russia finds an ally in the person of the
khamdzhils
, in other words, the revolutionary association of rebellious Mongolian shepherds. As for me, I would like to see Mongolia really prosperous, under the rule of freely elected
khurultai.
Personally, we ought to be concerned with the following. One step across the Mongolian border, and the world is at your feet, and you’re free as a bird.”

This verbose reasoning on an intrusive subject that had no relation to them exasperated Larissa Fyodorovna. Driven to the point of exhaustion by the boredom of the prolonged visit, she resolutely held out her hand to Komarovsky in farewell and, without beating around the bush, said with unconcealed hostility:

“It’s late. Time for you to go. I want to sleep.”

“I hope you won’t be so inhospitable as to put me out at such an hour. I’m not sure I’ll find my way at night in a strange, unlit town.”

“You should have thought of that earlier and not gone on sitting. Nobody was keeping you.”

“Oh, why do you speak so sharply with me? You didn’t even ask whether I have anywhere to stay here.”

“Decidedly uninteresting. No doubt you can stick up for yourself. If you’re inviting yourself to spend the night, I won’t put you in our bedroom, where we sleep together with Katenka. And in the others there’ll be no dealing with the rats.”

“I’m not afraid of them.”

“Well, as you like.”

“What’s wrong, my angel? You haven’t slept for so many nights now, you don’t touch your food at the table, you go around as if in a daze. And you keep thinking, thinking. What’s haunting you? You shouldn’t give such free rein to troubling thoughts.”

“The hospital caretaker Izot was here again. He’s carrying on with a laundress in the house. So he stopped by to cheer me up. ‘A terrible secret,’ he says. ‘Your man can’t avoid the clink. He’ll be put away any day now, so be ready. And you, hapless girl, after him.’ ‘Where did you get that, Izot?’ I
asked. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says, ‘you can count on it. People from the hexcom told me.’ ‘Hexcom,’ as you may have guessed, is his version of ‘excom,’ the executive committee.”

Larissa Fyodorovna and the doctor burst out laughing.

“He’s quite right. The danger is ripe and at our doorstep. We must disappear at once. The only question is where exactly. There’s no use thinking about going to Moscow. The preparations are too complicated, and they’ll attract attention. It has to be done hush-hush, so that nobody notices anything. You know what, my joy? I think we’ll avail ourselves of your idea. We have to drop from sight for a while. Let the place be Varykino. We’ll go there for two weeks, a month.”

“Thank you, my dearest, thank you. Oh, how glad I am! I realize how everything in you must go against such a decision. But I wasn’t talking about your house. Life in it would really be unthinkable for you. The sight of the empty rooms, the reproaches, the comparisons. As if I don’t understand? To build happiness on another’s suffering, to trample on what is dear and sacred to your heart. I could never accept such a sacrifice from you. But that’s not the point. Your house is such a ruin that it would hardly be possible to make the rooms fit to live in. I was sooner thinking of the Mikulitsyns’ abandoned place.”

“All that is true. Thank you for your sensitivity. But wait a minute. I keep wanting to ask and keep forgetting. Where is Komarovsky? Is he here, or has he already left? Since I quarreled with him and kicked him out, I’ve heard nothing more of him.”

“I don’t know anything either. But let him be. What do you want with him?”

“I keep coming back to the thought that we should have treated his suggestion differently. We’re not in the same position. You have a daughter to look after. Even if you wanted to perish with me, you’d have no right to allow yourself to do it.

“But let’s get back to Varykino. Naturally, to go to that wild backwoods in harsh winter, with no supplies, with no strength, with no hopes, is the maddest madness. But let’s be mad, my heart, if there’s nothing left us but madness. Let’s humble ourselves once more. Let’s beg Anfim to give us a horse. Let’s ask him, or not even him but the dealers who work for him, to lend us some flour and potatoes, as a debt not justifiable by any credit. Let’s persuade him not to buy back the good service he has rendered us by coming to visit right away, at once, but to come only at the end, when he needs the horse back. Let’s stay alone for a little while. Let’s go, my heart. In a week we’ll cut and burn a whole stand of trees, which would be enough for an entire year of conscientious housekeeping.

“And again, again. Forgive me for the confusion that keeps breaking through my words. How I’d like to talk to you without this foolish pathos! But we really have no choice. Call it what you like, death really is knocking at our door. The days at our disposal are numbered. Let’s use them in our own way. Let’s spend them on taking leave of life, on a last coming together before separation. Let’s bid farewell to all that was dear to us, to our habitual notions, to how we dreamed of living and to what our conscience taught us, bid farewell to hopes, bid farewell to each other. Let’s say once more to each other our secret night words, great and pacific as the name of the Asian ocean. It’s not for nothing that you stand at the end of my life, my secret, my forbidden angel, under a sky of wars and rebellions, just as you once rose up under the peaceful sky of childhood at its beginning.

“On that night, a girl in the last year of high school, in a coffee-colored uniform, in the semidarkness behind the partition of a hotel room, you were exactly as you are now, and as stunningly beautiful.

“Often, later in life, I tried to define and name that light of enchantment that you poured into me then, that gradually dimming ray and fading sound that suffused my whole existence ever after and became, owing to you, the key for perceiving everything else in the world.

“When you, a shadow in a schoolgirl’s uniform, stepped out of the darkness of the hotel room’s depths, I, a boy who knew nothing about you, understood with all the torment of a force that answered yours: this slight, skinny girl is charged to the utmost, as with electricity, with all conceivable femininity in the world. If you go near her or touch her with your finger, a spark will light up the room and either kill you on the spot or electrify you for your whole life with a magnetically attractive, plaintive craving and sorrow. I was all filled with wandering tears, all my insides glittered and wept. I felt a mortal pity for the boy I was, and still more pity for the girl you were. My whole being was astonished and asked: If it’s so painful to love and absorb electricity, how much more painful it is to be a woman, to be the electricity, to inspire love.

“Here at last I’ve spoken it out. It could make you lose your mind. And the whole of me is in it.”

Larissa Fyodorovna was lying on the edge of the bed, dressed and feeling unwell. She was curled up and had covered herself with a shawl. Yuri Andreevich was sitting on a chair next to her and speaking quietly, with long pauses. At times Larissa Fyodorovna raised herself on her elbow, propped her chin in her hand, and gazed open-mouthed at Yuri Andreevich. At times she pressed herself to his shoulder and, not noticing her tears, wept quietly and blissfully. She finally drew towards him, hanging over the edge of the bed, and whispered joyfully:

“Yurochka! Yurochka! How intelligent you are! You know everything, you guess about everything. Yurochka, you are my fortress, my refuge, and my foundation—God forgive my blasphemy. Oh, how happy I am! Let’s go, let’s go, my dear. Once we’re there, I’ll tell you what’s troubling me.”

He decided that she was hinting at her supposed pregnancy, probably imaginary, and said:

“I know.”

They drove out of town in the morning of a gray winter day. It was a weekday. People walked down the streets about their business. They frequently met acquaintances. At bumpy intersections, next to the old pump houses, women who had no wells near their houses lined up with their buckets and yokes set aside, waiting their turn to draw water. The doctor reined in Savraska, a smoky yellow, curly-haired Viatka horse, who was straining forward, and steered him carefully to avoid the crowding housewives. The sleigh picked up speed, slid sideways off the humpbacked, water-splashed, and icy pavement, rode onto the sidewalks, the bumpers hitting lampposts and hitching posts.

At full speed they overtook Samdevyatov walking down the street, flew past him, and did not look back to see if he recognized them and his horse and shouted anything after them. In another place, similarly, without any greeting, they left Komarovsky behind, having ascertained in passing that he was still in Yuriatin.

Glafira Tuntseva shouted all the way across the street from the opposite sidewalk:

“And they said you left yesterday. Go trusting people after that. Off to fetch potatoes?”—and, with a gesture showing that she had not heard their answer, she waved good-bye behind them.

For Sima’s sake they tried to pull up on a hillside, in an awkward place, where it was hard to stop. The horse had to be held back all the time without that, by tugging tightly on the reins. Sima was wrapped from head to foot in two or three shawls, which lent her figure the rigidity of a round log. With straight, unbending steps she came to the sleigh in the middle of the pavement and said good-bye, wishing them a safe journey.

“We must finish our talk when you get back, Yuri Andreevich.”

They finally drove out of town. Though Yuri Andreevich had occasionally ridden on this road in winter, he mainly remembered it as it was in summer and now did not recognize it.

The sacks of provisions and other luggage were placed deep in the hay at the front of the sleigh, under the dashboard, and tied securely. Yuri Andreevich drove either kneeling on the bottom of the broad sleigh, in local parlance a
koshovka
, or sitting sideways, his feet in Samdevyatov’s felt boots hanging over the edge.

In the afternoon, when winter’s deceptiveness made it seem that the day was coming to an end long before sunset, Yuri Andreevich started whipping Savraska mercilessly. She shot off like an arrow. The
koshovka
flew up and down like a boat, bobbing over the unevenness of the much-used road. Katya and Lara were wearing fur coats, which hindered their movements. As the sleigh leaned or jolted, they shouted and laughed their heads off, rolling from one side of the sleigh to the other and burying themselves in the hay like unwieldly sacks. At times, for the fun of it, the doctor purposely rode one runner over the snowbank on the edge of the road, turning the sleigh on its side and throwing Lara and Katya out into the snow without doing them any harm. After being dragged by the reins a few steps along the road, he would stop Savraska, set the sleigh back on both runners, and get a scolding from Lara and Katya, who would shake themselves off and climb into the sleigh, laughing and pouting.

“I’ll show you the place where the partisans stopped me,” the doctor promised, when they had driven far enough from town, but he was unable to keep his promise, because the winter bareness of the forest, the deathly calm and emptiness all around, changed the place beyond recognition. “Here it is!” he soon cried, mistaking the first Moreau and Vetchinkin billboard, which stood in a field, for the second one in the forest, where he had been taken. When they raced past this second one, which was still in its former place, in the woods by the Sakma intersection, the billboard could not be made out through the scintillating lattice of thick hoarfrost, which turned the forest into a filigree of silver and niello. And they did not notice the billboard.

They flew into Varykino while it was still light and stopped at the Zhivagos’ old house, since it was the first on the road, closer than the Mikulitsyns’. They burst into the room hurriedly, like robbers—it would soon be dark. Inside it was already dark. In his haste, Yuri Andreevich did not make out half the destruction and filth. Some of the familiar furniture was intact. In deserted Varykino there was no one left to carry through the destruction that had been begun. Of their household things Yuri Andreevich found nothing. But he had not been there at his family’s departure, he did not know what they had taken with them and what they had left behind. Meanwhile Lara was saying:

“We must hurry. Night is coming. There’s no time to reflect. If we settle here, then the horse must be put in the barn, the provisions in the front hall, and we here in this room. But I’m against such a decision. We’ve talked enough about it. It will be painful for you and therefore for me. What’s this, your bedroom? No, the nursery. Your son’s little bed. Too small for Katya. On the other hand, the windows are intact, no cracks in the walls or ceiling. And a magnificent stove besides, I already admired it on my last visit. And if you insist that we stay here after all, though I’m against it, then—off with my coat and straight to work. The heating first of all. Heat, heat, heat. Day and night nonstop to begin with. But what’s the matter, my dear? You don’t answer anything.”