Doctor Zhivago (7 page)

She and Rodya understood that they would have to get everything in life the hard way. In contrast to the idle and secure, they had no time to indulge in premature finagling and sniff out in theory things that in practice had not yet touched them. Only the superfluous is dirty. Lara was the purest being in the world.

The brother and sister knew the price of everything and valued what they had attained. One had to be in good repute to make one’s way. Lara studied well, not out of an abstract thirst for knowledge, but because to be exempt from paying for one’s studies one had to be a good student, and therefore one had to study well. Just as she studied well, so without effort she washed dishes, helped in the shop, and ran errands for her mother. She moved noiselessly and smoothly, and everything about her—the inconspicuous quickness of her movements, her height, her voice, her gray eyes and fair hair—went perfectly together.

It was Sunday, the middle of July. On holidays you could lounge in bed a little longer in the morning. Lara lay on her back, her arms thrown back, her hands under her head.

In the shop there was an unaccustomed quiet. The window onto the street was open. Lara heard a droshky rumbling in the distance drive off the cobbled pavement into the grooves of the horse-tram rails, and the crude clatter turned to a smooth gliding of wheels as if on butter. “I must sleep a little more,” thought Lara. The murmur of the city was as soporific as a lullaby.

Lara sensed her length and position in the bed by two points now—the jut of her left shoulder and the big toe of her right foot. There was a shoulder and a foot, and all the rest was more or less herself, her soul or essence, harmoniously enclosed in its outlines and responsively straining towards the future.

I must fall asleep, thought Lara, and she called up in her imagination the sunny side of Karetny Row at that hour, the sheds of the equipage establishments with enormous carriages for sale on clean-swept floors, the beveled glass of carriage lanterns, the stuffed bears, the rich life. And slightly lower—Lara was picturing it mentally—the dragoons drilling in the courtyard of the Znamensky barracks, horses decorously prancing in circles, running leaps into the saddle, riding at a walk, riding at a trot, riding at a gallop. And the gaping mouths of nannies with children and wet nurses, pressed in a row up against the barrack fence. And still lower—thought Lara—Petrovka Street, the Petrovsky Lines.

“How can you, Lara! Where do you get such ideas? I simply want to show you my apartment. The more so as it’s close by.”

It was the name day of Olga, the little daughter of his acquaintances on Karetny Row. The grown-ups were having a party for the occasion—dancing, champagne. He invited mama, but mama could not go, she was indisposed. Mama said: “Take Lara. You’re always cautioning me: ‘Amalia, see to Lara.’ So go now and see to her.” And he saw to her all right! Ha, ha, ha!

What a mad thing, the waltz! You whirl and whirl, without a thought in your head. While the music is playing, a whole eternity goes by, like life in novels. But the moment it stops, there is a feeling of scandal, as if they had poured cold water over you or found you undressed. Besides, you allow others these liberties out of vanity, to show what a big girl you are.

She could never have supposed that he danced so well. What knowing hands he has, how confidently he takes her by the waist! But never again would she allow anyone to kiss her like that. She could never have supposed that so much shamelessness could be concentrated in anyone’s lips when they were pressed so long to your own.

Drop all this foolishness. Once and for all. Do not play the simpleton, do not be coy, do not lower your eyes bashfully. It will end badly someday. The dreadful line is very close here. One step, and you fall straight into the abyss. Forget thinking about dances. That is where the whole evil lies. Do not be embarrassed to refuse. Pretend that you never learned to dance or have broken your leg.

In the fall there were disturbances at the Moscow railway junction. The Moscow–Kazan railway went on strike. The Moscow–Brest line was to join it. The decision to strike had been taken, but the railway committee could not agree on the day to call it. Everyone on the railway knew about the strike, and it needed only an external pretext for it to start spontaneously.

It was a cold, gray morning at the beginning of October. The wages on the line were to be paid that day. For a long time no information came from the accounting department. Then a boy arrived at the office with a schedule, a record of payments, and an armload of workers’ pay books collected in order to impose penalties. The payments began. Down the endless strip of unbuilt space that separated the station, the workshops, the engine depots, the warehouses, and the tracks from the wooden office buildings, stretched a line of conductors, switchmen, metalworkers and their assistants, scrubwomen from the car park, waiting to receive their wages.

It smelled of early city winter, trampled maple leaves, melting snow, engine fumes, and warm rye bread, which was baked in the basement of the station buffet and had just been taken out of the oven. Trains arrived and departed. They were made up and dismantled with a waving of furled and unfurled flags. The watchmen’s little horns, the pocket whistles of the couplers, and the bass-voiced hooting of locomotives played out all sorts of tunes. Pillars of smoke rose into the sky in endless ladders. The heated-up locomotives stood ready to go, scorching the cold winter clouds with boiling clouds of steam.

Up and down the tracks paced the head of the section, the railway expert Fuflygin, and the foreman of the station area, Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov. Antipov had been pestering the repair service with complaints about the materials supplied to him for replacing the tracks. The steel was not tensile enough. The rails did not hold up under tests for bending and breaking, and, according to Antipov’s conjectures, were sure to crack in freezing weather. The management treated Pavel Ferapontovich’s complaints with indifference. Somebody involved was lining his pockets.

Fuflygin was wearing an expensive fur coat, unbuttoned, trimmed with railway piping, and under it a new civilian suit made of cheviot. He stepped carefully along the embankment, admiring the general line of his lapels, the straight crease of his trousers, and the noble shape of his shoes.

Antipov’s words went in one ear and out the other. Fuflygin was thinking his own thoughts, kept taking his watch out and looking at it, and was hurrying somewhere.

“Right, right, old boy,” he interrupted Antipov impatiently, “but that’s only on the main lines somewhere or on a through passage with a lot of traffic. But, mind you, what have you got here? Sidings and dead ends, burdock and nettles, at most the sorting of empty freight cars and the shunting maneuvers of ‘pufferbillies.’ And he’s still displeased! You’re out of your mind! Not just these rails; here you could even lay wooden ones.”

Fuflygin looked at his watch, snapped the lid shut, and began gazing into the distance, where the highway came close to the railway. A carriage appeared at the bend of the road. This was Fuflygin’s own rig. Madame his wife had come for him. The driver stopped the horses almost on the tracks, holding them back all the time and whoa-ing at them in a high, womanish voice, like a nanny at whimpering children—the horses were afraid of trains. In the corner of the carriage, carelessly reclining on the cushions, sat a beautiful lady.

“Well, brother, some other time,” said the head of the section, and he waved his hand as if to say “Enough of your rails. There are more important matters.”

The spouses went rolling off.

Three or four hours later, closer to dusk, two figures, who had not been on the surface earlier, emerged as if from under the ground in the field to one side of the tracks and, looking back frequently, began to hurry off. They were Antipov and Tiverzin.

“Let’s make it quick,” said Tiverzin. “I’m not afraid of being tailed by spies, but once this diddling around is over, they’ll climb out of the dugout and catch up with us, and I can’t stand the sight of them. If everything’s dragged out like this, there’s no point fussing and fuming. There’s no need for a committee, and for playing with fire, and burrowing under the ground! You’re a good one, too, supporting all this slop from the Nikolaevsky line.”

“My Darya’s got typhoid fever. I’d like to get her to the hospital. Until I do, my head’s not good for anything.”

“They say they’re handing out wages today. I’ll go to the office. If it wasn’t payday, as God is my witness, I’d spit on you all and personally put an end to all this dithering without a moment’s delay.”

“In what way, may I ask?”

“Nothing to it. Go down to the boiler room, give a whistle, and the party’s over.”

They said good-bye and went off in different directions.

Tiverzin went along the tracks towards the city. On his way he met people coming from the office with their pay. There were a great many of them. Tiverzin judged by the look of it that almost everyone on station territory had been paid.

It was getting dark. Idle workers crowded on the open square near the office, lit by the office lights. At the entrance to the square stood Fuflygin’s carriage. Fuflygina sat in it in the same pose, as if she had not left the carriage since morning. She was waiting for her husband, who was getting his money in the office.

Wet snow and rain unexpectedly began to fall. The driver climbed down from the box and began to raise the leather top. While he rested his foot on the back and stretched the tight braces, Fuflygina admired the mess of watery silver beads flitting past the light of the office lamps. She cast her unblinking, dreamy gaze over the crowding workers with such an air, as though in case of need this gaze could pass unhindered through them, as through fog or drizzle.

Tiverzin happened to catch that expression. He cringed. He walked past without greeting Fuflygina, and decided to draw his salary later, so as to avoid running into her husband in the office. He walked on into the less well lit side of the workshops, where the turntable showed black with its tracks radiating towards the engine depot.

“Tiverzin! Kuprik!” several voices called to him from the darkness. In front of the workshops stood a bunch of people. Inside there was shouting and a child’s weeping could be heard. “Kiprian Savelyevich, step in for the boy,” said some woman in the crowd.

The old master Pyotr Khudoleev was again giving a habitual hiding to his victim, the young apprentice Yusupka.

Khudoleev had not always been a torturer of apprentices, a drunkard and a heavy-fisted brawler. Time was when merchants’ and priests’ daughters from the industrial suburbs near Moscow cast long glances at the dashing workman. But Tiverzin’s mother, to whom he proposed just after she graduated from the diocesan girls’ school, refused him and married his comrade, the locomotive engineer Savely Nikitich Tiverzin.

In the sixth year of her widowhood, after the terrible death of Savely Nikitich (he was burned up in 1888 in one of the sensational train collisions of that time), Pyotr Petrovich renewed his suit, and again Marfa Gavrilovna refused him. After that Khudoleev started drinking and became violent, settling accounts with the whole world, which was to blame, as he was convinced, for his present misfortunes.

Yusupka was the son of the yard porter Gimazetdin from the Tiverzins’ courtyard. Tiverzin protected the boy in the workshops. This added heat to Khudoleev’s dislike of him.

“Look how you’re holding your file, you slope-head,” Khudoleev shouted, pulling Yusupka’s hair and beating him on the neck. “Is that any way to file down a casting? I’m asking you, are you going to foul up the work for me, you Kasimov bride,
²
allah-mullah, slant-eyes?”

“Ow, I won’t, mister, ow, ow, I won’t, I won’t, ow, that hurts!”

“A thousand times he’s been told, first bring the mandril under, then tighten the stop, but no, he’s got his own way. Nearly broke the spendler on me, the son of a bitch.”

“I didn’t touch the spindle, mister, by God, I didn’t.”

“Why do you tyrannize the boy?” asked Tiverzin, squeezing through the crowd.

“Don’t poke your nose in other people’s business,” Khudoleev snapped.

“I’m asking you, why do you tyrannize the boy?”

“And I’m telling you to shove the hell off, social commander. Killing’s too good for him, the scum, he nearly broke the spendler on me. He can go on his knees to me for getting off alive, the slant-eyed devil—I just boxed his ears and pulled his hair a little.”

“So according to you, Uncle Khudolei, he should have his head torn off for it? You really ought to be ashamed. An old master, gray in your hair, but no brains in your head.”

“Shove off, shove off, I said, while you’re still in one piece. I’ll knock your soul through your shoes for teaching me, you dog’s ass! You got made on the ties, fish-blood, right under your father’s nose. I know your mother, the wet-tail, all too well, the mangy cat, the skirt-dragger!”

What came next took no more than a minute. They each grabbed the first thing that came to hand among the heavy tools and pieces of iron that lay about on the machines, and they would have killed each other if at that same moment people had not rushed in a mob to pull them apart. Khudoleev and Tiverzin stood, their heads lowered, their foreheads almost touching, pale, with bloodshot eyes. They were unable to speak from agitation. Their arms were seized and held tightly from behind. At moments, gathering their strength, they would try to tear free, their whole bodies writhing and dragging the comrades who were hanging on to them. Hooks and buttons were torn from their clothes, their jackets and shirts were pulled from their bared shoulders. The disorderly uproar around them would not quiet down.

“The chisel! Take the chisel from him—he’ll split his skull.” “Easy, easy,
Uncle Pyotr, we’ll sprain your arm.” “Are we just going to keep dancing around them? Pull them apart, lock them up, and be done with it.”

Suddenly, with a superhuman effort, Tiverzin shook off the tangle of bodies holding him and, breaking free of them, found himself running for the door. They were about to rush after him, but, seeing that he had something else in mind, let him go. He went out, slamming the door, and marched off without looking back. He was surrounded by autumnal dampness, night, darkness. “You reach them a hand and they bite it off,” he muttered, having no idea where he was going or why.