Doctor Zhivago (72 page)

Here is what happened a little later during one of those days. The doctor finally heeded the voice of reason. He said to himself that if one has set oneself the goal of doing oneself in at all costs, one could find a more effective and less tormenting way. He promised himself that as soon as Anfim Efimovich came for him, he would immediately leave the place.

Before evening, while it was still light, he heard the loud crunch of someone’s
footsteps on the snow. Someone was calmly walking towards the house with brisk, resolute strides.

Strange. Who could it be? Anfim Efimovich would have come with a horse. There were no passersby in deserted Varykino. “It’s for me,” Yuri Andreevich decided. “A summons or a request to come to town. Or to arrest me. But how will they take me? And then there should be two of them. It’s Mikulitsyn, Averky Stepanovich,” he surmised, rejoicing, recognizing his guest, as he thought, by his gait. The man, who was still a riddle, paused for a moment at the door with the broken-off bar, not finding the expected padlock on it, and then moved on with assured steps and knowing movements, opening the doors before him and closing them carefully, in a proprietary way.

These strangenesses found Yuri Andreevich at his desk, where he sat with his back to the entrance. While he was getting up from his chair and turning his face to the door so as to receive the visitor, the man was already standing on the threshold, stopped as if rooted to the spot.

“Whom do you want?” escaped from the doctor with an unconsciousness that did not oblige him to anything, and when no answer followed, Yuri Andreevich was not surprised.

The man who had come in was strong and well-built, with a handsome face. He was wearing a short fur jacket, fur-lined trousers, and warm goatskin boots, and had a rifle slung over his shoulder on a leather strap.

Only the moment of the stranger’s appearance was unexpected for the doctor, not his coming. His findings in the house and other tokens had prepared Yuri Andreevich for this meeting. The man who had come in was obviously the one to whom the supplies in the house belonged. In appearance he seemed to be someone the doctor had already seen and knew. The visitor had probably also been forewarned that the house was not empty. He was not surprised enough to find it inhabited. Maybe he had been told whom he would meet inside. Maybe he himself knew the doctor.

“Who is he? Who is he?” The doctor painfully searched his memory. “Lord help me, where have I seen him before? Can it be? A hot May morning in some immemorial year. The railway junction in Razvilye. The ill-omened carriage of the commissar. Clarity of notions, straightforwardness, strictness of principles, rightness, rightness, rightness. Strelnikov!”

They had been talking for a long time already, several hours straight, as only Russians in Russia talk, in particular those who are frightened and
anguished, and those who are distraught and frenzied, as all people were then. Evening was coming. It was getting dark.

Besides the uneasy talkativeness that Strelnikov shared with everybody, he also talked incessantly for some other reason of his own.

He could not have enough of talking and clung with all his might to the conversation with the doctor, so as to avoid solitude. Did he fear pangs of conscience or sad memories that pursued him, or was he tormented by dissatisfaction with himself, which makes a man unbearable and hateful to himself and ready to die of shame? Or had he taken some dreadful, irrevocable decision, with which he did not want to be left alone, and the fulfillment of which he kept postponing as long as possible by chatting with the doctor and being in his company?

However it was, Strelnikov was hiding some important secret that weighed on him, while giving himself in all the rest to the most lavish outpourings of the heart.

This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver. On the slightest pretext, a rage of self-castigating imagination would play itself out to the uttermost limits. People fantasized, denounced themselves, not only under the effect of fear, but also drawn on by a destructively morbid inclination, of their own free will, in a state of metaphysical trance and passion for self-condemnation that, once set loose, could not be stopped.

How much of this evidence, written and oral, given on the point of death, had been read and heard in his time by the prominent military, and sometimes also court-martial, figure Strelnikov. Now he himself was possessed by a similar fit of self-exposure, re-evaluated himself entirely, put a bottom line to everything, saw everything in a feverish, distorted, delirious misinterpretation.

Strelnikov was telling it all without order, jumping from confession to confession.

“It was near Chitá. Were you struck by the curiosities I stuffed the cupboards and drawers in this house with? It’s all from war requisitions, which we carried out when the Red Army occupied eastern Siberia. Naturally, I didn’t drag it on my back myself. Life always pampered me with loyal, devoted people. These candles, matches, coffee, tea, writing materials, and all the rest are partly from Czech military property, partly Japanese and English. Wonders of the world, right? ‘Right?’ was my wife’s favorite expression, as you’ve probably noticed. I didn’t know whether to tell you this
at once, but now I’ll confess. I came to see her and our daughter. I wasn’t told in time that they were here. And now I’m too late. When I learned about your intimacy with her from gossip and reports, and the name Doctor Zhivago was first uttered, I remembered in some inconceivable way, out of the thousands of faces that have flashed past me in these years, a doctor of that name who was once brought to me for interrogation.”

“And you were sorry you didn’t have him shot?”

Strelnikov let this remark go unnoticed. Perhaps he did not even hear his interlocutor interrupt his monologue with his own insertion. He went on distractedly and pensively.

“Of course, I was jealous of you, and I’m jealous now. How could it be otherwise? I’ve been hiding in these parts only in recent months, after my other covers failed far to the east. I was supposed to be court-martialed on a false accusation. The outcome was easy to predict. I didn’t know myself to be guilty of anything. There was a hope that I might vindicate myself and defend my good name in the future under better circumstances. I decided to quit the field in good time, before I was arrested, and meanwhile to hide, wander about, live like a hermit. Maybe I would have saved myself in the end. A young rascal who wormed his way into my confidence did me a bad turn.

“I was going west through Siberia on foot, in winter, hiding, starving. I buried myself in the snow, spent nights in snow-covered trains, of which there were endless chains standing under the snow then along the Siberian main line.

“In my wanderings, I ran into a vagabond boy who supposedly had survived after being shot by the partisans in a line of other men executed at the same time. He supposedly crawled from under the pile of corpses, caught his breath, recovered, and then began moving about from one lair to another, like myself. At least that’s what he told me. A scoundrelly adolescent, full of vices, backward, one of those dunces who get thrown out of school for inability.”

The more details Strelnikov gave, the better the doctor recognized the boy.

“First name Terenty, last name Galuzin?”

“Yes.”

“Then all that about the partisans and the execution is true. He didn’t invent any of it.”

“The only good feature the boy had was that he madly adored his mother. His father had perished as a hostage. He learned that his mother was in prison and would share the father’s lot, and decided to do anything to free her. In the provincial Cheka, where he came pleading guilty and
offering his services, they agreed to forgive him everything for the price of some important information. He pointed out the place where I was hiding. I managed to forestall his betrayal and disappear in time.

“With fantastic efforts, with thousands of adventures, I crossed Siberia and came here, to places where I’m known to everybody and am least of all expected to appear, such boldness not being presumed on my part. And indeed they spent a long time searching for me around Chitá, while I was hiding in this house or some other refuge in the area. But now it’s the end. They’ve tracked me down here, too. Listen. It’s getting dark. I don’t like the time that’s coming, because I lost my sleep long ago. You know what a torment that is. If you haven’t burned up all my candles—excellent stearine candles, right?—let’s talk a bit longer. Let’s talk as long as you can, with every luxury, all night long, with candles burning.”

“There are candles. Only one pack has been opened. I burned the kerosene I found here.”

“Do you have any bread?”

“No.”

“What did you live on? However, I’m asking a stupid question. On potatoes. I know.”

“Yes. There’s all you could want here. The owners of the place were experienced and provident. They knew how to store them. They’re all safe in the cellar. Didn’t rot or freeze.”

Suddenly Strelnikov began talking about the revolution.

“All this is not for you. You won’t understand it. You grew up differently. There was the world of the city’s outskirts, a world of railroad tracks and workmen’s barracks. Filth, overcrowding, destitution, the degradation of man in the laborer, the degradation of women. There was the gleeful, unpunished impudence of depravity, of mama’s boys, well-heeled students, and little merchants. The tears and complaints of the robbed, the injured, the seduced were dismissed with a joke or an outburst of scornful vexation. This was the olympianism of parasites, remarkable only in that they did not trouble themselves about anything, never sought anything, neither gave nor left the world anything!

“But we took up life like a military campaign, we moved mountains for the sake of those we loved. And though we brought them nothing but grief, we did not offend them in the least, because we turned out to be even greater martyrs than they were.

“Before I go on, though, it is my duty to tell you this. The point is the following. You must leave here without delay, if you hold your life dear. The roundup is closing in on me, and whatever its end may be, you’ll be implicated with me, you’re already part of my affair by the fact of our conversation. Besides, there are a lot of wolves here, I shot at them the other day.”

“Ah, so that was you shooting?”

“Yes. You, of course, heard it? I was on my way to another refuge, but before I came to it, I realized by various signs that it had been discovered and the people there had probably been killed. I won’t stay long with you, I’ll just spend the night and leave in the morning. So, then, with your permission, I’ll go on.

“But could it be that Tverskaya-Yamskaya Streets
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and fops in cocked caps and trousers with foot straps racing about with their girls in dashing cabs existed only in Moscow, only in Russia? The street, the evening street, the evening street of that age, the trotters, the dapple grays, existed everywhere. What unified the epoch, what shaped the nineteenth century into a single historical segment? The birth of socialist thought. Revolutions took place, selfless young men mounted the barricades. Publicists racked their brains over how to curb the brutal shamelessness of money and raise up and defend the human dignity of the poor man. Marxism appeared. It discovered what the root of the evil was and where the cure lay. It became the mighty force of the age. All this was the Tverskaya-Yamskaya of the age, and the filth, and the shining of sanctity, and the depravity, and the workers’ quarters, the leaflets and barricades.

“Ah, how beautiful she was as a young schoolgirl! You have no idea. She often visited her girlfriend in a house inhabited by workers of the Brest railway. That’s how the railway was named originally, before several subsequent renamings. My father, presently a member of the Yuriatin tribunal, worked then as a trackman on the station section. I visited that house and met her there. She was a young girl, a child, but the apprehensive thought, the anxiety of the age, could already be read on her face, in her eyes. All the themes of the time, all its tears and injuries, all its impulses, all its stored-up revenge and pride, were written on her face and in her posture, in the mixture of her girlish modesty and bold shapeliness. An accusation of the age could be pronounced on her behalf, with her mouth. You’ll agree, that’s not a trifling thing. It’s a sort of predestination, a marking out. One must have it from nature, one must have the right to it.”

“You speak wonderfully about her. I saw her at that time, just as you describe her. The schoolgirl was united in her with the heroine of an unchildish mystery. Her shadow flattened itself on the wall in a movement
of apprehensive self-defense. That’s how I saw her. That’s how I remember her. You’ve put it strikingly well.”

“You saw and remember? But what did you do about it?”

“That’s another question entirely.”

“So, you see, all this nineteenth century, with all its revolutions in Paris, several generations of Russian emigration, starting with Herzen,
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all the plotted regicides, realized and unrealized, all the workers’ movements of the world, all the Marxism in the parliaments and universities of Europe, all the new system of ideas, the novelty and hastiness of its conclusions, the mockery, all the additional pitilessness developed in the name of pity, all this was absorbed and in a generalized way expressed by Lenin, so as to fall upon the old in a personified retribution for what had been done.

“Beside him rose the unforgettably immense image of Russia, which suddenly blazed up in the eyes of all the world like a candle of atonement for all the woes and adversities of mankind. But why am I saying all this to you? For you it’s a clanging cymbal,
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empty sounds.

“For the sake of this girl I went to the university, for her sake I became a teacher and came to work in this Yuriatin, which was as yet unknown to me. I swallowed stacks of books and acquired a mass of knowledge, to be useful to her and to be at hand in case she needed my help. I went to war, so as to conquer her again after three years of marriage, and then, after the war and my return from captivity, I took advantage of my being considered dead and, under an assumed name, immersed myself totally in the revolution, to pay back in full for everything she had suffered, to wash clean these sad memories, so that there would be no return to the past, so that Tverskaya-Yamskaya would be no more. And they, she and my daughter, were next door, right here! What effort it cost me to suppress the desire to rush to them, to see them! But I wanted first to carry my life’s work to its conclusion. Oh, what I’d give now for just one look at them! When she came into a room, it was as if a window was thrown open, the room was filled with light and air.”