Doctor Zhivago (73 page)

“I know how dear she was to you. But, forgive me, do you have any idea of how she loved you?”

“Sorry. What did you say?”

“I said, do you have any idea to what extent you were dear to her, dearer than anyone in the world?”

“Where did you get that?”

“She said it to me herself.”

“She? To you?”

“Yes.”

“Forgive me. I suppose this request is unrealizable, but if it is permissible within the bounds of modesty, if it is within your power, please recall as far as possible precisely what she said to you.”

“Very willingly. She called you an exemplary man, whose equal she had never seen, of a uniquely high authenticity, and said that if the vision of the home she once shared with you glimmered again on the far horizon, she would crawl to its doorstep on her knees from anywhere at all, even the ends of the earth.”

“Sorry. If this does not encroach on something inviolable for you, can you remember when and in what circumstances she told you that?”

“She was tidying this room. Then she went outside to shake out the rug.”

“Forgive me, but which one? There are two here.”

“The larger one.”

“She couldn’t do it alone. Did you help her?”

“Yes.”

“You held opposite ends of the rug, and she threw herself back, waving her arms high, as on a swing, and turned away from the flying dust, squinting and laughing. Right? How well I know her habits! And then you started walking towards each other, folding the heavy rug first in two, then in four, and she joked and pulled all sorts of antics while you did it. Right? Right?”

They got up, walked over to different windows, started looking in different directions. After some silence, Strelnikov went up to Yuri Andreevich. Catching hold of his hands and pressing them to his breast, he went on with the former hastiness:

“Forgive me, I understand that I’m touching something dear, cherished. But, if I may, I’ll ask more questions. Only don’t go away. Don’t leave me alone. I’ll soon go away myself. Think, six years of separation, six years of inconceivable self-restraint. But it seemed to me that not all of freedom had been conquered yet. I would achieve that first, and then I would belong wholly to them, my hands would be unbound. And now all my constructions have come to nothing. Tomorrow they’ll seize me. You’re close and dear to her. Maybe you’ll see her someday. But no, what am I asking? It’s madness. They’ll seize me and won’t allow me to vindicate myself. They’ll fall upon me all at once, stopping my mouth with shouts and abuse. Don’t I know how it’s done?”

At last he would have a good night’s sleep. For the first time in a long while Yuri Andreevich did not notice how he fell asleep as soon as he stretched out
on his bed. Strelnikov spent the night with him. Yuri Andreevich gave him a place to sleep in the next room. In those brief moments when Yuri Andreevich woke up to turn on his other side or pull up the blanket that had slipped to the floor, he felt the strengthening power of his healthy sleep and delightedly fell asleep again. During the second half of the night, he began to have short, quickly changing dreams from the time of his childhood, sensible and rich in detail, which it was easy to take for reality.

Thus, for instance, his mother’s watercolor of the Italian seacoast, which hung on the wall, suddenly tore off, fell on the floor, and the sound of breaking glass awakened Yuri Andreevich. He opened his eyes. No, it was something else. It must be Antipov, Lara’s husband, Pavel Pavlovich, whose last name is Strelnikov, scarifying wolves in Shutma again, as Vakkh would say. Ah, no, what nonsense. Of course, it was the painting falling off the wall. There it is in splinters on the floor, he confirmed, as his dream returned and continued.

He woke up with a headache from having slept too long. He could not figure out at first who and where in the world he was.

Suddenly he remembered: “Strelnikov spent the night with me. It’s already late. I must get dressed. He’s probably up already, and if not, I’ll rouse him, make coffee, we’ll have coffee together.”

“Pavel Pavlovich!”

No answer. “It means he’s still asleep. Fast asleep, though.” Yuri Andreevich unhurriedly got dressed and went into the next room. Strelnikov’s military papakha was lying on the table, but he himself was not in the house. “Must have gone for a walk,” thought the doctor. “Without his hat. To keep himself in shape. And I’ve got to put a cross on Varykino today and go to town. But it’s too late. I overslept again. Just like every morning.”

Yuri Andreevich started a fire in the stove, took the bucket, and went to the well for water. A few steps from the porch, obliquely across the path, having fallen and buried his head in a snowdrift, lay Pavel Pavlovich. He had shot himself. The snow under his left temple was bunched into a red lump, soaked in a pool of spilled blood. The small drops of blood spattered around had rolled up with the snow into little red balls that looked like frozen rowan berries.

It remains to tell the uncomplicated story of the last eight or nine years of Yuri Andreevich’s life, in the course of which he declined and went more and more to seed, losing his knowledge and skill as a doctor and as a writer, would emerge from this state of depression and despondency for a short time, become inspired, return to activity, and then, after a brief flash, again fall into prolonged indifference towards himself and everything in the world. During these years his longtime heart ailment, which he himself had diagnosed earlier, though he had no idea of the degree of its seriousness, advanced greatly.

He arrived in Moscow at the beginning of the NEP,
¹
the most ambiguous and false of Soviet periods. He was more emaciated, overgrown, and wild than at the time of his return to Yuriatin from his partisan captivity. Along the way he had again gradually taken off everything of value and exchanged it for bread, plus some cast-off rags, so as not to be left naked. Thus, as he went, he ate up his second fur coat and his two-piece suit and appeared on the streets of Moscow in a gray papakha, foot cloths, and a threadbare soldier’s greatcoat, which, lacking its buttons, which had all been cut off, had turned into a wraparound prisoner’s robe. In this outfit, he was in no way distinguishable from the countless Red Army soldiers whose crowds flooded the squares, boulevards, and train stations of the capital.

He did not arrive in Moscow alone. A handsome peasant youth, dressed like himself in soldier’s clothes, had followed on his heels everywhere. In this guise they appeared in those surviving Moscow drawing rooms
where Yuri Andreevich had spent his childhood, where he was remembered and received with his companion, following delicate inquiries into whether they had gone to the bathhouse after the trip—typhus was still raging—and where Yuri Andreevich was told, in the first days of his appearance, the circumstances of his family’s leaving Moscow for abroad.

They both shunned people, but from acute shyness they avoided the chance of appearing singly as guests, when it was impossible to be silent and one had to keep up the conversation. Usually their two lanky figures showed up at a gathering of their acquaintances, hid in some inconspicuous corner, and silently spent the evening without taking part in the general conversation.

In the company of his young comrade, the tall, thin doctor in homely clothes looked like a seeker of truth from the common people, and his constant attendant like an obedient, blindly devoted disciple and follower. Who was this young companion?

For the last part of the trip, closer to Moscow, Yuri Andreevich had gone by rail, but the first, much bigger part he had made on foot.

The sight of the villages he passed through was no better than what he had seen in Siberia and the Urals during his flight from forest captivity. Only then he had passed through that region in winter, and now it was the end of summer and the warm, dry autumn, which was much easier.

Half the villages he passed through were deserted, as after an enemy campaign, the fields abandoned and unharvested, and in fact these were the results of war, of civil war.

For two or three days at the end of September, his road followed the steep, high bank of a river. The river, flowing towards Yuri Andreevich, was on his right. To the left, from the road to the cloud-heaped skyline, unharvested fields spread far and wide. They were broken up here and there by deciduous forests, with a predominance of oaks, elms, and maples. The forests ran down to the river in deep ravines, and cut across the road with precipices and steep descents.

In the unharvested fields, the rye, not holding to the overripe ears, flowed and spilled from them. Yuri Andreevich filled his mouth with handfuls of the grain, which he had difficulty grinding with his teeth, and fed on it on those especially difficult occasions when the possibility did not present itself for boiling the grain into porridge. His stomach poorly digested the raw, barely chewed feed.

Yuri Andreevich had never in his life seen rye of such a sinister dark brown, the color of old, dull gold. Ordinarily, when reaped in time, it is much lighter.

These flame-colored fields, burning without fire, these fields calling for help with a silent cry, were bordered with cold tranquillity by the big sky, already turned towards winter, over which, like shadows over a face, long stratus snow clouds with black middles and white sides ceaselessly drifted.

And everything was in movement, slow, regular. The river flowed. The road went the opposite way. The doctor strode along it. The clouds drew on in the same direction as he. But the fields did not remain motionless either. Something was moving about on them; they were covered by a tiny, restless, disgusting swarming.

Mice had bred in the fields in unprecedented, as yet unheard-of numbers. They scurried over the doctor’s face and hands and ran up his trouser legs and sleeves when night overtook him in the fields and he had to lie down and sleep somewhere by a boundary. Swarms of the enormously multiplied, glutted mice darted underfoot on the road by day and turned into a slippery, squealing, slithering mush when stepped on.

Frightening, shaggy village mongrels gone wild, who exchanged looks among themselves as if holding a council on when to fall upon the doctor and tear him to pieces, trudged after him in a pack at a respectful distance. They fed on carrion, but did not scorn the mouse flesh teeming in the fields, and, glancing at the doctor from afar, confidently moved after him, expecting something all the time. Strangely, they would not enter the forest, and on approaching it would drop behind little by little, turn tail, and vanish.

Forest and fields were complete opposites then. The fields were orphaned without man, as if they had fallen under a curse in his absence. Delivered from man, the forests stood beautiful in their freedom, like released prisoners.

Usually people, mainly village children, do not let hazelnuts ripen fully, but break them off while they are still green. Now the wooded hillsides and ravines were completely covered with untouched, rough, golden foliage, as if dusty and coarsened from autumnal sunburn. Out of it stuck handsomely bulging clusters of nuts, three or four at a time, as if tied in knots or bows, ripe, ready to fall from their common stem, but still holding to it. Yuri Andreevich cracked and ate them endlessly on his way. His pockets were stuffed with them, his sack was filled with them. For a week nuts were his chief nourishment.

It seemed to the doctor that the fields he saw were gravely ill, in a feverish delirium, but the forests were in a lucid state of recovery, that God dwelt in the forests, but the devil’s mocking smile snaked over the fields.

In those same days, in that part of the journey, the doctor entered a burned-down village deserted by its inhabitants. Before the fire, it had been built in only one row, across the road from the river. The river side had remained unbuilt on.

In the village a few intact houses could be counted, blackened and scorched on the outside. But they, too, were empty, uninhabited. The other cottages had turned into heaps of coal from which black, sooty chimneys stuck up.

The steep banks of the riverside were pitted with holes where the villagers had extracted millstones, which had been their livelihood. Three such unfinished, round millstones lay on the ground across from the last cottage in the row, one of the intact ones. It was also empty, like all the rest.

Yuri Andreevich went into it. The evening was still, but it was as if a wind burst into the cottage as soon as the doctor stepped inside. On the floor wisps of hay and tow crawled in all directions, on the walls shreds of unstuck paper fluttered. Everything in the cottage moved, rustled. It was swarming with mice, like the whole area around, and they squeaked and scurried all over it.

The doctor left the cottage. The sun was going down behind the fields. The warm, golden glow of the sunset flooded the opposite bank, the separate bushes and backwaters stretching the glitter of their fading reflections into the middle of the river. Yuri Andreevich crossed the road and sat down to rest on one of the millstones that lay on the grass.

Above the edge of the bank a light brown, shaggy head appeared, then shoulders, then arms. Someone was coming up the path from the river with a bucket of water. The man saw the doctor and stopped, showing to the waist above the line of the bank.

“Want a drink, my good man? Don’t hurt me and I won’t touch you.”

“Thanks. Yes, I’ll have a drink. Come all the way up, don’t be afraid. Why should I touch you?”

The water carrier, having come up over the bank, turned out to be a young adolescent. He was barefoot, ragged, and disheveled.

Despite his friendly words, he fastened his anxious, piercing gaze on the doctor. For some inexplicable reason, the boy was strangely excited. In his excitement, he set the bucket down, suddenly rushed towards the doctor, stopped halfway, and began to murmur:

“It can’t be … It can’t be … No, it’s impossible, I’m dreaming. But I beg your pardon, comrade, allow me to ask you anyway. It seems to me that you’re somebody I knew once. Ah, yes! Yes! Uncle doctor?!”