Doctor Zhivago (74 page)

“And who would you be?”

“You don’t recognize me?”

“No.”

“We were on the train from Moscow with you, in the same car. Herded off to labor camp. Under convoy.”

It was Vasya Brykin. He fell down before the doctor, started kissing his hands, and wept.

The burned-down place turned out to be Vasya’s native village Veretenniki. His mother was no longer living. When the village was raided and burned down, Vasya hid in an underground cave where a stone had been cut out, but his mother thought Vasya had been taken to town, went mad with grief, and drowned herself in that same river Pelga on the bank of which the doctor and Vasya now sat conversing. Vasya’s sisters, Alenka and Arishka, according to unconfirmed information, were in another district, in an orphanage. The doctor took Vasya with him to Moscow. On the way he told Yuri Andreevich all sorts of horrors.

“That’s last autumn’s winter crop spilling out. We’d just sowed it when the disasters began. When Auntie Polya left. Do you remember Auntie Palasha?”

“No. I never knew her. Who is she?”

“What do you mean, you don’t know Pelageya Nilovna! She was on the train with us. Tyagunova. Open face, plump, white.”

“The one who kept braiding and unbraiding her hair?”

“The braids, the braids! Yes! That’s it. The braids!”

“Ah, I remember. Wait. I met her afterwards in Siberia, in some town, in the street.”

“You don’t say! Auntie Palasha?”

“What is it, Vasya? You’re shaking my hands like a madman. Watch out, you’ll tear them off. And you’re blushing like a young maiden.”

“Well, how is she? Tell me quickly, quickly.”

“She was safe and sound when I saw her. Told me about you. That she stayed with you or visited you, as I recall. But maybe I’ve forgotten or confused something.”

“Well, sure, sure! With us, with us! Mama loved her like her own sister. Quiet. Hardworking. Good with her hands. While she lived with us, we were in clover. They hounded her out of Veretenniki, gave her no peace with their slander.

“There was a muzhik in the village, Rotten Kharlam. He played up to
Polya. A noseless telltale. She didn’t even look at him. He bore me a grudge for that. Said bad things about us, me and Polya. So she left. He wore us out. And then it started.

“A terrible murder took place hereabouts. A lonely widow was murdered at a forest farmstead over by Buiskoe. She lived alone near the forest. She went around in men’s boots with tabs and rubber straps. A fierce dog ran around the farmstead chained to a wire. Named Gorlan. The farming, the land, she managed by herself, without helpers. Then suddenly winter came when nobody was expecting it. Snow fell early. Before the widow had her potatoes dug out. She comes to Veretenniki. ‘Help me,’ she says, ‘I’ll give you a share, or pay you.’

“I volunteered to dig her potatoes. I come to her farmstead, and Kharlam’s already there. He invited himself before me. She didn’t tell me. Well, it was nothing to fight over. We set to work together. The worst weather for digging. Rain and snow, sleet, muck. We dug and dug, burned potato greens to dry the potatoes with warm smoke. Well, we dug them all out, she paid us off honestly. She let Kharlam go, but winked at me, meaning she had more business with me, I should come later or else stay.

“I came to her another time. ‘I don’t want my potatoes confiscated as surplus by the state,’ she said. ‘You’re a good lad,’ she said, ‘you won’t give me away, I know. See, I’m not hiding from you. I could dig a pit myself and bury them, but look what’s going on outside. It’s winter—too late to think about it. I can’t manage by myself. Dig a pit for me, you won’t regret it. We’ll dry it, fill it up.’

“I dug her a pit the way a hiding place should be, wider at the bottom, like a jug, the narrow neck up. We dried and warmed the pit with smoke, too. Right in the middle of a blizzard. We hid the potatoes good and proper, covered the pit with dirt. Done to a tee. I keep mum about the pit, sure enough. Don’t tell a living soul. Not even mama or my little sisters. God forbid!

“Well, so. Hardly a month went by—there was a robbery at the farmstead. People walking past from Buiskoe told about it, the house wide open, everything cleaned out, the widow nowhere to be seen, the chain broken and the dog Gorlan gone.

“More time went by. During the first winter thaw, on New Year’s Day, the eve of St. Basil’s,
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it was pouring rain, which washed the snow off the hillocks, melted through to the ground. Gorlan came and started scraping the dirt with his paws on the bare spot where the pit with the potatoes was. He dug away, scattered the top layer, and there were the mistress’s feet in their shoes with straps. See, what a frightful thing!

“Everybody in Veretenniki pitied the widow, talked about her. Nobody thought of blaming Kharlam. And how could they? Who’d think of such a thing? If it was him, where would he get the pluck to stay in Veretenniki and strut around like a peacock? He’d have made tracks for somewhere far away.

“The village kulaks, the ringleaders, were glad of this villainy at the farmstead. They began stirring up the village. See, they said, what townies come up with! There’s a lesson for you, a warning. Don’t hide bread, don’t bury potatoes. And these fools all keep at it—forest robbers, they dream up some kind of forest robbers at the farmstead. Simple folk! Go on listening to these townies. They’ll show you better than that, they’ll starve you to death. If you villagers know what’s good for you, you’ll follow us. We’ll teach you a thing or two. They’ll come to take what’s yours, earned with your own sweat, and you’ll say, what extra, we haven’t got a single grain of rye for ourselves. And if they try anything, go for the pitchfork. And anybody who’s against the community, look out! The old men made a buzz, started boasting, held meetings. And that was just what telltale Kharlam wanted. He snatched his hat and was off to town. And there psst-psst-psst. See what’s doing in the village, and you just sit and gawk? What’s needed there is a committee of the poor. Give the order, and I’ll set brother against brother in no time. And he hightailed it from these parts and never showed his face again.

“All that happened after that, happened of itself. Nobody set it up, nobody’s to blame. They sent Red Army soldiers from town. And an itinerant court. And got at me straight off. Kharlam blabbed. For escaping, and for avoiding labor, and for inciting the village to mutiny, and for murdering the widow. And they locked me up. Thanks be, I thought of taking up a floorboard and got away. I hid underground in a cave. The village was burning over my head—I didn’t see it. My dearest mama threw herself into a hole in the ice—I didn’t know it. It all happened of itself. The soldiers were put in a separate cottage and given drink, they were all dead drunk. During the night somebody got careless and set the house on fire, the ones next to it caught. The villagers jumped out of the burning houses, but the visitors, nobody set fire to them, they just got burned alive to a man, that’s clear. Those from Veretenniki weren’t driven from their burned-down places. They ran away themselves, frightened that something more might happen. Those cheating ringleaders told them again that every tenth man would be shot. I didn’t find anybody here, they’re all scattered, knocking about the world somewhere.”

The doctor and Vasya arrived in Moscow in the spring of 1922, at the beginning
of the NEP. The days were warm and clear. Patches of sunlight reflected from the golden cupolas of the Church of the Savior fell on the cobbled square, where grass was growing in the cracks between cobbles.

The ban on private enterprise was lifted, and free trade was permitted within strict limits. Deals were done on the scale of commodity circulation among junkmen in a flea market. The dwarf scope of it encouraged speculation and led to abuse. The petty scrambling of the dealers produced nothing new, it added nothing material to the city’s desolation. Fortunes were made by pointlessly reselling the same things ten times over.

The owners of a few rather modest private libraries would bring the books from their bookcases to some one place. Would make application to the city council asking to open a bookselling cooperative. Would request space for same. Would obtain use of a shoe warehouse that had stood empty since the first months of the revolution or a florist’s greenhouse also closed since then, and under these spacious vaults would try to sell their meager and haphazard collections.

The wives of professors, who even earlier in difficult times had secretly baked white rolls for sale in defiance of the prohibition, now openly sold them in some place registered as a bicycle repair shop all those years. They changed landmarks,
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accepted the revolution, and began saying “You bet,” instead of “Yes” or “Very well.”

In Moscow Yuri Andreevich said:

“You’ll have to start doing something, Vasya.”

“I suppose I’ll study.”

“That goes without saying.”

“I also have a dream. I want to paint mama’s face from memory.”

“Very good. But for that you must know how to draw. Have you ever tried?”

“In Apraksin, when my uncle wasn’t looking, I fooled around with charcoal.”

“Well, all right. With any luck. We’ll give it a try.”

Vasya turned out to have no great ability at drawing, but an average one was enough to allow him to study applied art. Through connections, Yuri Andreevich got him enrolled in the general education program of the former Stroganov school, from which he was transferred to the department of polygraphy. There he studied lithographic techniques, typography and bookbinding, and graphic design.

The doctor and Vasya combined their efforts. The doctor wrote little books the size of one printer’s sheet on the most varied questions, and Vasya printed them at school as work counted for his examinations. The books, published in a small number of copies, were distributed through newly opened secondhand bookstores, founded by mutual acquaintances.

The books contained Yuri Andreevich’s philosophy, explanations of his medical views, his definitions of health and unhealth, his thoughts about transformism and evolution, about personality as the biological basis of the organism, his reflections on history and religion, close to his uncle’s and to Simushka’s, sketches of the Pugachev places he had visited, and his stories and poems.

His works were set forth accessibly, in spoken form, though far from the goals set by popularizers, because they contained disputable, arbitrary opinions, insufficiently verified, but always alive and original. The little books sold. Fanciers valued them.

At that time everything became a specialty, verse writing, the art of literary translation, theoretical studies were written about everything, institutes were created for everything. Various sorts of Palaces of Thought and Academies of Artistic Ideas sprang up. Yuri Andreevich was the staff doctor in
half of these bogus institutions.

The doctor and Vasya were friends for a long time and lived together. During this period they took many rooms and half-ruined corners one after another, in various ways uninhabitable and uncomfortable.

Just after his arrival in Moscow, Yuri Andreevich visited his old house in Sivtsev, which, as he learned, his family had never stopped at in passing through Moscow. Their exile had changed everything. The rooms reserved for the doctor and his family had other tenants, and there was nothing left of his or his family’s belongings. People shied away from Yuri Andreevich as from a dangerous acquaintance.

Markel had risen in the world and no longer passed his time in Sivtsev. He had been transferred to Flour Town as a superintendent, one of the benefits of the job being a manager’s apartment for himself and his family. However, he preferred to live in the old porter’s lodge with a dirt floor, running water, and an enormous Russian stove that nearly filled the whole space. In all the buildings of the quarter, the water and heating pipes burst in winter, and only in the porter’s lodge was it warm and did the water not freeze.

At that time a cooling off took place in the relations between the doctor and Vasya. Vasya had become extraordinarily developed. He began to speak and think not at all as the barefoot and shaggy boy had spoken and thought in Veretenniki on the river Pelga. The obviousness, the self-evidence of the truths proclaimed by the revolution attracted him more and more. The doctor’s not entirely clear, figurative speech seemed to him the voice of error, condemned, aware of its weakness, and therefore evasive.

The doctor went around to various departments. He solicited for two causes: for the political rehabilitation of his family and their legal return to the motherland; and for a foreign passport for himself, with permission to go to Paris to fetch his wife and children.

Vasya was surprised at how lukewarm and limp this petitioning was. Yuri Andreevich was in too much of a hurry to establish ahead of time the failure of the efforts he made, announcing too confidently and almost with satisfaction the uselessness of any further attempts.

Vasya disapproved of the doctor more and more often. The latter did not take offense at his fair reproaches. But his relations with Vasya were deteriorating. Finally their friendship broke down and they parted ways. The doctor left Vasya the room they shared and moved to Flour Town, where the all-powerful Markel obtained for him the end of the Sventitskys’ former apartment. This end part consisted of the Sventitskys’ old out-of-use bathroom, a room with one window next to it, and a lopsided kitchen with a half-ruined and sagging back entrance. Yuri Andreevich moved there and after that abandoned medicine, grew unkempt, stopped seeing acquaintances, and started living in poverty.

It was a gray winter Sunday. The smoke from the chimneys did not rise in columns above the roofs, but seeped in black streams from the vent windows, through which, despite the prohibition, people continued to stick the iron pipes of their stoves. The city’s everyday life was still not settled. The inhabitants of Flour Town went about as unwashed slovens, suffered from boils, shivered, caught cold.

On the occasion of Sunday, the family of Markel Shchapov was all assembled.