Doctor Zhivago (75 page)

The Shchapovs were having dinner at that same table on which, in the time of the distribution of bread by ration cards, in the mornings at dawn, they used to cut up the small bread coupons of all the tenants with scissors, sort them, count them, tie them in bundles or wrap them in paper by categories, and take them to the bakery, and then, on coming back, they would chop, cut, crumble, and weigh out the portions for the quarter’s inhabitants. Now all that had become a thing of the past. The rationing of provisions was replaced by other forms of accounting. Those sitting at the long table ate with appetite, smacking their lips, chewing and chomping.

Half of the porter’s lodge was taken up by the Russian stove towering in the middle, with the edge of a quilted coverlet hanging off its shelf.

On the front wall by the entrance there was a sink with a faucet for running water sticking out over it. There were benches along the sides of the lodge with chattels in sacks and trunks stuffed under them. The left side was occupied by the kitchen table. Over it, nailed to the wall, hung a cupboard for dishes.

The stove was burning. It was hot in the porter’s lodge. In front of the stove, her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, stood Markel’s wife, Agafya Tikhonovna, using long, far-reaching tongs to move the pots in the oven closer together or further apart at need. Her sweaty face was alternately lit up by the breathing fire of the stove, then veiled by steam from the cooking. Having pushed the pots aside, she took from the depths a meat pie on an iron sheet, with one deft movement flipped it bottom side up, and pushed it back to brown for a moment. Yuri Andreevich came into the lodge with two buckets.

“Enjoy your meal.”

“Welcome to you! Sit down, be our guest.”

“Thank you, I’ve had my dinner.”

“We know your dinners. Sit down and eat something hot. Don’t scorn it. There are potatoes baked in a clay pot. A savory pie. Wheat kasha.”

“No, really, thank you. Forgive me, Markel, for coming so often and making your place cold. I want to store up a lot of water at once. I scrubbed the zinc bathtub at the Sventitskys’ till it shines; I’ll fill it up, and the big pots as well. I’ll come some five times now, maybe ten, and after that I won’t bother you for a long time. Forgive me for coming so often, I have nobody else but you.”

“Help yourself, we won’t miss it. There’s no syrup, but as much water as you like. It’s free. We don’t deal in it.”

The people at the table guffawed.

When Yuri Andreevich came for the third time, for his fifth and sixth bucketful, the tone had changed slightly and the talk went differently.

“My sons-in-law are asking who you are. I tell them—they don’t believe me. Go ahead, take the water, don’t hesitate. Only don’t spill it on the floor, you gawk. See, the doorstep’s wet. It’ll freeze, and it won’t be you who breaks it up with a crowbar. And shut the door tighter, you lummox—there’s a draft from outside. Yes, I tell my sons-in-law who you are, and they don’t believe me. So much money gone to waste on you! You studied and studied, and what was the use?”

When Yuri Andreevich came for the fifth or sixth time, Markel frowned:

“Well, once more, if you please, and then basta. You’ve got to know the
limits, brother. Marina here, our youngest one, defends you, otherwise I’d pay no attention to what a noble Freemason you are and lock the door. Do you remember Marina? There she is, at the end of the table, the dark-haired one. See, she’s getting red in the face. Don’t offend him, papa, she says. As if anybody’s bothering you. Marina’s a telegraph girl at the central telegraph, she understands when it’s foreign words. He’s miserable, she says. She’ll go through fire for you, she pities you so much. But is it my fault if you didn’t turn out? You shouldn’t have gone off to Siberia and abandoned your home in a time of danger. It’s your own fault. Here we sat out all this famine, all this White blockade, we didn’t waver, and we survived. The blame’s on you. You didn’t keep Tonka, so she’s wandering abroad. What is it to me? It’s your business. Only don’t get offended if I ask what you need all this water for. Were you hired to make a skating rink in the courtyard? Eh, I can’t even get angry at a sad sack like you.”

Again there was guffawing at the table. Marina glanced around at her family with a displeased look, blushed, and started reprimanding them. Yuri Andreevich heard her voice, was struck by it, but did not understand its secret yet.

“There’s a lot of cleaning to be done in the house, Markel. I have to tidy up. Wash the floors. Do some laundry.”

There was surprise at the table.

“Aren’t you ashamed even to say such things, let alone do them, as if you’re a Chinese laundry or something!”

“Yuri Andreevich, if you’ll allow me, I’ll send my daughter to you. She’ll come to your place, do the laundry, the scrubbing. If you need, she can mend things. Don’t be afraid of the gentleman, dear daughter. You see how well-breeded he is, not like some others. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“No, what are you saying, Agafya Tikhonovna, there’s no need. I’ll never agree that Marina should dirty and soil herself for me. Why should she work for me? I’ll see to it all myself.”

“You can dirty yourself, and I can’t? You’re so intractable, Yuri Andreevich. Why do you wave me away? And if I invite myself as a guest, will you really drive me out?”

Marina might have become a singer. She had a pure, melodious voice of great pitch and strength. Marina spoke softly, but in a voice that was stronger than conversation required and that did not merge with Marina, but could be conceived as separate from her. It seemed to come from another room, to be located behind her back. This voice was her defense, her guardian angel. One does not want to insult or sadden a woman with such a voice.

With this Sunday water carrying the doctor’s friendship with Marina began. She often came to help him around the house. One day she stayed with him and never went back to the porter’s lodge. Thus she became the third, not officially registered, wife of Yuri Andreevich, who was not divorced from the first. Children came along. Father and mother Shchapov, not without pride, began to call their daughter a doctor’s wife. Markel grumbled that Yuri Andreevich did not marry Marina in church or sign up in the registry office. “What, are you daft?” his wife protested. “With Antonina alive, what would that be? Bigamy?” “You’re a fool yourself,” replied Markel. “Why look at Tonka? Tonka’s the same as if she doesn’t exist. No law will defend her.”

Yuri Andreevich sometimes said jokingly that their intimacy was a novel of twenty buckets, as there are novels of twenty chapters or twenty letters.

Marina forgave the doctor his strange quirks, which had already formed by then, the whims of a man gone to seed and aware of his fall, and forgave the dirt and disorder that he spread around him. She put up with his grumbling, sharpness, irritability.

Her self-sacrifice went still further. When through his fault they fell into voluntary, self-created poverty, Marina, so as not to leave him alone in those intervals, would abandon her job, where she was so valued and where she was eagerly taken back after these forced interruptions. Submitting to Yuri Andreevich’s fantasy, she would go with him through the courtyards looking for odd jobs. They did woodcutting for tenants living on various floors. Some of them, particularly the speculators grown rich at the beginning of the NEP and people of science and art who were close to the government, began fixing up their apartments and furnishing them. One day Marina and Yuri Andreevich, stepping carefully on the rugs in their felt boots, so as not to track in sawdust from outside, brought a load of firewood to the study of an apartment owner, who was insultingly immersed in some reading and did not bestow so much as a glance on the sawyers. The lady of the house negotiated, gave orders, and paid them.

“What is the swine so riveted to?” The doctor became curious. “What is he marking up so furiously with his pencil?” Going around the desk with the firewood, he peeked over the reading man’s shoulder. On the desk lay Yuri Andreevich’s little books in Vasya’s early art school editions.

Marina and the doctor lived on Spiridonovka. Gordon was renting a room nearby on Malaya Bronnaya. Marina and the doctor had two girls, Kapka
and Klashka. Kapitolina (Kapka) was going on seven; the recently born Klavdia was six months old.

The beginning of the summer of 1929 was hot. Acquaintances from two or three streets away ran to visit each other without hats or jackets.

Gordon’s room was strangely organized. In its place there used to be a fashionable dressmaker’s shop with two sections, a lower and an upper one. From the street, these two levels had a single plate-glass window. The gold inscription on the glass gave the dressmaker’s last name and the nature of his occupation. Inside, behind the glass, there was a spiral staircase from the lower to the upper section.

Now this space had been divided in three.

By means of an additional floor, the shop had gained an intermediary entresol, with a window strange for an inhabited room. It was a meter high and was at floor level. It was covered with remnants of the gold lettering. Through the spaces between them, the legs of those in the room could be seen up to the knees. Gordon lived in this room. Sitting with him were Zhivago, Dudorov, Marina and the children. Unlike the adults, the children filled the entire window frame. Soon Marina and the children left. The three men remained alone.

They were having a conversation, one of those lazy, unhurried summer conversations conducted among schoolmates whose friendship dates back countless years. How are they usually conducted?

There are some who possess a sufficient stock of words and are satisfied with it. They speak and think naturally and coherently. Only Yuri Andreevich was in that position.

His friends were lacking in necessary expressions. They did not possess the gift of speech. To make up for their poor vocabulary, they paced the room as they talked, smoked cigarettes, waved their arms, repeated the same thing several times. (“That’s dishonest, brother; dishonest is what it is; yes, yes, dishonest.”)

They were not aware that the excessive dramatics of their intercourse in no way signified ardor and breadth of character, but, on the contrary, expressed an insufficiency, a blank.

Gordon and Dudorov belonged to a good professional circle. They spent their lives among good books, good thinkers, good composers, good, always, yesterday and today, good and only good music, and they did not know that the calamity of mediocre taste is worse than the calamity of tastelessness.

Gordon and Dudorov did not know that even the reproaches that they showered on Zhivago were suggested to them not by devotion to their
friend and the wish to influence him, but only by their inability to think freely and guide the conversation as they willed. The speeding cart of the conversation carried them where they had no wish to go. They were unable to turn it and in the end were bound to run into something and hit against something. And so, rushing at full speed, they smashed with all their sermons and admonitions into Yuri Andreevich.

He could see clearly the springs of their pathos, the shakiness of their sympathy, the mechanism of their reasonings. However, he could not very well say to them: “Dear friends, oh, how hopelessly ordinary you and the circle you represent, and the brilliance and art of your favorite names and authorities, all are. The only live and bright thing in you is that you lived at the same time as me and knew me.” But how would it be if one could make such declarations to one’s friends! And so as not to distress them, Yuri Andreevich meekly listened to them.

Dudorov had recently finished his first term of exile and come back. He was restored to his rights, of which he had been temporarily deprived. He received permission to resume his lectures and university occupations.

Now he initiated his friends into his feelings and state of soul in exile. He spoke with them sincerely and unhypocritically. His observations were not motivated by cowardice or extraneous considerations.

He said that the arguments of the prosecution, his treatment in prison and after leaving it, and especially his one-on-one interviews with the interrogator had aired out his brain and re-educated him politically, that his eyes had been opened to many things, that he had grown as a human being.

Dudorov’s reasonings were close to Gordon’s heart precisely in their triteness. He nodded his head sympathetically to Innokenty and agreed with him. The stereotyped character of what Dudorov said and felt was just what Gordon found especially moving. He took the imitativeness of these copybook sentiments for their universality.

Innokenty’s virtuous orations were in the spirit of the time. But it was precisely the conformity, the transparency of their hypocrisy that exasperated Yuri Andreevich. The unfree man always idealizes his slavery. So it was in the Middle Ages; it was on this that the Jesuits always played. Yuri Andreevich could not bear the political mysticism of the Soviet intelligentsia, which was its highest achievement, or, as they would have said then, the spiritual ceiling of the epoch. Yuri Andreevich concealed this feeling from his friends as well, so as not to quarrel.

But he was interested in something quite other, in Dudorov’s account of Vonifaty Orletsov, his cell mate, a priest and a follower of Tikhon.
⁴
The arrested man had a six-year-old daughter, Christina. The arrest and subsequent
trial of her beloved father were a shock to her. The words “servant of a cult” and “disenfranchised” and the like seemed to her a stain of dishonor. It may be that in her ardent child’s heart, she vowed to wash this stain from her father’s name someday. This goal, so far removed and set so early, burning in her as an inextinguishable resolution, made of her even then a childishly enthusiastic follower of everything that seemed to her most irrefutable in Communism.

“I’m leaving,” said Yuri Andreevich. “Don’t be angry with me, Misha. It’s stuffy in here, and hot outside. I don’t have enough air.”

“You can see the vent window on the floor is open. Forgive us for smoking. We always forget that we shouldn’t smoke in your presence. Is it my fault that it’s arranged so stupidly here? Find me another room.”