Doctor Zhivago (76 page)

“Well, so I’m leaving, Gordosha. We’ve talked enough. I thank you for caring about me, dear comrades. It’s not a whimsy on my part. It’s an illness, sclerosis of the heart’s blood vessels. The walls of the heart muscle wear out, get thin, and one fine day can tear, burst. And I’m not forty yet. I’m not a drunkard, not a profligate.”

“It’s too early to be singing at your funeral. Nonsense. You’ll live a long while yet.”

“In our time the frequency of microscopic forms of cardiac hemorrhages has increased greatly. Not all of them are fatal. In some cases people survive. It’s the disease of our time. I think its causes are of a moral order. A constant, systematic dissembling is required of the vast majority of us. It’s impossible, without its affecting your health, to show yourself day after day contrary to what you feel, to lay yourself out for what you don’t love, to rejoice over what brings you misfortune. Our nervous system is not an empty sound, not a fiction. It’s a physical body made up of fibers. Our soul takes up room in space and sits inside us like the teeth in our mouth. It cannot be endlessly violated with impunity. It was painful for me to hear you tell about your exile, Innokenty, how you grew during it, and how it re-educated you. It’s as if a horse were to tell how it broke itself in riding school.”

“I’ll stand up for Dudorov. You’ve simply lost the habit of human words. They’ve ceased to reach you.”

“That may well be, Misha. In any case, excuse me, let me go. It’s hard for me to breathe. By God, I’m not exaggerating.”

“Wait. That’s nothing but dodging. We won’t let you go until you give us a straight, sincere answer. Do you agree that you’ve got to change, to mend your ways? What do you intend to do in that respect? You ought to clarify your relations with Tonya and with Marina. They’re living beings, women capable of suffering and feeling, and not some bodiless ideas hovering in
your head in arbitrary combinations. Besides, it’s a shame that a man like you should go to waste uselessly. You must wake up from your sleep and indolence, rouse yourself, make out what’s around you without this unjustified haughtiness, yes, yes, without this inadmissible arrogance, find a job, take up practice.”

“Very well, I’ll answer you. I myself have often thought in that same spirit lately, and therefore I can promise you a thing or two without blushing for shame. It seems to me that everything will get settled. And quite soon. You’ll see. No, by God. Everything’s getting better. I have an incredible, passionate desire to live, and to live means always to push forward, towards higher things, towards perfection, and to achieve it.

“I’m glad, Gordon, that you defend Marina, as before you were always Tonya’s defender. But I have no dispute with them, I don’t make war on them or anybody else. You reproached me at first that she addresses me formally in response to my informality and calls me by my name and patronymic, as if it doesn’t weigh on me as well. But the deeper incoherence that underlies that unnaturalness has long been removed, everything’s smoothed over, and equality has been re-established.

“I can tell you some more good news. They’ve started writing to me from Paris again. The children have grown; they feel quite at ease among their French peers. Shura is finishing their primary school,
école primaire.
Manya is just beginning. I don’t know my daughter at all. For some reason I have the feeling that, despite their receiving French citizenship, they will soon return, and everything will be set right in some unknown way.

“By many tokens, my father-in-law and Tonya know about Marina and the girls. I didn’t write to them about it. These circumstances must have reached them from elsewhere. Alexander Alexandrovich is naturally offended in his paternal feelings; it’s painful for him on account of Tonya. That explains the nearly five-year break in our correspondence. I did correspond with them for a while after I came to Moscow. And suddenly they stopped answering. Everything stopped.

“Now, quite recently, I’ve begun to receive letters again from there. From all of them, even the children. Warm, tender letters. Something’s softened. Maybe there are changes with Tonya, some new friend. God grant it’s so. I don’t know. I also sometimes write to them. But I really can’t go on. I must leave or I’ll start suffocating. Good-bye.”

The next day Marina came running to Gordon more dead than alive. She had no one to leave the children with and carried the little one, Klasha, wrapped tightly in a blanket, pressing her to her breast with one hand, and with the other dragged the lagging and protesting Kapa by the hand.

“Is Yura here, Misha?” she asked in a voice not her own.

“Didn’t he spend the night at home?”

“No.”

“Well, then he’s at Innokenty’s.”

“I was there. Innokenty has classes at the university. But his neighbors know Yura. He didn’t show up there.”

“Then where is he?”

Marina placed the swaddled Klasha on the sofa. She became hysterical.

For two days Gordon and Dudorov never left Marina’s side. They took turns keeping watch on her, afraid of leaving her alone. In the intervals they went in search of the doctor. They ran around to all the places they supposed he might be wandering in, went to Flour Town and to the Sivtsev house, visited all the Palaces of Thought and Houses of Ideas that he had ever worked in, went to see all the old acquaintances they had any idea of and whose addresses they were able to find. The search yielded no results.

They did not inform the police, so as not to remind the authorities of a man who, though he was registered and had no criminal record, was, in the notions of that time, far from exemplary. They decided to put the police on his trail only in the last extremity.

On the third day, Marina, Gordon, and Dudorov received letters at different times from Yuri Andreevich. They were full of regrets regarding the anxieties and fears he had caused them. He begged them to forgive him and to calm themselves, and adjured them by all that was holy to stop their search for him, which in any case would lead to nothing.

He told them that with the aim of the speediest and fullest remaking of his life, he wanted to be left alone for a time, in order to go about his affairs in a concentrated way, and once he was somewhat set in his new pursuits and was convinced that, after the break that had taken place, there would be no return to the old ways, he would leave his hiding place and return to Marina and the children.

He told Gordon in his letter that he had transferred money for Marina to his name. He asked him to hire a nanny for the children, so as to free Marina to go back to work. He explained that he was wary of sending money directly to her address, for fear that the sum showing on the notice would expose her to the danger of being robbed.

The money soon came, far exceeding the doctor’s scale and the standards of his friends. A nanny was hired for the children. Marina was taken back at the telegraph. For a long time she could not calm down, but, being accustomed
to Yuri Andreevich’s past oddities, she finally reconciled herself to this new escapade as well. Despite Yuri Andreevich’s pleas and warnings, his friends and Marina continued to search for him, and his prediction kept being confirmed. They did not find him.

And meanwhile he was living a few steps away from them, right under their noses and in full view, within the narrow circle of their search.

When he left Gordon’s on the day of his disappearance, it was still light. He went down Bronnaya, heading for his home in Spiridonovka, and at once, before going a hundred steps, ran into his half brother, Evgraf Zhivago, coming in the opposite direction. Yuri Andreevich had not seen him for more than three years and knew nothing about him. As it turned out, Evgraf was in Moscow by chance, having arrived quite recently. As usual, he dropped from the sky and was impervious to questions, getting off with silent little smiles and jokes. Instead, passing over petty everyday details, after two or three questions to Yuri Andreevich, he straightaway entered into all his sorrows and quandaries, and right there, at the narrow turns of the crooked lane, amidst the jostling of passersby going in both directions, he came up with a practical plan of how to help his brother and save him. Yuri Andreevich’s disappearance and remaining in hiding were Evgraf’s idea, his invention.

He rented a room for Yuri Andreevich in a lane that was then still called Kamergersky, next to the Art Theater. He provided him with money and took steps to have the doctor accepted at some hospital, in a good position that would open prospects for scientific work. He protected his brother in every way in all the aspects of his life. Finally, he gave his brother his word that his family’s unsettled position in Paris would be resolved in one way or another. Either Yuri Andreevich would go to them, or they would come to him. Evgraf promised to take all these matters upon himself and arrange everything. His brother’s support inspired Yuri Andreevich. As always before, the riddle of his power remained unexplained. Yuri Andreevich did not even try to penetrate this mystery.

The room faced south. Its two windows looked onto the roofs opposite the theater, beyond which, high above the Okhotny Ryad, stood the summer sun, leaving the pavement of the lane in shadow.

The room was more than a place of work for Yuri Andreevich, more than
his study. In this period of devouring activity, when his plans and projects could not find enough room in the notes piled on his desk, and the images of his thoughts and visions hung in the air on all sides, as an artist’s studio is encumbered with a multitude of started works turned face to the wall, the doctor’s living room was a banquet hall of the spirit, a storeroom of ravings, a larder of revelations.

Fortunately, negotiations with the hospital authorities were taking a long time; the moment of starting work kept being put off to an indefinite future. He could take advantage of this opportune delay and write.

Yuri Andreevich began putting in order what had already been written, fragments he remembered, or what Evgraf found somewhere and brought to him, part of them in Yuri Andreevich’s own manuscripts, part in someone else’s typewritten copies. The chaotic state of the material made Yuri Andreevich squander his energy even more than his own nature predisposed him to do. He soon abandoned this work and, instead of reconstructing the unfinished, went on to writing new things, carried away by fresh sketches.

He composed rough drafts of articles, like those fleeting notes from the time of his first stay in Varykino, and wrote down separate pieces of poems that came to him, beginnings, ends, and middles all mixed up, unsorted. Sometimes he could barely manage his rushing thoughts; the first letters of words and the abbreviations of his swift handwriting could not keep up with them.

He hurried. When his imagination grew weary and the work began to lag, he speeded it and whipped it up with drawings in the margins. They represented forest clearings and city intersections with the billboard “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers” standing in the middle of them.

The articles and poems were on one theme. Their subject was the city.

Afterwards this note was found among his papers:

“In the year ’22, when I returned to Moscow, I found her emptied and half ruined. As she came out of the ordeals of the first years of the revolution, so she has remained to this day. Her population has thinned out, new houses are not built, the old ones are not renovated.

“But even in that state, she remains a big modern city, the only inspiration of a new, truly contemporary art.

“The disorderly listing of things and notions, which look incompatible and are placed side by side as if arbitrarily, in the symbolists, Blok, Verhaeren,
Whitman, is not at all a stylistic caprice. It is a new order of impressions observed in life and copied from nature.

“Just as they drive sequences of images through their lines, so a busy city street of the end of the nineteenth century sails along and draws past us its crowds, coaches, and carriages, and then, at the beginning of the next century, the cars of its electric trams and subways.

“Pastoral simplicity has no source in these conditions. Its false artlessness is a literary counterfeit, an unnatural mannerism, a phenomenon of a bookish order, picked up not in the countryside, but from the bookshelves of academic libraries. The living language, live-formed and answering naturally to the spirit of today, is the language of urbanism.

“I live on a crowded city intersection. Summer Moscow, blinded by the sun, her asphalt courtyards scorching, the windows of the upper floors scattering reflections and breathing in the flowering of clouds and boulevards, whirls around me and makes my head spin and wants me, for her glory, to make the heads of others spin. To that end she has brought me up and given art into my hands.

“Constantly noisy, day and night, the street outside my wall is as closely connected with the contemporary soul as the opening overture is with the theater curtain, filled with darkness and mystery, still lowered, but already set aglow by the flames of the footlights. Ceaselessly stirring and murmuring outside the doors and windows, the city is a vastly enormous introduction to the life of each of us. It is just along these lines that I would like to write about the city.”

In the notebook of Zhivago’s poems that has been preserved, no such poems are to be found. Perhaps the poem “Hamlet” belonged to that category?

One morning at the end of August, Yuri Andreevich got on the tram at the stop on the corner of Gazetny Lane, to go up Nikitskaya from the university to Kudrinskaya Square. He was going for the first time to his job at the Botkin Hospital, which was then called Soldatenkovskaya. It was all but his first visit to it in an official capacity.

Yuri Andreevich was not in luck. He got on a defective car which was meeting with all kinds of disasters. First a cart with its wheels stuck in the grooves of the rails held it up by blocking the way. Then faulty insulation under the floor or on the roof of the car caused a short circuit and something crackled and burned.