Doctor Zhivago (77 page)

The driver would stop the car and with wrenches in his hands would come down from the front platform and, going around the car, would crouch down and immerse himself in repairing its mechanism between the wheels and the rear platform.

The ill-fated car blocked traffic along the whole line. The street was filled with trams it had already made stop and newly arriving and gradually accumulating ones. Their line reached the Manège and stretched back further. Passengers from the cars behind came to the front one that was the cause of it all, hoping to gain something by it. On that hot morning, the jam-packed car was cramped and stifling. A black and purple cloud crept from behind the Nikitsky Gates, rising ever higher in the sky over the crowd of passengers running across the pavement. A thunderstorm was approaching.

Yuri Andreevich was sitting on a single seat on the left side of the car, squeezed up against the window. The left-hand sidewalk of Nikitskaya, where the Conservatory was, remained in his view all the time. Willy-nilly, with the dulled attention of a man thinking about something else, he stared at the people walking or riding on that side and did not miss a single one.

A gray-haired old lady in a light straw hat with cloth daisies and cornflowers, and in a tight-fitting old-fashioned lilac dress, puffing and fanning herself with a flat parcel she carried in her hand, trudged along that side. She was tightly corseted, weary from the heat, and, sweating profusely, kept wiping her wet lips and eyebrows with a small lace handkerchief.

Her path lay parallel to that of the tram. Yuri Andreevich had already lost sight of her several times when the repaired tram started up again and got ahead of her. And she returned to his field of vision several times, when a new breakdown stopped the tram and the lady caught up with it.

Yuri Andreevich recalled school problems on the calculation of the time and order of arrival of trains starting at different moments and moving at different speeds, and he wanted to recall the general method of solving them, but failed to do so and, without finishing, skipped from these memories to other, much more complicated reflections.

He thought about several existences developing side by side, moving next to each other at different speeds, and about one person’s fate getting ahead of another’s fate in life, and who outlives whom. He imagined something like a principle of relativity in the arena of life, but, getting thoroughly confused, he dropped these comparisons as well.

Lightning flashed, thunder rolled. The luckless tram got stuck yet again on the descent from Kudrinskaya to the Zoological Garden. The lady in purple appeared a little later in the frame of the window, went past the tram, began to move off. The first big drops of rain fell on the sidewalk and pavement,
and on the lady. A gust of dusty wind dragged over the trees, brushing leaves against leaves, began tearing the lady’s hat off and tucking her skirts under, and suddenly died down.

The doctor felt a rush of debilitating nausea. Overcoming his weakness, he got up from the seat and began jerking the window straps up and down, trying to open the window. It did not yield to his efforts.

They shouted to the doctor that the frame was screwed permanently to the jamb, but, fighting against the attack and seized by some sort of anxiety, he did not take these shouts as addressed to him and did not grasp their meaning. He continued his attempts and again tugged at the frame in three different movements, up, down, and towards himself, and suddenly felt an unprecedented, irreparable pain inside, and realized that he had torn something internally, that he had committed something fatal, and that all was lost. At that moment the car began to move, but having gone a little way down Presnya, it stopped again.

By an inhuman effort of will, staggering and barely making his way through the congested throng standing in the aisle between the seats, Yuri Andreevich reached the rear platform. They snarled at him and would not let him pass. He fancied that the breath of air had refreshed him, that perhaps all was not lost yet, that he felt better.

He began to squeeze through the crowd on the rear platform, provoking more abuse, kicks, and anger. Paying no attention to the shouts, he broke through the crowd, climbed down from the standing tram onto the pavement, took one step, another, a third, collapsed on the cobbles, and did not get up again.

Noise, talk, arguments, advice arose. Several persons got down from the platform and surrounded the fallen man. They soon established that he was not breathing and that his heart had stopped. People from the sidewalks came over to the little group around the body, some reassured, others disappointed that the man had not been run over and that his death had no connection with the tram. The crowd grew. The lady in purple also came up to the group, stood for a while, looked at the dead man, listened to the talk, and went on. She was a foreigner, but she understood that some suggested carrying the body into the tram car and taking it to the hospital, while others said that the police must be called. She went on without waiting to see what decision they would come to.

The lady in purple was the Swiss subject Mademoiselle Fleury from Meliuzeevo, now very, very old. For twelve years she had been pleading in writing for the right to leave for her native country. Quite recently her efforts had been crowned with success. She had arrived in Moscow to
obtain an exit visa. She was going that day to pick it up at the consulate, fanning herself with her documents tied with a ribbon. And she went on, getting ahead of the tram for the tenth time and, without knowing it in the least, went ahead of Zhivago and outlived him.

Through the doorway from the corridor one could see the corner of the room, with a table standing at an angle to it. From the table to the doorway peered the narrowing lower end of a crudely hollowed-out, boatlike coffin, with the dead man’s feet resting against it. This was the same table at which Yuri Andreevich used to write. There was no other in the room. The manuscripts had been put in the drawer, and the table had been put under the coffin. The pillows under the head had been plumped up high, the body in the coffin lay as if on the rising slope of a hill.

It was surrounded by a multitude of flowers, whole bushes of white lilacs, rare at that season, cyclamens, cineraria in pots and baskets. The flowers blocked the light from the windows. The light barely seeped through the flowers onto the dead man’s waxen face and hands, onto the wood and lining of the coffin. On the table lay a beautiful pattern of shadows that seemed as if it had just stopped swaying.

The custom of burning the dead in a crematorium was widespread by then.
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In hopes of obtaining a pension for the children, out of concern for their future at school, and from an unwillingness to damage Marina’s situation at work, they renounced a church funeral and decided to have nothing but a civil cremation. Application had been made to the relevant organizations. Representatives were expected.

In expectation of them, the room stood empty, as premises are vacated between the departure of old tenants and the moving in of new ones. The silence was broken only by the decorous tiptoeing and accidental shuffling of those who came for the leavetaking. They were few, but still far more than one might have expected. The news of the death of a man almost without name had spread all around their circle with miraculous speed. A good number of people turned up who had known the dead man at various periods of his life and at various times had lost track of or forgotten him. His scientific thought and his muse were found to have a still greater number of unknown friends, who had never seen the man they were drawn to, and who came to look at him for the first time and to give him a last parting glance.

In those hours when the general silence, not filled by any ceremony,
became oppressive in that almost tangible lack, the flowers alone were a substitute for the missing singing and the absent rite.

They did not simply blossom and give off fragrance, but, as if in a chorus, perhaps hastening the corruption by it, poured out their perfume and, endowing everyone with their sweet-scented power, seemed to perform something.

The kingdom of plants so easily offers itself as the nearest neighbor to the kingdom of death. Here, in the earth’s greenery, among the trees of the cemetery, amidst the sprouting flowers rising up from the beds, are perhaps concentrated the mysteries of transformation and the riddles of life that we puzzle over. Mary did not at first recognize Jesus coming from the tomb and took him for the gardener walking in the cemetery. (“She, supposing him to be the gardener …”)
⁶

When the dead man was brought to his last address in Kamergersky, his friends, informed of his death and shaken by the news, came running from the front entrance to the wide open door of the apartment with Marina, half-crazed by the terrible news. She was beside herself for a long time, thrashed on the floor, and beat her head against the edge of a long chest with a seat and back that stood in the front hall and on which the body was laid until the coffin came and the untidied room was put in order. She was bathed in tears and whispered and cried out, choking on the words, half of which escaped her against her will like the wailing of mourners. She babbled at random, the way simple people lament, not embarrassed by or noticing anyone. Marina clutched at the body and could not be torn away from it, so that the dead man could be transferred to the room, now tidied and freed of extra furniture, to be washed and placed in the delivered coffin. All that was yesterday. Today the violence of her suffering had eased, giving way to dull dejection, but she was still as beside herself as before, said nothing, and was oblivious of herself.

She had sat there through all the rest of the previous day and that night without going anywhere. Here Klava had been brought to her to be nursed and taken away, and Kapa had come with her young nanny and then gone.

She was surrounded by her own people, by Dudorov and Gordon, as grief-stricken as herself. Her father, Markel, quietly sobbing and deafeningly blowing his nose, came and sat with her on the bench. Here also came her weeping mother and sisters.

And there were two persons in this human flow, a man and a woman,
who stood out from them all. They claimed no greater closeness to the dead man than those listed above. They did not vie in their grief with Marina, her daughters, and the dead man’s friends, and acknowledged their precedence. These two had no claims, but had some entirely special rights of their own to the deceased. These incomprehensible and undeclared powers with which the two were somehow invested were of concern to no one, and no one disputed them. Precisely these people had apparently taken upon themselves the cares of the funeral and its arrangement from the very beginning, and had seen it through with such unruffled calm as though it gave them satisfaction. This loftiness of spirit struck everyone’s eye and produced a strange impression. It seemed that these people were involved not only in the funeral, but in the death itself, not as perpetrators or indirect causes, but as persons who, after the fact, accepted this event, reconciled with it, and did not see it as having the greatest importance. Some knew these people, others guessed about them, still others, who were in the majority, had no idea who they were.

But when this man, whose keen, narrow Kirghiz eyes aroused curiosity, and this effortlessly beautiful woman came into the room where the coffin was, all who sat, stood, or moved about in it, not excepting Marina, without objection, as if by arrangement, cleared the premises, stepped aside, got up from the chairs and stools placed along the walls, and, crowding together, went out to the corridor and the front hall, leaving the man and woman alone behind the closed doors, like two initiates called to perform in silence, without hindrance and undisturbed, something immediately concerned with the burial and vitally important. That is what happened now. The two, left alone, sat on two stools by the wall and began to talk business.

“What have you learned, Evgraf Andreevich?”

“The cremation is this evening. In half an hour people from the medical trade union will come for the body and take it to the union’s club. The civil ceremony is scheduled for four. Not a single document was in order. His work record had expired, his old trade union card had not been exchanged, his dues hadn’t been paid for several years. All of that had to be settled. Hence the red tape and delay. Before the body is taken from the house—incidentally, the moment isn’t far off, we must be prepared—I’ll leave you alone, as you asked. Forgive me. Do you hear? The telephone. One minute.”

Evgraf Zhivago went out to the corridor, overflowing with unknown colleagues of the doctor’s, his schoolmates, minor hospital personnel, and publishing workers, and where Marina and the children, her arms around them, keeping them covered with the skirts of her coat (it
was a cold day and there was a draft from the front door), sat on the edge of the bench waiting for the door to be opened again, the way a woman who has come to see an arrested man waits for the guard to let her into the prison reception room. It was crowded in the corridor. Some of those gathered could not get into it. The door to the stairway was open. Many stood, paced, and smoked in the front hall and on the landing. Those lower down the stairs talked the more loudly and freely the closer they were to the street. Straining his hearing on account of the subdued murmur, Evgraf, in a muffled voice, as decency required, covering the receiver with his palm, was giving answers over the telephone, probably about the order of the funeral and the circumstances of the doctor’s death. He returned to the room. The conversation continued.

“Please don’t disappear after the cremation, Larissa Fyodorovna. I have a great favor to ask of you. I don’t know where you’re staying. Don’t leave me in ignorance about where to find you. I want in the nearest future, tomorrow or the day after, to start going through my brother’s papers. I’ll need your help. You know so much, probably more than anyone else. You let drop in passing that it’s two days since you arrived from Irkutsk for a short stay in Moscow, and that you came up to this apartment by chance, knowing neither that my brother had been living here in recent months, nor what had happened here. Some of what you said I didn’t understand, and I’m not asking for explanations, but don’t disappear, I don’t know your address. It would be best to spend the few days devoted to sorting the manuscripts under the same roof, or not far from each other, maybe in two other rooms of the house. That could be arranged. I know the manager.”