Doctor Zhivago (78 page)

“You say you didn’t understand me. What is there to understand? I arrived in Moscow, left my things at the checkroom, walked through the old Moscow without recognizing half of it—I’d forgotten. I walk and walk, go down Kuznetsky Most, up Kuznetsky Lane, and suddenly there’s something terribly familiar—Kamergersky Lane. My husband, Antipov, who was shot, rented a room here as a student, precisely this room where you and I are sitting. Well, I think, let’s have a look, maybe if I’m lucky the old owners are still alive. That there was no trace of them and everything was different, I learned later, the next day and today, gradually, from asking. But you were there, why am I telling you? I was thunderstruck, the street door was wide open, there were people in the room, a coffin, a dead man in the coffin. What dead man? I go in, go up to it, I thought—I’ve lost my mind, I’m dreaming. But you witnessed it all, right? Why am I telling you about it?”

“Wait, Larissa Fyodorovna, I must interrupt you. I’ve already told you that my brother and I did not suspect that so many amazing things were connected with this room. For example, that Antipov used to live in it. But
still more amazing is an expression that just escaped you. I’ll tell you at once what it was—forgive me. At one time, at the beginning of the civil war, I heard much and often about Antipov, or Strelnikov in his military-revolutionary activity, almost every day in fact, and I saw him in person once or twice, without foreseeing how closely he would touch me one day for family reasons. But, excuse me, maybe I didn’t hear right, but I think you said, ‘Antipov, who was shot,’ in which case it’s a slip of the tongue. Surely you know that he shot himself?”

“There’s such a version going around, but I don’t believe it. Pavel Pavlovich was never a suicide.”

“But it’s completely trustworthy. Antipov shot himself in the little house from which, as my brother told me, you left for Yuriatin in order to continue on to Vladivostok. It happened soon after your departure with your daughter. My brother found him and buried him. Can it be that this information never reached you?”

“No. My information was different. So it’s true that he shot himself? Many people said so, but I didn’t believe it. In that same little house? It can’t be! What an important detail you’ve told me! Forgive me, but do you know whether he and Zhivago met? Did they talk?”

“According to the late Yuri, they had a long conversation.”

“Can it be true? Thank God. It’s better that way.” (Antipova slowly crossed herself.) “What an astounding, heaven-sent coincidence! Will you allow me to come back to it and ask you about all the details? Every little thing is precious to me here. But now I’m not able to. Right? I’m too agitated. I’ll be silent for a while, rest, collect my thoughts. Right?”

“Oh, of course, of course. Please do.”

“Right?”

“Surely.”

“Ah, I nearly forgot. You’ve asked me not to leave after the cremation. Very well. I promise. I won’t disappear. I’ll come back with you to this apartment and stay where you tell me to and for as long as necessary. We’ll start going through Yurochka’s manuscripts. I’ll help you. It’s true that I may be of use to you. That will be such a comfort to me! I feel all the nuances of his handwriting with my heart’s blood, with every fiber. Then I also have business with you, I may have need of you, right? It seems you’re a lawyer, or in any case have good knowledge of the existing practices, former and present. Besides, it’s so important to know which organization to address for which document. Not everybody knows these things, right? I’ll have need of your advice about one dreadful, oppressive thing. It has to do with a child. But I’ll tell you later, once we’re back from the crematorium.
All my life I’ve been searching for somebody, right? Tell me, if in some imaginary case it was necessary to find the traces of a child, the traces of a child placed in the hands of strangers to be brought up, is there some sort of general, nationwide archive of existing children’s homes and have they made, have they undertaken a national census or registration of homeless children? But don’t answer me now, I beg you. Later, later. Oh, how frightening, how frightening! What a frightening thing life is, right? I don’t know how it will be later on, when my daughter comes, but for now I can stay in this apartment. Katyusha has shown extraordinary abilities, partly dramatic, but also musical, imitates everybody wonderfully and acts out whole scenes of her own invention, but, besides, she also sings whole parts of operas by ear—an astonishing child, right? I want to send her to the preparatory, beginning classes of a theater school or the Conservatory, wherever they take her, and place her in a boardinghouse, that’s why I’ve come without her now, to set everything up and then leave. One can’t tell everything, right? But about that later. And now I’m going to wait till my agitation calms down, I’ll be silent, collect my thoughts, try to drive my fears away. Besides, we’re keeping Yura’s family in the corridor a horribly long time. Twice I fancied there was knocking at the door. And there’s some movement, noise. Probably the people from the funeral organization have come. While I sit here and think, you open the door and let the public in. It’s time, right? Wait, wait. We need a little footstool beside the coffin, otherwise one can’t reach Yurochka. I tried on tiptoe, it was very difficult. Marina Markelovna and the children will need it. And besides, it’s required by the ritual. ‘And kiss me with the last kiss.’
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Oh, I can’t, I can’t. It’s so painful. Right?”

“I’ll let them all in presently. But first there’s this. You’ve said so many mysterious things and raised so many questions that evidently torment you, that it’s hard for me to answer you. One thing I want you to know. From the bottom of my heart, I willingly offer you my help in everything that worries you. And remember. Never, in any circumstances, must you despair. To hope and to act is our duty in misfortune. Inactive despair is a forgetting and failure of duty. I’ll now let the people in to take their leave. You’re right about the footstool. I’ll find one and bring it.”

But Antipova no longer heard him. She did not hear how Evgraf Zhivago opened the door to the room and the crowd from the corridor poured in through it, did not hear him talk with the funeral attendants and the chief mourners, did not hear the rustle of people’s movements, Marina’s sobbing, the men’s coughing, the women’s tears and cries.

The swirl of monotonous sounds lulled her and made her feel sick. She kept a firm grip on herself so as not to faint. Her heart was bursting, her
head ached. Hanging her head, she immersed herself in surmises, considerations, recollections. She went into them, sank, was as if transported temporarily, for a few hours, to some future age, which she did not know she would live to see, which aged her by decades and made her an old woman. She plunged into reflections, as if falling into the very depths, to the very bottom of her unhappiness. She thought:

“Nobody’s left. One has died. The other killed himself. And only the one who should have been killed is left alive, the one she had tried to shoot but missed, that alien, useless nonentity who had turned her life into a chain of crimes unknown to her. And that monster of mediocrity hangs or hustles about the mythical byways of Asia, known only to stamp collectors, but none of my near and needed ones is left.

“Ah, but it was at Christmas, before her intended shooting of that horror of banality, that she had had a conversation with the boy Pasha in this room, and Yura, of whom they were now taking leave here, had not come into her life yet.”

And she began straining her memory to restore that Christmas conversation with Pashenka, but could recall nothing except the candle burning on the windowsill and the melted circle beside it in the icy crust of the windowpane.

Could she have thought that the dead man lying there on the table had seen that peephole from the street as he drove past and had paid attention to the candle? That from this flame seen from outside—“A candle burned on the table, a candle burned”—his destiny had come into his life?

Her thoughts strayed. She mused: “What a pity all the same that he won’t have a church funeral! The burial service is so majestic and solemn! Most of the dead aren’t worthy of it. But Yurochka was such a gratifying cause! He was so worthy of it all, he would so justify and repay that ‘making our funeral dirge the song: Alleluia’!”
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And she felt a wave of pride and relief, which always happened to her at the thought of Yuri and in the brief periods of her life close to him. The breath of freedom and lightheartedness that always issued from him came over her now. She impatiently got up from the stool she was sitting on. Something not quite comprehensible was going on in her. She wanted, with his help, to break free, if only for a short time, into the fresh air, out of the abyss of sufferings that entangled her, to experience, as she once had, the happiness of liberation. This happiness she dreamed, she imagined, as the happiness of taking leave of him, the occasion and the right to weep her fill over him, alone and unhindered. And with the haste of passion, she cast at the crowd a glance broken by pain, unseeing and filled with tears, as from
burning eyedrops administered by an oculist, and they all stirred, blew their noses, began moving aside, and went out of the room, leaving her finally alone behind the closed door, and she, quickly crossing herself, went to the table and the coffin, stepped onto the footstool Evgraf had placed there, slowly made three big crosses over the body, and put her lips to the cold forehead and hands. She passed by the sensation that the cold forehead had become smaller, like a hand clenched into a fist; she managed not to notice it. She became still and for a few moments did not speak, did not think, did not weep, covering the middle of the coffin, the flowers, and the body with herself, her head, her breast, her soul, and her arms, as big as her soul.

She shook all over with repressed sobs. While she could, she fought them back, but suddenly it became beyond her strength, the tears burst from her and poured over her cheeks, her dress, her arms, and the coffin to which she pressed herself.

She said nothing and thought nothing. Successions of thoughts, generalities, facts, certainties, freely raced, sped through her, like clouds across the sky, as in the times of their former nighttime conversations. It was this that used to bring happiness and liberation. An uncerebral, ardent, mutually inspired knowledge. Instinctive, immediate.

She was filled with such knowledge now as well, an obscure, indistinct knowledge of death, a preparedness for it, an absence of perplexity before it. As if she had already lived twenty times in the world, had lost Yuri Zhivago countless times, and had accumulated a whole heart’s experience on that account, so that everything she felt and did by his coffin was apropos and to the point.

Oh, what love this was, free, unprecedented, unlike anything else! They thought the way other people sing.

They loved each other not out of necessity, not “scorched by passion,” as it is falsely described. They loved each other because everything around them wanted it so: the earth beneath them, the sky over their heads, the clouds and trees. Everything around them was perhaps more pleased by their love than they were themselves. Strangers in the street, the distances opening out during their walks, the rooms they lived or met in.

Ah, it was this, this was the chief thing that united them and made them akin! Never, never, even in moments of the most gratuitous, self-forgetful happiness, did that most lofty and thrilling thing abandon them: delight in the general mold of the world, the feeling of their relation to the whole picture,
the sense of belonging to the beauty of the whole spectacle, to the whole universe.

They breathed only by that oneness. And therefore the exaltation of man over the rest of nature, the fashionable fussing over and worshipping of man, never appealed to them. Such false principles of social life, turned into politics, seemed to them pathetically homemade and remained incomprehensible.

And so she began to take leave of him in the simple, ordinary words of a brisk, informal conversation, which breaks up the framework of reality and has no meaning, as there is no meaning in the choruses and monologues of tragedies, in verse, in music, and in other conventions, justified only by the conventionality of emotion. The conventionality in the present case, which justified the tension of her light, unpreconceived talk, was her tears, in which her everyday, unfestive words plunged, bathed, floated.

It seemed that these words wet with tears stuck together of themselves in her tender and quick prattle, as the wind rustles silky and moist foliage tousled by a warm rain.

“So we’re together once more, Yurochka. This is how God granted that we meet again. How terrible, just think! Oh, I can’t! Oh Lord! I weep and weep! Just think! So again it’s something of our sort, from our arsenal. Your going, my end. Again something big, irrevocable. The riddle of life, the riddle of death, the enchantment of genius, the enchantment of nakedness—that, yes, if you please, that we understood. But petty worldly squabbles like recarving the globe—sorry, we pass, it’s not in our line.

“Farewell, my great and dear one, farewell, my pride, farewell, my swift, deep river, how I loved your daylong splashing, how I loved to throw myself into your cold waves.

“Remember how I said good-bye to you that time, there, in the snow? How you deceived me! Would I ever have gone without you? Oh, I know, I know, you forced yourself to do it, for the sake of my imaginary good. And then everything went to rack and ruin. Lord, what a cup I drank there, what I endured! But you don’t know anything. Oh, what have I done, Yura, what have I done! I’m such a criminal, you have no idea! But it wasn’t my fault. I was in the hospital for three months then, for one of them unconscious. Since then there’s been no life for me, Yura. There’s no peace for my soul from pity and torment. But I’m not telling, I’m not revealing the main thing. I can’t name it, I haven’t got strength enough. When I come to this point in
my life, my hair stands on end from horror. And, you know, I can’t even swear I’m quite normal. But, you see, I don’t drink, as many do, I didn’t set out on that path, because a drunken woman is the end, it’s an unthinkable thing, right?”