Doctor Zhivago (8 page)

This world of baseness and falsity, where a well-fed little lady dares to look like that at witless working people, and the drunken victim of this order finds pleasure in jeering at one of his own kind, this world was now more hateful to him than ever. He walked quickly, as if the speed of his pace could bring closer the time when everything in the world would be as reasonable and harmonious as it now was in his feverish head. He knew that their strivings in recent days, the disorders on the line, the speeches at meetings, and their decision to go on strike—not yet brought to fulfillment, but also not renounced—were all separate parts of that great path which still lay before them.

But now his excitement had reached such a degree that he was impatient to run the whole of that distance at once, without stopping for breath. He did not realize where he was going with such long strides, but his feet knew very well where they were taking him.

Tiverzin did not suspect for a long time that, after he and Antipov left the dugout, the committee had decided to start the strike that same evening. The members of the committee at once assigned who among them was to go where and who would relieve whom. When the hoarse, gradually clearing and steadying signal burst from the engine repair shop, as if from the bottom of Tiverzin’s soul, a crowd from the depot and the freight yard was already moving towards the city from the semaphore at the entrance, merging with a new crowd which, at Tiverzin’s whistle, had dropped their work in the boiler room.

For many years Tiverzin thought that he alone had stopped all work and movement on the railway that night. Only later trials, in which he was judged collectively and the accusations did not include inciting to strike, led him out of that error.

People came running out, asking: “Why is the whistle blowing?” The response came from the darkness: “Are you deaf? Can’t you hear? It’s the alarm. There’s a fire.” “But where is it?” “Must be somewhere, since the whistle’s blowing.”

Doors banged, new people came out. Other voices were heard. “Go on—a fire! Country hicks! Don’t listen to the fool. It’s what’s called a walkout, understand? Here’s my hat and here’s the door, I’m not your servant anymore. Let’s go home, boys.”

More and more people joined in. The railway was on strike.

Tiverzin came home two days later, chilled, sleepy, and unshaven. The night before there had been a sudden cold snap, unprecedented for that time of year, and Tiverzin was dressed for fall. At the gate he was met by the yard porter Gimazetdin.

“Thank you, Mr. Tiverzin,” he began. “You not let Yusup be hurt, you make us all pray God forever.”

“Are you out of your mind, Gimazetdin? What kind of ‘mister’ am I to you? Drop all that, please. Speak quickly, you see how freezing it is.”

“Why freezing, you warm, Savelyich. Yesterday we bring your mother, Marfa Gavrilovna, full shed of firewood from freight yard, birch only, good firewood, dry firewood.”

“Thank you, Gimazetdin. There’s something else you wanted to tell me. Be quick, please, you can see I’m cold.”

“I wanted to tell you, no sleep home, Savelyich, must hide. Policeman asked, police chief asked, who come to see you. I say no one come. An assistant come, the engine team comes, railway people. But strangers—no, no!”

The house where the bachelor Tiverzin lived with his mother and his married younger brother belonged to the neighboring church of the Holy Trinity. This house was inhabited partly by certain of the clergy, by two associations of fruit- and meat-sellers who hawked their wares from stands in town, but mostly by minor employees of the Moscow–Brest railway.

The house was of stone with wooden galleries. They surrounded on four sides a dirty, unpaved courtyard. Dirty and slippery wooden stairways led up to the galleries. They smelled of cats and pickled cabbage. To the landings clung outhouses and closets with padlocks.

Tiverzin’s brother had been called up as a private in the war and had been wounded at Wafangkou.
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He was recovering in the Krasnoyarsk hospital, where his wife and two daughters had gone to visit him and receive him when he was dismissed. Hereditary railwaymen, the Tiverzins were light-footed and went all over Russia on free company passes. At the time,
the apartment was quiet and empty. Only the mother and son were living in it.

The apartment was on the second floor. On the gallery outside the front door stood a barrel, which was filled by a water carrier. When Kiprian Savelyevich got up to his level, he discovered that the lid of the barrel had been moved aside and a metal mug stood frozen to the crust of ice that had formed on the water.

“Prov and nobody else,” thought Tiverzin with a smirk. “Can’t drink enough, got a hole in him, guts on fire.”

Prov Afanasyevich Sokolov, a psalm-reader, a stately and not yet old man, was a distant relation of Marfa Gavrilovna.

Kiprian Savelyevich tore the mug from the ice crust, put the lid on the barrel, and pulled the handle of the doorbell. A cloud of domestic smell and savory steam moved to meet him.

“You’ve really heated it up, mama. It’s warm here, very nice.”

His mother fell on his neck, embraced him, and wept. He stroked her head, waited a little, and moved her away gently.

“A stout heart takes cities, mama,” he said softly. “My path goes from Moscow right to Warsaw.”

“I know. That’s why I’m crying. It’s going to be bad for you. Take yourself off somewhere, Kuprinka, somewhere far away.”

“Your dear little friend, your kindly shepherd boy,
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Pyotr Petrovich, almost split my skull.” He meant to make her laugh. She did not understand the joke and earnestly replied:

“It’s a sin to laugh at him, Kuprinka. You should pity him. A hopeless wretch, a lost soul.”

“They’ve taken Pashka Antipov. Pavel Ferapontovich. They came at night, made a search, raked everything over. Led him away in the morning. Worse still, his Darya’s in the hospital with typhoid. Little Pavlushka—he’s in a progressive high school—is alone at home with his deaf aunt. What’s more, they’re being chased out of the apartment. I think we’ll have to take the boy in. Why did Prov come?”

“How do you know he did?”

“I saw the barrel uncovered and the mug standing on it. It must have been bottomless Prov, I thought, guzzling water.”

“You’re so sharp, Kuprinka. That’s right, it was Prov, Prov Afanasyevich. He ran by to ask if he could borrow some firewood. I gave it to him. But what a fool I am—firewood! He brought such news and it went clean out of my head. You see, the sovereign has signed a manifesto so that everything will be turned a new way, nobody’s offended, the muzhiks get the land, and everybody’s equal to the nobility.
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The ukase has been signed, just think of it, it only has to be made public. A new petition came from the Synod to put
it into the litany or some sort of prayer of thanksgiving, I’m afraid to get it wrong. Provushka told me, and I went and forgot.”

Patulya Antipov, the son of the arrested Pavel Ferapontovich and the hospitalized Darya Filimonovna, came to live with the Tiverzins. He was a neat boy with regular features and dark blond hair parted in the middle. He kept smoothing it with a brush and kept straightening his jacket and his belt with its school buckle. Patulya could laugh to the point of tears and was very observant. He imitated everything he saw and heard with great likeness and comicality.

Soon after the manifesto of October 17, there was a big demonstration from the Tver to the Kaluga gate. This was an initiative in the spirit of “too many cooks spoil the broth.” Several of the revolutionary organizations that took part in the enterprise squabbled with each other and gave it up one by one, but when they learned that on the appointed morning people took to the streets even so, they hastened to send their representatives to the demonstration.

Despite Kiprian Savelyevich’s protests and dissuasions, Marfa Gavrilovna went to the demonstration with the cheerful and sociable Patulya.

It was a dry, frosty day in early November, with a still, leaden sky and a few snowflakes, so few that you could almost count them, swirling slowly and hesitantly before they fell to earth and then, in a fluffy gray dust, filled the potholes in the road.

Down the street the people came pouring, a veritable babel, faces, faces, faces, quilted winter coats and lambskin hats, old men, girl students and children, railwaymen in uniform, workers from the tram depot and the telephone station in boots above their knees and leather jackets, high school and university students.

For some time they sang the “Varshavianka,” “You Fell Victims,” and the “Marseillaise,” but suddenly the man who had been walking backwards ahead of the marchers and conducting the singing by waving a papakha
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clutched in his hand, stopped directing, put his hat on, and, turning his back to the procession, began to listen to what the rest of the leaders marching beside him were saying. The singing faltered and broke off. You could hear the crunching steps of the numberless crowd over the frozen pavement.

Some well-wishers informed the initiators of the march that there were Cossacks lying in wait for the demonstrators further ahead. There had been a phone call to a nearby pharmacy about the prepared ambush.

“So what?” the organizers said. “The main thing then is to keep cool and not lose our heads. We must immediately occupy the first public building that comes our way, announce the impending danger to people, and disperse one by one.”

They argued over which would be the best place to go. Some suggested the Society of Merchant’s Clerks, others the Technical Institute, still others the School of Foreign Correspondents.

During the argument, the corner of a government building appeared ahead of them. It also housed an educational institution, which as a suitable shelter was no whit worse than the ones enumerated.

When the walkers drew level with it, the leaders went up onto the semicircular landing in front of it and made signs for the head of the procession to stop. The many-leafed doors of the entrance opened, and all the marchers, coat after coat and hat after hat, began pouring into the vestibule of the school and climbing its main stairway.

“To the auditorium, to the auditorium!” solitary voices shouted behind them, but the crowd continued to flow further on, dispersing through the separate corridors and classrooms.

When they managed to bring the public back and they were all seated on chairs, the leaders tried several times to announce to the assembly that a trap had been set for them ahead, but no one listened to them. This stopping and going into the building was taken as an invitation to an improvised meeting, which began at once.

After all the marching and singing, people wanted to sit silently for a while and have someone else do the work and strain his throat for them. Compared to the chief pleasure of resting, the insignificant disagreements among the speakers, who were at one with each other in almost everything, seemed a matter of indifference.

Therefore the greatest success fell to the worst orator, who did not weary his listeners with the necessity of following him. His every word was accompanied by a roar of sympathy. No one regretted that his speech was drowned out by the noise of approval. They hastened to agree with him out of impatience, cried “Shame,” composed a telegram of protest, then suddenly, bored by the monotony of his voice, they all rose to a man and, forgetting all about the orator, hat after hat, row after row, thronged down the stairs and poured outside. The march continued.

While they were meeting, it had begun to snow. The pavement turned white. The snow fell more and more heavily.

When the dragoons came flying at them, those in the back rows did not suspect it at first. Suddenly a swelling roar rolled over them from the front,
as when a crowd cries “Hurrah!” Cries of “Help!” and “Murder!” and many others merged into something indistinguishable. At almost the same moment, on the wave of those sounds, down a narrow pass formed in the shying crowd, horses’ manes and muzzles and saber-brandishing riders raced swiftly and noiselessly.

Half a platoon galloped by, turned around, re-formed, and cut from behind into the tail of the march. The massacre began.

A few minutes later the street was almost empty. People fled into the side streets. The snow fell more lightly. The evening was dry as a charcoal drawing. Suddenly the sun, setting somewhere behind the houses, began poking its finger from around the corner at everything red in the street: the red-topped hats of the dragoons, the red cloth of the fallen flag, the traces of blood scattered over the snow in red threads and spots.

Along the edge of the pavement, dragging himself with his hands, crawled a moaning man with a split skull. A row of several horsemen rode up at a walk. They were coming back from the end of the street, where they had been drawn by the pursuit. Almost under their feet, Marfa Gavrilovna was rushing about, her kerchief shoved back on her neck, and in a voice not her own was shouting for the whole street to hear: “Pasha! Patulya!”

He had been walking with her all the while, amusing her with a highly skillful imitation of the last orator, and had suddenly vanished in the turmoil when the dragoons fell upon them.

In the skirmish, Marfa Gavrilovna herself got hit in the back by a whip, and though her thick, cotton-quilted coat kept her from feeling the blow, she cursed and shook her fist at the retreating cavalry, indignant that they had dared to lash her, an old woman, with a whip before the eyes of all honest people.

Marfa Gavrilovna cast worried glances down both sides of the street. Luckily, she suddenly saw the boy on the opposite sidewalk. There, in the narrow space between a colonial shop and a projecting town house, crowded a bunch of chance gawkers.

A dragoon who had ridden up onto the sidewalk was pressing them into that nook with the rump and flanks of his horse. He was amused by their terror and, barring their way out, performed capers and pirouettes under their noses, then backed his horse away and slowly, as in the circus, made him rear up. Suddenly he saw ahead his comrades slowly returning, spurred his horse, and in two or three leaps took his place in their line.