A former second lieutenant from the volunteers, the mechanic Galiullin, son of the yard porter Gimazetdin from Tiverzin’s courtyard and in the distant past an apprentice to a locksmith, beaten by his master Khudoleev, owed his advancement to his former tormentor.
Having been made a second lieutenant, Galiullin, no one knew how and without his own will, wound up in a warm and cushy billet in one of the garrisons far in the rear. There he had command of a detachment of semi-invalids, whom equally decrepit veterans instructed in the mornings in a drill they had long forgotten. Besides that, Galiullin checked whether sentinels had been correctly placed at the supply depots. It was a carefree life—nothing more was required of him. Then suddenly, along with reinforcements consisting of militiamen from earlier drafts and coming from Moscow to be under his command, arrived Pyotr Khudoleev, who was all too well-known to him.
“Ah, an old acquaintance!” Galiullin said, smiling darkly.
“Yes, sir,” replied Khudoleev, standing to attention and saluting.
It could not end so simply. At the very first negligence in drill, the lieutenant yelled at the lower-ranking man, and when it seemed to him that the soldier was not looking him straight in the eye, but somehow vaguely to the side, he punched him in the teeth and put him in the guardhouse for two days on bread and water.
Now Galiullin’s every move smacked of revenge for past things. To settle accounts like this, under the discipline of the rod, was too unsporting and ignoble a game. What was to be done? It was impossible for the two of them to remain in the same place any longer. But where and on what pretext could an officer transfer a soldier from his assigned unit, unless he sent him to a disciplinary one? On the other hand, what grounds could Galiullin think up for requesting his own transfer? Justifying himself by the boredom and uselessness of garrison duty, Galiullin asked to be sent to the front. This earned him a good reputation, and when, in the next action, he displayed his other qualities, it became clear that he was an excellent officer, and he was quickly promoted to first lieutenant.
Galiullin had known Antipov since the time at Tiverzin’s. In 1905, when Pasha Antipov had lived for half a year with the Tiverzins, Yusupka had gone to see him and play with him on Sundays. He had seen Lara there once or twice then. After that he had heard nothing about them. When Pavel Pavlovich left Yuriatin and landed in their regiment, Galiullin was struck by the change that had come over his old friend. The bashful, laughter-prone, prissy prankster, who looked like a girl, had turned into a nervous, all-knowing, scornful hypochondriac. He was intelligent, very brave, taciturn, and sarcastic. At times, looking at him, Galiullin was ready to swear that he could see in Antipov’s heavy gaze, as in the depths of a window, some second person, a thought firmly embedded in him, a longing for his daughter or the face of his wife. Antipov seemed bewitched, as in a fairy tale. And now he was no more, and in Galiullin’s hands there remained Antipov’s papers and photographs and the mystery of his transformation.
Sooner or later Lara’s inquiries had to reach Galiullin. He was preparing to answer her. But it was a hot time. He felt unable to give her a proper answer. He wanted to prepare her for the coming blow. And so he kept postponing a long, detailed letter to her, until he heard that she herself was somewhere at the front, as a nurse. And now he did not know where to address a letter to her.
10
“Well? Will there be horses today?” Gordon would ask Dr. Zhivago when he came home in the afternoon to the Galician cottage they were living in.
“Horses, hah! And where will you go, if there’s no way forward or back? There’s terrible confusion all around. Nobody understands anything. In the south, we’ve encircled the Germans or broken through them in several places, and they say that in the process several of our scattered units got into a pocket, and in the north, the Germans have crossed the Sventa, which was considered impassable at that point. It’s their cavalry, up to a corps in number. They’re damaging railways, destroying depots, and, in my opinion, encircling us. Do you get the picture? And you say horses. Well, look lively, Karpenko, set the table and get a move on. What are we having today? Ah, calves’ feet. Splendid.”
The medical unit with the hospital and all its dependencies was scattered through the village, which by a miracle had gone unscathed. Its houses, with gleaming western-style, narrow, many-paned windows from wall to wall, were preserved to the last one.
It was Indian summer, the last days of a hot, golden autumn. During the day, the doctors and officers opened the windows, killed the flies that crawled in black swarms over the windowsills and low, white-papered ceilings, and, unbuttoning their tunics and field shirts, dripping with sweat, burned their tongues on hot cabbage soup or tea, and in the evenings squatted in front of the open stove, blowing on the dying coals under the damp firewood that refused to burn, and, their eyes tearful from the smoke, cursed their orderlies, who did not know how to heat a stove in human fashion.
It was a quiet night. Gordon and Zhivago lay facing each other on benches against the two opposite walls. Between them was the dinner table and a long, narrow window stretching from wall to wall. The room was overheated and filled with tobacco smoke. They opened the two end casements and breathed in the autumnal freshness of the night, which covered the glass with sweat.
As usual, they were talking, just as they had all those days and nights. As always, there was a pink glow on the horizon in the direction of the front, and when, into the steady growl of gunfire, which never ceased for a moment, there fell deeper, separately distinct and weighty blows, which seemed to shift the ground in the distance slightly to one side, Zhivago broke off the conversation out of respect for the sound, held the pause, and said: “That’s Bertha, a German sixteen-incher, there’s a ton of weight in the little thing,” and then went on with the conversation, forgetting what they had been talking about.
“What’s that smell all the time in the village?” asked Gordon. “I noticed it the first day. Such a sickly sweet, cloying smell. Like mice.”
“Ah, I know what you mean. It’s hemp. There are a lot of hemp fields here. Hemp by itself gives off an oppressive and obnoxious smell of carrion. Besides, in a zone of military action, when men are killed in a hemp field, they go unnoticed for a long time and begin to rot. There’s a putrid smell all over the place, it’s only natural. Another Bertha. Hear it?”
In the course of those days they discussed everything in the world. Gordon knew his friend’s thoughts about the war and the spirit of the time. Yuri Andreevich told him how hard it was to get used to the bloody logic of mutual destruction, to the sight of the wounded, especially to the horrors of some modern wounds, to the mutilated survivors that present-day technology turned into hunks of disfigured flesh.
Each day Gordon landed somewhere as he accompanied Zhivago, and thanks to him he saw something. He was, of course, aware of the immorality of gazing idly at other men’s courage and at how some, with an inhuman effort of will, overcame the fear of death, with great sacrifice and at great risk. But an inactive and inconsequential sighing over it seemed to him in no way more moral. He considered that you ought to behave honestly and naturally according to the situation life puts you in.
That one can faint at the sight of the wounded he proved to himself when he went to a mobile Red Cross unit that was working to the west of them at a first-aid field station almost on the front line.
They came to the edge of a big wood half cut down by artillery fire. Smashed and twisted gun carriages lay upside down among the broken and trampled underbrush. A riding horse was tied to a tree. Further in was the wooden house of the forest service with half its roof blown off. The first-aid station was set up in the forestry office and in two big gray tents across the road from it, in the middle of the wood.
“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” said Zhivago. “Our trenches are very close by, a mile or so, and our batteries are over there behind the wood. Do you hear what’s going on? Don’t play the hero, please—I won�
��t believe you. Your heart’s in your boots right now, and that’s only natural. The situation may change any moment. Shells will start flying here.”
On the ground by the forest road, spreading their legs in heavy boots, dusty and weary young soldiers lay on their stomachs or backs, their field shirts soaked with sweat on their chests and shoulder blades—the survivors of a greatly diminished detachment. They had been taken out of a battle that had been going on for four days and sent to the rear for a brief respite. The soldiers lay as if made of stone, they had no strength to smile or curse, and not one of them turned his head when from the road deep in the wood came the rumble of several quickly approaching carts. These were springless machine-gun carts coming at a trot, bouncing up and down, breaking the bones and spilling the guts of the wretched wounded men they were bringing to the dressing station, where they would be given first aid, bandaged up, and, in certain especially urgent cases, hastily operated on. Half an hour earlier, during a brief lull in the firing, they had been carried off the field beyond the trenches in appalling numbers. A good half of them were unconscious.
When they drew up to the porch of the office, orderlies came down with stretchers and started unloading the carts. Holding the lower flaps with her hands, a nurse peeked out of one of the tents. It was not her shift. She was free. In the wood behind the tent, two men were yelling loudly at each other. The fresh, tall wood resounded with the echoes of their argument, but the words could not be heard. When the wounded were brought, the arguers came out to the road and went towards the office. A hotheaded little officer was shouting at a doctor from the mobile unit, trying to find out from him where they had moved the artillery park formerly stationed there in the wood. The doctor knew nothing, it was not his concern. He begged the officer to leave him alone and not shout, because wounded men had been brought and he had work to do, but the little officer would not calm down and berated the Red Cross, and the artillery department, and everybody in the world. Zhivago went up to the doctor. They greeted each other and went to the forestry house. The officer, still cursing loudly with a slight Tartar accent, untied the horse from the tree, jumped onto it, and galloped down the road into the wood. And the nurse went on looking, looking …
Suddenly her face became distorted with horror.
“What are you doing? You’re out of your minds!” she cried to two lightly wounded men, who, with no external help, were walking between the stretchers to the dressing station, and, running out of the tent, she rushed towards them.
An unfortunate man, especially horribly and hideously mutilated, was being carried on a stretcher. The bottom of an exploded shell, which had split his face open, turning his tongue and teeth into a bloody gruel, but without killing him, was lodged between his jawbones in place of his torn-out cheek. In a thin little voice, resembling nothing human, the mangled man kept uttering short, broken moans, which no one could fail to understand as a plea to finish him off quickly and end his inconceivably prolonged suffering.
The nurse imagined that, under the influence of his moaning, the lightly wounded men walking beside him were about to pull this horrible iron splinter out of his cheek with their bare hands.
“No, you can’t do that! A surgeon will do it with special instruments. If it gets that far. (God, God, take him, don’t make me doubt Your existence!)”
The next moment, as he was being carried up the porch, the mutilated man cried out, shuddered all over, and gave up the ghost.
The mutilated man who had just died was Reserve Private Gimazetdin; the officer shouting in the wood was his son, Lieutenant Galiullin; the nurse was Lara; Gordon and Zhivago were the witnesses. They were all there, all side by side, and some did not recognize each other, while others had never known each other, and some things remained forever unascertained, while others waited till the next occasion, till a new meeting, to be revealed.
11
In this sector the villages had been preserved in some miraculous way. They made up an inexplicably intact island in the midst of a sea of destruction. Gordon and Zhivago were returning home in the evening. The sun was setting. In one of the villages they rode past, a young Cossack, to the unanimous guffawing of those around him, was making an old gray-bearded Jew in a long overcoat catch a five-kopeck copper coin he tossed in the air. The old man invariably failed to catch it. The coin, falling through his pathetically spread hands, fell in the mud. The old man bent down to pick it up, the Cossack slapped his behind, those standing around held their sides and moaned with laughter. This constituted the whole amusement. So far it was inoffensive, but no one could guarantee that it would not take a more serious turn. His old woman would come running from a cottage across the road, shouting and reaching her arms out to him, and each time would disappear again in fright. Two little girls looked at their grandfather through the window and wept.
The driver, who found it all killingly funny, slowed the horses’ pace to give the gentlemen time to amuse themselves. But Zhivago, calling the Cossack over, reprimanded him and told him to stop the mockery.
“Yes, sir,” the man said readily. “We didn’t mean nothing, it was just for laughs.”
For the rest of the way Zhivago and Gordon were silent.
“It’s terrible,” Yuri Andreevich began, when their own village came in sight. “You can hardly imagine what a cup of suffering the unfortunate Jewish populace has drunk during this war. It’s being conducted right within the pale of their forced settlement. And for all they’ve endured, for the sufferings, the taxes, and the ruin, they have the added reward of pogroms, taunts, and the accusation that these people lack patriotism. But where are they to get it, when they enjoy all rights with the enemy, and with us they’re only subjected to persecution? The very hatred of them, the basis of it, is contradictory. What vexes people is just what should touch them and win them over. Their poverty and overcrowding, their weakness and inability to fend off blows. Incomprehensible. There’s something fateful in it.”
Gordon made no reply.
12
And here again they were lying on two sides of the long, narrow window, it was night, and they were talking.
Zhivago was telling Gordon how he had seen the sovereign at the front. He told it well.
It was his first spring at the front. The headquarters of the unit to which he had been attached was in the Carpathians, in a hollow, the entrance to which, from the Hungarian valley, was blocked by that army unit.
At the bottom of the hollow there was a railway station. Zhivago described to Gordon the external appearance of the place, the mountains overgrown with mighty firs and pines, with white tufts of clouds caught among them, and the stone cliffs of gray slate and graphite, which showed through the forest like worn spots in thick fur. It was a damp, dark April morning, gray as that slate, locked in by the heights on all sides and therefore still and stuffy. Steaming hot. Steam hung over the hollow, and everything fumed, everything drew upwards in streams of smoke, engine smoke from the station, gray steam from the meadows, gray mountains, dark forests, dark clouds.
In those days the sovereign was making the rounds of Galicia. Suddenly it became known that he would visit the unit stationed here, of which he was the honorary colonel.
He might come at any moment. An honor guard was stationed on the platform to meet him. An hour or two of wearisome waiting followed. Then quickly, one after another, two trains came with the suite. Shortly afterwards the tsar’s train arrived.
Accompanied by the grand duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the sovereign inspected the lined-up grenadiers. With every syllable of his quiet greeting he raised up bursts and splashes of thunderously rolling hurrahs, like water dancing in swaying buckets.
The embarrassed and smiling sovereign gave the impression of a man older and more gone to seed than he appeared on rubles and medals. He had a listless, slightly puffy face. He kept casting guilty sidelong glances at Nikolai Nikolaevich, not knowing what was required of him in the given circumstances, and Nikolai N
ikolaevich, respectfully bending towards his ear, not even with words but with the movement of an eyebrow or a shoulder, helped him out of his difficulty.
The tsar was pitiable on that gray and warm mountain morning, and it was eerie to think that such timorous reserve and shyness could be the essence of an oppressor, that this weakness could punish and pardon, bind and loose.
“He should have pronounced something on the order of ‘I, my sword, and my people,’ like Wilhelm,11 or something in that spirit. But certainly about the people, that’s indispensable. But, you understand, he was natural in a Russian way and tragically above such banality. In Russia this theatricality is unthinkable. Because it is theatricality, isn’t it? I can understand that there were still such peoples in Caesar’s time, some sort of Gauls, or Suevians, or Illyrians. But from then on it’s only been a fiction, existing so that tsars and activists and kings could make speeches about it: ‘The people, my people.’
“Now the front is flooded with correspondents and journalists. They note down ‘observations,’ the utterances of popular wisdom, make the rounds of the wounded, construct a new theory of the people’s soul. It’s a sort of new Dahl,12 just as contrived, a linguistic graphomania of verbal incontinence. That’s one type. But there’s another. Clipped speech, ‘jottings and sketches,’ skepticism, misanthropy. For instance, in one of them (I read it myself), there are such sentences as: ‘A gray day, like yesterday. Rain and slush since morning. I look through the window at the road. Prisoners strung out in an endless line. Wounded being transported. A cannon fires. It fires again, today as yesterday, tomorrow as today, and so on every day and every hour …’ Just look, how perceptive and witty! Though why is he offended at the cannon? What a strange pretension, to demand diversity from a cannon! Instead of the cannon, why isn’t he astonished at himself, firing off lists, commas, phrases, day in and day out, why doesn’t he stop this barrage of journalistic philanthropy, as hasty as a hopping flea? How is it he doesn’t understand that it’s he, not the cannon, who should be new and not repeat himself, that the accumulation of a great quantity of senselessness in a notebook will never arrive at any sense, that facts don’t exist until a man puts something of his own into them, some share of whimsical human genius, something of the fantastic.”
Doctor Zhivago Page 16
