But, all the same, what swinishness! I suppose you can’t expect anything from Zhivago. He’s leaving tomorrow, and in his thoughts he’s already in Moscow or on his way. But what about Galiullin? How can he snore away or lie quiet, hearing such knocking, and count on her, a weak and defenseless old woman, to get up in the end and go to open the door to some unknown person, on this dreadful night, in this dreadful country?
“Galiullin!” She suddenly caught herself. “What Galiullin?” No, only half-awake could such an absurdity occur to her! What Galiullin, if even his tracks are cold? Didn’t she herself, together with Zhivago, hide him and change him into civilian clothes, and then explain about the roads and villages in the area, so he’d know where to escape to, when that dreadful lynching took place at the station and they killed Commissar Gintz, and chased Galiullin from Biriuchi as far as Meliuzeevo, shooting after him and searching for him all over town? Galiullin!
If those fellows hadn’t come rolling in, there’d be no stone left upon stone in the town. An armored division happened to be passing through. They stood up for the inhabitants and curbed the scoundrels.
The thunderstorm was weakening, moving away. The thunderclaps came from a distance, more rare and muffled. The rain stopped intermittently, but water continued to trickle down with a soft splashing from the leaves and gutters. Soundless glimmers of lightning came into Mademoiselle’s room, lit it up, and lingered there for an extra moment, as if searching for something.
Suddenly the knocking at the door, which had ceased for a long time, started again. Someone needed help and was knocking desperately and rapidly. The wind picked up again. More rain poured down.
“One moment!” Mademoiselle cried out, not knowing to whom, and frightened herself with her own voice.
An unexpected surmise dawned on her. Lowering her feet from the bed and putting on her slippers, she threw her house robe over her and ran to awaken Zhivago, so as not to feel so frightened alone. But he, too, had heard the knocking and was himself coming down to meet her with a candle. They had made the same assumptions.
“Zhivagó, Zhivagó! There’s knocking at the outside door, I’m afraid to open it by myself,” she cried in French, and added in Russian: “ ’Ave a luke. Ees Lar or Lieutenant Gaioul.”
Yuri Andreevich had also been awakened by the knocking, and thought that it must be someone they knew, either Galiullin, be hidden by something and coming back to the refuge where he could hide, or the nurse Antipova, forced by some difficulties to turn back from her journey.
In the front hall, the doctor handed Mademoiselle the candle, while he turned the key in the door and unbolted it. A gust of wind tore the door from his hand, blew out the candle, and showered them both with a cold spray of rain from outside.
“Who’s there? Who’s there? Is anybody there?” Mademoiselle and the doctor called out in turn into the darkness, but nobody answered. Suddenly they heard the former knocking in another place, from the back entrance, or, as it now seemed to them, at the window to the garden.
“It’s evidently the wind,” said the doctor. “But for the sake of a clear conscience, go to the back door anyway, to make sure, and I’ll wait here, so that we don’t cross each other, if it really is someone, and not from some other cause.”
Mademoiselle went off into the depths of the house, and the doctor went outside under the roof of the porch. His eyes, growing accustomed to the darkness, made out signs of the coming dawn.
Over the town, like halfwits, clouds raced swiftly, as if escaping pursuit. Their tatters flew so low that they almost caught in the trees leaning in the same direction, so that it looked as if someone were sweeping the sky with them, as if with bending besoms. Rain lashed at the wooden wall of the house, turning it from gray to black.
“Well?” the doctor asked Mademoiselle when she came back.
“You’re right. There’s nobody.” And she told him that she had gone around the whole house. In the butler’s pantry a window had been broken by a piece of a linden branch that struck the glass, and there were huge puddles on the floor, and it was the same in the room Lara had left behind, a sea, a veritable sea, a whole ocean.
“And here’s a shutter torn loose and beating against the window frame. You see? That’s the whole explanation.”
They talked a little more, locked the door, and went their ways to bed, both sorry that the alarm had proved false.
They had been certain that they would open the front door and the woman they knew so well would come in, wet to the skin and freezing, and they would bombard her with questions while she shook herself off. And then, having changed her clothes, she would come to dry herself by the lingering heat of the stove in the kitchen and would tell them about her countless misadventures, smoothing her hair and laughing.
They were so certain of it that, when they locked the door, the traces of their certainty remained by the corner of the house outside, in the form of the woman’s watermark or image, which continued to appear to them from around the turning.
10
The one considered to be indirectly responsible for the soldiers’ riot at the station was the Biriuchi telegraphist Kolya Frolenko.
Kolya was the son of a well-known Meliuzeevo watchmaker. He had been known in Meliuzeevo from the cradle. As a boy, he had visited someone among the Razdolnoe house staff and, under the surveillance of Mademoiselle, had played with her two charges, the countess’s daughters. Mademoiselle knew Kolya well. It was then that he had begun to understand a little French.
People in Meliuzeevo were used to seeing Kolya lightly dressed in any weather, without a hat, in canvas summer shoes, on a bicycle. Letting go of the handlebars, his body thrown back and his arms crossed on his chest, he rolled down the main street and around town and glanced at the poles and wires, checking the state of the network.
Some houses in town were connected with the station through a branch line of the railway telephone. The management of this line was in Kolya’s hands at the station control room.
There he was up to his ears in work: the railway telegraph, the telephone, and occasionally, in moments of the station chief Povarikhin’s brief absences, the signals and the block system, the apparatus for which was also in the control room.
The necessity of keeping an eye on the operation of several mechanisms at once made Kolya develop a special manner of speaking, obscure, abrupt, and full of riddles, to which Kolya resorted when he had no wish to answer someone or get into conversation. The word was that he had made too broad a use of this right on the day of the disorders.
By his omissions he had, in fact, deprived of force all of Galiullin’s good intentions in his phone calls from town, and, perhaps against his will, had given a fatal turn to the subsequent events.
Galiullin had asked to speak to the commissar, who was somewhere at the station or nearby, in order to tell him that he would soon come to join him at the clearing and to ask that he wait for him and undertake nothing without him. Kolya had refused Galiullin’s request to call Gintz to the phone, on the pretext that he had the line busy transmitting signals to the train approaching Biriuchi, while he himself was at the same time trying by hook or by crook to hold the train, which was bringing the summoned Cossacks to Biriuchi, at the previous junction.
When the troop train arrived after all, Kolya could not hide his displeasure.
The engine slowly crept under the dark roof of the platform and stopped just in front of the huge window of the control room. Kolya opened wide the heavy railway station curtains of dark blue broadcloth with railway monograms woven into the borders. On the stone windowsill stood a huge carafe of water and a thick, simply cut glass on a big tray. Kolya poured water into the glass, took several gulps, and looked out the window.
The engineer noticed Kolya and gave him a friendly nod from the cab. “Ooh, you stinking trash, you wood louse!” Kolya thought with hatred, stuck his tongue out at the engineer, and shook his fist at him. The engineer not only understood Kol
ya’s miming, but, by shrugging his shoulders and turning his head in the direction of the carriages, was able to convey: “What can I do? Try it yourself. He’s in charge.” “You’re trash and filth all the same,” Kolya mimed back.
They began leading the horses out of the freight cars. They balked, refusing to move. The hollow thud of hooves on the wooden gangways changed to the clanging of horseshoes against the stone of the platform. The rearing horses were led across several lines of tracks.
They ended up by two rows of discarded cars on two pairs of rusty rails overgrown with grass. The degradation of the wood, stripped of paint by the rain and rotted by worms and dampness, had restored to these broken-down cars their original kinship with the damp forest that began on the other side of the tracks, with the tinder fungus that ailed the birches, with the clouds piling up over it.
At the edge of the forest, the Cossacks mounted up on command and rode to the clearing.
The mutineers of the 212th were surrounded. Horsemen always look taller and more imposing among trees than in the open. They impressed the soldiers, though they had rifles in their dugouts. The Cossacks drew their sabers.
Inside the ring of horses, Gintz jumped onto a pile of stacked and leveled firewood and addressed a speech to the surrounded soldiers.
Again, as was usual with him, he spoke of military duty, the importance of the motherland, and many other lofty subjects. His notions met with no sympathy here. The mob was too numerous. It consisted of men who had suffered much during the war, had become coarse and weary. The words Gintz uttered had long since stuck in their ears. Four months of ingratiation from the right and the left had corrupted this crowd. The simple folk who made it up gave a cool reception to the orator’s non-Russian name and Baltic accent.
Gintz felt that he was speaking too long, and was vexed with himself, but thought he was doing it for the sake of greater accessibility to his listeners, who, instead of gratitude, paid him back with expressions of indifference and hostile boredom. Becoming more and more annoyed, he decided to address his audience in stiffer terms and make use of the threats he was keeping in reserve. Not hearing the rising murmur, he reminded the soldiers that revolutionary courts-martial had been introduced and were functioning, and demanded on pain of death that they lay down their weapons and hand over the instigators. If they did not do so, Gintz said, it would prove that they were lowdown traitors, irresponsible riffraff, conceited boors. These people were no longer accustomed to such a tone.
A roar of hundreds of voices arose. “You’ve had your say. Enough. All right,” some cried in bass voices and almost without malice. But there were hysterical outcries from the trebles overstrained with hatred. They were listened to. They shouted:
“Do you hear how he lays it on, comrades? Just like the old days! They haven’t shed their officer’s habits! So we’re the traitors! And where do you come from, Your Honor? Why dance around him? You can see, can’t you, he’s a German, an infiltrator. Hey, blue blood, show us your papers! And what are you pacifiers gaping at? Here we are, put the ropes on us, eat us up!”
But the Cossacks also had less and less liking for Gintz’s unfortunate speech. “It’s all boors and swine. The little squire!” they exchanged in whispers. First singly, then in greater numbers, they began to sheath their sabers. One after another they got off their horses. When enough of them had dismounted, they moved in disorder towards the center of the clearing to meet the 212th. Everything became confused. Fraternization began.
“You’d better quietly disappear somehow,” the worried Cossack officers said to Gintz. “Your car is near the junction. We’ll send word that it should be brought closer. Get away quickly.”
Gintz did so, but since he found it undignified to sneak off, he headed for the station without the necessary caution, almost openly. He walked in terrible agitation, forcing himself out of pride to go calmly and unhurriedly.
It was not far to the station; the forest was just next to it. At the edge, already within sight of the tracks, he looked back for the first time. Behind him walked soldiers with guns. “What do they want?” thought Gintz and quickened his pace.
His pursuers did the same. The distance between him and the chase did not change. The double wall of broken-down cars appeared ahead. Once behind them, Gintz broke into a run. The train that had delivered the Cossacks had been taken to the depot. The tracks were clear. Gintz crossed them at a run.
He made a running leap onto the high platform. At that moment the soldiers chasing him ran from behind the broken-down cars. Povarikhin and Kolya shouted something to Gintz and made signs for him to come inside the station, where they could save him.
But again the sense of honor bred over generations, urban, sacrificial, and inapplicable here, barred his way to safety. By an inhuman effort of will, he tried to control the trembling of his runaway heart. “I must call out to them: ‘Brothers, come to your senses, what kind of spy am I?’ ” he thought. “Something sobering, heartfelt, that will stop them.”
In recent months the sense of heroic deeds, of the soul’s outcry, had unconsciously become connected with rostrums and tribunes, with chairs that one could jump up on and hurl some call, something fiery, to the throng.
By the door of the station, under the signal bell, stood a tall firefighting barrel. It was tightly covered. Gintz jumped onto the lid and addressed to the approaching men several soul-wrenching words, inhuman and incoherent. The insane boldness of his address, two steps from the thrown-open doors of the station, where he could so easily have run, stunned them and rooted them to the spot. The soldiers lowered their guns.
But Gintz stepped on the edge of the lid and turned it under. One of his legs went into the water, the other hung down the side of the barrel. He wound up sitting astride the edge.
The soldiers met this clumsiness with an explosion of guffaws and the first one killed the unfortunate man with a point-blank shot in the neck, while the others rushed to stab the dead body with their bayonets.
11
Mademoiselle called Kolya on the telephone and told him to settle the doctor comfortably on the train, threatening him otherwise with disclosures that he would find unpleasant.
While answering Mademoiselle, Kolya was as usual conducting some other telephone conversation and, judging by the decimals that peppered his speech, was telegraphing something in ciphers to a third place.
“Pskov, north line, do you hear me? What rebels? What hand? What is it, Mam’selle? Nonsense, mumbo jumbo. Get off, hang up the phone, you’re bothering me. Pskov, north line, Pskov. Thirty-six comma zero zero fifteen. Ah, curse it all, the tape broke off! What? What? I don’t hear. Is that you again, Mam’selle? I told you in plain Russian, it’s impossible, I can’t. Ask Povarikhin. Nonsense, mumbo jumbo. Thirty-six … ah, the devil … Get off, don’t bother me, Mam’selle.”
And Mademoiselle was saying:
“Don’t throw dust in my eye, mumbo jumbo, Pskov, Pskov, mumbo jumbo, I see right through you and back again, you put the doctor in car tomorrow, and I won’t more speak with any murderer and little Judas-traitor.”
12
It was sultry when Yuri Andreevich left. A thunderstorm was gathering, as two days earlier.
The clay huts and geese in the settlement around the station, all scattered with spat-out husks of sunflower seeds, sat white and frightened under the immobile gaze of the black, menacing sky.
Bordering the station building was a wide clearing that stretched far to both sides. The grass on it was trampled down, and it was entirely covered by an immense crowd of people, who had spent weeks waiting for trains in the various directions each needed.
There were old men in the crowd, dressed in coarse gray kaftans, who went from group to group under the scorching sun gathering rumors and information. Silent adolescents around fourteen years old lay on their sides, propped on an elbow with a leafless switch in their hands, as if tending cattle. Their younger brothers and sisters darted underfoot, their s
hirts pulling up, exposing their pink bottoms. Their mothers sat on the ground, their tightly joined legs stretched out, with nursing babies swaddled crookedly under their brown homespun coats.
“They all scattered like sheep when the shooting began. Didn’t like it at all!” the stationmaster Povarikhin was saying with hostility as he and the doctor zigzagged their way among the rows of bodies lying next to each other outside the doors and inside on the floor of the station.
“The lawn was suddenly empty! We could see the ground again. What a joy! For four months we hadn’t seen it under this Gypsy camp—forgot what it looked like. Here’s where he lay. Amazing thing, I’ve seen all sorts of horrors during the war, it’s time I got used to them. But here I was seized by such pity! Above all—the senselessness. For what? What harm had he done them? Can they be human beings? They say he was the family favorite. And now to the right, here, here, this way, please, to my office. Don’t even think of getting on this train, you’ll be crushed to death. I’ll put you on another one, a local one. We’re making it up ourselves, it’s going to be formed right now. Only not a word till you get on, not to anyone! If you let it slip, they’ll tear it apart even before it’s coupled. You’ll have to change in Sukhinichi during the night.”
13
When the secret train was formed and started backing into the station from behind the depot, all the people crowded on the lawn rushed to intercept the slowly moving cars. People came rolling off the hillocks like peas and ran up the embankment. Pushing each other aside, they leaped onto the buffers and footboards in motion, while others climbed through the windows and onto the roofs of the cars. The still-moving train was filled up in no time, and when it reached the platform it was jam packed and hung from top to bottom with passengers.
By a miracle, the doctor squeezed himself onto a rear platform and then, in a still more incomprehensible way, penetrated into the corridor of the car.
Doctor Zhivago Page 20
