“This is papa, this is your papa, wave to papa,” Antonina Alexandrovna kept saying, as she lowered the side of the bed so that the father could more easily embrace the boy and pick him up.
Sashenka allowed the unfamiliar and unshaven man, who probably frightened and repelled him, to come close, and when he bent down, abruptly stood up, clutched his mother’s blouse, swung and angrily slapped him in the face. His own boldness so terrified Sashenka that he immediately threw himself onto his mother’s breast, buried his face in her dress, and burst into bitter, inconsolable child’s tears.
“Pooh, pooh,” Antonina Alexandrovna chided him. “You mustn’t do that, Sashenka. Papa will think Sasha bad, Sasha no-no. Show papa how you kiss. Kiss him. Don’t cry, you mustn’t cry, what is it, silly?”
“Leave him alone, Tonya,” the doctor asked. “Don’t torment him, and don’t be upset yourself. I know what kind of foolishness gets into your head. That it’s not by chance, that it’s a bad sign. It’s all such nonsense. And so natural. The boy’s never seen me. Tomorrow he’ll get used to me, there’ll be no tearing him away from me.”
But he himself left the room quite downcast, with a sense of foreboding.
4
In the course of the next few days it became clear how alone he was. He did not blame anyone for that. Evidently he himself had wanted it and achieved it.
His friends had become strangely dull and colorless. None of them had held on to his own world, his own opinion. They were much brighter in his memories. Apparently he had overestimated them earlier.
As long as the order of things had allowed the well-to-do to be whimsical and eccentric at the expense of the deprived, how easy it had been to mistake for a real face and originality that whimsicality and the right to idleness which the minority enjoyed while the majority suffered!
But as soon as the lower strata arose and the privileges of the upper strata were abolished, how quickly everyone faded, how unregretfully they parted with independent thinking, which none of them, evidently, had ever had!
Now the only people who were close to Yuri Andreevich were those without phrases and pathos—his wife and father-in-law, and two or three fellow doctors, humble toilers, ordinary workmen.
The evening with the duck and the alcohol had taken place in its time, as planned, on the second or third day after his arrival, once he had had time to see everyone invited, so that it was not their first meeting.
The fat duck was an unheard-of luxury in those already hungry times, but there was no bread to go with it, and that made the magnificence of the food pointless, so that it was even irritating.
Gordon brought the alcohol in a pharmaceutical bottle with a ground-glass stopper. Alcohol was a favorite medium of exchange for black marketeers. Antonina Alexandrovna did not let the bottle out of her hands and diluted the alcohol in small quantities, as it was needed, by inspiration, making it now too strong, now too weak. It turned out that an uneven drunkenness from changing concentrations was much worse than from a strong but consistent one. That, too, was annoying.
The saddest thing of all was that their party represented a deviation from the conditions of the time. It was impossible to imagine that in the houses across the lane people were eating and drinking in the same way at such an hour. Beyond the window lay mute, dark, hungry Moscow. Her food stores were empty, and people had even forgotten to think of such things as game and vodka.
And thus it turned out that the only true life is one that resembles the life around us and drowns in it without leaving a trace, that isolated happiness is not happiness, so that a duck and alcohol, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are even not alcohol and a duck at all. That was the most distressing thing.
The guests also brought on joyless reflections. Gordon had been fine as long as he had thought heavily and explained things morosely and incoherently. He had been Yuri Andreevich’s best friend. He had been liked in high school.
But now he had come to dislike himself and had begun to introduce unfortunate corrections in his moral image. He bucked himself up, played the merry fellow, told stories all the time with a pretense to wit, and often said “How entertaining” and “How amusing”—words not in his vocabulary, because Gordon had never understood life as a diversion.
Before Dudorov’s arrival he told a funny—as it seemed to him—story about Dudorov’s marriage, which circulated among friends. Yuri Andreevich did not know it.
It turned out that Dudorov had been married for about a year, and then separated from his wife. The unlikely salt of the adventure consisted in the following.
Dudorov had been drafted into the army by mistake. While he served and waited for the misunderstanding to be clarified, he was most often on punishment duty for gawkishness and for not saluting officers in the street. Long after he was discharged, his arm would jerk up at the sight of an officer, and he went around as if dazzled, seeing epaulettes everywhere.
In that period, he did everything out of place, committed various blunders and false steps. Precisely at that time he supposedly made the acquaintance, on a Volga landing, of two girls, sisters, who were waiting for the same boat, and, as if absentmindedly, owing to the multitude of officers flashing about, with vestiges of his soldierly saluting still alive, not watching himself, he fell in love by oversight and hastily made the younger sister a proposal. “Amusing, isn’t it?” asked Gordon. But he had to cut short his description. The voice of the story’s hero was heard outside the door. Dudorov came into the room.
With him the opposite change had taken place. The former unstable and extravagant featherbrain had turned into a concentrated scholar.
When he was expelled from school in his youth for participating in the preparation of a political escape, he spent some time wandering through various art schools, but in the end washed up on the classical shore. Dudorov finished university later than his peers, during wartime, and was kept on in two departments, Russian and general history. For the first he was writing something about the land policy of Ivan the Terrible, for the second some research about Saint-Just.2
He now reasoned about everything amiably, in a low voice, as if he had a cold, staring dreamily at one spot, and not raising or lowering his eyes, as one reads a lecture.
By the end of the evening, when Shura Schlesinger burst in with her attacks, and everyone, heated up enough without that, was shouting simultaneously, Innokenty, whom Yuri Andreevich had addressed formally since their schooldays, asked him several times:
“Have you read War and Peace and The Backbone Flute?”3
Yuri Andreevich had long since told him what he thought on the subject, but Dudorov had not heard him because of the rousing general argument, and therefore, a little later, he asked once more:
“Have you read The Backbone Flute and Man?”
“But I answered you, Innokenty. It’s your fault if you didn’t hear me. Well, have it your way. I’ll say it again. I’ve always liked Mayakovsky. It’s some sort of continuation of Dostoevsky. Or, more rightly, it’s lyric verse written by one of his young, rebellious characters, like Ippolit, Raskolnikov, or the hero of The Adolescent.4 Such all-devouring force of talent! How it’s said once and for all, implacably and straight out! And above all, with what bold sweep it’s all flung in the face of society and somewhere further out into space!”
But the big hit of the evening was certainly the uncle. Antonina Alexandrovna was mistaken in saying that Nikolai Nikolaevich was at a dacha. He came back on the day of his nephew’s arrival and was in town. Yuri Andreevich had already seen him two or three times and had managed to talk a lot with him, to laugh a lot, to “oh” and “ah” a lot.
Their first meeting took place in the evening of a gray, overcast day. Light rain drizzled down in a fine watery dust. Yuri Andreevich came to Nikolai Nikolaevich’s hotel room. Hotels were already accepting people only at the insistence of the city authorities. But Nikolai Nikolaevich was known everywhere. He still had his old connections.
The hotel gave the impression of a madhouse abandoned by its fleeing administration. Emptiness, chaos, the rule of chance on the stairways and corridors.
Into the big window of the untidied room gazed the vast, peopleless square of those mad days, somehow frightening, as if it had been dreamed of in sleep at night, and was not in fact lying before their eyes under the hotel window.
It was an astounding, unforgettable, portentous meeting! The idol of his childhood, the ruler of his youthful thoughts, stood before him again, alive, in the flesh.
Gray hair was very becoming to Nikolai Nikolaevich. His loose foreign suit fitted him well. He was still very young for his age and handsome to look at.
Of course, he lost much next to the enormity of what was going on. Events overshadowed him. But it had never occurred to Yuri Andreevich to measure him with such a measure.
He was surprised by Nikolai Nikolaevich’s calmness, by the cool, bantering tone in which he talked on political themes. His social bearing exceeded Russian possibilities of the day. This feature bespoke a newcomer. It struck the eye, seemed old-fashioned, and caused a certain awkwardness.
Ah, it was not at all that, not that which filled the first hours of their meeting, made them throw themselves into each other’s arms, weep, and, breathless with excitement, interrupt the rush and fervor of their initial conversation with frequent pauses.
This was a meeting of two creative characters, bound by family ties, and, though the past arose and began to live a second life, memories came in a flood, and circumstances surfaced that had occurred during their time of separation; still, as soon as the talk turned to what was most important, to things known to people of a creative cast, all ties disappeared except that single one, there was neither uncle nor nephew, nor any difference in age, and there remained only the closeness of element to element, energy to energy, principle to principle.
Over the last decade, Nikolai Nikolaevich had had no occasion to speak of the fascination of authorship and the essence of the creative vocation in such conformity with his own thoughts and so deservedly apropos as now. On the other hand, Yuri Andreevich had never happened to hear opinions that were so perceptively apt and so inspiringly captivating as this analysis.
The two men constantly exclaimed and rushed about the room, clutching their heads from the faultlessness of each other’s conjectures, or went to the window and silently drummed on the glass with their fingers, amazed at the proofs of mutual understanding.
So it was at their first meeting, but later the doctor saw Nikolai Nikolaevich several times in company, and among people he was different, unrecognizable.
He was aware of being a visitor in Moscow and had no wish to part with that awareness. Whether he considered Petersburg or some other place his home remained unclear. He was flattered by the role of political fine talker and society charmer. He may have imagined that political salons would be opened in Moscow as in Paris at Mme Roland’s before the Convention.5
He called on his lady friends, hospitable dwellers in quiet Moscow lanes, and most sweetly mocked them and their husbands for their halfway thinking and backwardness, for the habit of judging everything by their own parochial standards. And he now flaunted his newspaper erudition, just as he once had with the Apocrypha and Orphic texts.
It was said that he had left a new young passion behind in Switzerland, half-finished business, a half-written book, and that he would merely dip himself into the stormy whirlpool of the fatherland, and then, if he came up unharmed, would flit off to his Alps again and be seen no more.
He was for the Bolsheviks and often mentioned two left SR names6 as being of one mind with him: the journalist writing under the pseudonym of Miroshka Pomor, and the essayist Sylvia Coterie.
Alexander Alexandrovich grumblingly reproached him:
“It’s simply dreadful how low you’ve sunk, Nikolai Nikolaevich! These Miroshkas of yours. What a pit! And then you’ve got this Lydia Could-be.”
“Coterie,” Nikolai Nikolaevich corrected. “And it’s Sylvia.”
“Well, it’s all the same. Could-be or Potpourri, we won’t stick at words.”
“Sorry, but all the same it’s Coterie,” Nikolai Nikolaevich patiently insisted. He and Alexander Alexandrovich exchanged such speeches as:
“What are we arguing about? It’s simply a shame to have to demonstrate such truths. It’s like ABC. The main mass of people have led an unthinkable existence for centuries. Take any history book. Whatever it’s called, feudalism, or serfdom, or capitalism and factory industry, the unnaturalness and injustice of such an order have long been noted, and the revolution has long been prepared that will lead the people towards the light and put everything in its place.
“You know that a partial renovation of the old is unsuitable here, what’s needed is to break it radically. Maybe that will cause the building to collapse. Well, what of it? Just because it’s frightening, it doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. It’s a question of time. How can you argue against that?”
“Eh, that’s not the point. I’m not talking about that, am I?” Alexander Alexandrovich would get angry and the argument would flare up.
“Your Potpourris and Miroshkas are people without conscience. They say one thing and do another. And then, too, where’s the logic here? There’s no coherence. No, wait, I’ll show you right now.”
And he would start looking for some magazine with a contrary article, pulling open his desk drawers and slamming them shut, and rousing his eloquence with this noisy fussing about.
Alexander Alexandrovich liked to be hampered by something when he talked, so that the impediment would justify his mumbling pauses, his hems and haws. Loquaciousness would come over him while he was searching for something he had lost, for instance, when he was looking for his second galosh in the semidarkness of the front hall, or when he was standing on the bathroom threshold with a towel over his shoulder, or as he was passing a heavy platter across the table, or while he was pouring glasses of wine for his guests.
Yuri Andreevich listened to his father-in-law with delight. He adored the old Moscow singsong speech he knew so well, with the Gromekos’ soft, slightly guttural rs, like a cat’s purring.
Alexander Alexandrovich’s upper lip with its trim little mustache protruded slightly over the lower one. The bow tie stood out on his chest in the same way. There was something in common between the lip and the tie, and it lent Alexander Alexandrovich a certain touching, trustfully childish quality.
Late at night, just before the guests’ departure, Shura Schlesinger appeared. She came straight from some meeting, in a jacket and worker’s visored cap, walked into the room with resolute strides, shook everyone’s hand in turn, and in the same motion abandoned herself to reproaches and accusations.
“Hello, Tonya. Hello, Sanechka. Anyhow it’s swinishness, you must agree. I hear from everywhere, he’s here, the whole of Moscow is talking about it, and I’m the last to learn it from you. Well, to hell with you. Obviously, I don’t deserve it. Where is he, the long-awaited one? Let me through. You’re standing around him like a wall. Well, hello! Good for you, good for you. I’ve read it. I don’t understand a thing, but it’s brilliant. You can see it straight off. Hello, Nikolai Nikolaevich. I’ll come back to you at once, Yurochka. I must have a big, special talk with you. Hello, young people. Ah, Gogochka, you’re here, too? Goosey Goosey Gander, whither do you wander?”
The last exclamation referred to the Gromekos’ distant relation Gogochka, a zealous admirer of all the rising powers, who for being silly and laughter-prone was known as Goosey, and for being tall and skinny—the Tapeworm.
“So you’re all eating and drinking here? I’ll catch up with you right away. Ah, ladies and gentlemen! You know nothing, you suspect nothing! What’s going on in the world! Such things are happening! Go to some real local meeting with nonfictional workers, with nonfictional soldiers, not out of books. Try to make a peep there about war to a victorious conclusion. You’l
l get your victorious conclusion!7 I was just listening to a sailor! Yurochka, you’d go out of your mind! Such passion! Such integrity!”
Shura Schlesinger was interrupted. They all shouted with no rhyme or reason. She sat down beside Yuri Andreevich, took him by the hand, and, bringing her face close to his, so as to outshout the others, shouted without raising or lowering her voice, as through a speaking trumpet:
“Come with me some day, Yurochka. I’ll show you the people. You must, you must touch the earth, remember, like Antaeus. Why are you goggling your eyes? It seems I surprise you? I’m an old warhorse, an old Bestuzhevist,8 didn’t you know, Yurochka? I’ve known preliminary detention, I’ve fought at the barricades. Of course! What did you think? Oh, we don’t know the people! I’ve come straight from there, from the thick of them. I’m setting up a library for them.”
She had already taken a drop and was obviously getting tipsy. But Yuri Andreevich also had a clamor in his head. He did not notice how Shura Schlesinger turned up at one end of the room and he at the other, at the head of the table. He was standing and, by all tokens, beyond his own expectations, speaking. He did not obtain silence all at once.
“Ladies and gentlemen … I want … Misha! Gogochka! … But what else can I do, Tonya, when they don’t listen? Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to say a couple of words. Something unheard-of, something unprecedented is approaching. Before it overtakes us, here is my wish for you. When it comes, God grant that we do not lose each other and do not lose our souls. Gogochka, you can shout hurrah afterwards. I haven’t finished. Stop talking in the corners and listen carefully.
“By the third year of the war a conviction has been formed in the people that sooner or later the boundary between the front and the rear will be effaced, the sea of blood will come to everyone and flood those who sat it out and entrenched themselves. That flood is the revolution.
“In the course of it, it might seem to you, as to us at the war, that life has ceased, everything personal is over, nothing happens in the world any more except killing and dying, and if we survive till there are notes and memoirs of this time, and we read those recollections, we will realize that in these five or ten years we have lived through more than some do in a whole century.
Doctor Zhivago Page 23
