“Did you see the note on the desk?” asked his wife.
“From the head of the hospital? They spoke to me, I know about it. It’s a call to a sick woman. I’ll certainly go. I’ll just rest a little and go. It’s quite far. Somewhere by the Triumphal Arch. I wrote down the address.”
“They’re offering a strange honorarium. Did you see? Read it anyway. A bottle of German cognac or a pair of lady’s stockings for the visit. Some enticement! Who can it be? Bad tone, and total ignorance of our present-day life. Nouveaux riches of some sort.”
“Yes, a state purveyor.”
Along with concessionaires and authorized agents, this title was used to designate small private entrepreneurs, for whom the state authorities, having abolished private trade, made small allowances at moments of economic crisis, concluding contracts and deals with them for various provisions.
Their number did not include the fallen heads of old firms, proprietors on a grand scale. They never recovered from the blow they received. Into this category fell the ephemeral dealers, stirred up from the bottom by war and revolution, new and alien people without roots.
After drinking boiled water with saccharine, whitened by milk, the doctor went to the sick woman.
The sidewalks and roadways were buried under deep snow, which covered the streets from one row of houses to the other. In places the covering of snow reached the ground-floor windows. Across the whole width of this space moved silent, half-alive shadows, lugging some sort of meager provisions on their backs or pulling them on sleds. Almost no one drove.
On houses here and there old signboards still remained. The grocery shops and cooperatives placed under them, with no relation to their content, stood locked, their windows barred or boarded up, and empty.
They were locked and empty not only owing to the lack of goods, but because the reorganization of all sides of life, embracing trade as well, was still being carried out in the most general terms, and these boarded-up shops, as minute particulars, had not yet been touched by it.
11
The house that the doctor had been called to turned out to be at the end of Brestskaya Street, near the Tver Gate.
It was a barracklike brick building of antediluvian construction, with an inner courtyard and wooden galleries running in three tiers around the inside walls of the structure.
The tenants were holding a previously arranged general meeting with the participation of a woman representative of the district soviet, when a military commission suddenly appeared on a round to inspect permits to keep arms and confiscate those without permit. The leader of the round asked the delegate not to leave, assuring her that the search would not take much time, the tenants who had been checked would gradually come back, and the interrupted meeting would soon be able to resume.
The round was nearing its end, and the turn had just come for the apartment where the doctor was awaited when he came to the gate of the house. A soldier with a rifle on a string, who was standing guard by one of the stairways leading to the galleries, flatly refused to let Yuri Andreevich pass, but the commander of the detachment interfered in their dispute. He said the doctor should not be hindered and agreed to hold up the search until he had examined the sick woman.
The doctor was met by the owner of the apartment, a courteous young man with a dull, swarthy complexion and dark, melancholy eyes. He was upset by many circumstances: his wife’s illness, the impending search, and the supernatural respect he nursed for medicine and its representatives.
To spare the doctor work and time, the owner tried to speak as briefly as he could, but precisely this haste made his speech long and confused.
The apartment, with a mixture of luxury and cheapness, was furnished with things bought slapdash with the aim of investing money in something stable. Furniture in incomplete sets was supplemented by single objects that were missing a second to make up the pair.
The owner of the apartment thought his wife had some sort of nervous ailment from fright. With many irrelevant digressions, he told how they had bought for next to nothing an old, broken clock with musical chimes, which had not worked for a long time. They had bought it only as a curiosity of clock-making craftsmanship, as a rarity (the sick woman’s husband took the doctor to the next room to show it to him). They even doubted it could be fixed. And suddenly the clock, which had not been wound for years, started up by itself, started up, rang out an intricate minuet on its little bells, and stopped. His wife was terrified, the young man said, decided that her last hour had struck, and now she lies there, raves, doesn’t eat, doesn’t drink, doesn’t recognize him.
“So you think it’s nervous shock?” Yuri Andreevich asked with doubt in his voice. “Take me to the patient.”
They went into the next room with its porcelain chandelier and two mahogany bed tables on either side of a wide double bed. At the edge of it, the blanket pulled up over her chin, lay a small woman with big, dark eyes. Seeing the men coming in, she waved them away, freeing an arm from under the blanket, on which the wide sleeve of a robe slid up to the armpit. She did not recognize her husband and, as if there were no one in the room, started singing in a soft voice the beginning of a sad little song, which moved her so much that she burst into tears and, sobbing like a child, began asking to be taken home somewhere. The doctor tried to approach her from different sides, but she resisted examination and each time turned her back on him.
“She does need to be examined,” said Yuri Andreevich. “But, all the same, I can see quite clearly. It’s typhus, and a very grave form of it at that. She’s suffering greatly, poor thing. I’d advise putting her in the hospital. It’s not a matter of comfort, which you could provide for her, but of constant medical attention, which is necessary during the first weeks of the illness. Can you find some sort of transportation, hire a cab or at least a cart, to take the patient, making sure that she’s well wrapped up beforehand? I’ll write an order for you.”
“I can. I’ll try. But wait. Can it really be typhus? How terrible!”
“Unfortunately.”
“I’m afraid to lose her if I let her go from here. Isn’t there some way you could treat her at home, visiting her as often as possible? I’ll pay whatever fee you like.”
“I’ve already explained to you. The important thing is that she have constant attention. Listen. I’m giving you good advice. Dig up a cab somewhere, and I’ll write out an accompanying note for her. It would be best to do it through your house committee. The order will have to have the house seal, and there will be some other formalities.”
12
Having gone through the interrogation and search, the tenants returned one after another, in warm shawls and coats, to the unheated quarters of the former egg storage, now occupied by the house committee.
At one end of the room stood an office desk and several chairs, though not enough to seat so many people. Therefore, in addition to them, long, empty egg crates, turned upside down, were placed around them like benches. A mountain of such crates was piled up to the ceiling at the other end of the room. There in a corner was a swept-up heap of frozen wood shavings stuck together in lumps by the spilt insides of broken eggs. Rats noisily messed about in this heap, occasionally running out to the open space of the stone floor and hiding again in the shavings.
Each time this happened, a loud and fat-bloated woman jumped up on one of the crates with a shriek. She pulled up the corner of her skirt with coquettishly splayed fingers, rapidly stamped her feet in fashionable ladies’ high boots, and in a deliberately hoarse voice, affecting drunkenness, shouted:
“Olka, Olka, you’ve got rats running around here. Ooh, away, you vile thing! Aha, he understands, the scum! He’s angry. Ay-yay-yay, he’s climbing up the crate! Don’t let him get under my skirt! Oh, I’m afraid, I’m afraid! Turn your heads, gentlemen. Sorry, I forgot, you’re not gentlemen now, you’re comrade citizens.”
The noisy female was wearing an unbuttoned astrakhan sack. Under it her double chin,
ample bosom, and belly in a tight silk dress undulated in three layers, like quivering custard. Clearly, she had once passed for a lioness among third-rate shopkeepers and their clerks. She could barely open the slits of her piglike eyes with their swollen eyelids. In time immemorial some rival had thrown a vial of acid at her, but had missed, and only two or three drops had etched light traces on her left cheek and the left corner of her mouth, almost seductive in their inconspicuousness.
“Don’t yell, Khrapugina. It’s simply impossible to work,” said the woman at the desk, the representative of the district soviet, elected to chair the meeting.
She was well-known from long ago to the old-timers of the house, and she knew them well herself. Before the start of the meeting, she had an unofficial, half-whispered conversation with Fatima, the old caretaker of the house, who had once been cooped up with her husband and children in the dirty basement, but now had moved with her daughter to two bright rooms on the second floor.
“Well, how are things, Fatima?” asked the chairwoman.
Fatima complained that managing such a big and densely populated house was too much for her alone, and there was no help from anywhere, because nobody observed the obligations of tidying the courtyard and the street, which were distributed by apartment.
“Don’t worry, Fatima, we’ll blunt their horns, I assure you. What kind of committee is that? Is it conceivable? Hidden criminal elements, dubious morals living without registration. We’ll give them the boot and elect another one. I’ll get you made house manager, only don’t start kicking.”
The caretaker begged the chairwoman not to do that, but the latter was not even listening. She looked around the room, found that enough people had gathered, called for silence, and opened the meeting with a short introductory speech. After condemning the inactivity of the former house committee, she proposed the nominating of candidates for the election of a new one and went on to other questions. On finishing that, she said incidentally:
“Well, so that’s that, comrades. Let’s speak frankly. Your building’s roomy, suitable for a hostel. It happens, when delegates come for a conference, there’s nowhere to put people up. It has been decided to place the building at the disposal of the district soviet as a house for visitors and give it the name of Comrade Tiverzin, who lived in this house before his exile, which is a well-known fact. Do you have any objections? Now to the schedule for vacating the house. It’s not an urgent measure, you still have a year’s time. Working people will be relocated to lodgings provided for them, nonworkers are put on notice that they must find their own, and are given a term of twelve months.”
“But who here is a nonworker? We have no nonworkers! We’re all workers,” came cries from all sides, and one strained voice especially: “That’s great-power chauvinism! All nationalities are equal now! I know what you’re hinting at!”
“Not all at once! I simply don’t know who to answer. What nationalities? What have nationalities got to do with it, Citizen Valdyrkin? For instance, Khrapugina’s no nationality, but she’ll also be evicted.”
“Evicted! We’ll see how you evict me. Flattened old couch! Ten-jobs!” Khrapugina shouted out the senseless nicknames she gave to the woman delegate in the heat of the quarrel.
“What a viper! What a hellcat! You have no shame!” The caretaker became indignant.
“Don’t mix into it, Fatima, I can stand up for myself. Stop, Khrapugina. Reach you a hand, and you bite it off. Shut up, I said, or I’ll turn you over to the organs immediately and not wait till they pick you up for making moonshine and running a dive.”
The noise reached the limit. No one was given a chance to speak. Just then the doctor came into the storeroom. He asked the first man he ran into by the door to point out someone from the house committee. The man put his hands to his mouth like a megaphone and, above the noise and racket, shouted syllable by syllable:
“Ga-li-ul-li-na! Come here. Somebody’s asking for you.”
The doctor could not believe his ears. A thin, slightly stooping woman, the caretaker, came over. The doctor was struck by the resemblance of mother and son. But he did not yet give himself away. He said:
“One of your tenants here has come down with typhus” (he gave the woman’s name). “Precautions must be taken to keep the infection from spreading. Besides, the sick woman will have to be taken to the hospital. I’ll write out a document, which the house committee will have to certify. How and where can I do it?”
The caretaker understood the question as referring to transporting the sick woman, not to writing out the accompanying document.
“A droshky will come from the district soviet to pick up Comrade Demina,” said Galiullina. “Comrade Demina’s a kind person, I’ll tell her, she’ll give it up to you. Don’t worry, comrade doctor, we’ll transport your sick woman.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that! I just need a corner where I can write out an order. But if there’ll be a droshky … Excuse me, but are you the mother of Lieutenant Galiullin, Osip Gimazetdinovich? I served with him at the front.”
The caretaker shuddered all over and turned pale. Seizing the doctor’s hand, she said:
“Let’s step outside. We can talk in the courtyard.”
As soon as they crossed the threshold, she began hurriedly:
“Shh. God forbid anyone hears. Don’t ruin me. Yusupka’s gone bad. Judge for yourself, who is Yusupka? Yusupka was an apprentice, a workman. Yusup should understand, simple people are much better off now, a blind man can see that, there’s nothing to talk about. I don’t know what you think, maybe you can do it, but for Yusupka it’s wrong, God won’t forgive it. Yusup’s father died a soldier, killed, and how—no face left, no arms, no legs.”
She was unable to go on speaking and, waving her hand, waited for her agitation to subside. Then she continued:
“Let’s go. I’ll arrange the droshky for you now. I know who you are. He was here for two days, he told me. He said you know Lara Guisharova. She was a nice girl. She came here to see us, I remember. But who knows what she’s like now. Can it be that the masters go against the masters? But for Yusupka it’s wrong. Let’s go and ask for the droshky. Comrade Demina will let us have it. And do you know who Comrade Demina is? Olya Demina, who used to work as a seamstress for Lara Guisharova’s mother. That’s who she is. Also from here. From this house. Let’s go.”
13
It was already growing quite dark. Night lay all around. Only the white circle of light from Demina’s pocket flashlight leaped some five steps ahead of them from one snowdrift to another, and confused more than lit up the way for the walkers. Night lay all around, and the house stayed behind, where so many people had known her, where she used to come as a girl, where, as the story went, her future husband, Antipov, was brought up as a boy.
Demina addressed him with patronizing jocularity:
“Will you really get further without the flashlight? Eh? Otherwise I’ll give it to you, comrade doctor. Yes. Once I was badly smitten with her, I loved her to distraction, when we were girls. They had a sewing establishment here, a workshop. I lived with them as an apprentice. I saw her this year. Passing through. She was passing through Moscow. I say to her, where are you going, fool? Stay here. We’ll live together, you’ll find work. No way! She doesn’t want to. That’s her business. She married Pashka with her head, not her heart, and since then she’s been a bit off. She left.”
“What do you think of her?”
“Careful. It’s slippery here. How many times have I told them not to pour slops in front of the door—like sand against the wind. What do I think of her? What do you mean, think? What’s there to think? I have no time. Here’s where I live. I concealed it from her: her brother, who was in the army, has likely been shot. But her mother, my former boss, I’ll probably save, I’m interceding for her. Well, I go in here, good-bye.”
And so they parted. The beam of Demina’s flashlight poked into the narrow stone stairway and ran ahead, lighting the soile
d walls of the dirty way up, and darkness surrounded the doctor. To the right lay Sadovaya-Triumphalnaya Street, to the left Sadovaya-Karetnaya. In the black distance over the black snow, these were no longer streets in the ordinary sense of the word, but like two forest clearings in the dense taiga of stretched-out stone buildings, as in the impassable thickets of the Urals or Siberia.
At home there was light, warmth.
“Why so late?” asked Antonina Alexandrovna, and, not letting him reply, she went on:
“A curious thing happened while you were gone. An inexplicable oddity. I forgot to tell you. Yesterday papa broke the alarm clock and was in despair. The last clock in the house. He tried to repair it, poked at it, poked, with no result. The clockmaker at the corner asked three pounds of bread—an unheard-of price. What to do? Papa was completely downcast. And suddenly, imagine, an hour ago comes a piercing, deafening ring. The alarm clock! You see, it upped and started!”
“So my typhus hour has struck,” joked Yuri Andreevich, and he told his family about the sick woman and her chimes.
14
But he came down with typhus much later. In the meantime, the distress of the Zhivago family reached the limit. They were in want and were perishing. Yuri Andreevich sought out the party man he had once saved, the robbery victim. He did all he could for the doctor. However, the civil war had begun. His protector was traveling all the time. Besides, in accordance with his convictions, the man considered the hardships of the time natural and concealed the fact that he himself was starving.
Yuri Andreevich tried turning to the purveyor by the Tver Gate. But in the months that had passed, even his tracks had grown cold, and of his wife, who had recovered, there was nothing to be heard. The complement of tenants in the house had changed. Demina was at the front, the manager Galiullina was not there when Yuri Andreevich came.
Once by means of a coupon he received firewood at the official price, but had to transport it from the Vindava Station. He accompanied the driver and his nag, hauling this unexpected wealth down the endless Meshchanskaya Street. Suddenly the doctor noticed that Meshchanskaya had ceased somehow to be Meshchanskaya, that he was reeling and his legs would not support him. He realized that he was in for it, things were bad, and it was typhus. The driver picked up the fallen man. The doctor did not remember how they brought him home, somehow placed on top of the firewood.
Doctor Zhivago Page 26
