15
He was delirious for two weeks with some breaks. He dreamed that Tonya put the two Sadovaya streets on his desk, Sadovaya-Karetnaya to the left and Sadovaya-Triumphalnaya to the right, and moved his desk lamp close to them, hot, searching, orange. The streets became light. He could work. And now he is writing.
He is writing heatedly and with extraordinary success something he had always wanted to write and should long ago have written, but never could, and now it is coming out well. And only occasionally is he hindered by a boy with narrow Kirghiz eyes, in an unbuttoned reindeer coat like they wear in Siberia or the Urals.
It is perfectly clear that this boy is the spirit of his death, or, to put it simply, is his death. But how can he be death, when he is helping him to write a poem, can there be any benefit from death, can there be any help from death?
He is writing a poem not about the Resurrection and not about the Entombment, but about the days that passed between the one and the other. He is writing the poem “Disarray.”
He had always wanted to describe how, in the course of three days, a storm of black, wormy earth besieges, assaults the immortal incarnation of love, hurling itself at him with its clods and lumps, just as the breaking waves of the sea come rushing at the coast and bury it. How for three days the black earthy storm rages, advances, and recedes.
And two rhymed lines kept pursuing him: “Glad to take up” and “Have to wake up.”
Hell, and decay, and decomposition, and death are glad to take up, and yet, together with them, spring, and Mary Magdalene,13 and life are also glad to take up. And—have to wake up. He has to wake up and rise. He has to resurrect.
16
He began to recover. At first, blissfully, he sought no connections between things, he admitted everything, remembered nothing, was surprised at nothing. His wife fed him white bread and butter, gave him tea with sugar, made him coffee. He forgot that this was impossible now and was glad of the tasty food, as of poetry and fairy tales, which were lawful and admissible in convalescence. But when he began to reflect for the first time, he asked his wife:
“Where did you get it?”
“All from your Granya.”
“What Granya?”
“Granya Zhivago.”
“Granya Zhivago?”
“Why, yes, your brother Evgraf, from Omsk. Your half brother. While you were lying unconscious, he kept visiting us.”
“In a reindeer coat?”
“Yes, yes. So you noticed him through your unconsciousness? He ran into you on the stairs of some house, I know, he told me. He knew it was you and wanted to introduce himself, but you put a scare into him! He adores you, can’t read enough of you. He digs up such things! Rice, raisins, sugar! He’s gone back to his parts. And he’s calling us there. He’s so strange, mysterious. I think he has some sort of love affair with the authorities. He says we should leave the big city for a year or two, ‘to sit on the earth.’ I asked his advice about the Krügers’ place. He strongly recommends it. So that we could have a kitchen garden and a forest nearby. We can’t just perish so obediently, like sheep.”
In April of that year the whole Zhivago family set out for the far-off Urals, to the former estate of Varykino near the town of Yuriatin.
Part Seven
ON THE WAY
1
The last days of March came, days of the first warmth, false harbingers of spring, after which each year an intense cold spell sets in.
In the Gromeko house hurried preparations were being made for the journey. To the numerous inhabitants, whose density in the house was now greater than that of sparrows in the street, this bustle was explained as a general cleaning before Easter.
Yuri Andreevich was against the trip. He did not interfere with the preparations, because he considered the undertaking unfeasible and hoped that at the decisive moment it would fall through. But the thing moved ahead and was near completion. The time came to talk seriously.
He once again expressed his doubts to his wife and father-in-law at a family council especially organized for that purpose.
“So you think I’m not right, and, consequently, we’re going?” he concluded his objections. His wife took the floor:
“You say, weather it out for a year or two, during that time new land regulations will be established, it will be possible to ask for a piece of land near Moscow and start a kitchen garden. But how to survive in the meantime, you don’t suggest. Yet that is the most interesting thing, that is precisely what it would be desirable to hear.”
“Absolute raving,” Alexander Alexandrovich supported his daughter.
“Very well, I surrender,” Yuri Andreevich agreed. “The only thing that pulls me up short is the total uncertainty. We set out, eyes shut, for we don’t know where, not having the least notion of the place. Of three persons who lived in Varykino, two, mama and grandmother, are no longer alive, and the third, Grandfather Krüger, if he’s alive, is being held hostage and behind bars.
“In the last year of the war, he did something with the forests and factories, sold them for the sake of appearances to some straw man, or to some bank, or signed them away conditionally to someone. What do we know about that deal? Whose land is it now—that is, not in the sense of property, I don’t care, but who is responsible for it? What department? Are they cutting the forest? Are the factories working? Finally, who is in power there, and who will be by the time we get there?
“For you, the safety anchor is Mikulitsyn, whose name you like so much to repeat. But who told you that the old manager is still alive and still in Varykino? And what do we know about him, except that grandfather had difficulty pronouncing his name, which is why we remember it?
“But why argue? You’re set on going. I’m with you. We must find out how it’s done now. There’s no point in putting it off.”
2
Yuri Andreevich went to the Yaroslavsky train station to make inquiries about it.
The flow of departing people was contained by a boardwalk with handrails laid across the halls, on the stone floors of which lay people in gray overcoats, who tossed and turned, coughed and spat, and when they talked to each other, each time it was incongruously loudly, not taking into account the force with which their voices resounded under the echoing vaults.
For the most part they were patients who had been sick with typhus. In view of the overcrowding of the hospitals, they were discharged the day after the crisis. As a doctor, Yuri Andreevich had run into such necessity himself, but he did not know that these unfortunates were so many and that the train stations served them as shelters.
“Get sent on an official mission,” a porter in a white apron told him. “You have to come and check every day. Trains are a rarity now, a matter of chance. And of course it goes without saying …” (the porter rubbed his thumb against his first two fingers). “Some flour or whatever. To grease the skids. Well, and this here …” (he upended an invisible shot glass) “… is a most sacred thing.”
3
Around that time Alexander Alexandrovich was invited to the Supreme Council of National Economy for several special consultations, and Yuri Andreevich to a gravely ill member of the government. Both were remunerated in the best form of that time—coupons to the first closed distribution center then established.1
It was located in some garrison warehouse by the St. Simon monastery. The doctor and his father-in-law crossed two inner courtyards, the church’s and the garrison’s, and straight from ground level, with no threshold, entered under the stone vault of a deep, gradually descending cellar. Its widening far end was partitioned crosswise by a long counter, at which a calm, unhurried storekeeper weighed and handed over provisions, occasionally going back to the storeroom for something, and crossing out items on a list with a broad stroke of the pencil as he handed them over.
There were few customers.
“Your bags,” the storekeeper said to the professor and the doctor, glancing fleetingly at their invoices.
The two men’s eyes popped out as flour, grain, macaroni, and sugar poured into the covers for little ladies’ cushions and the bigger pillow cases they held open, along with lard, soap, and matches, and also a piece each of something wrapped in paper, which later, at home, turned out to be Caucasian cheese.
Son-in-law and father-in-law hastened to tie the multitude of small bundles into two big knapsacks as quickly as they could, so that their ungrateful pottering would not offend the eyes of the storekeeper, who had overwhelmed them with his magnanimity.
They came out of the cellar into the open air drunk not with animal joy, but with the consciousness that they, too, were not living in this world for nothing, that they were not just blowing smoke, and at home they would deserve the praise and recognition of the young mistress of the house, Tonya.
4
While the men disappeared into various institutions, soliciting missions and permanent residency papers for the rooms they were leaving, Antonina Alexandrovna was busy selecting things to be packed.
She walked anxiously about the three rooms of the house now assigned to the Gromeko family, and endlessly weighed each little trifle in her hand before placing it in the general pile of things destined to be packed.
Only an insignificant portion of their belongings went as the travelers’ personal luggage; the rest was kept in reserve as a means of exchange, necessary for the journey and on their arrival in the place.
Spring air came through the open vent window, tasting of a freshly bitten French loaf. Outside, cocks crowed and the voices of playing children were heard. The more they aired the room, the clearer became the smell of camphor, given off by the winter stuff removed from the trunks.
Concerning what ought to be taken and what renounced, there existed a whole theory worked out by those who had left earlier, whose observations had spread in the circle of their acquaintances who stayed behind.
These precepts, shaped into brief, indisputable instructions, were lodged with such distinctness in Antonina Alexandrovna’s head that she fancied she heard them from outside, together with the chirping of the sparrows and the noise of the playing children, as if some secret voice from the street were prompting her.
“Cloth, cloth,” said these considerations, “best of all in lengths, but there are inspections along the way, and it’s dangerous. Cut pieces quickly tacked together are more prudent. Fabric in general, textiles, clothes are acceptable, preferably outer wear, not too worn. As little rubbish as possible, no heavy things. Given the frequent need to carry it all yourselves, forget about hampers and trunks. After sorting them a hundred times, tie a few things into bundles light enough for a woman or a child. Salt and tobacco are expedient, as practice has shown, though the risk is considerable. Money in kerenki.2 Documents are hardest of all.” And so on and so forth.
5
On the eve of departure a snowstorm arose. The wind swept gray clouds of spinning snowflakes up into the sky, and they came back to earth in a white whirl, flew into the depths of the dark street, and spread a white shroud over it.
Everything in the house was packed. The supervision of the rooms and the belongings remaining in them was entrusted to an elderly married couple, Egorovna’s Moscow relations, whom Antonina Alexandrovna had met the preceding winter, when she arranged through them to exchange old things, clothes and unneeded furniture, for firewood and potatoes.
It was impossible to rely on Markel. At the police station, which he chose as his political club, he did not complain that the former house owners, the Gromekos, sucked his blood, but he reproached them after the fact for keeping him in the darkness of ignorance, deliberately concealing from him that the world descended from the apes.
Antonina Alexandrovna took this couple, Egorovna’s relations, a former commercial employee and his wife, around the rooms for a last time, showed them which keys fitted which locks and what had been put where, unlocked and locked the doors of the cupboards together with them, taught them everything and explained everything.
The tables and chairs in the rooms were pushed up against the walls, the bundles for the journey were dragged to one side, the curtains were taken down from all the windows. The snowstorm, more unhindered than in the setting of winter coziness, peeped through the bared windows into the empty rooms. It reminded each of them of something. For Yuri Andreevich it was his childhood and his mother’s death; for Antonina Alexandrovna and Alexander Alexandrovich, it was the death and funeral of Anna Ivanovna. It kept seeming to them that this was their last night in the house, which they would never see again. In that respect they were mistaken, but under the influence of the delusion, which they did not confide to each other, so as not to upset each other, they each went over the life they had spent under that roof and fought back the tears that kept coming to their eyes.
That did not prevent Antonina Alexandrovna from observing social conventions in front of strangers. She kept up an incessant conversation with the woman to whose supervision she was entrusting everything. Antonina Alexandrovna exaggerated the significance of the service rendered her. So as not to repay the favor with black ingratitude, she apologized every other minute, went to the next room, and came back with a present for this person of a scarf, or a little blouse, or a length of cotton or gauze. And all the materials were dark with white checks or polka dots, just as the dark, snowy outside was speckled with white, looking through the bare, curtainless windows on that farewell evening.
6
They were leaving for the station early in the morning. The inhabitants of the house were not up yet at that hour. The tenant Zevorotkina, the usual ringleader of all concerted actions, together now and heave-ho, ran around to the sleeping lodgers, knocking on their doors and shouting: “Attention, comrades! It’s good-bye time! Look lively, look lively! The former Garumekovs are leaving.”
They came pouring out to the hall and porch of the back entrance (the front entrance was now boarded up year-round) and covered its steps like an amphitheater, as if preparing for a group photograph.
The yawning tenants stooped so that the skimpy coats thrown over their shoulders would not fall off, hunched up, and shifted their chilled bare feet hastily thrust into loose felt boots.
Markel had contrived to get plastered on something lethal in that alcohol-less time, and kept toppling against the banisters, which threatened to break under him. He volunteered to carry the things to the station and was offended that his help was rejected. They had a hard time getting rid of him.
It was still dark outside. In the windless air, the snow fell more thickly than the evening before. Big, shaggy flakes floated down lazily and, nearing the ground, seemed to tarry longer, as if hesitating whether to lie down on it or not.
When they came out from their lane to the Arbat, it was a little lighter. Falling snow veiled everything down to the ground with its white, billowing curtain, the hanging fringe of which tangled under the walkers’ feet, so that the sensation of movement was lost and it seemed to them that they were marching in place.
There was not a soul in the street. The travelers from Sivtsev met no one on their way. Soon they were overtaken by an empty cab, the cabby all covered with snow as if he had been dragged through batter, driving a snow-blanched nag, and for a fabulous sum in those years, amounting to less than a kopeck, took all of them and their things into the droshky, except for Yuri Andreevich, who at his own request, light, without luggage, was allowed to go to the station on foot.
7
At the station, Antonina Alexandrovna and her father were already standing in a numberless line, squeezed between the barriers of wooden fences. Boarding was now done not from the platforms, but a good half mile down the tracks, by the exit semaphore, because there were not enough hands to clean the approach to the platforms, half of the station area was covered with ice and refuse, and the trains could not get that far.
Nyusha and Shurochka were not in the crowd with the mother and grandfather. They strolled freely under the enormous
overhanging roof of the entrance, only rarely coming to see if it was time to join the adults. They smelled strongly of kerosene, which had been heavily applied to their ankles, wrists, and necks as protection against typhus lice.
Seeing her husband approaching, Antonina Alexandrovna beckoned to him with her hand, but, not letting him come nearer, she called out from a distance to tell him at which window mandates for official missions were stamped. He went there.
“Show me what kind of seals they gave you,” she asked when he came back. The doctor handed her a wad of folded papers over the barrier.
“That’s a travel warrant for the delegates’ car,” Antonina Alexandrovna’s neighbor said behind her, making out over her shoulder the stamp on the document. The neighbor in front, one of those formalist legalists who in every circumstance know all the rules in the world, explained in more detail:
“With that seal you have the right to demand seats in a first-class, in other words, in a passenger coach, if there are any on the train.”
The case was subjected to discussion by the whole line. Voices arose:
“Go find any first-class coaches. That’d be too fat. Nowadays you can say thank you if you get a seat on a freight car buffer.”
“Don’t listen to them, you’re on official business. Here, I’ll explain to you. At the present time separate trains have been canceled, and there’s one combined one, which is for the military, and for convicts, and for cattle, and for people. The tongue can say whatever it likes—it’s pliable. But instead of confusing somebody with talk, you ought to explain so he’ll understand.”
Doctor Zhivago Page 27
