Before them stretched a field. It was crisscrossed in various directions by branch lines. Telegraph poles went off across it with seven-mile strides, dropping below the skyline. A wide, paved road wound out its ribbon, rivaling the railways in beauty. First it disappeared beyond the horizon, then momentarily showed the wavy arc of a turn. And vanished again.
“Our famous highway. Laid across the whole of Siberia. Much sung by convicts. Base for the local partisans. Generally, it’s not bad here. You’ll settle in, get used to it. Come to love our town’s curiosities. Our water hydrants. At the intersections. Women’s clubs in winter under the open sky.”
“We won’t be staying in town. In Varykino.”
“I know. Your wife told me. Never mind. You’ll come to town on errands. I guessed who she was at first sight. The eyes. The nose. The forehead. The image of Krüger. Her grandfather all over. In these parts everybody remembers Krüger.”
Tall, round-sided oil tanks showed red at the ends of the field. Industrial billboards perched on tall posts. One of them, which twice crossed the doctor’s eye, had written on it: “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers.”
“It was a solid firm. Produced excellent agricultural implements.”
“I didn’t hear. What did you say?”
“The firm, I said. Understand? The firm. Produced agricultural implements. A joint-stock company. My father was a shareholder.”
“You said he kept an inn.”
“An inn’s an inn. The one doesn’t interfere with the other. And he was no fool, he placed his money in the best enterprises. Invested in the Giant picture house.”
“It seems you’re proud of it?”
“Of my father’s shrewdness? What else!”
“And what about your social democracy?”
“What’s that got to do with it, may I ask? Where is it said that a man who reasons as a Marxist has to be a mush-minded driveler? Marxism is a positive science, a teaching about reality, a philosophy of the historical situation.”
“Marxism and science? To argue about that with a man I hardly know is imprudent, to say the least. But come what may. Marxism has too little control of itself to be a science. Sciences are better balanced. Marxism and objectivity? I don’t know of a movement more isolated within itself and further from the facts than Marxism. Each of us is concerned with testing himself by experience, but people in power, for the sake of the fable of their own infallibility, turn away from the truth with all their might. Politics says nothing to me. I don’t like people who are indifferent to truth.”
Samdevyatov considered the doctor’s words the whimsicalities of a witty eccentric. He merely chuckled and did not contradict him.
Meanwhile the train was being shunted. Each time it reached the exit switch by the semaphore, an elderly switchwoman with a milk jug tied to her belt shifted the knitting she was doing from one hand to the other, bent down, turned the disk of the shunting switch, and made the train back up. While it slowly moved backwards, she straightened up and shook her fist at it.
Samdevyatov took her movement to his own account. “Who is she doing it to?” he fell to thinking. “There’s something familiar. Isn’t she Tuntseva? Looks like her. But what’s with me? It’s hardly her. She’s too old for Glasha. And what have I got to do with it? There are upheavals in Mother Russia, confusion on the railways, the dear heart’s probably having a hard time, and it’s my fault, I get a fist shaken at me. Ah, well, devil take her, why should I rack my brains over her!”
Finally, after waving the flag and shouting something to the engineer, the switchwoman let the train pass the semaphore and go freely on its way, and when the fourteenth freight car sped by her, she stuck her tongue out at the babblers on the floor of the car, who were such an eyesore to her. And again Samdevyatov fell to thinking.
5
When the environs of the burning city, the cylindrical tanks, the telegraph poles and advertisements dropped behind and disappeared and other views came along, woods, hills, between which the windings of the highway frequently appeared, Samdevyatov said:
“Let’s get up and go our ways. I get off soon. And you, too, one stop later. Watch out you don’t miss it.”
“You must know this area thoroughly?”
“Prodigiously. A hundred miles around. I’m a lawyer. Twenty years of practice. Cases. Travels.”
“And up to the present?”
“What else.”
“What sort of cases can be tried now?”
“Anything you like. Old unfinished deals, operations, unfulfilled obligations—up to the ears, it’s terrible.”
“Haven’t such relations been abolished?”
“Nominally, of course. But in reality there’s a need at the same time for mutually exclusive things. The nationalization of enterprises, and fuel for the city soviet, and wagon transport for the provincial council of national economy. And along with all that everybody wants to live. Peculiarities of the transitional period, when theory doesn’t coincide with practice yet. Here there’s a need for quick-witted, resourceful people with my kind of character. Blessed is the man who walketh not, who takes a heap and ignores the lot.4 And a punch in the nose, and so it goes, as my father used to say. Half the province feeds off me. I’ll be coming to see you on the matter of wood supplies. By horse, naturally, once he’s on his feet. My last one went lame. If he was healthy, I wouldn’t be jolting around on this old junk. It drags along, curse it, an engine in name only. I’ll be of use to you when you get to Varykino. I know your Mikulitsyns like the palm of my hand.”
“Do you know the purpose of our trip, our intentions?”
“Approximately. I can guess. I have a notion. Man’s eternal longing for the land. The dream of living by the work of your own hands.”
“And so? It seems you don’t approve? What do you say?”
“A naïve, idyllic dream. But why not? God help you. But I don’t believe in it. Utopian. Homemade.”
“How will Mikulitsyn treat us?”
“He won’t let you cross the threshold, he’ll drive you out with a broom, and he’ll be right. He’s got bedlam there even without you, a thousand and one nights, factories idle, workers scattered, not a blessed thing in terms of means of existence, no fodder, and suddenly—oh, joy—the deuce brings you along. If he killed you, I wouldn’t blame him.”
“There, you see—you’re a Bolshevik and you yourself don’t deny that this isn’t life, but something unprecedented, phantasmagorical, incongruous.”
“Of course. But it’s a historical inevitability. We have to go through it.”
“Why an inevitability?”
“What, are you a little boy, or are you pretending? Did you drop from the moon or something? Gluttons and parasites rode on the backs of starving laborers, drove them to death, and it should have stayed that way? And the other forms of outrage and tyranny? Don’t you understand the legitimacy of the people’s wrath, their wish to live according to justice, their search for the truth? Or does it seem to you that a radical break could have been achieved in the dumas, by parliamentary ways, and that it can be done without dictatorship?”
“We’re talking about different things, and if we were to argue for a hundred years, we wouldn’t agree on anything. I used to be in a very revolutionary mood, but now I think that we’ll gain nothing by violence. People must be drawn to the good by the good. But that’s not the point. Let’s go back to Mikulitsyn. If that is most likely what awaits us, why should we go there? We ought to swing around.”
“What nonsense. First of all, are the Mikulitsyns the only light in the window? Second, Mikulitsyn is criminally kind, kind in the extreme. He’ll make noise, get his hackles up, then go soft, give you the shirt off his back, share his last crust of bread with you.” And Samdevyatov told this story.
6
“Twenty-five years ago, Mikulitsyn, a student at the Technological Institute, arrived from Petersburg. He was exiled here under police surveillance. Mikulit
syn arrived, got a job as manager at Krüger’s, and married. We had four Tuntsev sisters here, one more than in Chekhov—all the students in Yuriatin courted them—Agrippina, Evdokia, Glafira, and Serafima Severinovna. In a paraphrase of their patronymic, the girls were nicknamed ‘severyanki,’ or ‘northern girls.’ Mikulitsyn married the eldest severyanka.
“Soon a son was born to the couple. As a worshipper of the idea of freedom, the fool of a father christened the boy with the rare name of Liberius. Liberius—Libka in common parlance—grew up a madcap, showing versatile and outstanding abilities. War broke out. Libka faked the date on his birth certificate and, at the age of fifteen, ran off to the front as a volunteer. Agrafena Severinovna, who was generally sickly, could not bear the blow, took to her bed, never got up again, and died two winters ago, just before the revolution.
“The war ended. Liberius returned. Who is he? A heroic lieutenant with three medals, and, well, of course, a thoroughly propagandized Bolshevik delegate from the front. Have you heard of the Forest Brotherhood?”
“No, sorry.”
“Then there’s no sense in telling you. Half the effect is lost. There’s no need to go staring out of the car at the highway. What’s it noted for? At the present time, for the partisans. What are the partisans? The chief cadres of the civil war. Two sources went to make up this force. The political organization that took upon itself the guiding of the revolution, and the low-ranking soldiers, who, after the war was lost, refused to obey the old regime. From the combining of these two things came the partisan army. It’s of motley composition. They’re mostly middle peasants. But alongside them you’ll meet anyone you like. There are poor folk, and defrocked monks, and the sons of kulaks at war with their fathers. There are ideological anarchists, and passportless ragamuffins, and overgrown dunces thrown out of school old enough to get married. There are Austro-German prisoners of war seduced by the promise of freedom and returning home. And so, one of the units of this people’s army of many thousands, known as the Forest Brotherhood, is commanded by Comrade Forester, Libka, Liberius Averkievich, the son of Averky Stepanovich Mikulitsyn.”
“What are you saying?”
“Just what you heard. But to continue. After his wife’s death, Averky Stepanovich married a second time. His new wife, Elena Proklovna, was a schoolgirl, brought straight from the classroom to the altar. Naïve by nature, but also playing at naïveté out of calculation, a young thing, but already playing at being young. To that end she chirps, twitters, poses as an ingénue, a little fool, a lark of the fields. The moment she sees you, she starts testing you: ‘In what year was Suvorov born?’5 ‘List the cases of the equality of triangles.’ And she’s exultant if you fail and put your foot in it. But you’ll be seeing her in a few hours and can check on my description.
“ ‘Himself’ has other weaknesses: his pipe, seminary archaisms: ‘in this wise,’ ‘suffer it to be so,’ ‘all things whatsoever.’ His calling was to have been the sea. At the institute, he was in the shipbuilding line. He retained it in his appearance and habits. He’s clean-shaven, doesn’t take the pipe out of his mouth the whole day, speaks through his teeth, amiably, unhurriedly. The jutting lower jaw of a smoker, cold, gray eyes. Ah, yes, I nearly forgot one detail: an SR, elected from the region to the Constituent Assembly.”6
“But that’s very important. It means father and son are at daggers drawn? Political enemies?”
“Nominally, of course. Though in reality the taiga doesn’t make war on Varykino. But to continue. The other Tuntsev girls, Averky Stepanovich’s sisters-in-law, are in Yuriatin to this day. Eternal virgins. Times have changed, and so have the girls.
“The oldest of the remaining ones, Avdotya Severinovna, is the librarian in the city reading room. A sweet, dark-haired girl, bashful in the extreme. Blushes like a peony for no reason at all. The silence in the reading room is sepulchral, tense. She’s attacked by a chronic cold, sneezes up to twenty times, is ready to fall through the floor from shame. What are you to do? From nervousness.
“The middle one, Glafira Severinovna, is the blessing among the sisters. A sharp girl, a wonder of a worker. Doesn’t scorn any task. The general opinion, with one voice, is that the partisan leader Forester took after this aunt. You see her there in a sewing shop or as a stocking maker. Before you can turn around, she’s already a hairdresser. Did you pay attention to the switchwoman at the Yuriatin train station, shaking her fist and sticking her tongue out at us? Well, I thought, fancy that, Glafira got herself hired as a watchman on the railroad. But it seems it wasn’t her. Too old for Glafira.
“The youngest, Simushka, is the family’s cross, its trial. An educated girl, well-read. Studied philosophy, loved poetry. But then, in the years of the revolution, under the influence of the general elation, street processions, speeches from a platform on the square, she got touched in the head, fell into a religious mania. The sisters leave for work, lock the door, and she slips out the window and goes roaming the streets, gathering the public, preaching the Second Coming, the end of the world. But here I’m talking away and we’re coming to my station. Yours is the next one. Get ready.”
When Anfim Efimovich got off the train, Antonina Alexandrovna said:
“I don’t know how you look at it, but I think this man was sent to us by fate. It seems to me he’ll play some beneficial role in our existence.”
“That may well be, Tonechka. But I’m not glad that you’re recognized by your resemblance to your grandfather and that he’s so well remembered here. And Strelnikov, too, as soon as I mentioned Varykino, put in caustically: ‘Varykino? Krüger’s factories? His little relatives, by any chance? His heirs?’
“I’m afraid we’ll be more visible here than in Moscow, which we fled from in search of inconspicuousness.
“Of course, there’s nothing to be done now. No use crying over spilt milk. But it will be better not to show ourselves, to lie low, to behave more modestly. Generally, I have bad presentiments. Let’s wake up the others, pack our things, tie the belts, and prepare to get off.”
7
Antonina Alexandrovna stood on the platform in Torfyanaya counting people and things innumerable times to make sure nothing had been forgotten in the car. She felt the trampled sand under her feet, and yet the fear of somehow missing the stop did not leave her, and the rumble of the moving train went on sounding in her ears, though her eyes convinced her that it was standing motionless by the platform. This kept her from seeing, hearing, and understanding.
Her companions on the long journey said good-bye to her from above, from the height of the car. She did not notice them. She did not notice the train leaving and discovered its disappearance only after she noticed the second track, revealed after its departure, with a green field and blue sky beyond it.
The station building was of stone. By its entrance stood two benches, one on each side. The Moscow travelers from Sivtsev were the only passengers to get off at Torfyanaya. They put down their things and sat on one of the benches.
The newcomers were struck by the silence at the station, the emptiness, the tidiness. It seemed unusual to them that there was no crowding around, no swearing. Life was delayed in this out-of-the-way place, it lagged behind history. It had yet to catch up with the savagery of the capital.
The station was hidden in a birch grove. It became dark in the train as it approached it. The moving shadows cast by its barely swaying tops shifted over hands and faces and over the clean, damp yellow sand of the platform. The whistling of birds in the grove suited its freshness. As undisguisedly pure as ignorance, the full sounds echoed throughout the wood and permeated it. The grove was crosscut by two roads, the railway and the country track, and it curtained both with its flung-out, low-hanging branches, like the ends of wide, floor-length sleeves.
Suddenly Antonina Alexandrovna’s eyes and ears were opened. She became aware of everything at once. The ringing birdcalls, the purity of the forest solitude, the serenity of the peace all around her.
In her mind she had composed a phrase: “I couldn’t believe we would arrive unharmed. You understand, your Strelnikov might play at magnanimity before you and let you go, but telegraph orders here to have us all detained when we got off. I don’t believe in their nobility, my dear. It’s all only for show.” Instead of these prepared words, she said something different. “How delightful!” escaped her when she saw the loveliness around her. She could not say any more. Tears began to choke her. She burst into loud sobs.
Hearing her weeping, a little old man, the stationmaster, came out of the building. With rapid little steps he trotted over to the bench, put his hand politely to the visor of his red-topped uniform cap, and asked:
“Perhaps the young lady needs some drops of calmative? From the station medicine chest?”
“It’s nothing. Thank you. It will pass.”
“The cares and anxieties of travel. A well-known, widespread thing. Besides, there’s this African heat, rare in our latitudes. And, on top of that, the events in Yuriatin.”
“We watched the fire from the train as we passed.”
“So you’d be coming from Russia, if I’m not mistaken?”
“From our White-Stoned Mother.”7
“Muscovites? Then no wonder the lady’s nerves are upset. They say there’s no stone left upon stone?”
“They’re exaggerating. But it’s true we’ve seen all kinds of things. This is my daughter, this is my son-in-law. This is their little boy. And this is our young nanny, Nyusha.”
“How do you do. How do you do. Very pleased. I’ve been partly forewarned. Anfim Efimovich Samdevyatov rang up on the railway phone from the Sakma junction. Doctor Zhivago and family from Moscow, he says, please render them all possible assistance. So you must be that same doctor?”
“No, this is Doctor Zhivago, my son-in-law, and I’m in a different sector, in agriculture—Gromeko, professor of agronomy.”
“Sorry, my mistake. Forgive me. Very glad to make your acquaintance.”
Doctor Zhivago Page 33
