“Pipe down, you son of a bitch, you’ll be the end of us all, you snotty devil. You hear, Strese’s men are on the prowl—sneaking around. They turned at the village gate, they’re coming down the row, they’ll be here soon. That’s them. Freeze, don’t breathe, I’ll strangle you! Well, you’re in luck—they’re gone. Passed us by. What devil brought you here? And hiding, too, you blockhead! Who’d lay a finger on you?”
“I heard Goshka shouting, ‘Take cover, you slob!’ So I slipped in.”
“Goshka’s another matter. The whole Ryabykh family is being eyed as untrustworthy. They’ve got relations in Khodatskoe. Artisans, worker stock. Don’t twitch like that, you lunkhead, lie quiet. They’ve crapped and puked all around here. If you move, you’ll smear yourself with shit, and me, too. Can’t you smell the stench? Why do you think Strese’s rushing around the village? He’s looking for men from Pazhinsk. Outsiders.”
“How did all this come about, Koska? Where did it begin?”
“Sanka sparked the whole thing off, Sanka Pafnutkin. We’re standing naked in line for the examination. Sanka’s time came, it’s Sanka’s turn. He won’t undress. Sanka was a bit drunk, he came to the office tipsy. The clerk looks him over. ‘Get undressed, please,’ he says. Politely. Addresses Sanka formally. A military clerk. And Sanka answers him rudely: ‘I won’t. I ain’t gonna show everybody my private parts.’ As if he’s embarrassed. And he sidles up to the clerk, like he’s going to haul off and punch him in the jaw. Yes. And what do you think? Before you could bat an eye, Sanka bends over, grabs the little office desk by the leg, and dumps it and everything on it, the inkstand, the army lists, on the floor! From the boardroom door, Strese shouts: ‘I won’t tolerate excesses. I’ll show you your bloodless revolution and disrespect for the law in a government office. Who’s the instigator?’
“But Sanka’s at the window. ‘Help!’ he shouts. ‘Grab your clothes! It’s all up for us, comrades!’ I grabbed my clothes, got dressed on the run, and went over to Sanka. Sanka smashed the window with his fist and, whoop, he’s outside, try catching the wind. And me after him. And some others as well. Running our legs off. And there’s already hallooing after us, the chase is on. But if you ask me what it was all about? Nobody understands anything.”
“And the bomb?”
“What about the bomb?”
“Who threw the bomb? Well, bomb, grenade, whatever?”
“Lord, you don’t think it was us?”
“But who, then?”
“How should I know? Somebody else. He saw the turmoil, thought, I could blow up the council on the sly. They’ll think it was other people. Somebody political. There’s a lot of politicals from Pazhinsk here. Quiet. Shut up. Voices. You hear, Strese’s men are coming back. Well, we’re lost. Freeze, I said.”
The voices came closer. Boots creaked, spurs jangled.
“Don’t argue. You can’t fool me. I’m not that kind. There was definitely talking somewhere,” boomed the domineering, all-distinct Petersburg voice of the colonel.
“You may have imagined it, Your Excellency,” reasoned the village headman of Maly Ermolai, the old fishmonger Otviazhistin. “And no wonder if there’s talking, since it’s a village. Not a cemetery. Maybe they were talking somewhere. They’re not dumb beasts in the houses. Or maybe a hobgoblin’s choking somebody in his sleep …”
“Enough! I’ll teach you to play the holy fool, pretending you’re a poor orphan! Hobgoblin! You’ve grown too free and easy here! You’ll get the international on you with your cleverness, then it’ll be too late. Hobgoblin!”
“Good gracious, Your Excellency, mister colonel, sir! What international! They’re thick-headed oafs, impenetrable darkness. Stumble over the old prayer books. What do they want with revolution?”
“You all talk that way till the first evidence. Search the premises of the cooperative from top to bottom. Shake all the coffers, look under the counters. Search the adjoining buildings.”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
“Get Pafnutkin, Ryabykh, Nekhvalenykh, dead or alive. From the ends of the earth. And that Galuzin pup. Never mind that his papa delivers patriotic speeches, he won’t fine-talk us. On the contrary. We’re not lulled by it. Once a shopkeeper starts orating, it means something’s wrong. It’s suspicious. It’s contrary to nature. There’s secret information that there are political exiles hidden in their courtyard in Krestovozdvizhensk, that secret meetings are held. Catch the boy. I haven’t decided yet what to do with him, but if something’s uncovered, I’ll hang him without pity as a lesson to the rest.”
The searchers moved on. When they had gone far enough away, Koska Nekhvalenykh asked Tereshka Galuzin, who was dead with fright:
“Did you hear?”
“Yes,” the boy whispered in a voice not his own.
“For you and me, and Sanka, and Goshka, the only road now is to the forest. I don’t say forever. Till they get reasonable. And when they come to their senses, then we’ll see. Maybe we’ll come back.”
Part Eleven
THE FOREST ARMY
1
It was the second year since Yuri Andreevich fell captive to the partisans. The limits of this bondage were very vague. The place of Yuri Andreevich’s imprisonment was not fenced in. He was not guarded, not watched over. The partisan troops were on the move all the time. Yuri Andreevich made the marches with them. The troops did not separate themselves, did not shut themselves off from the rest of the people, through whose settlements and regions they moved. They mixed with them, dissolved in them.
It seemed that this dependence, this captivity, did not exist, that the doctor was free and simply did not know how to take advantage of it. The doctor’s dependence, his captivity, in no way differed from other forms of constraint in life, equally invisible and intangible, which also seem like something nonexistent, a chimera and a fiction. Despite the absence of fetters, chains, and guards, the doctor was forced to submit to his unfreedom, which looked imaginary.
His three attempts to escape from the partisans ended in capture. They let him off for nothing, but it was playing with fire. He did not repeat them any more.
The partisan chief Liberius Mikulitsyn was indulgent towards him, had him sleep in his tent, liked his company. Yuri Andreevich was burdened by this imposed closeness.
2
This was the period of the almost continuous withdrawal of the partisans towards the east. At times this displacement was part of the general offensive plan for driving Kolchak out of western Siberia. At times, when the Whites turned the partisans’ rear in an attempt to surround them, movement in the same direction was converted into a retreat. For a long time the doctor could not comprehend these subtleties.
The little towns and villages along the highway, most often parallel to which, but sometimes along which, the partisans made this withdrawal, varied between White and Red, depending on changing military fortunes. It was rarely possible to determine by their outward appearance who was in power in them.
In moments when the peasant militia passed through these small towns and villages, the main thing in them became precisely this army filing through them. The houses on both sides of the road seemed to be absorbed and drawn down into the ground, and the horsemen, horses, guns sloshing through the mud, and the tall, jostling riflemen with rolled-up greatcoats seemed to grow higher on the road than the houses.
Once, in one of these small towns, the doctor took over a supply of British medications abandoned during the retreat by officers of Kappel’s formation1 and seized as war booty.
It was a dark, rainy, two-colored day. All that was lit up seemed white, all that was not lit up—black. And in his soul there was the same gloom of simplification, without the softening of transitions and halftones.
The road, utterly destroyed by frequent troop movements, was a stream of black muck that could not be crossed everywhere on foot. The street could be crossed in a few places, very far from each other, to reach which one had to make b
ig detours on both sides. It was in such conditions that the doctor met, in Pazhinsk, his onetime fellow traveler on the train, Pelageya Tyagunova.
She recognized him first. He could not at once determine who this woman with the familiar face was, who was casting ambiguous glances at him from across the road, as from one bank of a canal to the other, now fully resolved to greet him, if he recognized her, now showing a readiness to retreat.
After a moment he remembered everything. Together with images of the overcrowded freight car, the multitudes being driven to forced labor, their convoy, and the woman passenger with braids thrown over her breast, he saw his own people in the center of the picture. The details of the family trip of two years ago vividly crowded around him. The dear faces, for which he felt a mortal longing, stood before him as if alive.
With a nod of the head he gave a sign that Tyagunova should go a little further up the street, to a place where it could be crossed on stones sticking up from the mud, went to the place himself, crossed over to Tyagunova, and greeted her.
She told him many things. Reminding him of the handsome, unspoiled boy Vasya, illegally taken into the party of forced laborers, who had ridden in the same car with them, Tyagunova described for the doctor her life in the village of Veretenniki with Vasya’s mother. Things were very good for her with them. But the village flung it in her face that she was a stranger, an outsider in the Veretenniki community. She was reproached for her supposed intimacy with Vasya, which they invented. She had to leave, so as not to be pecked to death. She settled in the town of Krestovozdvizhensk with her sister, Olga Galuzina. Rumors that Pritulyev had been seen in Pazhinsk lured her there. The information proved false, but she got stuck living there, having found a job.
Meanwhile misfortunes befell people who were dear to her heart. From Veretenniki came news that the village had been subjected to a punitive expedition for disobeying the law on food requisitioning.2 Apparently the Brykins’ house had burned down and someone from Vasya’s family had perished. In Krestovozdvizhensk the Galuzins’ house and property had been confiscated. Her brother-in-law had been imprisoned or shot. Her nephew had disappeared without a trace. At first, after the devastation, her sister Olga went poor and hungry, but now she works for her grub with peasant relations in the village of Zvonarsk.
As it happened, Tyagunova worked as a dishwasher in the Pazhinsk pharmacy, the property of which the doctor was about to requisition. The requisition meant ruin for everyone who fed off the pharmacy, including Tyagunova. But it was not in the doctor’s power to cancel it. Tyagunova was present at the handing over of the goods.
Yuri Andreevich’s cart was brought into the backyard of the pharmacy, to the doors of the storeroom. Bundles, bottles sleeved in woven wicker, and boxes were removed from the premises.
Along with the people, the pharmacist’s skinny and mangy nag mournfully watched the loading from its stall. The rainy day was declining. The sky cleared a little. For a moment the sun appeared, squeezed between clouds. It was setting. The dark bronze of its rays sprayed into the yard, sinisterly gilding the pools of liquid dung. The wind did not stir them. The dungy wash was too heavy to move. But the rainwater flooding the roadway rippled under the wind and was tinged with cinnabar.
And the army walked and walked along the edges of the road, stepping or driving around the deepest lakes and potholes. In the seized batch of medicines a whole jar of cocaine turned up, the sniffing of which had lately been the weakness of the partisan chief.
3
The doctor was up to his neck in work among the partisans. In winter typhus, in summer dysentery, and, besides that, the growing influx of wounded on days of fighting in the renewed military activity.
In spite of failures and the predominance of retreats, the ranks of the partisans were constantly replenished by new insurgents from the places the peasant horde passed through and by deserters from the enemy camp. During the year and a half that the doctor had spent with the partisans, their army had grown tenfold. When Liberius Mikulitsyn mentioned the numbers of his forces at the meeting in the underground headquarters in Krestovozdvizhensk, he exaggerated them about ten times. Now they had reached that size.
Yuri Andreevich had assistants, several fresh-baked medical orderlies with appropriate experience. His right-hand men in the medical unit were the captured Hungarian Communist and military doctor Kerenyi Lajos, known in camp as Comrade Layoff, and the Croat medic Angelyar, also an Austrian prisoner of war. With the former Yuri Andreevich spoke German; the latter, born in the Slavic Balkans, just managed to understand Russian.
4
According to the international convention of the Red Cross, army doctors and those serving in medical units did not have the right to armed participation in the military actions of the belligerents. But once, against his will, the doctor had to violate this rule. The skirmish that had started caught him in the field and forced him to share the fate of the combatants and shoot back.
The partisan line, in which the doctor, surprised by enemy fire, lay next to the detachment telephonist, occupied the edge of a forest. At the partisans’ back was the taiga, ahead was an open clearing, a bare, unprotected space, across which the Whites were moving to the attack.
They were approaching and were already close. The doctor saw them very well, the face of each one. They were boys and young men from the nonmilitary strata of the capitals and older men mobilized from the reserves. But the tone was set by the former, the young ones, the first-year students and high school boys recently enlisted as volunteers.
The doctor did not know any of them, but the faces of half of them seemed to him habitual, seen, familiar. They reminded him of his former schoolmates. Could it be that these were their younger brothers? Others he seemed to have met in street or theater crowds in years gone by. Their expressive, attractive physiognomies seemed close, kindred.
Doing their duty, as they understood it, inspired them with enthusiastic daring, unnecessary, defiant. They walked in a strung-out, sparse line, drawn up to full height, outdoing the regular guards in their bearing, and, braving the danger, did not resort to making rushes and then lying flat in the field, though there were unevennesses in the clearing, bumps and hummocks behind which they could have hidden. The bullets of the partisans mowed them down almost to a man.
In the middle of the wide, bare field over which the Whites were advancing stood a dead, burned tree. It had been charred by lightning or fire or split and scorched by previous battles. Each advancing volunteer rifleman cast glances at it, struggling with the temptation to get behind its trunk so as to take aim more safely and accurately, then ignored the temptation and went on.
The partisans had a limited number of cartridges. They had to use them sparingly. There was an order, upheld by mutual agreement, to shoot at close range, from the same number of rifles as there were visible targets.
The doctor lay unarmed in the grass, watching the course of the battle. All his sympathy was on the side of the heroically dying children. In his heart he wished them success. They were offspring of families probably close to him in spirit, to his upbringing, his moral cast, his notions.
The thought stirred in him to run out to them in the clearing and surrender and in that way find deliverance. But it was a risky step, fraught with danger.
While he was running to the middle of the clearing, holding his hands up, he could be brought down from both sides, shot in the chest and the back, by his own as a punishment for committing treason, by the others, not understanding his intentions. He had been in similar situations more than once, had thought over all the possibilities, and had long recognized these plans for salvation as unfeasible. And, reconciling himself to the ambiguity of his feelings, the doctor went on lying on his stomach, facing the clearing, and, unarmed, watched from the grass the course of the battle.
However, to look on and remain inactive amidst the fight to the death that was seething around him was inconceivable and beyond human strength. And it
was not a matter of loyalty to the camp to which his captivity chained him, nor of his own self-defense, but of following the order of what was happening, of submitting to the laws of what was being played out before and around him. It was against the rules to remain indifferent to it. He had to do what the others were doing. A battle was going on. He and his comrades were being shot at. It was necessary to shoot back.
And when the telephonist next to him in the line jerked convulsively and then stretched out and lay still, Yuri Andreevich crawled over to him, removed his pouch, took his rifle, and, returning to his place, began firing it shot after shot.
But pity would not allow him to aim at the young men, whom he admired and with whom he sympathized. And to fire into the air like a fool was much too stupid and idle an occupation, contradictory to his intentions. And so, choosing moments when none of the attackers stood between him and his target, he began shooting at the charred tree. Here he had his own method.
Taking aim and gradually adjusting the precision of his sights, imperceptibly increasing the pressure on the trigger, but not all the way, as if not counting on ever firing, until the hammer fell and the shot followed of itself, as if beyond expectation, the doctor began with an accustomed accuracy to knock off the dry lower branches and scatter them around the dead tree.
But, oh horror! Careful as the doctor was not to hit anybody, now one, now another of the attackers got between him and the tree at the decisive moment and crossed his line of sight just as the gun went off. Two he hit and wounded, but the third unfortunate, who fell not far from the tree, paid for it with his life.
Finally the White commanders, convinced of the uselessness of the attempt, gave the order to retreat.
The partisans were few. Their main forces were partly on the march, partly shifted elsewhere, starting action against a much larger enemy force. The detachment did not pursue the retreating men, so as not to betray their small numbers.
Doctor Zhivago Page 41
