“And think what abilities he has! Extraordinary! The son of a simple switchman or railroad watchman, through nothing but his own giftedness and persistent work he achieved—I was about to say the level, but I should say the summit of contemporary university knowledge in two fields, mathematics and the humanities. That’s no joke!”
“In that case, what upset your domestic harmony, if you loved each other so much?”
“Ah, how hard it is to answer that. I’ll tell you about it right now. But it’s astonishing. Is it for me, a weak woman, to explain to you, who are so intelligent, what is now happening with life in general, with human life in Russia, and why families fall apart, yours and mine among them? Ah, as if it’s a matter of people, of similarities and dissimilarities of character, of loving and not loving. All that’s productive, settled, all that’s connected with habitual life, with the human nest and its order, all of it went to rack and ruin along with the upheaval of the whole of society and its reorganization. All everyday things were overturned and destroyed. What remained was the un-everyday, unapplied force of the naked soul, stripped of the last shred, for which nothing has changed, because in all times it was cold and trembling and drawing towards the one nearest to it, which is just as naked and lonely. You and I are like Adam and Eve, the first human beings, who had nothing to cover themselves with when the world began, and we are now just as unclothed and homeless at its end. And you and I are the last reminder of all those countless great things that have been done in the world in the many thousands of years between them and us, and in memory of those vanished wonders, we breathe and love, and weep, and hold each other, and cling to each other.”
14
After a pause, she went on much more calmly:
“I’ll tell you. If Strelnikov became Pashenka Antipov again. If he stopped his madness and rebellion. If time turned backwards. If somewhere far away, at the edge of the world, the window of our house miraculously lit up, with a lamp and books on Pasha’s desk, I think I would crawl there on my knees. Everything in me would be aroused. I would not resist the call of the past, the call of faithfulness. I would sacrifice everything. Even what’s most dear. You. And my intimacy with you, so easy, so unforced, so self-implied. Oh, forgive me. I’m not saying the right thing. It’s not true.”
She threw herself on his neck and burst into tears. But very soon she came to herself. Wiping her tears, she said:
“But it’s the same voice of duty that drives you to Tonya. Lord, how miserable we are! What will become of us? What are we to do?”
When she had completely recovered, she went on:
“Anyhow, I haven’t answered you yet about why our happiness fell apart. I understood it so clearly afterwards. I’ll tell you. It won’t be a story only about us. It became the fate of many people.”
“Speak, my bright one.”
“We were married just before the war, two years before it began. And we had just started living by our own wits, setting up house, when war was declared. I’m convinced now that it’s to blame for everything, all the subsequent misfortunes that keep overtaking our generation to this day. I remember my childhood well. I caught the time when the notions of the previous, peaceful age were still in force. It was held that one should trust the voice of reason. What was prompted by conscience was considered natural and necessary. The death of a man at the hands of another was a rarity, an extraordinary phenomenon, out of the common run. Murders, it was supposed, happened only in tragedies, in detective novels, and in newspaper chronicles of events, not in ordinary life.
“And suddenly this leap from serene, innocent measuredness into blood and screaming, mass insanity, and the savagery of daily and hourly, lawful and extolled murder.
“Probably this never goes unpaid for. You probably remember better than I do how everything all at once started going to ruin. Train travel, food supplies for the cities, the foundations of family life, the moral principles of consciousness.”
“Go on. I know what you’ll say further. How well you analyze it all! What a joy to listen to you!”
“Then untruth came to the Russian land. The main trouble, the root of the future evil, was loss of faith in the value of one’s own opinion. People imagined that the time when they followed the urgings of their moral sense was gone, that now they had to sing to the general tune and live by foreign notions imposed on everyone. The dominion of the ready-made phrase began to grow—first monarchistic, then revolutionary.
“This social delusion was all-enveloping, contagious. Everything fell under its influence. Our home couldn’t stand against this bane either. Something in it was shaken. Instead of the unconscious liveliness that had always reigned with us, a dose of foolish declamation crept into our conversations, some ostentatious, mandatory philosophizing on mandatory world themes. Could a man as subtle and self-demanding as Pasha, who could so unerringly distinguish essence from appearance, pass by this insidious falseness and not notice it?
“And here he committed a fatal error, which determined everything beforehand. He took the sign of the time, the social evil, for a domestic phenomenon. He attributed the unnatural tone, the official stiffness of our discussions to himself, he ascribed them to his being a dry stick, a mediocrity, a man in a case.4 To you it probably seems incredible that such trifles could mean anything in our life together. You can’t imagine how important it was, how many stupid things Pasha did because of that childishness.
“He went to the war, something nobody demanded of him. He did it to free us from himself, from his imaginary burden. That was the beginning of his follies. With some youthful, misdirected vanity, he took offense at something in life that one doesn’t take offense at. He began to pout at the course of events, at history. He began to quarrel with it. And to this day he’s settling accounts with it. Hence his defiant extravagances. He’s headed for certain ruin because of that stupid ambition. Oh, if only I could save him!”
“How incredibly purely and deeply you love him! Go on, go on loving him. I’m not jealous of him, I won’t hinder you.”
15
Summer came and went imperceptibly. The doctor recovered. Temporarily, in expectation of his supposed departure for Moscow, he took three posts. The quickly progressing devaluation of money forced him to juggle several jobs.
The doctor rose at cockcrow, stepped out on Kupecheskaya, and went down it past the Giant picture house to the former printing shop of the Ural Cossack army, now renamed the Red Typesetter. At the corner of City Square, on the door of Administrative Affairs, he came upon a plaque reading “Claims Office.” He crossed the square diagonally and came to Malaya Buyanovka Street. Past the Stanhope factory, through the hospital backyard, he arrived at the dispensary of the Military Hospital—the place of his main job.
Half his way lay under the shady trees hanging over the street, past whimsical, mostly wooden little houses with steeply cocked roofs, lattice fences, wrought-iron gates, and carved platbands on the shutters.
Next to the dispensary, in the former hereditary garden of the merchant’s wife Goregliadova, stood a curious little house in old Russian taste. It was faced with faceted, glazed tiles, the triangular facets coming together to form a peak pointing outwards, as in ancient Moscow boyar mansions.
Three or four times in the ten-day week, Yuri Andreevich left the dispensary and went to the former Ligetti house on Staraya Myasskaya, to meetings of the Yuriatin regional health commission, which was housed there.
In a totally different, remote quarter stood the house donated to the town by Anfim’s father, Efim Samdevyatov, in memory of his late wife, who had died in childbed giving birth to Anfim. In that house the Institute of Gynecology and Obstetrics founded by Samdevyatov used to be located. Now it accommodated the Rosa Luxemburg5 accelerated course in medicine and surgery. Yuri Andreevich taught general pathology and several noncompulsory subjects there.
He came back from all these duties at night, worn out and hungry, to find Larissa Fyodorovna in the
heat of household chores, at the stove or over a tub. In this prosaic and homely appearance, disheveled, with her sleeves rolled up and her skirts tucked up, she was almost frightening in her regal, breathtaking attractiveness, more so than if he were suddenly to find her about to go to a ball, standing taller, as if she had grown on her high heels, in an open, low-cut dress and wide, rustling skirts.
She cooked or did laundry and then with the remaining soapy water washed the floors in the house. Or, calm and less flushed, she ironed and mended her own, his, and Katenka’s linen. Or, having finished with the cooking, laundry, and tidying up, she gave lessons to Katenka. Or, burying herself in textbooks, she occupied herself with her own political reeducation, before going back to the newly reformed school as a teacher.
The closer this woman and girl were to him, the less he dared to see them as family, the stricter was the prohibition imposed upon his way of thinking by his duty to his family and his pain at being unfaithful to them. In this limitation there was nothing offensive for Lara and Katenka. On the contrary, this nonfamily way of feeling contained a whole world of respect, excluding casualness and excessive familiarity.
But this split was always tormenting and wounding, and Yuri Andreevich got used to it as one gets used to an unhealed, often reopening wound.
16
Two or three months passed like this. One day in October Yuri Andreevich said to Larissa Fyodorovna:
“You know, it seems I’ll have to quit my job. It’s the old, eternally repeated story. It starts out as if nothing could be better. ‘We’re always glad of honest work. And still more of thoughts, especially new ones. How can we not encourage them? Welcome. Work, struggle, seek.’
“But experience shows that what’s meant by thoughts is only their appearance, a verbal garnish for the glorification of the revolution and the powers that be. It’s tiresome and sickening. And I’m no master in that department.
“And in fact they’re probably right. Of course I’m not with them. But it’s hard for me to reconcile with the thought that they’re heroes, shining lights, and I’m a petty soul, who stands for darkness and the enslavement of men. Have you ever heard the name of Nikolai Vedenyapin?”
“Well, of course. Before I met you, and later, from what you’ve often told me. Simochka Tuntseva mentions him often. She’s his follower. But I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read his books. I don’t like works devoted entirely to philosophy. I think philosophy should be used sparingly as a seasoning for art and life. To be occupied with it alone is the same as eating horseradish by itself. But forgive me, I’ve distracted you with my stupid talk.”
“No, on the contrary. I agree with you. That way of thinking is very close to me. Yes, so, about my uncle. Maybe I’ve really been spoiled by his influence. But they themselves shout with one voice: a brilliant diagnostician, a brilliant diagnostician! And it’s true I’m rarely mistaken in determining an illness. But that is precisely their detested intuition, which is alleged to be my sin, an integral knowledge that includes the whole picture.
“I’m obsessed by the question of mimicry, the external adaptation of organisms to the color of their environment. Here, hidden in this adjustment of color, is the astonishing transition from the internal to the external.
“I ventured to touch on it in my lectures. And off it went! ‘Idealism, mysticism! Goethe’s Naturphilosophie, neo-Schellingism!’6
“I’ve got to quit. I’ll turn in my resignation from the health commission and the institute, and try to hang on at the hospital until they throw me out. I don’t want to frighten you, but at times I have the feeling that I’ll be arrested one of these days.”
“God forbid, Yurochka. Fortunately, we’re still far from that. But you’re right. It won’t hurt to be more careful. As far as I’ve noticed, each time this young power installs itself, it goes through several stages. In the beginning it’s the triumph of reason, the critical spirit, the struggle against prejudices.
“Then comes the second period. The dark forces of the ‘hangers-on,’ the sham sympathizers, gain the majority. Suspiciousness springs up, denunciations, intrigues, hatred. And you’re right, we’re at the beginning of the second phase.
“No need to look far for an example. Two former political prisoners from the workers have been transferred from Khodatskoe to the board of the revolutionary tribunal here, a certain Tiverzin and Antipov.
“They both know me perfectly well, and one simply happens to be my father-in-law, my husband’s father. But in fact it’s only quite recently, since their transfer here, that I’ve begun to tremble for my and Katenka’s lives. Anything can be expected of them. Antipov has no great liking for me. They’re quite capable of destroying me and even Pasha one fine day in the name of higher revolutionary justice.”
The sequel to this conversation took place quite soon. By that time a night search had been carried out at 48 Malaya Buyanovka, next to the dispensary at the widow Goregliadova’s. In the house they found a cache of arms and uncovered a counterrevolutionary organization. Many people in town were arrested; the searches and arrests were still going on. In connection with this, it was whispered that some of the suspects had escaped across the river. Considerations were expressed, such as: “What good will it do them? There are rivers and rivers. There are, it must be said, certain rivers. In Blagoveshchensk-on-Amur, for instance, on one bank there’s Soviet power, and on the other—China. You jump into the water, swim across, and adyoo, it’s the last they see of you. That, you might say, is a river. A totally different story.”
“The atmosphere is thickening,” said Lara. “For us the safe time is past. We’ll undoubtedly be arrested, you and I. What will happen to Katenka then? I’m a mother. I must forestall misfortune and think up something. I must have a decision ready on that account. I lose my reason when I think of it.”
“Let’s consider. What will help here? Are we able to prevent this blow? After all, it’s a matter of fate.”
“There’s nowhere and no chance for escape. But we can withdraw somewhere into the shadows, into the background. For instance, go to Varykino. I keep thinking about the house in Varykino. It’s pretty far away, and everything’s abandoned there. But there we wouldn’t be in full view of everyone, as we are here. Winter’s coming. I’ll take on the work of wintering there. We’d gain a year of life before they get us, and that’s something. Samdevyatov would help me keep a connection with town. Maybe he’d agree to hide us. Eh? What do you say? True, there isn’t a soul there now, it’s eerie, deserted. At least it was in March when I went there. And they say there are wolves. Frightening. But people, especially people like Antipov or Tiverzin, are more frightening now than wolves.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. You yourself keep sending me to Moscow, persuading me not to put off going. It’s become easier now. I made inquiries at the station. They’ve evidently waved their hand at the black-marketeers. Evidently not all the stowaways are taken off the trains. They’ve grown tired of shooting people; shootings have become rarer.
“It troubles me that all my letters to Moscow have gone unanswered. I must get there and find out what has happened with my family. You keep saying that yourself. But then how understand your words about Varykino? Would you really go to that frightening wilderness without me?”
“No, without you, of course, it’s unthinkable.”
“And yet you’re sending me to Moscow?”
“Yes, that’s indispensable.”
“Listen. Do you know what? I have an excellent plan. Let’s go to Moscow. You and Katenka together with me.”
“To Moscow? You’re out of your mind. Why on earth? No, I have to stay. I must be in readiness somewhere nearby. Pashenka’s fate is being decided here. I must wait for the outcome, so as to be at hand in case of need.”
“Then let’s give some thought to Katenka.”
“From time to time Simushka stops by to see me, Sima Tuntseva. We were talking about her the other day.”
&n
bsp; “Well, of course. I often see her at your place.”
“I’m surprised at you. Where are men’s eyes? If I were you, I’d certainly have fallen in love with her. So enchanting! Such fine looks! Tall. Shapely. Intelligent. Well-read. Kind. Clear-headed.”
“On the day I returned here from captivity, her sister, the seamstress Glafira, shaved me.”
“I know. The sisters live together with the eldest, Avdotya, the librarian. An honest, hardworking family. I want to persuade them, in the worst case, if you and I are picked up, to take Katenka into their charge. I haven’t decided yet.”
“But really only in the most hopeless case. And God grant that such a misfortune is still a long way off.”
“They say Sima’s a bit odd, not all there. In fact, one has to admit that she’s not an entirely normal woman. But that’s owing to her depth and originality. She’s phenomenally well educated, only not like the intelligentsia, but like the people. Your views and hers are strikingly similar. I would trust Katya to her upbringing with an easy heart.”
17
Again he went to the station and came back with nothing for his pains. Everything remained undecided. He and Lara were faced with uncertainty. It was a cold, dark day, as before the first snow. The sky over the intersections, where it spread wider than over the streets drawn out lengthwise, had a wintry look.
Doctor Zhivago Page 50
