“Thank you for reminding me. I was also thinking of something like that today. But I don’t believe we can hold out here. On the contrary, I have a presentiment that we’ll soon be carried somewhere further on. But while this stopover is at our disposal, I have something to ask you. Sacrifice a few hours for me during the next few nights and, please, write down everything you’ve recited to me from memory at various times. Half of it has been lost, the other half has never been written down, and I’m afraid you’ll forget it all afterwards and it will perish, as you say has often happened to you before.”
8
By the end of the day they had all washed with hot water, left over in abundance from the laundry. Lara bathed Katenka. Yuri Andreevich, with a blissful feeling of cleanness, sat at the desk by the window with his back to the room in which Lara, fragrant, wrapped in a bathrobe, her wet hair wound turbanlike in a Turkish towel, was putting Katenka to bed and settling for the night. All immersed in the foretaste of impending concentration, Yuri Andreevich perceived everything that was going on through a veil of softened and all-generalizing attention.
It was one o’clock in the morning when Lara, who until then had been pretending, actually fell asleep. The changed linen on her, on Katenka, and on the bed shone, clean, ironed, lacy. Even in those years Lara somehow contrived to starch it.
Yuri Andreevich was surrounded by blissful silence, filled with happiness and breathing sweetly with life. The light of the lamp cast its calm yellowness on the white sheets of paper, and its golden patches floated on the surface of the ink in the inkstand. The frosty winter night shone pale blue outside the window. Yuri Andreevich stepped into the next room, cold and unlit, from which he could better see outside, and looked through the window. The light of the full moon bound the snowy clearing with the tangible viscosity of egg white or white sizing. The luxuriance of the winter night was inexpressible. There was peace in the doctor’s soul. He went back to the bright, warmly heated room and got down to writing.
In a sweeping script, taking care that the appearance of the writing conveyed the living movement of his hand and did not lose its personality, becoming soulless and dumb, he recalled and wrote out in gradually improving versions, deviating from the previous ones, the most fully formed and memorable poems, “The Star of the Nativity,” “Winter Night,” and quite a few others of a similar kind, afterwards forgotten, mislaid, and never found again by anyone.
Then, from settled and finished things, he went on to things once begun and abandoned, entered into their tone, and began to sketch out their continuation, without the least hope of finishing them now. Then he warmed up, got carried away, and went on to new things.
After two or three easily poured-out stanzas and several similes that he was struck by himself, the work took possession of him, and he felt the approach of what is known as inspiration. The correlation of forces that control creative work is, as it were, stood on its head. The primacy no longer belongs to man and the state of his soul, for which he seeks expression, but to the language in which he wants to express it. Language, the homeland and receptacle of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in terms of external, audible sounds, but in terms of the swiftness and power of its inner flow. Then, like the rolling mass of a river’s current, which by its very movement polishes the stones of the bottom and turns the wheels of mills, flowing speech itself, by the force of its own laws, on its way, in passing, creates meter and rhyme and thousands of other forms and constructions, still more important, but as yet unrecognized, unconsidered, unnamed.
In such moments Yuri Andreevich felt that the main work was done not by him, but by what was higher than him, by what was above him and guided him, namely: the state of world thought and poetry, and what it was destined for in the future, the next step it was to take in its historical development. And he felt himself only the occasion and fulcrum for setting it in motion.
He was delivered from self-reproach; self-dissatisfaction, the feeling of his own nonentity, left him for a while. He looked up, he looked around him.
He saw the heads of the sleeping Lara and Katenka on the snow-white pillows. The cleanness of the linen, the cleanness of the rooms, the purity of their profiles, merging with the purity of the night, the snow, the stars, and the moon into one equisignificant wave, passed through the doctor’s heart, making him exult and weep from the feeling of the triumphant purity of existence.
“Lord! Lord!” he was ready to whisper. “And all this for me! How have I deserved so much? How have You allowed me to approach You, how have You let me wander onto Your priceless earth, under Your stars, to the feet of this reckless, luckless, unmurmuring, beloved woman?”
It was three o’clock in the morning when Yuri Andreevich raised his eyes from the desk and the paper. From the detached concentration he had gone into over his head, he was returning to himself, to reality, happy, strong, at peace. Suddenly, in the silence of the distant expanses that spread beyond the window, he heard a mournful, dismal sound.
He went into the unlit next room to look out the window from there. During the hours he had spent writing, the windowpanes had become thickly frosted over, and he could see nothing through them. Yuri Andreevich pulled away the rolled-up rug placed at the bottom of the front door to stop the draft, threw his coat over his shoulders, and went out to the porch.
The white fire with which the snowy expanse was enveloped and blazing in the light of the moon blinded him. At first he could not focus his eyes and saw nothing. But after a moment he heard a drawn-out, hollow, whining howl, muffled by the distance, and then he noticed at the edge of the clearing, beyond the ravine, four elongated shadows no bigger than little dashes.
The wolves were standing side by side, their muzzles turned towards the house, and, raising their heads, were howling at the moon or at its silver reflection in Mikulitsyn’s windows. For a few moments they stood motionless, but as soon as Yuri Andreevich realized they were wolves, they lowered their behinds like dogs and trotted away from the clearing as if the doctor’s thought had reached them. The doctor had no time to figure out in which direction they had vanished.
“Unpleasant news!” he thought. “That’s all we needed. Can they have a lair somewhere nearby, quite close to us? Maybe even in the ravine? How frightening! And unfortunately there’s also Samdevyatov’s Savraska in the stable. It’s probably the horse they scented.”
He decided for the time being to say nothing to Lara, so as not to frighten her, went in, locked the front door, closed the hall doors connecting the cold and warm parts of the house, stopped all the cracks and openings, and went to the desk.
The lamp was burning as brightly and welcomingly as before. But he no longer felt like writing. He could not calm down. Nothing but wolves and other threatening complications went through his mind. And he was also tired. At that moment Lara woke up.
“And you’re still burning and glimmering, my dear, bright candle!” Lara said softly in a moist, sleep-congested whisper. “Sit here next to me for a minute. I’ll tell you the dream I had.”
And he put out the lamp.
9
Again a day went by in quiet madness. A child’s sled turned up in the house. Flushed Katenka, in her little fur coat, laughing loudly, came sliding onto the uncleared paths of the front garden from the ice hill the doctor had made for her, packing the snow down tightly with a shovel and pouring water over it. A smile fixed on her face, she endlessly climbed back up the hill, pulling her sled on a string.
It was freezing cold and getting noticeably colder. Outside it was sunny. The snow turned yellow under the noontime rays, and into its honey yellowness poured a sweet sediment of orange thickness from the early-falling evening.
With yesterday’s laundry and bathing, Lara had filled the house with dampness. The windows were covered with crumbly hoarfrost, the steam-dampened wallpaper was covered from floor to ceiling with black streaks. The rooms became dark and c
heerless. Yuri Andreevich carried firewood and water, continued the unfinished examination of the house with unceasing discoveries all the time, and helped Lara, who had been busy since morning with constantly emerging household chores.
Time and again in the heat of some task their hands came together and remained that way, the load picked up to be carried was set down before it reached its destination, and a haze of invincible tenderness rushed to disarm them. Time and again everything dropped from their hands and left their heads. Minutes passed and turned into hours, and it was getting late, and they both came to their senses, horrified, remembering the neglected Katenka or the unfed and unwatered horse, and they rushed headlong to make up for and amend what had been left undone, and suffered from remorse.
The doctor’s head throbbed from lack of sleep. It was filled with a sweet haze, like a hangover, and there was an aching, blissful weakness in his whole body. He waited impatiently for evening to go back to his interrupted night’s work.
The preliminary half of the work was performed for him by that sleepy mist that filled him, and covered everything around him, and enwrapped his thoughts. The general diffuseness it imparted to everything went in the direction that preceded the exactness of the final embodiment. Like the vagueness of first drafts, the languid idleness of the whole day served as a necessary preparation for a laborious night.
The idleness of fatigue left nothing untouched, untransformed. Everything underwent changes and acquired a different look.
Yuri Andreevich felt that his dreams of a more settled life in Varykino were not to be realized, that the hour of his separation from Lara was at hand, that he would inevitably lose her, and after that the incentive to live, and maybe even life itself. Anguish gnawed at his heart. But still greater was his longing for the coming of evening and the desire to weep out this anguish in expressions that would make everyone weep.
The wolves he had been remembering all day were no longer wolves in the snow under the moon, but became the theme of wolves, the representation of a hostile power that had set itself the goal of destroying the doctor and Lara or driving them from Varykino. The idea of this hostility, developing, attained such force by evening as if the tracks of an antediluvian monster had been discovered in Shutma and a fairy-tale dragon of gigantic proportions, thirsting for the doctor’s blood and hungering for Lara, were lying in the ravine.
Evening came. As he had yesterday, the doctor lit the lamp on the desk. Lara and Katenka went to bed earlier than the day before.
What he had written during the previous night fell into two categories. The familiar things, in newly revised versions, were written out in clean, calligraphic copies. The new things were sketched out with abbreviations and ellipses, in an illegible scrawl.
In deciphering these daubs, the doctor felt the usual disappointment. Last night these fragmentary drafts had moved him to tears and astounded him by the unexpectedness of certain strokes of luck. Now it was just these imaginary strokes of luck that stopped him and upset him, standing out sharply as too forced.
All his life he had dreamed of an originality that was smoothed over and muted, externally unrecognizable and hidden under the cover of conventional and habitual form; all his life he had striven to elaborate this restrained, unpretentious style, through which the reader and listener would grasp the content without noticing what enabled them to do so. All his life he had worked for this inconspicuous style, which would attract no one’s attention, and kept being horrified at how far he still was from this ideal.
In yesterday’s sketches he had wanted, using means of a simplicity verging on prattle and reaching the intimacy of the lullaby, to express his mixed mood of love and fear and anguish and courage, so as to have it pour out as if apart from words, by itself.
Now, the next day, looking through these trials, he found that they lacked a supporting plot that would join the disconnecting lines together. Gradually reworking what he had written, Yuri Andreevich began in the same lyrical manner to tell the legend of Egory the Brave.2 He started with a sweeping pentameter that allowed for great scope. But the euphony characteristic of this meter, regardless of content, annoyed him by its conventional, false melodiousness. He abandoned the pompous meter with its caesura, cramming his lines into four feet, the way one struggles against verbosity in prose. Writing became more difficult and more alluring. The work went at a livelier pace, but still some superfluous garrulity got into it. He forced himself to shorten the lines still more. The words were crowded into trimeters, the last traces of sleepiness fell from the writer, he awakened, took fire, the narrowness of the available space itself told him how to fill it. Subjects barely named in words began to stand out in relief within the frame of reference. He heard the pace of a horse stepping over the surface of the poem, as one can hear the clop of a horse’s amble in one of Chopin’s ballades. St. George galloped on horseback across the boundless expanse of the steppe; Yuri Andreevich saw him from behind growing smaller as he moved away. Yuri Andreevich wrote with feverish haste, barely managing to set down the words and lines arriving all in their place and apropos.
He did not notice how Lara got out of bed and came over to the desk. She seemed delicate and slender and taller than she really was in her floor-length nightgown. Yuri Andreevich gave a start when she unexpectedly rose up beside him, pale, afraid, and, stretching out her arm, asked in a whisper:
“Do you hear? A dog is howling. Two, even. Ah, how frightening, what a bad omen! Let’s wait somehow till morning, and then leave, leave. I won’t stay here a moment longer.”
An hour later, after much persuasion, Larissa Fyodorovna calmed down and went back to sleep. Yuri Andreevich went out to the porch. The wolves were closer than the night before and vanished still more quickly. And again Yuri Andreevich had no time to make out which way they went. They stood in a group, he had no time to count them. He fancied there were more of them.
10
The thirteenth day of their stay in Varykino arrived, in its circumstances no different from the previous ones. Wolves had howled in the same way in the evening, after disappearing for a time in the middle of the week. Again taking them for dogs, Larissa Fyodorovna had resolved in the same way to leave the next morning, frightened by the bad omen. In the same way states of equilibrium alternated in her with fits of anguished uneasiness, natural in a hardworking woman unaccustomed to daylong outpourings of the heart and the idle, impermissible luxury of immoderate caresses.
Everything repeated itself exactly, so that when, on that morning of the second week, Larissa Fyodorovna again, as so many times before, began preparing for the return trip, one might have thought the week and a half they had lived through in the interim had never been.
Again it was damp in the rooms, which were dark owing to the bleakness of the gray, overcast day. The cold had lessened; at any moment snow might start pouring from the dark sky covered with low clouds. Yuri Andreevich was succumbing to the mental and physical fatigue caused by a continual lack of sleep. His thoughts were confused, his strength was undermined, weakness made him feel chilled, and, shivering and rubbing his hands, he paced the unheated room, not knowing what Larissa Fyodorovna would decide and what, according to her decision, he would have to undertake.
Her intentions were not clear. Right then she would have given half her life for the two of them not to be so chaotically free, but forced to submit to any strict order, established once and for all, for them to go to work, to have duties, to be able to live sensibly and honestly.
She began her day as usual, made the beds, tidied up and swept the rooms, made breakfast for the doctor and Katya. Then she began to pack and asked the doctor to hitch up the horse. She had taken a firm and inflexible decision to leave.
Yuri Andreevich did not try to dissuade her. Their return to town in the heat of the arrests there after their recent disappearance was completely foolhardy. But it was scarcely more reasonable to sit there alone and unarmed in the midst of this dreadful winter des
ert, full of its own menace.
Besides that, the last armloads of hay, which the doctor had raked up in the nearby sheds, were coming to an end, and there were no more to be expected. Of course, had it been possible to settle here more permanently, the doctor would have made the rounds of the neighborhood and seen to replenishing the stock of fodder and provisions. But for a brief and problematic stay, it was not worthwhile starting such reconnoitering. And, waving his hand at it all, the doctor went to harness up.
He was not skillful at it. Samdevyatov had taught him how. Yuri Andreevich kept forgetting his instructions. With inexperienced hands he nevertheless did all that was needed. Having fastened the bow to the shafts with a studded leather strap, he tied its metal-tipped end in a knot on one of the shafts, winding it around several times, then, placing his leg against the horse’s side, he pulled and tightened the ends of the collar, after which, having finished the rest, he brought the horse to the porch, tethered her, and went to tell Lara that they could make ready.
He found her in extreme disarray. She and Katenka were dressed to leave, everything was packed, but Larissa Fyodorovna was wringing her hands and, holding back tears and asking Yuri Andreevich to sit down for a moment, throwing herself into the armchair, then getting up, and—frequently interrupting herself with the exclamation “Right?”—spoke very quickly, in an incoherent patter, on a high, singsong, and plaintive note:
“It’s not my fault. I myself don’t know how this came about. But we really can’t go now. It will be dark soon. Night will find us on the road. There in your dreadful forest. Right? I’ll do what you tell me, but myself, of my own will, I can’t decide on it. Something’s holding me back. My heart isn’t in it. Do as you know best. Right? Why are you silent, why don’t you say something? We lolled around all morning, spent half the day on God knows what. Tomorrow it won’t be the same, we’ll be more careful, right? Maybe we should stay one more day? We’ll get up early tomorrow and set out at daybreak, at seven or even six in the morning. What do you think? You’ll heat the stove, do some writing here for one extra evening, we’ll spend one more night here. Ah, it would be so incomparable, so magical! Why don’t you answer? Again I’m at fault for something, wretch that I am!”
Doctor Zhivago Page 54
