One winter Alexander Alexandrovich gave Anna Ivanovna an antique wardrobe, which he had picked up somewhere or other. It was made of ebony and was so enormous that it would not go through any door in one piece. It was taken into the house in sections; the problem then was where to put it. It would not do for the reception rooms because of its function nor for the bedrooms because of its size. In the end, a part of the landing was cleared for it outside the master bedroom.

Markel, the porter, came to put it together. He brought with him his six-year-old daughter Marinka. She was given a stick of barley sugar. Sniffling, and sucking the candy and her moist fingers, she stood intently watching her father.

At first everything went smoothly. The wardrobe grew in front of Anna Ivanovna's eyes; when only the top remained to be put on, she took it into her head to help Markel. She climbed onto the raised floor of the wardrobe, slipped, and fell against the sides, which were held in place only by tenons. The rope that Markel had tied loosely around them came undone. Anna Ivanovna fell on her back together with the boards as they clattered to the ground, and bruised herself painfully.

Markel rushed to her. "Oh, Madam, mistress," he said. "What made you do that, my dear? You haven't broken any bones? Feel your bones. It's the bones that matter, the soft part doesn't matter at all, the soft parts mend in God's good time, and, as the saying goes, they're only for pleasure anyway.—Don't bawl, you stupid!" he reprimanded the crying Marinka. "Wipe your nose and go to your mother.—Ah, Madam, couldn't you trust me to set up that clothes chest without you? Of course, to you I'm only a porter, you can't think otherwise, but the fact is, I was a cabinetmaker, yes Ma'am, cabinetmaking was my trade. You wouldn't believe how many cupboards and sideboards of all kinds, lacquer and walnut and mahogany, passed through my hands. Or, for that matter, how many well-to-do young ladies passed me by, and vanished from under my nose, if you'll forgive the expression. And it all comes from drink, strong liquor."

Markel pushed over an armchair, and with his help Anna Ivanovna sank into it groaning and rubbing her bruises. Then he set about restoring the wardrobe. When he put the top on he said, "Now the doors, and it'll be fit for an exhibition."

Anna Ivanovna did not like the wardrobe. Its appearance and size reminded her of a catafalque or a royal tomb and filled her with a superstitious dread. She nicknamed it the tomb of Askold;[7] she meant the horse of Prince Oleg,[8] which had caused its master's death. She had read a great deal, but haphazardly, and she tended to confuse related ideas.

After that accident Anna Ivanovna developed a pulmonary weakness.

2

Throughout November, 1911, Anna Ivanovna stayed in bed with pneumonia.

Yura, Misha Gordon, and Tonia were due to graduate the following spring, Yura in medicine, Tonia in law, and Misha, who studied at the Faculty of Philosophy, in philology.

Everything in Yura's mind was still helter-skelter, but his views, his habits, and his inclinations were all distinctly his own. He was unusually impressionable, and the originality of his vision was remarkable.

Though he was greatly drawn to art and history, he scarcely hesitated over the choice of a career. He thought that art was no more a vocation than innate cheerfulness or melancholy was a profession. He was interested in physics and natural science, and believed that a man should do something socially useful in his practical life. He settled on medicine.

In the first year of his four-year course he had spent a term in the dissecting room, situated in the cellars of the university. You went down the winding staircase. There was always a crowd of dishevelled students, some poring over their tattered textbooks surrounded by bones, or quietly dissecting, each in his corner, others fooling about, cracking jokes and chasing the rats that scurried in swarms over the stone floors. In the half darkness of the mortuary the naked bodies of unidentified young suicides and drowned women, well preserved and untouched by decay, shone like phosphorus. Injections of alum solutions rejuvenated them, giving them a deceptive roundness. The corpses were cut open, dismembered, and prepared, yet even in its smallest sections the human body kept its beauty, so that Yura's wonder before some water nymph brutally flung onto a zinc table continued before her amputated arm or hand. The cellar smelled of carbolic acid and formaldehyde, and the presence of mystery was tangible in everything, from the obscure fate of these spread-out bodies to the riddle of life and death itself—and death was dominant in the underground room as if it were its home or its headquarters.

The voice of this mystery, silencing everything else, haunted Yura, disturbing him in his anatomical work. He had become used to such distracting thoughts and took them in his stride.

Yura had a good mind and was an excellent writer. Ever since his schooldays he had dreamed of composing a book about life which would contain, like buried explosives, the most striking things he had so far seen and thought about. But he was too young to write such a book; instead, he wrote poetry. He was like a painter who was always making sketches for a big canvas he had in mind.

He was indulgent toward these immature works on account of their vigor and originality. These two qualities, vigor and originality, in his opinion gave reality to art, which he otherwise regarded as pointless, idle, unnecessary.

Yura realized the great part his uncle had played in molding his character.

Nikolai Nikolaievich now lived in Lausanne. In his books, published there in Russian and in translations, he developed his old view of history as another universe, made by man with the help of time and memory in answer to the challenge of death. These works were inspired by a new interpretation of Christianity, and led directly to a new conception of art.

Misha Gordon was influenced by these ideas even more than Yura. They determined him to register at the Faculty of Philosophy. He attended lectures on theology, and even considered transferring later to the theological academy.

Yura advanced and became freer under the influence of his uncle's theories, but Misha was fettered by them. Yura realized that his friend's enthusiasms were partly accounted for by his origin. Being tactful and discreet, he made no attempt to talk him out of his extravagant ideas. But he often wished that Misha were a realist, more down-to-earth.

3

One night at the end of November Yura came home late from the university; he was exhausted and had eaten nothing all day. He was told that there had been a terrible alarm that afternoon. Anna Ivanovna had had convulsions. Several doctors had seen her; at one time they had advised Alexander Alexandrovich to send for the priest, but later they had changed their minds. Now she was feeling better; she was fully conscious and had asked for Yura to be sent to her the moment he got back.

Yura went up at once.

The room showed traces of the recent commotion. A nurse, moving noiselessly, was rearranging something on the night table. Towels that had been used for compresses were lying about, damp and crumpled. The water in the slop basin was pinkish with expectorated blood, and broken ampoules and swollen tufts of cotton wool floated on its surface.

Anna Ivanovna lay drenched in sweat, with parched lips. Her face had become haggard since morning.

"Can the diagnosis be wrong?" Yura wondered. "She has all the symptoms of lobar pneumonia. It looks like the crisis." After greeting her and saying the encouraging, meaningless things that are always said on such occasions, he sent the nurse out of the room, took Anna Ivanovna's wrist to feel her pulse, and reached into his coat pocket for his stethoscope. She moved her head to indicate that this was unnecessary. He realized that she wanted him for some other reason. She spoke with effort.

"They wanted to give me the last sacraments.… Death is hanging over me.… It may come any moment.… When you go to have a tooth out you're frightened, it'll hurt, you prepare yourself.… But this isn't a tooth, it's everything, the whole of you, your whole life…being pulled out.… And what is it? Nobody knows.… And I am sick at heart and terrified."

She fell silent. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Yura said nothing. A moment later Anna Ivanovna went on.

"You're clever, talented.… That makes you different.… You surely know something.… Comfort me."

"Well, what is there for me to say?" replied Yura. He fidgeted on his chair, got up, paced the room, and sat down again. "In the first place, you'll feel better tomorrow! There are clear indications—I'd stake my life on it—that you've passed the crisis. And then—death, the survival of consciousness, faith in resurrection.… You want to know my opinion as a scientist? Perhaps some other time? No? Right now? Well, as you wish. But it's difficult like that, all of a sudden." And there and then he delivered a whole impromptu lecture, astonished that he could do it.

"Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ's words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn't big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They'd be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for the animal life.

"But all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it.

"Will you feel pain? Do the tissues feel their disintegration? In other words, what will happen to your consciousness? But what is consciousness? Let's see. A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a light directed outward, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we don't stumble. It's like the headlights on a locomotive—turn them inward and you'd have a crash.

"So what will happen to your consciousness? Your consciousness, yours, not anyone else's. Well, what are you? There's the point. Let's try to find out. What is it about you that you have always known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels? No. However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity—in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people. And now listen carefully. You in others—this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life—your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you—the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it.

"And now one last point. There is nothing to fear. There is no such thing as death. Death has nothing to do with us. But you said something about being talented—that it makes one different. Now, that does have something to do with us. And talent in the highest and broadest sense means talent for life.

"There will be no death, says St. John. His reasoning is quite simple. There will be no death because the past is over; that's almost like saying there will be no death because it is already done with, it's old and we are bored with it. What we need is something new, and that new thing is life eternal."

He was pacing up and down the room as he was talking. Now he walked up to Anna Ivanovna's bed and putting his hand on her forehead said, "Go to sleep." After a few moments she began to fall asleep.

Yura quietly left the room and told Egorovna to send in the nurse. "What's come over me?" he thought. "I'm becoming a regular quack—muttering incantations, laying on the hands.…"

Next day Anna Ivanovna was better.

4

Anna Ivanovna continued to improve. In the middle of December she tried to get up but she was still weak. The doctors told her to stay in bed and have a really good rest.

She often sent for Yura and Tonia and for hours on end talked to them of her childhood, spent on her grandfather's estate, Varykino, on the river Rynva, in the Urals. Neither Yura nor Tonia had ever been there, but listening to her, Yura could easily imagine those ten thousand acres of impenetrable virgin forest as black as night, and, thrusting into it like a curved knife, the bends of the swift stream with its rocky bed and steep cliffs on the Krueger side.

For the first time in their lives Yura and Tonia were getting evening clothes, Yura a dinner jacket and Tonia a pale satin party dress with a suitably modest neckline.

They were going to wear them at the traditional Christmas party at the Sventitskys' on the twenty-seventh. When the tailor and the seamstress delivered the clothes, Yura and Tonia tried them on, were delighted, and had not yet taken them off when Egorovna came in asking them to go to Anna Ivanovna.

They went to her room in their new clothes. On seeing them, she raised herself on her elbow, looked them over, and told them to turn around.

"Very nice," she said. "Charming. I had no idea they were ready. Let me have another look, Tonia. No, it's all right, I thought the yoke puckered a bit. Do you know why I've called you? But first I want a word with you, Yura."

"I know, Anna Ivanovna, I know you've seen the letter, I had it sent to you myself. I know you agree with Nikolai Nikolaievich. You both think I should not have refused the legacy. But wait a moment. It's bad for you to talk. Just let me explain—though you know most of it already.

"Well, then, in the first place, it suits the lawyers that there should be a Zhivago case because there is enough money in Father's estate to cover the costs and to pay the lawyers' fees. Apart from that there is no legacy—nothing but debts and muddle—and a lot of dirty linen to be washed. If there really had been anything that could be turned into money, do you think I'd have made a present of it to the court and not used it myself? But that's just the point—the whole case is trumped up. So rather than rake up all that dirt it was better to give up my right to a nonexistent property and let it go to all that bunch of false rivals and pretenders who were after it. One claimant, as you know, is a certain Madame Alice, who calls herself Zhivago and lives with her children in Paris—I've known about her for a long time. But now there are various new claims—I don't know about you, but I was told of them quite recently.

"It appears that while Mother was still alive, Father became infatuated with a certain dreamy, eccentric Princess Stolbunova-Enrici. This lady has a son by him, Evgraf; he is ten years old.

"The Princess is a recluse. She lives—God knows on what—in her house just outside Omsk, and she never goes out. I've seen a photograph of the house. It's very handsome, with five French windows and stucco medallions on the cornices. And recently I've been having the feeling that the house was staring at me nastily, out of all its five windows, right across all the thousands of miles between Siberia and Moscow, and that sooner or later it would give me the evil eye. So what do I want with all this—imaginary capital, phony claimants, malice, envy? And lawyers."

"All the same, you shouldn't have renounced it," said Anna Ivanovna. "Do you know why I called you?" she asked again and immediately went on, "His name came back to me. You remember the forest guard I was telling you about yesterday? He was called Bacchus. Extraordinary, isn't it! A real bogeyman, black as the devil, with a beard growing up to his eyebrows, and calls himself Bacchus! His face was all disfigured, a bear had mauled him but he had fought it off. And they're all like that out there. Such names—striking, sonorous! Bacchus or Lupus or Faustus. Every now and then somebody like that would be announced—perhaps Auctus or Frolus—somebody with a name like a shot from your grandfather's gun—and we would all immediately troop downstairs from the nursery to the kitchen. And there—you can't think what it was like—you'd find a charcoal dealer with a live bear cub, or a prospector from the far end of the province with a specimen of the ore. And your grandfather would always give them a credit slip for the office. Some were given money, some buckwheat, others cartridges. The forest came right up to the windows. And the snow, the snow! Higher than the roofs!" Anna Ivanovna had a coughing fit.

"That's enough, it's bad for you," Tonia and Yura urged her.

"Nonsense, I'm perfectly all right. That reminds me. Egorovna told me that you two are worrying about whether you should go to the party the day after tomorrow. Don't let me hear anything so silly again, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves! And you call yourself a doctor, Yura! So that's settled, you'll go, and that's that. But to return to Bacchus. He used to be a blacksmith when he was young. He got into a fight and was disembowelled. So he made himself a set of iron guts. Now, Yura, don't be silly. Of course I know he couldn't. You mustn't take it literally! But that's what the people out there said."

She was interrupted by another coughing fit, a much longer one than the last. It went on and on; she could not get her breath.

Yura and Tonia hurried across to her simultaneously. They stood shoulder to shoulder by her bedside. Their hands touched. Still coughing, Anna Ivanovna caught their hands in hers and kept them joined awhile. When she was able to speak she said: "If I die, stay together. You're meant for each other. Get married. There now, you're engaged," she added and burst into tears.

5

As early as the spring of 1906—only a few months before she would begin her last year in the gymnasium—six months of Lara's liaison with Komarovsky had driven her beyond the limits of her endurance. He cleverly turned her wretchedness to his advantage, and when it suited him subtly reminded her of her shame. These reminders brought her to just that state of confusion that a lecher requires in a woman. As a result, Lara felt herself sinking ever deeper into a nightmare of sensuality which filled her with horror whenever she awoke from it. Her nocturnal madness was as unaccountable as black magic. Here everything was topsy-turvy and flew in the face of logic; sharp pain manifested itself by peals of silvery laughter, resistance and refusal meant consent, and grateful kisses covered the hand of the tormentor.

It seemed that there would be no end to it, but that spring, as she sat through a history lesson at the end of term, thinking of the summer when even school and homework would no longer keep her from Komarovsky, she came to a sudden decision that altered the course of her life.

It was a hot morning and a storm was brewing. Through the open classroom windows came the distant droning of the town, as monotonous as a beehive, and the shrieks of children playing in the yard. The grassy smell of earth and young leaves made her head ache, like a Shrovetide surfeit of pancakes and vodka.

The lesson was about Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. When the teacher came to the landing at Fréjus, the sky blackened and was split by lightning and thunder, and clouds of dust and sand swept into the room together with the smell of rain. Two teacher's pets rushed out obligingly to call the handyman to shut the windows, and as they opened the door, the wind sent all the blotting paper flying off the desks.

The windows were shut. A dirty city rain mingled with dust began to pour. Lara tore a page out of an exercise book, and wrote a note to her neighbor, Nadia Kologrivova:

"Nadia, I've got to live away from Mother. Help me to find a tutoring job, as well paid as possible. You know lots of rich people."

Nadia wrote back:

"We are looking for a governess for Lipa. Why not come to us—it would be wonderful! You know how fond my parents are of you."

6

Lara spent three years at the Kologrivovs' as behind stone walls. No one bothered her, and even her mother and brother, from whom she had become estranged, kept out of her way.

Lavrentii Mikhailovich Kologrivov was a big businessman, a brilliant and intelligent practitioner of the most modern methods. He hated the decaying order with a double hatred, as a man rich enough to outbid the treasury, and as a member of the lower classes who had risen to fabulous heights. In his house he sheltered revolutionaries sought by the police, and he paid the defense costs in political trials. It was a standing joke that he was so keen on subsidizing the revolution that he expropriated himself and organized strikes at his own plants. An excellent marksman and a passionate hunter, he went to the Serebriany woods and Losin Island in the winter of 1905, giving rifle training to workers' militia.

He was a remarkable man. His wife, Serafima Filippovna, was a worthy match. Lara admired and respected both of them, and the whole household loved her and treated her as a member of the family.

For more than three years Lara led a life free from worries. Then one day her brother Rodia went to see her. Swaying affectedly on his long legs and drawling self-importantly, he told her that the cadets of his class had collected money for a farewell gift to the head of the Academy and entrusted it to him, asking him to choose and buy the gift. This money he had gambled away two days ago down to the last kopek. Having told his story, he flopped full length in an armchair and burst into tears.

Lara sat frozen while Rodia went on through his sobs:

"Last night I went to see Victor Ippolitovich. He refused to talk about it with me, but he said if you wished him to…He said that although you no longer loved any of us, your power over him was still so great…Lara darling…One word from you would be enough.… You realize what this means to me, what a disgrace it is…the honor of my uniform is at stake. Go to see him, that's not too much to ask, speak to him…You can't want me to pay for this with my life."

"Your life…The honor of your uniform." Lara echoed him indignantly, pacing the room. "I am not a uniform. I have no honor. You can do what you like with me. Have you any idea of what you are asking? Do you realize what he is proposing to you? Year after year I slave away, and now you come along and don't care if everything goes smash. To hell with you. Go ahead, shoot yourself. What do I care? How much do you need?"

"Six hundred and ninety odd rubles. Say seven hundred in round figures," he added after a slight pause.

"Rodia! No, you're out of your mind! Do you know what you are saying? You've gambled away seven hundred rubles! Rodia! Rodia! Do you realize how long it takes an ordinary person like me to earn that much by honest work?"

She broke off and after a short silence said coldly, as if to a stranger, "All right. I'll try. Come tomorrow. And bring your revolver—the one you were going to shoot yourself with. You'll hand it over to me, for good. And with plenty of bullets, remember."

She got the money from Kologrivov.

7

Her work at the Kologrivovs' did not prevent Lara from graduating from the gymnasium, and taking university courses. She did well, and was to obtain her diploma the following year, 1912.

In the spring of 1911 her pupil Lipa graduated from the gymnasium. She was already engaged to a young engineer, Friesendank, who came of a good, well-to-do family. Lipa's parents approved of her choice but were against her marrying so young, and urged her to wait. This led to scenes. Lipa, the spoiled and willful darling of the family, shouted at her parents and stamped her feet.

In this rich household where Lara was accepted as a member of the family, no one reminded her of her debt or indeed remembered it. She would have paid it back long before, if she had not had secret expenses.

Unknown to Pasha, she sent money to his father, who had been deported to Siberia, helped his querulous and ailing mother, and reduced his own expenses by paying part of his board and lodging directly to his landlady. It was she who had found him his room in a new building in Kamerger Street near the Art Theater.

Pasha, who was a little younger than Lara, loved her madly and obeyed her slightest wish. After graduating from the Realgymnasium, he had, at her urging, taken up Greek and Latin. It was her dream that after they had passed their state examinations the following year they would marry and go out as gymnasium teachers to some provincial capital in the Urals.

In the summer of 1911 Lara went for the last time with the Kologrivovs to Duplyanka. She adored the place, and was even fonder of it than its owners. They knew this, and every summer on their arrival the same scene was enacted as though by an unwritten agreement. When the hot, grimy train left them at the station, Lara, overwhelmed by the infinite silence and heady fragrance of the countryside, and speechless with emotion, was allowed to walk alone from the railroad station to the estate. Meanwhile, the luggage was loaded onto a cart, and the family climbed into their barouche and listened to the Duplyanka coachman in his scarlet shirt and sleeveless coat telling them the latest local news.

Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.

That summer she had arrived exhausted by the many duties she had undertaken. She was easily upset. Generous and understanding by nature, she developed a new suspiciousness and a tendency to nurse petty grievances.

The Kologrivovs were as fond of her as ever and wanted her to stay on with them, but now that Lipa had grown up she felt that she had become useless to them. She refused her salary. They had to press it on her. At the same time she needed the money, and it would have been embarrassing and unfeasible to earn it independently while she was their guest.

Lara felt that her position was false and unendurable. She imagined that they all found her a burden and were only putting a good face on it. She was a burden to herself. She longed to run away from herself and from the Kologrivovs—anywhere—but according to her standards, she must first repay the money she had borrowed, and at the moment she had no means of doing it. She felt that she was a hostage—all through Rodia's stupid fault—and was trapped in impotent exasperation.

She suspected slights at every turn. If the Kologrivovs' friends were attentive to her she was sure that they regarded her as a submissive "ward" and an easy prey. If they left her alone, that proved that she did not exist for them.

Her fits of moodiness did not prevent her from sharing in the amusements of the many house guests. She swam, went boating, joined in night picnics by the river, and danced and let off fireworks with the rest. She took part in amateur theatricals and with even more zest in shooting competitions. Short Mauser rifles were used in these contests, but she preferred Rodia's light revolver and became very skillful in its use. "Pity I'm a woman," she said, laughing, "I'd have made an expert duellist." But the more she did to distract herself, the more wretched she felt and the less she knew what she wanted.

When they went back to town it was worse than ever, for to her other troubles were now added her tiffs with Pasha (she was careful not to quarrel with him seriously; she regarded him as her last refuge). Pasha was beginning to show a certain self-assurance. His tone was becoming a little didactic, and this both amused and irritated her.

Pasha, Lipa, the Kologrivovs, money—everything whirled inside her head. She was disgusted with life. She was beginning to lose her mind. She was obsessed with the idea of breaking with everything she had ever known or experienced, and starting on something new. In this state, at Christmastime in the year 1911, she arrived at a fatal decision. She would leave the Kologrivovs now, at once, and become independent, and she would get the money for this from Komarovsky. It seemed to her that after all there had been between them and the years of independence she had won for herself, he must help her chivalrously, disinterestedly, without explanations or disgraceful conditions.

With this in mind she set out for Petrovka Street on the night of the twenty-seventh. Rodia's revolver, loaded and with the safety catch off, was inside her muff. Should Komarovsky refuse or humiliate her in any way, she intended to shoot him.

She walked through the festive streets in a terrible excitement, seeing nothing. The intended revolver shot had already gone off in her heart—and it was a matter of complete indifference whom the shot was aimed at. This shot was the only thing that she was conscious of. She heard it all the way to Petrovka Street, and it was aimed at Komarovsky, at herself, at her own fate, and at the wooden target on the Duplyanka oak tree.

8

"Don't touch my muff!"

Emma Ernestovna had put out her hand to help her off with her coat; she had received her with Oh's and Ah's, telling her that Victor Ippolitovich was out but she must stay and wait for him.

"I can't. I'm in a hurry. Where is he?"

He was at a Christmas party. Clutching the scrap of paper with the address on it, Lara ran down the familiar gloomy staircase with its stained-glass coats of arms and started off for the Sventitskys' house in Flour Town.

Only now, when she came out for the second time, did she take a look around her. It was winter. It was the city. It was night.

It was bitter cold. The streets were covered with a thick, black, glassy layer of ice, like the bottom of beer bottles. It hurt her to breathe. The air was dense with gray sleet and it tickled and pricked her face like the gray frozen bristles of her fur cape. Her heart thumping, she walked through the deserted streets past the steaming doors of cheap teashops and restaurants. Faces as red as sausages and horses' and dogs' heads with beards of icicles emerged from the mist. A thick crust of ice and snow covered the windows, and the colored reflections of lighted Christmas trees and the shadows of merrymakers moved across their chalk-white opaque surfaces as on magic lantern screens; it was as though shows were being given for the benefit of pedestrians.

In Kamerger Street Lara stopped. "I can't go on. I can't bear it." The words almost slipped out. "I'll go up and tell him everything." Pulling herself together, she went in through the heavy door.

9

Pasha, his face red from the effort, his tongue pushing out his cheek, stood in front of the mirror struggling with a collar, a stud, and the starched buttonhole of his shirt front. He was going to a party. So chaste and inexperienced was he that Lara embarrassed him by coming in without knocking and finding him with this minor incompleteness in his dress. He at once noticed her agitation. She could hardly keep on her feet. She advanced pushing the hem of her skirt aside at each step as if she were fording a river.

He hurried toward her. "What's the matter?" he said in alarm. "What has happened?"

"Sit down beside me. Sit down, don't bother to finish dressing. I'm in a hurry, I must go in a minute. Don't touch my muff. Wait, turn the other way for a minute."

He complied. Lara was wearing a tailored suit. She took off her coat, hung it up, and transferred Rodia's revolver from the muff to a pocket. Then she went back to the sofa.

"Now you can look," she said. "Light a candle, and turn off the electricity."

She liked to sit in the dim light of candles, and Pasha always kept a few spare ones. He replaced the stump in the candlestick with a new candle, put it on the window sill, and lit it. The flame choked and spluttered, shooting off small stars, and sharpened to an arrow. A soft light filled the room. In the sheet of ice covering the windowpane a black eyelet began to form at the level of the flame.

"Listen, Pasha," said Lara. "I am in trouble. You must help me. Don't be frightened and don't question me. But don't ever think we can be like other people. Don't take it so lightly. I am in constant danger. If you love me, if you don't want me to be destroyed, we must not put off our marriage."

"But that's what I've always wanted," broke in Pasha. "Just name the day. I'm ready when you are. Now tell me plainly what is worrying you. Don't torment me with riddles."

But Lara evaded his question, imperceptibly changing the subject. They talked a long time about a number of things that had nothing to do with her distress.

10

That winter Yura was preparing a scientific paper on the nervous elements of the retina for the University Gold Medal competition. Though he had qualified only in general medicine, he had a specialist's knowledge of the eye. His interest in the physiology of sight was in keeping with other sides of his character—his creative gifts and his preoccupation with imagery in art and the logical structure of ideas.

Tonia and Yura were driving in a hired sleigh to the Sventitskys' Christmas party. After six years of late childhood and early adolescence spent in the same house they knew everything there was to know about each other. They had habits in common, their own special way of snorting at each other's jokes. Now they drove in silence, their lips tightly closed against the cold, occasionally exchanging a word or two, and absorbed in their own thoughts.

Yura was thinking about the date of his competition and that he must work harder at his paper. Then his mind, distracted by the festive, end-of-the-year bustle in the streets, jumped to other thoughts. He had promised Gordon an article on Blok for the mimeographed student paper that he edited; young people in both capitals were mad about Blok, Yura and Gordon particularly. But not even these thoughts held his mind for long. He and Tonia rode on, their chins tucked into their collars, rubbing their frozen ears, and each of them thinking of something else. But on one point their thoughts converged.

The recent scene at Anna Ivanovna's bedside had transformed them. It was as though their eyes had opened, and they appeared to each other in a new light.

Tonia, his old friend, who had always been taken for granted and had never needed explaining, had turned out to be the most inaccessible and complicated being he could imagine. She had become a woman. By a stretch of imagination he could visualize himself as an emperor, a hero, a prophet, a conqueror, but not as a woman.

Now that Tonia had taken this supreme and most difficult task on her slender and fragile shoulders (she seemed slender and fragile to him, though she was a perfectly healthy girl), he was filled with the ardent sympathy and timid wonder that are the beginning of passion.

Tonia's attitude to Yura underwent a similar change.

It occurred to Yura that perhaps they should not, after all, have gone out. He was worried about Anna Ivanovna. They had been on the point of leaving when, hearing that she was feeling less well, they had gone to her room, but she had ordered them off to the party as sharply as before. They had gone to the window to have a look at the weather. As they came out, the net curtains had clung to Tonia's new dress, trailing after her like a wedding veil. They all noticed this and burst out laughing.

Yura looked around him and saw what Lara had seen shortly before. The moving sleigh was making an unusually loud noise, which was answered by an unusually long echo coming from the ice-bound trees in the gardens and streets. The windows, frosted and lighted from inside, reminded him of precious caskets made of smoky topaz. Behind them glowed the Christmas life of Moscow, candles burned on trees, and guests in fancy dress milled about playing hide-and-seek and hunt-the-ring.

It suddenly occurred to Yura that Blok reflected the Christmas spirit in all domains of Russian life—in this northern city and in the newest Russian literature, under the starry sky of this modern street and around the lighted tree in a twentieth-century drawing room. There was no need to write an article on Blok, he thought, all you had to do was to paint a Russian version of a Dutch Adoration of the Magi with snow in it, and wolves, and a dark fir forest.

As they drove through Kamerger Street Yura noticed that a candle had melted a patch in the icy crust on one of the windows. The light seemed to look into the street almost consciously, as if it were watching the passing carriages and waiting for someone.

"A candle burned on the table, a candle burned…," he whispered to himself—the beginning of something confused, formless; he hoped that it would take shape of itself. But nothing more came to him.

11

From time immemorial the Sventitskys' Christmas parties followed the same pattern. At ten, after the children had gone home, the tree was lit a second time for the others, and the party went on till morning. The more staid people played cards all night long in the "Pompeiian" sitting room, curtained off from the ballroom by a heavy portiere on bronze rings. Before daybreak they would all have supper together.

"Why are you so late?" asked the Sventitskys' nephew, Georges, running through the entrance hall on his way to his uncle's and aunt's rooms. Yura and Tonia took off their things and looked in at the ballroom door before going to greet their hosts.

Rustling their dresses and treading on each other's toes, those who were not dancing but walking and talking moved like a black wall past the hotly breathing Christmas tree with its several tiers of lights.

In the center of the room the dancers twirled and spun dizzily. They were paired off or formed into chains by a young law school student, Koka Kornakov, son of an assistant public prosecutor who was leading the cotillion. "Grand rond!" he bellowed at the top of his voice across the room, or "Chaîne chinoise!"—and they all followed his orders. "Une valse, s'il vous plaît," he shouted to the pianist as he led his partner at the head of the first round, whirling away with her and gradually slowing down in ever smaller and smaller circles until they were barely marking time in what was still the dying echo of a waltz. Everyone clapped, and ices and cool drinks were carried around the noisy, milling, shuffling crowd. Flushed boys and girls never stopped shouting and laughing as they greedily drank cold cranberry juice and lemonade, and the moment they put down their glasses on the trays the noise was ten times louder, as if they had gulped down some exhilarating mixture.

Without stopping in the ballroom, Tonia and Yura went through to their hosts' rooms in the back.

12

The living rooms of the Sventitskys were cluttered up with furniture that had been moved out of the ballroom and the drawing room. Here was the Sventitskys' magic kitchen, their Christmas workshop. The place smelled of paint and glue, and there were piles of colored wrappings and boxes of cotillion favors and spare candles.

The Sventitskys were writing names on cards for presents and for seats at the supper table and numbers on tickets for a lottery. They were helped by Georges, but he kept losing count and they grumbled at him irritably. They were overjoyed at Tonia's and Yura's coming; they had known them as children and unceremoniously set them to work.

"Feliciata Semionovna cannot understand that this should have been done in advance, not right in the middle of the party when the guests are here. Look what you've done now, Georges—the empty bonbonnières go on the sofa and the ones with sugared almonds on the table—now you've mixed up everything."

"I am so glad Annette is better. Pierre and I were so worried."

"Except that she's worse, not better, darling—worse, do you understand? You always get things devant-derrière."

Yura and Tonia spent half the evening backstage with Georges and the old couple.

13

All this time Lara was in the ballroom. She was not in evening dress and did not know anyone there, but she stayed on, either waltzing with Koka Kornakov like a sleepwalker or wandering aimlessly around the room.

Once or twice she stopped and stood hesitating outside the sitting room, in the hope that Komarovsky, who sat facing the doorway, might see her. But he did not take his eyes from his cards, which he held in his left hand and which shielded his face, and he either really did not notice her or pretended not to. She was choking with mortification. A girl whom she did not know went in from the ballroom. Komarovsky looked at her in the way Lara remembered so well. The girl was flattered and flushed and smiled with pleasure. Lara crimsoned with shame and nearly screamed. "A new victim," she thought. Lara saw, as in a mirror, herself and the whole story of her liaison. She did not give up her plan to speak to him but decided to do it later, at a more convenient moment; forcing herself to be calm, she went back to the ballroom.

Komarovsky was playing with three other men. The one on his left was Kornakov, the father of the elegant young man with whom Lara was dancing again, so she understood from the few words she exchanged with him. And the young man's mother was the tall dark woman in black with fiercely burning eyes and an unpleasantly snakelike neck who went back and forth between the ballroom and the sitting room, watching her son dancing and her husband playing cards. And finally Lara learned that the girl who had aroused such complicated feelings in her was the young man's sister and that her suspicions had been groundless.

She had not paid attention to Koka's surname when he had first introduced himself, but he repeated it as he swept her in the last gliding movement of the waltz to a chair and bowed himself off. "Kornakov. Kornakov." It reminded her of something. Of something unpleasant. Then it came back to her. Kornakov was the assistant public prosecutor at the Moscow central court who had made a fanatical speech at the trial of the group of railway men which had included Tiverzin. At Lara's wish, Kologrivov had gone to plead with him, but without success. "So that's it.… Well, well, well.… Interesting.… Kornakov. Kornakov."

14

It was almost two in the morning. Yura's ears were ringing. There had been an interval with tea and petits fours and now the dancing had begun again. No one bothered any more to replace the candles on the tree as they burned down.

Yura stood uneasily in the middle of the ballroom, watching Tonia dancing with a stranger. She swept up to him, flounced her short satin train—like a fish waving its fin—and vanished in the crowd.

She was very excited. During the interval, she had refused tea and had slaked her thirst with innumerable tangerines, peeling them and wiping her fingers and the corners of her mouth on a handkerchief the size of a fruit blossom. Laughing and talking incessantly, she kept taking the handkerchief out and unthinkingly putting it back inside her sash or her sleeve.

Now, as she brushed past the frowning Yura, spinning with her unknown partner, she caught and pressed his hand and smiled eloquently. The handkerchief she had been holding stayed in his hand. He pressed it to his lips and closed his eyes. The handkerchief smelled equally enchantingly of tangerines and of Tonia's hand. This was something new in Yura's life, something he had never felt before, something sharp that pierced him from top to toe. This naïvely childish smell was as intimate and understandable as a word whispered in the dark. He pressed the handkerchief to his eyes and lips, breathing through it. Suddenly a shot rang out inside.

Everyone turned and looked at the portiere that hung between the ballroom and the sitting room. There was a moment's silence. Then the uproar began. Some people rushed about screaming, others ran after Koka into the sitting room from which the sound of the shot had come; others came out to meet them, weeping, arguing and all talking at once.

"What has she done, what has she done!" Komarovsky kept saying in despair.

"Boria, Boria, tell me you're alive," Mrs. Kornakov was screaming hysterically. "Where is Doctor Drokov? They said he's here. Oh, but where, where is he?—How can you, how can you say it's nothing but a scratch! Oh, my poor martyr, that's what you get for exposing all those criminals! There she is, the scum, there she is, I'll scratch your eyes out, you slut, you won't get away this time! What did you say, Komarovsky? You? She shot at you? No, I can't bear it, this is a tragic moment, Komarovsky, I haven't time to listen to jokes. Koka, Kokochka! Can you believe it? She tried to kill your father.… Yes.… But Providence…Koka! Koka!"

The crowd poured out of the sitting room into the ballroom. At the head of it came Kornakov, laughingly assuring everyone that he was quite all right and dabbing with a napkin at a scratch on his left hand. Another group, somewhat apart, was leading Lara by the arms.

Yura was dumfounded. This girl again! And again in such extraordinary circumstances! And again that gray-haired man. But this time Yura knew who he was—the prominent lawyer, Komarovsky, who had had something to do with his father's estate. No need to greet him. They both pretended not to know each other. And the girl…So it was the girl who had fired the shot? At the prosecutor? Must be for political reasons. Poor thing. She was in for a bad time. How haughtily beautiful she was! And those louts, twisting her arms, as if she were a common thief!

But at once he realized that he was mistaken. Lara's legs gave way under her, they were holding her up and almost carrying her to the nearest armchair, where she collapsed.

Yura was about to rush up to her to bring her around but thought it proper first to show some interest in the victim. He walked up to Kornakov.

"I am a doctor," he said. "Let me see your hand. Well, you've been lucky. It's not even worth bandaging. A drop of iodine wouldn't do any harm though. There's Felitsata Semionovna, we'll ask her."

Felitsata and Tonia, who were coming toward him, were white-faced. They told him to leave everything and quickly get his coat. There had been a message from home, they were to go back at once.

Yura, imagining the worst, forgot everything else and ran for his things.

15

They did not find Anna Ivanovna alive. When they ran up the stairs to her room she had been dead for ten minutes. The cause of death had been an attack of suffocation resulting from acute edema of the lungs; this had not been diagnosed in time. For the first few hours Tonia screamed, sobbed convulsively, and recognized no one. On the following day she calmed down but could only nod in answer to anything that Yura and her father said to her; each time she tried to speak, her grief overpowered her and she began to scream again as if she were possessed.

In the intervals between the services she knelt for hours beside the dead woman, her large, fine hands clasping a corner of the coffin standing on its dais, covered with wreaths. She was oblivious of the people around her. But whenever her eyes met those of her friends she would quickly get up and hurry from the room and up the stairs, repressing her sobs until she fell on the bed and buried her bursts of despair in the pillow.

Sorrow, standing for many hours on end, lack of sleep, the deep-toned singing and the dazzling candles by night and day as well as the cold he had caught, filled Yura's soul with a sweet confusion, a fever of grief and ecstasy.

When his mother had died ten years earlier he had been a child. He could still remember how he had cried, grief-stricken and terrified. In those days he had not been primarily concerned with himself. He could hardly even realize that such a being as Yura existed on its own or had any value or interest. What mattered then was everything outside and around him. From every side the external world pressed in on him, dense, indisputable, tangible as a forest. And the reason he had been so shaken by his mother's death was that, at her side, he had lost himself in the forest, suddenly to find her gone and himself alone in it. The forest was made up of everything in the world—clouds and shop signs and the golden balls on fire towers and the bare-headed riders who went as escort before the holy image of the Mother of God carried in a coach. Shop fronts were in it, and arcades, and the inaccessibly high star-studded sky, and the Lord God and the saints.

This inaccessibly high sky once came all the way down to his nursery, as far as his nurse's skirt when she was talking to him about God; it was close and within reach like the tops of hazel trees in the gullies when you pulled down their branches and picked the nuts. It was as if it dipped into the gilt nursery washbasin and, having bathed in fire and gold, re-emerged as the morning service or mass at the tiny church where he went with his nurse. There the heavenly stars became the lights before the icons, and the Lord God was a kindly Father, and everything more or less fell into its right place. But the main thing was the real world of the grownups and the city that loomed up all around him like a forest. At that time, with the whole of his half-animal faith, Yura believed in God, who was the keeper of that forest.

Now it was quite different. In his twelve years at gymnasium and university, Yura had studied the classics and Scripture, legends and poets, history and natural science, which had become to him the chronicles of his house, his family tree. Now he was afraid of nothing, neither of life nor of death; everything in the world, all the things in it were words in his vocabulary. He felt he was on an equal footing with the universe. And he was affected by the services for Anna Ivanovna differently than he had been by the services for his mother. Then he had prayed in confusion, fear, and pain. Now he listened to the services as if they were a message addressed to him and concerning him directly. He listened intently to the words, expecting them, like any other words, to have a clear meaning. There was no religiosity in his reverence for the supreme powers of heaven and earth, which he worshipped as his progenitors.

16

"Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and deathless, have mercy on us." What was it? Where was he? They must be taking out the coffin. He must wake up. He had fallen asleep in his clothes on the sofa at six in the morning. Now they were hunting for him all over the house, but no one thought of looking in the far corner of the library behind the bookshelves.

"Yura! Yura!" Markel was calling him. They were taking out the coffin. Markel would have to carry the wreaths, and nowhere could he find Yura to help him; to make matters worse he had got stuck in the bedroom where the wreaths were piled up, because the door of the wardrobe on the landing had swung open and blocked that of the bedroom.

"Markel! Markel! Yura!" people were shouting from downstairs. Markel kicked open the door and ran downstairs carrying several wreaths.

"Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and deathless," the words drifted softly down the street and stayed there; as if a feather duster had softly brushed the air, everything was swaying—wreaths, passers-by, plumed horses' heads, the censer swinging on its chain from the priest's hand, and the white earth under foot.

"Yura! My God! At last." Shura Shlesinger was shaking his shoulder. "What's the matter with you? They're carrying out the coffin. Are you coming with us?"

"Yes, of course."

17

The funeral service was over. The beggars, shuffling their feet in the cold, closed up in two ranks. The hearse, the gig with wreaths on it, and the Kruegers' carriage stirred and swayed slightly. The cabs drew up closer to the church. Out of it came Shura Shlesinger, crying; lifting her veil, damp with tears, she cast a searching glance at the crowd, spotted the pallbearers, beckoned to them, and went back into the church. More and more people were pouring out.

"Well, so now it's Anna Ivanovna's turn. She sends her best regards. She took a ticket to a far place, poor soul."

"Yes, her dance is over, poor cricket, she's gone to her rest."

"Have you got a cab or are you going to walk?"

"I need to stretch my legs after all that standing. Let's walk a bit and then we'll take a cab."

"Did you see how upset Fufkov was? Looking at her, tears pouring down his face, blowing his nose, staring at her face. Standing next to her husband at that."

"He always had his eye on her."

They slowly made their way to the cemetery at the other end of town. That day the hard frost had broken. It was a still, heavy day; the cold had gone and the life had gone too—it was a day as though made for a funeral. The dirty snow looked as if it shone through crêpe, and the firs behind the churchyard railings, wet and dark like tarnished silver, seemed to be in deep mourning.

It was in this same churchyard that Yura's mother lay buried. He had not been to her grave in recent years. He glanced in its direction and whispered, "Mother," almost as he might have done years before.

They dispersed solemnly, in picturesque groups, along the cleared paths, whose meanderings did not harmonize with the sorrowful deliberation of their step. Alexander Alexandrovich led Tonia by the arm. They were followed by the Kruegers. Black was very becoming to Tonia.

Hoarfrost, bearded like mold, sprouted on the chains with crosses hanging from the domes and on the pink monastery walls. In the far corner of the monastery yard, washing hung on lines stretching from wall to wall—shirts with heavy sodden sleeves, peach-colored tablecloths, badly wrung out and crookedly fastened sheets. Yura realized that this, altered in appearance by the new buildings, was the part of the monastery grounds where the blizzard had raged that night.

He walked on alone, ahead of the others, stopping occasionally to let them catch up with him. In answer to the desolation brought by death to the people slowly pacing after him, he was drawn, as irresistibly as water funnelling downward, to dream, to think, to work out new forms, to create beauty. More vividly than ever before he realized that art has two constant, two unending concerns: it always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St. John.

With joyful anticipation he thought of the day or two which he would set aside and spend alone, away from the university and from his home, to write a poem in memory of Anna Ivanovna. He would include all those random things that life had sent his way, a few descriptions of Anna Ivanovna's best characteristics, Tonia in mourning, street incidents on the way back from the funeral, and the washing hanging in the place where, many years ago, the blizzard had raged in the night and he had wept as a child.

FOUR

The Hour of the Inevitable

 

Lara lay feverish and half conscious in Feliciata Semionovna's bed; the Sventitskys, the servants, and Dr. Drokov were talking in whispers around her.

The rest of the house was dark and empty. Only in one small sitting room did a lamp on a bracket cast its dim light up and down the long suite of rooms.

Here Komarovsky strode with angry, resolute steps, as if he were at home and not a visitor. He would look into the bedroom for news and tear back to the other end of the house, past the tree with its tinsel, and through the dining room where the table stood laden with untasted dishes and the greenish crystal wineglasses tinkled every time a cab drove past the windows or a mouse scurried over the tablecloth among the china.

Komarovsky thrashed about in a fury. Conflicting feelings crowded in his breast. The scandal! The disgrace! He was beside himself. His position was threatened, his reputation would suffer from the incident. At whatever cost he must prevent the gossip or, if the news had already spread, stop the rumors, nip them in the bud.

Another reason for his agitation was that he had once again experienced the irresistible attraction of this crazy, desperate girl. He had always known that she was different. There had always been something unique about her. But how deeply, painfully, irreparably had he wounded her and upset her life, and how rebellious and violent she was in her determination to reshape her destiny and start afresh!

It was clear that he must help her in every way. Take a room for her, perhaps. But in no circumstances must he come near her; on the contrary, he must keep away, stand aside so as not to be in her way, or with her violent nature there was no knowing what she might do.

And what a lot of trouble ahead! This wasn't the sort of thing for which they patted you on the head! The law didn't wink at it. It was not yet morning, and hardly two hours had passed since it happened but already the police had been twice and he, Komarovsky, had had to go to the kitchen and see the inspector and smooth things over.

And the further it went the more complications there would be. They would have to have proof that Lara had meant to shoot at him and not at Kornakov. And even that wouldn't be the end of it; she would only be cleared of one part of the charge, but she would still be liable to prosecution.

Naturally, he would do everything to prevent it. If the case came to court he would get expert evidence from a psychiatrist that she had not been responsible for her actions at the moment when she fired the shot and would see to it that the proceedings were dropped.

With these reflections he began to calm down. The night was over. Streaks of light probed from room to room and dived under the chairs and tables like thieves or appraisers.

After a last look in the bedroom, where he was told that Lara was no better, Komarovsky left and went to see a friend of his, Ruffina Onissimovna Voit-Voitkovsky, a woman lawyer who was the wife of a political émigré. Her eight-room apartment was now too large for her, she could not afford to keep it all up, so she let two of the rooms. One of them had recently become vacant, and Komarovsky took it for Lara. There she was taken a few hours later, only half conscious with brain fever.

2

Ruffina Onissimovna was a woman of advanced views, entirely unprejudiced, and well disposed toward everything that she called "positive and vital."

On top of her chest of drawers she kept a copy of the Erfurt Program with a dedication by the author. One of the photographs on the wall showed her husband, "her good Voit," at a rally in Switzerland, together with Plekhanov, both in alpaca jackets and panama hats.

Ruffina Onissimovna took a dislike to her sick lodger the moment she saw her. She considered Lara a malingerer. The girl's feverish ravings seemed to her nothing but play-acting. She was ready to swear that Lara was impersonating Gretchen gone mad in her dungeon.

She expressed her contempt for Lara by being brisker than usual. She banged doors, sang in a loud voice, tore through her part of the apartment like a hurricane, and kept the windows open all day long.

The apartment was on the top floor of a building in the Arbat. After the winter solstice its windows filled to overflowing with blue sky as wide as a river in flood. Through half the winter it was full of the early signs of the coming spring.

A warm wind from the south blew in through the casements. Locomotives at their distant stations roared like sea lions. Lara, lying ill in bed, filled her leisure with recollections.

She often thought of the night of her arrival in Moscow from the Urals, seven or eight years before, in the unforgettable days of her childhood. She was riding in a cab from the station through gloomy alleys to the hotel at the other end of town. One by one the street lamps threw the humpbacked shadow of the coachman on the walls. The shadow grew and grew till it became gigantic and stretched across the roofs, and was cut off. Then it all began again from the beginning. The bells of Moscow's countless churches clanged in the darkness overhead, and the trolleys rang as they scurried through the streets, but Lara was also deafened by the gaudy window displays and glaring lights, as if they too emitted sounds of their own, like the bells and wheels.

In their hotel room she was staggered at the sight of a watermelon of incredible size. It was Komarovsky's house-warming gift, and to her it was a symbol of his power and wealth. When he thrust a knife into this marvel, and the dark green globe split in half, revealing its icy, sugary heart, she was frightened, but she dared not refuse a slice. The fragrant pink mouthfuls stuck in her throat, but she forced herself to swallow them.

Just as she was intimidated by expensive food and by the night life of the capital, so she was later intimidated by Komarovsky himself—this was the real explanation of everything.

But now he had changed beyond recognition. He made no demands, never reminded her of the past, and never even came. And all that time he kept at a distance from her, and most nobly offered to help her.

Kologrivov's visit was something entirely different. She was overjoyed when he came. Not because he was tall and handsome, but because of his overflowing vitality, her visitor with his shining eyes and intelligent smile filled half the space in her room, making it seem crowded.

He sat by her bed rubbing his hands. On the occasions when he was summoned to attend a ministerial meeting in Petersburg he spoke to the old dignitaries as if they were schoolboys; but now he saw before him a girl who till recently had been part of his household, something like a daughter to him, with whom, as with all other members of his family, he had exchanged words and glances only casually (this constituted the characteristic charm of their closeness, and both he and his family were aware of this). He could not treat Lara as an adult, with gravity and indifference. He did not know how to speak to her without offending her. "What's the big idea?" he said smilingly, as if she were a child. "Who wants these melodramas?"

He paused, and glanced at the damp stains on the walls and ceiling. Then, shaking his head reproachfully, he went on:

"There's an international exhibition opening at Düsseldorf—painting, sculpture, gardening. I'm going. You know, it's a bit damp here. And how long do you think you're going to wander about from pillar to post without a proper place to live in? This Voit woman, between ourselves, is no good, I know her. Why don't you move out? You've been ill in bed long enough—time you got up. Change your room, take up something, finish your studies. There's a painter, a friend of mine, who's going to Turkistan for two years. He's got partitions up in his studio—it's more like a small flat. I think he'd turn it over furnished to somebody who'd look after it. How about my fixing it up? And there's another thing. I've been meaning to do it for a long time, it's a sacred duty…since Lipa…Here's a small sum, a bonus for her graduation. No, please…No, I beg you, don't be stubborn…no, really you'll have to ..."

And in spite of her protests, her tears, and her struggles, he forced her, before he left, to accept a check for ten thousand rubles.

When she recovered, Lara moved to the lodgings Kologrivov had recommended, near the Smolensky Market. The flat was at the top of an old-fashioned two-story house. There were teamsters living in the other part of it, and there was a warehouse on the ground floor. The cobbled yard was always littered with spilled oats and hay. Pigeons strutted about cooing and fluttered up noisily to the level of Lara's window whenever a drove of rats scurried down the stone gutter.

3

Lara was greatly troubled about Pasha. So long as she was seriously ill he had not been allowed to see her, and what could he be expected to think? Lara had tried to kill a man who, as he saw it, was no more than an acquaintance of hers, and this same man, the object of her unsuccessful attempt at murder, had afterwards shielded her from its consequences. And all that after their memorable conversation at Christmas, by candlelight. If it had not been for this man, Lara would have been arrested and tried. He had warded off the punishment that hung over her. Thanks to him she was able to continue her studies, safe and unharmed. Pasha was puzzled and tormented.

When she was better Lara sent for him and said: "I am a bad woman. You don't know me, someday I'll tell you. I can't talk about it now, you can see for yourself, every time I try I start crying. But enough, forget me, I'm not worthy of you."

There followed heart-rending scenes, each more unbearable than the last. All this went on, while Lara was still living in Arbat Street, and Voitkovskaia, meeting Pasha in the corridor with his tear-stained face, would rush off to her room and collapse on her sofa laughing herself sick. "Oh, I can't, I can't, it's too much!" she exclaimed. "Really! The hero! Ha, ha, ha!"

To deliver Pasha from a disgraceful attachment, to tear out his love for her by the roots and put an end to his torment, Lara told him that she had decided to give him up because she did not love him, but in making this renunciation she sobbed so much that it was impossible to believe her. Pasha suspected her of all the deadly sins, disbelieved every word she said, was ready to curse and hate her, but he loved her to distraction and was jealous of her very thoughts, and of the mug she drank from and of the pillow on which she lay. If they were not to go insane they must act quickly and firmly. They made up their minds to get married at once, before graduation. The idea was to have the wedding on the Monday after Low Sunday. At Lara's wish it was again put off.

They were married on Whit Monday; by then it was quite clear that they had passed their examinations. All the arrangements were made by Liudmila Kapitonovna Chepurko, the mother of Lara's fellow student Tusia. Liudmila was a handsome woman with a high bosom, a fine low-pitched singing voice, and a head full of innumerable superstitions, some of them picked up and others invented by herself.

The day Lara was to be "led to the altar" (as Liudmila purred in her gypsy voice while helping her to dress) it was terribly hot. The golden domes of churches and the freshly sanded paths in the town gardens were a glaring yellow. The green birch saplings cut on Whitsun Eve hung over the church railings, dusty, their leaves rolled up into little scrolls and as though scorched. There was hardly a breath of air, and the sunshine made spots before your eyes. It was as though a thousand weddings were to be held that day, for all the girls were in white dresses like brides and had curled their hair and all the young men were pomaded and wore tight-fitting black suits. Everyone was excited and everyone was hot.

As Lara stepped on the carpet leading to the altar, Lagodina, the mother of another friend, threw a handful of small silver coins at her feet to ensure the future prosperity of the couple; and with the same intention Liudmila told her that, when the wedding crown was held over her head, she must not make the sign of the cross with her bare fingers but cover them with the edge of her veil or a lace frill. She also told Lara to hold her candle high in order to have the upper hand in her house. Lara, sacrificing her future to Pasha's, held her candle as low as she could, but all in vain, because however low she held it Pasha held his lower still.

Straight from the church they drove to the wedding breakfast at the studio to which the couple moved. The guests shouted, "It's bitter!" and others responded unanimously from the end of the room, "Make it sweet!" and the bride and bridegroom smiled shyly and kissed. Liudmila sang "The Vineyard" in their honor, with the double refrain "God give you love and concord," and a song that began "Undo the braid, scatter the fair hair."

When all the guests had gone and they were left alone, Pasha felt uneasy in the sudden silence. A street lamp shone from across the road, and however tightly Lara drew the curtains, a streak of light, narrow as a board, reached into the room. This light gave Pasha no rest, he felt as if they were being watched. He discovered to his horror that he was thinking more of the street lamp than of Lara or of himself or of his love for her.

During this night, which lasted an eternity, Antipov ("Stepanida," or "the fair maiden," as he was called by his fellow students) reached the heights of joy and the lowest depths of despair. His suspicious guesses alternated with Lara's confessions. He questioned her, and with each of her answers his spirit sank as though he were hurtling down a void. His wounded imagination could not keep up with her revelations.

They talked till morning. In all Pasha's life there had not been a change in him so decisive and abrupt as in the course of this night. He got up a different man, almost astonished that he was still called Pasha Antipov.

4

Nine days later their friends arranged a farewell party for them, in that same room. Both Pasha and Lara had graduated with flying colors, and both had been offered jobs in the same town in the Urals. They were setting out for it next day.

Again they drank and sang and were boisterous, but this time there were only young people present.

Behind the partition that separated the living quarters from the studio, there stood a big wicker hamper and another, smaller one of Lara's, a suitcase, a box of crockery, and several sacks. There was a lot of luggage. Part of it was being sent next day by freight. Almost everything was packed, but there was still a little room left in the box and in the hampers. Every now and then Lara thought of something else she meant to take and put it into one of the hampers, rearranging things to make it tidy.

Pasha was at home entertaining guests by the time Lara got back from the university office where she had gone for her birth certificate and other papers. She came up followed by the janitor with a bundle of sacking and a thick rope for those pieces that were going by freight. After he left, Lara made the round of the guests, shaking hands with some and kissing others, and went behind the partition to change. When she came back, they greeted her with applause, sat down, and a noisy party began, like the one a few days earlier. The more enterprising poured vodka for their neighbors; hands armed with forks stretched toward the center of the table where bread, appetizers, and cooked dishes were set out. There were speeches, toasts, and constant joking. Some got drunk.

"I'm dead tired," said Lara, who was sitting next to her husband. "Did you manage to get everything done?"

"Yes."

"All the same, I'm feeling wonderful. I'm so happy. Are you?"

"I too. I feel fine. But there's a lot to talk about."

As an exception Komarovsky had been allowed to join the young people's party. At the end of the evening he started to say how bereaved he would feel when his two young friends left Moscow—the town would be like a desert, a Sahara; but he became so sentimental that he began to sob, and he had to start all over from the beginning.

He asked the Antipovs' permission to write to them and to visit them at Yuriatin, if he missed them too much.

"That's quite unnecessary," Lara said loudly and nonchalantly. "And in general it's all quite pointless—writing, Sahara, and all that. As for coming, don't think of it. With God's help you'll manage without us, we aren't as important as all that. Don't you think so, Pasha? I'm sure you'll find other young friends."

Then suddenly forgetting with whom she was talking and what she was saying she hurried off to the kitchen. There she took the meat grinder apart and packed the parts into the corners of the crockery case, padding them with tufts of straw. In doing this she scratched herself on the edge of the box and nearly ran a splinter into her hand.

She was suddenly reminded of her guests by a particularly loud outburst of laughter on the other side of the partition. It occurred to her that when people were drunk they always tried to impersonate drunkards, and the drunker they were the more they overacted.

At this moment she became aware of another peculiar sound, coming from the yard, through the open window. She pulled the curtains and leaned out.

A hobbled horse was moving across the yard with short, limping jumps. Lara did not know whose it was or how it had strayed into the yard. It was completely light though a long way to sunrise. The sleeping city seemed dead. It was bathed in the gray-blue coolness of the early hours. Lara closed her eyes. The characteristic sound of the hobbled horse's steps, so unlike anything else, transported her to some wonderful, remote village.

There was a ring at the door. Lara pricked up her ears. Someone got up from the table to open. It was Nadia! Lara ran to meet her. Nadia had come straight from the train, so fresh and enchanting that it seemed as if she brought with her the scent of the lilies of the valley of Duplyanka. The two friends stood speechless with emotion and, hugging each other, could only cry.

Nadia had brought Lara the congratulations and good wishes of the whole family and a present from her parents. She took a jewel case out of her travelling bag, snapped it open, and held out a very beautiful necklace.

There were gasps of delight and astonishment. A guest who had been drunk but had recovered a little said:

"It's pink hyacinth. Yes, yes, pink, believe it or not. That's what it is. It's just as valuable as diamonds."

But Nadia said that the stones were yellow sapphires.

Lara put Nadia next to her at table and made her eat and drink. The necklace lay beside her plate, and she could not stop looking at it. The stones had rolled into a hollow on the mauve-cushioned lining of the case and looked now like dew and now like a cluster of small grapes.

Meanwhile those of the guests who had sobered up were again drinking to keep company with Nadia, whom they soon made tipsy.

Soon everyone in the flat was fast asleep. Most of them, planning to go to the station with Lara and Pasha in the morning, stayed the night. A good many had been snoring before Nadia came, and Lara herself never knew afterwards how she came to be lying fully dressed on the sofa next to Ira Lagodina.

She was wakened by the sound of loud voices near by. They were the voices of strangers who had come into the yard to recover their horse. As she opened her eyes she said to herself: "What on earth can Pasha be doing pottering about in the middle of the room?" But when the man she had taken for Pasha turned his head she saw a pockmarked scarecrow whose face was cut by a deep scar from brow to chin. She realized it was a burglar and tried to shout but could not utter a sound. She remembered her necklace and raising herself cautiously on her elbow looked where she had left it on the table.

The necklace was still there among the bread crumbs and unfinished pieces of caramel; the thief hadn't noticed it among the litter. He was only rummaging in the suitcase she had packed so carefully and making a mess of her work. That was all she could think of at the moment, half asleep and still tipsy as she was. Indignant, she tried to shout and again found she couldn't. Then she dug her knee into Ira's stomach, and when Ira yelped with pain she too began to scream. The thief dropped everything and ran. Some of the men jumped up and tried to chase him without quite knowing what it was all about, but by the time they got outside the door he had vanished.

The commotion woke everyone up, and Lara, whose tipsiness had suddenly gone, did not allow them to go back to sleep. She made them coffee and packed them off home until it was time to go to the station.

Then she set to work feverishly stuffing the bed linen into the hampers, strapping up the luggage and tying it with ropes, and begging Pasha and the janitor's wife just not to bother her by trying to help.

Everything got done in time. The Antipovs did not miss their train. It started smoothly, as though wafted away by the hats their friends were waving after them. When they stopped waving and bellowed something three times—probably "Hurrah!"—the train put on speed.

5

For the third day the weather was wretched. It was the second autumn of the war. The successes of the first year had been followed by reverses. Brusilov's Eighth Army, which had been concentrated in the Carpathians ready to pour down the slopes into Hungary, was instead drawing back, caught by the ebb of the general retreat. The Russians were evacuating Galicia, which they had occupied in the first months of the fighting.

Dr. Zhivago, until recently known as Yura but now addressed more and more often as Yurii Andreievich, stood in the corridor of the gynecological section of the hospital, outside the door of the maternity ward to which he had just brought his wife Tonia—Antonina Alexandrovna. He had said goodbye to her and was waiting for the midwife, to tell her where she could reach him in case of need and to ask her how he could get in touch with her.

He was in a hurry: he had to visit two patients and get back to his hospital as soon as possible, and there he was, wasting precious time, staring out of the window at the slanting streaks of rain buffeted by the autumn wind like a cornfield in a storm.

It was not yet very dark. He could see the back yards of the hospital, the glassed-in verandas of the private houses in Devichie Pole, and the branch trolley line leading to one of the hospital blocks.

The rain poured with a dreary steadiness, neither hurrying nor slowing down for all the fury of the wind, which seemed enraged by the indifference of the water. Gusts of wind shook the creeper on one of the houses as if intending to tear it up by the roots, swung it up into the air, and dropped it in disgust like a discarded rag.

A truck with two trailers drove past the veranda to the hospital entrance. Wounded men were carried in.

The Moscow hospitals were desperately overcrowded, especially since the battle of Lutsk. The wounded were put in the passages and on landings. The general overcrowding was beginning to affect the women's wards.

Yurii Andreievich turned away from the window yawning with fatigue. He had nothing to think about. Suddenly he remembered an incident at the Hospital of the Holy Cross, where he worked. A woman had died a few days earlier in the surgical ward. Yurii Andreievich had diagnosed echinococcus of the liver, but everyone thought he was wrong. An autopsy was to be made today, but their prosector was a habitual drunkard and you never could tell how careful he would be.

Night fell suddenly. Nothing more was visible outside. As at the waving of a magic wand, lights sprang up in all the windows.

The head gynecologist came out of Tonia's ward through the narrow lobby separating it from the corridor. He was of mammoth size, and always responded to questions by shrugging his shoulders and staring at the ceiling. These silent gestures were meant to suggest that, whatever the advances of science, there were more things in heaven and earth, friend Horatio, than science ever dreamt on.

He passed Yurii Andreievich with a nod and a smile, flipped his podgy hands a few times to intimate that there was nothing for it but patience, and went off down the corridor to have a smoke in the waiting room.

After him came his assistant, who was as garrulous as her superior was taciturn.

"If I were you I'd go home," she told Yurii Andreievich. "I'll call you up tomorrow at the Holy Cross. It's most unlikely that anything will happen between now and then. There's every reason to expect a natural birth; there shouldn't be any need for surgical intervention. But of course the pelvis is narrow, the child's head is in the occipito-posterior position, there are no pains, and the contractions are slight. All this gives grounds for anxiety. However, it's too soon to say. It all depends on how the pains develop once labor begins. Then we'll know."

 

When he telephoned the following day, the hospital porter who took the call told him to wait while he made inquiries; after keeping him in misery for a good ten minutes he came back with the following inadequate and crudely worded information: "They say, tell him he's brought his wife too soon, he's to take her back."

Infuriated, Yurii Andreievich told him to get the nurse on the telephone. "The symptoms may be misleading," the nurse said. "We'll know more in a day or two."

On the third day he was told that labor had begun the night before, the water had broken at dawn, and there had been strong pains with short intervals since the early morning.

He rushed headlong to the hospital. As he walked down the passage to the door, which by mistake had been left half open, he heard Tonia's heart-rending screams; she screamed like the victims of an accident dragged with crushed limbs from under the wheels of a train.

He was not allowed to see her. Biting his knuckle until he drew blood, he went over to the window; the same slanting rain was pouring down as on the two preceding days.

A nurse came out of the ward, and he heard the squealing of a newborn child. "She's safe, she's safe," Yurii Andreievich muttered joyfully to himself.

"It's a son. A little boy. Congratulations on a safe delivery," said the nurse in a singsong. "You can't go in yet. When they're ready we'll show you. Then you'll have to give her a nice present. She's had a bad time. It's the first one. There's always trouble with the first."

"She's safe, she's safe." Yurii Andreievich was happy. He did not understand what the nurse was telling him, and why she was including him in her congratulations as if he had played a part in what had happened. For what had he actually had to do with it? Father—son; he did not see why he should be proud of this unearned fatherhood, he felt that this son was a gift out of the blue. He was scarcely aware of all this. The main thing was that Tonia—Tonia, who had been in mortal danger—was now happily safe.

He had a patient living near the hospital. He went to see him and was back in half an hour. Both the door of the lobby and that of the ward were again ajar. Without knowing what he was doing, Yurii Andreievich slipped into the lobby.

The huge gynecologist, in his white coat, rose as though from under the ground in front of him, barring the way.

"Where do you think you're going?" he whispered breathlessly so that the new mother should not hear. "Are you out of your mind? After she lost all that blood, risk of sepsis, not to speak of psychological shock! And you call yourself a doctor!"

"I didn't mean to…Do let me have just a glance. Just from here, through the crack."

"Oh, well, that's different. All right, if you must. But don't let me catch you…If she sees you, I'll wring your neck."

Inside the ward two women in white uniforms stood with their backs to the door; they were the midwife and the nurse. Squirming on the palm of the nurse's hand lay a tender, squealing, tiny human creature, stretching and contracting like a dark red piece of rubber. The midwife was putting a ligature on the navel before cutting the cord. Tonia lay on a surgical bed of adjustable height in the middle of the room. She lay fairly high. Yurii Andreievich, exaggerating everything in his excitement, thought that she was lying, say, at the level of one of those desks at which you write standing up

Raised higher, closer to the ceiling than ordinary mortals usually are, Tonia lay exhausted in the cloud of her spent pain. To Yurii Andreievich she seemed like a barque lying at rest in the middle of a harbor after putting in and being unloaded, a barque that plied between an unknown country and the continent of life across the waters of death with a cargo of immigrant new souls. One such soul had just been landed, and the ship now lay at anchor, relaxed, its flanks unburdened and empty. The whole of her was resting, her strained masts and hull, and her memory washed clean of the image of the other shore, the crossing and the landing.

And as no one had explored the country where she was registered, no one knew the language in which to speak to her.

At Yurii Andreievich's hospital everyone congratulated him. He was astonished to see how fast the news had travelled.

He went into the staff room, known as the Rubbish Dump. With so little space in the overcrowded hospital, it was used as a cloakroom; people came in from outside wearing their snow boots, they forgot their parcels and littered the floor with papers and cigarette ends.

Standing by the window, the flabby, elderly prosector was holding up a jar with some opaque liquid against the light and examining it over the top of his glasses.

"Congratulations," he said, without looking around.

"Thank you. How kind of you."

"Don't thank me. I've had nothing to do with it. Pichuzhkin did the autopsy. But everyone is impressed—echinococcus it was. That's a real diagnostician, they're all saying. That's all everyone is talking about."

Just then the medical director came in, greeted them both, and said: "What the devil is happening to this place? What a filthy mess it is! By the way, Zhivago, it was echinococcus after all! We were wrong. Congratulations. There's another thing. It's a nuisance. They've been reviewing the lists of exemptions again. I can't stop them this time. There's a terrible shortage of medical personnel. You'll be smelling gunpowder before long."

6

The Antipovs had done much better in Yuriatin than they had hoped to. The Guishars were remembered well. This had helped Lara over the difficulties of setting up house in a new place.

Lara had her hands full and plenty to think about. She took care of the house and of their three-year-old daughter, Katenka. Marfutka, their red-haired maid, did her best but could not get all the work done. Larisa Feodorovna shared all her husband's interests. She herself taught at the girls' gymnasium. She worked without respite and was happy. This was exactly the kind of life she had dreamed of.

She liked Yuriatin. It was her native town. It stood on the big river Rynva, navigable except in its upper reaches, and one of the Ural railways passed through it.

The approach of winter in Yuriatin was always heralded by the owners of boats, when they took them from the river and transported them on carts to the town, to be stored in back yards. There they lay in the open air waiting for the spring. The boats with their light upturned bottoms in the yards meant in Yuriatin what the migration of storks or the first snow meant in other places. Such a boat lay in the yard of the house rented by the Antipovs. Katenka played in the shelter of its white hull as in a summerhouse.

Larisa Feodorovna liked Yuriatin's provincial ways, the long vowels of its northern accent, and the naïve trustfulness of its intelligentsia, who wore felt boots and gray flannel sleeveless coats. She was drawn to the land and to the common people.

Paradoxically, it was her husband, Pavel Pavlovich, the son of a Moscow railway worker, who turned out to be an incorrigible urbanite. He judged the people of Yuriatin much more harshly than she. Their crudeness and ignorance irritated him.

He had an extraordinary capacity, it now appeared, for reading quickly and storing up the knowledge he picked up. He had read a great deal in the past, partly thanks to Lara. During the years of his provincial seclusion, he became so well read that even Lara no longer seemed to him well-informed. He towered high above his fellow teachers and complained that he felt stifled among them. Now in wartime, their standard, commonplace, and somewhat stale patriotism was out of tune with his own, more complicated feelings about his country.

Pavel Pavlovich had graduated in classics. He taught Latin and ancient history. But from his earlier Realgymnasium days he had kept a half-forgotten passion for the exact sciences, physics and mathematics, and it had now suddenly revived in him. Teaching himself at home, he had reached university standard in these subjects, and dreamed of taking his degree, specializing in some branch of mathematics, and moving with his family to Petersburg. Studying late into the night had affected his health. He began to suffer from insomnia.

His relations with his wife were good but lacked simplicity. Her kindness and her fussing over him oppressed him, but he would not criticize her for fear that she might take some quite innocent word of his for a reproach—a hint, perhaps, that her blood was bluer than his, or that she had once belonged to someone else. His anxiety lest she suspect him of having some absurdly unfair idea about her introduced an element of artificiality into their life. Each tried to behave more nobly than the other, and this complicated everything.

One night they had guests—the headmistress of Lara's school, several fellow teachers of her husband's, the member of an arbitration court on which Pavel Pavlovich too had recently served, and a few others. They were all, from Pavel Pavlovich's point of view, complete fools. He was amazed at Lara's amiability toward them, and he could not believe that she sincerely liked any of them.

After the visitors had gone, Lara took a long time airing and tidying the rooms and washing dishes in the kitchen with Marfutka. Then she made sure that Katenka was properly tucked up and Pasha asleep, quickly undressed, turned off the light, and lay down next to him as naturally as a child getting into bed with its mother.

But Antipov was only pretending that he was asleep. As so often recently, he had insomnia. He knew that he would lie awake for three or four hours. To walk himself to sleep, and to escape from the still smoky air of the room, he got up quietly, put on his fur coat and cap over his night clothes, and went outside.

It was a clear, frosty autumn night. Thin sheets of ice crumbled under his steps. The sky, shining with stars, threw a pale blue flicker like the flame of burning alcohol over the black earth with its clumps of frozen mud.

The Antipovs lived at the other end of town from the river harbor. The house was the last in the street, and beyond it lay a field cut by a railway with a grade crossing and a guard's shelter.

Antipov sat down on the overturned boat and looked at the stars. The thoughts to which he had become accustomed in the past few years assailed him with alarming strength. It seemed to him that sooner or later they would have to be thought out to the end, and that it might as well be done now.

This can't go on, he thought. He could have foreseen it long ago, before they were married. He had caught on late. Even as a child he had been fascinated by her, and she could make him do whatever she liked. Why hadn't he had the sense to renounce her in time, that winter before their marriage, when she herself had insisted on it? Wasn't it clear that it was not he whom she loved, but the noble task she had set herself in relation to him, and that for her he was the embodiment of her own heroism? But what had her mission, however meritorious or inspired, to do with real family life? The worst of it was that he loved her as much as ever. She was stunningly beautiful. And yet—was he sure that it was love even on his side? Or was it a bewildered gratitude for her beauty and magnanimity? Who could possibly sort it all out! The devil himself would be stumped.

So what was he to do? He must set his wife and daughter free from this counterfeit life. This was even more important than to liberate himself. Yes, but how? Divorce? Drown himself? What disgusting rubbish! He rebelled against the very thought. "As if I'd ever do anything of the sort! So why rehearse this melodrama even in my mind?"

He looked up at the stars as if asking them for advice. They flickered on, small or large, quick or slow, some blue and some in all the hues of the rainbow. Suddenly they were blotted out, and the house, the yard, and Antipov sitting on his boat were thrown into relief by a harsh, darting light, as though someone were running from the field toward the gate waving a torch. An army train, puffing clouds of yellow, flame-shot smoke into the sky, rolled over the grade crossing going westward, as countless others had rolled by, night and day, for the past year.

Pavel Pavlovich smiled, got up, and went to bed. He had found a way out of his dilemma.

7

When Larisa Feodorovna learned of Pasha's decision, she was stunned and at first would not believe her ears. "It's absurd," she thought, "a whim. I won't take any notice, and he'll forget it."

But it appeared that he had been getting ready for the past two weeks. He had sent in his papers to the recruiting office, the gymnasium had found a substitute teacher, and he had been notified that he was admitted to the military school at Omsk.

Lara wailed like a peasant woman and, grabbing Pasha's hands, threw herself at his feet. "Pasha, Pashenka," she screamed, "don't leave us. Don't do it, don't. It isn't too late, I'll see to everything. You haven't even had a proper medical examination, and with your heart…You're ashamed to change your mind? And aren't you ashamed to sacrifice your family to some crazy notion? You, a volunteer! All your life you've laughed at Rodia, and now you're jealous of him. You have to swagger about in an officer's uniform too, you have to do your own bit of saber-rattling. Pasha, what's come over you? I don't recognize you. What's changed you like this? Tell me honestly, for the love of Christ, without any fine phrases, is this really what Russia needs?"

Suddenly she realized that it wasn't that at all. Though she could not understand all of it, she grasped the main thing. Pasha misunderstood her attitude to him. He rebelled against the motherly feeling that all her life had been a part of her affection for him and could not see that such a love was something more, not less, than the ordinary feeling of a woman for a man.

She bit her lip and, shrinking as if she had been beaten, and swallowing her tears, set about silently packing his things.

After he had left, it seemed to her that the whole town was silent, and even that there were fewer crows flying about in the sky. "Madam, madam," Marfutka would say reproachfully, trying to call her back to herself. "Mama, Mama," Katenka babbled, pulling at her sleeve. This was the greatest defeat of her life. Her best, brightest hopes had collapsed.

Her husband's letters from Siberia told her all about his moods. He had seen his mistake. He badly missed his wife and daughter. After a few months he was commissioned lieutenant before term and then, just as unexpectedly, was sent to the front. His journey took him nowhere near Yuriatin, and he was not in Moscow long enough to see anyone there.

His letters from the front were less depressed than those from the Omsk school had been. He wanted to distinguish himself so that, as a reward for some military exploit or as a result of some light wound, he could go home on leave and see his family. Soon his opportunity was within sight. Brusilov's forces had broken through and were attacking. Antipov's letters stopped coming. At first Lara was not worried. She put down his silence to the military operations: he could not write when his regiment was on the move. But in the autumn the advance slowed down, the troops were digging themselves in, and there was still no word from him. His wife began to be worried, and to make inquiries, at first locally, in Yuriatin, then by mail in Moscow and at his old field address. There was no reply; nobody seemed to know anything.

Like other local ladies, Larisa Feodorovna had been giving a hand at the military ward attached to the town hospital. Now she trained seriously and qualified as a nurse, got leave of absence from her school for six months, and, putting the house in Marfutka's care, took Katenka to Moscow. She left her with Lipa, whose husband, Friesendank, was a German subject and had been interned with other enemy civilians at Ufa.

Convinced of the futility of trying to get any news by mail, she had decided to go and look for Pasha. With this in mind, she got a job as a nurse on a hospital train going to Mezo-Laborch, on the Hungarian border, the last address Pasha had given her.

8

A Red Cross train, equipped through voluntary contributions collected by the Tatiana Committee for Aid to the Wounded, arrived at divisional headquarters. It was a long train mostly made up of shabby, short freight cars; the only first-class coach carried prominent people from Moscow with presents for the troops. Among them was Gordon. He knew that his childhood friend Zhivago was attached to the divisional hospital; hearing that it was in a near-by village, he obtained the necessary permit to travel in the area just behind the lines, and got a lift in a carriage going to the village.

The driver was a Byelorussian or a Lithuanian who spoke broken Russian. The current spy scare reduced his conversation to a stale official patter. Discouraged by his ostentatious loyalty, Gordon travelled most of the way in silence.

At headquarters, where they were used to moving armies and measured distances in hundred-mile stages, he had been told that the village was quite near—within fifteen miles at most; in reality, it was more like fifty.

All along the way, an unfriendly grunting and grumbling came from the horizon on their left. Gordon had never been in an earthquake, but he decided (quite rightly) that the sullen, scarcely distinguishable, distant sound of enemy artillery could best be compared to volcanic tremors and rumblings. Toward evening, a pink glow flared up over the skyline on that side and went on flickering until dawn.

They passed ruined villages. Some were abandoned; in others people were living in cellars deep underground. Piles of refuse and rubble were aligned as the houses had been. These gutted settlements could be encompassed in a glance, like barren desert. Old women scratched about in the ashes, each on the ruins of her own home, now and then digging something up and putting it away, apparently feeling as sheltered from the eyes of strangers as if their walls were still around them. They looked up at Gordon and gazed after him as he drove past, seeming to ask him how soon the world would come to its senses and peace and order be restored to their lives.

After dark the carriage ran into a patrol and was ordered off the main road. The driver did not know the new by-pass. They drove about in circles for a couple of hours without getting anywhere. At dawn they came to a village that had the name they were looking for, but nobody knew anything about a hospital. It turned out that there were two villages of the same name. At last, in the morning, they found the right one. As they drove down the village road, which smelled of camomile and iodoform, Gordon decided not to stay the night but to spend the day with Zhivago and go back that evening to the railway station where he had left his other friends. But circumstances kept him there for more than a week.

9

During those days the front line began to move. To the south of the village where Gordon found himself, Russian forces succeeded in breaking through the enemy positions. Supporting units followed, widening the gap, but they fell behind and the advance units were cut off and captured. Among the prisoners was Lieutenant Antipov, who was obliged to give himself up when his platoon surrendered.

There were false rumors about him. He was believed to have been killed by a shell and buried by the explosion. This was told on the authority of his friend, Lieutenant Galiullin, who had been watching through field glasses from an observation post when Antipov led the attack.

What Galiullin had seen was the usual picture of an attacking unit. The men advanced quickly, almost at a run, across the no man's land, an autumn field with dry broom swaying in the wind and motionless, spiky gorse. Their object was either to flush the Austrians out of their trenches and engage them with bayonets or to destroy them with hand grenades. To the running men the field was endless. The ground seemed to slip under their feet like a bog. Their lieutenant was running, first in front of them, then beside them, waving his revolver above his head, his mouth split from ear to ear with hurrahs which neither he nor they could hear. At intervals they threw themselves onto the ground, got up all together, and ran on shouting. Each time one or two who had been hit fell with the rest but in a different way, toppling like trees chopped down in a wood, and did not get up again.

"They're shooting long! Get the battery," Galiullin said anxiously to the artillery officer who stood next to him "No. wait. It's all right."

The attackers were on the point of engaging the enemy. The artillery barrage stopped. In the sudden silence the observers heard their own hearts pounding as if they were in Antipov's place, had brought their men to the edge of the enemy trench, and were expected within the next few minutes to perform wonders of resourcefulness and courage. At that moment two German sixteen-inch shells burst in front of the attackers. Black clouds of dust and smoke hid what followed. "Ya Allah! Finished. They're done for," whispered Galiullin, white-lipped, believing that the lieutenant and his men had been killed. Another shell came down close to the observation post. Bent double, the observers hurried to a safer distance.

Galiullin had shared Antipov's dugout. After Antipov's comrades resigned themselves to the idea that he was dead, Galiullin, who had known him well, was asked to take charge of his belongings and keep them for his widow, a large number of whose photographs had been found among his things.

An enlisted man recently promoted to lieutenant, the mechanic Galiullin, son of Gimazetdin, the janitor of Tiverzin's tenement, was that very Yusupka whom, as an apprentice in the distant past, the foreman Khudoleiev had beaten up. It was to his old tormentor that he was now indebted for his promotion.

On getting his commission, he had found himself, against his will and for no reason that he knew of, in a soft job in a small-town garrison behind the lines. There he commanded a troop of semi-invalids whom instructors as decrepit as themselves took every morning through the drill they had forgotten. Galiullin supervised the changing of the guard in front of the commissary. Nothing else was expected of him. He did not have a care in the world when, among the replacements consisting of older reservists sent from Moscow and put under his orders, there turned up the all too familiar figure of Piotr Khudoleiev.

"Well, well, an old friend," said Galiullin, grinning sourly.

"Yes, sir," said Khudoleiev, standing at attention and saluting.

It was impossible that this should be the end of it. The very first time the lieutenant caught the private in a fault at drill he bawled him out, and when it seemed to him that his subordinate was not looking him straight in the eye but somehow sideways, he hit him in the jaw and put him on bread and water in the guardhouse for two days.

From now on every move of Galiullin's smacked of revenge. But this game, in their respective positions and with rules enforced by the stick, struck Galiullin as unsporting and mean. What was to be done? Both of them could not be in the same place. But what pretext could an officer find for transferring a private from his unit, and where, if it were not for disciplinary reasons, could he transfer him? On the other hand, what grounds could Galiullin think of to apply for his own transfer? Giving the boredom and uselessness of garrison duty as his reasons, he asked to be sent to the front. This earned him a good mark, and when, at the first engagement, he showed his other qualities it turned out that he had the makings of an excellent officer and he was quickly promoted to first lieutenant.

Galiullin had met Antipov in 1905, when Pasha Antipov spent six months with the Tiverzins and Yusupka went to play with him on Sundays. There too he had once or twice met Lara. He had heard nothing of either of them since. When Antipov came from Yuriatin and joined the regiment, Galiullin was struck by the change in his old friend. The shy, mischievous, and girlish child had turned into an arrogant, know-it-all misanthrope. He was intelligent, very brave, taciturn, and sarcastic. Sometimes, looking at him, Galiullin could have sworn that he saw in his gloomy eyes, as inside a window, something beyond, an idea that had taken firm hold of him: a longing for his daughter or for the face of his wife. Antipov seemed like one bewitched, as in a fairy tale. And now Antipov was gone, and Galiullin was left with his papers, his photographs, and the unsolved secret of his transformation on his hands.

As was bound to happen sooner or later, Lara's inquiries for her husband reached Galiullin. He meant to write to her, but he was busy, he had no time to write properly, yet he wished to prepare her for the blow. He kept postponing a long, detailed letter to her until he heard that she was somewhere at the front as a nurse. And he did not know where to address his letter to her now.

10

"Will there be horses today?" Gordon asked every time Dr. Zhivago came home to his midday meal. They were living in a Galician peasant house.

"Not a chance. Anyway, where would you go? You can't go anywhere. There's a terrible muddle. Nobody knows what's what. To the south we have outflanked or broken through the German lines in several places, and I am told some of our overextended units were encircled. To the north, the Germans have crossed the Sventa, at a point that was supposed to be impassable. That is their cavalry, about a corps in strength. They are blowing up railways, destroying supply stores, and in my opinion trying to surround us. That's the picture, and you talk about horses. Come on, Karpenko," he said, turning to his orderly, "set the table, and make it quick. What are we having for dinner? Calves' feet? Good!"

The Medical Unit, with its hospital and its dependencies, was scattered all over the village, which by a miracle was still unharmed. The houses glittered with Western-style lattice windows stretching from wall to wall, and not so much as a pane was damaged.

The end of a hot, golden autumn had turned into an Indian summer. In the daytime the doctors and officers opened windows, swatted at the black swarms of flies along the sills and the low white ceilings, unbuttoned their tunics and hospital coats, and, dripping with sweat, sipped scalding-hot soup or tea. At night they squatted in front of the open stove, blew on the damp logs which kept going out, their eyes smarting with smoke, and cursed the orderlies for not knowing how to build a fire.

It was a still night. Gordon and Zhivago lay on two bunks facing each other. Between them were the dinner table and the low window running the whole length of the wall. The room was overheated and filled with tobacco smoke. They had opened the two end lattices to get a breath of the fresh autumn night air, which made the panes sweat. They were talking, as they had done all these nights and days, and as usual the horizon in the direction of the front was flickering with a pink glow. When the even, incessant chatter of gunfire was occasionally interrupted by a deep bang that shook the ground as though a heavy steel-bound trunk were being dragged across the floor, scraping the paint, Zhivago interrupted the conversation as if out of respect for the sound, paused for a while, and said, "That's a Bertha, a German sixteen-inch. A little fellow that weighs twenty-four hundred pounds." And then, resuming the conversation, he would forget what they had been talking about.

"What's that smell that hangs over the whole village?" asked Gordon. "I noticed it as soon as I arrived. It's a nauseatingly sweet, cloying smell, rather like mice."

"I know what you mean. That's hemp—they grow a lot of it here. The plant itself has that nagging, clinging, carrion smell. And then in the battle zone, the dead often remain undiscovered in the hemp fields for a long time and begin to decay. Of course the smell of corpses is everywhere. That's only natural. Hear that? It's the Bertha again."

In the past few days they had talked of everything in the world. Gordon had learned his friend's ideas about the war and its effect on people's thinking. Zhivago had told him how hard he found it to accept the ruthless logic of mutual extermination, to get used to the sight of the wounded, especially to the horror of certain wounds of a new sort, to the mutilation of survivors whom the technique of modern fighting had turned into lumps of disfigured flesh.

Going about with him day after day, Gordon too had seen terrible sights. Needless to say, he was aware of the immorality of being an idle spectator of other men's courage, of how they mastered, by an inhuman effort, their fear of death, of the sacrifices they made and the risks they ran. But he did not think that merely crying over them was any less immoral. He believed in behaving simply and honestly according to the circumstances in which life placed him.

That it was possible to faint at the sight of wounds he learned from his own experience when they visited a first-aid station run by a mobile Red Cross unit just behind the front line.

They drove to a clearing in a wood that had been badly damaged by artillery fire. Twisted gun carriages lay upside down in the broken and trampled undergrowth. A riding horse was tethered to a tree. A little farther in the wood was the frame structure of the forester's house; half its roof had been blown away. The first-aid station was in the house and in two big gray tents across the way.

"I shouldn't have brought you," said Zhivago. "The trenches are within half a mile and our batteries are just over there, behind the wood. You can hear what's going on. So don't play the hero, I wouldn't believe you if you did. You're bound to be scared stiff, it's only natural. Any moment the situation may change, and shells will be dropping here."

Tired young soldiers in enormous boots and dusty tunics which were black with sweat on the chest and shoulder-blades sprawled on their backs or on their stomachs by the side of the road. They were the survivors of a decimated unit that had been taken out of the front line after four days of heavy fighting and was being sent to the rear for a short rest. They lay as if they were of stone, without the strength to smile or to swear, and no one turned his head when several carts came rumbling swiftly down the road. They were ammunition carts, without springs, loaded with wounded men whom they jolted, cracking their bones and twisting their guts, as they jogged along at a trot to the first-aid station. There the wounded would be hastily bandaged and the most urgent cases operated on. They had been picked up in appalling numbers on the battlefield in front of the trenches half an hour ago during a short lull in the artillery fire. A good half of them were unconscious.

When the carts stopped in front of the porch, orderlies came down the steps with stretchers and unloaded them. A nurse raised the flap on one of the tents and stood looking out; she was off duty. Two men who had been arguing loudly in the wood behind the tents, their voices echoing among the tall young trees, but their words indistinguishable, came out and walked along the road toward the house. One of them, an excited young lieutenant, was shouting at the Medical Officer of the mobile unit: there had been an artillery park in the clearing and he wanted to know where it had been moved. The doctor did not know, it was not his business; he asked the lieutenant to leave him alone and to stop shouting—there were wounded men here and he was busy. But the little lieutenant went on cursing the Red Cross, the artillery command, and everybody else. Zhivago walked up to the doctor; they greeted each other and went into the house. The lieutenant, still swearing loudly with a slight Tartar accent, untied his horse, vaulted into the saddle, and galloped down the road into the woods. The nurse was still looking on.

Suddenly her face was distorted with horror. "What are you doing? You're out of your minds!" she shouted at two lightly wounded soldiers who were walking without assistance between the stretchers. She ran out toward them.

On one stretcher lay a man who had been mutilated in a particularly monstrous way. A large splinter from the shell that had mangled his face, turning his tongue and lips into a red gruel without killing him, had lodged in the bone structure of his jaw, where the cheek had been torn out. He uttered short groans in a thin inhuman voice; no one could take these sounds for anything but an appeal to finish him off quickly, to put an end to his inconceivable torment.

The nurse had got the impression that the two lightly wounded men who were walking beside the stretcher had been so moved by his cries that they were about to pull out the terrible piece of iron with their bare hands.

"What's the matter with you? You can't do that. The surgeon will do it, he has special instruments…if it has to be done." (O God, O God, take him away, don't let me doubt that You exist.)

Next moment, as he was carried up the steps, the man screamed, and with one great shudder he gave up the ghost.

The man who had just died was Private Gimazetdin; the excited officer who had been shouting in the wood was his son, Lieutenant Galiullin; the nurse was Lara. Gordon and Zhivago were the witnesses. All these people were there together, in one place. But some of them had never known each other, while others failed to recognize each other now. And there were things about them which were never to be known for certain, while others were not to be revealed until a future time, a later meeting.

11

In this area the villages had been miraculously preserved. They constituted an inexplicably intact island in the midst of a sea of ruins. One day at sunset Gordon and Zhivago were driving home. In one village they saw a young Cossack surrounded by a crowd laughing boisterously, as the Cossack tossed a copper coin into the air, forcing an old Jew with a gray beard and a long caftan to catch it. The old man missed every time. The coin flew past his pitifully spread-out hands and dropped into the mud. When the old man bent to pick it up, the Cossack slapped his bottom, and the onlookers held their sides, groaning with laughter: this was the point of the entertainment. For the moment it was harmless enough, but no one could say for certain that it would not take a more serious turn. Every now and then, the old man's wife ran out of the house across the road, screaming and stretching out her arms to him, and ran back again in terror. Two little girls were watching their grandfather, out of the window and crying.

The driver, who found all this extremely comical, slowed down so that the passengers could enjoy the spectacle. But Zhivago called the Cossack, bawled him out, and ordered him to stop baiting the old man.

"Yes, sir," he said readily. "We meant no harm, we were only doing it for fun."

Gordon and Zhivago drove on in silence.

"It's terrible," said Yurii Andreievich when they were in sight of their own village. "You can't imagine what the wretched Jewish population is going through in this war. The fighting happens to be in their Pale. And as if punitive taxation, the destruction of their property, and all their other sufferings were not enough, they are subjected to pogroms, insults, and accusations that they lack patriotism. And why should they be patriotic? Under enemy rule, they enjoy equal rights, and we do nothing but persecute them. This hatred for them, the basis of it, is irrational. It is stimulated by the very things that should arouse sympathy—their poverty, their overcrowding, their weakness, and this inability to fight back. I can't understand it. It's like an inescapable fate."

Gordon did not reply.

12

Once again they were lying on their bunks on either side of the long low window, it was night, and they were talking.

Zhivago was telling Gordon how he had once seen the Tsar at the front. He told his story well.

It was his first spring at the front. The headquarters of his regiment was in the Carpathians, in a deep valley, access to which from the Hungarian plain was blocked by this army unit.

At the bottom of the valley was a railway station. Zhivago described the landscape, the mountains overgrown with mighty firs and pines, with tufts of clouds catching in their tops, and sheer cliffs of gray slate and graphite showing through the forest like worn patches in a thick fur. It was a damp, dark April morning, as gray as the slate, locked in by the mountains on all sides and therefore still and sultry. Mist hung over the valley, and everything in it steamed, everything rose slowly—engine smoke from the railway station, gray vapors from the fields, the gray mountains, the dark woods, the dark clouds.

At that time the sovereign was making a tour of inspection in Galicia. It was learned suddenly that he would visit Zhivago's unit, of which he was the honorary Colonel. He might arrive at any moment. A guard of honor was drawn up on the station platform. They waited for about two oppressive hours, then two trains with the imperial retinue went by quickly one after the other. A little later the Tsar's train drew in.

Accompanied by the Grand Duke Nicholas, the Tsar inspected the grenadiers. Every syllable of his quietly spoken greeting produced an explosion of thunderous hurrahs whose echoes were sent back and forth like water from swinging buckets.

The Tsar, smiling and ill at ease, looked older and more tired than on the rubles and medals. His face was listless, a little flabby. He kept glancing apologetically at the Grand Duke, not knowing what was expected of him, and the Grand Duke, bending down respectfully, helped him in his embarrassment not so much by words as by moving an eyebrow or a shoulder.

On that warm gray morning in the mountains, Zhivago felt sorry for the Tsar, was disturbed at the thought that such diffident reserve and shyness could be the essential characteristics of an oppressor, that a man so weak could imprison, hang, or pardon.

"He should have made a speech—'I, my sword, and my people'—like the Kaiser. Something about 'the people'—that was essential. But you know he was natural, in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities. After all, that kind of theatricalism is unthinkable in Russia. For such gestures are theatrical, aren't they? I suppose that there were such things as 'peoples' under the Caesars—Gauls or Scythians or Illyrians and so on. But ever since, they have been mere fiction, which served only as subjects for speeches by kings and politicians: 'The people, my people.'

"Now the front is flooded with correspondents and journalists. They record their 'observations' and gems of popular wisdom, they visit the wounded and construct new theories about the people's soul. It's a new version of Dahl[9] and just as bogus—linguistic graphomania, verbal incontinence. That's one type—and then there's the other: clipped speech, 'sketches and short scenes,' skepticism and misanthropy. I read a piece like that the other day: 'A gray day, like yesterday. Rain since morning, slush. I look out of the window and see the road. Prisoners in an endless line. Wounded. A gun is firing. It fires today as yesterday, tomorrow as today and every day and every hour.' Isn't that subtle and witty! But what has he got against the gun? How odd to expect variety from a gun! Why doesn't he look at himself, shooting off the same sentences, commas, lists of facts day in, day out, keeping up his barrage of journalistic philanthropy as nimble as the jumping of a flea? Why can't he get it into his head that it's for him to stop repeating himself—not for the gun—that you can never say something meaningful by accumulating absurdities in your notebook, that facts don't exist until man puts into them something of his own, a bit of free human genius—of myth."

"You've hit the nail on the head," broke in Gordon. "And now I'll tell you what I think about that incident we saw today. That Cossack tormenting the poor patriarch—and there are thousands of incidents like it—of course it's an ignominy—but there's no point in philosophizing, you just hit out. But the Jewish question as a whole—there philosophy does come in—and then we discover something unexpected. Not that I'm going to tell you anything new—we both got our ideas from your uncle.

"You were saying, what is a nation?…And who does more for a nation—the one who makes a fuss about it or the one who, without thinking of it, raises it to universality by the beauty and greatness of his actions, and gives it fame and immortality? Well, the answer is obvious. And what are the nations now, in the Christian era? They aren't just nations, but converted, transformed nations, and what matters is this transformation, not loyalty to ancient principles. And what does the Gospel say on this subject? To begin with, it does not make assertions: 'It's like this and like that.' It is a proposal, naïve and timid: 'Do you want to live in a completely new way? Do you want spiritual happiness?' And everybody accepted, they were carried away by it for thousands of years.…

"When the Gospel says that in the Kingdom of God there are neither Jews nor Gentiles, does it merely mean that all are equal in the sight of God? No—the Gospel wasn't needed for that—the Greek philosophers, the Roman moralists, and the Hebrew prophets had known this long before. But it said: In that new way of living and new form of society, which is born of the heart, and which is called the Kingdom of Heaven, there are no nations, there are only individuals.

"You said that facts are meaningless, unless meanings are put into them. Well, Christianity, the mystery of the individual, is precisely what must be put into the facts to make them meaningful.

"We also talked about mediocre publicists who have nothing to say to life and the world as a whole, of petty second-raters who are only too happy when some nation, preferably a small and wretched one, is constantly discussed—this gives them a chance to show off their competence and cleverness, and to thrive on their compassion for the persecuted. Well now, what more perfect example can you have of the victims of this mentality than the Jews? Their national idea has forced them, century after century, to be a nation and nothing but a nation—and they have been chained to this deadening task all through the centuries when all the rest of the world was being delivered from it by a new force which had come out of their own midst! Isn't that extraordinary? How can you account for it? Just think! This glorious holiday, this liberation from the curse of mediocrity, this soaring flight above the dullness of a humdrum existence, was first achieved in their land, proclaimed in their language, and belonged to their race! And they actually saw and heard it and let it go! How could they allow a spirit of such overwhelming power and beauty to leave them, how could they think that after it triumphed and established its reign, they would remain as the empty husk of that miracle they had repudiated? What use is it to anyone, this voluntary martyrdom? Whom does it profit? For what purpose are these innocent old men and women and children, all these subtle, kind, humane people, mocked and beaten up throughout the centuries? And why is it that all these literary friends of 'the people' of all nations are always so un-talented? Why didn't the intellectual leaders of the Jewish people ever go beyond facile Weltschmerz and ironical wisdom? Why have they not—even if at the risk of bursting like boilers with the pressure of their duty—disbanded this army which keeps on fighting and being massacred nobody knows for what? Why don't they say to them: 'Come to your senses, stop. Don't hold on to your identity. Don't stick together, disperse. Be with all the rest. You are the first and best Christians in the world. You are the very thing against which you have been turned by the worst and weakest among you.' "

13

The following day when Zhivago came home to dinner, he said: "Well, you were so anxious to leave, now your wish has come true. I won't say 'Just your luck' because it isn't lucky that we are being hard-pressed and beaten again. The way east is open; the pressure is from the west. All the medical units are under orders to get out. We'll be going tomorrow or the next day. Where to, I don't know. And I suppose, Karpenko Mikhail Grigorievich's linen still hasn't been washed. It's always the same thing. Karpenko will tell you he has given it to his girl to wash, but if you ask him who and where she is, he doesn't know, the idiot."

He paid no attention to Karpenko's excuses nor to Gordon's apologies for borrowing his host's shirts.

"That's army life for you," he went on. "As soon as you get used to one place you're moved to another. I didn't like anything here when we came. It was dirty, stuffy, the stove was in the wrong place, the ceiling was too low. And now, even if you killed me I couldn't remember what it was like where we came from. I feel as if I wouldn't mind spending my life in this place, staring at that corner of the stove with the sunshine on the tiles and the shadow of that tree moving across."

They packed without haste.

During the night they were roused by shouts, gunfire, and running footsteps. There was a sinister glow over the village. Shadows flickered past the window. The landlord and his wife were getting up behind the partition. Yurii Andreievich sent the orderly to ask what the commotion was about.

He was told that the Germans had broken through. Zhivago hurried off to the hospital and found that it was true. The village was under fire. The hospital was being moved at once, without waiting for the evacuation order.

"We'll all be off before dawn," Zhivago told Gordon. "You're going in the first party, the carriage is ready now, but I've told them to wait for you. Well, good luck. I'll see you off and make sure you get your seat."

They ran down the village street, ducking and hugging the walls. Bullets whizzed past them, and from the crossroads they could see shrapnel explosions like umbrellas of fire opening over the fields.

"And what about you?" asked Gordon as they ran.

"I'll follow with the second party. I have to go back and collect my things."

They separated at the edge of the village. The carriage and several carts that made up the convoy started, bumping into one another and gradually spacing out. Yurii Andreievich waved to his friend, who saw him for a few moments longer by the light of a burning barn.

Again keeping to the shelter of the houses, Yurii Andreievich hurried back. A few yards from his house he was knocked off his feet by the blast of an explosion and hit by a shell splinter. He fell in the middle of the road, bleeding and unconscious.

14

The hospital where Yurii Andreievich was recovering in the officers' ward had been evacuated to an obscure, small town on a railway line close to the G.H.Q. It was a warm day at the end of February. The window near his bed was open at his request.

The patients were killing time before dinner as best they could. They had been told that a new nurse had joined the hospital staff and would be doing her first round that day. In the bed opposite Zhivago's, Galiullin was looking at the newspapers that had just arrived and exclaiming indignantly at the blanks left by the censorship. Yurii Andreievich was reading Tonia's letters, which had accumulated in one great batch. The breeze rustled the letters and the papers. At the sound of light footsteps he looked up. Lara came into the ward.

Zhivago and Galiullin each recognized her without realizing that the other knew her. She knew neither of them. She said: "Hello. Why is the window open? Aren't you cold?" Going up to Galiullin, she asked him how he felt and took his wrist to feel his pulse, but immediately let go of it and sat down by his bed, looking at him with a puzzled expression.

"This is indeed unexpected, Larisa Feodorovna," he said. "I knew your husband. We were in the same regiment. I've kept his things for you."

"It isn't possible," she kept saying, "it isn't possible. You knew him! What an extraordinary coincidence. Please tell me quickly how it happened. He was killed by a shell, wasn't he, and buried by the explosion? You see I know, please don't be afraid of telling me."

Galiullin's courage failed him. He decided to tell her a comforting lie.

"Antipov was taken prisoner," he said. "He advanced too far with his unit. They were surrounded and cut off. He was forced to surrender."

But she did not believe him. Shaken by the unexpectedness of the meeting and not wishing to break down in front of strangers, she hurried out into the corridor.

A few moments later she came back, outwardly collected; afraid of crying again if she spoke to Galiullin, she deliberately avoided looking at him and went over to Yurii Andreievich. "Hello," she said absentmindedly and mechanically. "What's the trouble with you?"

Yurii Andreievich had seen her agitation and her tears. He wanted to ask her why she was so upset and to tell her that he had seen her twice before in his life, once as a schoolboy and once as a university student, but it occurred to him that he would sound too familiar and she would misinterpret his meaning. Then he suddenly remembered the coffin with Anna Ivanovna's body in it and Tonia's screams, and said instead:

"Thank you. I am a doctor. I am looking after myself. I don't need anything."

"How have I offended him?" Lara wondered. She looked in surprise at the stranger with his snub nose and unremarkable face.

For several days the weather was variable, uncertain, with a warm, constantly murmuring wind in the night, smelling of damp earth.

During those days there came strange reports from G.H.Q., and there were alarming rumors from the interior. Telegraphic communications with Petersburg were cut off time and again. Everywhere, at every corner, people were talking politics.

Nurse Antipova did her rounds morning and evening, exchanging a few words with each patient, including Galiullin and Zhivago. "What a curious creature," she thought. "Young and gruff. You couldn't call him handsome with his turned-up nose. But he is intelligent in the best sense of the word, alive and with an attractive mind. However, that's unimportant. What is important is to finish my job here as soon as possible and get transferred to Moscow to be near Katenka, and then to apply for my discharge and go home to Yuriatin, back to the gymnasium. It's quite clear now what happened to poor Pasha, there isn't any hope, so the sooner I stop playing the heroine the better. I wouldn't be here if I hadn't come to look for Pasha."

How was Katenka getting on out there, she wondered, poor orphan, and this always made her cry.

She had noticed a sharp change around her recently. Before, there had been obligations of all kinds, sacred duties—your duty to your country, to the army, to society. But now that the war was lost (and that was the misfortune at the bottom of all the rest) nothing was sacred any more.

Everything had changed suddenly—the tone, the moral climate; you didn't know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute—life or truth or beauty—of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good. But in her own case, Lara reminded herself, she had Katenka to fulfill her need for an absolute, her need of a purpose. Now that she no longer had Pasha, Lara would be nothing but a mother, devoting all her strength to her poor orphaned child.

Yurii Andreievich heard from Moscow that Gordon and Dudorov had published his book without his permission, and that it was praised and regarded as showing great literary promise; that Moscow was going through a disturbed, exciting time and was on the eve of something important, that there was growing discontent among the masses, and that grave political events were imminent.

It was late at night. Yurii Andreievich was terribly sleepy. He dozed intermittently and imagined that the excitement of the past days was keeping him awake. A drowsy, sleepily breathing wind yawned and stirred outside the window. The wind wept and complained, "Tonia, Sasha, I miss you, I want to go home, I want to go back to work." And to the muttering of the wind Yurii Andreievich slept and woke and slept again in a quick, troubled alternation of joy and suffering, as fleeting and disturbing as the changing weather, as the restless night.

It occurred to Lara that after all the devotion Galiullin had shown to Pasha's memory, the pains he had taken to look after his things, she had not so much as asked him who he was and where he came from.

To make up for her omission and not seem ungrateful she asked him all about himself when she made her next morning round.

"Merciful heaven," she wondered aloud. Twenty-eight Brest Street, the Tiverzins, the revolution of 1905, that winter! Yusupka? No, she couldn't remember having met him, he must forgive her. But that year, that year, and that house! That's true, there had really been such a house and such a year! How vividly it all came back to her! The gunfire and—what was it she had called it then?—"Christ's judgment"! How strong, how piercingly sharp were the feelings you experienced for the first time as a child! "Forgive me, do forgive me, Lieutenant, what did you say your name is? Yes, yes, you did tell me once. Thank you, Osip Gimazetdinovich, I can't thank you enough for reminding me, for bringing it all back to my mind."

All day long she went about thinking of "that house" and kept talking to herself.

To think of it, Brest Street, No. 28! And now they were shooting again, but how much more frightening it was now! You couldn't say, "The boys are shooting" this time. The children had all grown up, the boys were all here, in the army, all those humble people who had lived in that house and in others like it and in villages that also were like it. Extraordinary, extraordinary!

All the patients who were not bedridden rushed in from the other rooms, hobbling noisily on crutches or running, or walking with canes, and shouted vying with each other:

"Big news! Street fighting in Petersburg! The Petersburg garrison has joined the insurgents! The revolution!"

FIVE

Farewell to the Old

 

The small town was called Meliuzeievo and lay in the fertile, black-soil country. Black dust hung over its roofs like a cloud of locusts. It was raised by the troops and convoys passing through the town; they moved in both directions, some going to the front and others away from it, and it was impossible to tell whether the war were still going on or had ceased.

Every day newly created offices sprang up like mushrooms. And they were elected to everything—Zhivago, Lieutenant Galiullin, and Nurse Antipova, as well as a few others from their group, all of them people from the big cities, well-informed and experienced.

They served as temporary town officials and as minor commissars in the army and the health department, and they looked upon this succession of tasks as an outdoor sport, a diversion, a game of blindman's buff. But more and more they felt that it was time to stop and to get back to then ordinary occupations and their homes.

Zhivago and Antipova were often brought together by their work.

2

The rain turned the black dust into coffee-colored mud and the mud spread over the streets, most of them unpaved.

The town was small. At the end of almost every street you could see the steppe, gloomy under the dark sky, all the vastness of the war, the vastness of the revolution.

Yurii Andreievich wrote to his wife:

"The disintegration and anarchy in the army continue. Measures are being taken to improve discipline and morale. I have toured units stationed in the neighborhood.

"By way of a postscript, though I might have mentioned it much earlier, I must tell that I do a lot of my work with a certain Antipova, a nurse from Moscow who was born in the Urals.

"You remember the girl student who shot at the public prosecutor on that terrible night of your mother's death? I believe she was tried later. I remember telling you that Misha and I had once seen her, when she was still a schoolgirl, at some sordid hotel where your father took us. I can't remember why we went, only that it was a bitterly cold night. I think it was at the time of the Presnia uprising. Well, that girl was Antipova.

"I have made several attempts to go home, but it is not so simple. It is not so much the work—we could hand that over easily enough—the trouble is the trip. Either there are no trains at all or else they are so overcrowded that there is no way of finding a seat.

"But of course it can't go on like this forever, and some of us, who have resigned or been discharged, including Antipova, Galiullin, and myself, have made up our minds that whatever happens we shall leave next week. We'll go separately; it gives us a better chance.

"So I may turn up any day out of the blue, though I'll try to send a telegram."

Before he left, however, he received his wife's reply. In sentences broken by sobs and with tear stains and ink spots for punctuation, she begged him not to come back to Moscow but to go straight to the Urals with that wonderful nurse whose progress through life was marked by portents and coincidences so miraculous that her own, Tonia's, modest life could not possibly compete with it.

"Don't worry about Sasha's future," she wrote. "You will never need to be ashamed of him. I promise you to bring him up in those principles which as a child you saw practiced in our house."

Yurii Andreievich wrote back at once: "You must be out of your mind, Tonia! How could you imagine such a thing? Don't you know, don't you know well enough, that if it were not for you, if it were not for my constant, faithful thoughts of you and of our home, I would never have survived these two terrible, devastating years of war? But why am I writing this—soon we'll be together, our life will begin again, everything will be cleared up.

"What frightens me about your letter is something else. If I really gave you cause to write in such a way, my behavior must have been ambiguous and I am at fault not only before you but before that other woman whom I am misleading. I'll apologize to her as soon as she is back. She is away in the country. Local councils, which formerly existed only in provincial capitals and county seats, are being set up in the villages, and she has gone to help a friend of hers who is acting as instructor in connection with these legislative changes.

"It may interest you to know that although we live in the same house I don't know to this day which is Antipova's room. I've never bothered to find out."