3

Two main roads ran from Meliuzeievo, one going east, the other west. One was a mud track leading through the woods to Zybushino, a small grain center that was administratively a subdivision of Meliuzeievo although it was ahead of it in every way. The other was gravelled and went through fields, boggy in winter but dry in summer, to Biriuchi, the nearest railway junction.

In June Zybushino became an independent republic. It was set up by the local miller Blazheiko and supported by deserters from the 212th Infantry who had left the front at the time of the upheavals, kept their arms, and come to Zybushino through Biriuchi.

The republic refused to recognize the Provisional Government and split off from the rest of Russia. Blazheiko, a religious dissenter who had once corresponded with Tolstoy, proclaimed a new millennial Zybushino kingdom where all work and property were to be collectivized, and referred to the local administration as an Apostolic Seat.

Zybushino had always been a source of legends and exaggerations. It is mentioned in documents dating from the Times of Troubles[10] and the thick forests surrounding it teemed with robbers even later. The prosperity of its merchants and the fabulous fertility of its soil were proverbial. Many popular beliefs, customs, and oddities of speech that distinguished this whole western region near the front originated in Zybushino.

Now amazing stories were told about Blazheiko's chief assistant. It was said that he was deaf and dumb, that he acquired the gift of speech at moments of inspiration, and then lost it again.

The republic lasted two weeks. In July a unit loyal to the Provisional Government entered the town. The deserters fell back on Biriuchi. Several miles of forest had once been cleared along the railway line on both sides of the junction, and there, among the old tree stumps overgrown with wild strawberries, the piles of timber depleted by pilfering, and the tumble-down mud huts of the seasonal laborers who had cut the trees, the deserters set up their camp.

4

The hospital in which Zhivago convalesced and later served as a doctor, and which he was not preparing to leave, was housed in the former residence of Countess Zhabrinskaia. She had offered it to the Red Cross at the beginning of the war.

It was a two-story house on one of the best sites of the town, at the corner of the main street and the square, known as the Platz, where soldiers had drilled in the old days and where meetings were held now.

Its position gave it a good view of the neighborhood; in addition to the square and the street it overlooked the adjoining farm (owned by a poor, provincial family who lived almost like peasants) as well as the Countess's old garden at the back.

The Countess had a large estate in the district, Razdolnoie, and had used the house only for occasional business visits to the town and as a rallying point for the guests who came from near and far to stay at Razdolnoie in summer.

Now the house was a hospital, and its owner was in prison in Petersburg, where she had lived.

Of the large staff, only two women were left, Ustinia, the head cook, and Mademoiselle Fleury, the former governess of the Countess's daughters, who were now married.

Gray-haired, pink-cheeked, and dishevelled, Mademoiselle Fleury shuffled about in bedroom slippers and a floppy, worn-out housecoat, apparently as much at home in the hospital as she had been in the Zhabrinsky family. She told long stories in her broken Russian, swallowing the ends of her words in the French manner, gesticulated, struck dramatic poses, and burst into hoarse peals of laughter that ended in coughing fits.

She believed that she knew Nurse Antipova inside out and thought that the nurse and the doctor were bound to be attracted to each other. Succumbing to her passion for matchmaking, so deep-rooted in the Latin heart, she was delighted when she found them in each other's company, and would shake her finger and wink slyly at them. This puzzled Antipova and angered the doctor; but, like all eccentrics, Mademoiselle cherished her illusions and would not be parted from them at any price.

Ustinia was an even stranger character. Her clumsy, pear-shaped figure gave her the look of a brood hen. She was dry and sober to the point of maliciousness, but her sober-mindedness went hand in hand with an imagination unbridled in everything to do with superstition. Born in Zybushino and said to be the daughter of the local sorcerer, she knew countless spells and would never go out without first muttering over the stove and the keyhole to protect the house in her absence from fire and the Evil One. She could keep quiet for years, but once she was roused nothing would stop her. Her passion was to defend the truth.

After the fall of the Zybushino republic, the Meliuzeievo Executive Committee launched a campaign against the local anarchistic tendencies. Every night peaceful meetings were held at the Platz, attended by small numbers of citizens who had nothing better to do and who, in the old days, used to gather for gossip outside the fire station. The Meliuzeievo cultural soviet encouraged them and invited local and visiting speakers to guide the discussions. The visitors believed the tales about the talking deaf-mute to be utter nonsense and were anxious to say so. But the small craftsmen, the soldiers' wives, and former servants of Meliuzeievo did not regard these stories as absurd and stood up in his defense.

One of the most outspoken of his defenders was Ustinia. At first held back by womanly reserve, she had gradually become bolder in heckling orators whose views were unacceptable in Meliuzeievo. In the end she developed into an expert public speaker.

The humming of the voices in the square could be heard through the open windows of the hospital, and on quiet nights even fragments of speeches. When Ustinia took the floor, Mademoiselle often rushed into any room where people were sitting and urged them to listen, imitating her without malice in her broken accent: "Disorder…Disorder…Tsarist, bandit…Zybushi…deaf-mute…traitor! traitor!"

Mademoiselle was secretly proud of the spirited and sharp-tongued cook. The two women were fond of each other although they never stopped bickering.

5

Yurii Andreievich prepared to leave, visiting homes and offices where he had friends, and applying for the necessary documents.

At that time the new commissar of the local sector of the front stopped at Meliuzeievo on his way to the army. Everybody said he was completely inexperienced, a mere boy.

A new offensive was being planned and a great effort was made to improve the morale of the army masses. Revolutionary courts-martial were instituted, and the death penalty, which had recently been abolished, was restored.

Before leaving, the doctor had to obtain a paper from the local commandant.

Usually crowds filled his office, overflowing far out into the street. It was impossible to elbow one's way to the desks and no one could hear anything in the roar caused by hundreds of voices.

But this was not one of the reception days. The clerks sat writing silently in the peaceful office, disgruntled at the growing complication of their work, and exchanging ironic glances. Cheerful voices came from the commandant's room; it sounded as if, in there, people had unbuttoned their tunics and were having refreshments.

Galiullin came out of the inner room, saw Zhivago, and vigorously beckoned to him.

Since the doctor had in any case to see the commandant, he went in. He found the room in a state of artistic disorder.

The center of the stage was held by the new commissar, the hero of the day and the sensation of the town, who, instead of being at his post, was addressing the rulers of this paper kingdom quite unconnected with staff and operational matters.

"Here's another of our stars," said the commandant, introducing the doctor. The commissar, completely self-absorbed, did not look around, and the commandant turned to sign the paper that the doctor put in front of him and waved him politely to a low ottoman in the center of the room.

The doctor was the only person in the room who sat normally. All the rest were lolling eccentrically with an air of exaggerated and assumed ease. The commandant almost lay across his desk, his cheek on his fist, in a thoughtful, Byronic pose. His aide, a massive, stout man, perched on the arm of the sofa, his legs tucked on the seat as if he were riding side saddle. Galiullin sat astride a chair, his arms folded on its back and his head resting on his arms, and the commissar kept hoisting himself up by his wrists onto the window sill and jumping off and running up and down the room with small quick steps, buzzing about like a wound-up top, never still or silent for a moment. He talked continuously; the subject of the conversation was the problem of the deserters at Biriuchi.

The commissar was exactly as he had been described to Zhivago. He was thin and graceful, barely out of his teens, aflame with the highest ideals. He was said to come of a good family (the son of a senator, some people thought) and to have been one of the first to march his company to the Duma in February. He was called Gints or Gintse—the doctor had not quite caught the name—and spoke very distinctly, with a correct Petersburg accent and a slight Baltic intonation.

He wore a tight-fitting tunic. It probably embarrassed him to be so young, and in order to seem older he assumed a sneer and an artificial stoop, hunching his shoulders with their stiff epaulettes and keeping his hands deep in his pockets; this did in fact give him a cavalryman's silhouette which could be drawn in two straight lines converging downward from the angle of his shoulders to his feet.

"There is a Cossack regiment stationed a short distance down the railway," the commandant informed him. "It's Red, it's loyal. It will be called out, the rebels will be surrounded, and that will be the end of the business. The corps commander is anxious that they should be disarmed without delay."

"Cossacks? Out of the question!" flared the commissar. "This is not 1905. We're not going back to prerevolutionary methods. On this point we don't see eye to eye. Your generals have outsmarted themselves."

"Nothing has been done yet. This is only a plan, a suggestion."

"We have an agreement with the High Command not to interfere with operational matters. I am not cancelling the order to call out the Cossacks. Let them come. But I, for my part, will take such steps as are dictated by common sense. I suppose they have a bivouac out there?"

"I guess so. A camp, at any rate. Fortified."

"So much the better. I want to go there. I want to see this menace, this nest of robbers. They may be rebels, gentlemen, they may even be deserters, but remember, they are the people. And the people are children, you have to know them, you have to know their psychology. To get the best out of them, you must have the right approach, you have to play on their best, most sensitive chords.

"I'll go, and I'll have a heart-to-heart talk with them. You'll see, they'll go back to the positions they have deserted. You don't believe me? Want to bet?"

"I wonder. But I hope you're right."

"I'll say to them, 'Take my own case, I am an only son, the hope of my parents, yet I haven't spared myself. I've given up everything—name, family, position. I have done this to fight for your freedom, such freedom as is not enjoyed by any other people in the world. This I did, and so did many other young men like myself, not to speak of the old guard of our glorious predecessors, the champions of the people's rights who were sent to hard labor in Siberia or locked up in the Schlüsselburg Fortress. Did we do this for ourselves? Did we have to do it? And you, you who are no longer ordinary privates but the warriors of the first revolutionary army in the world, ask yourselves honestly: Have you lived up to your proud calling? At this moment when our country is being bled white and is making a supreme effort to shake off the encircling hydra of the enemy, you have allowed yourselves to be fooled by a gang of nobodies, you have become a rabble, politically unconscious, surfeited with freedom, hooligans for whom nothing is enough. You're like the proverbial pig that was allowed in the dining room and at once jumped onto the table.' Oh, I'll touch them to the quick, I'll make them feel ashamed of themselves."

"No, that would be risky," the commandant objected halfheartedly, exchanging quick, meaningful glances with his aide.

Galiullin did his best to dissuade the commissar from his insane idea. He knew the reckless men of the 212th, they had been in his division at the front. But the commissar refused to listen.

Yurii Andreievich kept trying to get up and go. The commissar's naïveté embarrassed him, but the sly sophistication of the commandant and his aide—two sneering and dissembling opportunists—was no better. The foolishness of the one was matched by the slyness of the others. And all this expressed itself in a torrent of words, superfluous, utterly false, murky, profoundly alien to life itself.

Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!

The doctor remembered his coming talk with Antipova. Though it was bound to be unpleasant, he was glad of the necessity of seeing her, even at such a price. She was unlikely to be back. But he got up as soon as he could and went out, unnoticed by the others.

6

She was back. Mademoiselle, who gave him the news, added that she was tired, she had had a quick meal and had gone up to her room saying she was not to be disturbed. "But I should go up and knock if I were you," Mademoiselle suggested. "I am sure she is not asleep yet."—"Which is her room?" the doctor asked. Mademoiselle was surprised beyond words by his question. Antipova lived at the end of the passage on the top floor, just beyond several rooms in which all of the Countess's furniture was kept locked, and where the doctor had never been.

It was getting dark. Outside, the houses and fences huddled closer together in the dusk. The trees advanced out of the depth of the garden into the light of the lamps shining from the windows. The night was hot and sticky. At the slightest effort one was drenched with sweat. The light of the kerosene lamps streaking into the yard went down the trees in a dirty, vaporous flow.

The doctor stopped at the head of the stairs. It occurred to him that even to knock on Antipova's door when she was only just back and tired from her journey would be discourteous and embarrassing. Better leave the talk for tomorrow. Feeling at a loss as one does when one changes one's mind, he walked to the other end of the passage, where a window overlooked the neighboring yard, and leaned out.

The night was full of quiet, mysterious sounds. Next to him, inside the passage, water dripped from the washbasin regularly and slowly. Somewhere outside the window people were whispering. Somewhere in the vegetable patch they were watering cucumber beds, clanking the chain of the well as they drew the water and poured it from pail to pail.

All the flowers smelled at once; it was as if the earth, unconscious all day long, were now waking to their fragrance. And from the Countess's centuries-old garden, so littered with fallen branches that it was impenetrable, the dusty aroma of old linden trees coming into bloom drifted in a huge wave as tall as a house.

Noises came from the street beyond the fence on the right—snatches of a song, a drunken soldier, doors banging.

An enormous crimson moon rose behind the crows' nest in the Countess's garden. At first it was the color of the new brick mill in Zybushino, then it turned yellow like the water tower at Biriuchi.

And just under the window, the smell of new-mown hay, as perfumed as jasmine tea, mixed with that of belladonna. Below there a cow was tethered; she had been brought from a distant village, she had walked all day, she was tired and homesick for the herd and would not yet accept food from her new mistress.

"Now, now, whoa there, I'll show you how to butt," her mistress coaxed her in a whisper, but the cow crossly shook her head and craned her neck, mooing plaintively, and beyond the black barns of Meliuzeievo the stars twinkled, and invisible threads of sympathy stretched between them and the cow as if there were cattle sheds in other worlds where she was pitied.

Everything was fermenting, growing, rising with the magic yeast of life. The joy of living, like a gentle wind, swept in a broad surge indiscriminately through fields and towns, through walls and fences, through wood and flesh. Not to be overwhelmed by this tidal wave, Yurii Andreievich went out into the square to listen to the speeches.

7

By now the moon stood high. Its light covered everything as with a thick layer of white paint. The broad shadows thrown by the pillared government buildings that surrounded the square in a semicircle spread on the ground like black rugs.

The meeting was being held across the square. Straining one's ears, one could hear every word. But the doctor was stunned by the beauty of the spectacle; he sat down on the bench outside the fire station and instead of listening looked about him.

Narrow dead-end streets ran off the square, as deep in mud as country lanes and lined with crooked little houses. Fences of plaited willows stuck out of the mud like bow nets in a pond, or lobster pots. You could see the weak glint of open windows. In the small front gardens, sweaty red heads of corn with oily whiskers reached out toward the rooms, and single pale thin hollyhocks looked out over the fences, like women in night clothes whom the heat had driven out of their stuffy houses for a breath of air.

The moonlit night was extraordinary, like merciful love or the gift of clairvoyance. Suddenly, into this radiant, legendary stillness, there dropped the measured, rhythmic sound of a familiar, recently heard voice. It was a fine ardent voice and it rang with conviction. The doctor listened and recognized it at once. Commissar Gints was addressing the meeting on the square.

Apparently the municipality had asked him to lend them the support of his authority. With great feeling he chided the people of Meliuzeievo for their disorganized ways and for giving in to the disintegrating influence of the Bolsheviks, who, he said, were the real instigators of the Zybushino disorders. Speaking in the same spirit as at the commandant's, he reminded them of the powerful and ruthless enemy, and of their country's hour of trial. Then the crowd began to heckle.

Calls of protest alternated with demands for silence. The interruptions grew louder and more frequent. A man who had come with Gints, and who now assumed the role of chairman, shouted that speeches from the floor were not allowed and called the audience to order. Some insisted that a citizeness who wished to speak should be given leave.

A woman made her way through the crowd to the wooden box that served as a platform. She did not attempt to climb on the box but stood beside it. The woman was known to the crowd. Its attention was caught. There was a silence. This was Ustinia.

"Now you were saying, Comrade Commissar, about Zybushino," she began, "and about looking sharp—you told us to look sharp and not to be deceived—but actually, you yourself, I heard you, all you do is to play about with words like 'Bolsheviks, Mensheviks,' that's all you talk about—Bolsheviks, Mensheviks. Now all that about no more fighting and all being brothers, I call that being godly, not Menshevik, and about the works and factories going to the poor, that isn't Bolshevik, that's just human decency. And about that deaf-mute, we're fed up hearing about him. Everybody goes on and on about the deaf-mute. And what have you got against him? Just that he was dumb all that time and then he suddenly started to talk and didn't ask your permission? As if that were so marvellous! Much stranger things than that have been known to happen. Take the famous she-ass, for instance. 'Balaam, Balaam,' she says, 'listen to me, don't go that way, I beg you, you'll be sorry.' Well, naturally, he wouldn't listen, he went on. Like you saying, 'A deaf-mute,' he thought 'a she-ass, a dumb beast, what's the good of listening to her.' He scorned her. And look how sorry he was afterwards. You all know what the end of it was."

"What?" someone asked curiously.

"That's enough," snapped Ustinia. "If you ask too many questions you'll grow old before your time."

"That's no good. You tell us," insisted the heckler.

"All right, all right, I'll tell you, you pest. He was turned into a pillar of salt."

"You've got it wrong, that was Lot. That was Lot's wife," people shouted. Everyone laughed. The chairman called the meeting to order. The doctor went to bed.

8

He saw Antipova the following evening. He found her in the pantry with a pile of linen, straight out of the wringer; she was ironing.

The pantry was one of the back rooms at the top, looking out over the garden. There the samovars were got ready, food was dished out, and the used plates were stacked in the dumb-waiter to be sent down to the kitchen. There too the lists of china, silver, and glass were kept and checked, and there people spent their moments of leisure, using it as a meeting place.

The windows were open. In the room, the scent of linden blossoms mingled, as in an old park, with the caraway-bitter smell of dry twigs and the charcoal fumes of the two flat-irons that Antipova used alternately, putting them each in turn in the flue to keep them hot.

"Well, why didn't you knock last night? Mademoiselle told me. But it's a good thing you didn't. I was already in bed. I couldn't have let you in. Well, how are you? Look out for the charcoal, don't get it on your suit."

"You look as if you've been doing the laundry for the whole hospital."

"No, there's a lot of mine in there. You see? You keep on teasing me about getting stuck in Meliuzeievo. Well, this time I mean it, I'm going. I'm getting my things together, I'm packing. When I've finished I'll be off. I'll be in the Urals and you'll be in Moscow. Then one day somebody will ask you: 'Do you happen to know a little town called Meliuzeievo?' and you'll say: 'I don't seem to call it to mind.'—'And who is Antipova?'—'Never heard of her.' "

"That's unlikely. Did you have a good trip? What was it like in the country?"

"That's a long story. How quickly these irons cool! Do hand me the other, do you mind? It's over there, look, just inside the flue. And could you put this one back? Thanks. Every village is different, it depends on the villagers. In some the people are industrious, they work hard, then it isn't bad. And in others I suppose all the men are drunks. Then it's desolate. A terrible sight."

"Nonsense! Drunks? A lot you understand! It's just that there is no one there, all the men are in the army. What about the new councils?"

"You're wrong about the drunks, I don't agree with you at all. The councils? There's going to be a lot of trouble with the councils. The instructions can't be applied, there's nobody to work with. All the peasants care about at the moment is the land question.… I stopped at Razdolnoie. What a lovely place, you should go and see it.… It was burned a bit and looted last spring, the barn is burned down, the orchards are charred, and there are smoke stains on some of the houses. Zybushino I didn't see, I didn't get there. But they all tell you the deaf-mute really exists. They describe what he looks like, they say he's young and educated."

"Last night Ustinia stood up for him on the square."

"The moment I got back there was another lot of old furniture from Razdolnoie. I've asked them a hundred times to leave it alone. As if we didn't have enough of our own. And this morning the guard from the commandant's office comes over with a note—they must have the silver tea set and the crystal glasses, it's a matter of life and death, just for one night, they'll send it back. Half of it we'll never see again. It's always a loan—I know these loans. They're having a party—in honor of some visitor or something."

"I can guess who that is. The new commissar has arrived, the one who's appointed to our sector of the front. They want to tackle the deserters, have them surrounded and disarmed. The commissar is a greenhorn, a babe in arms. The local authorities want to call out the Cossacks, but not he—he's planning to speak to their hearts. The people, he says, are like children, and so on; he thinks it's a kind of game. Galiullin tried to argue with him, he told him to leave the jungle alone, not to rouse the wild beast. 'Leave us to deal with it,' he said. But you can't do anything with a fellow like that once he's got a thing in his head. I do wish you'd listen to me. Do stop ironing a minute. There will be an unimaginable mess here soon; it's beyond our power to avert it. I do wish you'd leave before it happens."

"Nothing will happen, you're exaggerating. And anyway, I am leaving. But I can't just snap my fingers and say goodbye. I have to hand in a properly checked inventory. I don't want it to look as if I've stolen something and run away. And who is to take over? That's the problem, I can't tell you what I've been through with that miserable inventory, and all I get is abuse. I listed Zhabrinskaia's things as hospital property, because that was the sense of the decree. Now they say I did it on purpose to keep them for the owner! What a dirty trick!"

"Do stop worrying about pots and rugs. To hell with them. What a thing to fuss about at a time like this! Oh, I wish I'd seen you yesterday. I was in such good form that I could have told you all about everything, explained the whole celestial mechanics, answered any accursed question! It's true, you know, I'm not joking, I really did want to get it all off my chest. And I wanted to tell you about my wife, and my son, and myself.… Why the hell can't a grown-up man talk to a grown-up woman without being at once suspected of some ulterior motive? Damn all motives—ulterior ones and others.

"Please, go on with your ironing, make the linen nice and smooth, don't bother about me, I'll go on talking. I'll talk a long time.

"Just think what's going on around us! And that you and I should be living at such a time. Such a thing happens only once in an eternity. Just think of it, the whole of Russia has had its roof torn off, and you and I and everyone else are out in the open! And there's nobody to spy on us. Freedom! Real freedom, not just talk about it, freedom, dropped out of the sky, freedom beyond our expectations, freedom by accident, through a misunderstanding.

"And how great everyone is, and completely at sea! Have you noticed? As if crushed by his own weight, by the discovery of his greatness.

"Go on ironing, I tell you. Don't talk. You aren't bored. Let me change your iron for you.

"Last night I was watching the meeting in the square. An extraordinary sight! Mother Russia is on the move, she can't stand still, she's restless and she can't find rest, she's talking and she can't stop. And it isn't as if only people were talking. Stars and trees meet and converse, flowers talk philosophy at night, stone houses hold meetings. It makes you think of the Gospel, doesn't it? The days of the apostles. Remember St. Paul? You will speak with tongues and you will prophesy. Pray for the gift of understanding."

"I know what you mean about stars and trees holding meetings. I understand that. It's happened to me too."

"It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life—as if life could be put off for a time—what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly, like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions—his own personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it—the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice."

The sudden trembling of his voice betrayed his rising agitation. Antipova stopped ironing and gave him a grave, astonished look. It confused him and he forgot what he was saying. After a moment of embarrassed silence he rushed on, blurting out whatever came into his head.

"These days I have such a longing to live honestly, to be productive. I so much want to be a part of all this awakening. And then, in the middle of all this general rejoicing, I catch your mysterious, sad glance, wandering God knows where, far away. How I wish it were not there! How I wish your face to say that you are happy with your fate and that you need nothing from anyone. If only someone who is really close to you, your friend or your husband—best of all if he were a soldier—would take me by the hand and tell me to stop worrying about your fate and not to weary you with my attentions. But I'd wrest my hand free and take a swing Ah, I have forgotten myself. Please forgive me."

Once again the doctor's voice betrayed him. He gave up struggling and, feeling hopelessly awkward, got up and went to the window. Leaning on the sill, his cheek on his hand, he stared into the dark garden with absent, unseeing eyes, trying to collect himself.

Antipova walked round the ironing board, propped between the table and the other window, and stopped in the middle of the room a few steps behind him. "That's what I've always been afraid of," she said softly, as if to herself. "I shouldn't have…Don't, Yurii Andreievich, you mustn't. Oh. now just look at what you've made me do!" she exclaimed. She ran back to the board, where a thin stream of acrid smoke came from under the iron that had burned through a blouse.

She thumped it down crossly on its stand. "Yurii Andreievich," she went on, "do be sensible, go off to Mademoiselle for a minute, have a drink of water and come back, please, as I've always known you till now and as I want you to be. Do you hear, Yurii Andreievich? I know you can do it. Please do it. I beg you."

They had no more talks of this kind, and a week later Larisa Feodorovna left.

9

Some time later, Zhivago too set out for home. The night before he left there was a terrible storm. The roar of the gale merged with that of the downpour, which sometimes crashed straight onto the roofs and at other times drove down the street with the changing wind as if lashing its way step by step.

The peals of thunder followed each other uninterruptedly, producing a steady rumble. In the blaze of continual flashes of lightning the street vanished into the distance, and the bent trees seemed to be running in the same direction.

Mademoiselle Fleury was waked up in the night by an urgent knocking at the front door. She sat up in alarm and listened. The knocking went on.

Could it be, she thought, that there wasn't a soul left in the hospital to get up and open the door? Did she always have to do everything, poor old woman, just because nature had made her reliable and endowed her with a sense of duty?

Well, admittedly, the house had belonged to rich aristocrats, but what about the hospital—didn't that belong to the people, wasn't it their own? Whom did they expect to look after it? Where, for instance, had the male nurses got to, she'd like to know. Everyone had fled—no more orderlies, no more nurses, no doctors, no one in authority. Yet there were still wounded in the house, two legless men in the surgical ward where the drawing room used to be, and downstairs next to the laundry the storeroom full of dysentery cases. And that devil Ustinia had gone out visiting. She knew perfectly well that there was a storm coming, but did that stop her? Now she had a good excuse to spend the night out.

Well, thank God the knocking had stopped, they realized that nobody would answer, they'd given it up. Why anybody should want to be out in this weather…Or could it be Ustinia? No, she had her key. Oh God, how terrible, they've started again.

What pigs, just the same! Not that you could expect Zhivago to hear anything, he was off tomorrow, his thoughts were already in Moscow or on the journey. But what about Galiullin? How could he sleep soundly or lie calmly through all this noise, expecting that in the end she, a weak, defenseless old woman, would go down and open for God knows whom, on this frightening night in this frightening country.

Galiullin!—she remembered suddenly. No, such nonsense could occur to her only because she was half asleep, Galiullin wasn't there, he should be a long way off by now. Hadn't she herself, with Zhivago, hidden him, and disguised him as a civilian, and then told him about every road and village in the district to help him to escape after that horrible lynching at the station when they killed Commissar Gints and chased Galiullin all the way from Biriuchi to Meliuzeievo, shooting at him and then hunting for him all over the town!

If it hadn't been for those automobiles, not a stone would have been left standing in the town. An armored division happened to be passing through, and stopped those evil men.

The storm was subsiding, moving away. The thunder was less continuous, duller, more distant. The rain stopped occasionally, when the water could be heard splashing softly off the leaves and down the gutters. Noiseless reflections of distant lightning lit up Mademoiselle's room, lingering as though looking for something.

Suddenly the knocking at the front door, which had long since stopped, was resumed. Someone was in urgent need of help and was knocking repeatedly, in desperation. The wind rose again and the rain came down.

"Coming," shouted Mademoiselle to whoever it was, and the sound of her own voice frightened her.

It had suddenly occurred to her who it might be. Putting down her feet and pushing them into slippers, she threw her dressing gown over her shoulders and hurried to wake up Zhivago, it would be less frightening if he came down with her. But he had heard the knocking and was already coming down with a lighted candle. The same idea had occurred to both of them.

"Zhivago, Zhivago, they're knocking on the front door, I'm afraid to go down alone," she called out in French, adding in Russian: "You will see, it's either Lar or Lieutenant Gaiul."

Roused by the knocking, Yurii Andreievich had also felt certain that it was someone he knew—either Galiullin, who had been stopped in his flight and was coming back for refuge, or Nurse Antipova, prevented from continuing her journey for some reason.

In the hallway the doctor gave the candle to Mademoiselle, drew the bolts, and turned the key. A gust of wind burst the door open, putting out the candle and showering them with cold raindrops.

"Who is it? Who is it? Anybody there?"

Mademoiselle and the doctor shouted in turn into the darkness but there was no reply. Suddenly the knocking started again in another place—was it at the back door, or, as they now thought, at the French window into the garden?

"Must be the wind," said the doctor. "But just to make sure, perhaps you'd have a look at the back. I'll stay here in case there really is someone."

Mademoiselle disappeared into the house while the doctor went out and stood under the entrance roof. His eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, and he could make out the first signs of dawn.

Above the town, clouds raced dementedly as if pursued, so low that their tatters almost caught the tops of the trees, which bent in the same direction so that they looked like brooms sweeping the sky. The rain lashed the wooden wall of the house, turning it from gray to black.

Mademoiselle came back. "Well?" said the doctor.

"You were right. There's no one." She had been all around the house; a branch knocking on the pantry window had broken one of the panes and there were huge puddles on the floor, and the same thing in what used to be Lara's room—there was a sea, a real sea, an ocean. "And on this side, look, there's a broken shutter knocking on the casement, do you see it? That's all it was."

They talked a little, locked the door, and went back to their rooms, both regretting that the alarm had been a false one.

They had been sure that when they opened the door Antipova would come in, chilled through and soaked to the skin, and they would ask her dozens of questions while she took off her things, and she would go and change and come down and dry herself in front of the kitchen stove, still warm from last night, and would tell them her adventures, pushing back her hair and laughing.

They had been so sure of it that after locking the front door they imagined that she was outside the house in the form of a watery wraith, and her image continued to haunt them.

10

It was said that the Biriuchi telegrapher, Kolia Frolenko, was indirectly responsible for the trouble at the station.

Kolia, the son of a well-known Meliuzeievo clockmaker, had been a familiar figure in Meliuzeievo from his earliest childhood. As a small boy he had stayed with some of the servants at Razdolnoie and had played with the Countess's daughters. It was then that he learned to understand French. Mademoiselle Fleury knew him well.

Everyone in Meliuzeievo was used to seeing him on his bicycle, coatless, hatless, and in canvas summer shoes in any weather. Arms crossed on his chest, he free-wheeled down the road, glancing up at the poles and wires to check the condition of the network.

Some of the houses in Meliuzeievo were connected by a branch line with the exchange at the station. The calls were handled by Kolia at the station switchboard. There he was up to his ears in work, for not only the telephone and telegraph were in his charge, but, if the stationmaster Povarikhin was absent for a few moments, also the railway signals, which were operated from the same control room.

Having to look after several mechanical instruments at once, Kolia had evolved a special style of speech, obscure, abrupt, and puzzling, which enabled him, if he chose, to avoid answering questions or getting involved in a conversation. He was said to have abused the advantage this gave him on the day of the disorders.

It is true that, by suppressing information, he had defeated Galiullin's good intentions and, perhaps unwittingly, had given a fatal turn to the events.

Galiullin had called up from town and asked for Commissar Gints, who was somewhere at the station or in its vicinity, in order to tell him that he was on his way to join him and to ask him to wait for him and do nothing until he arrived. Kolia, on the pretext that he was busy signalling an approaching train, refused to call the commissar. At the same time he did his utmost to delay the train, which was bringing up the Cossacks summoned to Biriuchi.

When the troops arrived nevertheless he did not conceal his dismay.

The engine, crawling slowly under the dark roof of the platform, stopped in front of the huge window of the control room. Kolia drew the green serge curtain with the initials of the Company woven in yellow into the border, picked up the enormous water jug standing on the tray on the window ledge, poured some water into the plain, thick, straight-sided glass, drank a few mouthfuls, and looked out.

The engineer saw him from his cab and gave him a friendly nod.

"The stinker, the louse," Kolia thought with hatred. He stuck out his tongue and shook his fist. The engineer not only understood him but managed to convey by a shrug of the shoulders and a nod in the direction of the train: "What was I to do? I'd like to know what you'd have done in my place. He's the boss."—"You're a filthy brute all the same," Kolia replied by gestures.

The horses were taken, balking, out of the freight cars. The thud of their hoofs on the wooden gangways was followed by the ring of their shoes on the stone platform. They were led, rearing, across the tracks.

At the end of the tracks were two rows of derelict wooden coaches. The rain had washed them clean of paint, and worms and damp had rotted them from inside, so that now they were reverting to their original kinship with the wood of the forest, which began just beyond the rolling stock, with its lichen, its birches, and the clouds towering above it.

At the word of command, the Cossacks mounted their horses and galloped to the clearing.

The rebels of the 212th were surrounded. In woods, horsemen always seem taller and more formidable than in an open field. They impressed the infantrymen, although they had rifles in their mud huts. The Cossacks drew their swords.

Within the ring formed by the horses, some timber was piled up. Gints mounted it and addressed the surrounded men.

As usual, he spoke of soldierly duty, of the fatherland, and many other lofty subjects. But these ideas found no sympathy among his listeners. There were too many of them. They had suffered a great deal in the war, they were thick-skinned and exhausted. They had long been fed up with the phrases Gints was giving them. Four months of wooing by the Left and Right had corrupted these unsophisticated men, who, moreover, were alienated by the speaker's foreign-sounding name and Baltic accent.

Gints felt that his speech was too long and was annoyed at himself, but he thought that he had to make himself clear to his listeners, who instead of being grateful rewarded him with expressions of indifference or hostile boredom. Gradually losing his temper, he decided to speak straight from the shoulder and to bring up the threats he had so far held in reserve. Heedless of the rising murmurs, he reminded the deserters that revolutionary courts-martial had been set up, and called on them, on pain of death, to disarm and give up their ringleaders. If they refused, he said, they would prove that they were common traitors, and irresponsible swollen-headed rabble. The men had become unused to being talked to in such a tone.

Several hundred voices rose in an uproar. Some were low pitched and almost without anger: "All right, all right. Pipe down. That's enough." But hate-filled, hysterical trebles predominated:

"The nerve! Just like in the old days! These officers still treat us like dirt. So we're traitors, are we? And what about you yourself, Excellency? Why bother with him? Obviously he's a German, an infiltrator. Show us your papers, blueblood. And what are you gaping at, pacifiers?" They turned to the Cossacks. "You've come to restore order, go on, tie us up, have your fun."

But the Cossacks, too, liked Gints' unfortunate speech less and less. "They are all swine to him," they muttered. "Thinks himself the lord and master!" At first singly, and then in ever-growing numbers, they began to sheathe their swords. One after another they got off their horses. When most of them had dismounted, they moved in a disorderly crowd toward the center of the clearing, mixed with the men of the 212th, and fraternized.

"You must vanish quietly," the worried Cossack officers told Gints. "Your car is at the station, we'll send for it to meet you. Hurry."

Gints went, but he felt that to steal away was beneath his dignity, so he turned quite openly toward the station. He was terribly agitated but out of pride forced himself to walk calmly and unhurriedly.

He was close to the station. At the edge of the woods, within sight of the tracks, he looked back for the first time. Soldiers with rifles had followed him. "What do they want?" he wondered. He quickened his pace.

So did his pursuers. The distance between them remained unchanged. He saw the double wall of derelict coaches, stepped behind them, and ran. The train that had brought the Cossacks had been shunted. The lines were clear. He crossed them at a run and leapt onto the steep platform. At the same moment the soldiers ran out from behind the old coaches. Povarikhin and Kolia were shouting and waving to him to get into the station building, where they could save him.

But once again the sense of honor bred in him for generations, a city-bred sense of honor, which impelled him to self-sacrifice and was out of place here, barred his way to safety. His heart pounding wildly, he made a supreme effort to control himself. He told himself: "I must shout to them, 'Come to your senses, men, you know I'm not a spy.' A really heartfelt word or two will bring them to their senses."

In the course of the past months his feeling for a courageous exploit or a heart-felt speech had unconsciously become associated with stages, speakers' platforms, or just chairs onto which you jumped to fling an appeal or ardent call to the crowds.

At the very doors of the station, under the station bell, there stood a water butt for use in case of fire. It was tightly covered. Gints jumped up on the lid and addressed the approaching soldiers with an incoherent but gripping speech. His unnatural voice and the insane boldness of his gesture, two steps from the door where he could so easily have taken shelter, amazed them and stopped them in their tracks. They lowered their rifles.

But Gints, who was standing on the edge of the lid, suddenly pushed it in. One of his legs slipped into the water and the other hung over the edge of the butt.

Seeing him sitting clumsily astride the edge of the butt, the soldiers burst into laughter and the one in front shot Gints in the neck. He was dead by the time the others ran up and thrust their bayonets into his body.

11

Mademoiselle called up Kolia and told him to find Dr. Zhivago a good seat in the train to Moscow, threatening him with exposure if he did not.

Kolia was as usual conducting another conversation and, judging by the decimal fractions that punctuated his speech, transmitting a message in code over a third instrument.

"Pskov, Pskov, can you hear me? What rebels? What help? What are you talking about, Mademoiselle? Ring off, please. Pskov, Pskov, thirty-six point zero one five. Oh hell, they've cut me off. Hello, hello, I can't hear. Is that you again, Mademoiselle? I've told you, I can't. Ask Povarikhin. All lies, fictions. Thirty-six…Oh hell…Get off the line, Mademoiselle."

And Mademoiselle was saying:

"Don't you throw dust in my eyes, Pskov, Pskov, you liar, I can see right through you, tomorrow you'll put the doctor on the train, and I won't listen to another word from any murdering little Judases."

12

The day Yurii Andreievich left, it was sultry. A storm like the one that had broken two days earlier was brewing. Near the station, at the outskirts of the town, littered with the shells of sunflower seeds, the clay huts and the geese looked white and frightened under the still menace of the black sky.

The grass on the wide field in front of the station and stretching to both sides of it was trampled and entirely covered by a countless multitude who had for weeks been waiting for trains.

Old men in coarse gray woollen coats wandered about in the hot sun from group to group in search of news and rumors. Glum fourteen-year-old boys lay on their elbows twirling peeled twigs, as if they were tending cattle, while their small brothers and sisters scuttled about with flying shirts and pink bottoms. Their legs stretched straight in front of them, their mothers sat on the ground with babies packed into the tight shapeless bosoms of their brown peasants coats.

"All scattered like sheep as soon as the shooting began. They didn't like it," the stationmaster told the doctor un-sympathetically as they walked between the rows of bodies lying on the ground in front of the entrance and on the floors inside the station. "In a twinkling everybody cleared off the grass. You could see the ground again; we hadn't seen it in four months with all this gypsy camp going on, we'd forgotten what it looked like. This is where he lay. It's a strange thing, I've seen all sorts of horror in the war, you'd think I'd be used to anything. But I felt so sorry somehow. It was the senselessness of it. What had he done to them? But then they aren't human beings. They say he was the favorite son. And now to the right, if you please, into my office. There isn't a chance on this train, I'm afraid, they'd crush you to death. I'm putting you on a local one. We are making it up now. But not a word about it until you're ready to get on it, they'd tear it apart before it was made up. You change at Sukhinichi tonight."

13

When the "secret" train backed into the station from behind the railway sheds, the whole crowd poured onto the tracks. People rolled down the hills like marbles, scrambled onto the embankment, and, pushing each other, jumped onto the steps and buffers or climbed in through the windows and onto the roofs. The train filled in an instant, while it was still moving, and by the time it stood by the platform, not only was it crammed but passengers hung all over it, from top to bottom. By a miracle, the doctor managed to get into a platform and from there, still more unaccountably, into the corridor.

There he stayed, sitting on his luggage, all the way to Sukhinichi.

The stormy sky had cleared. In the hot, sunny fields, crickets chirped loudly, muffling the clatter of the train.

Those passengers who stood by the windows shaded the rest from the light. Their double and triple shadows streaked across the floor and benches. Indeed, these shadows went beyond the cars. They were crowded out through the opposite windows, and accompanied the moving shadow of the train itself.

All around people were shouting, bawling songs, quarreling, and playing cards. Whenever the train stopped, the noise of the besieging crowds outside was added to this turmoil. The roar of the voices was deafening, like a storm at sea, and, as at sea, there would be a sudden lull. In the inexplicable stillness you could hear footsteps hurrying down the platform, the bustle and arguments outside the freight car, isolated words from people, farewells spoken in the distance, and the quiet clucking of hens and rustling of trees in the station garden.

Then, like a telegram delivered on the train, or like greetings from Meliuzeievo addressed to Yurii Andreievich, there drifted in through the windows a familiar fragrance. It came from somewhere to one side and higher than the level of either garden or wild flowers, and it quietly asserted its excellence over everything else.

Kept from the windows by the crowd, the doctor could not see the trees; but he imagined them growing somewhere very near, calmly stretching out their heavy branches to the carriage roofs, and their foliage, covered with dust from the passing trains and thick as night, was sprinkled with constellations of small, glittering waxen flowers.

This happened time and again throughout the trip. There were roaring crowds at every station. And everywhere the linden trees were in blossom.

This ubiquitous fragrance seemed to be preceding the train on its journey north as if it were some sort of rumor that had reached even the smallest, local stations, and which the passengers always found waiting for them on arrival, heard and confirmed by everyone.

14

That night at Sukhinichi a porter who had preserved his pre-war obligingness took the doctor over the unlit tracks to the back of some unscheduled train that had just arrived, and put him in a second-class carriage.

Hardly had he unlocked it with the conductor's key and heaved the doctor's luggage inside when the conductor came and tried to throw it out. He was finally appeased by Yurii Andreievich and withdrew and vanished without a trace.

The mysterious train was a "special" and went fairly fast, stopping only briefly at stations, and had some kind of armed guard. The carriage was almost empty.

Zhivago's compartment was lit by a guttering candle that stood on the small table, its flame wavering in the stream of air from the half-open window.

The candle belonged to the only other occupant of the compartment, a fair-haired youth who, judging by the size of his arms and legs, was very tall. His limbs seemed to be attached too loosely at the joints. He had been sprawling nonchalantly in a corner seat by the window, but when Zhivago came in he politely rose and sat up in a more seemly manner.

Something that looked like a floor cloth lay under his seat. One corner of it stirred and a flop-eared setter scrambled out. It sniffed Yurii Andreievich over and ran up and down the compartment throwing out its paws as loosely as its lanky master crossed his legs. Soon, at his command, it scrambled back under the seat and resumed its former likeness to a floor rag.

It was only then that Yurii Andreievich noticed the double-barrelled gun in its case, the leather cartridge belt, and the hunter's bag tightly packed with game that hung on a hook in the compartment.

The young man had been out shooting.

He was extremely talkative, and, smiling amiably, at once engaged the doctor in conversation, looking, as he did so, fixedly at his mouth.

He had an unpleasant, high-pitched voice that now and then rose to a tinny falsetto. Another oddity of his speech was that, while he was plainly Russian, he pronounced one vowel, u, in a most outlandish manner, like the French u. To utter even this garbled u, he had to make a great effort, and he pronounced it louder than any other sound, accompanying it each time with a slight squeal. At moments, apparently by concentrating, he managed to correct this defect but it always came back.

"What is this?" Zhivago wondered. "I'm sure I've read about it, as a doctor I ought to know, but I can't think what it is. It must be some brain trouble that causes defective speech." The squeal struck him as so funny that he could hardly keep a straight face. "Better go to bed," he told himself.

He climbed up onto the rack which was used as a berth. The young man offered to blow out the candle lest it keep him awake. The doctor accepted, thanking him, and the compartment was plunged into darkness.

"Shall I close the window?" Yurii Andreievich asked. "You are not afraid of thieves?"

There was no reply. He repeated his question louder, but there was still no answer.

He struck a match to see if his neighbor had gone out during the brief interval. That he had dropped off to sleep in so short a time seemed even more improbable.

He was there, however, sitting in his place with his eyes open. He smiled at the doctor, leaning over him from his berth.

The match went out. Yurii Andreievich struck another, and while it was alight repeated his question for the third time.

"Do as you wish," the young man replied at once. "I've got nothing a thief would want. But perhaps leave it open. It's stuffy."

"What an extraordinary character!" thought Zhivago. "An eccentric, evidently. Doesn't talk in the dark. And how distinctly he pronounced everything now, without any slur. It's beyond me."

15

Tired out by the events of the past week, the preparations for the trip, and the early start, the doctor expected to go to sleep the moment he had stretched comfortably, but he was mistaken. His exhaustion made him sleepless. Only at daybreak did he fall asleep.

His thoughts swarmed and whirled in the dark. But they all fell clearly into two distinct groups, as it were, two main threads that kept getting tangled and untangled.

One group of thoughts centered around Tonia, their home, and their former, settled life where everything, down to the smallest detail, had an aura of poetry and was permeated with affection and warmth. The doctor was concerned about this life, he wanted it safe and whole and in his night express was impatient to get back to it after two years of separation.

In the same group were his loyalty to the revolution and his admiration for it. This was the revolution in the sense in which it was accepted by the middle classes and in which it had been understood by the students, followers of Blok, in 1905.

These familiar, long-held ideas also included the anticipations and promises of a new order which had appeared on the horizon before the war, between 1912 and 1914, which had emerged in Russian thinking, in Russian art, in Russian life, and which had a bearing on Russia as a whole and on his own future.

It would be good to go back to that climate, once the war was over, to see its renewal and continuation, just as it was good to be going home.

New things were also in the other group of his thoughts, but how different, how unlike the first! These new things were not familiar, not led up to by the old, they were unchosen, determined by an ineluctable reality, and as sudden as an earthquake.

Among these new things was the war with its bloodshed and its horrors, its homelessness and savagery, its ordeals and the practical wisdom that it taught. So, too, were the lonely little towns to which the war washed you up, and the people you met in them. And among these new things too was the revolution—not the idealized intellectuals' revolution of 1905, but this new upheaval, today's, born of the war, bloody, ruthless, elemental, the soldiers' revolution led by those professional revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks.

And among the new thoughts, too, was Nurse Antipova, stranded by the war God knows where, about whose past he knew nothing, who never blamed anyone but whose very silence seemed to be a complaint, who was mysteriously reserved and so strong in her reserve. And so was Yurii Andreievich's honest endeavor not to love her, as wholehearted as his striving throughout his life until now to love everyone, not only his family and his friends, but everyone else as well.

The train rushed on at full speed. The head wind, coming through the open window, ruffled and blew dust on Yurii Andreievich's hair. At every station, by night as by day, the crowds stormed and the linden trees rustled.

Sometimes carts or gigs rattled up to the station out of the darkness, and voices and rumbling wheels mingled with the rustling of trees.

At such moments Yurii Andreievich felt he understood what it was that made these night shadows rustle and put their heads together, and what it was they whispered to each other, lazily stirring their leaves heavy with sleep, like faltering, lisping tongues. It was the very thing he was thinking of, turning restlessly in his berth—the tidings of the ever-widening circles of unrest and excitement in Russia, the tidings of the revolution, of its difficult and fateful hour and its probable ultimate greatness.

16

The doctor did not wake up until after eleven. "Prince, Prince," his neighbor was calling softly to his growling dog. To Yurii Andreievich's astonishment, they still had the compartment to themselves; no other passenger had got in.

The names of the stations were familiar to him from childhood. They were out of the province of Kaluga and well into that of Moscow.

He washed and shaved in prewar comfort and came back to the compartment in time for breakfast, to which his strange companion had invited him. Now he had a better look at him.

What struck him most were his extreme garrulousness and restlessness. He liked to talk, and what mattered to him was not communicating and exchanging ideas but the function of speech itself, pronouncing words and uttering sounds. As he spoke he kept jumping up as if he were on springs; he laughed deafeningly for no reason, briskly rubbing his hands with contentment, and, when all this seemed inadequate to express his delight, he slapped his knees hard, laughing to the point of tears.

His conversation had the same peculiarities as the night before. He was curiously inconsistent, now indulging in uninvited confidences, now leaving the most innocent questions unanswered. He poured out incredible and disconnected facts about himself. Perhaps he lied a little; he obviously was out to impress by his extremism and by his rejection of all commonly accepted opinions.

It all reminded Zhivago of something long familiar to him. Similar radical views were advanced by the nihilists of the last century, and a little later by some of Dostoievsky's heroes, and still more recently by their direct descendants, the provincial educated classes, who were often ahead of the capitals because they still were in the habit of going to the root of things while in the capitals such an approach was regarded as obsolete and unfashionable.

The young man told him that he was the nephew of a well-known revolutionary, but that his parents were incorregible reactionaires, real dodoes, as he called them. They had a fairly large estate in a place near the front, where he had been brought up. His parents had been at swords' points with his uncle all their lives, but the uncle did not bear them a grudge and now used his influence to save them a good deal of unpleasantness.

His own views were like his uncle's, the talkative man informed Zhivago; he was an extremist in everything, whether in life, politics, or art. This too reminded the doctor of Piotr Verkhovensky[11]—not so much the leftism as the frivolity and the shallowness. "He'll be telling me he's a futurist next," thought Yurii Andreievich, and indeed they spoke of modern art. "Now it'll be sport—race horses, skating rinks, or French wrestling." And the conversation turned to shooting.

The young man had been shooting in his native region. He was a crack shot, he boasted, and if it had not been for the physical defect that had kept him out of the army he would have distinguished himself by his marksmanship. Catching Zhivago's questioning glance, he exclaimed: "What? Haven't you noticed anything? I thought you had guessed what was the matter with me."

He took two cards out of his pocket and handed them to Yurii Andreievich. One was his visiting card. He had a double name; he was called Maxim Aristarkhovich Klintsov-Pogorevshikh—or just Pogorevshikh, as he asked Zhivago to call him, in honor of his uncle who bore this name.

The other card showed a table with squares, each containing a drawing of two hands variously joined and with fingers differently folded. It was an alphabet for deaf-mutes. Suddenly everything became clear. Pogorevshikh was a phenomenally gifted pupil of the school of either Hartman or Ostrogradov, a deaf-mute who had reached an incredible facility in speaking and understanding speech by observing the throat muscles of his teachers.

Putting together what he had told him of the part of the country he came from and of his shooting expedition, the doctor said:

"Forgive me if this is indiscreet; you needn't tell me. Did you have anything to do with setting up the Zybushino republic?"

But how did you guess…Do you know Blazheiko? Did I have anything to do with it? Of course I did!" Pogorevshikh burst forth joyfully, laughing, rocking from side to side, and frenziedly slapping his knees. And once again he launched on a long and fantastic discourse.

He said that Blazheiko had provided the opportunity and Zybushino the place for the application of his own theories. Yurii Andreievich found it hard to follow his exposition of them. Pogorevshikh's philosophy was a mixture of the principles of anarchism and hunter's tall stories.

Imperturbable as an oracle, he prophesied disastrous upheavals in the near future. Yurii Andreievich inwardly agreed that this was not unlikely, but the calm, authoritative tone in which this unpleasant boy was making his forecasts angered him.

"Just a moment," he said hesitantly. "True, all this may happen. But it seems to me that with all that's going on—the chaos, the disintegration, the pressure from the enemy—this is not the moment to start dangerous experiments. The country must be allowed to recover from one upheaval before plunging into another. We must wait till at least relative peace and order are restored."

"That's naïve," said Pogorevshikh. "What you call disorder is just as normal a state of things as the order you're so keen about. All this destruction—it's a natural and preliminary stage of a broad creative plan. Society has not yet disintegrated sufficiently. It must fall to pieces completely, then a genuinely revolutionary government will put the pieces together and build on completely new foundations."

Yurii Andreievich felt disturbed. He went out into the corridor.

The train, gathering speed, was approaching Moscow. It ran through birch woods dotted with summer houses. Small roofless suburban stations with crowds of vacationers flew by and were left far behind in the cloud of dust raised by the train, and seemed to turn like a carrousel. The engine hooted repeatedly, and the sound filled the surrounding woods and came back in long, hollow echoes from far away.

All at once, for the first time in the last few days, Yurii Andreievich understood quite clearly where he was, what was happening to him, and what awaited him in an hour or so.

Three years of changes, moves, uncertainties, upheavals; the war, the revolution; scenes of destruction, scenes of death, shelling, blown-up bridges, fires, ruins—all this turned suddenly into a huge, empty, meaningless space. The first real event since the long interruption was this trip in the fast-moving train, the fact that he was approaching his home, which was intact, which still existed, and in which every stone was dear to him. This was real life, meaningful experience, the actual goal of all quests, this was what art aimed at—homecoming, return to one's family, to oneself, to true existence.

The woods had been left behind. The train broke out of the leafy tunnels into the open. A sloping field rose from a hollow to a wide mound. It was striped horizontally with dark green potato beds; beyond them, at the top of the mound, were cold frames. Opposite the field, beyond the curving tail of the train, a dark purple cloud covered half the sky. Sunbeams were breaking through it, spreading like wheel spokes and reflected by the glass of the frames in a blinding glare.

Suddenly, warm, heavy rain, sparkling in the sun, fell out of the cloud. The drops fell hurriedly and their drumming matched the clatter of the speeding train, as though the rain were afraid of being left behind and were trying to catch up.

Hardly had the doctor noticed this when the Church of Christ the Savior showed over the rim of the hill, and a minute later the domes, chimneys, roofs, and houses of the city.

"Moscow," he said, returning to the compartment. "Time to get ready."

Pogorevshikh jumped up, rummaged in his hunter's bag, and took out a fat duck. "Take it," he said. "As a souvenir. I have rarely spent a day in such pleasant company."

Zhivago's protests were unavailing. In the end he said: "All right, I'll take it as a present from you to my wife."

"Splendid, splendid, your wife," Pogorevshikh kept repeating delightedly, as though he had heard the word for the first time, jerking and laughing so much that Prince jumped out and took part in the rejoicing.

The train drew into the station. The compartment was plunged into darkness. The deaf-mute held out the wild duck, wrapped in a torn piece of some printed poster.

SIX

The Moscow Encampment

 

In the train it had seemed to Zhivago that only the train was moving but that time stood still and it was not later than noon.

But the sun was already low by the time his cab had finally made its way through the dense crowd in Smolensky Square.

In later years, when the doctor recalled this day, it seemed to him—he did not know whether this was his original impression or whether it had been altered by subsequent experiences—that even then the crowd hung about the market only by habit, that there was no reason for it to be there, for the empty stalls were shut and not even padlocked and there was nothing to buy or sell in the littered square, which was no longer swept.

And it seemed to him that even then he saw, like a silent reproach to the passers-by, thin, decently dressed old men and women shrinking against the walls, wordlessly offering for sale things no one bought and no one needed—artificial flowers, round coffee pots with glass lids and whistles, black net evening dresses, uniforms of abolished offices.

Humbler people traded in more useful things—crusts of stale rationed black bread, damp, dirty chunks of sugar, and ounce packages of coarse tobacco cut in half right through the wrapping.

And all sorts of nondescript odds and ends were sold all over the market, going up in price as they changed hands.

The cab turned into one of the narrow streets opening from the square. Behind them, the setting sun warmed their backs. In front of them a draft horse clattered along, pulling an empty, bouncing cart. It raised pillars of dust, glowing like bronze in the rays of the low sun. At last they passed the cart which had blocked their way. They drove faster. The doctor was struck by the piles of old newspapers and posters, torn down from the walls and fences, littering the sidewalks and streets. The wind pulled them one way and hoofs, wheels, and feet shoved them the other.

They passed several intersections, and soon the doctor's house appeared at a corner. The cab stopped.

Yurii Andreievich gasped for breath and his heart hammered loudly as he got out, walked up to the front door, and rang the bell. Nothing happened. He rang again. As there was still no reply, he went on ringing at short, anxious intervals. He was still ringing when he saw that the door had been opened by Antonina Alexandrovna and that she stood holding it wide open. The unexpectedness of it so dumfounded them both that neither of them heard the other cry out. But as the door held wide open by Tonia was in itself a welcome and almost an embrace, they soon recovered and rushed into each other's arms. A moment later they were both talking at once, interrupting each other.

"First of all, is everybody well?"

"Yes, yes, don't worry. Everything is all right. I wrote you a lot of silly nonsense, forgive me. But we'll talk about that later. Why didn't you send a telegram? Markel will take your things up. I suppose you got worried when Egorovna didn't let you in! She is in the country."

"You're thinner. But how young you look, and so pretty! Wait a minute, I'll pay the driver."

"Egorovna has gone to get some flour. The other servants have been discharged. There's only one girl now, Niusha, you don't know her, she's looking after Sashenka, there's no one else. Everybody has been told you're coming, they're all longing to see you—Gordon, Dudorov, everyone."

"How is Sashenka?"

"All right, thank God. He's just waked up. If you weren't still dirty from the train we could go to him at once."

"Is Father at home?"

"Didn't anyone write to you? He's at the borough council from morning till night, he's the chairman. Yes, can you believe it! Have you settled with the driver? Markel! Markel!"

They were standing in the middle of the street with wicker hamper and suitcase blocking the way, and the passers-by, as they walked around them, looked them over from head to foot, and stared at the cab as it pulled away from the curb and at the wide-open front door, to see what would happen next.

But Markel was already running up from the gate to welcome the young master, his waistcoat over his cotton shirt and his porter's cap in his hand, shouting as he ran:

"Heavenly powers, if it isn't Yurochka! It's our little falcon in person! Yurii Andreievich, light of our eyes, so you haven't forgotten us and our prayers, you've come home! And what do you want?" he snapped at the curious. "Be off with you. What's there to goggle at?"

"How are you, Markel? Let's embrace. Put your cap on, you eccentric. Well, what's new? How's your wife? How are the girls?"

"How should they be? They're growing, thanks be to God. As for news, you can see for yourself, while you were busy at the front we were not idle either. Such a mess they made, such bedlam, the devil couldn't sort it out! The streets unswept, roofs unrepaired, houses unpainted, bellies empty as in Lent. Real peace there—no annexations and no reparations, as they say."

"I'll tell on you, Markel. He's always like that, Yurochka. I can't stand that foolishness. He's talking like that only because he thinks you like it, but he's a sly one. All right, all right, Markel, don't argue with me, I know you. You're a deep one, Markel. Time you were sensible. After all, you know what kind of people we are."

They went in. Markel carried the doctor's things inside, shut the front door behind him, and went on confidentially:

"Antonina Alexandrovna is cross, you heard what she said. It's always like that. She says, You're all black inside, Markel, she says, like that stovepipe. Nowadays, she says, every little child, maybe even every spaniel or any other lap dog knows what's what. That, of course, is true, but all the same, Yurochka, believe it or not, those who know have seen the book, the Mason's prophecies, one hundred and forty years it's been lying under a stone, and now, it's my considered opinion, Yurochka, we've been sold down the river, sold for a song. But can I say a word? See for yourself, Antonina Alexandrovna is making signs to me, she wants me to go."

"Do you wonder? That's enough, Markel, put the things down, and that will be all, thank you. If Yurii Andreievich wants anything, he'll call you."

2

"At last we've got rid of him! All right, all right, you can listen to him if you like, but I can tell you, it's all make-believe. You talk to him and you think he's the village idiot, butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, and all the time he's secretly sharpening his knife—only he hasn't quite decided yet whom he'll use it on, the charming fellow."

"Isn't that a bit far-fetched? I expect he's just drunk, that's all."

"And when is he sober, I'd like to know. Anyway, I've had enough of him. What worries me is, Sasha might go to sleep again before you've seen him. If it weren't for typhus on trains…You haven't any lice on you?"

"I don't think so. I travelled comfortably—the same as before the war. I'd better have a quick wash, though; I'll wash more thoroughly afterwards. Which way are you going? Don't we go through the drawing room any more?"

"Oh, of course, you don't know. Father and I thought and thought and we decided to give up a part of the ground floor to the Agricultural Academy. It's too much to heat in winter, anyway. Even the top floor is too big. So we've offered it to them. They haven't taken it over yet, but they've moved in their libraries and their herbariums and their specimens of seed. I only hope we don't get rats—it's grain, after all. But at the moment they're keeping the rooms spick-and-span. By the way, we don't say 'rooms' any more, it's called 'living space' now. Come on, this way. Aren't you slow to catch on! We go up the back stairs. Understand? Follow me, I'll show you."

"I'm very glad you've given up those rooms. The hospital I've been in was also in a private house. Endless suites of rooms, here and there the parquet flooring still left. Potted palms sticking out their paws like ghosts over the beds—some of the wounded from the battle zone used to wake up screaming—they weren't quite normal, of course—shell-shocked—we had to remove the plants. What I mean is, there really was something unhealthy in the way rich people used to live. Masses of superfluous things. Too much furniture, too much room, too much emotional refinement, too many circumlocutions. I'm very glad we're using fewer rooms. We should give up still more."

"What's that parcel you've got? There's something sticking out of it, it looks like a bird's beak. It's a duck! How lovely! A wild drake! Where did you get it? I can't believe my eyes. It's worth a fortune these days."

"Somebody made me a present of it on the train. I'll tell you later, it's a long story. What shall I do? Shall I leave it in the kitchen?"

"Yes, of course. I'll send Niusha down at once to pluck and clean it. They say there will be all sorts of horrors this winter, famine, cold."

"Yes, that's what they are saying everywhere. Just now, I was looking out of the window in the train—I thought, what is there in the whole world worth more than a peaceful family life and work? The rest isn't in our hands. It does look as if there is a bad time coming for a lot of people. Some are trying to get out, they talk of going south, to the Caucasus, or farther still. I wouldn't want to do that, myself. A grown-up man should share his country's fate. To me it's obvious. But for you it's different. I wish you didn't have to go through it all. I'd like to send you away to some safe place—to Finland, perhaps. But if we stand gossiping half an hour on every step we'll never get upstairs."

"Wait a minute. I forgot to tell you. I've got news for you—and what news! Nikolai Nikolaievich is back."

"What Nikolai Nikolaievich?"

"Uncle Kolia."

"Tonia! It can't be! Is it really true?"

"It is true. He was in Switzerland. He came all the way around through London and Finland."

"Tonia! You're not joking? Have you seen him? Where is he? Can't we get him now, at once?"

"Don't be so impatient. He's staying with someone in the country. He promised to be back the day after tomorrow. He's changed a lot. You'll be disappointed. He stopped in Petersburg on the way, he's got Bolshevized. Father gets quite hoarse arguing with him. But why do we stop on every step. Let's go. So you too have heard there's a bad time ahead—hardships, dangers, anything might happen."

"I think so myself. Well, what of it? We'll manage, it can't be the end of everything. We'll wait and see, the same as other people."

"They say there won't be any firewood, or water, or light. They'll abolish money. No supplies will be coming in. Now we've stopped again! Come along. Listen, they say there are wonderful iron stoves for sale in the Arbat. Small ones. You can burn a newspaper and cook a meal. I've got the address. We must get one before they're all gone."

"That's right. We'll get one. Good idea. But just think of it, Uncle Kolia! I can't get over it."

"Let me tell you what I want to do. We'll set aside a corner somewhere on the top floor, say two or three rooms, communicating ones, and we'll keep those for ourselves and Father and Sashenka and Niusha, and we'll give up all the rest of the house. We'll put up a partition and have our own door, and it will be like a separate apartment. We'll put one of those iron stoves in the middle room, with a pipe through the window, and we'll do all our laundry, and our cooking, and our entertaining, all in this one room. That way we'll get the most out of the fuel, and who knows, with God's help, we'll get through the winter."

"Of course we'll get through it. There's no question. That's a fine idea. And you know what? We'll have a housewarming. We'll cook the duck and we'll invite Uncle Kolia."

"Lovely. And I'll ask Gordon to bring some drink. He can get it from some laboratory or other. Now look, this is the room I was thinking of. All right? Put your suitcase down and go get your hamper. We could ask Dudorov and Shura Shlesinger to the housewarming as well. You don't mind? You haven't forgotten where the washroom is? Spray yourself with some disinfectant. In the meantime I'll go in to Sashenka, and send Niusha down, and when we're ready I'll call you."

3

The most important thing for him in Moscow was his little boy. He had been mobilized almost as soon as Sashenka was born. He hardly knew him.

One day, while Tonia was still in hospital, he went to see her; he was already in uniform and was about to leave Moscow. He arrived at the babies' feeding time and was not allowed in.

He sat down in the waiting room. From the nursery, at the end of the passage beyond the maternity ward, came the squealing chorus of ten or twelve babies' voices. Several nurses came down the corridor, hurrying so that the newborn babies should not catch cold, taking them to their mothers, bundled up like shopping parcels, one under each arm.

"Wa, wa," yelled the babies all on one note, almost impassively, without feeling, as if it were all in the day's work. Only one voice stood out from the others. It was also yelling "wa, wa," and it did not express any more suffering than the rest, but it was deeper and seemed to shout less out of duty than with a deliberate, sullen hostility.

Yurii Andreievich had already decided that his child was to be called Alexander in honor of his father-in-law. For some reason he imagined that the voice he had singled out was that of his son; perhaps it was because this particular cry had its own character and seemed to foreshadow the future personality and destiny of a particular human being; it had its own sound-coloring, which included the child's name, Alexander, so Yurii Andreievich imagined.

He was not mistaken. It turned out later that this had in fact been Sashenka's voice. It was the first thing he had known about his son.

The next thing was the photographs Tonia sent to him at the front. They showed a cheerful, handsome, chubby little fellow with a cupid's-bow mouth, standing up on a blanket, bandy-legged and with its fist up as if it were doing a peasant dance. Sashenka had been a year old at the time and trying to take his first steps; now he was two and was beginning to talk.

Yurii Andreievich picked up his suitcase, put it on to the card table by the window, and began to unpack. What had the room been used for in the past, he wondered. He could not recognize it. Tonia must have changed the furniture or the wallpaper or redecorated it in some way.

He took out his shaving kit. A bright full moon rose between the pillars of the church tower exactly opposite the window. When it lit up the top layer of clothes and books inside the suitcase, the light in the room changed and he realized where he was.

It had been Anna Ivanovna's storeroom, where she used to put broken chairs and tables and old papers. Here she had kept her family archives and, in the summer, the trunks of winter clothes. During her lifetime the corners were cluttered up to the ceiling with junk, and the children were not allowed in. Only at Christmas or Easter, when huge crowds of children came to parties and the whole of the top floor was thrown open to them, was it unlocked and they played bandit in it, hiding under the tables, dressing up, and blackening their faces with cork.

The doctor stood thinking of all this, then he went down the back stairs to get his wicker hamper from the hall.

In the kitchen Niusha squatted in front of the stove, plucking the duck on a piece of newspaper. When he came in carrying his hamper she jumped up with a shy, graceful movement, blushing crimson, shook the feathers from her apron, and, after greeting him respectfully, offered to help him. He thanked her, saying he could manage, and went up. His wife called him from a couple of rooms farther on: "You can come in now, Yura."

He went into the room, which was Tonia's and his old classroom. The boy in the crib was not nearly so handsome as in his photograph, but he was the exact image of Yurii Andreievich's mother, Maria Nikolaievna Zhivago, a more striking likeness than any of her portraits.

"Here's Daddy, here's your Daddy, wave your hand like a good boy," Antonina Alexandrovna was saying. She lowered the net of the crib to make it easier for the father to kiss the boy and pick him up.

Sashenka, though doubtless frightened and repelled, let the unshaven stranger get quite close and bend over him, then he jerked himself upright, clutching the front of his mother's dress with one hand, and angrily swung the other arm and slapped him in the face. Terrified by his own daring, he then threw himself into his mother's arms and burst into bitter tears.

"No, no," Tonia scolded him. "You mustn't do that, Sashenka. What will Daddy think? He'll think Sasha is a bad boy. Now, show how you can kiss, kiss Daddy. Don't cry, silly, it's all right."

"Let him be, Tonia," the doctor said. "Don't bother him, and don't upset yourself. I know the kind of nonsense you are thinking—that it's not accidental, it's a bad sign—but that's all rubbish. It's only natural. The boy has never seen me. Tomorrow he'll have a good look at me and we'll become inseparable."

Yet he went out of the room depressed and with a feeling of foreboding.

4

Within the next few days he realized how alone he was. He did not blame anyone. He had merely got what he had asked for.

His friends had become strangely dim and colorless. Not one of them had preserved his own outlook, his own world. They had been much more vivid in his memory. He must have overestimated them in the past. Under the old order, which enabled those whose lives were secure to play the fools and eccentrics at the expense of the others while the majority led a wretched existence, it had been only too easy to mistake the foolishness and idleness of a privileged minority for genuine character and originality. But the moment the lower classes had risen, and the privileges of those on top had been abolished, how quickly had those people faded, how unregretfully had they renounced independent ideas—apparently no one had ever had such ideas!

The only people to whom Yurii Andreievich now felt close were his wife, her father, and two or three of his colleagues, modest rank-and-file workers, who did not indulge in grandiloquent phrases.

The party with duck and vodka was given as planned, a few days after his return. By then he had seen all those who came to it, so that the dinner was not in fact the occasion of their reunion.

The large duck was an unheard-of luxury in those already hungry days, but there was no bread with it, and because of this its splendor was somehow pointless—it even got on one's nerves.

The alcohol (a favorite black-market currency) had been brought by Gordon in a medicine bottle with a glass stopper. Antonina Alexandrovna never let go of the bottle, and now and then diluted a small portion of the alcohol with more or less water, according to her inspiration. It was discovered that it is easier to hold a number of consistently strong drinks than ones of varying strength. This, too, was annoying.

But the saddest thing of all was that their party was a kind of betrayal. You could not imagine anyone in the houses across the street eating or drinking in the same way at the same time. Beyond the windows lay silent, dark, hungry Moscow. Its shops were empty, and as for game and vodka, people had even forgotten to think about such things.

And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness, so that duck and vodka, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not even duck and vodka. And this was most vexing of all.

The guests too inspired unhappy reflections. Gordon had been all right in the days when he was given to gloomy thoughts and expressed them sullenly and clumsily. He was Zhivago's best friend, and in the gymnasium many people had liked him.

But now he had decided to give himself a new personality, and the results of his efforts were unfortunate. He played the merry fellow, he was jovial, cracked jokes, and often exclaimed, "What fun!" and "How amusing!"—expressions that did not belong to his vocabulary, for Gordon had never looked upon life as an entertainment.

While they were waiting for Dudorov he told the story of Dudorov's marriage, which he thought was comical, and which was circulating among his friends. Yurii Andreievich had not yet heard it.

It turned out that Dudorov had been married for about a year and then divorced his wife. The improbable gist of this story consisted in the following:

Dudorov had been drafted into the army by mistake. While he was serving and his case was being investigated, he was constantly punished for absent-mindedly forgetting to salute officers in the street. For a long time after his discharge he would raise his arm impulsively whenever an officer came in sight, and often he imagined epaulettes where there were none.

In this latter period his behavior was erratic in other ways as well. At one point—so the rumor went—while waiting for a steamer at a Volga port, he made the acquaintance of two young women, sisters, who were waiting for the same steamer. Confused by the presence of a large number of army men and the memories of his misadventures as a soldier, he fell in love with the younger sister, and proposed to her on the spot. "Amusing, isn't it?" Gordon said. But he had to interrupt his story when its hero was heard at the door. Dudorov entered the room.

Like Gordon, he had become the opposite of what he had been. He had always been flippant and featherbrained: now he was a serious scholar. As a schoolboy he had been expelled for helping political prisoners escape; he had then tried several art schools, but in the end had become a student of the humanities. During the war he graduated from the university a few years behind his schoolmates. Now he held two chairs—those of Russian history and of general history. He was even the author of two books, one on the land policies of Ivan the Terrible, the other a study of Saint-Just.

Here at the party he spoke amiably about everyone and everything, in a voice that was muffled as though by a cold, staring dreamily at a certain fixed point in the distance like a man delivering a lecture.

Toward the end of the evening, when Shura Shlesinger burst in and added to the general noise and excitement, Dudorov, who had been Zhivago's childhood friend, asked him several times, addressing him with the formal "you" rather than the usual "thou," whether he had read Mayakovsky's War and the World and Flute-Spine.

Missing Yurii Andreievich's reply in all the noise, he asked him again a little later: "Have you read Flute-Spine and Man?"

"I told you, Innokentii. It's not my fault that you don't listen. Well, all right, I'll say it again. I've always liked Mayakovsky. He is a sort of continuation of Dostoievsky. Or rather, he's a Dostoievsky character writing lyrical poems—one of his young rebels, the 'Raw Youth' or Hippolyte or Raskolnikov. What an all-devouring poetic energy! And his way of saying a thing once and for all, uncompromisingly, straight from the shoulder! And above all, with what daring he flings all this in the face of society and beyond, into space!"

But the main attraction of the evening was, of course, Uncle Kolia. Antonina Alexandrovna had been mistaken in thinking that he was out of town; he had come back the day of his nephew's return. They had met a couple of times already and had got over their initial exclamations and had talked and laughed together to their heart's content.

The first time had been on a dull, gray night with a drizzle, fine as watery dust. Yurii Andreievich went to see him at his hotel. The hotels were already refusing to take people in except at the recommendation of the town authorities, but Nikolai Nikolaievich was well known and had kept some of his old connections.

The hotel looked like a lunatic asylum abandoned by its staff—the stairways and corridors empty, everything in a state of chaos.

Through the large window of his unswept room the huge square of those mad days looked in, deserted and frightening, more like a square in a nightmare than the one plainly to be seen in front of the hotel.

For Yurii Andreievich the encounter was a tremendous, unforgettable event. He was seeing the idol of his childhood, the teacher who had dominated his mind as a boy.

His gray hair was becoming to him, and his loose foreign suit fitted him well. He was very young and handsome for his years.

Admittedly, he was overshadowed by the grandeur of the events; seen beside them, he lost in stature. But it never occurred to Yurii Andreievich to measure him by such a yardstick.

He was surprised at Nikolai Nikolaievich's calm, at his light and detached tone in speaking of politics. He was more self-possessed than most Russians could be at that time. It marked him as a new arrival, and it seemed old-fashioned and a little embarrassing.

But it was something very different from politics that filled those first few hours of their reunion, that made them laugh and cry and throw their arms around each other's necks, and punctuated their first feverish conversation with frequent moments of silence.

Theirs was a meeting of two artists, and although they were close relatives, and the past arose and lived again between them and memories surged up and they informed each other of all that had happened during their separation, the moment they began to speak of the things that really matter to creative minds, all other ties between them vanished, their kinship and difference of age were forgotten, all that was left was the confrontation of elemental forces, of energies and principles.

For the last ten years Nikolai Nikolaievich had had no opportunity to speak about the problems of creative writing as freely and intimately as now. Nor had Yurii Andreievich ever heard views as penetrating, apt, and inspiring as on that occasion.

Their talk was full of exclamations, they paced excitedly up and down the room, marvelling at each other's perspicacity, or stood in silence by the window drumming on the glass, deeply moved by the exalting discovery of how completely they understood each other.

Such was their first meeting, but later the doctor had seen his uncle a few times in company, and then Nikolai Nikolaievich was completely different, unrecognizable.

He felt that he was a visitor in Moscow and persisted in acting like one. Whether it was Petersburg that he regarded as his home, or some other place, remained uncertain. He enjoyed his role of a social star and political oracle, and possibly he imagined that Moscow would have political salons in the style of Madame Roland's in Paris on the eve of the Convention.

Calling on his women friends at their hospitable apartments in quiet Moscow back streets, he amiably teased them and their husbands on their backwardness and parochialism. He showed off his familiarity with newspapers, as he had done formerly with books forbidden by the Church, and Orphic texts.

It was said that he had left a new young love, much unfinished business, and a half-written book in Switzerland, and had only come for a dip into the stormy waters of his homeland, expecting, if he came out safe and sound, to hasten back to his Alps.

He was pro-Bolshevik, and often mentioned two left-wing Social Revolutionaries who shared his views, a journalist who wrote under the pseudonym of Miroshka Pomor and a pamphleteer, Sylvia Koteri.

"It's frightful, what you've come down to, Nikolai Nikolaievich," Alexander Alexandrovich chided him. "You and your Miroshkas! What a cesspool! And then that Lydia Pokori."

"Koteri," corrected Nikolai Nikolaievich, "and Sylvia."

"Pokori or Potpourri, who cares. Names won't change anything."

"All the same, it happens to be Koteri," Nikolai Nikolaievich insisted patiently. They had dialogues of this sort:

"What are we arguing about? It's so obvious that it makes you blush to have to prove it. It's elementary. For centuries the mass of the people have lived impossible lives. Take any history textbook. Whatever it was called—feudalism and serfdom or capitalism and industrial workers, it was unnatural and unjust. This has been known for a long time, and the world has been preparing for an upheaval that would bring enlightenment to the people and put everything in its proper place.

"You know perfectly well that it's quite useless tinkering with the old structure, you have to dig right down to the foundations. I don't say the whole building mayn't collapse as a result. What of it? The fact that it's frightening doesn't mean it won't happen. It's a question of time. How can you dispute it?"

"That's not the point, that's not what I was talking about," Alexander Alexandrovich said angrily, and the argument flared up. "Your Potpourris and Miroshkas are people without a conscience. They say one thing and do another. Anyway, where's your logic? It's a complete nonsequitur. No, wait a minute, I'll show you something," and he would begin hunting for some newspaper with a controversial article, banging the drawers of his desk and stimulating his eloquence with this noisy fuss.

Alexander Alexandrovich liked something to get in his way when he was talking; the distraction served as an excuse for his mumbling and his hems and haws. His fits of talkativeness came on him when he was looking for something he had lost—say, hunting for a matching snow boot in the dimly lighted cloakroom—or when he stood at the bathroom door with a towel over his arm, or when he was passing a heavy serving dish or pouring wine into the glasses of his friends.

Yurii Andreievich enjoyed listening to his father-in-law. He adored the familiar, old-Moscow singsong and the soft, purring Gromeko r's.

Alexander Alexandrovich's upper lip with its little cropped mustache protruded above the lower lip in just the same way as his butterfly tie stuck out from his neck. There was something in common between the lip and the tie, and it somehow gave him a touching, childishly trusting look.

On the night of the party Shura Shlesinger appeared very late. She had come straight from a meeting and was wearing a suit and a worker's cap. She strode into the room and, shaking everyone's hand in turn, at once burst into complaints and accusations.

"How are you, Tonia? Hello, Alexander. You must admit it's disgusting. The whole of Moscow knows he's back, everyone is talking about it, and I am the last to be told. Well, I suppose I'm not good enough. Where is he, anyway? Let me get at him, you surround him like a wall. Well, how are you? I've read it, I don't understand a word, but it's brilliant, you can tell at once. How are you, Nikolai Nikolaievich? I'll be back in a moment, Yurochka, I've got to talk to you. Hello, young men. You're here too, Gogochka, Goosey-Goosey-Gander" (this to a distant relative of the Gromekos', an enthusiastic admirer of all rising talents, known as Goosey because of his idiot laugh and as the Tapeworm on account of his lankiness). "So you're eating and drinking? I'll soon catch up with you. Well, my friends, you've simply no idea what you're missing. You don't know anything, you haven't seen a thing. If you only knew what's going on! You go and have a look at a real mass meeting, with real workers, real soldiers, not out of books. Just try to let out a squeak to them about fighting the war to a victorious end! They'll give you a victorious end! I've just been listening to a sailor—Yurochka, you'd simply rave! What passion! What single-mindedness!"

Shura was interrupted time and again. Everyone shouted. She sat next to Yurii Andreievich, took his hand in hers, and, moving her face close to his, shouted like a megaphone above the din:

"Let me take you along someday, Yurochka. I'll show you real people. You must, you simply must get your feet on the ground, like Antaeus. Why are you staring at me like that? I'm an old war horse, didn't you know? An old Bestuzhevist.[12] I've seen the inside of a prison, I've fought on the barricades.—Well of course, what did you think? Oh, we don't know the people at all. I've just come from there, I was right in the thick of it. I'm collecting a library for them."

She had had a drink and was obviously getting tipsy. But Yurii Andreievich's head was also spinning. He never noticed how it happened that Shura was now at one end of the room and he at the other; he was standing at the head of the table and apparently, quite unexpectedly to himself, making a speech. It took him some time to get silence.

"Ladies and gentlemen…I should like…Misha! Gogochka! Tonia, what am I to do, they won't listen! Ladies and gentlemen, let me say a word or two. Unprecedented, extraordinary events are approaching. Before they burst upon us, here is what I wish you: May God grant us not to lose each other and not to lose our souls. Gogochka, you can cheer afterwards, I haven't finished. Stop talking in the corners and listen carefully.

"In this third year of the war the people have become convinced that the difference between those on the front line and those at the rear will sooner or later vanish. The sea of blood will rise until it reaches every one of us and submerge all who stayed out of the war. The revolution is this flood.

"During the revolution it will seem to you, as it seemed to us at the front, that life has stopped, that there is nothing personal left, that there is nothing going on in the world except killing and dying. If we live long enough to read the chronicles and memoirs of this period, we shall realize that in these five or ten years we have experienced more than other people do in a century. I don't know whether the people will rise of themselves and advance spontaneously like a tide, or whether everything will be done in the name of the people. Such a tremendous event requires no dramatic proof of its existence. I'll be convinced without proof. It's petty to explore causes of titanic events. They haven't any. It's only in a family quarrel that you look for beginnings—after people have pulled each other's hair and smashed the dishes they rack their brains trying to figure out who started it. What is truly great is without beginning, like the universe. It confronts us as suddenly as if it had always been there or had dropped out of the blue.

"I too think that Russia is destined to become the first socialist state since the beginning of the world. When this comes to pass, the event will stun us for a long time, and after awakening we shall have lost half our memories forever. We'll have forgotten what came first and what followed, and we won't look for causes. The new order of things will be all around us and as familiar to us as the woods on the horizon or the clouds over our heads. There will be nothing else left."

He said a few more things, and by then he had sobered up completely. As before, he could not hear clearly what people were saying, and answered them pointlessly. He saw that they liked him, but could not rid himself of the sadness that oppressed him. He said:

"Thank you, thank you. I appreciate your feelings, but I don't deserve them. It's wrong to bestow love in a hurry, as though otherwise one would later have to give much more of it."

They all laughed and clapped, taking it for a deliberate witticism, while he did not know where to escape from his forebodings of disaster and his feeling that despite his striving for the good and his capacity for happiness, he had no power over the future.

The guests began to leave. They had long, tired faces. Their yawns, snapping and unsnapping their jaws, made them look like horses.

Before going, they drew the curtains and pushed the windows open. There was a yellowish dawn in the wet sky filled with dirty, pea-colored clouds. "Looks as if there's been a storm while we were chattering," said someone. "I was caught in the rain on my way here, I only just made it," Shura confirmed.

In the deserted street it was still dark and the drip-drip of the water from the trees alternated with the insistent chirruping of drenched sparrows.

There was a roll of thunder, as if a plow had been dragged right across the sky. Then silence. Then four loud, delayed thuds, like overgrown potatoes in autumn being flung out with a shovel from the soft ground.

The thunder cleared the dusty, smoke-filled room. Suddenly the element of life became distinguishable, as apprehensible as electric currents, air and water, desire for happiness, earth, sky.

The street filled with the voices of the departing guests. They had begun a heated argument in the house and continued arguing just as hotly in the street. Gradually the voices grew fainter in the distance and died out.

"How late it is," said Yurii Andreievich. "Let's go to bed. The only people I love in the world are you and Father."

5

August had gone by and now September was almost over. The inevitable was approaching. Winter was near and, in the human world, something like a state of suspended animation, which was in the air, and which everyone was talking about.

This was the time to prepare for the cold weather, to store up food and wood. But in those days of the triumph of materialism, matter had become a disembodied idea, and the problems of alimentation and fuel supply took the place of food and firewood.

The people in the cities were as helpless as children in the face of the unknown—that unknown which swept every established habit aside and left nothing but desolation in its wake, although it was itself the offspring of the city and the creation of city-dwellers.

All around, people continued to deceive themselves, to talk endlessly. Everyday life struggled on, by force of habit, limping and shuffling. But the doctor saw life as it was. It was clear to him that it was under sentence. He looked upon himself and his milieu as doomed. Ordeals were ahead, perhaps death. Their days were counted and running out before his eyes.

He would have gone insane had he not been kept busy by the details of daily life. His wife, his child, the necessity to earn money, the humble daily ritual of his practice—these were his salvation.

He realized that he was a pygmy before the monstrous machine of the future; he was anxious about this future, and loved it and was secretly proud of it, and as though for the last time, as if in farewell, he avidly looked at the trees and clouds and the people walking in the streets, the great Russian city struggling through misfortune—and was ready to sacrifice himself for the general good, and could do nothing.

He most often saw the sky and the people from the middle of the street when he crossed the Arbat at the corner of Old Coachyard Row, near the pharmacy of the Russian Medical Society.

He resumed his duties at his old hospital. It was still called the Hospital of the Holy Cross, although the society of that name had been dissolved. So far no one had thought of a new name for the hospital.

The staff had already divided up into camps. To the moderates, whose obtuseness made the doctor indignant, he seemed dangerous; to those whose politics were advanced, not Red enough. Thus he belonged to neither group, having moved away from the former and lagging behind the latter.

In addition to his normal duties, the medical chief had put him in charge of general statistics. Endless questionnaires and forms went through his hands. Death rate, sickness rate, the earnings of the staff, the degree of their political consciousness and of their participation in the elections, the perpetual shortage of fuel, food, medicines, everything had to be checked and reported.

Zhivago worked at his old table by the staff-room window, stacked with charts and forms of every size and shape. He had pushed them to one side; occasionally, in addition to taking notes for his medical works, he wrote in snatches his "Playing at People, a Gloomy Diary or Journal Consisting of Prose, Verse, and What-have-you, Inspired by the Realization that Half the People Have Stopped Being Themselves and Are Acting Unknown Parts."

The light, sunny room with its white painted walls were filled with the creamy light of the golden autumn days that follow the Feast of the Assumption, when the mornings begin to be frosty and titmice and magpies dart into the bright-leaved, thinning woods. On such days the sky is incredibly high, and through the transparent pillar of air between it and the earth there moves an icy, dark-blue radiance coming from the north. Everything in the world becomes more visible and more audible. Distant sounds reach us in a state of frozen resonance, separately and clearly. The horizons open, as if to show the whole of life for years ahead. This rarefied light would be unbearable if it were not so short-lived, coming at the end of the brief autumn day just before the early dusk.

Such was now the light in the staff room, the light of an early autumn sunset, as succulent, glassy, juicy as a certain variety of Russian apple.

The doctor sat at his desk writing, pausing to think and to dip his pen while some unusually quiet birds flew silently past the tall windows, throwing shadows on his moving hands, on the table with its forms, and on the floor and the walls, and just as silently vanished from sight.

The prosector came in; he was a stout man who had lost so much weight that his skin hung on him in bags. "The maple leaves are nearly all gone," he said. "When you think how they stood up to all the rain and wind, and now a single morning frost has done it."

The doctor looked up. The mysterious birds darting past the window had in fact been wine-red maple leaves. They flew away from the trees, gliding through the air, and covered the hospital lawn, looking like bent orange stars.

"Have the windows been puttied up?" the prosector asked.

"No," Yurii Andreievich said, and went on writing.

"Isn't it time they were?"

Yurii Andreievich, absorbed in his work, did not answer.

"Pity Taraska's gone," went on the prosector. "He was worth his weight in gold. Patch your boots or repair your watch—he'd do anything. And he could get you anything in the world. Now we'll have to do the windows ourselves."

"There's no putty."

"You can make some. I'll give you the recipe." He explained how you made putty with linseed oil and chalk. "Well, I'll leave you now. I suppose you want to get on with your work."

He went off to the other window and busied himself with his bottles and specimens. "You'll ruin your eyes," he said a minute later. "It's getting dark. And they won't give you any light. Let's go home."

"I'll work another twenty minutes or so."

"His wife is a nurse here."

"Whose wife?"

"Taraska's."

"I know."

"Nobody knows where he is himself. He prowls about all over the country. Last summer he came twice to see his wife, now he's in some village. He's building the new life. He's one of those soldier-Bolsheviks, you see them everywhere, walking about in the streets, travelling in trains. And do you know what makes them tick? Take Taraska. He can turn his hand to anything. Whatever he does, he has to do it well. That's what happened to him in the army—he learned to fight, just like any other trade. He became a crack rifleman. His eyes and hands—first-class! All his decorations were awarded him, not for courage, but for always hitting the mark. Well, anything he takes up becomes a passion with him, so he took to fighting in a big way. He could see what a rifle does for a man—it gives him power, it brings him distinction. He wanted to be a power himself. An armed man isn't just a man like any other. In the old days such men turned from soldiers into brigands. You just try to take Taraska's rifle away from him now! Well, then came the slogan 'Turn your bayonets against your masters,' so Taraska turned. That's the whole story. There's Marxism for you."

"That's the most genuine kind—straight from life. Didn't you know?"

The prosector went back to his test tubes.

"How did you make out with the stove specialist?" he asked after a while.

"I'm most grateful to you for sending him. A most interesting man. We spent hours talking about Hegel and Croce."

"Naturally! Took his doctorate in philosophy at Heidelberg. What about the stove?"

"That's not so good."

"Still smoking?"

"Never stops."

"He can't have fixed the stovepipe right. It ought to be connected with a flue. Did he let it out through the window?"

"No, the flue, but it still smokes."

"Then he can't have found the right air vent. If only we had Taraska! But you'll get it right in the end. Moscow wasn't built in a day. Getting a stove to work isn't like playing the piano, it takes skill. Have you laid in your firewood?"

"Where am I to get it from?"

"I'll send you the church janitor. He's an expert at stealing wood. Takes fences to pieces and turns them into firewood. But you'll have to bargain with him. No, better get the exterminator."

They went down to the cloakroom, put their coats on, and went out.

"Why the exterminator? We don't have bedbugs."

"That's got nothing to do with it. I'm talking about wood. The exterminator is an old woman who is doing a big business in wood. She's got it all set up on a proper business footing—buys up whole houses for fuel. It's dark, watch your step. In the old days I could have taken you blindfold anywhere in this district. I knew every stone. I was born near here. But since they've started pulling down the fences I can hardly find my way about, even by day. It's like being in a strange town. On the other hand, some extraordinary places have come to light. Little Empire houses you never knew were there, with round garden tables and half-rotten benches. The other day I passed a place like that, a sort of little wilderness at an intersection of three streets, and there was an old lady poking about with a stick—she must have been about a hundred. 'Hello, Granny,' I said, 'are you looking for worms to go fishing?' I was joking, of course, but she took it quite seriously. 'No, not worms,' she said, 'mushrooms.' And it's true, you know, the town is getting to be like the woods. There's a smell of decaying leaves and mushrooms."

"I think I know where you mean—between Serebriany and Molchanovka, isn't it? The strangest things are always happening to me there—either I meet someone I haven't seen in twenty years, or I find something. They say it's dangerous, and no wonder, there's a whole network of alleys leading to the old thieves' dens near Smolensky. Before you know where you are, they've stripped you to the skin and vanished."

"And look at those street lamps—they don't shine at all. No wonder they call bruises shiners. Be careful you don't bump yourself."

6

All sorts of things did indeed happen to the doctor at that place. One cold dark night, shortly before the October fighting, he came across a man lying unconscious on the sidewalk, his arms flung out, his head against a curbstone, and his feet in the gutter. Occasionally he uttered weak groans. When the doctor tried to rouse him he muttered a few words, something about a wallet. He had been attacked and robbed. His head was battered and covered with blood, but a casual examination revealed that the skull was intact.

Zhivago went to the pharmacy in the Arbat, telephoned for the cab that the hospital used in emergencies, and took the patient to the emergency ward.

The wounded man proved to be a prominent political leader. The doctor treated him till he recovered, and for years afterwards this man acted as his protector, getting him out of trouble several times in those days that were so heavy with suspicion.

7

Antonina Alexandrovna's plan had been adopted and the family had settled for the winter in three rooms on the top floor.

It was a cold, windy Sunday, dark with heavy snow clouds. The doctor was off duty.

The fire was lit in the morning, and the stove began to smoke. Niusha struggled with the damp wood. Antonina Alexandrovna, who knew nothing about stoves, kept giving her absurd and bad advice. The doctor, who did know, tried to interfere, but his wife took him gently by the shoulders and pushed him out of the room, saying: "Don't you meddle in this. You'll only pour oil on the fire."

"Oil wouldn't be so bad, Toniechka, the stove would be ablaze at once! The trouble is, there is neither oil nor fire."

"This is no time for jokes. There are moments when they are out of place."

The trouble with the stove upset everyone's plans. They had all hoped to get their chores done before dark and have a free evening, but now dinner would be late, there was no hot water, and various other plans might have to be dropped.

The fire smoked more and more. The strong wind blew the smoke back into the room. A cloud of black soot stood in it like a fairy-tale monster in a thick wood.

Finally Yurii Andreievich drove everyone out into the two other rooms, and opened the top pane of the window. He removed half the wood from the stove, and spaced out the rest with chips and birchwood shavings between them.

Fresh air rushed in through the window. The curtain swayed and flew up. Papers blew off the desk. A door banged somewhere down the hall, and the wind began a cat-and-mouse game with what was left of the smoke.

The logs flared up and crackled. The stove was ablaze. Its iron body was covered with red-hot spots like a consumptive flush. The smoke in the room thinned out and soon vanished.

The room grew lighter. The windows, which Yurii Andreievich had recently fixed according to the prosector's recipe, gave off the warm, greasy smell of putty. An acrid smell of charred fir bark and the fresh, toilet-water scent of aspen came from the wood drying by the stove.

Nikolai Nikolaievich burst into the room as impetuously as the wind coming through the open window.

"They're fighting in the street," he reported. "There is a regular battle between the cadets who support the Provisional Government and the garrison soldiers who support the Bolsheviks. There is skirmishing all over the city. I got into trouble coming here—once at the corner of Bolshaia Dmitrovka and once at the Nikitsky Gate. Now you can't get through directly, you have to go around. Hurry up, Yura! Put your coat on, let's go. You've got to see it. This is history. This happens once in a lifetime."

But he stayed talking for a couple of hours. Then they had dinner, and by the time he was ready to go home and was dragging the doctor out, Gordon burst in, in exactly the same way as Nikolai Nikolaievich and with much the same news.

Things had progressed, however. There were new details. Gordon spoke of increasing rifle fire and of passers-by killed by stray bullets. According to him, all traffic had stopped. He had got through by a miracle, but now the street was cut off.

Nikolai Nikolaievich refused to believe him and dashed out but was back in a minute. He said bullets whistled down the street knocking chips of brick and plaster off the corners. There was not a soul outside. All traffic had stopped. That week Sashenka caught a cold.

"I've told you a hundred times, he's not to play near the stove," Yurii Andreievich scolded. "It's much worse to let him get too hot than cold."

Sashenka had a sore throat and a fever. He had a special, overwhelming terror of vomiting, and when Yurii Andreievich tried to examine his throat he pushed away his hand, clenching his teeth, yelling and choking. Neither arguments nor threats had the slightest effect on him. At one moment, however, he inadvertently yawned, and the doctor quickly took advantage of this to insert a spoon into his son's mouth and hold down his tongue for long enough to get a look at his raspberry-colored larynx and swollen tonsils covered with alarming white spots.

A little later, by means of a similar maneuver, he got a specimen and, as he had a microscope at home, was able to examine it. Fortunately, it was not diphtheria.

But on the third night Sashenka had an attack of nervous croup. His temperature shot up and he could not breathe. Yurii Andreievich was helpless to ease his suffering and could not bear to watch it. Antonina Alexandrovna thought the child was dying. They carried him about the room in turn, and this seemed to make him feel better.

They needed milk, mineral water, or soda water for him. But the street fighting was at its height. Gun and rifle fire never ceased for a moment. Even if Yurii Andreievich had crossed the battle zone at the risk of his life, he would not have found anyone about in the streets beyond it. All life in the city was suspended until the situation would be definitively clarified.

Yet there could be no doubt about the outcome. Rumors came from all sides that the workers were getting the upper hand. Small groups of cadets were fighting on, but they were cut off from each other and from their command.

The Sivtzev quarter was held by soldiers' units who were pressing on toward the center. Soldiers who had fought against Germany and young working boys sat in a trench they had dug down the street; they were already getting to know the people who lived in the neighborhood and joked with them as they came and stood outside their gates. Traffic in this part of the town was being restored.

Gordon and Nikolai Nikolaievich, who had got stuck at the Zhivagos', were released from their three days' captivity. Zhivago had been glad of their presence during Sashenka's illness, and his wife forgave them for adding to the general disorder. But they had felt obliged to repay the kindness of their hosts by entertaining them with ceaseless talk. Yurii Andreievich was so exhausted by three days of pointless chatter that he was happy to see them go.

8

They learned that their guests had got home safely. But military operations continued, several streets were still closed, and the doctor could not yet go to his hospital. He was impatient to return to his work and the manuscript he had left in the drawer of the staff-room desk.

Only here and there did people come out in the morning and walk a short distance to buy bread. When they saw a passer-by carrying a milk bottle, they would surround him trying to find out where he had got it.

Occasionally the firing resumed all over the town, and the streets were cleared again. It was said that the two sides were engaged in negotiations, whose course, favorable or unfavorable, was reflected in the varying intensity of the firing.

At about 10 P.M. one evening in late October (Old Style) Yurii Andreievich went without any particular necessity to call on one of his colleagues. The streets he passed were deserted. He walked quickly. The first thin powdery snow was coming down, scattered by a rising wind.

He had turned down so many side streets that he had almost lost count of them when the snow thickened and the wind turned into a blizzard, the kind of blizzard that whistles in a field covering it with a blanket of snow, but which in town tosses about as if it had lost its way.

There was something in common between the disturbances in the moral and in the physical world, near and far on the ground and in the air. Here and there resounded the last salvoes of islands of resistance. Bubbles of dying fires rose and broke on the horizon. And the snow swirled and eddied and smoked at Yurii's feet, on the wet streets and pavements.

A newsboy running with a thick batch of freshly printed papers under his arm and shouting "Latest news!" overtook him at an intersection.

"Keep the change," said the doctor. The boy peeled a damp sheet off the batch, thrust it into his hand, and a minute later was engulfed in the snowstorm.

The doctor stopped under a street light to read the headlines. The paper was a late extra printed on one side only; it gave the official announcement from Petersburg that a Soviet of People's Commissars had been formed and that Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat were established in Russia. There followed the first decrees of the new government and various brief news dispatches received by telegraph and telephone.

The blizzard lashed at the doctor's eyes and covered the printed page with gray, rustling pellets of snow. But it was not the snowstorm that prevented him from reading. The historic greatness of the moment moved him so deeply that it took him some time to collect himself.

To read the rest of the news he looked around for a better lit, sheltered place. He found that he was standing once again at that charmed spot, the intersection of Serebriany and Molchanovka, in front of a tall, five-story building with a glass door and a spacious, well-lit lobby.

He went in and stood under the electric light, next to the staircase, reading the news.

Footsteps sounded above him. Someone was coming down the stairs, stopping frequently, as though hesitating. At one point, he actually changed his mind and ran up again. A door opened somewhere and two voices welled out, so distorted by echoes that it was impossible to tell whether men or women were speaking. Then the door banged and the same steps ran down, this time resolutely.

Yurii Andreievich was absorbed in his paper and had not meant to look up, but the stranger stopped so suddenly at the foot of the stairs that he raised his head.

Before him stood a boy of about eighteen in a reindeer cap and a stiff reindeer coat worn, as in Siberia, fur side out. He was dark and had narrow Kirghiz eyes. His face had an aristocratic quality, the fugitive spark and reticent delicacy that give an impression of remoteness and are sometimes found in people of a complex, mixed parentage.

The boy obviously mistook Yurii Andreievich for someone else. He looked at him, puzzled and shy, as if he knew him but could not make up his mind to speak. To put an end to the misunderstanding Yurii Andreievich measured him with a cold, discouraging glance.

The boy turned away confused and walked to the entrance. There he looked back once again before going out and banging the heavy glass door shut behind him.

Yurii Andreievich left a few minutes after him. His mind was full of the news; he forgot the boy and the colleague he had meant to visit, and set out straight for home. But he was distracted on the way by another incident, one of those details of everyday life that assumed an inordinate importance in those days.

Not far from his house he stumbled in the dark over an enormous pile of timber near the curb. There was an institution of some sort in the street, to which the government had probably supplied fuel in the form of boards from a dismantled house in the outskirts of the town. Not all of it would go into the yard, and the rest had been left outside. A sentry with a rifle was on duty by this pile; he paced up and down the yard and occasionally went out into the street.

Without thinking twice, Yurii Andreievich took advantage of a moment when the sentry's back was turned and the wind had raised a cloud of snow into the air to creep up on the dark side, avoiding the lamplight, carefully loosen a heavy beam from the very bottom, and pull it out. He loaded it with difficulty on his back, immediately ceasing to feel its weight (your own load is not a burden), and, hugging the shadow of the walls, took the wood safely home.

Its arrival was timely; they had run out of firewood. The beam was chopped up, and the pieces were stacked. Yurii Andreievich lit the stove and squatted in front of it in silence, while Alexander Alexandrovich moved up his armchair and sat warming himself.

Yurii Andreievich took the newspaper out of the side pocket of his coat and held it out to him.

"Seen that? Have a look."

Still squatting on his heels and poking the fire, he talked to himself.

"What splendid surgery! You take a knife and with one masterful stroke you cut out all the old stinking ulcers. Quite simply, without any nonsense, you take the old monster of injustice, which has been accustomed for centuries to being bowed and scraped and curtsied to, and you sentence it to death.

"This fearlessness, this way of seeing the thing through to the end, has a familiar national look about it. It has something of Pushkin's uncompromising clarity and of Tolstoy's unwavering faithfulness to the facts."

"Pushkin, you said? Wait a second. Let me finish. I can't read and listen at the same time," said Alexander Alexandrovich under the mistaken impression that his son-in-law was addressing him.

"And the real stroke of genius is this. If you charged someone with the task of creating a new world, of starting a new era, he would ask you first to clear the ground. He would wait for the old centuries to finish before undertaking to build the new ones, he'd want to begin a new paragraph, a new page.

"But here, they don't bother with anything like that. This new thing, this marvel of history, this revelation, is exploded right into the very thick of daily life without the slightest consideration for its course. It doesn't start at the beginning, it starts in the middle, without any schedule, on the first weekday that comes along, while the traffic in the street is at its height. That's real genius. Only real greatness can be so unconcerned with timing and opportunity."

9

Winter came, just the kind of winter that had been foretold. It was not as terrifying as the two winters that followed it, but it was already of the same sort, dark, hungry, and cold, entirely given to the breaking up of the familiar and the reconstruction of all the foundations of existence, and to inhuman efforts to cling to life as it slipped out of your grasp.

There were three of them, one after the other, three such terrible winters, and not all that now seems to have happened in 1917 and 1918 really happened then—some of it may have been later. These three successive winters have merged into one and it is difficult to tell them apart.

The old life and the new order had not yet come in contact. They were not yet openly hostile to each other, as when the civil war broke out a year later, but there was no connection between the two. They stood apart, confronting each other, incompatible.

There were new elections everywhere—in administration of buildings, organizations of all kinds, government offices, public services. Commissars invested with dictatorial powers were appointed to each, men of iron will in black leather jackets, armed with means of intimidation and guns, who shaved rarely and slept even more rarely.

They knew the slinking bourgeois breed, the ordinary holders of cheap government bonds, and they spoke to them without the slightest pity and with Mephistophelean smiles, as to petty thieves caught in the act.

These were the people who reorganized everything in accordance with the plan, and company after company, enterprise after enterprise became Bolshevized.

The Hospital of the Holy Cross was now known as the Second Reformed. Many things had changed in it. Part of the staff had been dismissed and others had resigned because they did not find work sufficiently rewarding. These were doctors with a fashionable practice and high fees, and glib talkers. They left out of self-interest but asserted that they had made a civic gesture of protest and looked down on those who had stayed on, almost boycotting them. Zhivago had stayed.

In the evenings husband and wife had conversations of this sort:

"Don't forget Wednesday, at the Doctors' Union; they'll have two sacks of frozen potatoes for us in the basement. I'll let you know what time I can get away. We'll have to go together and take the sled."

"All right, Yurochka, there's plenty of time. Why don't you go to bed now, it's late. I wish you'd rest, you can't do everything."

"There's an epidemic. Exhaustion is lowering resistance. You and Father look terrible. We must do something. If only I knew what. We don't take enough care of ourselves. Listen. You aren't asleep?"

"No."

"I'm not worried about myself, I've got nine lives, but if by any chance I should get ill, you will be sensible, won't you, you mustn't keep me at home. Get me into the hospital at once."

"Don't talk like that. Pray God you'll keep well. Why play Cassandra?"

"Remember, there aren't any honest people left, or any friends. Still less any experts. If anything should happen don't trust anyone except Pichuzhkin. That is if he's still there, of course. You aren't asleep?"

"No."

"The pay wasn't good enough, so off they went; now it turns out they had principles and civic sentiments. You meet them in the street, they hardly shake hands, just raise an eyebrow: 'So you're working for them?'—'I am,' I said, 'and if you don't mind, I am proud of our privations and I respect those who honor us by imposing them on us.' "

10

For a long time most people's daily food consisted of thin millet boiled in water and soup made of herring heads; the herring itself was used as a second course. A sort of kasha was also made of unground wheat or rye.

A woman professor who was a friend of Antonina Alexandrovna's taught her to bake bread in an improvised Dutch oven. The idea was to sell some of the bread and so cover the cost of heating the tile stove as in the old days, instead of using the iron stove, which continued to smoke and gave almost no heat.

Antonina Alexandrovna's bread was good but nothing came of her commercial plans. They had to go back to the wretched iron stove. The Zhivagos were hard up.

One morning, after Yurii Andreievich had gone to work, Antonina Alexandrovna put on her shabby winter coat—she was so run down that she shivered in it even in warm weather—and went out "hunting." There were only two logs left. For about half an hour she wandered through the alleys in the neighborhood where you could sometimes catch a peasant from one of the villages outside Moscow selling vegetables and potatoes. In the main streets, peasants with loads were liable to be arrested. Soon she found what she was looking for. A sturdy young fellow in a peasant's coat walked back with her, pulling a sleigh that looked as light as a toy, and followed her cautiously into the yard.

Covered up by sacking inside the sleigh was a load of birch logs no thicker than the balusters of an old-fashioned country house in a nineteenth-century photograph. Antonina Alexandrovna knew their worth—birch only in name, the wood was of the poorest sort and too freshly cut to be suitable for burning. But as there was no choice, it was pointless to argue.

The young peasant carried five or six armloads up to the living room and took in exchange Tonia's small mirror wardrobe. He carried it down and packed it in his sleigh to take away as a present for his bride. In discussing a future deal in potatoes, he asked the price of the piano.

When Yurii Andreievich came home he said nothing about his wife's purchase. It would have been more sensible to chop up the wardrobe, but they could never have brought themselves to do it.

"There's a note for you on the table, did you see it?" she said.

"The one sent on from the hospital? Yes, I've had the message already. It's a sick call. I'll certainly go. I'll just have a little rest first. But it's pretty far. It's somewhere near the Triumphal Arch, I've got the address."

"Have you seen the fee they are offering you? You'd better read it. A bottle of German cognac or a pair of stockings! What sort of people are they, do you imagine? Vulgar. They don't seem to have any idea of how we live nowadays. Nouveaux riches, I suppose."

"Yes, that's from a supplier."

Suppliers, concessionaires, and authorized agents were names then given to small businessmen to whom the government, which had abolished private trade, occasionally made concessions at moments of economic difficulties, charging them with the procurement of various goods.

They were not former men of substance or dismissed heads of old firms—such people did not recover from the blow they had received. They were a new category of businessmen, people without roots who had been scooped up from the bottom by the war and the revolution.

Zhivago had a drink of hot water and saccharin whitened with milk and went off to see his patient.

Deep snow covered the street from wall to wall, in places up to the level of the ground-floor windows. Silent half-dead shadows moved all over this expanse carrying a little food or pulling it along on sleds. There was almost no other traffic.

Old shop signs still hung here and there. They had no relation to the small new consumer shops and co-operatives, which were all empty and locked, their windows barred or boarded up.

The reason they were locked and empty was not only that there were no goods but that the reorganization of all aspects of life, including trade, had so far remained largely on paper and had not yet affected such trifling details as the boarded-up shops.

11

The house to which the doctor went was at the end of Brest Street near the Tver Gate.

It was an old barracklike stone building with an inside courtyard, and three wooden staircases rose along the courtyard walls.

That day the tenants were at their general meeting, in which a woman delegate from the borough council participated, when a military commission suddenly turned up to check arms licenses and to confiscate unlicensed weapons. The tenants had to go back to their flats, but the head of the commission asked the delegate not to leave, assuring her that the search would not take long and the meeting could be resumed within a short time.

When the doctor arrived, the commission had almost finished but the flat where he was going had not yet been searched. Zhivago was stopped on the landing by a soldier with a rifle, but the head of the commission heard them arguing and ordered the search to be put off until after the doctor had examined his patient.

The door was opened by the master of the house, a polite young man with a sallow complexion and dark, melancholy eyes. He was flustered by a number of things—because of his wife's illness, the impending search, and his profound reverence for medical science and its representatives.

To save the doctor time and trouble he tried to be as brief as possible, but his very haste made his speech long and incoherent.

The flat was cluttered with a mixture of expensive and cheap furniture, hastily bought as an investment against the rapid inflation. Sets were supplemented by odd pieces.

The young man thought his wife's illness had been caused by nervous shock. He explained with many digressions that they had recently bought an antique clock. It was a broken-down chiming clock, and they had bought it for a song merely as a remarkable example of the clockmaker's art (he took the doctor into the next room to see it). They had even doubted whether it could be repaired. Then, one day, suddenly the clock, which had not been wound for years, had started of itself, played its complicated minuet of chimes, and stopped. His wife was terrified, the young man said; she was convinced that her last hour had struck, and now there she was delirious, refused all food, and did not recognize him.

"So you think it's nervous shock," Yurii Andreievich said doubtfully. "May I see her now?"

They went into another room, which had a porcelain chandelier, a wide double bed, and two mahogany bedside tables. A small woman with big black eyes lay near the edge of the bed, the blanket pulled up above her chin. When she saw them she freed one arm from under the bedclothes and waved them back, the loose sleeve of her dressing gown falling back to her armpit. She did not recognize her husband, and as if she were alone in the room, she began to sing something sad in a low voice, which upset her so much that she cried, whimpering like a child and begging to "go home." When the doctor went up to the bed she turned her back on him and refused to let him touch her.

"I ought to examine her," he said, "but it doesn't really matter. It's quite clear that she's got typhus—a severe case, poor thing; she must be feeling pretty wretched. My advice to you is to put her in a hospital. I know you'd see to it that she had everything she needed at home, but it's most important that she should have constant medical supervision in the first few weeks. Could you get hold of any sort of transportation—a cab or even a cart? Of course she'll have to be well wrapped up. I'll give you an admission order."

"I'll try, but wait a moment. Is it really typhus? How horrible!"

"I am afraid so."

"Look, I know I'll lose her if I let her go—couldn't you possibly look after her here? Come as often as you possibly can—I'll be only too happy to pay you anything you like."

"I am sorry—I've told you: what she needs is constant supervision. Do as I say—I really am advising you for her good. Now, get a cab at any cost and I'll write out the order. I'd better do it in your house committee room. The order has to have the house stamp on it, and there are a few other formalities."

12

One by one the tenants, in shawls and fur coats, had returned to the unheated basement, which had once been a wholesale egg store and was now used by the house committee.

An office desk and several chairs stood at one end of it. As there were not enough chairs, old empty egg crates turned upside down had been placed in a row to form a bench. A pile of them as high as the ceiling towered at the far end of the room; in a corner was a heap of shavings stuck into lumps with frozen yolk that had dripped from broken eggs. Rats scurried noisily inside the heap, making an occasional sortie into the middle of the stone floor and darting back.

Each time this happened a fat woman climbed squealing onto a crate and, holding up her skirt daintily and tapping her fashionable high shoes, shouted in a deliberately hoarse, drunken voice:

"Olia, Olia, you've got rats all over the place. Get away, you filthy brute. Ai-ai-ai! look at it, it understands, it's mad at me. Ai-ai-ai! it's trying to climb up, it'll get under my skirt, I'm so frightened! Look the other way, gentlemen. Sorry, I forgot, you're comrade citizens now, not gentlemen."

Her astrakhan cape hung open over the three quaking layers of her double chin and rich, silk-swathed bosom and stomach. She had once been the belle of her circle of small tradesmen and salesmen, but now her little pig eyes with their swollen lids could scarcely open. A rival had once tried to splash her with vitriol but had missed and only a drop or two had plowed traces on her cheek and at the corner of her mouth, so slight as to be almost becoming.

"Stop yelling, Khrapugina. How can we get on with our work?" said the delegate of the borough council, who had been elected chairman and was sitting behind the desk.

The delegate had known the house and many of the tenants all her life. Before the meeting she had had an unofficial talk with Aunt Fatima, the old janitress who had once lived with her husband and children in a corner of the filthy basement but had now only her daughter with her and had been moved into two light rooms on the first floor.

"Well, Fatima, how are things going?" the delegate asked.

Fatima complained that she could not cope with such a big house and so many tenants all by herself and that she got no help because, although each family was supposed to take turns cleaning the yard and the sidewalks, not one of them did it.

"Don't worry, Fatima, we'll show them. What kind of committee is this, anyway? They're hopeless. Criminal elements are given shelter, people of doubtful morals stay on without registration. We'll get rid of them and elect another. I'll make you house-manageress, only don't make a fuss."

The janitress begged to be let off, but the delegate refused to listen.

Looking around the room and deciding that enough people were present, she called for quiet and opened the meeting with a short introductory speech. She condemned the committee for slackness, proposed that candidates should be put up for the election of a new one, and went on to other business.

In conclusion she said:

"So that's how it is, comrades. Frankly speaking, this is a big house, it's suitable for a hostel. Look at all the delegates who come to town to attend conferences, and we don't know where to put them. It's been decided to take over the building for a district soviet hostel for visitors from the country and to call it the Tiverzin Hostel, in honor of Comrade Tiverzin, who lived here before he was deported, as everyone knows. No objections? Now, as to dates. There's no hurry, you've got a whole year. Working people will be rehoused; others must find accommodations for themselves and are given a year's notice."

"We're all working people! Every one of us! We're all workers," people shouted from every side, and one voice sobbed out: "It's Great-Russian chauvinism! Ah! the nations are equal now! I know what you're hinting at."

"Not all at once, please. Whom am I to answer first? What have nations got to do with it, Citizen Valdyrkin? Look at Khrapugina, you can't think there's a question of nationality involved in her case, and we are certainly evicting her."

"You are, are you! Just you try and evict me, we'll see about that! You crushed sofa! You crumpled bedsheet!" Khrapugina screamed, calling the delegate every meaningless name she could think of in the heat of the quarrel.

"What a she-devil!" the janitress was indignant. "Haven't you any shame?"

"Don't you meddle in this, Fatima, I can look after myself," said the delegate. "Stop it, Khrapugina, I know all about you. Shut up, I tell you, or I'll hand you over at once to the authorities before they catch you brewing vodka and running an illegal bar."

The uproar was at its height when the doctor came into the room. He asked the first man he ran into at the door to point out to him a member of the house committee. The other held up his hands like a trumpet in front of his mouth and shouted above the noise:

"Ga-li-iul-li-na! Come here. You're wanted."

The doctor could not believe his ears. A thin elderly woman with a slight stoop, the janitress, came up to him. He was struck by her likeness to her son. He did not, however, identify himself at once, but said: "One of your tenants has got typhus" (he told her the name). "There are various precautions that have to be taken to prevent its spreading. Moreover, the patient must go to the hospital. I'll make out an admission order, which the house committee has to certify. How and where can we get that done?"

She thought he meant "How is the patient to get to the hospital?" and replied: "There's a cab coming from the soviet for Comrade Demina, that's the delegate. She's very kind, Comrade Demina, I'll tell her, she's sure to let your patient have the cab. Don't worry, Comrade Doctor, we'll get her there all right."

"That's wonderful. Actually, I only meant where could I write out the order. But if there's a cab as well…May I ask you, are you the mother of Lieutenant Galiullin? We were in the same unit at the front."

Galiullina started violently and grew pale. She grasped the doctor's hand. "Come outside," she said. "We'll talk in the yard."

As soon as they were outside the door she said quickly: "Talk softly, for God's sake. Don't ruin me. Yusupka's gone wrong. Judge for yourself—what is he? He was an apprentice, a worker. He ought to understand—simple people are much better off now, a blind man can see that, nobody can deny it. I don't know what you feel yourself, maybe it would be all right for you, but it's a sin for Yusupka, God won't forgive him. Yusupka's father was a private, he was killed, they say his face was shot off, and his arms and legs."

Her voice broke, she waited till she was more calm, then she went on: "Come. I'll get you the cab. I know who you are. He was here for a couple of days. He told me. He said you knew Lara Guishar. She was a good girl, I remember her, she used to come and see us. What she's like now, I don't know—who can tell with you people? After all, it's natural for the masters to stick together. But for Yusupka it's a sin. Come, let's ask for the cab. I'm sure Comrade Demina will let you have it. You know who Comrade Demina is? She's Olia Demina, a seamstress she was, worked for Lara's mother, that's who she is, and she's from this house. Come along."

13

Night had fallen. All around them was darkness, Only the small round patch of light from Demina's pocket flashlight jumped from snowdrift to snowdrift four or five paces ahead, confusing more than lighting the way. The darkness was all around them, and they had left behind them the house where so many people had known Lara, where she had often come as a girl, and where, they said, Antipov, her husband, had grown up.

"Will you really find your way without a flashlight, Comrade Doctor?" Demina was facetiously patronizing. "If not, I'll lend you mine. It's a fact, you know, I had a real crush on her when we were little girls. They had a dressmaking establishment, I was an apprentice in the workshop. I've seen her this year. She stopped on her way through Moscow. I said, 'Where are you off to, silly? Stay here. Come and live with us. We'll find you a job.' But it wasn't any good, she wouldn't. Well, it's her business. She married Pasha with her head, not with her heart, she's been crazy ever since. Off she went."

"What do you think of her?"

"Careful—it's slippery. I don't know how many times I've told them not to throw the slops out of the door—might as well talk to a wall. What do I think of her? How do you mean, think? What should I think? I haven't any time to think. Here's where I live. One thing I didn't tell her—her brother, who was in the army, I think they've shot him. As for her mother, my mistress she used to be—I'll save her, I'm seeing to it. Well, I've got to go in, goodbye."

They parted. The light of Demina's little flashlight shot into the narrow stone entrance and ran on, lighting up the stained walls and the dirty stairs while the doctor was left surrounded by the darkness. On his right lay Sadovaia Triumphalnaia Street, on his left Sadovaia Karetnaia Street. Running into the black snowy distance, they were no longer streets but cuttings in the jungle of stone buildings, like cuttings through the impassable forests of Siberia or the Urals.

At home it was light and warm.

"Why are you so late?" asked Antonina Alexandrovna. "An extraordinary thing happened while you were out," she went on before he could reply. "Really quite unaccountable. Yesterday Father broke the alarm clock—I forgot to tell you—he was terribly upset, it was our only clock. He tried to repair it, he tinkered and tinkered with it, but he got nowhere. The clockmaker around the corner wanted a ridiculous price—three pounds of bread. I didn't know what to do and Father was completely dejected. Well, about an hour ago—can you believe it—there was a sudden ringing—such a piercing, deafening noise, we were all frightened out of our wits. It was the alarm clock! Can you imagine such a thing? It had started up again, all by itself."

"My hour for typhus has struck," said Yurii Andreievich, laughing. He told her about his patient and the chiming clock.

14

But he did not get typhus until much later. In the meantime the Zhivagos were tried to the limits of endurance. They had nothing and they were starving. The doctor went to see the Party member he had once saved, the one who had been the victim of a robbery. This man did everything he could for the doctor, but the civil war was just beginning and he was hardly ever in Moscow; moreover, he regarded the privations people had to suffer in those days as only natural, and he himself went hungry, though he concealed it

Yurii Andreievich tried to get in touch with the supplier in Brest Street. But in the intervening months the young man had disappeared and nothing was known about his wife, who had recovered. Galiullina was out when Yurii Andreievich called, most of the tenants were new, and Demina was at the front.

One day he received an allocation of wood at the official price. He had to bring it from the Vindava Station. Walking home along the endless stretches of Meshchanskaia Street—keeping an eye on the cart loaded with his unexpected treasure—he noticed that the street looked quite different; he found that he was swaying from side to side, his legs refusing to carry him. He realized that he was in for a bad time, that he had typhus. The driver picked him up when he fell down and slung him on top of the wood. The doctor never knew how he got home.

15

He was delirious off and on for two weeks. He dreamed that Tonia had put two streets on his desk, Sadovaia Karetnaia on his left and Sadovaia Triumphalnaia on his right, and had lit the table lamp; its warm orange glow lit up the streets and now he could write. So he was writing.

He was writing what he should have written long ago and had always wished to write but never could. Now it came to him quite easily, he wrote eagerly and said exactly what he wanted to say. Only now and then a boy got in his way, a boy with narrow Kirghiz eyes, in an unbuttoned reindeer coat worn fur side out, as in the Urals or Siberia.

He knew for certain that this boy was the spirit of his death or, to put it quite plainly, that he was his death. Yet how could he be his death if he was helping him to write a poem? How could death be useful, how was it possible for death to be a help?

The subject of his poem was neither the entombment nor the resurrection but the days between; the title was "Turmoil."

He had always wanted to describe how for three days the black, raging, worm-filled earth had assailed the deathless incarnation of love, storming it with rocks and rubble—as waves fly and leap at a seacoast, cover and submerge it—how for three days the black hurricane of earth raged, advancing and retreating.

Two lines kept coming into his head:

"We are glad to be near you," and "Time to wake up."

Near him, touching him, were hell, dissolution, corruption, death, and equally near him were the spring and Mary Magdalene and life. And it was time to awake. Time to wake up and to get up. Time to arise, time for the resurrection.

16

He began to get better. At first he took everything for granted, like a halfwit. He remembered nothing, he could see no connection between one thing and another and was not surprised at anything. His wife fed him on white bread and butter and sugared tea; she gave him coffee. He had forgotten that such things did not exist, and he enjoyed their taste like poetry or like fairy tales, as something right and proper for a convalescent. Soon, however, he began to think and wonder.

"How did you get all this?" he asked his wife.

"Your Grania got it for us."

"What Grania?"

"Grania Zhivago."

"Grania Zhivago?"

"Well, yes, your brother Evgraf, from Omsk. Your half brother. He came every day while you were ill."

"Does he wear a reindeer coat?"

"That's right. So you did see him. You were unconscious nearly all the time. He said he had run into you on the stairs in some house or other. He knew you—he meant to speak to you, but apparently you frightened him to death! He worships you, he reads every word you write. The things he got for us! Rice, raisins, sugar! He's gone back now. He wants us to go there too. He's a strange boy, a bit mysterious. I think he must have some sort of connection with the government out there. He says we ought to get away for a year or two, get away from the big towns, 'go back to the land' for a bit, he says. I thought of the Krueger place and he said it was a very good idea. We could grow vegetables and there's the forest all around. There isn't any point in dying without a struggle, like sheep."

In April that year Zhivago set out with his whole family for the former Varykino estate, near the town of Yuriatin, far away in the Urals.

SEVEN

Train to the Urals

 

The end of March brought the first warm days of the year, false heralds of spring which were always followed by a severe cold spell.

The Zhivagos were hurriedly getting ready to leave. To disguise the bustle, the tenants—there were more of them now than sparrows in the street—were told that the apartment was having a spring cleaning for Easter.

Yurii Andreievich had opposed the move. So far, he had thought that it would come to nothing and had not interfered with the preparations, but they had advanced and were about to be completed. The time had come to discuss the matter seriously.

He reiterated his doubts at a family council made up of himself, his wife, and his father-in-law. "Do you think I'm wrong?" he asked them after stating his objections. "Do you still insist on going?"

"You say that we must manage as best we can for the next couple of years," said his wife, "until land conditions are settled, then we might get a vegetable garden near Moscow. But how are we to endure until then? That's the crucial point, and you haven't told us."

"It's sheer madness to count on such things," her father backed her up.

"Very well then, you win," Yurii Andreievich said. "What bothers me is that we are going blindfold, to a place we know nothing about. Of the three people who lived at Varykino, Mother and Grandmother are dead, and Grandfather Krueger is being held as a hostage—that is, if he is still alive.

"You know he made a fictitious sale in the last year of the war, sold the forests and the factories or else put the title deeds in the name of someone else, a bank or a private person, I don't know. We don't know anything, in fact. To whom does the estate belong now? I don't mean whose property it is, I don't care if we lose it, but who is in charge there? Who runs it? Is the timber being cut? Are the factories working? And above all, who is in power in that part of the country, or rather, who will be by the time we get there?

"You are relying on the old manager, Mikulitsyn, to see us through, but who is to tell us if he is still there? Or whether he is still alive? Anyway what do we know about him except his name—and that we only remember because Grandfather had such difficulty in pronouncing it.

"However, what is there to argue about? You have made up your minds, and I've agreed. Now we must find out exactly what one does about travelling these days. There is no point in putting it off."

2

Yurii Andreievich went to the Yaroslavsky Station to make inquiries.

Endless queues of passengers moved along raised gangways between wooden handrails. On the stone floors lay people in gray army coats who coughed, spat, shifted about, and spoke in voices that resounded incongruously loudly under the vaulted ceilings.

Most of these people had recently had typhus and been discharged from the overcrowded hospitals as soon as they were off the critical list. Yurii Andreievich, as a doctor, knew the necessity for this, but he had had no idea that there could be so many of these unfortunates or that they were forced to seek refuge in railway stations.

"You must get a priority," a porter in a white apron told him. "Then you must come every day to ask if there is a train. Trains are rare nowadays, it's a question of luck. And of course" (he rubbed two fingers with his thumb) "a little flour or something…Wheels don't run without oil, you know, and what's more" (he tapped his Adam's apple) "you won't get far without a little vodka."

3

About that time Alexander Alexandrovich was asked several times to act as consultant to the Higher Economic Council, and Yurii Andreievich to treat a member of the government who was dangerously ill. Both were paid in what was then the highest currency—credit slips for an allotment of articles from the first of the newly opened distribution centers.

The center was an old army warehouse next to the Simonov Monastery. The doctor and his father-in-law went through the monastery and the barrack yard and straight through a low stone door into a vaulted cellar. It sloped down and widened at its farther end, where a counter ran across from wall to wall; behind it stood an attendant, weighing, measuring, and handing out goods with calm unhurried movements, crossing off the items on the list with broad pencil strokes and occasionally replenishing his stock from the back of the store.

There were not many customers. "Containers," said the storekeeper, glancing at the slips. The professor and the doctor held out several large and small pillowcases and, with bulging eyes, watched them being filled with flour, cereals, macaroni, sugar, suet, soap, matches, and something wrapped in paper that was later found to be Caucasian cheese.

Overwhelmed by the storekeeper's generosity and anxious not to waste his time, they hurriedly stuffed their bundles into big sacks and slung them over their shoulders.

They came out of the vault intoxicated not by the mere thought of food but by the realization that they too were of use in the world and did not live in vain and had deserved the praise and thanks that Tonia would shower on them at home.