4

While the men disappeared for whole days into government offices, seeking travel documents and registering the apartment so that they should be able to go back to it on their return to Moscow, Antonina Alexandrovna sorted the family belongings.

Walking up and down the three rooms now officially assigned to the Zhivagos, she weighed even the smallest article twenty times in her hand before deciding whether to put it into the pile of things they were taking with them. Only a small part of their luggage was intended for their personal use; the rest would serve as currency on the way and in the first weeks after their arrival.

The spring breeze came in through the partly open window, tasting faintly of newly cut white bread. Cocks were crowing and children playing and shouting in the yard. The more the room was aired the more noticeable became the smell of mothballs from the open trunks in which the winter clothes had been packed.

As for the choice of things to be taken or left behind, there existed a whole theory, developed by those who had left earlier and communicated their observations to friends at home. The simple, indisputable rules of this theory were so distinctly present in Antonina Alexandrovna's mind that she imagined hearing them repeated by some secret voice coming from outside with the chirruping of sparrows and the cries of playing children.

"Lengths for dresses," she pondered, "but luggage is checked on the way, so this is dangerous unless they are tacked up to look like clothes. Materials and fabrics, clothes, preferably coats if they're not too worn. No trunks or hampers (there won't be any porters); be sure to take nothing useless and tie up everything in bundles small enough for a woman or a child to carry. Salt and tobacco have been found very useful but risky. Money in Kerenkas.[13] Documents are the hardest thing to carry safely." And so on and so on.

5

On the day before they left there was a snowstorm. Gray clouds of spinning snow swept into the sky and came back to earth as a white whirlwind, which ran off into the black depths of the street and covered it with a white shroud.

All the luggage was packed. The apartment, with such things as remained in it, was being left in the care of an elderly former salesclerk and his wife, relatives of Egorovna's who, the preceding winter, had helped Antonina Alexandrovna to trade old clothes and furniture for potatoes and wood.

Markel could not be trusted. At the militia post which he had selected as his political club he did not actually say that his former masters sucked his blood, but he accused them, instead, of having kept him in ignorance all these years and deliberately concealed from him that man is descended from apes.

Antonina Alexandrovna took the couple on a final survey of the house, fitting keys to locks, opening and shutting drawers and cupboards, and giving them last-minute instructions.

The chairs and tables had been pushed against the walls, the curtains taken down, and there was a pile of bundles in the corner. The snowstorm, seen through the bare windows of the rooms stripped of their winter comfort, reminded each of them of past sorrows. Yurii Andreievich thought of his childhood and his mother's death, and Antonina Alexandrovna and her father of the death and funeral of Anna Ivanovna. They felt that this was their last night in the house, that they would never see it again. They were mistaken on this point, but under the influence of their thoughts, which they kept to themselves in order not to upset each other, they looked back over the years spent under this roof, struggling against the tears that came to their eyes.

In spite of all this, Antonina Alexandrovna kept within the rules of propriety in the presence of strangers. She talked endlessly with the woman in whose care she was leaving everything. She overestimated the favor the couple were doing her. Anxious not to seem ungrateful, she kept apologizing, going next door and coming back with presents for the woman—blouses and lengths of cotton and silk prints. And the dark materials, with their white check or polka-dot patterns, were like the dark snow-bound street checkered with bricks and covered with white dots which, that farewell night, looked in through the uncurtained windows.

6

They left for the station at dawn. The other tenants were usually asleep at this hour, but one of them, Zevorotnina, incurably fond of organizing any social occasion, roused them all shouting: "Attention! Attention! Comrades! Hurry up! The Gromeko people are going. Come and say goodbye!"

They all poured out onto the back porch (the front door was kept boarded up) and stood in a semicircle as though for a photograph. They yawned and shivered and tugged at the shabby coats they had thrown over their shoulders and stamped about in the huge felt boots they had hastily pulled on over their bare feet.

Markel had already managed to get drunk on some murderous brew he had succeeded in obtaining even in those dry days, and he hung like a corpse over the worn porch railings, which threatened to collapse under him. He insisted on carrying the luggage to the station and was offended when his offer was refused. At last they got rid of him.

It was still dark. The wind had fallen and the snow fell thicker than the night before. Large, fluffy flakes drifted down lazily and hung over the ground, as though hesitating to settle.

By the time they had left the street and reached the Arbat it was lighter. Here the snow came down like a white, slowly descending stage curtain as wide as the street, its fringe swinging around the legs of the passers-by so that they lost the sense of moving forward and felt they were marking time.

There was not a soul about except the travellers, but soon they were overtaken by a cab with a snow-white nag and a driver who looked as if he had been rolled in dough. For a fabulous sum (worth less than a kopek in those days) he took them to the station with their luggage, except for Yurii Andreievich, who at his own request was allowed to walk.

7

He found Antonina Alexandrovna and her father standing in one of the endless queues squeezed between the wooden handrails. Niusha and Sashenka were walking about outside and occasionally looking in to see if it were time to join the grown-ups. They gave off a strong smell of kerosene, which had been thickly smeared on their necks, wrists, and ankles as a protection against lice.

The queues went up to the gates of the platforms, but in fact the passengers had to board the train a good half mile farther down the line. With not enough cleaners, the station was filthy and the tracks in front of the platforms were unusable because of dirt and ice. The trains stopped farther out.

Antonina Alexandrovna waved to her husband and when he was close enough shouted instructions as to where he was to get their travel papers stamped.

"Show me what they've put," she said when he came back. He held out a batch of papers across the handrail.

"That's for the special coach," said the man behind her in the queue, reading over her shoulder.

The man in front of her was more explicit. He was one of those sticklers for form who seem to be familiar with and accept without question every regulation in the world.

"This stamp," he explained, "gives you the right to claim seats in a classified coach, that is to say a passenger coach, if there is a passenger coach on the train."

The whole queue joined in at once.

"Passenger coach indeed! If you can get a seat on the buffers you must be thankful nowadays!"

"Don't listen to them," said the other. "I'll explain, it's quite simple. Today there is only one type of train, and it always includes army, convict, cattle, and passenger cars. Why mislead the man?" he said, turning to the crowd. "Words don't cost anything, you can say what you like, but you should say it clearly so that he can understand."

"A lot you've explained." He was shouted down. "A lot you've said when you've told him he's got stamps for the special coach! You should look at a man first, before you start explaining. How can anyone with such a face go in the special coach? The special coach is full of sailors. A sailor has a trained eye and a gun. He takes a look at him and what does he see? A member of the propertied classes—worse than that: a doctor, former quality. He pulls out his gun—and goodbye."

There is no knowing to what lengths the sympathy aroused by the doctor's case would have gone if the crowd had not turned its attention to something else.

For some time people had been looking curiously through the enormous plate-glass windows at the tracks, which were roofed in for several hundred yards. The falling snow could be seen only beyond the far end of the roofs; seen so far away, it looked almost still, sinking to the ground as slowly as bread crumbs thrown to fishes sink through water.

For some time, figures had been strolling into the distance along the tracks, singly or in groups. At first they were taken for railwaymen attending to their duties, but now a whole mob rushed out, and from the direction in which they were running there appeared a small cloud of smoke.

"Open up the gates, you scoundrels," yelled voices in the queue. The crowd stirred and swung against the gates, those at the back pushing those in front.

"Look what's going on! They've locked us in here and through there some people have found a way around and jumped the queue. Open up, you bastards, or we'll smash the gates. Come on, let's give it a push."

"They needn't envy that lot, the fools," said the know-it-all stickler for form. "Those men are conscripts, called up for forced labor from Petrograd. They were supposed to be sent to Vologda, but now they're being taken to the eastern front. They're not travelling of their own choice. They're under escort. They'll be digging trenches."

8

They had been travelling three days but had not got far from Moscow. The landscape was wintry. Tracks, fields, woods, and village roofs—everything was covered with snow.

The Zhivagos had been lucky enough to get a corner to themselves on the upper bunks, right up against the long bleary window close under the ceiling.

Antonina Alexandrovna had never travelled in a freight car before. The first time they got in Yurii Andreievich lifted her up to the high floor and pushed open the heavy sliding doors for her, but later she learned to climb in and out by herself.

The car looked to Antonina Alexandrovna no better than a pigsty on wheels, and she had expected it to fall apart at the first jar. But for three days now they had been jolted back and forth and from side to side as the train had changed speed or direction, for three days the wheels had rattled underneath them like the sticks on a mechanical toy drum, and there had been no accident. Her fears had been groundless.

The train had twenty-three cars (the Zhivagos were in the fourteenth). When it stopped at country stations, only a few front, middle, or end cars stood beside the short platform.

Sailors were in front, civilian passengers in the middle, and the labor conscripts in eight cars at the back. There were about five hundred of the latter, people of all ages, conditions, and professions.

They were a remarkable sight—rich, smart lawyers and stockbrokers from Petrograd side by side with cab drivers, floor polishers, bath attendants, Tartar ragpickers, escaped lunatics, shopkeepers, and monks, all lumped in with the exploiting classes.

The lawyers and stockbrokers sat on short thick logs in their shirt sleeves around red-hot iron stoves, told endless stories, joked, and laughed. They were not worried, they had connections, influential relatives were pulling strings for them at home, and at the worst they could buy themselves off later on.

The others, in boots and unbuttoned caftans, or barefoot and in long shirts worn outside their trousers, with or without beards, stood at the half-open doors of the airless cars, holding on to the sides or to the boards nailed across the openings, and gazed sullenly at the peasants and villages by the wayside, speaking to no one. These had no influential friends. They had nothing to hope for.

There were too many conscripts for the cars allotted to them, and the overflow had been put among the civilian passengers, including those of the fourteenth car.

9

Whenever the train stopped, Antonina Alexandrovna sat up cautiously to avoid knocking her head on the ceiling and looked down through the slightly open door to see if it were worth while to go out. This depended on the size of the station, the probable length of the halt, and the consequent likelihood of profitable barter.

So it was on this occasion. The train had wakened her from a doze by slowing down. The number of switches over which it bumped and rattled suggested that the station was fairly large, and that they would stop for a long time.

She rubbed her eyes, tidied her hair, and after rummaging at the bottom of a bundle pulled out a towel embroidered with cockerels, oxbows, and wheels.

The doctor, who had waked up in the meantime, jumped down first from his bunk, and helped his wife to get to the floor. Guards' shelters and lampposts drifted past the door, followed by trees bending under heavy piles of snow, which they held out toward the train as though in sign of welcome. Long before it had stopped, sailors jumped off into the untrodden snow and raced around the corner of the station building where peasant women were usually to be found trading illegally in food.

Their black uniforms with bell-bottom trousers and ribbons fluttering from their visorless caps gave an air of reckless speed to their advance and made other people give way as before the onrush of racing skiers or skaters.

Around the corner, girls and women from near-by villages, as excited as if they were at the fortuneteller's, stood one behind the other in single file in the shelter of the station wall selling cucumbers, cottage cheese, and platters of boiled beef and rye pancakes kept hot and tasty by quilted napkins. Muffled up in shawls tucked inside their sheepskins, the women blushed a fiery red at the sailors' jokes but at the same time were terrified of them, for it was generally sailors who formed the units organized to fight against speculation and the forbidden free market.

The apprehensions of the peasant women were soon dispelled. When the train stopped and civilian passengers joined the crowd, trade became brisk.

Antonina Alexandrovna walked down the line inspecting the wares, her towel flung over her shoulder as if she were going to the back of the station to wash in the snow. Several women had called out: "Hey, what do you want for your towel?" but she continued on her way, escorted by her husband.

At the end of the row there was a woman in a black shawl with a scarlet pattern. She saw the towel and her bold eyes lit up. Glancing around cautiously, she sidled up to Antonina Alexandrovna and, uncovering her wares, whispered eagerly: "Look at this. Bet you haven't seen that in a long while. Tempting, isn't it? Don't think about it too long or it will be gone. Like to give me your towel for a half?"

Antonina Alexandrovna missed the last word.

"What do you mean, my good woman?"

The woman meant half a hare, roasted whole from head to tail and cut in two. She held it up. "I'm telling you, I'll give you a half for your towel. What are you staring at? It isn't dog meat. My husband is a hunter. It's hare, all right."

They exchanged their goods. Each believed that she had had the best of the bargain. Antonina Alexandrovna felt as ashamed as if she had swindled the peasant woman, while she, delighted with her deal, called a friend who had also sold out her wares and made off with her, home to their village, striding down the snowy path into the distance.

At this moment there was an uproar in the crowd. An old woman was screaming: "Hey, you! Where are you off to? Where's my money? When did you pay me, you cheat? Look at him, greedy pig, you call him and he doesn't even bother to turn around. Stop! Stop, I tell you, Mister Comrade! I've been robbed! Stop, thief! There he goes, that's him, catch him!"

"Which one?"

"That one, the one who's clean-shaven and grinning."

"Is that the one with the hole in his sleeve?"

"Yes, yes, catch him, the heathen!"

"The one with the patched elbow?"

"Yes, yes. Oh, I've been robbed."

"What's going on here?"

"Fellow over there bought some milk and pies, stuffed himself, and went off without paying, so the old woman is crying."

"That shouldn't be allowed. Why don't they go after him?"

"Go after him! He's got straps and cartridge belts all over him. He'll go after you."

10

There were several labor conscripts in car fourteen. With them was their guard, Private Voroniuk. Three of the men stood out from the rest. They were Prokhor Kharitonovich Prituliev, who had been cashier in a government liquor store in Petrograd—the cashier, as he was called in the car; Vasia Brykin, a sixteen-year-old boy apprenticed to an ironmonger; and Kostoied-Amursky, a gray-haired revolutionary co-operativist, who had been in all the forced-labor camps of the old regime and was now discovering those of the new.

The conscripts, who had all been strangers when they were impressed, were gradually getting to know each other. It turned out that the cashier and Vasia, the apprentice, came from the same part of the country, the Viatka government, and also that the train would be going through their native villages.

Prituliev came from Malmyzh. His hair was cropped and he was pockmarked, squat, and hideous. His gray sweater, black with sweat under the arms, fitted him snugly like a fleshy woman's blouse. He would sit for hours as silent as a statue, lost in thought, scratching the warts on his freckled hands until they bled and suppurated.

One day last autumn, he was going down the Nevsky when he walked into a militia roundup at the corner of Liteiny Street. He had to show his papers and was found to hold a fourth-class ration book, the kind issued to nonworkers, on which nothing could ever be bought. He was consequently detained, with many others who were arrested for the same reason, and taken under escort to barracks. His group was to be sent, like the one preceding it, to dig trenches on the Archangel front, but was diverted on its way and sent east through Moscow.

Prituliev had a wife in Luga, where he had worked before the war. She heard indirectly of his misfortune and rushed off to Vologda (the junction for Archangel) to look for him and obtain his release. But the unit had not gone there, her labors had been in vain, and she lost track of him.

In Petrograd Prituliev lived with a certain Pelagia Nilovna Tiagunova. At the time he was arrested he had just said goodbye to her, preparing to go in a different direction to keep an appointment, and looking down Liteiny Street he could still see her back disappearing among the crowd.

She was a plump woman with a stately carriage, beautiful hands, and a thick braid which she tossed from time to time, with deep sighs, over her shoulder. She was now with the convoy, having volunteered to accompany Prituliev.

It was difficult to know what it was that attracted women to such an ugly man, but certainly they clung to him. In a car farther forward there was another woman friend of his, Ogryzkova, a bony girl with white eyelashes who had somehow made her way onto the train and whom Tiagunova called "the squirt," "the nozzle," and many other insulting names. The rivals were at swords' points and took good care to avoid each other. Ogryzkova never went to the other's car. It was a mystery to know how she ever met the object of her passion. Perhaps she contented herself with seeing him from afar, when the engine was being refuelled with the help of all the passengers.

11

Vasia's story was quite different. His father had been killed in the war and his mother had sent him to Petrograd to be apprenticed to his uncle.

The uncle kept a private shop in Apraksin Yard. One day last winter he had been summoned by the local soviet to answer a few questions. He mistook the door and walked into the office of the labor corps selection board. The room was full of conscripts; after a while soldiers came in, surrounded the men, and took them to the Semenov barracks for the night, and escorted them to the Vologda train in the morning.

The news of so many arrests spread and the prisoners' families came to say goodbye to them at the station. Among them were Vasia and his aunt. His uncle begged the guard (Voroniuk, who was now in car fourteen) to let him out for a minute to see his wife. The guard refused without a guarantee that he would return. The uncle and aunt offered Vasia as a hostage. Voroniuk agreed. Vasia was brought in and his uncle was let out. This was the last he ever saw of his aunt or uncle.

When the fraud was discovered, Vasia, who had suspected nothing, burst into tears. He threw himself at Voroniuk's feet, kissed his hands, and begged him to let him go, but to no avail. The guard was inexorable not because he was cruel, but discipline was very strict in those troubled times. The guard answered for the number of his charges with his life, and the numbers were checked by roll call. That was how Vasia came to be in the labor corps.

The co-operativist, Kostoied-Amursky, who had enjoyed the respect of his jailors under both Tsarism and the present government and who was always on good terms with them, repeatedly spoke to the head of the convoy about Vasia's predicament. The officer admitted that it was a terrible misunderstanding but said there were formal difficulties in the way of examining the case until they arrived; he promised to do his best at that moment.

Vasia was an attractive boy with regular features who looked like a royal page or an angel of God in a picture. He was unusually innocent and unspoiled. His favorite occupation was to sit on the floor at the feet of his elders, looking up at them, his hands clasped around his knees, and listen to their discussions and stories. By watching the muscles of his face, as he just barely restrained himself from tears or choked with laughter, you could almost follow the conversation.

12

The Zhivagos had invited the co-operativist Kostoried to dinner. He sat in their corner sucking a leg of hare with a loud wheezing noise. He dreaded drafts and chills, and changed his place several times, looking for a sheltered spot. At last he found a place where he did not feel the draft. "That's better," he said. He finished his bone, sucked his fingers clean, wiped them on his handkerchief, thanked his hosts, and said: "It's your window. It has to be cemented. But to go back to our discussion: You're mistaken, Doctor. Roast hare is an excellent thing, but to conclude that the peasants are prosperous is rash, to say the least, if you'll forgive my saying so."

"Oh, come," said Yurii Andreievich. "Look at all these stations. The trees aren't cut, the fences are intact. And these markets! These women! Think how wonderful! Somewhere life is still going on, some people are happy. Not everyone is wretched. This justifies everything."

"It would be good if that were true. But it isn't. Where did you get all those ideas? Take a trip to any place that is fifty miles from the railway. You'll find that there are peasant rebellions everywhere. Against whom? you'll ask. Well, they're against the Reds or against the Whites, whoever happens to be in power. You'll say, Aha, that's because the peasants are enemies of all authority, they don't know what they want. Allow me to differ. The peasant knows very well what he wants, better than you or I do, but he wants something quite different.

"When the revolution woke him up, he decided that his century-old dream was coming true—his dream of living on his own land by the work of his hands, in complete independence and with no obligations to anyone. Instead, he found he had only exchanged the oppression of the former state for the new, much harsher yoke of the revolutionary superstate. Can you wonder that the villages are restless and can't settle down? And you say they are prosperous! No, there are a lot of things you don't know, my dear fellow, and as far as I can see you don't want to know them."

"All right, it's true, I don't. Why on earth should I know and worry myself sick over every blessed thing? History hasn't consulted me. I have to put up with whatever happens, so why shouldn't I ignore the facts? You tell me my ideas don't correspond to reality. But where is reality in Russia today? As I see it, reality has been so terrorized that it is hiding. I want to believe that the peasants are better off and flourishing. If it is an illusion, what am I to do? What am I to live by; whom am I to believe? And I have to go on living, I've got a family."

He made a despairing gesture and, leaving the argument to his father-in-law, moved away, and hung his head over the edge of the bunk to look at what was going on below.

Prituliev, Tiagunova, Vasia, and Voroniuk were talking together. As the train was approaching his native province, Prituliev recalled the way to his village, the station, and the road you took according to whether you went by horse or on foot, and at the mention of familiar village names, Vasia repeated them with shining eyes, as if they were a marvellous fairy tale.

"You get off at Dry Ford?" he asked, choking with excitement. "Our station! Of course! And then you go on to Buisky, right?"

"That's right, you take the Buisky road."

"That's what I say—Buisky—Buisky village. Of course I know it, that's where you get off the main road, you turn right and right again. That's to get to us, to Veretenniki. And your way must be left, away from the river, isn't it? You know the river Pelga? Well, of course! That's our river. You keep following the river, on and on, and away up on the cliff on the right, overhanging that same river Pelga, there's our village, Veretenniki! It's right up on the edge, and it's stee-eep! It makes you giddy, honest to God it does. There's a quarry down below, for millstones. That's where my mother lives, in Veretenniki, and my two little sisters. Alenka and Arishka…Mother is a bit like you, Aunt Pelagia, she's young and fair. Uncle Voroniuk! Please, Uncle Voroniuk, for the love of Christ, please, I beg you, for God's sake…Uncle Voroniuk!"

"Well, what? Uncle, uncle, I know I'm not your aunt. What do you expect me to do? Am I mad? If I let you go that would be the end of me, amen, they'd put me up against a wall."

Pelagia Tiagunova sat looking thoughtfully out of the window, stroking Vasia's reddish hair. Now and then she bent down to him and smiled as if she were telling him: "Don't be silly. This isn't something to talk to Voroniuk about in front of everyone. Don't worry, have patience, it will be all right."

13

Peculiar things began to happen when they left Central Russia behind on their way east. They were going through a restless region infested with armed bands, past villages where uprisings had recently been put down.

The train stopped frequently in the middle of nowhere and security patrols checked the passengers' papers and luggage.

Once they stopped at night, but no one came in and no one was disturbed. Yurii Andreievich wondered if there had been an accident and went out to see.

It was dark. For no apparent reason the train had stopped between two stations, in a field, with a row of firs on either side of the track. Other passengers who had come out and were stamping their feet in the snow told Yurii Andreievich that there was nothing wrong, but that the engineer refused to go on, saying that this stretch was dangerous and should first be inspected by handcar. Spokesmen of the passengers had gone to reason with him and if necessary to grease his palm. It was said that sailors were also taking a hand in it and would undoubtedly get their way.

The snow at the head of the train was lit up at intervals, as from a bonfire, by fiery flashes from the smokestack or the glowing coals in the firebox. By this light several dark figures were now seen running to the front of the engine.

The first of them, presumably the engineer, reached the far end of the running board, leapt over the buffers, and vanished as if the earth had swallowed him. The sailors who were chasing him did exactly the same thing: they too flashed for a moment through the air and vanished.

Curious about what was going on, several passengers including Yurii Andreievich went to see.

Beyond the buffers, where the track opened out before them, they were met with an astonishing sight. The engineer stood in the snow up to his waist. His pursuers surrounded him in a semicircle, like hunters around their quarry; like him, they were buried in snow up to the waist.

"Thank you, comrades, fine stormy petrels you are,"[14] the engineer was shouting. "A fine sight, sailors chasing a fellow worker with guns! All because I said the train must stop. You be my witnesses, comrade passengers, you can see what kind of place this is. Anybody might be roaming around unscrewing the bolts. Do you think I'm worrying about myself, you God-damned bastards? To hell with you. It's for you I was doing it, so that nothing should happen to you, and that's all the thanks I get for my trouble! Go on, go on, why don't you shoot? Here I am. You be my witnesses, comrade passengers, I'm not running away."

Bewildered voices rose from the group. "Pipe down, old man…They don't mean it…Nobody would let them…They don't really mean it ..." Others urged him on: "That's right, Gavrilka, stand up for yourself! Don't let them bully you!"

The first sailor to scramble out of the snow was a red-haired giant with a head so huge that it made his face look flat. He turned to the passengers and spoke in a deep, quiet, unhurried voice with a Ukrainian accent, like Voroniuk's, his composure oddly out of keeping with the scene.

"Beg pardon, what's all this uproar about? Be careful you don't catch a chill in this cold, citizens. It's windy. Why not go back to your seats and keep warm?"

The crowd gradually dispersed. The giant went to the engineer, who was still worked up, and said:

"Enough hysterics, comrade engineer. Get out of the snow, and let's get going."

14

Next day the train, creeping at a snail's pace lest it run off the tracks, powdered by the wind with unswept snow, pulled up beside a lifeless, burned-out ruin. This was all that was left of the station, Nizhni Kelmes, its name still faintly legible on its blackened facade.

Beyond it lay a deserted village blanketed in snow. This too was damaged by fire. The end house was charred, the one next to it sagged where its corner timbers had fallen in; broken sleighs, fences, rusty pieces of metal, and smashed furniture were scattered all over the street; the snow was dirty with soot, and black patches of earth showed through the frozen puddles with half-burnt logs sticking out of them—all evidence of the fire and of the efforts to put it out.

The place was not in fact as dead as it looked; there were a few people still about. The stationmaster rose out of the ruins and the guard jumped down from the train and commiserated with him. "The whole place was burned down?"

"Good day to you, and welcome. Yes, we certainly had a fire, but it was worse than that."

"I don't follow."

"Better not try."

"You don't mean Strelnikov!"

"I do."

"Why? What had you done?"

"We didn't do anything, it was our neighbors; we got it too for good measure. You see that village over there? Nizhni Kelmes is in the Ust-Nemdinsk county—it was all because of them."

"And what crime had they committed?"

"Just about all the seven deadly sins: Dissolved their Poor Peasants' Committee, that's one; refused to supply horses to the Red Army, that's two (and they're all Tartars, mind you, horsemen); resisted the mobilization decree, that makes three. Well, there you are."

"Yes, I see. I quite see. So they were shelled?"

"Naturally."

"From the armored train?"

"Of course."

"That's bad. All our sympathy. Still, it's none of our business."

"Besides, it's an old story. And the news I have isn't very good either. You'll have to stop here for a couple of days."

"You're joking! I'm taking replacements to the front. This is an urgent matter."

"I'm not joking at all. We've had a blizzard for a solid week—snowdrifts all along the line, and no one to clear it. Half the village has run away. I'll put the rest of them on the job, but it won't be enough."

"Damn. What am I to do?"

"We'll get it cleared, somehow."

"How deep is the snow?"

"Not too bad. It varies. The worst patch is in the middle-about two miles long; we'll certainly have trouble there. Farther on the forest has kept the worst of the snow off the tracks. And on this side it's open country, so the wind has blown away some of it."

"Hell, what a pain in the neck! I'll mobilize all the passengers."

"That's what I was thinking."

"We mustn't use the sailors and Red Army men. But there's a whole corps of labor conscripts—including the other passengers, there are about seven hundred in all."

"That's more than enough. We'll start the moment we get the shovels. We're a bit short of them, so we've sent to the near-by villages for more. We'll manage."

"God, what a blow! Do you think we can do it?"

"Of course we can. With plenty of troops you can take a city, they say, and this is only a bit of tracks. Don't worry."

15

Clearing the line took three days, and all the Zhivagos, even Niusha, took part in it. They were the best three days of their journey.

The landscape had a withdrawn, secretive quality. It made one think of Pushkin's story about the Pugachev uprising and of some places described by Aksakov. The ruins added to the air of mystery; so did the wariness of the remaining villagers, who, afraid of informers, avoided the passengers and were silent even among themselves.

The workers were divided into gangs, with the labor conscripts and the civilians kept apart. Armed soldiers guarded each working group.

The tracks were cleared in several places at the same time by separate gangs. Mounds of snow between the sections hid the gangs from one another and were left untouched until the last.

The workers spent all day in the open, going back only to sleep. The days were clear and frosty, and the shifts were short because there were not enough shovels. It was sheer pleasure.

Zhivago's section of the track had a fine view. The country to the east dipped down into a valley and rose in gentle hills as far as the horizon.

On the top of a hill there was a house exposed to all the winds; its park must have been luxuriant in summer but could not give it any shelter now with its frosty lacework.

The snow smoothed and rounded all contours. It could not quite conceal the winding bed of a stream which in spring would rush down to the viaduct below the railway bank but at present was tucked up in the snow like a child in its cot with its head under the eiderdown.

Was anyone living in the house on the hill, Zhivago wondered, or was it standing empty and falling into ruins, held by some land committee? What had happened to the people who had once lived there? Had they fled abroad? Or been killed by the peasants? Or had they been popular and were they allowed to settle in the district as technical specialists? If they had stayed, had they been spared by Strelnikov or shared the fate of the kulaks?

The house teased his curiosity but kept its sorrowful silence. Questions were not in order in these days, and no one ever answered them. But the sun sparkled on the pure whiteness with a glare that was almost blinding. How cleanly his shovel cut into its smooth surface! How dry, how iridescent, like diamonds, was each shovelful. He was reminded of the days when, as a child in their yard at home, dressed in a braided hood and a black sheepskin fastened with hooks and eyes sewn in the curly fleece, he cut the dazzling snow into cubes and pyramids and cream puffs and fortresses and the cities of cave dwellers. Life had had zest in those far-off days, everything was a feast for the eyes and the stomach!

But these three days in the air, too, gave the impression of a feast. And no wonder! At night the workers received loaves of hot fresh bread, which was brought no one knew from where or by whose orders. The bread had a tasty crisp crust, shiny on top, cracked at the side, and with bits of charcoal baked into it underneath.

16

They became fond of the ruined station, as one becomes attached to a shelter used for a few days on a climbing trip in a snow-bound mountain. Its shape, its site, the details of its damage, remained imprinted in their memory.

They returned to it every evening just as the sun, as if out of loyalty to the past, set at its usual place behind an old birch tree outside the telegrapher's window.

At that spot the wall had caved into the room, but the corner facing the window had remained intact, with its coffee-colored wallpaper, the tiled stove with the round vent and the copper lid closed with a chain, and the inventory of the office furniture hanging on the wall in a black frame. As before the collapse, the setting sun brushed the tiles, brought out the warm brown glow on the wallpaper, and hung the shadow of the birch on the wall as if it were a woman's scarf.

At the rear of the building, on the nailed door to the ruins of the waiting room, there was still an announcement, put up in the first days of the February revolution, or shortly before it, which said:

 

"Sick passengers are temporarily requested not to bother about medicines and bandages. For obvious reasons, am sealing door, of which am giving notice hereby.

"Medical Assistant

"Ust-Nemdinsk District"

 

When finally the last piles of snow between the cleared tracks were levelled, the entire line of rails came into view, flying into the distance like an arrow. On each side stretched white mountains of shovelled snow, bordered all along by the black walls of the forest.

As far as the eye could reach, groups of people with shovels in hand stood at intervals along the line. Seeing themselves for the first time in full force, they were astonished at their numbers.

17

It was learned that the train would leave shortly, despite the lateness of the hour and the approaching night. Yurii Andreievich and Antonina Alexandrovna went out to enjoy the sight of the cleared line once again. No one else was on the tracks. The doctor and his wife stood a while, gazing into the distance, exchanged a few words, and turned back to their car.

On the way they heard the angry voices of two quarrelling women. They recognized them at once as those of Ogryzkova and Tiagunova, who were walking in the same direction as they were, from the head to the end of the train, but on the station side, while the doctor and his wife walked on the wooded side. The endless line of cars screened the two couples from each other. The women seemed hardly ever to be abreast of the doctor and Antonina Alexandrovna, but always to be ahead of them or falling behind.

They seemed to be in a state of great agitation, and it was as though their strength failed them. Judging from the way their voices rose to a shriek or died down to a whisper, either their legs refused to carry them or else they kept stumbling and falling into snowdrifts. Tiagunova seemed to be chasing Ogryzkova, perhaps belaboring her with her fists whenever she caught up with her. She showered her rival with choice abuse, and her genteel, melodious voice made the insults sound infinitely more obscene than the coarse and unmusical swearing of men.

"You slut, you drag-tailed whore," Tiagunova screamed. "I can't move an inch without seeing you flouncing up and down, and ogling. Isn't my old fool enough for you without your having to make eyes at a babe in arms, to seduce a minor?"

"So Vasia too is your legal husband?"

"I'll give you legal husband, you filthy plague! One more word from you, and I'll kill you, don't tempt me."

"Now, now, keep your hands to yourself. What do you want of me?"

"I want to see you dead, you lecherous louse, you cat in heat, you shameless bitch!"

"That's what I am, is it? Naturally, I'm nothing but a cat, a bitch, compared with such a grand lady as you! Born in the gutter, married in a ditch, a rat in your belly, and a hedgehog for a brat!…Help! Help! She'll kill me! Help a poor orphan, help a poor defenseless girl!"

"Come along," Antonina Alexandrovna urged her husband. "I can't bear to listen to it, it's too disgusting. It will end badly."

18

Suddenly everything changed—the weather and the landscape. The plains ended, and the track wound up hills through mountain country. The north wind that had been blowing all the time dropped, and a warm breath came from the south, as from an oven.

Here the woods grew on escarpments projecting from the mountain slopes, and when the track crossed them, the train had to climb sharply uphill until it reached the middle of the wood, and then go steeply down again.

The train creaked and puffed on its way into the wood, hardly able to drag itself along, as if it were an aged forest guard walking in front and leading the passengers, who turned their heads from side to side and observed whatever was to be seen.

But there was nothing yet to see. The woods were still deep in their winter sleep and peace. Only here and there, a branch would rustle and shake itself free of the remaining snow, as though throwing off a choker.

Yurii Andreievich was overcome with drowsiness. All these days he lay in his bunk and slept and woke and thought and listened. But there was nothing yet to hear.

19

While Yurii Andreievich slept his fill, the spring was heating and melting the masses of snow that had fallen all over Russia, first in Moscow on the day they had left and since then all along the way—all that snow they had spent three days clearing off the line at Ust-Nemdinsk, all that thick, deep layer of snow that had settled over the immense distances.

At first the snow thawed quietly and secretly from within. But by the time half the gigantic labor was done it could not be hidden any longer and the miracle became visible. Waters came rushing out from below with a roar. The forest stirred in its impenetrable depth, and everything in it awoke.

There was plenty of room for the water to play. It flung itself down the rocks, filled every pool to overflowing, and spread. It roared and smoked and steamed in the forest. It streaked through the woods, bogging down in the snow that tried to hinder its movement, it ran hissing on level ground or hurtled down and scattered into a fine spray. The earth was saturated. Ancient pine trees perched on dizzy heights drank the moisture almost from the clouds, and it foamed and dried a rusty white at their roots like beer foam on a mustache.

The sky, drunk with spring and giddy with its fumes, thickened with clouds. Low clouds, drooping at the edges like felt, sailed over the woods and rain leapt from them, warm, smelling of soil and sweat, and washing the last of the black armor-plating of ice from the earth.

Yurii Andreievich woke up, stretched, raised himself on one elbow, and looked and began to listen.

20

As they approached the mining region, there were more and more settlements, the runs were shorter, the stations more frequent. More people got on and off at the small stations. Instead of settling down and going to sleep, those who had only a short way to go found seats anywhere—near the door or in the middle of the car—and sat up arguing in low voices about local matters intelligible only to themselves.

From the hints dropped by such local passengers in the past three days Yurii Andreievich gathered that in the north the Whites were getting the upper hand and had seized or were about to occupy Yuriatin. Moreover, unless he had misheard the name or his old friend had a namesake, the White forces were led by Galiullin, whom he had last seen in Meliuzeievo.

Not to worry his family, he said nothing to them about these unconfirmed rumors.

21

Yurii Andreievich woke up shortly after midnight brimming with a vague feeling of happiness, which was, however, strong enough to have aroused him. The train was standing still. The station bathed in the glassy dusk of a white night. Something subtle and powerful in this luminous darkness suggested a vast and open landscape and that the station was situated high up.

People walked along the platform past the carriage speaking softly and treading as silently as shadows. Zhivago was touched by this evidence of a prewar consideration for the sleeping passengers.

The doctor was mistaken. There was the same din of shouting voices and stamping boots on this platform as on any other. But there was a waterfall near by. It widened the expanse of the white night by a breath of freshness and freedom; that was what had filled him with happiness in his sleep. Its incessant noise dominated all other sounds and gave an illusion of stillness.

Knowing nothing of its existence but soothed and braced by it, the doctor fell fast asleep.

Two men were talking underneath his bunk.

"Well, have they had their tails twisted yet? Are they keeping quiet now?"

"The shopkeepers, you mean?"

"That's right. The grain merchants."

"Feed out of your hand! As soon as a few were bumped off by way of example, all the others piped down. A fine has been imposed on the district."

"How much?"

"Forty thousand."

"You're lying!"

"Why should I lie?"

"Forty thousand—that isn't even chicken feed!"

"Not forty thousand rubles, of course—forty thousand bushels."

"That was smart!"

"Forty thousand of the finest ground."

"Well, that's not such a miracle, after all. It's rich soil. Right in the thick of the corn belt. From here on, along the Rynva till you get to Yuriatin, it's village to village, harbor to harbor, one wholesale after another."

"Don't shout. You'll wake people up."

"All right." He yawned.

"How about going to sleep? Looks as if we're moving."

The train, however, stayed where it was. But the rumble of another train came from behind, bursting into a deafening thunder and obliterating the sound of the waterfall as it approached, and an old-fashioned express rushed past at full speed on the parallel track, roared, hooted, winked its tail lights, and vanished into the distance ahead.

The conversation was resumed.

"Well, we're in for it. Now we'll never go."

"Yes. It won't be soon."

"It's an armored express—must be Strelnikov."

"Must be him."

"He's a wild beast when it comes to counter-revolutionaries."

"He's after Galeiev."

"Who's that?"

"Hetman Galeiev. They say he's outside Yuriatin with a Czech covering force. He's seized the harbors, the pest, and he's hanging on. Hetman Galeiev."

"Never heard of him."

"Or it may be Prince Galileiev. I can't quite remember the name."

"There aren't any such princes. Must be Ali Kurban. You've mixed them up."

"May be Kurban."

"That's more like it."

22

Toward morning Yurii Andreievich woke up a second time. He had had a pleasant dream. The feeling of bliss and liberation was still with him. Again the train was standing still, perhaps at the same station as before, possibly at another. Once more there was the sound of the waterfall, perhaps a different waterfall but more probably the same one.

He went back to sleep almost at once, and as he was dozing off he dimly heard the sound of running feet and of some commotion. Kostoied was quarrelling with the commander of the convoy and they were shouting at each other. The air was even more pleasant than before. It had a breath of something new in it, something that had not been there earlier—something magical, springlike, white, blackish, thin and insubstantial, like a snow flurry in May when the wet, melting flakes falling on the earth make it seem black rather than white. It was something transparent, blackish-white, sweet-smelling—"Wild cherry," Yurii Andreievich decided in his sleep.

23

Next morning Antonina Alexandrovna said:

"Really, Yura, you're extraordinary, you're a mass of contradictions. Sometimes a fly will wake you up and you can't get back to sleep till morning, and here you slept through all this row and I simply couldn't get you to wake up. Prituliev and Vasia have escaped, just think of it! And so have Tiagunova and Ogryzkova! Can you imagine such a thing! Wait, that isn't all. Voroniuk as well. It's true, I tell you, he's run away. Now listen. How they managed it, together or separately, and in what order—it's all a complete mystery. Voroniuk, of course, I understand—once he found the others had gone, he would have to try to save his skin. But what about the rest? Did they really all vanish of their own free will, or was somebody done away with? For instance, if the women are to be suspected, did Tiagunova kill Ogryzkova or was it the other way around? Nobody knows. The commander of the escort has been running up and down the train like a lunatic. 'You're not to start the train. I order you in the name of the law not to move till I've caught my prisoners.' And the commanding officer shouts back: 'I'm taking replacements up to the front, I'm not waiting for your lousy crew. What an idea!' Then they both went for Kostoied. 'You, a syndicalist, an educated man, how could you sit by and let a simple soldier, an ignorant child of nature, act in such a reckless manner! And you a populist!'[15] And Kostoied gave them as good as he got. That's interesting,' he says. 'The prisoner has to look after his guard, does he? Well, really, the day that happens the hens will start to crow.' I was shaking you as hard as I could. 'Yura,' I cried, 'get up, there's been an escape.' But nothing doing. If a gun had gone off in your ear you wouldn't have heard it.… But I'll tell you more later.… Look! Father, Yura, look, isn't the view superb!"

Through the opening in the window they could see the country covered with spring floods as far as eye could reach. Somewhere a river had overflowed its banks and the water had come right up to the embankment. In the foreshortened view from the bunk it looked as if the train were actually gliding on the water.

Only here and there was its smoothness broken by streaks of a metallic blue, but over all the rest of its surface the hot morning sun was chasing glassy patches of light as smooth and oily as melted butter that a cook brushes with a feather on a pie crust.

In this shoreless flood were sunk the shafts of the white clouds, their pediments submerged together with the fields, the hollows, and the bushes.

And somewhere in the middle of the flood there was a narrow strip of land with a row of doubled trees growing up and down and suspended between earth and sky.

"Look, a family of ducks!" Alexander Alexandrovich cried out.

"Where?"

"Near the island. More to the right. Damn, they've flown. We've frightened them."

"Yes, I see them now," said Yurii Andreievich. "I must have a talk with you, Alexander Alexandrovich. Some other time.… As for our labor conscripts and the women, good for them. And I'm sure there wasn't any murder. They just broke free like the water."

24

The white northern night was ending. Everything could be seen clearly—the mountain, the thicket, and the ravine—but seemed unreal, as though made up.

The wood, which had several blossoming wild cherries in it, was just coming into leaf. It grew under an overhanging cliff, on a narrow ledge above another precipice.

The waterfall, though not far away, could be seen only from the edge of the ravine beyond the thicket. Vasia was tired from walking to see it, to experience the joy and terror of the spectacle.

The waterfall had no equal anywhere around, nothing that could match it. This uniqueness endowed it with an awesome quality; it was like a living and conscious creature, a local dragon or winged serpent who levied tribute and preyed upon the countryside.

Halfway down, it broke on a sharp rock and divided in two. The top was almost motionless, but the two lower columns weaved slightly from side to side as if the water were continually slipping and righting itself, shaken but always recovering.

Vasia had spread his sheepskin on the ground and was lying at the edge of the thicket. When it grew lighter, a large bird with heavy wings flew down from the mountain, soared in a smooth circle around the wood, and settled on a pine close to where he lay. He looked up enchanted at its dark blue throat and gray-blue breast and whispered its Urals name, ronzha. Then he got up, picked up his sheepskin, flung it over his shoulders, and crossed the clearing to speak to his companion.

"Come on, Auntie Polia. Goodness, how cold you are! I can hear your teeth chattering. Well, what are you staring at, why are you so frightened? We've got to go, I'm telling you, we must get to a village. They'll hide us, they won't harm their own kind. If we go on like this we'll die of starvation. We've had nothing to eat for two days. Uncle Voroniuk must have raised a terrible hullabaloo, they must all be out looking for us. We have to go, Auntie; to put it plainly, we've got to run. I don't know what to do with you, Auntie, not a word out of you for two whole days. You worry too much, honest to God, you do. What are you so unhappy about? It isn't as if you'd meant to push Auntie Katia Ogryzkova off the train, you just caught her sideways, by accident, I saw you. She picked herself up off the grass—I saw her with my own eyes—and she got up and ran away. She and Uncle Prokhor, Prokhor Kharitonovich, are sure to catch up with us, we'll all be together again. The main thing is to stop worrying, then you'll find your tongue again."

Tiagunova got up, took Vasia's hand, and said softly:

"All right, let's go, lamb."

25

Their timbers creaking, the cars climbed up the steep hill. Below the bank there was a thicket, its top not quite reaching the level of the track. Lower still were fields. The floods had just withdrawn and the grass was strewn with sand and pieces of timber. The boards must have been washed down from somewhere higher up the hill where they had been stacked preparatory to floating them downstream.

The young wood below the embankment was still almost as bare as in winter. Only in the buds that spotted it all over like drops of candle grease there was something not in accord with the rest, something superfluous, some disturbance, perhaps dirt or an inflammation causing them to swell, and the disturbance, superfluity, and dirt were the signs of life, which had already set the most forward of the trees on fire with its green leafy flame.

Here and there a birch stretched itself like a martyr pierced by the barbs and arrows of its opening shoots, and you knew its smell by just looking at it, the smell of its glistening resin, which is used for making varnish.

Soon the tracks drew level with the place where the logs washed down by the flood might have come from. A cutting through the wood showed at a bend of the tracks; it was littered all over with chips and shavings, and there was a pile of timber in the middle. The engine braked and the train shuddered and stopped on the curve of the hill, bending slightly in a wide arc.

A few short barking hoots and shouts came from the engine, but the passengers did not need these signals to know that the engineer had stopped to take in a supply of fuel.

The freight-car doors rolled open, and a crowd the size of the population of a small town poured out. Only the sailors stayed in the front cars; they were excused from all chores.

There was not enough small firewood in the clearing to fill the tender, and some of the large timber had to be cut down to the right size. The engine crew had saws as part of their equipment and these were issued to volunteers, one to each pair, the doctor and his father-in-law among them.

Grinning sailors stuck their heads out of their doors. They were a curious mixture of middle-aged workingmen, straight from their emergency training, and boys just out of naval college who looked as if they had got in by mistake among the staid fathers of families and who joked and played the fool with the older sailors to keep themselves from thinking. All of them felt that their hour of trial was at hand.

Jokes and guffaws followed the work parties.

"Hey, Grandfather! I'm not shirking, I'm too young to work, my nanny won't let me." "Hey, Marva, don't saw off your skirt, you'll catch cold!" "Hey, young one, don't go to the wood, come and be my wife instead!"

26

There were several trestles in the clearing. Yurii Andreievich and Alexander Alexandrovich went up to one of them and began to saw.

This was the moment of spring when the earth emerges from the snow looking much as when the snow had trapped it six months earlier. The wood smelled of damp and was heaped with last year's leaves like an unswept room where people have been tearing up letters, bills, and receipts for years.

"Don't go so fast, you'll tire yourself," said the doctor, giving a slower and more even movement to the saw. "What about a rest?"

The wood echoed to the hoarse ringing of other saws; somewhere, very far away, a nightingale was trying out its voice, and at longer intervals a blackbird whistled as if blowing dust out of a flute. Even the engine steam rose into the sky warbling like milk boiling up on a nursery alcohol stove.

"What did you want to speak to me about?" asked Alexander Alexandrovich. "Do you remember? We were going past the island, the ducks flew away, and you said you wanted to speak to me."

"Oh, yes.… Well, I don't quite know how to put it briefly. I was thinking that we are going farther and farther. The whole of this region is in ferment. We don't know what we'll find when we get there. Perhaps we ought to talk things over just in case…I don't mean about our convictions—it would be absurd to try to define them in five minutes in a spring wood. Besides, we know each other well. You and I and Tonia and many others like us, we make up our own world these days, the only difference between us is in the degree of our awareness of it. But that's not what I want to talk about. What I meant was that perhaps we ought to agree in advance on how to behave under certain circumstances, so that we need never blush for one another or make each other feel ashamed."

"I know what you mean. I like the way you put it. Now this is what I'll tell you. Do you remember that night you brought me the paper with the first government decrees in the winter, in a snowstorm? You remember how unbelievably uncompromising they were? It was that single-mindedness that carried us away. But such things retain their original purity only in the minds of those who have conceived them, and then only on the day they are first made public. Next day, the casuistry of politics has turned them inside out. What can I say to you? Their philosophy is alien to me, their regime is hostile to us, I have not been asked if I consent to all this change. But I have been trusted, and my own actions, even if they were not freely chosen, put me under a certain obligation.

"Tonia keeps asking if we'll arrive in time to plant our vegetables. I don't know. I don't know the soil or the climate in the Urals; the summer is so short I can't imagine how anything ever ripens in time.

"But after all, it is not for the sake of gardening that we are going all this enormous distance. No, we had better face things honestly, our object is quite different. We are going to try to subsist in the modern fashion, taking our share in the squandering of old Krueger's properties, his factories and machines. We are not going to rebuild his fortune, but like everyone else and in the same incredibly chaotic way we'll fritter it away and lend a hand in the collective squandering of thousands for the sake of earning a kopek's worth of living. Not that I would take back the estate on the old terms, even if you showered me with gold. That would be as foolish as to start running about naked or trying to forget the alphabet. No, the age of private property in Russia is over, and anyway, we Gromekos lost our acquisitive passion a generation ago."

27

It was too hot and stuffy in the car to sleep. The doctor's pillow was soaked in sweat. Carefully, so as not to wake the others, he got down from his bunk and pushed open the car doors.

Sticky damp heat struck him in the face as if he had walked into a cobweb in a cellar. "Mist," he guessed. "Tomorrow will be scorching hot. That's why it is so airless and so heavy and oppressive now."

It was a big station, possibly a junction. Besides the mist and the stillness, there was a feeling of emptiness, of neglect, as if the train had been lost and forgotten. It must be standing at the farthest end of the station, and so great was the maze of tracks separating it from the station buildings that if, at the other end of the yard, the earth were to open and swallow up the station, no one in the train would have noticed it.

Two faint sounds could be heard in the distance.

Behind him, where they had come from, there was a rhythmic splashing, as if clothes were being rinsed or the wind were flapping a heavy, damp flag against a pole.

From ahead there came an even rumbling, which made the doctor, who had been at the front, prick up his ears. "Long-range guns," he decided after listening to the calmly echoing, low, sustained note.

"That's it, we're right at the front." He shook his head and jumped down from the car. He walked a few steps forward. Two cars farther up, the train ended; the rest had been uncoupled and had gone away with the engine.

"So that was why they were so keyed up yesterday," the doctor thought. "They had a feeling they would be thrown in as soon as we arrived."

He walked around the front car, meaning to cross the rails and look for the main part of the station, but a sentry with a rifle rose in his path.

"Where you going? Got a pass?"

"What is this station?"

"Never mind. Who are you?"

"I am a doctor from Moscow. My family and I are passengers on this train. Here are my papers."

"To hell with your papers. I'm not such a fool as to try to read in the dark. There's a mist—can't you see? I don't need any papers to know what kind of doctor you are. Those are more of your doctors shooting twelve-inch guns at us. Put an end to you, I would, but it's too soon for that. Get back now, while you're still in one piece."

"He's taking me for someone else," thought Zhivago. Clearly, it was no use arguing, better follow his advice before it was too late. He turned and walked the other way.

The gunfire was now at his back. There, behind him, was the east. There the sun had risen in a drift of mist and was peering dully through floating shadows, like a naked man through clouds of steam at the baths.

Zhivago walked down the length of the train and passed the end car. His feet sank deeper and deeper into soft sand.

The even sound of splashing came nearer. The ground sloped down steeply. He stopped, trying to make out the indistinct shapes in front of him; the mist made them unnaturally large. One more step, and the hulls of beached boats came up out of the dark. Before him was a wide river, its lazy ripples splashing slowly, wearily against the sides of the fishing smacks and the planks of landing stages along the shore.

A figure rose from the beach.

"Who gave you permission to prowl around?" asked another sentry with a rifle.

"What is this river?" shot out Yurii Andreievich, though he had firmly resolved not to ask any more questions.

By way of answer the sentry put his whistle to his mouth, but he was saved the trouble, for the first sentry, whom it was meant to summon, had evidently been following the doctor without a sound, and now joined his comrade. They stood talking.

"There's no doubt about it. You can tell this kind of bird at a glance. 'What's this station?' 'What's this river?' There's dust in your eyes! What do you say? Shall we take him straight to the jetty or to the train first?"

"I say to the train. See what the boss says.—Your documents," he barked. Grabbing the bunch of papers in his fist and calling back to someone: "Keep an eye on him," he strode away with the first sentry toward the station.

The third figure, whom Zhivago had not so far made out, was evidently a fisherman. He had been lying on the beach, but he now grunted, stirred, and set about enlightening the doctor on his position.

"It's lucky for you they're taking you to the boss. That may save your skin. But you mustn't blame them. They're only doing their duty. The people are on top nowadays. Perhaps it's even for the best in the long run, though there isn't much to be said for it now. They've made a mistake, you see. They've been hunting, hunting all the time, for a certain man. So they thought it was you. That's him, they thought, that's the enemy of the workers' state, we've got him. A mistake, that's all it is. If anything happens, insist on seeing the boss. Don't you let those two get away with anything. They're politically conscious, it's a misfortune, God help us. They'd think nothing of doing away with you. So, if they say 'Come along,' see you don't go. Say you must see the boss."

From the fisherman Yurii Andreievich learned that the river was the famous waterway, the Rynva, and that the station by the river served Razvilie, an industrial suburb of the town of Yuriatin. He also learned that Yuriatin, which lay a couple of miles upstream, seemed now to have been recaptured from the Whites. And that there had been troubles in Razvilie and that they too seemed to have been put down, the reason for the great stillness all around being that the station area had been cleared of civilians and strictly cordoned off. He learned finally that among the trains at the station which were used as military offices was the special train of Army Commissar Strelnikov, to whom the two sentries had gone to report.

A third sentry now came from the direction in which the two others had gone; he was distinguished from them chiefly by the fact that he pulled his rifle after him, the butt trailing on the ground, or propped it up in front of him like a tipsy friend who needed his support. This guard took the doctor to the commissar.

28

Sounds of laughter and movement came from one of the two coupled parlor cars to which the guard, after giving the password to the sentry, took the doctor, but they ceased the moment the two men went in.

The guard led the doctor down a narrow passage to a wide central compartment. It was a clean, comfortable room where tidy, well-dressed people worked in complete silence. The doctor had had a very different idea of the background of Strelnikov, the famous non-Party military expert who was the pride and terror of the region.

But undoubtedly the real center of his activities lay elsewhere, closer to the staff H.Q. and to the field of military operations. This could only be his personal suite, his private office and sleeping quarters.

Hence the stillness, rather like that in a steam bath with cork floors and attendants in soft slippers.

The office was in the former dining car, carpeted and with several desks in it.

"One moment," said a young officer whose desk was by the door. He nodded absent-mindedly, dismissing the guard who left, rattling his rifle butt on the metal strips nailed across the floor of the passage. After this, everyone felt free to forget the doctor and paid no more attention to him.

From where he stood at the entrance he could see his papers lying on a desk at the far end of the room. The desk was occupied by a man who was older than the rest and who looked like an old-style colonel. He was an army statistician of some sort. Mumbling to himself, he consulted reference books, studied field maps, checked, compared, cut out, and pasted things in. After looking around at every window in the room he announced: "It's going to be hot," as though forced to this conclusion only by the examination of all the windows.

An army electrician was crawling about on the floor mending a broken wire. When he reached the desk by the door the young officer got up to make room for him. At the next table a typist in an army leather jacket was struggling with her typewriter; its carriage had slipped and got stuck. The young officer stood over her and examined the cause of the mishap from above while the electrician crawled in under her desk and examined it from below. The old-style colonel got up and joined them, and all four busied themselves with the typewriter.

This made Yurii Andreievich feel better. These people must know his fate better than he did; it was hardly likely that they would be so unconcerned and so busy with trifles in the presence of a man whom they considered doomed.

"And yet who knows?" he reflected. "Why are they so unconcerned? Guns are going off and people are dying, and they calmly prognosticate heat—not the heat of the battle but of the weather. Perhaps, after all, they have seen so much that they have no sensibility left."

To occupy himself, he stared across the room through the window opposite.

29

He could see the edge of the tracks and higher up the hill the station and the suburb of Razvilie.

Three flights of unpainted wooden steps led from the platforms to the station building.

At the end of the tracks there was a large graveyard for old engines. Locomotives without tenders, with smokestacks shaped like the tops of knee boots or like beakers, stood smokestack to smokestack amid piles of scrap.

The engine graveyard below and the human graveyard above, the crumpled iron on the tracks and the rusty iron of the roofs and shop signs of the suburb, composed a single picture of neglect and age under the white sky scalded by the early morning heat.

Living in Moscow, Yurii Andreievich had forgotten how many shop signs there still were in other towns and how much of the façades they covered. Some of those he was seeing now were so large that he could read them easily from where he stood, and they came down so low over the crooked windows of the sagging one-story buildings that the squat little houses were almost hidden by them like the faces of village children in their fathers' caps.

The mist had gone from the west, and now what remained of it in the east stirred, swayed, and parted like the curtain of a stage.

And there, on a hill above Razvilie and a mile or two beyond it, stood a large town, the size of a provincial capital. The sun warmed its colors and the distance simplified its lines. It clung to the summit of the hill in tiers, house by house and street by street, with a big church in the middle on the top, as in a cheap color print of a desert monastery or of Mount Athos.

"Yuriatin," the doctor thought excitedly. "The town I used to hear about so often from Anna Ivanovna and from Nurse Antipova. How strange that I should see it in these circumstances!"

At that moment the attention of the military was diverted from the typewriter to something they could see from one of the other windows, and the doctor looked around.

A group of prisoners was being taken under guard up the station steps. Among them was a boy in a school uniform who was wounded in the head. He had received first aid, but a trickle of blood seeped through the bandage and he kept smudging it with his hand over his dark sweaty face. Walking between two Red Army men at the tail of the procession, he attracted notice not only by his resolute air, his good looks, and the pathos of so young a rebel's plight, but by the utter absurdity of his own and his two companions' gestures. They were doing exactly the opposite of what they should have done.

He was still wearing his school cap. It slithered continually from his bandaged head, and instead of taking it off and carrying it in his hand he rammed it back each time, disturbing the bandage and the wound, and in this his two guards assisted him readily.

In this absurdity, so contrary to common sense, the doctor saw a profound symbol. He longed to rush out and address the boy in words that were impatiently welling up inside him. He longed to shout to him and to the people in the railway coach that salvation lay not in loyalty to forms but in throwing them off.

He turned away. Strelnikov came in with long, vigorous strides and stood in the middle of the room.

How was it possible that he, a doctor, with his countless acquaintances, had never until this day come across anything so definite as this man's personality? How was it that they had never been thrown together, that their paths had not crossed?

In some inexplicable way it was clear at once that this man was entirely a manifestation of the will. So completely was he the self he resolved to be that everything about him seemed inevitable, exact, perfect—his well-proportioned, handsomely set head, his impetuous step, his long legs, his knee boots which may well have been muddy but looked polished, and his gray serge tunic which may have been creased but looked as if it were made of the best linen and had just been pressed.

Such was the irresistible effect of his brilliance, his unaffected ease, and his sense of being at home in any conceivable situation on earth.

He must certainly, Yurii Andreievich thought, be possessed of a remarkable gift, but it was not necessarily the gift of originality. This talent, which showed itself in his every movement, might well be the talent of imitation. In those days everyone modelled himself on someone else—they imitated heroes of history, or the men who had struck their imagination by winning fame in the fighting at the front or in the streets, or those who had great prestige with the people, or this or that comrade who had won distinction, or simply one another.

Strelnikov politely concealed any surprise or annoyance he may have felt at the presence of a stranger. He addressed his staff, treating him as if he belonged among them.

He said: "Congratulations. We have driven them back. It all seems more like playing at war than serious business, because they are as Russian as we are, only stuffed with nonsense—they won't give it up, so we have to beat it out of them. Their commander was my friend. His origin is even more proletarian than mine. We grew up in the same house. He has done a great deal for me in my life and I am deeply indebted to him. And here I am rejoicing that we have thrown them back beyond the river and perhaps even farther. Hurry up with that connection, Gurian, we need the telephone, we can't possibly manage with only messengers and the telegraph. Have you noticed how hot it is? I managed to get in an hour's sleep, just the same. Oh, yes!" He turned to the doctor, remembering that he had been waked up to deal with some nonsense in connection with this man.

"This man?" Strelnikov thought, looking him over sharply. "Nonsense! He's nothing like him. Fools!" He laughed, and said to Yurii Andreievich:

"My apologies, comrade. They mistook you for someone else. My sentries got mixed up. You are free to go. Where are the comrade's work papers? Ah, here are your documents. May I just have a glance…Zhivago…Zhivago…Doctor Zhivago…Moscow…How about going to my place for a moment? This is the secretariat, I'm in the next car. This way, I won't keep you long."

30

Who, in fact, was Strelnikov?

That he should have reached and held his position was remarkable, for he was a non-Party man. He had been totally unknown because, though born in Moscow, he had gone straight from the university to the provinces as a teacher, and in the war had been taken prisoner, reported missing, believed killed, and had only recently come back from German captivity.

He was recommended and vouched for by Tiverzin, a railway worker of advanced political views in whose family he had lived as a child. Those who controlled appointments were impressed by him: in those days of inordinate rhetoric and political extremism his revolutionary fervor, equally unbridled, was remarkable for its genuineness. His fanaticism was not an imitation but was his own, a natural consequence of all his previous life.

Strelnikov justified the confidence of the authorities.

His fighting record over the past few months included the actions at Nizhni Kelmes and Ust-Nemdinsk, the suppression of the Gubysov peasants who had put up armed resistance to food levies, and of the men of the 14th Infantry who had plundered a food convoy. He had also dealt with Stenka Razin soldiers, who had started an uprising in the town of Turkatui and gone over to the Whites, and with the mutiny at Chirkin Us, where a loyal commander had been killed.

In each case, he had taken his enemies by surprise and had investigated, tried, sentenced, and enforced his sentence with speed, severity, and resolution.

He had brought the epidemic of desertions in this whole region under control and had successfully reorganized the recruiting bodies. As a result, conscription went ahead and the Red Army reception centers were working overtime.

Finally, when the White pressure from the north increased and the position became admittedly grave, Strelnikov was entrusted with new responsibilities, military, strategic, and operational. His interventions produced immediate results.

Strelnikov ("the shooter") knew that rumor had nicknamed him Razstrelnikov, the Executioner. He took this in his stride; he was disturbed by nothing.

He was a native of Moscow, and his father was a worker who had been sent to prison for taking part in the revolution of 1905. He did not participate in the revolutionary movement in those years, first because he was too young, and at the university because young men who come from a poor background value higher education more and work harder than the children of the rich. The ferment among other students left him uninvolved. He absorbed an immense amount of information and after taking his degree in the humanities trained himself later in science and mathematics.

Exempted from the army, he enlisted voluntarily, was commissioned, sent to the front, and captured, and on hearing of the revolution in Russia he escaped in 1917 and came home. He had two characteristic features, two passions: an unusual power of clear and logical reasoning, and a great moral purity and sense of justice; he was ardent and honorable.

But he would not have made a scientist of the sort who break new ground. His intelligence lacked the capacity for bold leaps into the unknown, the sudden flashes of insight that transcend barren, logical deductions.

And if he were really to do good, he would have needed, in addition to his principles, a heart capable of violating them—a heart which knows only of particular, not of general, cases, and which achieves greatness in little actions.

Filled with the loftiest aspirations from his childhood, he had looked upon the world as a vast arena where everyone competed for perfection, keeping scrupulously to the rules. When he found that this was not so, it did not occur to him that his conception of the world order might have been oversimplified. He nursed his grievance and with it the ambition to judge between life and the dark forces that distorted it, and to be life's champion and avenger.

Embittered by his disappointment, he was armed by the revolution.

31

"Zhivago," repeated Strelnikov when they were settled in his room. "Zhivago…Trade. I think. Or upper class…Well, of course, a Moscow doctor…Going to Varykino. That's strange, why should you leave Moscow for such a provincial hole?"

"That's just the idea. In search of quiet, seclusion, and obscurity."

"Well, well, how romantic! Varykino? I know most of the places around here. That used to be Krueger's estate. You aren't related to him, by any chance? You don't happen to be his heir?"

"Why the irony? Being his 'heir' has nothing to do with it. Though it is true that my wife ..."

"Ah, so you see! But if you're feeling nostalgic for the Whites I'm going to disappoint you. You're too late. We've cleared the district."

"You're still making fun of me?"

"And then, a doctor. An army medical officer. And we're at war. That really is my business. You're a deserter. The Greens[16] are also seeking refuge in the woods. Your reasons?"

"I have been wounded twice and discharged as an invalid."

"Next you'll be handing me a reference from the People's Commissariat of Education or Health to prove that you are a Soviet citizen, a 'sympathizer,' 'entirely loyal.' These are apocalyptic times, my dear sir, this is the Last Judgment. This is a time for angels with flaming swords and winged beasts from the abyss, not for sympathizers and loyal doctors. However, I told you you were free, and I won't go back on my word. But remember, it's for this once. I have a feeling that we'll meet again, and then our conversation will be quite different. Watch out."

Neither the threat nor the challenge disturbed Yurii Andreievich. He said: "I know what you think of me. From your point of view you are right. But the issue you wish me to discuss with you is one I have been arguing with an imaginary accuser all my life, and it would be odd if I had not by now reached some conclusion. Only I could not put it into a couple of words. So if I am really free, permit me to leave without having it out with you. If I am not, then you must decide what to do with me. I have no excuses to make to you."

They were interrupted by the telephone. The line was repaired. Strelnikov picked up the receiver.

"Thanks, Gurian. Now be a good fellow and send somebody along to see Comrade Zhivago to his train; I don't want any more accidents. And give me the Razvilie Cheka Transport Department."

When Zhivago had gone, Strelnikov telephoned the railway station.

"There's a schoolboy they've brought in, keeps pulling his cap over his ears and he's got a bandaged head, it's disgraceful.—That's right.—He's to have medical aid if he needs it.—Certainly.—Yes, like the apple of your eye, you'll be responsible to me personally.—Food, too, if necessary. That's right. Now, let's get down to business.… I'm still talking, don't cut me off. Damn, there's somebody else on the line. Gurian! Gurian! They've cut me off."

He gave up trying to finish his conversation for the time being. "It could be one of my former pupils," he thought. "Fighting us, now he's big." He counted up the years since he had stopped teaching to see if the boy could have been his pupil. Then he looked out of the window toward the panorama of the horizon, and searched for the part of Yuriatin where they had lived. Suppose his wife and daughter were still there! Couldn't he go to them? Why not now, this very minute? Yes, but how could he? They belonged to another life. First he must see this one through, this new life, then he could go back to the one that had been interrupted. Someday he would do it. Someday. But when, when?

PART TWO

EIGHT

Arrival

 

The train that had brought the Zhivago family was still on a siding behind several other trains that screened it from the station, yet they had a feeling that their connection with Moscow—which till now had remained unbroken—snapped that morning, that it had come to an end. Here began another territory, a different, provincial world, which had a center of gravity of its own.

Here people were closer together than in the capitals. Although the station area was cleared of civilians and surrounded by Red Army units, passengers for the local trains managed in some unaccountable way to get to the tracks, to "infiltrate," as we would say today. They had already crammed the cars, thronging in the open sliding doors, and they walked back and forth along the train and stood in small groups on the embankment.

All of them, without exception, were acquainted; they waved and called out as soon as they caught sight of each other, and they exchanged greetings as they passed. Their speech and dress, their food and manners, were all a little different from those of people in the capitals.

"How do they earn their living?" the doctor wondered. What were their interests and their material resources, how did they cope with the difficulties of the times, how did they evade the laws?

All these questions were soon answered in the most vivid way.

2

Escorted by the sentry who dragged his rifle after him or used it as a walking stick, the doctor went back to his carriage. It was a sultry day. The hot sun beat down on the rails and the roofs of the cars. The black puddles of oil on the ground blazed with a yellow shimmer, like gold leaf.

The sentry's rifle butt plowed a furrow in the sand. It clinked against the ties.

"The weather has settled," he was saying. "Time for the spring sowing—oats, wheat, millet—it's the best time. It's too early for the buckwheat, though. Where I come from we sow the buckwheat on the Feast of Akulina. I'm not from these parts, I come from Morshansk, in the Tambov government. Eh, Comrade Doctor, if it wasn't for this here civil war and this plague of a counterrevolution, do you think I'd be wasting my time in strange parts at this season? The class war has run between us like the black cat of discord, and just look at what it's doing."

3

Hands stretched out of the carriage to help him up.

"Thanks, I can manage."

Yurii Andreievich hoisted himself into the car, and after regaining his balance embraced his wife.

"At last! Thank God, it's ended well," she said. "Actually, we knew you were all right."

"What do you mean, you knew?"

"We knew everything."

"How?"

"The sentries told us. How could we have stood it otherwise? As it is, Father and I nearly went out of our minds. There he is, he's fast asleep, you can't wake him, sleeping like a log after all the excitement. There are several new passengers, I'll introduce you in a moment, but listen to what everybody's talking about—they are all congratulating you on your lucky escape. Here he is," she said suddenly, turning and introducing her husband over her shoulder to one of the new passengers who was hemmed in by the crowd at the back of the freight car.

"Samdeviatov," the stranger introduced himself, raising his soft hat over other people's heads and pushing his way forward through the press of bodies.

"Samdeviatov," thought the doctor. "With a name like that he ought to have come straight out of an old Russian ballad, complete with a bushy beard, a smock, and a studded belt. But he makes you think of the local Arts Club, with his graying curls, mustache, goatee ..."

"Well, did Strelnikov give you a fright?" said Samdeviatov. "Tell the truth."

"No, why? We had an interesting talk Certainly he has a powerful personality."

"I should think so. I've got some idea of what he's like. He's not from these parts. He's one of you Moscow people. Like all our newfangled things. They too are imported from the capital. We wouldn't have thought of them ourselves."

"Yurochka, this is Anfim Efimovich, he knows everything," Antonina Alexandrovna said. "He's heard about you and about your father, and he knew my grandfather—he knows everyone, absolutely everyone!—I suppose you must have met the schoolteacher, Antipova?" she slipped in casually, and Samdeviatov replied just as casually: "What about Antipova?" Yurii Andreievich heard this exchange but did not say anything, and his wife went on: "Anfim Efimovich is a Bolshevik. Be on your guard, Yurochka. You must watch your tongue when he is around."

"Really? I'd never have thought so. I'd have taken him for an artist of some sort."

"My father kept an inn," said Samdeviatov. "He had seven troikas on the road. But I went to the university, and it's true that I'm a Social Democrat."

"Listen to what Anfim Efimovich told me, Yurochka, and by the way, if you don't mind my saying so, Anfim Efimovich, your name is a real tongue-twister!—So, listen, Yurochka, we've been terribly lucky. We can't change at Yuriatin—part of the town is on fire and the bridge has been blown up, you can't get through. Our train will be switched to another line, and that line happens to be just the one we need to get to Torfianaia. Isn't it wonderful! We don't have to change and lug all our stuff from one station to another. On the other hand, we'll be shunted back and forth for hours before we really start off. Anfim Efimovich told me all that."

4

Antonina Alexandrovna was right. Cars were coupled and uncoupled, and the train was shifted endlessly from one congested line to another where other trains blocked its way into the open country.

The town lay in the distance partly hidden by the rolling countryside. Only now and then did its roofs, the chimneys of its factories, and the crosses on its belfries emerge above the horizon. One of its suburbs was on fire. The smoke drifted across the sky looking like a gigantic horse's mane blowing in the wind.

The doctor and Samdeviatov sat on the floor of the freight car, their legs dangling over the side. Samdeviatov kept pointing into the distance and explaining what they saw to Yurii Andreievich. Every now and then the train would jerk noisily and drown his voice, and he would lean across bringing his mouth close to the doctor's ear and repeat what he had said, shouting himself hoarse.

"That's a movie house, the 'Giant,' they've set on fire. The cadets were holding it, though they'd surrendered earlier. Otherwise, the fighting isn't over yet. You see those black dots on the belfry? Those are our people, sniping at the Czechs."

"I can't see a thing. How can you see them at such a distance?"

"That's the artisans' quarter, Khokhriki, burning over there. Kholodeievo, the shopping center, is farther on. I'm interested because our inn is there. Luckily, it's only a small fire, it hasn't spread. So far the center has remained intact."

"What did you say? I can't hear you."

"I said the center, the center of the town—the cathedral, the library…Our name, Samdeviatov, is a garbled Russian form of San Donate. We're supposed to be descended from the Demidovs."

"I still can't hear."

"I said Samdeviatov is a form of San Donato. They say we are a branch of the Demidov family, the Princess Demidov San Donato. But it may be just a family legend. This place here is called Spirka's Dell. It's full of summer houses and amusement parks. Strange name, isn't it?"

Before them extended a field crisscrossed by branch tracks. Telegraph poles strode away to the horizon like giants in seven-league boots, and the broad winding ribbon of a highway competed in beauty with the tracks. It vanished beyond the horizon, reappeared in a broad arc at a turn, and again vanished.

"That's our famous highway. It runs right across Siberia. The convicts used to sing songs about it. Now it's the operational base of the partisans.… You'll like it here, you know, it's not at all bad. You'll get used to it. You'll get to like the curiosities of the town. Our water pumps, for instance. The women queue up for water at the intersections, it's their open-air club through the winter."

"We are not going to live in town. We're going to Varykino."

"I know. Your wife told me. Still, you'll be coming in to town on business. I guessed who your wife was the moment I saw her. She's the living image of Krueger—eyes, nose, forehead—just like her grandfather. Everyone here remembers him."

There were round red oil tanks in the field, and large advertisements on wooden billboards. One of them caught the doctor's eye twice. It bore the inscription: "Moreau & Vetchinkin. Mechanical seeders. Threshing machines."

"That was a good firm. Their agricultural machinery was first-rate."

"I can't hear. What did you say?"

"A good firm, I said. Can you hear? A good firm. They made agricultural machinery. It was a corporation. My father was a stockholder."

"I thought you said he kept an inn."

"He did. That didn't mean he couldn't have stock. Very shrewd investments he made, too. He had money in the 'Giant.' "

"You sound as if you were proud of it."

"Of my father being shrewd? Of course I am."

"But what about your socialism?"

"Good Lord, what has that got to do with it? Why on earth should a man, because he is a Marxist, be a drivelling idiot? Marxism is a positive science, a theory of reality, a philosophy of history."

"Marxism a science? Well, it's taking a risk, to say the least, to argue about that with a man who hardly knows. However—Marxism is too uncertain of its ground to be a science. Sciences are more balanced, more objective. I don't know a movement more self-centered and further removed from the facts than Marxism. Everyone is worried only about proving himself in practical matters, and as for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of their infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore the truth. Politics doesn't appeal to me. I don't like people who don't care about the truth."

Samdeviatov took the doctor's words for the fooling of a witty eccentric. He listened with a smile, and did not contradict him.

The train was still being shunted. Every time it reached the "go" signal, an elderly woman with a milk can tied to her belt, who was on duty at the switch, shifted her knitting, bent down, and moved the lever, sending the train back. As it slowly rolled away she sat up and shook her fist at it.

Samdeviatov took this personally. "Why does she do that?" he wondered. "Her face is familiar. Can it be Tuntseva? No, I don't think it can be Glasha. She looks too old. Anyway, what has she got against me? I suppose, what with Mother Russia in the throes of her upheavals and the railways in a muddle, the poor old thing is having a bad time, so she is taking it out on me. Oh, to hell with her!—Why should I rack my brains about her?"

At long last the woman waved her flag, shouted something to the engineer, and let the train past the signals, out into the open; but as the fourteenth car sped by she stuck her tongue out at the two men chatting on the floor, who had got on her nerves. Once again Samdeviatov wondered.

5

When the outskirts of the burning town, the round oil tanks, telegraph poles, and advertisements had vanished in the distance, giving way to a landscape of woods and low hills with occasional glimpses of the winding road, Samdeviatov said:

"Let's go back to our seats. I have to get off soon and your station is the one after the next. Be careful you don't miss it."

"I suppose you know all this area very well?"

"Like my own back yard. Up to a hundred-mile radius. I'm a lawyer, you know. Twenty years of practice. I'm always travelling about on business."

"Even now?"

"Certainly."

"But what kind of business can there be, these days?"

"Anything you please. Old unfinished deals, business operations, breaches of contract. I'm up to my ears in it."

"But haven't all such activities been abolished?"

"Of course they have, nominally. But in practice people are asked to do all sorts of things, sometimes mutually exclusive. There's the nationalization of all enterprises, but the municipal soviet needs fuel, and the Provincial Economic Council wants transportation. And everyone wants to live. This is a transitional period, when there is still a gap between theory and practice. At a time like this you need shrewd, resourceful people like myself. Blessed is the man who doesn't see too much. Also an occasional punch on the jaw doesn't come amiss, as my father used to say. Half the province depends on me for its livelihood. I'll be dropping in at Varykino about timber one of these days. Not just yet, though. You can't get there except by horse, and my horse is lame. Otherwise you wouldn't catch me jolting along on this pile of scrap. Look at the way it crawls. Calls itself a train! I might be useful to you in Varykino. I know those Mikulitsyns of yours inside out."

"Do you know why we are going there, what we want to do?"

"More or less. I have an idea. Man's eternal longing to go back to the land. The dream of living by the sweat of your brow."

"What's wrong with it? You sound disapproving."

"It's naïve and idyllic, but why not? Good luck to you. Only I don't believe in it. It's Utopian. Arts and craftsy!"

"How do you think Mikulitsyn will receive us?"

"He won't let you in, he'll drive you out with a broomstick, and he'll be quite right! He's in a fine pickle as it is. Idle factories, workers gone, no means of livelihood, no food, and then you turn up. If he murders you, I won't blame him!"

"There you are. You are a Bolshevik, and yet you yourself don't deny that what's going on isn't life—it's madness, an absurd nightmare."

"Of course it is. But it's historically inevitable. It has to be gone through."

"Why is it inevitable?"

"Are you a baby, or are you just pretending? Have you dropped from the moon? Gluttons and parasites sat on the backs of the starving workers and drove them to death, and you imagine things could stay like that? Not to mention all the other forms of outrage and tyranny. Don't you understand the rightness of the people's anger, of their desire for justice, for truth? Or do you think a radical change was possible through the Duma, by parliamentary methods, and that we can do without dictatorship?"

"We are talking at cross-purposes, and even if we argued for a hundred years we'd never see eye to eye. I used to be very revolutionary, but now I think that nothing can be gained by brute force. People must be drawn to good by goodness. But let's drop the subject. To return to Mikulitsyn—if that's what is in store for us, then why are we going? We should turn back."

"Nonsense. To begin with, Mikulitsyn is not the only pebble on the beach. And second, Mikulitsyn is kind to excess, almost criminally kind. He'll make a fuss and refuse and resist, and then he'll relent. He'll give you the shirt off his back and share his last crust of bread with you." And Samdeviatov told Yurii Andreievich Mikulitsyn's story.