CHAPTER NINE

Varykino

1

In the winter, when Yurii Andreievich had more time, he began a notebook. He wrote: “How often, last summer, I felt like saying with Tiutchev:

‘What a summer, what a summer!

This is magic indeed.

And how, I ask you, did it come

Just like that, out of the blue?’

What happiness, to work from dawn to dusk for your family and for yourself, to build a roof over their heads, to till the soil to feed them, to create your own world, like Robinson Crusoe, in imitation of the Creator of the universe, and, as your own mother did, to give birth to yourself, time and again.

“So many new thoughts come into your head when your hands are busy with hard physical work, when your mind has set you a task that can be achieved by physical effort and that brings its reward in joy and success, when for six hours on end you dig or hammer, scorched by the life-giving breath of the sky. And it isn’t a loss but a gain that these transient thoughts, intuitions, analogies are not put down on paper but forgotten. The town recluse whipping up his nerves and his imagination with strong black coffee and tobacco doesn’t know the strongest drug of all—good health and real necessity.

“I am not going further than this. I am not preaching Tolstoyan austerity and the return to the land, I am not trying to improve on socialism and its solution to the agrarian problem. I am merely stating a fact, I am not building a system on the basis of our own accidental experience. Our example is debatable and unsuitable for deductions. Our economy is too mixed. What we produce ourselves—potatoes and vegetables—is only a small part of what we need; the rest comes from other sources.

“Our use of the land is illegal. We have taken the law into our own hands, and we conceal what we are doing from the state. The wood we cut is stolen, and it is no excuse that we steal from the state or that the property once belonged to Krueger. We can do all this thanks to Mikulitsyn’s tolerant attitude (he lives in much the same way as we do), and we can do it safely because we are far from the town, where, fortunately, nothing is known, for the time being, about our illegal activities.

“I have given up practicing medicine, and I don’t tell anyone that I am a physician, because I don’t want to restrict my freedom. But there are always some good souls who get wind of the fact that there is a doctor in Varykino. So they trudge twenty miles to consult me, and bring a chicken or eggs, or butter, or something. And there is no way to persuade them that I don’t want to be paid, because people don’t believe in the effectiveness of free medical advice. So my practice brings in a little. But our chief mainstay, Mikulitsyn’s and ours, is Samdeviatov.

“He is a fantastically complicated character. I can’t make him out. He is a genuine supporter of the revolution and he fully deserves the confidence that the Yuriatin Soviet has in him. With all the powers they have given him he could requisition the Varykino timber without so much as telling Mikulitsyn or us, and he knows that we wouldn’t protest. On the other hand, if he felt like robbing the state, he could fill his pocket and again no one would say a word. He has no need to bribe or share with anybody. What, then, is it that makes him take care of us; help the Mikulitsyns, and everyone in the district, for instance, the stationmaster at Torfianaia? All the time he is on the road, getting hold of something to bring us. He is just as familiar with Dostoievsky’s Possessed as with the Communist Manifesto, and he talks about them equally well. I have the impression that if he didn’t complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.”

2

A little later the doctor wrote:

“We are living in two rooms in a wooden annex at the back of the old house. When Anna Ivanovna was a child Krueger used it for special servants—the dressmaker, the housekeeper, and the retired nurse.

“It was pretty dilapidated when we came, but we repaired it fairly quickly. With the help of experts we rebuilt the stove, which serves both rooms. We have rearranged the flues and it gives more heat.

“In this part of the grounds the old garden has vanished, obliterated by new growth. But now, in winter, when everything is inanimate, living nature no longer covers the dead; in snowy outline the past can be read more clearly.

“We have been lucky. The autumn was dry and warm. It gave us time to dig up the potatoes before the rains and the cold weather. Not counting those we gave back to Mikulitsyn, we had twenty sacks. We put them in the biggest bin in the cellar and covered them with old blankets and hay. We also put down two barrels of salted cucumbers and two of sauerkraut prepared by Tonia. Fresh cabbages hang in pairs from the beams. There are carrots buried in dry sand, and radishes and beets and turnips, and plenty of peas and beans are stored in the loft. There is enough firewood in the shed to last us till spring.

“I love the warm, dry winter breath of the cellar, the smell of earth, roots, and snow that hits you the moment you raise the trap door as you go down in the early hours before the winter dawn, a weak, flickering light in your hand.

“You come out; it is still dark. The door creaks or perhaps you sneeze or the snow crunches under your foot, and hares start up from the far cabbage patch and hop away, leaving the snow crisscrossed with tracks. In the distance dogs begin to bark and it is a long time before they quiet down. The cocks have finished their crowing and have nothing left to say. Then dawn breaks.

“Besides the tracks the hares, the endless snowy plain is patterned by those of lynxes, stretching across it neatly, like strings of beads. The lynx walks like a cat, putting one paw down in front of the other, and they say it travels many miles in a night.

“Traps are set for them, but instead of the lynxes the wretched hares get caught, half buried in the snow, and are taken out, frozen stiff.

“At the beginning, during spring and summer, we had a very hard time. We drove ourselves to the utmost. But now we can relax in the winter evenings. Thanks to Samdeviatov, who supplies us with kerosene, we sit around a lamp. The women sew or knit, Alexander Alexandrovich or I read aloud. The stove is hot, and I, as the appointed stoker, watch it for the right moment to close the damper so as not to waste any heat. If a charred log prevents the fire from drawing properly, I remove it and run out with it smoking and fling it as far as possible into the snow. It flies through the air like a torch, throwing off sparks and lighting up the white rectangular lawns of the sleeping park and then buries itself, hissing, in a snowdrift.

“We read and reread War and Peace, Evgenii Onegin and Pushkin’s other poems, and Russian translations of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, and Kleist’s short stories.”

3

As spring approached, the doctor wrote:

“I believe Tonia is pregnant. I told her and she doesn’t believe it, but I feel sure of it. The early symptoms are unmistakable to me, I don’t have to wait for the later, more certain ones.

“A woman’s face changes at such a time. It isn’t that she becomes less attractive, but her appearance is no longer quite under her control. She is now ruled by the future which she carries within her, she is no longer alone. Her loss of control over her appearance makes her seem physically at a loss; her face dims, her skin coarsens, her eyes shine in a different way, not as she wants them to, it is as if she couldn’t quite cope with all these things and has neglected herself.

“Tonia and I have never drifted apart, but this year of work has brought us even closer together. I have noticed how efficient, strong, and tireless she is, how cleverly she plans her work, so as to waste as little time as possible between one job and another.

“It has always seemed to me that every conception is immaculate and that this dogma, concerning the Mother of God, expresses the idea of all motherhood.

“At childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone. At this vital moment the man’s part is as irrelevant as if he had never had anything to do with it, as though the whole thing had dropped from heaven.

“It is the woman, by herself, who brings forth her progeny, and carries it off to some remote corner of existence, a quiet, safe place for a crib. Alone, in silence and humility, she feeds and rears the child.

“The Mother of God is asked to ‘pray zealously to her Son and her God,’ and the words of the psalm are put into her mouth: ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For He hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.’ It is because of her child that she says this, He will magnify her (‘For He that is mighty hath done to me great things’): He is her glory. Any woman could say it. For every one of them, God is in her child. Mothers of great men must have been familiar with this feeling, but then, all women are mothers of great men—it isn’t their fault if life disappoints them later.”

4

“We go on endlessly rereading Evgenii Onegin and the poems. Samdeviatov came yesterday and brought presents—nice things to eat and kerosene for the lamps. We have endless discussions about art.

“I have always thought that art is not a category, not a realm covering innumerable concepts and derivative phenomena, but that, on the contrary, it is something concentrated, strictly limited. It is a principle that is present in every work of art, a force applied to it and a truth worked out in it. And I have never seen art as form but rather as a hidden, secret part of content. All this is as clear to me as daylight. I feel it in every bone of my body, but it’s terribly difficult to express or to define this idea.

“A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways—by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov’s crime.

“Primitive art, the art of Egypt, Greece, our own—it is all, I think, one and the same art through thousands of years. You can call it an idea, a statement about life, so all-embracing that it can’t be split up into separate words; and if there is so much as a particle of it in any work that includes other things as well, it outweighs all the other ingredients in significance and turns out to be the essence, the heart and soul of the work.”

5

“A slight chill, a cough, probably a bit of temperature. Gasping all day long, the feeling of a lump in my throat. I am in a bad way. It is my heart. The first symptoms that I have inherited my poor mother’s heart—she suffered from it all her life. Can it really be that? So soon? If so, my tenure in this world is short.

“A faint smell of charcoal in the room. A smell of ironing. Tonia is ironing, every now and then she gets a coal out of the stove and puts it in the iron, and the lid of the iron snaps over it like a set of teeth. It reminds me of something, but I can’t think of what. Must be my condition.

“To celebrate Samdeviatov’s gift of soap we have had two washing days and Sashenka has been running wild. As I write he sits astride the crosspiece under the table and, imitating Samdeviatov, who takes him out in his sleigh whenever he comes, pretends that he is giving me a ride.

“As soon as I feel better I must go to the town library and read up on the ethnography and history of the region. They say the library has had several important donations and is exceptionally good. I have an urge to write. But I’ll have to hurry. It will be spring before we know where we are—and then there’ll be no time for reading or writing.

“My headache gets worse and worse. I slept badly. Had a muddled dream of the kind you forget as you wake up. All that remained in my memory was the part that woke me up. It was a woman’s voice, I heard it in my dream, sounding in the air. I remembered it and kept hearing it in my mind and going through the list of our women friends—I tried to think of someone who spoke in that deep, soft, husky voice. It didn’t belong to any of them. I thought it might be Tonia’s, and that I had become so used to her that I no longer heard the tone of her voice. I tried to forget that she was my wife and to become sufficiently detached to find out. But it wasn’t her voice either. It remains a mystery.

“About dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something that has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it’s just the contrary.

“Often it’s something you paid no attention to at the time—a vague thought that you didn’t bother to think out to the end, words spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed—these are the things that return at night, clothed in flesh and blood, and they become the subjects of dreams, as if to make up for having been ignored during waking hours.”

6

“A clear, frosty night. Unusual brilliance and perfection of everything visible. Earth, sky, moon, and stars, all seem cemented, riveted together by the frost. Shadows of trees lie across the paths, so sharp that they seem carved in relief. You keep thinking you see dark figures endlessly cross the road at various places. Big stars hang in the woods between branches like blue lanterns. Small ones are strewn all over the sky like daisies in a summer field.

“We go on discussing Pushkin. The other night we talked about the early poems he wrote as a schoolboy. How much depended on his choice of meter!

“In the poems with long lines, his ambition did not extend beyond the Arzamas Literary Circle; he wanted to keep up with the grownups, impress his uncle with mythologism, bombast, faked epicureanism and sophistication, and affected a precocious worldly wisdom.

“But as soon as he stopped imitating Ossian and Parny and changed from ‘Recollections of Tsarskoie Selo’ to ‘A Small Town’ or ‘Letter to My Sister’ or ‘To My Inkwell’ (written later in Kishinev), or ‘To Yudin,’ the future Pushkin was already there.

“Air, light, the noise of life, reality burst into his poetry from the street as through an open window. The outside world, everyday things, nouns, crowded in and took possession of his lines, driving out the vaguer parts of speech. Things and more things lined up in rhymed columns on the page.

“As if this, Pushkin’s tetrameter, which later became so famous, were a measuring unit of Russian life, a yardstick, as if it had been patterned after the whole of Russia’s existence, as you draw the outline of a foot or give the size of a hand to make sure that the glove or the shoe will fit.

“Later in much the same way, the rhythm of spoken Russian, the intonations of ordinary speech were expressed in Nekrassov’s trimeters and dactyls.”

7

“I should like to be of use as a doctor or a farmer and at the same time to be gestating something lasting, something fundamental, to be writing some scientific paper or a literary work.

“Every man is born a Faust, with a longing to grasp and experience and express everything in the world. Faust became a scientist thanks to the mistakes of his predecessors and contemporaries. Progress in science is governed by the laws of repulsion, every step forward is made by refutation of prevalent errors and false theories. Faust was an artist thanks to the inspiring example of his teachers. Forward steps in art are governed by the law of attraction, are the result of the imitation of and admiration for beloved predecessors.

“What is it that prevents me from being a doctor and a writer? I think it is not our privations or our wanderings or our unsettled lives, but the prevalent spirit of high-flown rhetoric, which has spread everywhere—phrases such as ‘the dawn of the future,’ ‘the building of a new world,’ ‘the torch-bearers of mankind.’ The first time you hear such talk you think ‘What breadth of imagination, what richness!’ But in fact it’s so pompous just because it is so unimaginative and second-rate.

“Only the familiar transformed by genius is truly great. The best object lesson in this is Pushkin. His works are one great hymn to honest labor, duty, everyday life! Today, ‘bourgeois’ and ‘petty bourgeois’ have become terms of abuse, but Pushkin forestalled the implied criticism in his ‘Family Tree,’ where he says proudly that he belongs to the middle class, and in ‘Onegin’s Travels’ we read:

‘Now my ideal is the housewife,

My greatest wish, a quiet life

And a big bowl of cabbage soup.’

“What I have come to like best in the whole of Russian literature is the childlike Russian quality of Pushkin and Chekhov, their modest reticence in such high-sounding matters as the ultimate purpose of mankind or their own salvation. It isn’t that they didn’t think about these things, and to good effect, but to talk about such things seemed to them pretentious, presumptuous. Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoievsky looked restlessly for the meaning of life, and prepared for death and balanced accounts. Pushkin and Chekhov, right up to the end of their lives, were absorbed in the current, specific tasks imposed on them by their vocation as writers, and in the course of fulfilling these tasks they lived their lives, quietly, treating both their lives and their work as private, individual matters, of no concern to anyone else. And these individual things have since become of concern to all, and their works, like apples picked while they are green, have ripened of themselves, mellowing gradually and growing richer in meaning.”

8

“First signs of spring. Thaw. The air smells of buttered pancakes and vodka, as at Shrovetide. A sleepy, oily sun blinking in the forest, sleepy pines blinking their needles like eyelashes, oily puddles glistening at noon. The countryside yawns, stretches, turns over, and goes back to sleep.

“Chapter Seven of Evgenii Onegin describes the spring, Onegin’s house deserted in his absence, Lensky’s grave by the stream at the foot of the hill.

‘The nightingale, spring’s lover,

Sings all night. The wild rose blooms.’

Why ‘lover’? The fact is, the epithet is natural, apt: the nightingale is spring’s lover. Moreover, he needed it for the rhyme. I wonder whether the nickname Nightingale, for the brigand son of Odikmantii, in the well-known Russian folk epic, is not a metaphor based on similarity of sound. How well the song characterizes him!

‘At his nightingale whistle,

At his wild forest call,

The grass is all a-tremble,

The flowers shed their petals,

The dark forest bows down to the ground,

And all good people fall down dead.’

We came to Varykino in early spring. Soon the trees grew green—alder and nut trees and wild cherry—especially in the Shutma, the ravine below Mikulitsyn’s house. And soon after that the nightingales began to sing.

“Once again, as though hearing them for the first time, I wondered at the difference between their song and that of all other birds, at the sudden jump, without transitions, that nature makes to the richness and uniqueness of their trills. Such variety and power and resonance! Turgenev somewhere describes these whistling, fluting modulations. There were two phrases that stood out particularly. One was a luxurious, greedily repetitive tiokh-tiokh-tiokh, in response to which the vegetation, all covered with dew, trembled with delight. The other was in two syllables, grave, imploring, an appeal or a warning: ‘Wake up! Wake up!’ ”

9

“Spring. We are preparing for the spring sowing. No time for a diary. It was pleasant to write. I’ll have to stop until next winter.

“The other day—and now it really was Shrovetide—right in the middle of the spring floods, a sick peasant drove his sleigh into the yard through the mud and slush. I refused to examine him. ‘I’ve given up practicing,’ I said. ‘I have neither medicines nor equipment.’ But he persisted. ‘Help me. My skin is bad. Have pity on me. I’m sick.’ What could I do? I don’t have a heart of stone. I told him to undress. He had lupus. As I was examining him I glanced at the bottle of carbolic acid on the window sill (don’t ask me where it comes from—that and a few other things I couldn’t do without—everything comes from Samdeviatov). Then I saw there was another sleigh in the yard. I thought at first it was another patient. But it was my brother, Evgraf, who had dropped in on us out of the blue. The family took charge of him—Tonia, Sashenka, Alexander Alexandrovich. Later I went out and joined them. We showered him with questions. Where had he come from? How had he come? As usual, he was evasive, he smiled, shrugged, spoke in riddles.

“He stayed about two weeks, went often to Yuriatin, and then vanished suddenly as if the earth had swallowed him. I realized while he was staying with us that he had even more influence than Samdeviatov and that his work and his connections were even more mysterious. What is he? What does he do? Why is he so powerful? He promised to make things easier for us so that Tonia should have more time for Sashenka and I for practicing medicine and writing. We asked him how he proposed to do this. He merely smiled. But he has been as good as his word. There are signs that our living conditions are really going to change.

“It is truly extraordinary. He is my half brother. We bear the same name. And yet I know virtually nothing about him.

“For the second time he has burst into my life as my good genius, my rescuer, resolving all my difficulties. Perhaps in every life there has to be, in addition to the other protagonists, a secret, unknown force, an almost symbolic figure who comes unsummoned to the rescue, and perhaps in mine Evgraf, my brother, plays the part of this hidden benefactor?”

At this point Yurii Andreievich’s diary breaks off. He never went on with it.

10

Yurii Andreievich looked through the books he had ordered at the reading room of the Yuriatin public library. The reading room had several windows and could seat about a hundred people. Long tables stood in rows that ended by the windows. The library closed at sunset; in the spring the town had no lighting. Zhivago always left before dark, however, and never stayed in town later than the dinner hour. He would leave the horse that Mikulitsyn lent him at Samdeviatov’s inn, read all morning, and ride back to Varykino in the afternoon.

Before he began visiting the library Yurii Andreievich had only rarely been to Yuriatin; he had nothing in particular to do there, and he hardly knew it. Now, as the reading room gradually filled with local people, some sitting down near to him and others farther away, he felt as if he were getting to know the town by standing at one of its bustling intersections, and as if not only the people but also the houses and the streets in which they lived were coming into the room.

However, from the windows one could also see the actual Yuriatin, real and not imagined. In front of the central, largest window was a tank of boiled water. Readers who wanted a break went out to the landing to smoke or gathered around the tank for a drink and, after emptying the cup into the basin, stood at the window, admiring the view over the town.

The readers were of two kinds. The majority were elderly members of the local intelligentsia; the rest were of more humble origin.

The former, mostly women, were poorly dressed and had a neglected, hangdog look and long, sickly faces which for one reason or another—whether through hunger, jaundice, or dropsy—were puffy. They were habitués of the library, and knew the attendants personally and felt at home here.

The common people looked well and handsome and were neatly dressed in their best clothes; they came in timidly as though they were entering a church; they made more noise than the others, not because they did not know the rules but because in their anxiety not to make a sound they could not control their vigorous steps and voices.

The librarian and his two assistants sat on a dais in a recess in the wall opposite the window, separated from the rest of the room by a high counter. One of the assistants was a cross-looking woman who wore a woollen shawl and kept putting on her pince-nez and taking it off, apparently in accordance with mood rather than need. The other, in a black silk blouse, seemed to have a weak chest, for she breathed and spoke through her handkerchief and never took it away from her nose and mouth.

The staff had the same long, puffy, flabby faces as most of the readers, and the same loose skin, earthy and greenish like pickled cucumbers or gray mold. The three of them took turns explaining the rules in whispers to new readers, sorted the order slips, handed out books and took them back, and in the intervals worked on some report or other.

Through an unaccountable association of ideas started by the sight of the real town outside the window and the imagined one inside the room, as well as by the swollen faces around him, which made it seem as though everyone had goiter and somehow recalled the face of the sulky woman in charge of the Yuriatin railway switch on the morning of his arrival, Yurii Andreievich remembered the distant panorama of the town and Samdeviatov beside him on the floor of the car, and his comments and explanations. He tried to connect these explanations, given him so far outside the town, with his immediate surroundings now that he was at the center of the picture. But he did not remember what Samdeviatov had told him, and he did not get anywhere.

11

Yurii Andreievich sat at the far end of the room. In front of him were several reports on local land statistics and some reference books on the ethnography of the region. He had also asked for two books on the history of the Pugachev rebellion, but the librarian in the silk blouse had whispered through her handkerchief that no one reader could have so many volumes at the same time and that he would have to give back some of the journals and reference books before taking out the others that interested him.

So he applied himself to his unsorted pile of books with more haste and industry than before in order to set aside those that he really needed and exchange the rest for the historical books he wanted. He was leafing through the manuals and going over the chapter headings, wholly concentrated on his work and not looking about him. The crowd of readers did not distract him. He had had a good look at his neighbors; those on his left and right were fixed in his mind, he knew they were there without raising his eyes and he had the feeling that they would not leave before him, just as the houses and churches outside the window would not move from their places.

The sun, however, did move. It had shifted from the east corner of the room and was now shining through the windows in the south wall straight into the eyes of the nearest readers.

The librarian who had a cold came down from her dais and went over to the windows. They had pleated white curtains that softened the light pleasantly. She drew them all except at the last window, which was still in the shade. Coming to it, she pulled the cord to open the transom and had a fit of sneezing.

After she had sneezed ten or twelve times Yurii Andreievich realized that she was Mikulitsyn’s sister-in-law, one of the Tuntseva girls mentioned by Samdeviatov. Like other readers, he raised his head and looked in her direction.

Now he noticed a change in the room. At its farther end there was a new reader. Yurii Andreievich recognized Antipova at once. She was sitting with her back to him, speaking in a low voice with the sneezing librarian, who stood leaning over her. The conversation seemed to have a good effect on the librarian. It cured her instantly, not only of her annoying cold but of her nervous tenseness. With a warm, grateful glance at Antipova, she took the handkerchief she had been ceaselessly pressing to her mouth away from her face, put it in her pocket, and went back to her place behind the partition, happy, self-confident, and smiling.

The incident marked by this touching detail was noticed by several people in different parts of the room; they too smiled, looking at Antipova with approval. From these trivial signs Yurii Andreievich gathered that Antipova was known and liked in the town.

12

His first impulse was to get up and speak to her. But a shyness and lack of simplicity, entirely alien to his nature, had, in the past, crept into his relationship with her and now held him back. He decided not to disturb her and not to interrupt his work. To keep away from the temptation of looking at her he turned his chair sideways, so that its back was almost against his table; he tried to concentrate on his books, holding one in his hand and another on his knees.

But his thoughts had wandered far from his studies. Suddenly he realized that the voice he had once heard in a dream on a winter night in Varykino had been Antipova’s. The discovery dumfounded him, and startling his neighbors he jerked his chair back to be able to see Antipova. He began to look at her.

He saw her in a quarter view from the rear. She wore a light checked blouse with a belt and read with complete absorption, like a child, her head bent slightly over her right shoulder. Occasionally she stopped to think, looked up at the ceiling or straight in front of her, then again propped her cheek on her hand and copied excerpts from the volume she was reading, writing with a swift, sweeping movement of her pencil in her notebook.

Yurii Andreievich noticed again what he had observed long ago in Meliuzeievo. “She does not want to please or to look beautiful,” he thought. “She despises all that aspect of a woman’s nature; it’s as though she were punishing herself for being lovely. But this proud hostility to herself makes her ten times more irresistible.

“How well she does everything! She reads not as if reading were the highest human activity, but as if it were the simplest possible thing, a thing that even animals could do. As if she were carrying water from a well, or peeling potatoes.”

These reflections calmed him. A rare peace descended upon his soul. His mind stopped darting from subject to subject. He could not help smiling; Antipova’s presence affected him the same way as it had affected the nervous librarian.

No longer worrying about the angle of his chair nor afraid of distractions, he worked for an hour or so with even greater concentration than before her arrival. He went through the whole pile of books in front of him. setting aside those he needed most, and even had time to read two important articles he found in them. Then, deciding that he had done enough for the day, he collected his books and took them back to the desk. With an easy conscience and without any ulterior motive, he reflected that after his hard morning’s work he deserved to take time off to see an old friend and that he could legitimately allow himself his pleasure. But when he stood up and looked around the room, Antipova was no longer there.

The books she had just returned were still lying on the counter where he had put his own. They were textbooks of Marxism. She must be re-educating herself politically before going back to her teaching job.

On her order slips, which stuck out from between the pages of the books, was her address. Yurii Andreievich took it down, surprised by its oddity: “Merchant Street, opposite the house with sculptures.” He asked another reader what this meant and was told that the expression “house with sculptures” was as familiar in Yuriatin as in Moscow the designation of a street by the name of its parish church, or the phrase “the Five Corners” in Petersburg.

The name referred to a dark, steel-gray house decorated with Caryatides and statues of the Muses holding cymbals, lyres, and masks. A merchant had built it in the last century as his private theater. His heirs had sold it to the Merchants’ Guild, which gave its name to the street, and the whole neighborhood was known by the name of the house. It was now used by the Party’s Town Committee, and the lower part of its facade, where posters and programs had been displayed in the old days, was now covered with government proclamations and decrees

13

It was a cold, windy afternoon at the beginning of May. Yurii Andreievich, having finished what he had to do in town and having looked in at the library, suddenly changed his plans and decided to go see Antipova.

The wind often held him up, barring his way with clouds of dust and sand. He averted his head, closed his eyes, waited for the dust to stop blowing, and continued on his way

Antipova lived at the corner of Merchant Street opposite the dark, blue-gray house with sculptures, which he now saw for the first time. It did indeed live up to its name, and there was something strange and disturbing about it.

Its entire top floor was surrounded by female mythological figures half as big again as human beings. Between two gusts of the dust storm it seemed to him as if all the women in the house had come out on the balcony and were looking down at him over the balustrade.

There were two doors into Antipova’s house, one from Merchant Street, the other around the corner from the alley. Not having noticed the front entrance, Yurii Andreievich went in from the side street.

As he turned in at the gate the wind whirled scraps and trash up into the sky, screening the yard from the doctor. Through this black curtain, hens, chased by a cock, fled clucking from under his feet.

When the dust settled the doctor saw Antipova by the well. She had filled two buckets and hung them on a yoke across her left shoulder. Her hair was hastily tied in a kerchief knotted in front to protect it from the dust, and she was holding her billowing skirt down between her knees. She started for the house, but was stopped by another gust that tore the kerchief from her head and carried it off to the far end of the fence where the hens were still cackling.

Yurii Andreievich ran after it, picked it up, and took it back to her at the well. Preserving her usual natural air, she did not, even by an exclamation, betray her amazement or embarrassment. All she said was: “Zhivago!”

“Larisa Feodorovna!”

“What on earth are you doing here?”

“Put your buckets down. I’ll carry them for you.”

“I never stop halfway, I never leave what I do unfinished. If it’s me you’ve come to see, let’s go.”

“Who else?”

“How should I know?”

“Anyway, let me take those buckets. I can’t just stand by while you work.”

“You call that work? Leave them alone. You’d only splash the stairs. Better tell me what brought you here. You’ve been around more than a year and you never found a moment to come till now.”

“How do you know?”

“Things get around. Moreover, I saw you in the reading room.”

“Why didn’t you speak to me?”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t see me.”

Swaying a little under the weight of the lightly swinging buckets, she walked in front of him through the low arch of the entrance. Here she squatted quickly, setting the pails on the earth floor, took the yoke off her shoulder, straightened up, and dried her hands with a small handkerchief.

“Come, I’ll take you through the inside passage to the front hall. It’s lighter. You’ll have to wait there a moment. I’ll take the buckets up the back stairs and tidy lip a bit. I won’t be long. Look at our smart stairs—cast-iron steps with an openwork pattern. You can see everything through them from the top. It’s an old house. The shelling has shaken it up a bit, you can see where the masonry has come loose. See this crack in the brickwork? That’s where Katenka and I leave the key to the flat when we go out. Keep it in mind. You might come someday when I’m out—you can open the door and make yourself at home till I come back. You see, there it is, but I don’t need to use it now. I’ll go in the back way and open the door from inside. Our only trouble is rats. There are swarms and swarms of them, and you can’t get rid of them. It’s these old walls. Cracks and crevices all over the place. I stop up all the ratholes I can, but it doesn’t do much good. Perhaps you’d come one day and help me? The cracks between the skirting and the floor boards need stopping up. Yes? Well, you stay here in the hall and think about something. I won’t be long, I’ll call you in a minute.”

While waiting, he looked around at the peeling walls and the cast-iron steps. He told himself: “In the reading room I thought she was absorbed in her reading with the ardor she would give to a real, hard physical task. Now I see that the reverse is also true: she carries water from the well as lightly and effortlessly as if she were reading. There is the same gracefulness in everything she does, as if she had taken a flying start early in life, way back in her childhood, and now everything she does follows this momentum, easily, naturally. This quality is in the line of her back when she bends down and in her smile as it parts her lips and rounds her chin, and in her words and thoughts.”

“Zhivago!” Antipova called down from the top landing.

He went up.

14

“Give me your hand and do as I tell you. We have to go through two dark rooms piled with furniture. You might bump into something and hurt yourself.”

“True. It is like a labyrinth. I’d never have found my way. Why is it like this? Is the flat being redecorated?”

“Oh no, nothing like that. It belongs to someone else, I don’t even know who it is. I had my own flat in the school building. When the school was taken over by the Town Housing Department, Katenka and I were given part of this house. The owners had gone away, leaving all their furniture. There was an awful lot of it. I don’t want other people’s things, so I put it all into these two rooms and whitewashed the windows to keep out the sun. Don’t let go of my hand or you’ll get lost. Here we are, we turn right, now we’re out of the maze, here’s my door. It will be lighter in a second. Watch the step.”

As he followed her into the room he was struck by the view from the window facing the door. It looked out on the yard and over the low roofs of the houses beyond it to the vacant lots by the river. Goats and sheep grazed there, and their long woolly coats swept the ground like long skirts. There too was the familiar billboard: “Moreau & Vetchinkin. Mechanical seeders. Threshing machines.”

Reminded by it of the day of his arrival from Moscow, the doctor proceeded to describe it to Larisa Feodorovna. Forgetting there was a rumor that Strelnikov was her husband, he told her of his meeting with the commissar in the train. This part of his story made a deep impression on her.

“You saw Strelnikov?” she asked eagerly. “I won’t tell you now, but really it is extraordinary. It’s as if you were predestined to meet. I’ll tell you all about it sometime, you’ll be amazed. If I’m not mistaken, he made a good rather than a bad impression on you?”

“Yes, on the whole. He ought to have repelled me. We had actually passed through the country where he had brought death and destruction. I expected to see a brutal soldier or a revolutionary Jack-the-Ripper, but he was neither. It’s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him. It shows he isn’t a type. If he were, it would be the end of him as a man. But if you can’t place him in a category, it means that at least a part of him is what a human being ought to be. He has risen above himself, he has a grain of immortality.”

“They say he is not a Party member.”

“Yes, I think that’s true. What is it that makes one like him? He is a doomed man. I believe that he’ll come to a bad end. He will atone for the evil he has done. Revolutionaries who take the law into their own hands are horrifying not because they are criminals, but because they are like machines that have got out of control, like runaway trains. Strelnikov is as mad as the others, only his madness does not spring from theories, but from the ordeals he has gone through. I don’t know his secret, but I am sure he has one. His alliance with the Bolsheviks is accidental. So long as they need him, they put up with him, and he happens to be going their way. The moment they don’t need him they’ll throw him overboard with no regret, and crush him, as they have done with other military experts.”

“You think so?”

“I am sure of it.”

“Is there no escape for him? Couldn’t he run away?”

“Where could he run, Larisa Feodorovna? You could do that in the old days, under the Tsars. But just you try nowadays!”

“Too bad. You’ve made me feel sorry for him. You’ve changed, you know. You used to speak more calmly about the revolution, you were less harsh about it.”

“That’s just the point, Larisa Feodorovna. There are limits to everything. In all this time something definite should have been achieved. But it turns out that those who inspired the revolution aren’t at home in anything except change and turmoil, they aren’t happy with anything that’s on less than a world scale. For them transitional periods, worlds in the making, are an end in themselves. They aren’t trained for anything else, they don’t know anything except that. And do you know why these never-ending preparations are so futile? It’s because these men haven’t any real capacities, they are incompetent. Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. Life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so breathtakingly serious! So why substitute this childish harlequinade of immature fantasies, these schoolboy escapades? But enough of this. It’s my turn to ask questions. We arrived on the morning of the local upheaval. Were you in it?”

“I should say I was! There were fires all around us, it’s a wonder the house didn’t burn down. It was pretty badly shaken, as I told you. To this day there’s an unexploded shell in the yard just inside the gate. Looting, bombardment, all kinds of horrors—as at every change of government. But by then we were used to it, it wasn’t the first time. And the things that went on under the Whites! Murders to settle old accounts, extortions, blackmail—a real orgy! But I haven’t told you the most extraordinary thing. Our Galiullin! He turned up with the Czechs as a most important personage—a sort of Governor-General.”

“I know. I heard about it. Did you see him?”

“Very often. You can’t think how many people I managed to save, thanks to him, how many I hid. In all fairness, he behaved perfectly, chivalrously, not like all those small fry—little Cossack captains, policemen, and what not. Unfortunately, it was the small fry who set the tone, not the decent people. Galiullin helped me a lot, bless him. We are old friends, you know. When I was a little girl I often went to the house where he grew up. Most of the tenants were railway workers. I saw a lot of poverty as a child. That’s why my attitude to the revolution is different from yours. It’s closer to me. There’s a lot of it I understand from the inside. But that Galiullin, that the son of a janitor should become a White Colonel—perhaps even a General! There aren’t any soldiers in my family, I don’t know much about army ranks. And by profession I am a history teacher. ... Anyway, that’s how it was. Between us, we managed to help quite a lot of people. I used to go and see him. We talked about you. I’ve always had friends and connections in every government—and also sorrows and disappointment from all of them. It’s only in mediocre books that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don’t you think you’d have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?—Ah, there you are!”

A little girl of about eight came in, her hair done up in finely braided pigtails. Her narrow eyes had a sly, mischievous look and went up at the corners when she laughed. She knew her mother had a visitor, having heard his voice outside the door, but she thought it necessary to put on an air of surprise. She curtsied and looked at the doctor with the fearless, unblinking stare of a lonely child who had begun to think early in life.

“My daughter, Katenka. I hope you’ll be friends!”

“You showed me her photograph in Meliuzeievo. How she’s grown and changed since then!”

“I thought you were out. I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I took the key out of the crack and there was an enormous rat in it—as big as this! You should have seen me jump! I nearly died of fright.”

She made an absurd face, opening her eyes wide and rounding her mouth like a fish out of water.

“Off you go now. I’ll get Uncle to stay to dinner, and call you when the kasha is ready.”

“Thank you, I wish I could stay. But we have dinner at six since I’ve started coming to town and I try not to be late. It takes me over three hours to get home—nearly four. That is why I came so early. I’m afraid I’ll have to go soon.”

“You can stay another half hour.”

“I’d love to.”

15

“And now, since you have been so frank with me, I’ll be frank with you. The Strelnikov you met is my husband, Pasha, Pavel Pavlovich Antipov, whom I went to look for at the front and in whose death I so rightly refused to believe.”

“What you say does not come as a surprise. I was prepared for something of the sort. I heard that rumor, but I didn’t believe it for a moment. That’s why I spoke about him to you so freely, ignoring the rumor, which is sheer nonsense. I’ve seen this man. How could anyone connect him with you? What do you have in common with him?”

“And yet it’s true. Strelnikov is Antipov, my husband. I share the general belief. Katenka knows it and is proud of her father. Strelnikov is his pseudonym—he has an assumed name, like all active revolutionaries. For some reason he must live and act under an alias.

“It was he who took Yuriatin, and shelled us, knowing that we were here, and never once tried to find out if we were alive, in order not to reveal his identity. Of course it was his duty. If he had asked me I would have told him to do just that. You might say that my being safe and the Town Soviet’s giving me a reasonable place to live in shows that he is secretly looking after us. But that he should actually have been here and resisted the temptation to have a look at us—it’s inconceivable! It’s beyond me, it isn’t natural, it’s like the ancient Roman virtue, one of those newfangled ideas. But I mustn’t let myself be influenced by your way of looking at things. You and I don’t really think alike. When it comes to the intangible, the marginal choices, we understand each other. But when it comes to the big issues, to one’s outlook on life, we don’t see eye to eye. But to go back to Strelnikov. ...

“Now he’s in Siberia, and you are right—I have heard him accused of things that make my blood run cold. He is out there, in command of one of our most advanced positions, and he is fighting and beating poor old Galiullin, his childhood friend and his comrade in arms in the German war. Galiullin knows who he is, and he knows that I am his wife, but he has had the delicacy—I can’t value it too highly—never to refer to it, though goodness knows he goes mad with rage at the sound of Strelnikov’s name.

“Yes, that’s where he is now, in Siberia. But he was here for a long time, living in that railway car where you saw him. I kept hoping I’d run into him by accident. Sometimes he went to the staff headquarters, which were in the building where Komuch—the Constituent Assembly Army—used to have its headquarters. And by an odd coincidence, the entrance was through the wing where Galiullin used to see me. I was always going there to ask him to help somebody or to stop some horrible business or other. For instance, there was that affair at the military academy, which made a lot of noise at the time. If an instructor was unpopular the cadets ambushed him and shot him, saying he was a Bolshevik sympathizer. And then there was the time when they started beating up the Jews. Incidentally, if you do intellectual work of any kind and live in a town, as we do, half of your friends are bound to be Jews. Yet in times when there are pogroms, when all these terrible, despicable things are done, we don’t only feel sorry and indignant and ashamed, we feel wretchedly divided, as if our sympathy came more from the head than from the heart and had an aftertaste of insincerity.

“It’s so strange that these people who once liberated mankind from the yoke of idolatry, and so many of whom now devote themselves to its liberation from injustice, should be incapable of liberating themselves from their loyalty to an obsolete, antediluvian identity that has lost all meaning, that they should not rise above themselves and dissolve among all the rest whose religion they have founded and who would be so close to them, if they knew them better.

“Of course it’s true that persecution forces them into this futile and disastrous attitude, this shamefaced, self-denying isolation that brings them nothing but misfortune. But I think some of it also comes from a kind of inner senility, a historical centuries-long weariness. I don’t like their ironical whistling in the dark, their prosaic, limited outlook, the timidity of their imagination. It’s as irritating as old men talking of old age or sick people about sickness. Don’t you think so?”

“I haven’t thought about it much. I have a friend, Misha Gordon, who thinks as you do.”

“Well, I used to go to this place hoping to catch Pasha on his way in or out. In Tsarist times the Governor-General used to have his office in that part of the building. Now there is a notice on the door: ‘Complaints.’ Have you seen it? It’s the prettiest place in town. The square in front of it is paved with wooden blocks, and across the square there is the town park, full of maples, hawthorn, honeysuckle. There was always a line in the street outside the door. I used to stand there and wait. Of course I didn’t try to crash the door, I didn’t say I was his wife. After all, our names are different. And don’t think that an appeal to sentiment would move them! Their ways are quite different. Do you know, his own father, Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov, a former political exile, an old worker, is quite near here, in a settlement along the highway, where he lived as an exile. And his friend Tiverzin is there too. They are both members of the local revolutionary court. Well, can you believe it, Pasha hasn’t been to see his father and he hasn’t told him who he is. And his father takes it for granted, he isn’t a bit hurt. If his son wants to remain incognito, then that’s as it should be, he can’t see him and that’s all there is to it. They are made of stone, these people, they aren’t human, with all their discipline and principles.

“Even if I had managed to prove that I was his wife, it wouldn’t have done me any good! What do wives matter to them at a time like this? The workers of the world, the remaking of the universe—that’s something! But a wife, just an individual biped, is of no more importance than a flea or a louse!

“His aide-de-camp used to come out and ask people what they wanted to see him for and let some of them in. But I never told him my name and when he asked me what my business was I always said it was personal. Of course, I knew I was wasting my time. The aide would shrug his shoulders and give me a suspicious look. I never once saw him.

“I suppose you think he can’t be bothered with us, he doesn’t love us, he’s forgotten us? Well, you are wrong. I know him too well. I know just what he wants, and it’s just because he loves us. He can’t bear to come back to us empty-handed. He wants to come back as a conqueror, full of honor and glory, and lay his laurels at our feet. To immortalize us, to dazzle us! Just like a child.”

Katenka came in again. Larisa Feodorovna snatched her up and, to the girl’s astonishment, started swinging her around and tickling and hugging her.

16

Yurii Andreievich was riding back to Varykino. He had been over this stretch of country countless times. He was so used to the road that he was no longer aware of it, he hardly saw it.

Soon he would come to the crossroad in the forest where the way ahead led to Varykino and another path turned off to the fishing village of Vasilievskoie on the river Sakma. Here stood yet a third billboard advertising agricultural machinery. As usual he reached the crossroad at dusk.

Two months had now elapsed since the day when, instead of going home from Yuriatin, he spent the night at Larisa Feodorovna’s and told his family that he had been kept on business and had stayed at Samdeviatov’s inn. He had long been calling her Lara and addressing her as “thou,” though she still called him Zhivago. Yurii Andreievich was betraying Tonia, and his involvement was becoming ever more serious. This was shocking, impossible.

He loved Tonia, he worshipped her. Her peace of mind meant more to him than anything in the world. He would defend her honor more devotedly than her father or herself. He would have torn apart with his own hands anyone who would hurt her pride. And yet he himself was now the offender.

At home he felt like a criminal. His family’s ignorance of the truth and their unchanged affection were a mortal torment to him. In the middle of a conversation he would suddenly be numbed by the recollection of his guilt and cease hearing a word of what was being said around him.

If this happened during a meal, his food stuck in his throat and he put down his spoon and pushed away his plate. He choked, repressing his tears. “What is wrong with you?” Tonia would ask, puzzled. “You must have had some bad news when you were in town. Has anyone been arrested? Or shot? Do tell me. Don’t be afraid of upsetting me. You’ll feel better when you’ve told me.”

Had he been unfaithful because he preferred another woman? No, he had made no comparison, no choice. The idea of “free love,” terms like “the legitimate demands of love,” were alien to him. To think or speak in such terms seemed to him degrading. He had never “sown wild oats,” nor did he regard himself as a superman with special rights and privileges. Now he was crushed by the weight of his guilty conscience.

“What next?” he had sometimes wondered, and hoped wretchedly for some impossible, unexpected circumstance to solve his problem for him.

But now he no longer wondered. He had decided to cut the knot, and he was going home with a solution. He would confess everything to Tonia, beg her to forgive him, and never see Lara again.

Not that everything was quite as it should be. He felt now that he had not made it clear enough to Lara that he was breaking with her for good, forever. He had announced to her that morning that he wished to make a clean breast of it with Tonia and that they must stop seeing each other, but now he had the feeling that he had softened it all down and not made it sufficiently definite.

Larisa Feodorovna had realized how unhappy he felt and had no wish to upset him further by painful scenes. She tried to hear him out as calmly as she could. They were talking in one of the empty front rooms. Tears were running down her cheeks, but she was no more conscious of them than the stone statues on the house across the road were of the rain running down their faces. She kept saying softly: “Do as you think best, don’t worry about me. I’ll get over it.” She was saying it sincerely, without any false magnanimity, and as she did not know that she was crying she did not wipe away her tears.

At the thought that Lara might have misunderstood him, and that he had left her with a wrong impression and false hopes, he nearly turned and galloped straight back, to say what he had left unsaid and above all to take leave of her much more warmly, more tenderly, in a manner more suitable to a last farewell. Controlling himself with difficulty, he continued on his way.

As the sun went down, the forest was filled with cold and darkness. It smelled of damp leaves. Swarms of mosquitoes hung in the air as still as buoys, humming sadly on a constant, high-pitched note. They settled on his sweating face and neck, and he kept swatting them, his noisy slaps keeping time with the sounds of riding—the creaking of the saddle, the heavy thud of hoofs on the squelching mud, and the dry, crackling salvoes as the horse broke wind. In the distance, where the sunset glow seemed to endure forever, a nightingale began to sing.

“Wake up! Wake up!” it called persuasively; it sounded almost like the summons on the eve of Easter Sunday: “Awake, O my soul, why dost thou slumber?”

Suddenly Yurii Andreievich was struck by a very simple thought. What was the hurry? He would not go back on his promise to himself; the confession would be made, but who had said that it must be made that day? He had not said anything to Tonia yet, it was not too late to put it off till his next trip to town. He would finish his conversation with Lara, with such warmth and depth of feeling that it would make up for all their suffering. How splendid, how wonderful! How strange that it had not occurred to him before!

At the thought of seeing Lara once more his heart leapt for joy. In anticipation he lived through his meeting with her.

The wooden houses and pavements on the outskirts of the town ... He is on his way to her. In a moment he will leave the wooden sidewalks and vacant lots for the paved streets. The small suburban houses flash by like the pages of a book, not as when you turn them over one by one with your forefinger but as when you hold your thumb on the edge of the book and let them all swish past at once. The speed is breathtaking. And over there is her house at the far end of the street, under the white gap in the rain clouds where the sky is clearing, toward the evening. How he loves the little houses in the street that lead to her! He could pick them up and kiss them! Those one-eyed attics with their roofs pulled down like caps. And the lamps and icon lights reflected in the puddles and shining like berries! And her house under the white rift of the sky! There he will again receive the dazzling, God-made gift of beauty from the hands of its Creator. A dark muffled figure will open the door, and the promise of her nearness, unowned by anyone in the world and guarded and cold as a white northern night, will reach him like the first wave of the sea as you run down over the sandy beach in the dark.

Yurii Andreievich dropped his reins, leaned forward in his saddle, flung his arms around the horse’s neck, and buried his face in its mane. Taking this display of affection for an appeal to its strength, the horse broke into a gallop.

As it bounded smoothly, its hoofs barely touching the ground, it seemed to Yurii Andreievich that, besides the joyful thudding of his own heart, he heard shouts, but he thought he was imagining it.

Suddenly a deafening shot was fired very close to him. He sat up, snatched at the reins, and pulled. Checked in full flight, the horse side-stepped, backed, and went down on its haunches ready to rear.

In front of him was the crossroad. The sign, “Moreau & Vetchinkin. Mechanical seeders, Threshing machines,” glowed in the rays of the setting sun. Three armed horsemen blocked his way: a boy in a school cap and a tunic with two cartridge belts, a cavalryman in an officer’s overcoat and fur cap, and a fat man oddly clothed as for a fancy-dress ball in quilted trousers and a wide-brimmed clerical hat pulled low over his forehead.

“Don’t move, Comrade Doctor,” said the cavalryman in the fur cap, who was the oldest of the three. “If you obey orders, we guarantee that you will not be harmed. If you don’t—no offense meant—we’ll shoot you. The surgeon attached to our unit has been killed and we are conscripting you as a medical worker. Get down from your horse and hand the reins over to this young man. And let me remind you: if you try to escape we’ll give you short shrift.”

“Are you Comrade Forester, Mikulitsyn’s son Liberius?”

“No, I am his chief liaison officer.”