CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Return to Varykino

1

Winter had settled in. It was snowing hard as Yurii Andreievich walked back from the hospital. Lara met him in the hall.

“Komarovsky is here,” she said in a low, hoarse voice. She stood looking bewildered as if she had been struck.

“Where? Here?”

“No, of course not. He came this morning and said he would come back tonight. He’ll be here soon. He wants to have a word with you.”

“Why has he come?”

“I didn’t understand all he said. He said he was going to the Far East and that he had come out of his way to see us. Particularly to see you and Pasha. He talked a great deal about both of you. He insists that we are in mortal danger, all three of us, you and Pasha and I. And that he alone can save us, provided we do as he says.”

“I will go out. I don’t want to see him.”

Lara burst into tears and tried to throw herself at his feet and clasp his knees, but he forced her to get up.

“Please don’t go, for my sake,” she implored him. “It isn’t that I’m frightened of being alone with him, but it’s so painful. Spare me from having to see him alone. Besides, he is practical, experienced—he might really have some advice to give us. Your aversion for him is natural, but please put your feelings aside. Don’t go.”

“What is the matter with you, darling? Don’t be so upset. What are you trying to do? Don’t fall on your knees. Get up now, and cheer up. You really must get rid of this obsession—he’s frightened you for life. You know I’m with you. I’ll kill him if necessary, if you tell me to.”

Night fell about half an hour later. It was completely dark. It was half a year now since all the ratholes had been stopped up. Yurii Andreievich watched for new ones, plugging them up in time. They also kept a big, fluffy tomcat who spent his time in immobile contemplation, looking enigmatic. The rats were still in the house, but they were now more cautious.

Waiting for Komarovsky, Larisa Feodorovna cut some slices of rationed black bread and put a plate with a few boiled potatoes on the table. They had decided to receive him in the old dining room, which they still used for their meals. The large, heavy, dark oak table and sideboard were part of its original furnishings. Standing on the table was a bottle of castor oil with a wick in it which they used as a portable lamp.

Komarovsky came out of the dark December night covered with snow. Lumps of it fell from his hat, coat, and galoshes and melted into puddles on the floor. His mustache and beard, plastered with snow, made him look like a clown. (He had been clean-shaven in the old days.) He wore a well-preserved suit with striped, well-creased trousers. Before greeting his hosts he spent a long time combing his rumpled, glistening hair with a pocket comb and drying his mustache and eyebrows with a handkerchief. Then, silently and with a solemn expression, he stretched out both his hands—the left one to Larisa Feodorovna and the right one to Yurii Andreievich.

“We’ll assume that we are old acquaintances,” he said to Yurii Andreievich. “I was a great friend of your father’s, as you probably know. He died in my arms. I keep looking at you to see if there is any likeness. But I don’t think you take after him. He was an expansive man, spontaneous and impulsive. You must be more like your mother. She was gentle, a dreamer.”

“Larisa Feodorovna asked me to see you. She said you had some business with me. I agreed, but our meeting is not of my choice, and I don’t consider that we are acquainted. So shall we get on with it? What is it you want?”

“I am so happy to see you both, my dears. I understand everything, absolutely everything. Forgive my boldness, but you are wonderfully well suited to each other. A perfect match.”

“I’ll have to interrupt you. Kindly don’t interfere in what doesn’t concern you. We haven’t asked for your sympathy. You forget yourself.”

“Don’t be so touchy, young man. Perhaps after all you do take after your father. He used to lose his temper just like that. Well, my children, with your permission I offer you my best wishes. Unfortunately, however, you really are children—not just in a manner of speaking—completely ignorant and thoughtless children. In two days here I’ve learned more about you than you know or suspect about yourselves. Without knowing it, you are walking on the brink of a precipice. Unless you do something about it, the days of your freedom and perhaps even of your lives are numbered.

“There exists a certain Communist style, Yurii Andreievich. Few people measure up to it. But no one flouts that way of life and thought as openly as you do. Why you have to flirt with danger, I can’t imagine. You are a living mockery of that whole world, a walking insult to it. If at least your past were your own secret—but there are people from Moscow who know you inside out. Neither of you are at all to the liking of the local priests of Themis. Comrades Antipov and Tiverzin are busy sharpening their claws, ready to pounce on Larisa Feodorovna and you.

“However, you are a man, Yurii Andreievich, you are your own master, and you have a perfect right to gamble with your life if you feel like it. But Larisa Feodorovna is not a free agent. She is a mother, she has a child’s life in her hands, and she can’t go about with her head in the clouds.

“I wasted all my morning trying to get her to take the situation seriously. She wouldn’t listen to me. Will you use your influence? She has no right to play with her daughter’s safety. She must not disregard my arguments.”

“I’ve never in my life forced my views on anyone. Certainly not on those who are close to me. Larisa Feodorovna is free to listen to you or not as she thinks fit. It’s her business. Apart from that, I have no idea what you are talking about. I haven’t heard what you call your arguments.”

“Really, you remind me more and more of your father—just as intractable. Well, I’ll tell you. But it’s a fairly complicated business, so you’ll have to be patient with me and not interrupt.

“Big changes are being planned at the top. Yes, really, I have it from a most reliable source and you can take it that it’s true. What they have in mind is to take a more democratic line, make a concession to legality, and this will come about quite soon.

“But just because of it, the punitive organs that are to be abolished will be in all the greater hurry to settle their local accounts before the end, and they will be all the more savage. You are marked for destruction, Yurii Andreievich. Your name is on the list—I am telling you this in all seriousness, I’ve seen it myself. You must think of saving yourself before it is too late.

“But all this is by way of introduction. I am coming to the point.

“Those political forces that are still faithful to the Provisional Government and the disbanded Constituent Assembly are concentrating in the Maritime Province on the Pacific coast. Deputies to the Duma, the more prominent members of the old Zemstvos, and other public figures, businessmen and industrialists, are getting together. The remnants of the armies that fought against the Reds are being concentrated there.

“They intend to form a Far Eastern republic, and the Soviet Government winks at it, because at the moment it would suit it to have a buffer between Red Siberia and the outside world. The republic is to have a coalition government. More than half the seats, at the insistence of Moscow, will go to Communists. When it suits them, they will stage a coup d’état and bring the republic to heel. The plan is quite transparent, but it gives us a certain breathing space; and we must make the most of it.

“At one time before the revolution I used to look after the affairs of the Merkulovs, the Arkharov Brothers, and several other banks and trading firms in Vladivostok. They know me there, and an emissary came to see me on behalf of the shadow cabinet, to offer me the post of Minister, of Justice in the future government. This was done secretly, but with unofficial Soviet approval. I accepted and I am on my way there now. All I’ve just told you is happening with the tacit consent of the Soviet Government, but not so openly that it would be wise to talk much about it.

“I can take you and Larisa Feodorovna with me. From there, you can easily get a boat and join your family overseas. You know, of course, that they have been deported. It made a lot of noise; the whole of Moscow is still talking about it.

“I have promised Larisa Feodorovna to save Strelnikov. As a member of an independent government recognized by Moscow, I can look for him in eastern Siberia and help him to cross over into our autonomous region. If he does not succeed in escaping, I’ll suggest that he should be exchanged for someone who is in Allied custody and is valuable to the Moscow Government.”

Larisa Feodorovna had followed Komarovsky’s explanation with difficulty, but when he came to the arrangements for the safety of the doctor and of Strelnikov, she pricked up her ears. Blushing a little, she said:

“You see, Yurochka, how important all this is for you and for Pasha?”

“You are too trusting, my dear. You can’t take a half-formed plan for an accomplished fact. I don’t say Victor Ippolitovich is deliberately misleading us, but so far he has only told us about castles in the air. For my part,” he said, turning to Komarovsky, “thank you for the interest you take in my affairs, but you surely don’t imagine that I am going to let you run them? As for Strelnikov, Lara will have to think it over.”

“All it comes down to,” said Lara, “is whether we go with him or not. You know perfectly well I wouldn’t go without you.”

Komarovsky sipped the diluted alcohol that Yurii Andreievich had brought from the hospital, ate boiled potatoes, and became more and more tipsy.

2

It was getting late. Every time the wick was trimmed it spluttered and burned brightly, lighting up the room, then the flame died down and the shadows returned. The hosts were sleepy, they wanted to talk things over by themselves and go to bed, but Komarovsky stayed on. His presence was oppressive, as was the sight of the heavy oak sideboard and the December darkness outside the windows.

He was not looking at them but over their heads, his glazed eyes staring at some distant point and his drowsy, slurred voice grinding on and on, tedious and interminable. His latest hobbyhorse was the Far East. He was explaining the political importance of Mongolia. Yurii Andreievich and Larisa Feodorovna, who were not interested in the subject, had missed the point at which he had got onto it, and this made his explanations even more boring. He was saying:

“Siberia—truly a New America, as it is often called—has immense possibilities. It is the cradle of Russia’s future greatness, the gauge of our progress toward democracy and political and economic health. Still more pregnant with future possibilities is our great Far Eastern neighbor—Outer Mongolia. What do you know about it? You yawn and blink shamelessly, and yet Mongolia has nearly a million square miles and untold mineral wealth; it is a virgin land that tempts the greed of China, of Japan, and of the United States. They are all ready to snatch at it to the detriment of our Russian interests—interests that have been recognized by all our rivals, whenever there has been a division of that remote quarter of the globe into spheres of influence.

“China exploits the feudal-theocratic backwardness of Mongolia through her influence over the lamas and other religious dignitaries. Japan backs the local princes—the hoshuns. Red Russia has found an ally in the Revolutionary Association of Insurgent Mongolian Herdsmen. I myself would like to see a really prosperous Mongolia with a freely elected government. What should interest you personally is that once you are across the Mongolian frontier, the world is at your feet—you are as free as a bird.”

His wordy dissertation got on Larisa Feodorovna’s nerves. Finally, bored to tears and utterly tired, she held out her hand to him and said abruptly and with undisguised hostility:

“It’s late and it’s time for you to go. I am sleepy.”

“I hope you aren’t going to be so inhospitable as to throw me out at this hour of the night! I don’t believe I can find my way—I don’t know the town and it’s pitch dark.”

“You should have thought of that earlier, instead of sitting on and on. No one asked you to stay so late.”

“Why are you so sharp with me? You didn’t even ask me if I have anywhere to stay.”

“It doesn’t interest me in the slightest. You are perfectly well able to look after yourself. If you are angling for an invitation to spend the night, I certainly won’t put you in the room where we and Katenka sleep, and the other rooms are full of rats.”

“I don’t mind them.”

“Well, have it your way.”

3

“What is wrong, darling? You don’t sleep for nights on end, you don’t touch your food, you go about all day looking like a maniac. You are always brooding about something. What is bothering you? You mustn’t let your worries get the better of you.”

“Izot, the watchman from your hospital, has been around again—he is having an affair with the laundress downstairs. So he dropped in and gave me a cheerful piece of news! ‘It’s terribly secret,’ he said. ‘It’s jail for your friend. Any day now. And then it’ll be your turn, poor thing.’ ‘How do you know?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, it’s quite certain, I heard it from a friend who works at the Comics.’ Of course, what he means by that is the Executive Committee. That’s what he calls the Comics.” They both burst out laughing.

“He is quite right,” said Yurii Andreievich. “The danger has caught up with us and it’s time we vanished. The problem is where. There is no question of going to Moscow—we couldn’t make the arrangements for the journey without attracting attention. We must slip away so that nobody sees us go. Do you know, my love, we’ll do what you thought of in the first place, we’ll go to Varykino and drop out of sight. Let’s go there for a week or two or a month.”

“Thank you, thank you, my dear. Oh, how glad I am! I understand how much you dislike the idea. But we wouldn’t live in your house. You couldn’t possibly face that—the sight of the empty rooms, the self-reproach, the comparisons with the past. How well I know what it means to build one’s happiness on the sufferings of others, to trample on what is dear to one, and holy. I’d never accept such a sacrifice from you. But there is no question of that. Your house is in such a state that it would be difficult to make the rooms fit to live in, anyway. I was thinking of the house where the Mikulitsyns lived.”

“All that is true enough, and I am grateful to you for being so considerate. But wait a minute. I keep meaning to ask you and forgetting. What has happened to Komarovsky? Is he still here or is he gone? Since I quarrelled with him and threw him out I’ve heard nothing more of him.”

“I don’t know anything either. But who cares! What do you want with him?”

“I have come to think that perhaps we shouldn’t have rejected his proposal outright—I mean both of us. We are not in the same position. You have your daughter to think of. Even if you wanted to share my fate, you’d have no right to do it.

“But about Varykino. Of course, to go to that wilderness in winter, without food, without strength or hope—it’s utter madness. But why not, my love! Let’s be mad, if there is nothing except madness left to us. We’ll forget our pride once more and beg Samdeviatov to lend us a horse. And we’ll ask him, or not even him but the speculators who depend on him, to let us have flour and potatoes on credit, for what our credit is still worth. And we’ll persuade him not to take advantage of the favor he’s doing us by coming to see us at once, but to wait until later—not to come until he needs his horse. Let’s be alone for a while. Let’s go, my love. And we’ll cut and use more logs in a week than a careful housewife would use in a year in peaceful times.

“And once again, forgive me for my confused way of speaking. How I wish I could talk with you without being so stupidly solemn! But after all, it’s true that we haven’t any choice. Call it what you like, death is really knocking at our door. Our days are really numbered. So at least let us take advantage of them in our own way. Let us use them up saying goodbye to life, being together for the last time before we are parted. We’ll say goodbye to everything we hold dear, to the way we look at things, to the way we’ve dreamed of living and to what our conscience has taught us, and to our hopes and to each other. We’ll speak to one another once again the secret words we speak at night, great and pacific like the name of the Asian ocean. It’s not for nothing that you stand at the end of my life, my hidden, forbidden angel, under the skies of wars and turmoil, you who arose at its beginning under the peaceful skies of childhood.

“That night, as a girl in a dark brown school uniform, in the half shadow of the hotel room, you were exactly as you are now, and just as breathtakingly beautiful.

“Often since then I have tried to define and give a name to the enchantment that you communicated to me that night, that faint glow, that distant echo, which later permeated my whole being and gave me a key to the understanding of everything in the world.

“When you rose out of the darkness of that room, like a shadow in a schoolgirl’s dress, I, a boy who knew nothing about you, understood who you were, with all the tormenting intensity which responded in me: I realized that this scraggy, thin little girl was charged, as with electricity, with all the femininity in the world. If I had touched you with so much as the tip of my finger, a spark would have lit up the room and either killed me on the spot or charged me for the whole of my life with magnetic waves of sorrow and longing. I was filled to the brim with tears, I cried and glowed inwardly. I was mortally sorry for myself, a boy, and still more sorry for you, a girl. My whole being was astonished and asked: If it is so painful to love and to be charged with this electric current, how much more painful must it be to a woman and to be the current, and to inspire love.

“There—at last I’ve said it. Such a thing can drive you mad. It expresses my very being.”

Larisa Feodorovna lay dressed at the edge of her bed. She was not feeling well, and had curled up and covered herself with a shawl. Yurii Andreievich sat on a chair beside her, speaking quietly, with long pauses. Sometimes she raised herself on her elbow, propped her chin on her hand, and gazed at him, her lips parted. At other times she buried her head in his shoulder and cried silently with joy, without noticing her tears. At last she leaned out of bed, put her arms around him, and whispered happily:

“Yurochka! Yurochka! How wise you are! You know everything, you divine everything, Yurochka, you are my strength and my refuge, God forgive me the blasphemy. Oh, I am so happy. Let’s go, my darling, let’s go. Out there I’ll tell you something I have on my mind.”

He decided that she was referring to pregnancy, probably a false pregnancy, and he said: “I know.”

4

They left town on the morning of a gray winter day. It was a weekday. People in the streets were going about their business; there were many familiar faces. At the squares, women who had no wells in their yards were queueing up for water at the old pumps, their yokes and buckets on the ground beside them. The doctor drove around them carefully, checking Samdeviatov’s spirited, smoky-yellow horse. The sleigh kept gliding off the slope of the street, icy with splashed water, onto the sidewalks and hitting lampposts and curbstones.

Galloping at full tilt, they caught up with Samdeviatov, who was walking down the street, and swept past him without looking back to see if he had recognized them and his horse, or whether he had anything to say to them. A little farther on they passed Komarovsky, and again swept by without a greeting.

Glafira Tuntseva shouted to them from across the street: “What lies people tell! They said you had left yesterday. Going for potatoes?” and signalling that she could not hear what they replied waved them goodbye.

They slowed down for Sima, and this was on an awkward slope where it was impossible to stop; the horse kept pulling at the reins. Sima, muffled from head to foot in several shawls and looking as stiff as a log, hobbled out into the middle of the street to say goodbye and wish them a good journey.

“When you come back we must have a talk,” she said to Yurii Andreievich.

At last they left the town behind. Although the doctor had been on this road in winter, he mostly remembered it in its summer aspect and hardly recognized it now.

They had pushed their sacks of food and other bundles deep into the hay in the front of the sleigh and had tied them down with rope. Yurii Andreievich drove either kneeling upright on the floor of the sleigh like the local peasants or sitting with his legs in Samdeviatov’s felt boots hanging over the side.

In the afternoon when, as usual in winter, the day seemed on the point of ending long before sunset, Yurii Andreievich began to whip the horse mercilessly. It shot forward like an arrow. The sleigh pitched and tossed on the uneven road, like a ship in a storm. Lara and Katia were bundled up in their fur coats so that they could hardly move. Swinging around corners and bumping over ruts, they rolled from side to side and down into the hay like sacks, laughing themselves sick. Sometimes the doctor drove into the snowy banks on purpose, for a joke, and harmlessly tipped them all out into the snow. After being dragged for a few yards by the reins he stopped the horse, righted the sleigh, and was pummelled by Lara and Katia, who climbed back, scolding and laughing.

“I’ll show you the place where I was stopped by the partisans,” the doctor told them when they were at some distance from the town, but he was unable to keep his promise because the winter bareness of the woods, the dead quiet, and the emptiness all around changed the country beyond recognition. “Here it is,” he soon shouted, mistaking the first of the Moreau & Vetchinkin signs, which stood in a field, for the one in the forest where he was captured. When they galloped past the second, still in its old place in the thicket at the Sakma crossroads, it was indistinguishable from the dazzling lacework of hoarfrost that made the forest look like black and silver filigree, so that they never saw it.

It was still daylight when they swept into Varykino, and as the Zhivagos’ house came first they stopped in front of it. They burst in like robbers, hurrying because it would soon be dark. But inside it was dark already, so that Yurii Andreievich never saw half the destruction and abomination. Part of the furniture he remembered was still there; Varykino was deserted and there was no one to complete the damage. He could see no personal belongings; but as he had not been there when his family left he could not tell how much they had taken with them. In the meantime Lara was saying:

“We must hurry. It will be dark in a moment. We haven’t time to stand about thinking. If we are to stay here, the horse must go into the barn, the food into the hallway, and we must fix this room for ourselves. But I’m against it. We talked it all out before. It will be painful for you and therefore also for me. What was this room, your bedroom? No, the nursery. There’s your son’s crib. It would be too small for Katia. On the other hand, the windows are whole, there are no cracks in the walls or ceiling, and the stove is marvellous—I admired it last time I came. So if you insist on our staying here—though I am against it—I’ll get out of my coat and set to work at once. The first thing is to get the stove going, and to stoke and stoke and stoke, we’ll have to keep it going all the time for at least twenty-four hours. But what is it, my darling? You haven’t answered.”

“In a moment. I’m all right. I’m sorry. ... No, perhaps we’d better have a look at the Mikulitsyns’ house.”

They drove on.

5

The Mikulitsyns’ door was padlocked. Yurii Andreievich wrenched off the lock together with its screws and splintered wood, and here again they rushed in hurriedly, going straight to the inner rooms without taking off their coats, hats, and felt boots.

They were immediately struck by the tidiness of certain parts of the house, particularly of Mikulitsyn’s study. Someone must have been living here until recently, but who? Had it been any of the Mikulitsyns, where had they gone, and why had they put a padlock on the door instead of using their keys? Furthermore, if the Mikulitsyns had been here continuously for long stretches, wouldn’t the whole house have been tidy and not just some of the rooms? Everything spoke of an intruder, but who could it have been? Neither the doctor nor Lara worried about the mystery. They did not try to solve it. There were plenty of half-looted houses now, and plenty of fugitives. “Some White officer on the run,” they told each other. “If he comes we’ll make some arrangement.”

Once again, as so long before, Yurii Andreievich stood spellbound in the door of the study, so spacious and comfortable with its large, convenient table by the window. And once again he thought that such austere surroundings would be conducive to patient, fruitful work.

Among the outbuildings in the yard was the stable adjoining the barn, but it was locked and Yurii Andreievich did not bother to break in, since in any case it might not be fit to use. The horse could spend the night in the barn, which opened easily. He unharnessed the horse and when it had cooled down gave it water which he had got at the well. He had meant to give it the hay he had brought along, but it had been trampled to rubbish under their feet. Luckily, there was enough of it in the large loft over the barn.

They lay down without undressing, using their fur coats for blankets, and fell into a deep, sound, blissful sleep, like children after running about and playing all day.

6

From the moment they got up, Yurii Andreievich kept glancing at the table standing so temptingly by the window. His fingers itched for paper and pen. But he put off writing until the evening, until after Lara and Katia would have gone to bed. Until then he would have his hands full, even if no more than two of the rooms were to be made habitable. In looking forward to the evening he had no important work in mind. It was merely that the passion to write possessed him.

He had to scribble something. For a beginning, he would put down old unwritten thoughts, just to get him into trim. Later, he hoped, if he and Lara managed to stay on, there would be time for undertaking something new, important.

“Are you busy? What are you doing?”

“Stoking and stoking. What is it?”

“I want a tub to wash the linen in.”

“We’ll run out of logs in three days if we go on using them at this rate. I must have a look in our old woodshed, there might be some left—who knows? If there are, I’ll bring them over. I’ll do that tomorrow. A tub, you said. I’m sure I’ve seen one somewhere, I can’t think where.”

“So have I, and I can’t think where either. It must have been somewhere it had no business to be, that’s why I forgot. Well, never mind. Remember, I’m heating a lot of water for cleaning up. What’s left I’ll use for laundering some of Katia’s and my things. You might as well give me your laundry too. We’ll have baths in the evening, when we’ve settled in, before we go to bed.”

“Thank you. I’ll get my things now. I’ve moved all the heavy furniture away from the walls, as you wanted it.”

“Good. I’ll use the dish-washing basin for the laundry, since we can’t find the tub. But it’s greasy, I’ll have to scrub it.”

“As soon as the stove is properly stoked I’ll go through the rest of the drawers. I keep finding more things in the desk and the chest—soap, matches, paper, pencils, pens, ink. And the lamp on the table is full of kerosene. I am sure the Mikulitsyns didn’t have any, it must come from somewhere else.”

“What luck! It’s our mysterious lodger. Just like something out of Jules Verne. But here we are gossiping again, and my water’s boiling.”

They bustled and dashed about from room to room, their hands never still or empty for a moment, running into one another and stumbling over Katenka, who was always under their feet. She drifted about, getting in the way of their work and sulking when they scolded her. She shivered and complained of the cold.

“These poor modern children,” thought the doctor, “victims of our gypsy life, wretched little fellow wanderers.” Aloud he said:

“Cheer up, girl. You can’t be cold, that’s nonsense, the stove is red hot.”

“The stove may be feeling warm but I’m cold.”

“Well then, you’ll have to be patient till this evening. I’ll get a huge blaze going and you heard Mama say she’ll give you a hot bath. And now you play with these—catch.” He got all Liberius’s old toys out of the chilly storeroom and dumped them on the floor, some whole, some broken, blocks, trains, and locomotives, boards with squares and pictures or numbers on them for games with dice and counters.

“What can you be thinking of, Yurii Andreievich?” Katia protested like a grownup. “They aren’t mine. And they are for a baby. I’m too big.”

But the next moment she had made herself comfortable in the middle of the rug and all the toys had turned into bricks for a house for Ninka, the doll she had brought from town. It was a much more sensible and settled home than any of the temporary lodgings in other people’s houses where she had spent most of her life.

Lara watched her from the kitchen. “Look at that instinct for domesticity. It just shows, nothing can destroy the longing for home and for order. Children are more honest, they aren’t frightened of the truth, but we are so afraid of seeming to be behind the times that we are ready to betray what is most dear to us and praise what repels us and say yes to what we don’t understand.”

“Here’s the tub,” said Yurii Andreievich, coming in out of the dark hallway. “It certainly wasn’t in its place. It was standing under the leak in the ceiling. I suppose it’s been there since last autumn.”

7

For dinner, Lara, who had started on the provisions they had brought and had cooked enough for three days, served an unprecedented feast of potato soup and roast mutton and potatoes. Katenka ate till she could eat no more, giggling and getting more and more naughty, and afterwards, warm and full, curled up in her mother’s shawl on the sofa and went to sleep.

Larisa Feodorovna, hot and tired from the oven, almost as sleepy as her daughter, and pleased with the success of her cooking, was in no hurry to clear away the plates and sat down to have a rest. After making sure that Katenka was asleep, she said, leaning forward on the table, with her chin on her hand:

“I’d slave and be happy if only I knew it was getting us somewhere, if it wasn’t all for nothing. You’ll have to keep reminding me that we came here to be together. Keep cheering me up, don’t let me think. Because strictly speaking, if you look at it honestly, what are we doing, what is all this? We’ve raided someone else’s house, we’ve broken in and made ourselves at home, and now we bustle around like mad so as not to see that this isn’t life, that it’s a stage set, that it isn’t real, that it’s all ‘pretend,’ as children say, a child’s game—just ridiculous.”

“But, darling, isn’t it you who insisted on our coming? Don’t you remember how long I held out against it?”

“Certainly I did. I don’t deny it. So now I am at fault! It’s all right for you to think twice and hesitate, but I have to be logical and consistent all the time! You come in, you see your son’s crib, and you nearly faint. That’s your right, but I’m not allowed to be worried, to be afraid for Katenka, to think about the future, everything has to give way before my love for you.”

“Larusha! Pull yourself together. Think. It’s not too late to go back on your decision. I was the first to tell you to take Komarovsky’s plan more seriously. We’ve got a horse. If you like we’ll go straight back to Yuriatin tomorrow. Komarovsky is still there, we saw him—and incidentally I don’t think he saw us. I’m sure we’ll still find him.”

“I’ve hardly said a word, and you sound annoyed. But tell me, am I so wrong? We might just as well have stayed in Yuriatin if we weren’t going to hide better than this. If we really meant to save ourselves we should have had a sensible plan, properly thought out, and that after all is what Komarovsky offered us. Disgusting as he is, he is a well-informed and practical man. We are in greater danger here than anywhere else. Just think!—alone on a boundless, wind-swept plain! If we were snowed under in the night we couldn’t dig ourselves out in the morning! Or suppose our mysterious benefactor, who visited this house, turns out to be a bandit and comes and slits our throats! Have you at least got a gun? I thought not! You see? What terrifies me is your thoughtlessness, and you’ve infected me with it as well. I simply can’t think straight.”

“But what do you want? What do you want me to do now?”

“I don’t know myself what to say. Keep me under your thumb all the time. Keep reminding me that I’m your loving slave and that it’s not my business to think or argue. Oh, I’ll tell you what. Your Tonia and my Pasha are a thousand times better than we are, but that isn’t the point. The point is that the gift of love is like any other gift. However great it is, it won’t thrive without a blessing. You and I, it’s as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught. It’s a sort of crowning harmony—no limits, no degrees, everything is of equal value, everything is a joy, everything has become spirit. But in this wild tenderness that lies in wait for us at every moment there is something childish, unrestrained, irresponsible. It’s a willful, destructive element, hostile to domestic happiness, such a love. It’s my duty to be afraid of it and to distrust it.”

She threw her arms around his neck, struggling with tears.

“Don’t you see, we are not in the same position. You were given wings to fly above the clouds, but I’m a woman, mine are given me to stay close to the ground and to shelter my young.”

He was deeply moved by everything she said, but he didn’t show it, lest he give way to his emotions.

“It’s quite true that there is something false and strained about this camp life we lead. You are perfectly right. But it isn’t we who invented it. This frantic dashing about from pillar to post is what is happening to everyone, it’s in the spirit of the times.

“I’ve been thinking about it myself all day. I should like to do everything possible to stay here for some time. I can’t tell you how I’m longing to get back to work. I don’t mean farming. That’s what we were doing here before, we took it on as a family and we succeeded. But I wouldn’t have the strength to do it again. I’ve got something else in mind.

“Things are gradually settling down. Perhaps one day they’ll start publishing books again.

“This is what I was thinking. Couldn’t we come to an agreement with Samdeviatov—we’d have to give him profitable terms, of course—so that “he should keep us here for six months at his expense, on condition that I spend this time writing a book, say a textbook on medicine, or something literary, perhaps a collection of poems. Or I might translate some famous classic. I’m good at languages. I saw an advertisement the other day, there’s a big publisher in Petersburg who is doing nothing but translations. I’m pretty sure this sort of work will have a value in terms of money. I’d be very happy doing something of that kind.”

“I am glad you reminded me, I was also thinking of something like that today. But I have no faith in our future here. On the contrary, I have a foreboding that we’ll soon be swept away, somewhere even more distant. But so long as we still have this breathing space, I want to ask you a favor. Will you give up a few hours in the next few evenings and put down all the poems I have heard from you at different times? Half of them you’ve lost and the rest you’ve never written down, and I’m afraid you’ll forget them and they’ll be lost altogether as you say has often happened before.”

8

At the end of the day they washed in plenty of hot water, and Lara bathed Katenka. Feeling blissfully clean, Yurii Andreievich sat down at the table before the window, his back to the room where Lara, wrapped in a bath towel and fragrant with soap, her hair twisted in a turban with another towel, was putting Katenka to bed and tucking her up. Enjoying the foretaste of concentrated work, he took in what was going on around him with a happy, diffuse attentiveness.

It was one in the morning when Lara, who had been pretending, finally went to sleep. Her nightdress and Katenka’s, like the freshly laundered linen on the beds, shone clean and lacy. Even in those days, Lara managed somehow to get starch.

The stillness that surrounded Yurii Andreievich breathed with happiness and life. The lamplight fell softly yellow on the white sheets of paper and gilded the surface of the ink inside the inkwell. Outside, the frosty winter night was pale blue. To see it better, Yurii Andreievich stepped into the next room, cold and dark, and looked out of the window. The light of the full moon on the snow-covered clearing was as viscid as white of egg or thick white paint. The splendor of the frosty night was inexpressible. His heart was at peace. He went back into the warm, well-lit room and began to write.

Careful to convey the living movement of his hand in his flowing writing, so that even outwardly it should not lose individuality and grow numb and soulless, he set down, gradually improving them and moving further and further away from the original as he made copy after copy, the poems that he remembered best and that had taken the most definite shape in his mind—“Christmas Star,” “Winter Night,” and a number of others of the same kind, which later were forgotten, mislaid, and never found again.

From these old, completed poems, he went on to others that he had begun and left unfinished, getting into their spirit and sketching the sequels, though without the slightest hope of finishing them now. Finally getting into his stride and carried away, he started on a new poem.

After two or three stanzas and several images by which he himself was struck, his work took possession of him and he felt the approach of what is called inspiration. At such moments the relation of the forces that determine artistic creation is, as it were, reversed. The dominant thing is no longer the state of mind the artist seeks to express but the language in which he wants to express it. Language, the home and receptacle of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in terms of sonority but in terms of the impetuousness and power of its inward flow. Then, like the current of a mighty river polishing stones and turning wheels by its very movement, the flow of speech creates in passing, by virtue of its own laws, meter and rhythm and countless other forms and formations, which are even more important, but which are as yet unexplored, insufficiently recognized, and unnamed.

At such moments Yurii Andreievich felt that the main part of the work was being done not by him but by a superior power which was above him and directed him, namely the movement of universal thought and poetry in its present historical stage and the one to come. And he felt himself to be only the occasion, the fulcrum, needed to make this movement possible.

This feeling relieved him for a time of self-reproach, of his dissatisfaction with himself, of the sense of his own insignificance. He looked up, he looked around him.

He saw the two sleeping heads on their snow-white pillows. The purity of their features, and of the clean linen and the clean rooms, and of the night, the snow, the stars, the moon, surged through his heart in a single wave of meaning, moving him to a joyful sense of the triumphant purity of being. “Lord! Lord!” he whispered, “and all this is for me? Why hast Thou given me so much? Why hast Thou admitted me to Thy presence, allowed me to stray into Thy world, among Thy treasures, under Thy stars, and to the feet of my luckless, reckless, uncomplaining love, who fills my eyes with perpetual delight?”

At three in the morning Yurii Andreievich looked up from his papers. He came back from his remote, selfless concentration, home to reality and to himself, happy, strong, peaceful. Suddenly the stillness of the open country stretching into the distance outside the window was broken by a mournful, plaintive sound.

He went into the unlit adjoining room to look through the window, but while he had been working the glass had frosted over. He dragged away the roll of carpet that had been pushed against the front door to stop the draft, threw his coat over his shoulders, and went out.

He was dazzled by the white glow playing on the shadowless, moonlit snow and could at first see nothing. Then the long, whimpering, deep-bellied howl sounded around, muffled by the distance, and he noticed four long shadows, no thicker than pencil strokes, at the edge of the clearing just beyond the gully.

The wolves stood in a row, their heads raised and their muzzles pointing at the house, baying at the moon or at its silver reflection on the windows. But scarcely had Yurii Andreievich realized that they were wolves when they turned and trotted off like dogs, almost as if they could read his thoughts. He lost sight of them before he noticed the direction in which they had vanished.

“That’s the last straw!” he thought. “Is their lair quite close? Perhaps in the gully? How terrible! And Samdeviatov’s horse in the barn! They must have scented it.”

He decided for the time being not to tell Lara, lest he upset her. Going back, he shut all the doors between the cold rooms and the heated part of the house, pushed rugs and clothes against the cracks to keep out the draft, and went back to his desk. The lamplight was bright and welcoming as before. But he was no longer in the mood to write. He couldn’t settle down. He could think of nothing but wolves and of looming dangers and complications of every kind. Moreover, he was tired.

Lara woke up. “Are you still burning, my precious bright light?” she whispered in a husky voice heavy with sleep. “Come and sit beside me for a moment. I’ll tell you my dream.”

He put out the light.

9

Another day of quiet madness went by. They had found a child’s sled in the house. Katenka, flushed bright red and bundled up in her coat, glided, shrieking with laughter, down the unswept paths from the snow-chute Yurii Andreievich had made for her by packing the snow hard with his spade and pouring water on it. Endlessly, she climbed back to the top of the mound, pulling the sled by a string, her smile never leaving her face.

It was freezing; the air was getting noticeably colder, but it was sunny. The snow was yellow at noon, with orange seeping into its honey color like an aftertaste at sunset.

The laundering and washing that Lara had done the day before had made the house damp. The steam had covered the windows with thick hoarfrost and left black streaks of damp on the wallpaper. The rooms were dark and cheerless. Yurii Andreievich carried logs and water and went on with his inspection of the house, making more and more discoveries, and he helped Lara with her endless chores.

In the rush of some task or other their hands would meet and join, and then they set down whatever they were carrying, weak and giddy with the irresistible onslaught of their tenderness, all thought driven from their heads. And the moments went by until it was late and they both remembered, horrified, that Katenka had been left alone much too long or that the horse was unwatered and unfed, and rushed off, conscience-stricken, to make up for their omissions.

Yurii Andreievich had not slept enough; there was a pleasant haze in his head, like tipsiness, and he ached all over with a nagging blissful weakness. He waited impatiently for the night, to go back to his interrupted writing.

The preliminary part of the work was being done outside his consciousness, during the drowsiness that filled him and veiled his surroundings and his thoughts. The diffuse mistiness in which everything was enveloped marked the stage preceding the distinctness of the final embodiment. Like the confusion of a first rough draft, the wearisome inactivity of the day was a necessary preparation for the night.

Although he felt exhausted, nothing was left untouched, unchanged. Everything was being altered and transformed.

Yurii Andreievich felt that his dream of remaining in Varykino would not come true, that the hour of his parting with Lara was at hand; he would inevitably lose her and with her the will to live and perhaps life itself. He was sick at heart, yet his greatest torment was his impatience for the night, his longing so to express his grief that everyone should be moved to tears.

The wolves he had been remembering all day long were no longer wolves on the snowy plain under the moon, they had become a theme, they had come to symbolize a hostile force bent upon destroying him and Lara and on driving them from Varykino.

The thought of this hostility developed in him and by evening it loomed like a prehistoric beast or some fabulous monster, a dragon whose tracks had been discovered in the ravine and who thirsted for his blood and lusted after Lara.

The night came and once again the doctor lit the lamp on the table. Lara and Katenka went to bed earlier than the night before.

What he had written that night fell into two parts. Clean copies—improved versions of earlier poems—were set out in his best penmanship. New work was written in an illegible scrawl full of gaps and abbreviations.

In deciphering these scribbles, he went through the usual disappointments. Last night these rough fragments had moved him to tears, and he himself had been surprised by some felicitous passages. Now these very passages seemed to him distressingly and conspicuously strained.

It had been the dream of his life to write with an originality so discreet, so well concealed, as to be unnoticeable in its disguise of current and customary forms; all his life he had struggled for a style so restrained, so unpretentious that the reader or the hearer would fully understand the meaning without realizing how he assimilated it. He had striven constantly for an unostentatious style, and he was dismayed to find how far he still remained from his ideal.

Last night he had tried to convey, by words so simple as to be almost childish and suggesting the directness of a lullaby, his feeling of mingled love and fear and longing and courage, in such a way that it should speak for itself, almost apart from the words.

Looking over these rough sketches now, he found that they needed a connecting theme to give unity to the lines, which for lack of it fell apart. He crossed out what he had written and began to write down the legend of St. George and the dragon in the same lyrical manner. At first he used a broad, spacious pentameter. The regularity of the rhythm, independent of the meaning and inherent in the meter itself, annoyed him by its doggerel artificiality. He gave up the pompous meter and the caesura and cut down the lines to four beats, as you cut out useless words in prose. The task was now more difficult but more engaging. The result was livelier but still too verbose. He forced himself to even shorter lines. Now the words were crammed in their trimeters, and Yurii Andreievich felt wide awake, roused, excited; the right words to fill the short lines came, prompted by the measure. Things scarcely named in the lines evoked concrete images. He heard the horse’s hoofs ringing on the surface of the poem, as you hear the ambling of a horse in one of Chopin’s ballades. St. George was galloping over the boundless expanse of the steppe. He could watch him, as he grew smaller in the distance. He wrote in a feverish hurry, scarcely able to keep up with the words as they poured out, always to the point and tumbling into place of themselves.

He had not noticed Lara getting out of bed and coming across to the table. She seemed very thin in her long nightdress and taller than she really was. He started with surprise when she appeared beside him, pale, frightened, stretching out her hand and whispering:

“Do you hear? A dog howling. Even two of them, I think. Oh, how terrible! It’s a very bad omen. We’ll bear it somehow till the morning, and then we’ll go, we’ll go! I won’t stay here any longer.”

An hour later, after much persuasion, she calmed down and fell asleep. Yurii Andreievich went outside. The wolves were nearer than the night before. They vanished even more swiftly and again before he could make out in which direction they went. They had stood in a bunch and he had not had time to count them, but it seemed to him that there were more of them.

10

It was the thirteenth day of their stay at Varykino. There was nothing new or different about it. The wolves, after having disappeared for a few days, had again howled in the night. Once again, mistaking them for dogs, and frightened by the omen, Larisa Feodorovna, just as before, announced that she was leaving the next day. Her usual balance was disturbed by attacks of anxiety, natural in a woman unused to pouring out her feelings all day long or to the luxury of unrestrained affection.

The same scenes were repeated again and again, so that when that morning Lara, as she had done so many times before, began to pack for the return journey, it was as if the thirteen days since their arrival had not existed at all.

It was again damp and dark in the rooms, this time because the weather was overcast. It was less cold, and judging from the look of the dark, low clouds it would snow any moment. Yurii Andreievich was exhausted by the physical and mental strain of too many sleepless nights. His legs were weak and his thoughts were in a tangle; shivering with cold and rubbing his hands, he walked about from room to room, waiting to see what Lara would decide and what he would have to do in consequence.

She did not know herself. Just then she would have given anything to exchange their chaotic freedom for a daily round, however strenuous, but laid down once and for all, for work and obligations, so that they could live a decent, honest, sensible life.

She began her day as usually making the beds, sweeping, dusting, and cooking breakfast. Then she began to pack and asked the doctor to harness the horse; she had firmly resolved to go.

Yurii Andreievich did not argue. It was mad to return to town, where the wave of arrests must have reached its peak, but it was equally mad to remain, alone and unarmed, in this winter desert with its own hazards.

Besides, there was hardly an armful of hay left in the barn or the sheds. Of course, had it been possible to settle down for a long stay, the doctor would have scouted around looking for new ways of getting food and fodder, but it wasn’t worth it for a few uncertain days. He gave up the thought and went to harness the horse.

He wasn’t good at it. Samdeviatov had taught him how to do it, but he kept forgetting. Still, he managed it, though clumsily. He strapped the yoke to the shafts, wound the slack and knotted the end of the metal-studded strap around one of them, then, one leg braced against the horse’s flank, pulled the two ends of the stiff collar tight and fastened them. At last he led the horse to the porch, tied it, and went inside to call Lara.

She and Katenka had their coats on and everything was packed, but Lara was in great distress. Wringing her hands and on the verge of tears, she begged him to sit down a moment and, throwing herself into a chair and getting up again, spoke incoherently, in a high-pitched plaintive singsong, stumbling over her words and repeatedly interjecting: “What do you think?”

“I can’t help it, I don’t know how it’s happened, but you can see for yourself, we can’t possibly go now, so late, it will be dark soon, we’ll be caught in the darkness in your terrible forest. What do you think? I’ll do whatever you tell me to, but I simply can’t make up my mind to go, something tells me not to, but do whatever you think best. What do you think? Why don’t you say something? We’ve wasted half the day, goodness knows how. Tomorrow we’ll be more sensible, more careful. What do you think? How would it be if we stayed one more night? And tomorrow we’ll get up early and start at daybreak, at six or seven. What do you think? You’ll light the stove and write one more evening and we’ll have one more night here, wouldn’t that be lovely, darling, wonderful? Oh, God, have I done something wrong again? Why don’t you say something?”

“You’re exaggerating. Dusk is a long way off, it’s quite early. But have it your way. We’ll stay. Only calm yourself, don’t be so upset. Come now, let’s take off our coats and unpack. And Katenka says she’s hungry. We’ll have something to eat. You are quite right, there would have been no point in going so suddenly, with so little preparation. But don’t be so upset, and don’t cry. I’ll light the stove in a moment. But before I do that, I might as well take the sleigh, since it’s at the door, and bring what’s left of the logs in our old woodshed; we’re entirely out. Don’t cry now. I’ll be back soon.”

11

Several sets of sleigh tracks led up to the woodshed of the Zhivagos’ house; Yurii Andreievich had made them on his earlier trips, and the snow over the threshold was trampled and littered from his last visit two days before.

The sky, which had been cloudy since morning, had cleared. It was cold again. The old park came right up to the shed, as if to peer at the doctor’s face and remind him of something. The snow was deep that winter. It was piled high over the threshold so that the lintel seemed lower and the shed hunchbacked. Snow hung over the edge of the roof almost down to the doctor’s head, like the rim of a gigantic mushroom. Just above it, as though plunging a point of its crescent into the snow, stood the new moon, glowing with a gray blaze along its edge.

Although it was early in the afternoon and full daylight, the doctor felt as if he were standing late at night in the dark forest of his life. Such was the darkness in his soul, such was his dejection. The new moon shining almost at eye level was an omen of separation and an image of solitude.

He was so tired that he could hardly stand. He threw the logs out of the shed onto the sleigh in smaller armfuls than usual; to handle the icy wood with snow clinging to it was painful even though he wore gloves. The work did not make him feel any warmer. Something within him had broken and come to a standstill. He cursed his luckless fate and prayed God to spare the life of the beautiful, sad, humble, and simple-hearted woman he loved. And the new moon stood over the barn blazing without warmth and shining without giving light.

The horse turned its head in the direction of the Mikulitsyns’ house and whinnied, at first softly, timidly, then louder, with assurance.

“What’s that for?” Yurii Andreievich wondered. “It can’t be fright. A frightened horse wouldn’t neigh, and it wouldn’t be such a fool as to signal to the wolves if it had scented them, and so cheerfully, too. It must be looking forward to going home. Hold on a moment, we’ll soon be off.”

He added chips for kindling to the logs, and strips of bark that curled like shoe leather, covered the load with sacking, lashed it to the sleigh with a rope, and turned back, walking at the horse’s head.

The horse neighed again, this time in answer to another horse neighing in the distance. “What can that be? Is it possible that Varykino is not as deserted as we thought?” It never occurred to him that they had guests or that the neighing came from the direction of Mikulitsyn’s house. He took the sleigh around the farm buildings, and since the house was hidden from him by snowy folds of land he did not see its front entrance.

Taking his time—why should he hurry?—he stacked the wood and, unhitching the horse, left the sleigh in the barn. Then he took the horse to the stables, put it in the far stall where there was less draft, and stuffed the few remaining handfuls of hay into the rack of the manger.

He felt uneasy as he walked home. In front of the porch stood a roomy peasant sleigh with a sleek black foal harnessed to it, and walking up and down beside it was an equally sleek, plump stranger, who gave the horse an occasional slap and had a look at its fetlocks.

There were voices coming from the house. Neither wishing to eavesdrop nor close enough to hear more than an occasional word, Yurii Andreievich nevertheless involuntarily slowed down and suddenly stopped. He recognized the voice of Komarovsky talking to Lara and Katenka. They were apparently in the first room near the door. They were arguing, and, judging from the sound of her voice, Lara was upset and crying, now violently contradicting him and now agreeing with him.

Something made Yurii Andreievich feel that just then Komarovsky was speaking about him, saying something to the effect that he should not be trusted (“serving two masters,” he thought he heard), that it was impossible to tell if he were more attached to Lara or to his family, that Lara must not rely on him, because if she did she would be “running with the hare and the hounds” and would “fall between two stools.” Yurii Andreievich went in.

As he had thought, they were in the first room on the right, Komarovsky in a fur coat reaching to his heels, Lara holding Katenka by her coat collar, trying to fasten it but not finding the hooks and shouting at her not to wriggle, and Katenka protesting: “Easy, Mama, you’ll choke me.” All three were standing in their outdoor clothes, ready to leave. When Yurii Andreievich came in, Lara and Komarovsky rushed to meet him, speaking together:

“Where have you been all this time? We need you so badly!”

“Hello, Yurii Andreievich. As you see, in spite of the rude things we said to each other last time, I’m with you once again, though you didn’t invite me.”

“Hello, Victor Ippolitovich.”

“Where on earth have you been?” Lara asked again. “Now listen to what he says and decide quickly for both of us. There isn’t any time. We have to hurry.”

“But why are we all standing? Sit down, Victor Ippolitovich. How do you mean, darling, where have I been? You know I went to get the wood, and afterwards I saw to the horse. Victor Ippolitovich, do sit down, please.”

“Well, aren’t you amazed to see him? How is it you don’t look surprised? Here we were, regretting that he had gone away and that we hadn’t jumped at his offer, and now here he is, right under your very eyes, and you don’t even look surprised! But what is even more astonishing is what he has to tell us now. Tell him, Victor Ippolitovich.”

“I don’t know what Larisa Feodorovna has in mind. One thing I must explain is this: I deliberately spread the rumor that I had left, but I stayed on to give you and Larisa Feodorovna more time to think over what we had discussed, and perhaps come to a less rash decision.”

“But we can’t put it off any longer,” broke in Lara. “Now is the perfect time to leave. And tomorrow morning ... But let Victor Ippolitovich tell you himself.”

“One moment, Lara dear. Forgive me, Victor Ippolitovich. Why should we all stand about in our coats? Let’s take them off and sit down. After all, these are serious things we have to talk about, we can’t settle them in a minute. I am afraid, Victor Ippolitovich, our discussion has touched on something personal; it would be ludicrous and embarrassing to go into it. But the fact is that while I have never considered going away with you, Lara’s case is different. On the rare occasions when our concerns were not the same and we remembered that we were not one person but two, I have always told her that she ought to give your suggestion more consideration. And in fact she has never stopped thinking about it, she has come back to it again and again.”

“But only on condition that you come with us,” broke in Lara.

“It is as difficult for you as it is for me to think of our being separated, but perhaps we ought to put our feelings aside and make this sacrifice. Because there’s no question of my going.”

“But you haven’t heard anything yet, you don’t know ... Listen to what Victor Ippolitovich says. ... Tomorrow morning ... Victor Ippolitovich.”

“Larisa Feodorovna is evidently thinking of the news I brought and have already told her. In the sidings at Yuriatin, an official train of the Far Eastern Government is standing under steam. It arrived yesterday from Moscow and is leaving for the East tomorrow. It belongs to our Ministry of Communications. Half the carriages are wagons-lits.

“I have to go by this train. Several seats have been put at my disposal for my assistants. We could travel in great comfort. There won’t ever be another chance like this again. I realize that you are not in the habit of speaking lightly, you are not the man to go back on your decisions, and you have made up your mind not to go with us. But even so, shouldn’t you reconsider it for Larisa Feodorovna’s sake? You heard her say that she won’t go without you. Come with us, if not to Vladivostok, then at least as far as Yuriatin—and there we shall see. Only we must really hurry—there is not a moment to lose. I have a driver with me—I don’t drive myself—and there isn’t room for five of us in my sleigh. But I understand you have Samdeviatov’s horse—didn’t you say you had gone with it to get the wood? Is it still harnessed?”

“No, I have unharnessed it.”

“Well then, harness it again as quickly as you possibly can. My driver will help you. ... Though, come to think of it, why bother—let’s forget about your sleigh, we’ll manage with mine, we’ll squeeze in somehow. Only let’s hurry, for heaven’s sake. You only need to pack the most essential things for the journey—whatever comes to hand first. There’s no time to fuss with packing when it’s a question of a child’s life.”

“I don’t understand you, Victor Ippolitovich. You talk as if I had agreed to come. Go and good luck to you, and let Lara go with you if she wishes. You needn’t worry about the house. I’ll clean it up and lock it after you’ve gone.”

“What are you talking about, Yura? What’s all this nonsense you don’t even believe yourself? ‘Lara’s wishes’ indeed! As if you didn’t know perfectly well that I won’t go without you and I won’t make any decision on my own. So what’s all this talk about your locking up the house?”

“So you are quite adamant?” said Komarovsky. “In that case, with Larisa Feodorovna’s permission I should like to have a couple of words with you, if possible alone.”

“Certainly. We can go into the kitchen. You don’t mind, darling?”

12

“Strelnikov has been captured, condemned to death, and shot.”

“How horrible! Are you really sure?”

“It’s what I’ve been told, and I am convinced it’s true.”

“Don’t tell Lara. She would go out of her mind.”

“Of course I won’t. That’s why I asked to speak to you alone. Now that this has happened, she and her daughter are in imminent danger. You must help me to save them. Are you quite sure you won’t go with us?”

“Quite sure. I’ve told you already.”

“But she won’t go without you. I simply don’t know what to do. You’ll have to help me in a different way. You’ll have to pretend, let her think that you might be willing to change your mind, look as if you might allow yourself to be persuaded. I can’t see her saying goodbye and leaving you, either here or at the station at Yuriatin. We’ll have to make her think that you are coming after all, if not now, then later, when I’ve arranged another opportunity for you to come. You’ll have to pretend that you’ll be willing to do that. You’ll just have to convince her of this, even if you have to lie. Though this is no empty offer on my part—I swear to you on my honor that at the first sign you give me I’ll get you out to the East and I’ll arrange for you to go on from there anywhere you like. But Larisa Feodorovna must believe that you are at least coming to see us off. You’ll simply have to make her believe that. For instance, you might pretend that you are going to get your sleigh ready and urge us to start at once, without waiting for you, not to waste any time—say you’ll catch up with us as soon as you are ready.”

“I am so shaken by the news about Strelnikov that I cannot collect my wits. I have hardly taken in all you’ve said. But you are right. Now that they’ve settled accounts with’ him, we must conclude, things being as they are, that Larisa Feodorovna and Katia’s lives are also threatened. Either she or I will certainly be arrested, so we’ll be parted anyway. It’s better that it should be you who separate us and take them off, as far away as possible. I am saying this, but it doesn’t make much difference—things are already going your way. Probably in the end I’ll break down completely, and swallow my pride and my self-respect and crawl to you, and ask you for her, for my life, and for a sea passage to my family, and for my own salvation, and accept it all from your hands. But you must give me time to think about it. I am stunned by the news. I am so distressed that I can’t think or reason properly. Perhaps, by putting myself in your hands, I am making a disastrous mistake and it will appall me all the rest of my life. But I am so dazed and overcome that all I can do at the moment is to agree with you blindly and obey you helplessly. ... Very well, then, for her sake I’ll go out now and tell her that I’ll get the sleigh ready and catch up with you, but in fact I shall stay behind. ... There’s one thing, though. How can you go now, when it will soon be dark? The road runs through woods, and there are wolves. Watch out.”

“I know. Don’t worry. I’ve got a gun and a revolver. I’ve brought a bit of liquor too, by the way, to keep out the cold. Would you like some? I’ve got enough.”

13

“What have I done? What have I done? I’ve given her up, renounced her, given her away. I must run after them. Lara! Lara!

“They can’t hear. The wind is against me and they are probably shouting at each other. She has every reason to feel happy, reassured. She has no idea of the trick I’ve played on her.

“She is thinking: It’s wonderful that things have gone so well, they couldn’t be better. Her absurd, obstinate Yurochka has relented at last, thank heaven, we are going to a nice, safe place, where people are more sensible than we are, where you can be sure of law and order. Suppose even, just to be annoying, he doesn’t come on tomorrow’s train, Komarovsky will send another to bring him, and he’ll join us in no time at all. And at the moment, of course, he’s in the stable, hurrying, excited, fumbling with the harness, and he’ll rush after us full tilt and catch up with us before we get into the forest.

“That’s what she must be thinking. And we didn’t even say goodbye properly, I just waved to her and turned back, trying to swallow my pain as if it were a piece of apple stuck in my throat, choking me.”

He stood on the veranda, his coat over one shoulder. With his free hand he was clutching the slender wooden pillar just under the roof as if he meant to strangle it. His whole attention was concentrated on a point in the distance. There a short stretch of the road could be seen climbing uphill, bordered by a few sparse birches. The low rays of the setting sun fell on this open space, and there the sleigh now hidden by a shallow dip would appear at any moment.

“Farewell, farewell,” he said over and over again in anticipation of that moment; his words were breathed almost soundlessly into the cold afternoon air. “Farewell, my only love, my love forever lost.

“They’re coming, they’re coming,” he whispered through dry, blenched lips as the sleigh shot like an arrow out of the dip, swept past the birches one after another, gradually slowing down, and—oh, joy!—stopped before the last of them.

His heart thumped with such a wild excitement that his knees shook and he felt weak and faint, the whole of his body soft as cloth, like the coat slipping from his shoulder. “O God, is it Thy will to give her back to me? What can have happened? What is going on out there near the sunset? What can be the meaning of it? Why are they standing still? No. It’s finished. They’ve moved. They’re off. She must have stopped for a last look at the house. Or perhaps to make sure that I had left? That I was chasing after them? They’ve gone.”

With luck, if the sun didn’t go down first (he wouldn’t see them in the dark) they would flash past once again, for the last time, on the other side of the ravine, across the field where the wolves had stood two nights before.

And now this moment also had come and gone. The dark red sun was still round as a ball above the blue snowdrifts along the horizon, flooding the plain with a juicy pineapple-colored light that the snow greedily sucked in, when the sleigh swept into sight and vanished. “Farewell, Lara, until we meet in the next world, farewell, my love, my inexhaustible, everlasting joy. I’ll never see you again, I’ll never, never see you again.”

It was getting dark. Swiftly the bronze-red patches of sunset scattered on the snow died down and went out. The soft, ashy distance filled with a lilac dusk that turned to deep mauve, its smoky haze smudging the fine lacework of the roadside birches lightly traced on the pink sky, pale as though it had suddenly grown shallow.

Grief had sharpened Yurii Andreievich’s senses and quickened his perception a hundredfold. The very air surrounding him was rare, unique. The winter evening was alive with sympathy, like a friendly witness. It was as if there had never been such a dusk before and night were falling now for the first time in order to console him in his loneliness and bereavement; as if the valley were not always girded by a panorama of wooded hills on the horizon but the trees had only taken up their places now, rising out of the ground in order to comfort him with their presence.

He almost waved away the tangible beauty of the hour, like a crowd of persistent friends, almost saying to the lingering afterglow: “Thank you, thank you, I’ll be all right.”

Still standing on the veranda, he turned his face to the shut door, his back to the world. “My bright sun has set,” he kept repeating inwardly, as though trying to engrave these words in his memory. He did not have the strength to utter all these words aloud.

He went into the house. A double monologue was going on in his mind, two different kinds of monologue, the one dry and businesslike, the other addressed to Lara, like a river in flood.

“Now I’ll go to Moscow,” ran, his thoughts. “The first job is to survive. I must not force myself to sleep. Instead, I must work all through the night till I drop with exhaustion. Yes, and another thing, light the stove in the bedroom at once, there is no reason why I should freeze tonight.”

But there was also this other inward conversation: “I’ll stay with you a little, my unforgettable delight, for as long as my arms and my hands and my lips remember you. I’ll put my grief for you in a work that will endure and be worthy of you. I’ll write your memory into an image of aching tenderness and sorrow. I’ll stay here till this is done, then I too will go. This is how I will portray you, I’ll trace your features on paper as the sea, after a fearful storm has churned it up, traces the form of the greatest, farthest-reaching wave on the sand. Seaweed, shells, cork, pebbles, the lightest, most imponderable things that it could lift from its bed, are cast up in a broken, sinuous line on the sand. This line endlessly stretching into the distance is the frontier of the highest tide. That was how life’s storm cast you up on my shore, O my pride, that is how I’ll portray you.”

He went in, locked the door behind him, and took off his coat. When he went into the bedroom, which Lara had tidied up so well and so carefully that morning and which her hurried packing had again turned inside out, when he saw the disarranged bed and the things thrown about in disorder on the chairs and floor, he knelt down like a little boy, leaned his breast against the hard edge of the bedstead, buried his head in the bedclothes, and wept freely and bitterly as children do. But not for long. Soon he got up, hastily dried his face, looked around him with tired, absent-minded surprise, got out the bottle of vodka Komarovsky had left, drew the cork, poured half a glass, added water and snow, and with a relish almost equal in strength to the hopelessness of the tears he had shed drank long, greedy gulps.

14

Something unaccountable was going on in Yurii Andreievich. He was slowly losing his mind. Never before had he led such a strange existence. He neglected the house, he stopped taking proper care of himself, he turned night into day and had lost count of time since Lara had left.

He drank vodka and he wrote about Lara; but the more he crossed out and rewrote what he had written the more the Lara of his poems and notebooks grew away from her living prototype, from the Lara who was Katia’s mother off on a journey with her daughter.

The reason for his revision and rewriting was his search for strength and exactness of expression, but they also followed the promptings of an inward reticence that forbade him to disclose his personal experiences and the real events in his past with too much freedom, lest he offend or wound those who had directly taken part in them. As a result, his feeling, still pulsing and warm, was gradually eliminated from his poems, and romantic morbidity yielded to a broad and serene vision that lifted the particular to the level of the universal and familiar. He was not deliberately striving for such a goal, but this broad vision came of its own accord as a consolation, like a message sent to him by Lara from her travels, like a distant greeting from her, like her appearance in a dream or the touch of her hand on his forehead, and he loved this ennobling imprint.

At the same time that he was working on his lament for Lara he was also scribbling the end of the notes he had accumulated over the years concerning nature, man, and various other things. As had always happened to him whenever he was writing, a host of ideas about the life of the individual and of society assailed him.

He reflected again that he conceived of history, of what is called the course of history, not in the accepted way but by analogy with the vegetable kingdom. In winter, under the snow, the leafless branches of a wood are thin and poor, like the hairs on an old man’s wart. But in only a few days in spring the forest is transformed, it reaches the clouds, and you can hide or lose yourself in its leafy maze. This transformation is achieved with a speed greater than in the case of animals, for animals do not grow as fast as plants, and yet we cannot directly observe the movement of growth even of plants. The forest does not change its place, we cannot lie in wait for it and catch it in the act of change. Whenever we look at it, it seems to be motionless. And such also is the immobility to our eyes of the eternally growing, ceaselessly changing history, the life of society moving invisibly in its incessant transformations.

Tolstoy thought of it in just this way, but he did not spell it out so clearly. He denied that history was set in motion by Napoleon or any other ruler or general, but he did not develop his idea to its logical conclusion. No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history’s organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshipped for decades thereafter, for centuries.

Mourning for Lara, he also mourned that distant summer in Meliuzeievo when the revolution had been a god come down to earth from heaven, the god of the summer when everyone. had gone crazy in his own way, and when everyone’s life had existed in its own right, and not as an illustration for a thesis in support of the rightness of a superior policy.

As he scribbled his odds and ends, he made a note reaffirming his belief that art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence. And his own ideas and notes also brought him joy, a tragic joy, a joy full of tears that exhausted him and made his head ache.

Samdeviatov came to see him. He brought him more vodka and told him of how Antipova and her daughter had left with Komarovsky. He came by the railway handcar. He scolded the doctor for not looking after the horse properly and took it back, unwilling to leave it for three or four more days as Yurii Andreievich wished, but promising to come back within the week, and personally take him away from Varykino for good.

Sometimes, after losing himself in his work, Yurii Andreievich suddenly remembered Lara as vividly as if she were before him, and broke down from tenderness and the sharpness of his loss. As in his childhood, when after his mother’s death he thought he heard her voice in the bird calls, in the summer magnificence of Kologrivov’s garden, so now his hearing, accustomed to Lara’s voice and expecting it as part of his life, played tricks on him and he heard her calling, “Yurochka!” from the next room.

He also had other hallucinations that week. Toward the end of it, he woke up in the night from a nonsensical nightmare about a dragon that had its lair underneath the house. He opened his eyes. A light flashed from the gully and he heard the crack and echo of a rifle shot. Strangely, a few moments after so unusual an experience, he went back to sleep, and in the morning told himself that it had been a dream.

15

This is what happened a day or two later. The doctor had at last convinced himself that he must be sensible, that if he wished to kill himself he could find a quicker and less painful method. He promised himself to leave as soon as Samdeviatov came for him.

A little before dusk, while it was still light, he heard loud crunching footsteps on the snow. Someone was calmly approaching the house with a firm, easy step.

Strange! Who could it be? Samdeviatov had his horse, he would not have come on foot, and Varykino was deserted. “They’ve come for me,” Yurii Andreievich decided. “A summons or an order to go back to town. Or they’ve come to arrest me. No, there would be two of them and they would have transportation to take me back. It’s Mikulitsyn,” he thought joyfully, imagining that he recognized the step. The stranger, still unidentified, fumbled at the door with its broken bolt, as if he had expected the padlock to be there; then he walked in confidently, certain of his way, opening the connecting doors and closing them carefully behind him.

Yurii Andreievich had been sitting at his desk with his back to the door. As he rose and turned to face it he found the stranger already in the doorway, where he had stopped dead.

“Whom do you want to see?” The doctor mechanically blurted out these conventional words without thinking, and was not surprised when there was no reply.

The stranger was a powerful, well-built man with a handsome face. He was dressed in a fur jacket and trousers, and warm, goatskin boots, and he had a rifle slung over his shoulder on a strap.

Only the moment of his appearance took the doctor by surprise, not his arrival in itself. The traces of occupation in the house had prepared him for it. This, evidently, was the owner of the supplies he had found, which, as he knew, could not have been left by the Mikulitsyns. Something about him struck Yurii Andreievich as familiar, he felt he had seen him before. Neither did the caller look as astonished as might have been expected at the sight of Yurii Andreievich. Perhaps he had been told that the house was lived in, and even who was living in it. Perhaps he even recognized the doctor.

“Who is he? Who is he?” The doctor racked his brains. “Where have I seen him, for heaven’s sake? Surely not ... A hot morning in May, God knows in what year. The station at Razvilie. The Commissar’s coach, promising nothing good. Cut-and-dried ideas, a one-track mind, harsh principles, and integrity, absolute integrity ... Strelnikov!”

16

They had been talking for hours. They talked as only Russians in Russia can talk, particularly as they talked then, desperate and frenzied as they were in those anxious, frightened days. Night was falling, and it was getting dark.

Apart from the nervous garrulousness that was common in those days, Strelnikov had some personal reason for talking ceaselessly.

He went on and on, doing everything possible to keep the conversation going, in order to avoid being alone. Was it his conscience he was afraid of, or the sad memories that haunted him, or was he tormented by that self-dissatisfaction which makes a man so hateful and intolerable to himself that he is ready to die of shame? Or had he made some dreadful, irrevocable decision and was he unwilling to remain alone with it and anxious to delay its execution by chatting with the doctor and staying in his company?

Whatever it was, he was evidently keeping to himself some important secret that burdened him, while pouring out his heart all the more effusively on every other subject.

It was the disease, the revolutionary madness of the age, that at heart everyone was different from his outward appearance and his words. No one had a clear conscience. Everyone could justifiably feel that he was guilty, that he was a secret criminal, an undetected impostor. The slightest pretext was enough to launch the imagination on an orgy of self-torture. Carried away by their fantasy, people accused themselves falsely not only out of terror but out of a morbidly destructive impulse, of their own will, in a state of metaphysical trance, in a passion for self-condemnation which cannot be checked once you give it its head.

As an important military leader who had often presided at military courts, Strelnikov must have heard and read any number of confessions and depositions by condemned men. Now he was himself swayed by the impulse to unmask himself, to reappraise his whole life, to draw up a balance sheet, while monstrously distorting everything in his feverish excitement.

He spoke incoherently, jumping from confession to confession.

“This all happened near Chita. ... Were you surprised at all the outlandish things you found in the drawers and cupboards? All that comes from the requisitioning we did when the Red Army occupied eastern Siberia. Naturally, I didn’t bring it here all by myself. I’ve always had trustworthy, devoted people around me; life has been very good to me that way. These candles, matches, coffee, tea, writing materials, and so on all come from requisitioned military stores, partly Czech, partly English and Japanese. Odd, don’t you think? ... ‘What do you think?’ was my wife’s favorite expression, I suppose you noticed. I couldn’t make up my mind whether to tell you when I arrived, but I might as well admit it now—I came to see her and my daughter. The message saying that they were here didn’t reach me till too late. That’s how I missed them. When rumors and reports reached me of your intimacy with her and the name Dr. Zhivago was mentioned to me, for some inexplicable reason, out of the thousands of faces I’d seen in these years, I remembered a doctor of that name who had once been brought to me for questioning.”

“And were you sorry you hadn’t had me shot?”

Strelnikov ignored the question. Perhaps he had not even heard the interruption. Lost in his thoughts, he went on with his monologue.

“Naturally, I was jealous—I’m jealous now, for that matter. What could you expect? ... I came to this district only a few months ago, after my other hide-outs farther east were uncovered. I was to be court-martialed on a trumped-up charge. It wasn’t difficult to guess the outcome. I wasn’t guilty. I thought there might be a hope of defending myself and clearing my good name at some time in the future, in more propitious circumstances. So I decided to disappear while I still could, before they arrested me, and hide for the present, lead a hermit’s life, keep moving. Perhaps I would have succeeded if it hadn’t been for a young scoundrel who wheedled himself into my confidence.

“It was while I was making my way westward across Siberia, on foot, keeping out of people’s way and starving. I used to sleep in snowdrifts, or in trains—there were endless rows of them standing buried in the snow all along the line.

“Well, I came across this boy, a tramp, who said he had got away from a partisan shooting squad—they had lined him up with a lot of other condemned men, but he was only wounded, and he crawled out from under a pile of dead bodies and hid in the forest and recovered, and now he was moving from one hide-out to another, like me. That was his story, anyway. He was a good-for-nothing, vicious and backward; he had been kicked out of school because he was dull-witted.”

The more details Strelnikov added to his description, the more certain the doctor felt that he knew the boy.

“Was his name Terentii Galuzin?”

“Yes.”

“Then everything he said about the partisans and the shooting was true. He didn’t invent a word.”

“The only good thing about him was that he was devoted to his mother. His father had been shot as a hostage, and his mother was in prison, and the same thing was likely to happen to her. When he heard that, he made up his mind to do all he could to get her out. He went to the local Cheka, gave himself up, and offered to work for them. They agreed to give him a chance on condition he made some important betrayal. He told them where I was hiding. But fortunately I got away in time.

“By a fantastic effort and after endless adventures, I got across Siberia and reached this part of the country. I am so well known here, I thought it was the last place they’d expect to find me; they wouldn’t suppose I’d have the nerve. And in fact, they went on for a long time looking for me around Chita, while I was hiding either in this house or in one or two others I knew were safe in the neighborhood. But now that’s out, they’re on my trail. Listen. It’s getting dark and I don’t like it because I haven’t been able to sleep for ages. You know what a torment that is. If any of my candles are still left—good, aren’t they, real tallow!—then let’s go on talking for a bit. Let’s go on talking for as long as you can stand it, right through the night, in luxury, by candlelight.”

“The candles are all there. I’ve opened only one box. I’ve been using the kerosene, which probably you also left.”

“Have you any bread?”

“No.”

“Then what have you been living on? But what a silly question! Potatoes, of course.”

“That’s right. Any amount of those. The people who used to live here were good housekeepers, they knew how to store them, they’re all safe and sound in the cellar, neither rotten nor frozen.” Strelnikov suddenly switched to the revolution.

17

“None of this can mean anything to you. You couldn’t understand it. You grew up quite differently. There was the world of the suburbs, of the railways, of the slums and tenements. Dirt, hunger, overcrowding, the degradation of the worker as a human being, the degradation of women. And there was the world of the mother’s darlings, of smart students and rich merchants’ sons; the world of impunity, of brazen, insolent vice; of rich men laughing or shrugging off the tears of the poor, the robbed, the insulted, the seduced; the reign of parasites, whose only distinction was that they never troubled themselves about anything, never gave anything to the world, and left nothing behind them.

“But for us life was a campaign. We moved mountains for those we loved, and if we brought them nothing but sorrow, they did not hold it against us because in the end we suffered more than they did.

“But before I go on, I ought to tell you something. This is the point. You’ve got to leave Varykino, don’t put it off if you value your life. They are closing in on me, and whatever happens to me will involve you. You are implicated already by the very fact of talking to me now. And apart from everything else, there are a lot of wolves around here; I had to shoot my way out of the Shutma the other night.”

“So it was you shooting.”

“Yes. Of course, you heard me. I was on my way to another hide-out, but before I got there I saw by various signs that it had been discovered. The people who were there having probably been shot. I won’t stay long with you. I’ll spend the night and leave in the morning. ... Well, I’ll go on if I may.

“Of course, it wasn’t only in Moscow or in Russia that there existed these elegant Tverskaia Yamskaia Streets with young rakes in fancy hats and spats rushing about with their girls in cabs. That street, the night life of the street, the night life of the past century, and the race horses and the rakes, existed in every city in the world. But what gave unity to the nineteenth century, what set it apart as one historical period? It was the birth of socialist thought. Revolutions, young men dying on the barricades, writers racking their brains in an effort to curb the brute insolence of money, to save the human dignity of the poor. Marxism arose, it uncovered the root of the evil and it offered the remedy, it became the great force of the century. And the elegant streets of the age were all that, as well as the dirt and the heroism, the vice and the slums, and the proclamations and the barricades.

“You can’t think how lovely she was as a child, a schoolgirl. You have no idea. She had a school friend who lived in a tenement next door to us; most of the tenants were railway workers on the Brest line. It was called the Brest line in those days, it’s been renamed several times since. My father—he’s a member of the Yuriatin revolutionary court now—he was a track overseer. I used to go to that house and see her there. She was still a child, but even then, the alertness, the watchfulness, the restlessness of those days—it was all there, you could read it all in her face, her eyes. All the themes of the century—all the tears and the insults and the hopes, the whole accumulation of resentment and pride were written in her face and bearing, which expressed both girlish shyness and self-assured grace. She was a living indictment of the age. This is something, isn’t it? It’s predestination. Something nature endowed her with, something to which she had a birthright.”

“How well you speak of her. I too saw her in those days, just as you have described her. A schoolgirl, and yet at the same time the secret heroine of an unchildish drama. Her shadow on the wall was the shadow of helpless, watchful self-defense. That was how I saw her, and so I still remember her. You put it perfectly.”

“You saw and you remembered? And what did you do?”

“That’s another story altogether.”

“Yes. Well. So you see, the whole of this nineteenth century—its revolutions in Paris, its generations of Russian exiles starting with Herzen, its assassinations of Tsars, some only plotted, others carried out, the whole of the workers’ movement of the world, the whole of Marxism in the parliaments and universities of Europe, the whole of this new system of ideas with its newness, the swiftness of its conclusion, its irony, and its pitiless remedies elaborated in the name of pity—all of this was absorbed and expressed in Lenin, who fell upon the old world as the personified retribution for its misdeeds.

“And side by side with him there arose before the eyes of the world the vast figure of Russia bursting into flames like a light of redemption for all the sorrows and misfortunes of mankind. But why on earth am I telling you all this? To you it must be the tinkling of a cymbal—just words.

“For the sake of this girl I studied and became a teacher, and went to Yuriatin, which I did not know at that time. For her sake I devoured piles of books and absorbed a great mass of knowledge, to be available to her if she asked for my help. To win her back after three years of marriage, I went to war, and when the war was over and I returned from captivity, I took advantage of having been listed as dead, and under an assumed name plunged headlong into the revolution, to pay back in full all the wrongs that she had suffered, to wash her mind clean of those memories, so that it should not be possible to return to the past, so that there should be no more Tverskaia-Yamskaias. And all the time they, she and my daughter, were next door, they were here! What an effort it cost me to resist the longing to rush to them, to see them! But I wanted to finish my life’s work first. Oh, what wouldn’t I give now for one look at them! When she came in it was as if the window flew open and the room filled with air and light.”

“I know how much you loved her. But forgive me, have you any idea of her love for you?”

“Sorry. What was that you said?”

“I asked you, had you any idea of how much she loved you—more than anyone in the world?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because she told me so herself.”

“She said that? To you?”

“Yes.”

“Forgive me, I realize it’s an impossible thing to ask, but if it isn’t hopelessly indiscreet, if you can, will you tell me exactly what it was she said to you?”

“Gladly. She said that you were the embodiment of what a human being should be, a man whose equal she had never met, that you were unique in your genuineness, and that if she could go back to the home she had shared with you she would crawl to it on her knees from the end of the earth.”

“Forgive me, but if it isn’t intruding on something too intimate, can you remember the circumstances in which she said this?”

“She had been doing this room and she went outside to shake the carpet.”

“Sorry, which carpet? There are two.”

“That one, the larger one.”

“It would have been too heavy for her. Did you help her?”

“Yes.”

“Each of you held one end, and she leaned far back throwing up her arms high as on a swing and turning away her face from the blowing dust and squinted her eyes and laughed? Isn’t that how it was? How well I know her ways! And then you walked toward each other folding up the heavy carpet first in two and then in four, and she joked and made faces, didn’t she? Didn’t she?”

They stood up and went to different windows and looked out in different directions. After a time Strelnikov walked up to Yurii Andreievich, caught hold of his hands, pressed them to his breast, and went on as hurriedly as before:

“Forgive me. I realize that I am touching on things that are dear and holy to you. But I should like to ask you more questions, if you’ll let me. Only please don’t go away. Don’t leave me alone. I’ll be going soon myself. Just think—six years of separation, six years of inconceivable self-restraint. But I kept thinking that freedom was not yet wholly won. When I’d won it, I thought, my hands would be untied and I could belong to my family. And now, all my calculations have come to nothing. They’ll arrest me tomorrow. You are near and dear to her. Perhaps you’ll see her one day and ... But what am I saying! I’m mad. They’ll arrest me, and they won’t let me say a word in my own defense. They’ll come at me with shouts and curses and gag me. Don’t I know how it’s done!”

18

At long last, Yurii Andreievich had a good sleep. For the first time in many nights he fell asleep the moment he lay down. Strelnikov spent the night; the doctor put him in the next room. The few times the doctor woke up and turned over or pulled the blankets up to his chin, he was conscious of the strong refreshment of sleep and he dropped off happily again at once. Toward morning he had several short, kaleidoscopic dreams of his childhood, so detailed and logical that he took them for reality.

He dreamed, for instance, that his mother’s watercolor showing a place on the Italian Riviera suddenly dropped from the wall, and he was aroused by a sound of breaking glass. He opened his eyes. “No, it can’t be that,” he thought. “It’s Antipov, Lara’s husband Strelnikov, scaring the wolves in the Shutma as Bacchus would say.” But no, what nonsense! It was the picture. There it was, lying in pieces on the floor, he assured himself, back in his dream.

He woke up late, with a headache from having slept too long. For a time he couldn’t think who or where he was.

Then he remembered: “Strelnikov is in here. It’s late. I must get dressed. He must be up by now. If not, I’ll wake him and make some coffee, and we’ll have it together.”

“Pavel Pavlovich!” he called out.

There was no answer. “He’s still asleep. He’s a sound sleeper, I must say.” He dressed unhurriedly and went into the next room. Strelnikov’s fur hat was on the table, but he was nowhere in the house. “Must have gone for a walk. And without his hat. Toughening himself up. I ought to be getting out of Varykino today, but it’s too late now Again I’ve overslept, it’s the same thing every day.”

He lit the kitchen range, picked up a bucket, and started toward the well. A few yards from the door, Strelnikov lay across the path with his head in a snowdrift. He had shot himself. The snow was a red lump under his left temple where he had bled. Drops of spurting blood that had mixed with the snow formed red beads that looked like rowanberries.