CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Conclusion

1

It remains to tell the brief story of the last eight or ten years of Zhivago’s life, during which he went more and more to seed, gradually losing his knowledge and skill as a doctor and a writer, emerging from his state of depression and resuming his work only to fall back, after a short flare-up of activity, into long periods of indifference to himself and to everything in the world. During these years the heart disease which he had himself diagnosed earlier but without realizing its gravity developed to an advanced stage.

He went to Moscow at the beginning of the NEP, the most ambiguous and hypocritical of all Soviet periods. He was even thinner, more neglected, and more unkempt than when he went to Yuriatin after escaping from the partisans. In the course of his journey he had again gradually discarded those of his clothes that had some value, exchanging them for bread and a few worn old rags to cover his nakedness. So he had lived off his second fur coat and suit, and arrived in the streets of Moscow dressed in a gray sheepskin hat, puttees, and a worn-out army overcoat stripped of all its buttons like a convict’s uniform. In this getup he was indistinguishable from the countless Red Army men who thronged the stations and the streets and squares of the capital.

He had not arrived alone. Following him wherever he went was a good-looking young peasant boy who was also dressed in old army clothes. They both turned up in the few surviving Moscow drawing rooms like those in which Yurii Andreievich had spent his childhood, where he was remembered and welcomed with his companion (after tactful inquiries as to whether they had been to the baths—typhus was still raging) and in which he was soon told of the circumstances of his family’s departure from Russia.

Both of them shied away from people, and their unsociability made them avoid going among people separately, for fear of becoming the center of attention and having to talk. Usually, when these two lanky figures made their appearance at any gathering of friends, they retired to some corner, where they could spend the evening in silence, without having to take part in the general conversation.

Dressed in his rags and accompanied everywhere by the boy, the tall, gaunt doctor looked like a peasant Seeker after Truth, and his companion like a patient, blindly devoted, and obedient disciple. Who was his young companion?

2

Yurii Andreievich had made the last stage of his journey by train but had covered the earlier and much longer part on foot.

The villages he went through looked no better than those he had seen in Siberia and the Urals, after running away from his captivity in the woods. Only then it had been winter, while now, at the end of the summer and the beginning of a warm, dry autumn, the weather made things easier.

Half the villages he passed were deserted, the fields abandoned and unharvested as after an enemy raid. Such were the effects of war—the civil war.

For two or three days at the end of September his road followed the steep bank of a river. The river flowing toward him was on his right. On his left the wide, unharvested fields stretched from the road to the cloudbanks on the horizon. At long intervals they were interrupted by woods, for the most part oak, maple, and elm. The woods ran to the river in deep gullies, which dropped precipitously and cut across the road.

In the unharvested fields the ripe grain spilled and trickled on the ground. Yurii Andreievich gathered it in handfuls, and at the worst, if he had no means of boiling it and making gruel, he stuffed it into his mouth and chewed it with great difficulty. The raw, half-chewed grain was almost indigestible.

Never in his life had he seen such dark-looking rye, rusty, brown, the color of old gold. Usually, when it is harvested in time, its color is much lighter.

These flame-colored fields blazing without fire, these fields silently proclaiming their distress, were coldly bordered by the vast, quiet sky, its face already wintry and shadowed by ceaselessly moving, long, flaky snow-clouds with black centers and white flanks.

Everything was moving slowly, regularly—the flowing river, the road running by it, and the doctor walking along the road in the same direction as the drifting clouds. Nor were the rye fields motionless. Their surface was alive, they were astir with an incessant crawling that suggested something foul and repellent.

Never had there been such a plague of mice. They had bred in unprecedented quantities. They scurried over the doctor’s face and hands and inside his sleeves and trousers at night, when he was caught by darkness and forced to sleep in the open, they raced across the road by day, gorged and teeming, and turned into squeaking, pulsing slush when they were trodden underfoot.

Shaggy, village curs, turned wild, followed him at a respectful distance, exchanging glances as if to decide on the best moment to fall on him and tear him to pieces. They fed on carrion, did not disdain mice, and eyed Yurii Andreievich from afar, moving after him confidently as though waiting for something. For some reason they never ventured into the wood and, whenever he came near one, gradually fell back, turned tail, and vanished.

The woods and the fields offered a complete contrast in those days. Deserted by man, the fields looked orphaned as if his absence had put them under a curse. The forest, however, well rid of him, flourished proudly in freedom as though released from captivity.

Usually the nuts are not allowed to ripen, as people, and particularly village children, pick them green, breaking off whole branches. But now the wooded sides of hills and gullies were thick with rough, golden foliage dusted and coarsened by the sun. Festive among it were bulging clusters of nuts, three or four, as if tied together, ripe and ready to fall from the branches. Yurii Andreievich cracked and crunched them in quantity. He stuffed his pockets and his bag full of them; for a whole week he fed on hazelnuts.

The fields appeared to him as something seen in the fever of a dangerous illness, and the woods, by contrast, in the lucidity of health regained. God, so it seemed to him, dwelled in the woods, while the fields echoed with the sardonic laughter of the devil.

3

At this point of his journey, Yurii Andreievich came to a deserted, burned-out village. All the houses had stood in one row on the side of the road opposite the river. The strip of land between the road and the edge of the steep riverbank had not been built on.

Only a few houses, blackened by the fire, were still standing, but they too were empty, uninhabited. Nothing was left of the others but piles of charred rubble with black chimneys rising out of them.

The cliffs facing the river were honeycombed with pits where the villagers had quarried rock for millstones; this had been their means of livelihood. Three such unfinished stones were lying on the ground in front of the last house in the row, one of the few that had remained standing. Like the others, this house was uninhabited.

Yurii Andreievich went inside. It was a still afternoon, but the moment he entered it was as if a gust of wind burst into the house. Tufts of straw and hay slithered across the floors, remnants of paper flapped on the walls, and the whole place stirred and rustled. Like the countryside, it swarmed with mice which scampered off, squeaking, in all directions.

He came out. The sun was setting behind the fields in back of the village. A warm, golden glow flooded the opposite bank, and its fading brilliance was reflected by pools and on bushes, some of which reached out into the middle of the stream. Yurii Andreievich crossed the road and sat down on one of the millstones that lay on the grass.

A fair, shaggy head came up over the edge of the bank, then shoulders, then arms. Someone was climbing up the cliff path with a bucket of water. Seeing the doctor, he stopped, still visible only from the waist up.

“Would you like a drink of water? If you won’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you.”

“Thank you. Yes, I’d like a drink. But come over here, don’t be frightened. Why should I hurt you?”

The water carrier was a boy in his teens, barefoot, ragged, and dishevelled.

In spite of his friendly words, he pierced the doctor with a worried, suspicious stare. For some reason the boy was strangely agitated. Finally, putting down his bucket, he rushed toward the doctor but stopped halfway, muttering:

“It isn’t ... It can’t be ... I must be dreaming. Pardon me, comrade, if I ask you, but haven’t I seen you before? Yes! Yes! Surely! You’re the doctor, aren’t you?”

“And who are you?”

“Don’t you recognize me?”

“No.”

“We were in the same train from Moscow, in the same car. They’d conscripted me for labor. I was in the convoy.”

It was Vasia Brykin. He threw himself on the ground before the doctor, kissed his hands, and wept.

The burned ruins were those of his native village, Veretenniki. His mother was dead. When the village was destroyed, Vasia hid in a cave in the quarries, but his mother, thinking he had been taken off to town, went mad with grief and drowned herself in the river—that very river Pelga which flowed at the foot of the cliff where they were sitting and talking. His sisters Alia and Aria were said to be in an orphanage in another district, but he knew nothing certain about them. He went on to Moscow with the doctor, and on the way told him of many terrible happenings.

4

“That’s last winter’s corn going to waste in the fields. We’d just finished sowing it when our troubles began. It was after Aunt Polia went away. Do you remember Aunt Polia?”

“No. I never even knew her. Who is she?”

“You never knew Aunt Polia? She was with us in the train! Tiagunova. The one who was plump and fair, and looked you straight in the eye.”

“That’s the one who was always braiding and undoing her hair?”

“That’s it! The one with the pigtail, that’s the one!”

“Yes, I remember her. Wait a moment, now I come to think of it, I met her later in a town in Siberia, we met in the street.”

“You don’t mean it! You met Aunt Polia!”

“What’s the matter with you, Vasia? Why are you shaking my hands like a madman? If you’re not careful you’ll pull them off. And what are you blushing for, like a girl?”

“Well, tell me quickly, how is she? Tell me.”

“She was all right when I saw her. She spoke about you and your people. Didn’t she say she’d been staying with you, or have I got it wrong?”

“Of course she did, of course she did. She stayed with us. My mother loved her like her own sister. She’s quiet and a good worker, very clever with her hands. We had plenty of everything in the house as long as she was living with us. But they made her life a misery in Veretenniki with all their talk.

“There was a man in the village called Rotten Kharlam. He was making up to Polia. He’s a slanderer, and he had no nose. She wouldn’t even look at him. He had a grudge against me for that. He spoke evil about me and Polia. In the end she left, she couldn’t stand it any more. And that was the beginning of all our troubles.

“There was a terrible murder near here. A widow who lived all by herself on a farm, up toward Buiskoie. Used to walk about in a man’s shoes with elastic straps. She kept a fierce dog chained to a long wire, which ran all around the house. Gorlan, she called it. She did all the work around the house and on the farm by herself, without any help. Well, last year the winter came before anyone expected it. The snow was early, and the old woman hadn’t dug up her potatoes. So she comes to Veretenniki and says, ‘Help me,’ she says, ‘I’ll pay you either in money or a share of the potatoes.’

“I said I’d do it, but when I got to the farm Kharlam was there, he’d taken the job on before me and she hadn’t bothered to tell me. Well, I wasn’t going to fight him about it, so we did the work together. It was wicked weather—rain and snow and mud and slush. We dug and we dug, and we burned the tops to dry the potatoes in the smoke. When we’d finished she settled with us, fair and square, and she let Kharlam go, but she gave me a wink as much as to say, I should stay on or come back later.

“So I went back again and she said: ‘I don’t want to give up my surplus to the state. You’re a good boy,’ she says, ‘I know you won’t give me away. You see, I’m not hiding anything from you. I would dig a pit myself, but you see what it’s like outside. I’ve left it too late, it’s winter, I can’t manage by myself. If you dig it for me, you won’t be sorry.’

“So I made the pit in the proper way for a hiding place, wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, like a jug, and we started a fire again and warmed and dried the pit with the smoke—all in a howling blizzard. Then we put the potatoes into the pit and the earth back on top. A very neat job it was. Of course, I didn’t say a word to a living soul, not even to my mother or my sisters. God forbid!

“Well, hardly a month went by before the farm was robbed. People coming past from Buiskoie said the door was wide open, and the whole place was cleaned out. No sign of the widow, and Gorlan had broken his chain and bolted.

“A bit later still, there was a thaw just before the New Year. On St. Basil’s Eve it rained, so the snow got washed off the high ground, you could see the bare soil. Then Gorlan came back to the farm and found the place where the potatoes were buried, and started rooting up the earth. He dug and dug and threw the earth back, and there were the old woman’s feet sticking up out of the hole, in those shoes with elastic straps she used to wear—horrible!

“Everyone in Veretenniki was sorry for the old woman. No one suspected Kharlam, and can you blame them? It was unthinkable. He wouldn’t have had the nerve. If he had done it, he would have run away, far from here.

“The kulaks, in the village, were very pleased about the murder. Here’s a chance to stir up trouble, they thought. ‘See what those town people are doing to you,’ they said. ‘They did it on purpose to frighten you, so you wouldn’t hide your grain and bury your potatoes. And you think it’s bandits from the woods that killed her, fools that you are! Just you go on doing what the town people tell you. They’ve got a lot more up their sleeves, they’ll take everything, they’ll starve you out. If you want to know what’s good for you, then listen to us, we’ll teach you some sense. When they come to take away what you’ve earned by the sweat of your brow, tell them, We haven’t so much as a grain of rye, let alone surpluses. And in case of trouble, use your pitchforks. And anyone who’s against the village had better look out!” Well, the old fellows talked and held village meetings, and that was just what Kharlam wanted. Off he went to the town with his tale. ‘Fine goings on in the village,’ he says, ‘and what are you doing about it? A Poor Peasants’ Committee, that’s what we need. Give the word and I’ll have them all at each other’s throats in no time.’ Then he made off somewhere, and never showed up in our parts again.

“What came after happened of itself. Nobody informed. Nobody’s to blame. They sent Red Army men from the town, and they set up a court. And they started on me. That was because of what Kharlam had told them. I’d dodged the labor service. I’d run away. And I’d killed the old woman and stirred up the village, they said. They locked me up, but luckily I thought to pull up one of the floor boards and get away. I hid in a cave in the old quarry. The village was burned over my head—I never saw it, and my own mother drowned herself in a hole in the ice and I never knew. It all happened by itself. They’d put the Red Army men in a house by themselves and given them liquor, and they all got dead drunk. In the night the house happened to catch fire, and the fire spread to the other houses, from one to the next. Our village people, when it started, jumped out of their houses and ran away. But the people from town—mind you, nobody set fire to them—naturally, they were all burned to death. Nobody told our people to run away or to stay away from their burned-out homes, but they were afraid that something else would happen. The kulaks spread a rumor that every tenth man would be shot. When I came out of the cave, they’d all gone, I didn’t find a soul, they’re wandering around somewhere.”

5

The doctor and Vasia arrived in Moscow in the spring of 1922 at the beginning of the NEP. The weather was fine and warm. Sunshine glancing off the golden domes of the Church of the Saviour played on the square below where grass was growing in the cracks between the paving stones.

The ban on private enterprise had been lifted and trade within certain narrow limits was allowed. Deals were made on the scale of the turnover of a rag-and-bone merchant in a flea market; their pettiness led to speculation and abuses. No new wealth was created by these transactions and they did nothing to relieve the squalor of the town, but fortunes were made out of the futile reselling of goods already sold a dozen times over.

The owners of several modest private libraries got down their books from their shelves and collected them all in one place. They notified the Town Soviet of their wish to start a co-operative bookshop. They applied for premises and obtained the use of some shoestore or florist’s, which had been empty and closed down since the first days of the revolution, and there, under its spacious vaults, they sold out their small haphazard collections.

Professors’ wives who, when times had been hard before, had secretly baked white rolls and sold them in defiance of the regulations, now sold them openly at some bicycle repair shop or other which had been requisitioned and left unused all these years. They changed sides, accepted the revolution, and no longer used their genteel language.

In Moscow Yurii Andreievich said:

“You’ll have to work at something, Vasia.”

“I’d like to study.”

“That goes without saying.”

“Another thing I want to do is draw my mother’s picture from memory.”

“That’s a good idea too. But for that you’d have to know how to draw. Have you ever tried?”

“When I was apprenticed to my uncle I used to play around with charcoal when he wasn’t looking.”

“Well, why not? We’ll see what can be done.”

Vasia did not show any great talent for drawing but he had enough aptitude to enter a school of industrial design. With the help of his friends, Yurii Andreievich got him into what had been the Stroganov Institute, where he first took a course in general subjects and then specialized in printing, binding, and book design.

The doctor and Vasia combined their efforts. The doctor wrote booklets on various subjects and Vasia set them up and printed them in small editions, as part of his training at the Institute. They were then distributed through the secondhand bookshops that had been recently opened by their friends.

These booklets contained Yurii Andreievich’s philosophy, his views on medicine, his definitions of health and sickness, reflections on the doctrine of evolution, his theory of individuality as the biological basis of the organism, and thoughts about religion and history (which had much in common with those of his uncle and Sima), as well as his poems, short stories, and sketches of the Pugachev country he had visited.

They were written in an easy conversational style but were anything but works of popularization, since they advanced opinions that were controversial, hypothetical, and untested, though always lively and original. The booklets found an easy sale among collectors.

In those days everything became a specialty, including versification and the art of translation; theoretical studies were written on all possible subjects, and institutes were founded right and left. There arose all sorts of Palaces of Thought, Academies of Artistic Ideas. Yurii Andreievich acted as medical consultant to half of these pseudo-cultural institutions.

For a long time he and Vasia remained friends and lived together. During that period they moved from one dilapidated place to another, each uninhabitable and uncomfortable in a different way.

Immediately on arriving in Moscow, Yurii Andreievich had revisited his old home in Sivtsev Vrazhok. He was told that his family had not stayed there when they returned to Moscow. After their deportation, the rooms registered in their name had been given to new tenants and there was not a sign of their belongings. Yurii Andreievich himself was avoided by his former neighbors, who regarded him as dangerous to know.

Markel was no longer there. He had gone up in the world and had been appointed house manager at Flour Town. The manager’s flat had been put at his disposal, but he preferred the old porter’s lodge, which had floors of beaten earth but which also had running water and an enormous Russian stove. All the pipes and radiators in the buildings burst in the cold weather, but the porter’s lodge was always warm and dry, and the water did not freeze.

There came a time when the friendship between Yurii Andreievich and Vasia cooled. Vasia had developed remarkably. He no longer thought or spoke like the ragged, barefoot, dishevelled boy from Veretenniki. The obviousness, the self-evidence of the truths proclaimed by the revolution attracted him increasingly, and the doctor’s language, with its obscurities and its imagery, now struck him as the voice of error, doomed, conscious of its weakness and therefore evasive.

The doctor was making calls on various government departments. He was trying to obtain the political rehabilitation of his family and permission for them to return to Russia. At the same time he applied for a foreign passport for himself and permission to bring his family back from Paris.

Vasia was astonished at how lukewarm and half-hearted his efforts were. Yurii Andreievich seemed always to be in a hurry to decide that he was not getting anywhere, and he spoke with too much conviction and almost with satisfaction of the futility of undertaking anything further.

Vasia found fault with him more and more often, and although Yurii Andreievich did not take offense at being justly criticized, his relationship with Vasia gradually deteriorated. Finally their friendship broke up, and they parted company. The doctor left the room that they had shared to Vasia and moved to Flour Town, where Markel was all-powerful and had set aside for him a corner at the back of what had been the Sventitskys’. It consisted of a derelict bathroom, a room with a single window adjoining it, and the dilapidated, crumbling kitchen and back entrance. After he had moved in, Yurii Andreievich gave up medicine, neglected himself, stopped seeing his friends, and lived in great poverty.

6

It was a gray Sunday in winter. Smoke was rising in columns from the roofs and in thin black streams from the windows, which, in spite of the regulations, were still used as outlets for the metal pipes of stoves. The amenities of town life had still not been restored. The tenants of Flour Town went about unwashed and suffered from boils and colds.

As on every Sunday, Markel Shchapov and his family were all at home.

They were having dinner at a large kitchen table. At this same table in days gone by, at the time of the bread rationing, all the tenants’ coupons were collected and cut, snipped, counted, sorted, and wrapped in pieces of paper or tied into bundles according to their category before being taken to the baker’s at dawn; and here too, later on in the morning, the loaves were cut and broken and crumbled to make up each tenant’s apportioned weight. But all this was now only a memory. Food rationing had been replaced by other forms of control, and the Shchapovs at their midday meal ate their fill and champed and chewed with relish.

Half the room was taken up by the broad Russian stove, which stood in the middle and had bedding on its flat top and quilts hanging down over the sides.

Near the entrance was a faucet, and here the pipes were not frozen. Benches ran down two sides of the room; under them were kept the family belongings in trunks and bundles. The table was on the left and had a plate rack fixed above it.

The room was very hot. The stove was going full blast. In front of it stood Markel’s wife, Agafia; her sleeves were rolled up above her elbows and she was using a long pair of tongs to move the pots inside the oven, crowding them together or spacing them out according to need. Her sweating face was in turn lit by the blaze in the oven and misted over by steam. Pushing the pots to one side, she pulled out from behind them a pastry on an iron sheet, flipped it over, and put it back to brown. Yurii Andreievich came in with two buckets.

“Good appetite.”

“Make yourself at home. Sit down and have dinner with us.”

“Thank you, I’ve had mine.”

“We know what you call dinner. Why don’t you sit down and have something hot? You needn’t turn up your nose at it—it’s good stuff, baked potatoes, pie with kasha.”

“No thanks, really. ... I’m sorry to keep on opening the door and letting in the cold. I want to take up as much water as I can. I’ve cleaned the bathtub, now I’m filling that and the wash tubs. I’ll come in half a dozen times and then I won’t trouble you again for a long time. Forgive me for bothering you like this, but I can’t get water anywhere else.”

“Help yourself. If you asked for syrup, we haven’t got any, but there’s plenty of water. Take as much as you like, we won’t even charge you for it!”

They all laughed.

When Yurii Andreievich came for the third time to fill his fifth and sixth buckets, the tone had changed.

“My sons-in-law have been asking me who you are. I told them but they don’t believe me. You go on running the water, don’t mind me. Only don’t slop it on the floor, clumsy! Don’t you see, you’ve splashed some in the doorway. If it freezes over I can’t see you coming to hack it up with a crowbar. And shut the door properly, you oaf, there’s a draft coming in. Yes, so I was telling them who you are but they won’t believe it. The money that was spent on you! All that learning, and where has it got you, I’d like to know?”

When Yurii Andreievich came in for the fifth or sixth time, Markel frowned.

“Just once more and that’s that. There’s a limit to everything, old man. If our little Marina didn’t keep sticking up for you, I’d lock the door, no matter how high-born you are. You remember our Marina, don’t you? There she is, the dark one at the end of the table. She’s gone all red, look. ‘Don’t hurt his feelings, Dad,’ she keeps telling me. As if anybody wants to hurt your feelings. She’s a telegrapher at the Central Post Office—she knows foreign languages. ‘He’s unfortunate,’ she says. She’s so sorry for you, she’d go through fire and water for you! As if I’m to blame that you’re a poor fish! You shouldn’t have run away to Siberia, leaving your house at a bad time. It’s your own fault. Look at us here—we sat it out through the famine and the White blockade, we didn’t flinch—so here we are, safe and sound. Blame yourself. If you’d taken proper care of Tonia, she wouldn’t be traipsing abroad now. Well, it’s your business, what do I care. Only what I’d like to know, begging your pardon, is what do you want with all this water? Hired yourself out to make a skating rink or something? You and your water! I can’t even get mad at you, you’re such a wet rag!”

Again they all laughed. Marina, however, looked around angrily, flared up, and began to chide them. Yurii Andreievich was astonished by the sound of her voice, though he could not as yet have said why.

“There’s a lot of cleaning to be done in the house, Markel. I’ve got to scrub the floors and wash some of my things as well.”

The Shchapovs were amazed.

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, saying such things, let alone doing them? You’ll be starting a Chinese laundry next.”

“Let me send my daughter up,” said Agafia. “She’ll do your washing and scrubbing, and your mending, if there is any. You don’t need to be afraid of him, my dear. You can see how well brought up he is, he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“What an idea, Agafia Tikhonovna! I wouldn’t dream of letting Marina do my scrubbing. Why on earth should she dirty her hands for me? I’ll manage all right.”

“You can dirty your hands and I can’t, is that it?” Marina broke in. “Why are you so difficult, Yurii Andreievich? Would you really drive me out if I came up to see you?”

Marina could have been a singer. She had a pure, well-modulated voice of great range and strength. She did not speak loudly, but her voice gave the impression of being stronger than was needed for ordinary conversation; it seemed to have a life of its own, as though it did not belong to her. It seemed to come from behind her back or from the next room. This voice was her protection, her guardian angel; no one could wish to hurt or distress a woman with such a voice.

It was from this water-carrying on a Sunday that a friendship sprang up between the doctor and Marina. She would often come and help him with his housework. One day she stayed with him and did not again go back to the lodge. Thus she became Yurii Andreievich’s third wife, though he was not divorced from the first, and they did not register their marriage. They had children. Markel and Agafia spoke of their daughter, not without pride, as the doctor’s wife. Her father grumbled that there had never been a proper wedding either in church or at the registry, but his wife said: “Are you out of your mind? With Tonia still alive, that would be bigamy.”—“It’s you that’s stupid,” said Markel. “What’s Tonia got to do with it? It’s just the same as if she were dead. There’s no law to protect her.”

Yurii Andreievich sometimes said jokingly that theirs was a romance in twenty buckets, as you might have a novel in twenty chapters.

Marina forgave the doctor his eccentricities, the dirt and disorder he made in the house, his moods and his fancies; they were those of a man who was letting himself go and knew it. She bore with his grumbling, his tempers, and his nerves.

Her devotion went even further. At times they were destitute through his fault, and in order not to leave him alone at such moments she would give up her own job at the post office, where her work was so highly thought of that she was always taken back after her enforced absence. In obedience to Yurii Andreievich’s whim, she would go out with him, doing odd jobs from house to house. They chopped wood for a good many of the tenants on the different floors. Some of them, particularly speculators who had made fortunes at the beginning of the NEP and artists and scholars who were close to the government, were setting up house on a comfortable scale. One day Yurii Andreievich and Marina, stepping carefully in their felt boots so as not to dirty the carpet with sawdust, were carrying wood into the study of a tenant who remained insultingly engrossed in something he was reading and did not honor them with so much as a glance. It was his wife who gave the orders and who paid them.

“What has the pig got his nose in?” the doctor wondered. The scholar was scribbling furiously in the margins of his book. As he passed him with a bundle of logs, Yurii Andreievich glanced over his shoulder. On the desk lay a pile of the early editions of the booklets that he had written and Vasia had printed.

7

Yurii Andreievich and Marina were now living in Spiridonovka Street, and Gordon had a room in Malaia Bronnaia Street near by. Marina and the doctor had two daughters, Kapka (Capitolina), who was five years old, and the baby Klazhka (Claudia), who was only six months.

The early summer of 1929 was very hot. People who lived in the same neighborhood would go to see each other, hatless and in their shirtsleeves.

Gordon’s room was part of a curious structure, which had once been the premises of a fashionable tailor. The shop had been on two floors, connected by a spiral staircase, and both looking out onto the street through one large plate-glass window, on which the tailor’s name and occupation were traced in gold letters.

The premises were now divided into three. By means of floor boards an extra room had been fitted into the space between the lower and the upper levels. It had what was, for a living room, a curious window, about three feet high, starting at floor level and with part of the gold letters remaining. From outside through the gaps in the lettering, anyone in the room could be seen up to the knees. This was Gordon’s room. With him at the moment were Zhivago, Dudorov, Marina, and the children, who, unlike the grownups, were entirely visible through the glass. Marina soon left with the little girls, and the three men remained alone.

They were having one of those unhurried, lazy summer conversations that go on between men who were at school together and have many years of friendship behind them.

To carry on a conversation naturally and intelligently, a man must have an adequate supply of words. Of the three, only Yurii Andreievich answered this requirement.

The other two were always at a loss for an expression. They did not possess the gift of eloquence. At a loss for words, they paced up and down, puffed at their cigarettes, gesticulated, and repeated themselves. (“That, plainly, is dishonest, old man! Dishonest, yes, yes, that’s what it is, dishonest.”)

They were unaware that such dramatic excesses, far from showing their warmth and breadth of character, expressed intellectual poverty.

Both Gordon and Dudorov moved among cultured academicians, they spent their lives among good books, good thinkers, good composers and good music, which was as good yesterday as today (but always good!), and they did not know that the misfortune of having average taste is a great deal worse than the misfortune of having no taste at all.

Neither Dudorov nor Gordon realized that even their admonitions to Zhivago were prompted less by a friendly wish to influence his conduct than by their inability to think with freedom and to guide the conversation at will. Like a runaway cart, the conversation took them where they did not want to go. Unable to steer it, they were bound, sooner or later, to bump into something, and to be hit. And so, in their sermonizing, time and again they got off their tracks.

To Zhivago, their unconscious motives, their artificial emotionalism, and their strained reasoning were transparent. But he could hardly say to them: “Dear friends, how desperately commonplace you are—you and your circle, the names and the authorities you always quote, their glamour and art which you so much admire! The only bright and vital thing about you is that you are my contemporaries and friends!” How could anyone confess to such a thought? So, in order to spare their feelings, he listened meekly.

Dudorov had recently come back from his first deportation. His civil rights had been restored, and he had been allowed to resume his regular work at the university.

Now he was telling his friends about his experiences as a deportee. He spoke sincerely and without hypocrisy. He was not motivated by fear; he really believed in what he was saying.

He said that the arguments of the prosecution, his treatment in prison and after he came out, and particularly his private talks with the examining judge had “aired” his brains, re-educated him politically, opened his eyes to many things he had not seen before, and made him more mature as a person.

These reflections appealed to Gordon just because they were so hackneyed. He nodded his head with sympathy and agreed with Dudorov in everything. It was the very triteness of the feelings and expressions that moved him most; he mistook Dudorov’s reflection of prescribed feeling for a genuine expression of humanity.

Dudorov’s pious platitudes were in the spirit of the times. But it was precisely their conformism, their transparent sanctimoniousness, that exasperated Yurii Andreievich. Men who are not free, he thought, always idealize their bondage. So it was in the Middle Ages, and later the Jesuits always exploited this human trait. Zhivago could not bear the political mysticism of the Soviet intelligentsia, though it was the very thing they regarded as their highest achievement, or as it would have been called in those days, “the spiritual ceiling of the age.” But this he also kept to himself in order not to hurt the feelings of his friends.

What did interest him in Dudorov’s story was his account of a cellmate of his, Bonifatii Orletsov, a follower of Tikhon, the Patriarch of Moscow. Orletsov had a six-year-old daughter, Christina. The arrest and subsequent fate of her beloved father had been a terrible blow to her. Terms such as “obscurantist priest” and “disenfranchised” seemed to her the stigma of dishonor. Dudorov felt that in her childish ardor she had vowed someday to remove that stigma from her family name. This goal, conceived at such an early age and nursed with burning resolution, made of her even now an enthusiastic champion of Communist ideals.

“I must go,” said Yurii Andreievich. “Don’t be cross with me, Misha. It’s hot and stuffy in here. I need to get some air.”

“But the window is open, look, down there on the floor. ... I’m sorry, we’ve been smoking too much. We keep forgetting that we shouldn’t smoke with you here. It isn’t my fault that it gets so stuffy, it’s the idiotic way the window is made. You should find me another room.”

“I must be off, Misha. We’ve talked enough. Thank you both for your concern. ... I’m not pretending, you know. It’s an illness I’ve got, sclerosis of the heart. The walls of the heart muscle wear out and get thin, and one fine day they may burst. I’m not yet forty, you know, and it isn’t as if I were a drunkard, or burned the candle at both ends!”

“Nonsense! We aren’t playing your funeral march yet. You’ll last us out.”

“Microscopic forms of cardiac hemorrhages have become very frequent in recent years. They are not always fatal. Some people get over them. It’s a typical modern disease. I think its causes are of a moral order. The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s a part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity. I found it painful to listen to you, Innokentii, when you told us how you were re-educated and became mature in jail. It was like listening to a circus horse describing how it broke itself in.”

“I must stand up for Dudorov,” said Gordon. “You’ve got unused to simple human words, they don’t reach you any more.”

“It may very well be, Misha. But in any case, you must let me go now. I can hardly breathe. I swear, I’m not exaggerating.”

“Wait a moment, you’re just looking for excuses. We won’t let you go until you’ve given us an honest, straightforward answer. Do you or don’t you agree that it’s time you changed your ways and reformed? What are you going to do about it? To start with, you must clarify your situation with Tonia and Marina. They are human beings, women who feel and suffer, not disembodied ideas existing only in your head. And second, it’s a scandal that a man like you should go to waste. You’ve got to wake up and shake off your inertia, pull yourself together and look at things without this impermissible arrogance, yes, yes, without this inexcusable haughtiness in regard to everyone, you must go back to work and take up your practice.”

“All right, I’ll give you my answer. I’ve been thinking something of this sort myself recently, so I can really promise you that there’s going to be a change. I think everything will come out all right. And quite soon, at that. You’ll see. I really mean it. It’s already begun. I have an incredible, passionate desire to live, and to live always means to strive to move higher, toward perfection, and to achieve it.

“I am glad that you stand up for Marina, Misha, just as you always stood up for Tonia. But after all, I have no quarrel with either of them, I am not at war with them, or with anyone else for that matter. You used to reproach me at first because Marina said ‘you’ to me and called me Yurii Andreievich, while I said ‘thou’ and ‘Marina’ to her—as though it didn’t distress me too! But you know that the deeper causes of this unnatural behavior were removed long ago, and now we treat each other as equals.

“Now I can tell you another piece of good news. I’ve been getting letters again from Paris. The children are growing up, they have a lot of French friends of their own age. Sasha is about to graduate from the école primaire and Masha is soon going to it. I’ve never seen her, you know. I have a feeling in spite of everything that although they’ve become French citizens, they’ll soon be back and that everything will be straightened out in some way or other.

“It seems that Tonia and my father-in-law know about Marina and our children. I didn’t tell them in my letters, but they must have heard about it from others. Naturally, Alexander Alexandrovich, as a father, feels outraged and hurt. That would explain why our correspondence was interrupted for almost five years. I used to correspond with them, you know, after I got back to Moscow, and then they suddenly stopped writing.

“Now, quite recently, they’ve begun writing again, all of them, even the children. They write very warmly and affectionately. For some reason they’ve relented. Perhaps Tonia has found someone else; I hope with all my heart she has. I don’t know. I too write from time to time. ... But I really can’t stay any longer. I must go or I’ll get an attack. Goodbye.”

Next morning Marina came running in to Gordon, greatly distressed. There was no one she could leave the children with, so in one arm she carried the baby wrapped in a blanket and with her free hand she was pulling Kapka, who trailed behind and dragged her feet.

“Is Yura here, Misha?” she asked in a frightened voice.

“Didn’t he go home last night?”

“No.”

“Then he must have spent the night at Innokentii’s.”

“I’ve come from there. Innokentii is at the university, but the neighbors know Yura and they say he hasn’t been there.”

“Where can he be, then?”

Marina put Klazhka down on the sofa, and then she began to sob hysterically.

8

For two days Gordon and Dudorov did not dare to leave Marina alone and took turns watching her and hunting for the doctor. They called at all the places he might conceivably have gone to—Flour Town, Sivtsev Vrazhok, all the Palaces of Thought and Academies of Ideas he had ever been employed in; they looked up every friend of his they had ever heard him talk about and whose address they could discover—but with no success.

They did not report him as missing to the police. Although he was registered and had no police record, it was better not to draw the attention of the authorities to a man who, by the standards of the day, lived anything but an exemplary life. They decided not to put them on his track except as a last resort.

On the third day, letters from Yurii Andreievich came by different mails for all three of them—Gordon, Dudorov, and Marina. He was full of regret for the trouble and anxiety he had caused them, he begged them not to worry about him, and he implored them by everything that was holy to give up their search for him, saying that it would in any case be fruitless.

He told them that in order to rebuild his life as completely and rapidly as possible, he wished to spend some time by himself, concentrating on his affairs, and that as soon as he was settled in a job and reasonably certain of not falling back into his old ways he would leave his hiding place and return to Marina and the children.

He told Gordon that he was sending him a money order for Marina and asked him to get a nurse for the children, so that Marina could go back to work. He explained that he was not sending the money to her address for fear of someone seeing the receipt and her thus being exposed to the risk of robbery.

The money soon came, and the amount far exceeded the standards of Yurii and his friends. The nurse was hired. Marina went back to work at the post office. She was still greatly upset but, accustomed as she was to Yurii Andreievich’s oddities, she eventually resigned herself to his latest whim. All three of them went on looking for him, but gradually they came to the conclusion that it was as futile as he had warned them it would be. They could find no trace of him.

9

Yet all the time he was living within a stone’s throw, right under their eyes and noses, in the very middle of the district they were combing for him.

On the day of his disappearance he left Gordon and went out into Bronnaia Street a little before dusk. He turned straight toward home, but almost immediately, within less than a hundred yards, he ran into his half brother Evgraf, who was coming down the street toward him. He had neither seen him nor heard of him for more than three years. It turned out that Evgraf had just arrived in Moscow; as usual, he came quite unexpectedly, and he shrugged off all questions with a smile or a joke. On the other hand, from the few questions he asked Yurii Andreievich, he gathered the gist of his troubles at once, and then and there, between one corner and another as they walked along the narrow, twisting, crowded street, he worked out a practical plan to rescue him. It was his idea that Yurii Andreievich should disappear and remain in hiding for some time.

He took a room for him in Kamerger Street, as it was still called, near the Arts Theater. He provided him with money. He took steps to get him a good position in a hospital, with plenty of opportunity for going on with his research, and assisted him by his patronage. Finally, he gave him his word that the ambiguity of his family’s situation in Paris would be resolved. Either Yurii Andreievich would go to them or they would come to him. All these things Evgraf undertook to see to himself. As usual, his brother’s help put new heart into Yurii Andreievich. As always before, the riddle of his power remained unsolved. Yurii Andreievich did not even try to penetrate the secret.

10

His room faced south. It almost adjoined the theater and looked out over the rooftops opposite; beyond them, the summer sun stood over Okhotny Ryad, and the street below was in shadow.

To Yurii Andreievich the room was more than a place for work, more than his study. At this time of devouring activity, when the pile of notebooks on his desk was too small to hold all his plans and ideas and the surplus floated in the air like apparitions—as unfinished pictures stand with their faces to the walls in a painter’s studio—his living room was to him a banqueting room of the spirit, a cupboard of mad dreams, a storeroom of revelations.

Fortunately, Evgraf’s negotiations with the hospital dragged on, and the start of Yurii Andreievich’s new job was indefinitely postponed. The delay gave him time to write.

He began by trying to sort out those of his earlier poems of which he could remember snatches or of which Evgraf somehow got him the texts. (These were manuscripts, some in his own hand, some copies made by others.) But the disorderliness of the material made him squander his energy even more than he was inclined to do by nature. He soon gave it up and turned to new work.

He would make the rough draft of an article, like the notes he had kept when he first went to Varykino, or put down the middle, or the end, or the beginning of a poem as it came into his mind. There were times when he could hardly keep pace with his thoughts, even in his shorthand made up of initials and abbreviations.

He was in a hurry. Whenever his imagination flagged he whipped it up by making drawings in the margins of his notebooks. The drawings were always of forest cuttings or of street intersections marked by the sign: “Moreau & Vetchinkin. Mechanical seeders. Threshing machines.”

The articles and poems were all on the same theme, the city.

11

These notes were found later among his papers:

“When I came back to Moscow in 1922 I found it deserted and half destroyed. So it had come out of the ordeals of the first years after the revolution; so it remains to this day. Its population has decreased, no new houses are being built, and the old ones are left in disrepair.

“But even in this condition it is still a big modern city, and cities are the only source of inspiration for a new, truly modern art.

“The seemingly incongruous and arbitrary jumble of things and ideas in the work of the Symbolists (Blok, Verhaeren, Whitman) is not a stylistic caprice. This is a new order of impressions, taken directly from life.

“Just as they hurry their succession of images through the lines of their poems, so the street in a busy town hurries past us, with its crowds and its broughams and carriages at the end of the last century, or its streetcars and subways at the beginning of ours.

“Pastoral simplicity doesn’t exist in these conditions. When it is attempted, its pseudo-artlessness is a literary fraud, not inspired by the countryside but taken from the shelves of academic archives. The living language of our time, born spontaneously and naturally in accord with its spirit, is the language of urbanism.

“I live at a busy intersection. Moscow, blinded by the sun and the white heat of its asphalt-paved yards, scattering reflections of the sun from its upper windows, breathing in the flowering of clouds and streets, is whirling around me, turning my head and telling me to turn the heads of others by writing poems in its praise. For this purpose, Moscow has brought me up and made me an artist.

“The incessant rumbling by day and night in the street outside our walls is as inseparable from the modern soul as the opening bars of an overture are inseparable from the curtain, as yet secret and dark, but already beginning to crimson in the glow of the footlights. The city, incessantly moving and roaring outside our doors and windows, is an immense introduction to the life of each of us. It is in these terms that I should like to write about the city.”

There are no such poems in what has been preserved of Zhivago’s work. Or does the one entitled “Hamlet” belong to this category?

12

One morning at the end of August, Yurii Andreievich took the trolley at a stop at a corner of Gazetny Street which went up along Nikita Street to the Kudrinskaia terminal. He was going for the first time to his job at the Botkin Hospital, which was then known as the Soldatenko Hospital. He had been there before only once or twice for reasons connected with his job.

He had no luck with his trolley; it had a defective motor and kept getting into trouble of every sort. Either its way was blocked by a cart in front of it with its wheels caught in the grooves of the rails, or the insulation went wrong on the roof or under the floor and the current short-circuited with a flash and a crackle.

The driver would step off the front platform, walk around the trolley with a wrench, and squat down and tinker with the machinery between the rear platform and the wheels.

The ill-fated trolley blocked the traffic all along the line. The whole street was dammed up with other trolleys that had already been stopped, and still others kept joining. The end of the line now reached as far back as the riding school and beyond. Passengers from cars in the rear moved to the front car, hoping to gain time, and got into the very car that was the cause of all the trouble. It was a hot morning, and the car was crowded and stuffy. Above the crowds running about in the street from one trolley to another, a dark lilac thundercloud was creeping higher and higher up the sky. A storm was gathering.

Yurii Andreievich sat on a single seat on the left, pressed against the window. He could see the left side of Nikita Street, where the Conservatory was situated. With the vague attention of a man thinking of something else, he watched the people walking and driving past on that side, missing no one.

A gray-haired old lady, in a light straw hat with linen daisies and cornflowers and a tight old-fashioned lilac dress, was trudging along the pavement, panting and fanning herself with a flat parcel that she was carrying in her hand. Tightly corseted, exhausted by the heat, and streaming with sweat, she kept mopping her damp lips and eyebrows with a small lace handkerchief.

Her course was parallel to that of the trolley. Yurii Andreievich had already lost sight of her several times, whenever the trolley had started up after a stop for repairs and passed her. She had again come back into his field of vision when it broke down once more and she overtook it.

Yurii Andreievich thought of the problems in school arithmetic in which you are asked how soon and in what order trains, starting at different times and going at different speeds, get to their destinations; he tried to remember the general method of solving them, but it escaped him and he went on from these school memories to others and to still more complicated speculations.

He tried to imagine several people whose lives run parallel and close together but move at different speeds, and he wondered in what circumstances some of them would overtake and survive others. Something like a theory of relativity governing the hippodrome of life occurred to him, but he became confused and gave up his analogies.

There was a flash of lightning and a roll of thunder. The ill-starred trolley was stuck for the nth time; it had stopped halfway down the hill from Kudrinskaia to the Zoo. The lady in lilac appeared in the frame of the window, passed beyond it, and moved on. The first heavy drops of rain fell on the street, the sidewalk, and the lady. A gusty wind whipped past the trees, flapped the leaves, tugged at the lady’s hat, ballooned her skirt, and suddenly “died down.

The doctor felt an attack of nausea coming on. Surmounting his weakness, he got up from his seat and jerked the window straps up and down trying to open the window. But he could not budge it.

People shouted to him that the window was fastened with screws, but the doctor, fighting against his attack and seized by a sort of panic, was not aware that the people were addressing him, or of the meaning of their words. He continued his attempts to open the window and again gave three sharp tugs at the strap—up, down, and toward himself. Suddenly he felt a sharp pain, greater than any he had ever experienced before; he realized that something had broken in him, he had done something irreparable, fatal, that this was the end. At this moment the trolley started, but after going only a short way down the Presnia it stopped again.

By a superhuman effort of the will, Yurii Andreievich pushed through the solid crowd down the center passage, swaying and stumbling, and came out on the rear platform; people blocked his way and snapped at him. The fresh air seemed to revive him and he thought that perhaps everything was not lost, that he was better.

He began to squeeze his way through the crush on the rear platform, provoking kicks and more abuse. Ignoring the resentful cries, he broke through the crowd, got down from the standing trolley into the street, took a step, another, a third, collapsed on the stone paving, and did not get up again.

There arose a hubbub of talk, arguments, suggestions. Several people got off the trolley and surrounded him. They soon found that he was not breathing and his heart had stopped. The group around the body was joined by others who stepped off the sidewalks, some relieved and others disappointed that the dead man had not been run over and his death had nothing to do with the trolley. The crowd grew larger. The lady in lilac came up too, stood a moment, looked at the body, listened to the talk, and went on. She was a foreigner, but she understood that some people were in favor of putting the body on the trolley and taking it to the hospital, while others said that the police should be called. She did not wait to learn the outcome.

The lady in lilac was a Swiss national; she was Mademoiselle Fleury, from Meliuzeievo, and she was now very, very old. For twelve years she had been writing to the authorities in Moscow for permission to return to her native country, and quite recently her application had been granted. She had come to Moscow for her exit visa and was now on her way to her embassy to collect it, fanning herself as she went along with her documents, which were done up in a bundle and tied with a ribbon. So she walked on, overtaking the trolley for the tenth time and quite unaware that she had overtaken Zhivago and survived him.

13

Through the open door of the passage could be seen one end of the room with the table placed at an angle in the corner. On the table the coffin, like a roughly carved canoe, pointed at the door with its lower, narrow end, which bore the feet of the corpse. It was the same table at which Yurii Andreievich had done his writing; the room had no other. The manuscripts had been put away in a drawer, and the coffin stood on the top. His head was raised on a mound of pillows, and his body lay in the coffin as on a hillside.

He was surrounded by a great many flowers, whole bushes of white lilac, hard to find at this season, cyclamen and cineraria in pots and baskets. The flowers screened the light from the windows. The light filtered thinly through the banked flowers to the waxen face and hands of the corpse and the wood and lining of the coffin. Shadows lay on the table in a pattern of leaves and branches as if they had just stopped swaying.

The custom of cremating the dead had by this time become widespread. In the hope of a pension for the children, and to ensure their education and Marina’s position at the post office, it had been decided to dispense with a church service and simply have a civil cremation. The proper authorities had been notified and their representatives were expected.

In the interval the room seemed empty, like premises vacant between the going of one set of tenants and the coming of another. The stillness was broken only by the unwitting shuffling of the mourners, as they tiptoed in to take their leave of the dead. There were not many of them, but nevertheless a good many more than might have been expected. The news of the death of this almost unknown man had spread with amazing speed. Among the people were many who had known him at different times in his life, though he had afterwards lost touch with them and forgotten them. His poetry and scientific work attracted an even greater number of unknown friends who had never met the man but had been drawn to him and had now come to see him for the first and last time.

In these hours when the silence, unaccompanied by any ceremony, became oppressive as if it were an almost tangible privation, only the flowers compensated for the absence of the ritual and the chant.

They did more than blossom and smell sweet. Perhaps hastening the return to dust, they poured forth their scent as in a choir and, steeping everything in their exhalation, seemed to take over the function of the Office of the Dead.

The vegetable kingdom can easily be thought of as the nearest neighbor of the kingdom of death. Perhaps the mysteries of evolution and the riddles of life that so puzzle us are contained in the green of the earth, among the trees and the flowers of graveyards. Mary Magdalene did not recognize Jesus risen from the grave, “supposing Him to be the gardener. ...”

14

When Yurii Andreievich’s body was taken to the flat in Kamerger Street (this had been his last registered address), his friends, notified of his death and shaken by it, came in, straight from the landing through the wide-open door, bringing Marina with them. Half out of her mind with shock and grief, she threw herself down on the floor, beating her head against the edge of the long wooden chest in the hallway. The body had been left there until the coffin (which had already been ordered) was delivered and the living room was put in order. She was in a flood of tears, now whispering, now crying out, choking over her words and breaking into loud lamentations. She grieved with an abundance of speech, as peasants do, neither distracted nor embarrassed by strangers. She clung to the body and could scarcely be torn away when the time came for it to be carried into the room, washed, and placed in the coffin. All this had been the day before. Today the frenzy of her grief had abated, giving way to a weary numbness; she sat in silence, though still only half conscious of herself or her surroundings.

Here she had stayed the rest of the preceding day and all through the night, never leaving the room. Here the baby had been brought for her to feed, and Kapka and her young nurse had come and gone.

She was accompanied by her friends Gordon and Dudorov, who also were numb with grief. Markel, her father, would sit down on the bench by her side and sob and blow his nose into his handkerchief loudly. Her weeping mother and sisters came and went.

But there were two people in the gathering, a man and a woman, who stood out from all the rest. They did not claim any closer tie with the deceased than the others. They did not compete in sorrow with Marina, her daughters, or his friends. But although they made no claims, they evidently had their own special rights over the dead man, and no one questioned or disputed the undeclared authority that they had unaccountably assumed. These were the people who had apparently taken it upon themselves to arrange the funeral, and they had seen to everything from the first with unruffled calm, as if it gave them satisfaction. Their composure was remarkable and it produced a strange impression, as if they were involved not only in the funeral but also in the death, not in the sense of having directly or indirectly caused it but as people who, once it had occurred, had given their consent to it, were reconciled, and did not see it as the most important event in the story of Zhivago. Few of the mourners knew them, a few others surmised who they were, but most had no idea.

Yet whenever this man, whose narrow Kirghiz eyes both expressed and aroused curiosity, came into the room with the casually beautiful woman by his side, they all, including even Marina, at once, without protest, as if by agreement, got up from where they had been sitting on the chairs and stools placed in a row against the wall, and went out, crowding uncomfortably into the corridor and the hallway and leaving the couple alone, behind half-closed doors, like two experts who needed, quietly, unhindered, to accomplish something directly concerned with the funeral, and vitally important.

So it was now. They remained alone, sat down on two chairs near the wall, and at once began to talk.

“What have you found out, Evgraf Andreievich?”

“The cremation is to be tonight. In half an hour they’ll come from the Medical Workers’ Union to get the body and take it to their club. The civil ceremony is at four. Not one of his papers was in order; his workbook was out of date, he had an old union card, which he hadn’t changed for the new one, and his dues hadn’t been paid up for years. All that had to be put in order, that was why I took so long. Before they take him away—that’s quite soon, we ought to get ready—I’ll leave you here alone as you asked. ... Sorry. That’s the telephone. I’ll just be a moment.”

Evgraf went out into the corridor crowded with the doctor’s colleagues, his school friends, junior members of the hospital staff, and people from the publishing world. Marina, her arms around both her children, sheltered them in the folds of the coat she had thrown over her shoulders (it was a cold day), and sat on the edge of the wooden bench waiting to go back into the living room, as a visitor who has gone to see a prisoner in jail waits for the guard to admit her. The corridor and hall were overcrowded. The front door was open and a great many people were standing or strolling about smoking on the landing. Others stood talking on the flight of stairs leading down to the ground floor, the louder and more freely the lower down and closer to the street they were.

Straining to hear above the sustained murmur and speaking in a decorously muffled voice, his hand over the receiver, Evgraf answered questions over the telephone about the funeral arrangements and the circumstances of the doctor’s death. Then he went back into the living room and the conversation was resumed.

“Please don’t vanish after the cremation, Larisa Feodorovna. I don’t know where you are staying, don’t disappear without letting me know. I have a great favor to ask you. I’d like as soon as possible—tomorrow or the day after—to begin sorting my brother’s papers. I’ll need your help. You know so much about him, probably more than anyone else. You mentioned that you had come from Irkutsk only a couple of days ago and not for long, and that you came up here for some other reason, not knowing it had been my brother’s flat in recent months or what had happened to him. I didn’t understand all you said and I am not asking you to explain, but please don’t go away without leaving me your address. It would be best if we could spend the few days that we still need to go through these manuscripts in the same room, or at least quite near, perhaps in two other rooms in this house. It could be arranged. I know the manager.”

“You say you didn’t understand what I said. What is there to understand? I arrived in Moscow, checked my things at the station, and went for a walk through some old Moscow streets. Half of it I couldn’t recognize, I’ve been away so long I’d forgotten. Well, I walked and walked, down Kuznetsky Most and up Kuznetsky Pereulok, and suddenly I saw something terribly, extraordinarily familiar—Kamerger Street. That was where my husband, Antipov, who was shot, used to live as a student—in this house and in this very room where you and I are sitting now. I’ll go in, I thought; who knows, the old tenants might still be there, I’ll look them up. You see, I didn’t know it had all changed—no one so much as remembers their name—I didn’t find that out till later, the day after and today, gradually, by asking people. But you were there, I don’t know why I’m telling you. I was thunderstruck—the door wide open, people all over the place, a coffin in the room, a dead man. Who is it? I come in, I come up and look. I thought I had lost my mind. But you were there, you saw me, didn’t you? Why on earth am I telling you?”

“Wait a moment, Larisa Feodorovna, I must interrupt you. I’ve already told you, neither my brother nor I ever suspected that there was anything extraordinary about this room—for instance, that Antipov once lived here. But even more amazing is something you said just now. I’ll tell you in a moment. About Antipov, Strelnikov, at one time at the beginning of the civil war I used to hear of him very often, almost every day, and I met him two or three times, never realizing, of course, that his name would come to mean so much to me for family reasons. But forgive me, I may have misheard you, I thought you said—it could only have been a slip of the tongue—that he’d been shot. You must surely know that he shot himself?”

“Yes, I’ve heard that version, but I don’t believe it. Pavel Pavlovich wasn’t a man to commit suicide.”

“But it’s quite certain. Antipov shot himself in that house where, my brother said, you were living before you went to Vladivostok. It happened very soon after you left. My brother found his body. He buried him. How is it you weren’t told?”

“I was told something different. ... So it’s really true, he shot himself? People said so but I didn’t believe it. And in that very house? It doesn’t seem possible. It’s very important to me, that detail. You don’t know, I suppose, whether he and Zhivago ever met, whether they got to know each other?”

“From what Yurii told me, they had a long conversation.”

“Is it possible! Well, thank God, thank God, that’s better.” Antipova slowly crossed herself. “What an extraordinary, preordained coincidence! Will you let me come back to this and ask you more about it later? Every detail is so dear to me. But this isn’t the moment, don’t you think? I couldn’t, I’m too upset. I’ll keep quiet a little, I’ll rest and collect my thoughts. What do you think?”

“Of course! Of course!”

“Don’t you really think so?”

“Yes, naturally.”

“Oh, yes. I nearly forgot. You asked me not to go away after the cremation. All right. I promise. I won’t disappear. I’ll come back here with you and stay wherever you tell me and for as long as necessary. We’ll go through Yurochka’s manuscripts. I’ll help you. It’s true, I might be useful to you. It will comfort me a great deal. I know his writing so well, every twist of it. I know it with my heart, with my life’s blood. And then, you know, there’s something I want to ask you, too. I’ll need your help. Didn’t I hear you were a lawyer? Or anyway, you know all the present customs and regulations. And another thing, I need to know what government department to apply to for information. So few people can tell one things like that. What do you think? I’ll need your advice about something terrible, something really terrible. It’s about a child. But we’ll talk about it later, when we come back from the crematorium. All my life I’ve had to keep looking for people. Tell me, suppose in some quite imaginary case it was necessary to trace a child, a child who had been turned over to strangers to be brought up by them, is there any centralized source of information about all the children’s homes throughout the country? And is there any record of all the waifs and strays, has anything like that ever been done or attempted? No, don’t tell me now, please don’t. We’ll talk about it later. I’m so frightened. Life is so terrifying—what do you think? I don’t know about later on, when my daughter comes and joins me, but for the moment I don’t see why I shouldn’t stay in this flat. Katia has a remarkable talent for music and for acting, she’s marvellous at imitating people and she acts out entire scenes that she makes up herself, and she sings whole operatic arias, all by ear. She’s a remarkable child. What do you think? I want her to go to the junior classes either at the drama school or the Conservatory, whichever will take her, and I must apply for a scholarship, that’s really why I’ve come without her at the moment, to make the arrangements; when I’ve fixed it and I’ll go back. Things are so complicated, don’t you think, you can’t explain everything. But we’ll talk about it later. Now I’ll wait a bit, I’ll pull myself together, I’ll keep quiet and collect my thoughts and try to forget my anxieties. Besides, we’ve kept Yurii’s friends out of the room much too long. Twice I thought I heard someone knocking. And there’s something going on outside, they’ve probably come from the undertaker’s. I’ll stay here quietly for a bit, but you’d better open the door and let them come in. It’s time, don’t you think? Wait, wait. There ought to be a footstool near the coffin, otherwise people can’t reach up to Yurochka. I tried to on tiptoe, but it’s very difficult. And Marina Markelovna and the children, they’ll need it. Besides, it’s prescribed in the ritual: ‘And you shall kiss me with a last kiss.’ Oh, I can’t bear it. It’s all so terrible. What do you think?”

“I’ll let them in. But just one thing before I do that. You have said so many baffling things and raised so many questions that are evidently painful to you that I don’t know what to tell you. But there’s one thing I want you to know. Please count on my help in everything. I offer it to you willingly, with all my heart. And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune. To do nothing and to despair is to neglect our duty. Now I’m going to let the mourners in. You’re right about the footstool, I’ll get one.”

But Antipova was no longer listening. She never heard him opening the door nor the people pouring in from the corridor, nor the directions he gave to the undertaker’s men and the chief mourners; she heard neither the shuffling of the crowd nor Marina’s sobs, neither the coughing of the men nor the tears and cries of the women.

The ceaseless, monotonous noise made her feel sick and giddy. It took all her strength not to faint. Her heart was bursting and her head ached. Lowering her head, she withdrew into memories, reflections, conjectures. She escaped into them, sank into them, as though carried forward for a time, for a few hours, into some future that she might not live to see, a future that aged her by several decades, a future where she was an old woman. In her thoughts she seemed to touch the very bottom of her unhappiness.

“No one is left. One has died. The other has killed himself. And only that one is left alive who should have been killed, whom I tried to kill and missed, that stranger who had nothing in common with me, that complete cipher who turned my life into a chain of crimes beyond my knowing. And that monster of mediocrity is busy dashing about in the mythical byways of Asia known only to stamp collectors, and not one of those who are near to me and whom I need is left.

“Ah, it was at Christmastime, and I had set out to shoot that caricature of vulgarity when I had that talk in this very room, lit only by a candle, with Pasha, who was still a boy, and Yura, whose body they are taking leave of now, had not yet come into my life.”

She strained her memory to reconstruct that Christmas conversation with Pasha, but she could remember nothing except the candle burning on the window sill and melting a round patch in the icy crust on the glass.

Did she divine that Yurii, whose dead body was lying on the table, had seen the candle as he was driving past, and noticed it, and that from the moment of his seeing its light from the street (“A candle burned on the table, a candle burned ...”) his life took its fatal course?

Her thoughts scattered. She thought: “But what a pity he isn’t having a church funeral. The burial service is so grand and solemn! It’s more than most people deserve when they die, but it would have been so appropriate for Yurochka! He would have deserved all that, he would have justified and given meaning to ‘the lament over the grave which is the hymn of Alleluiah.’ ”

Now she felt a wave of pride and relief, as always at the thought of Yurii and as in the short intervals of her life that she had spent beside him. Now, too, she was enveloped in the air of that freedom and unconcern that he had always emanated. She got up impatiently from her chair. Something incomprehensible was happening to her. She wanted, if only for a few moments, to break free with Yurii’s help into the open, out of the sorrows that imprisoned her, to feel again the joy of liberation. Such a joy, it seemed to her, would be the joy of taking leave of him, of using the right and the occasion to weep her fill over him unhindered. With a passionate haste, she looked around her at the crowd, with eyes as smarting, unseeing, and tearful as if an oculist had put caustic eye-drops into them, and all the people began to move, shuffle, and walk out of the room, leaving her at last alone, behind half-closed doors. She went up to the table with the coffin on it, quickly crossing herself, got up on the footstool Evgraf had brought, made three sweeping signs of the cross over the body, and pressed her lips to the cold forehead and hands. She brushed aside the impression that the cold forehead was somehow smaller, like a hand clenched into a fist, she managed not to notice it. For a moment she stood still and silent, neither thinking nor crying, bowed over the coffin, the flowers, and the body, shielding them with her whole being, her head, her breast, her heart, and her arms, as big as her heart.

15

She was shaken by her repressed sobs. She fought her tears as long as she could, but at times it was beyond her strength and they burst from her, pouring down her cheeks and onto her dress, her hands, and the coffin, to which she clung.

She neither spoke nor thought. Sequences of ideas, notions, insights, truths drifted and sailed freely through her mind, like clouds in the sky, as happened so often before during their nighttime conversations. It was such things that had brought them happiness and liberation in those days. A spontaneous mutual understanding, warm, instinctive, immediate.

Such an understanding filled her now, a dark, indistinct knowledge of death, preparedness for death, a preparedness that removed all feeling of helplessness in its presence. It was as if she had lived twenty lives, and had lost Yurii countless times, and had accumulated such experience of the heart in this domain that everything she felt and did beside this coffin was exactly right and to the point.

Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people’s songs.

They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the “blaze of passion” often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the wide expanses they saw on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, took more delight in their love than they themselves did.

Ah, that was just what had united them and had made them so akin! Never, never, even in their moments of richest and wildest happiness, were they unaware of a sublime joy in the total design of the universe, a feeling that they themselves were a part of that whole, an element in the beauty of the cosmos.

This unity with the whole was the breath of life to them. And the elevation of man above the rest of nature, the modern coddling and worshipping of man, never appealed to them. A social system based on such a false premise, as well as its political application, struck them as pathetically amateurish and made no sense to them.

16

And now she took her leave of him, addressing him in the direct language of everyday life. Her speech, though lively and informal, was not down-to-earth. Like the choruses and monologues of ancient tragedies, like the language of poetry or music, or any other conventional mode of expression, its logic was not rational but emotional. The rhetorical strain in her effortless, spontaneous talk came from her grief. Her simple, unsolemn words were drenched in tears.

It was these tears that seemed to hold her words together in a tender, quick whispering like the rustling of silky leaves in a warm, windy rain.

“At last we are together again, Yurochka. And in what a terrible way God has willed our reunion. Can you conceive of such misfortune! I cannot, cannot. Oh, God! I can’t stop crying. Think of it! It’s again so much in our style, made to our measure. Your going—my end. Again something big, irreparable. The riddle of life, the riddle of death, the enchantment of genius, the enchantment of unadorned beauty—yes, yes, these things were ours. But the small problems of practical life—things like the reshaping of the planet—these things, no thank you, they are not for us.

“Farewell, my great one, my own, farewell, my pride, farewell, my swift, deep, dear river, how I loved your daylong splashing, how I loved to plunge into your cold waves.

“Remember how we said goodbye that day out there in the snow? How you deceived me! Would I ever have gone without you? Oh, I know, I know, you forced yourself to do it, you thought it was for my good. And after that everything was ruined. Oh, God, what I suffered there, what I went through! But of course you don’t know any of that. Oh, what have I done, Yura, what have I done? I am such a criminal, you have no idea. But it wasn’t my fault. I was in the hospital for three months, a whole month I was unconscious. And since then my life has been nothing but torment, Yura. My soul has no peace, I am torn by remorse and pain. But I’m not telling you the most important thing. I can’t say it, I haven’t the strength. Every time I come to that part of my life my hair stands on end with horror. And you know, I’m not even sure I’m in my right mind. But you see, I haven’t taken to drink as so many people do, I’m staying away from that, because a drunken woman, that really is the end, it’s impossible, don’t you think?”

She went on speaking and sobbing in her’ agony. Suddenly she looked up in surprise and glanced around her. People had come into the room and were going about their business. She got down from the footstool and moved away from the coffin, swaying, pressing her hand to her eyes as if to wipe away the last of her tears.

Men came up to the coffin and lifted it on three cloths. The funeral procession began.

17

Larisa Feodorovna stayed several days in Kamerger Street. The sorting of Zhivago’s papers was begun with her help but finished without her. She also had her talk with Evgraf Andreievich and told him an important fact.

One day Larisa Feodorovna went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street at that time. She vanished without a trace and probably died somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterwards got mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.