Doctor Zhivago (12 page)

Markel pushed over an armchair, and with his help Anna Ivanovna sank into it groaning and rubbing her bruises. Then he set about restoring the wardrobe. When he put the top on he said,
"
Now the doors, and it
'
ll be fit for an exhibition.
"

Anna Ivanovna did not like the wardrobe. Its appearance and size reminded her of a catafalque or a royal tomb and filled her with a superstitious dread. She nicknamed it the tomb of Askold;
[7]
she meant the horse of Prince Oleg,
[8]
which had caused its master
'
s death. She had read a great deal, but haphazardly, and she tended to confuse related ideas.

After that accident Anna Ivanovna developed a pulmonary weakness.

Throughout November, 1911, Anna Ivanovna stayed in bed with pneumonia.

Yura, Misha Gordon, and Tonia were due to graduate the following spring, Yura in medicine, Tonia in law, and Misha, who studied at the Faculty of Philosophy, in philology.

Everything in Yura
'
s mind was still helter-skelter, but his views, his habits, and his inclinations were all distinctly his own. He was unusually impressionable, and the originality of his vision was remarkable.

Though he was greatly drawn to art and history, he scarcely hesitated over the choice of a career. He thought that art was no more a vocation than innate cheerfulness or melancholy was a profession. He was interested in physics and natural science, and believed that a man should do something socially useful in his practical life. He settled on medicine.

In the first year of his four-year course he had spent a term in the dissecting room, situated in the cellars of the university. You went down the winding staircase. There was always a crowd of dishevelled students, some poring over their tattered textbooks surrounded by bones, or quietly dissecting, each in his corner, others fooling about, cracking jokes and chasing the rats that scurried in swarms over the stone floors. In the half darkness of the mortuary the naked bodies of unidentified young suicides and drowned women, well preserved and untouched by decay, shone like phosphorus. Injections of alum solutions rejuvenated them, giving them a deceptive roundness. The corpses were cut open, dismembered, and prepared, yet even in its smallest sections the human body kept its beauty, so that Yura
'
s wonder before some water nymph brutally flung onto a zinc table continued before her amputated arm or hand. The cellar smelled of carbolic acid and formaldehyde, and the presence of mystery was tangible in everything, from the obscure fate of these spread-out bodies to the riddle of life and death itself—and death was dominant in the underground room as if it were its home or its headquarters.

The voice of this mystery, silencing everything else, haunted Yura, disturbing him in his anatomical work. He had become used to such distracting thoughts and took them in his stride.

Yura had a good mind and was an excellent writer. Ever since his schooldays he had dreamed of composing a book about life which would contain, like buried explosives, the most striking things he had so far seen and thought about. But he was too young to write such a book; instead, he wrote poetry. He was like a painter who was always making sketches for a big canvas he had in mind.

He was indulgent toward these immature works on account of their vigor and originality. These two qualities, vigor and originality, in his opinion gave reality to art, which he otherwise regarded as pointless, idle, unnecessary.

Yura realized the great part his uncle had played in molding his character.

Nikolai Nikolaievich now lived in Lausanne. In his books, published there in Russian and in translations, he developed his old view of history as another universe, made by man with the help of time and memory in answer to the challenge of death. These works were inspired by a new interpretation of Christianity, and led directly to a new conception of art.

Misha Gordon was influenced by these ideas even more than Yura. They determined him to register at the Faculty of Philosophy. He attended lectures on theology, and even considered transferring later to the theological academy.

Yura advanced and became freer under the influence of his uncle
'
s theories, but Misha was fettered by them. Yura realized that his friend
'
s enthusiasms were partly accounted for by his origin. Being tactful and discreet, he made no attempt to talk him out of his extravagant ideas. But he often wished that Misha were a realist, more down-to-earth.

One night at the end of November Yura came home late from the university; he was exhausted and had eaten nothing all day. He was told that there had been a terrible alarm that afternoon. Anna Ivanovna had had convulsions. Several doctors had seen her; at one time they had advised Alexander Alexandrovich to send for the priest, but later they had changed their minds. Now she was feeling better; she was fully conscious and had asked for Yura to be sent to her the moment he got back.

Yura went up at once.

The room showed traces of the recent commotion. A nurse, moving noiselessly, was rearranging something on the night table. Towels that had been used for compresses were lying about, damp and crumpled. The water in the slop basin was pinkish with expectorated blood, and broken ampoules and swollen tufts of cotton wool floated on its surface.

Anna Ivanovna lay drenched in sweat, with parched lips. Her face had become haggard since morning.

"
Can the diagnosis be wrong?
"
Yura wondered.
"
She has all the symptoms of lobar pneumonia. It looks like the crisis.
"
After greeting her and saying the encouraging, meaningless things that are always said on such occasions, he sent the nurse out of the room, took Anna Ivanovna
'
s wrist to feel her pulse, and reached into his coat pocket for his stethoscope. She moved her head to indicate that this was unnecessary. He realized that she wanted him for some other reason. She spoke with effort.

"
They wanted to give me the last sacraments.… Death is hanging over me.… It may come any moment.… When you go to have a tooth out you
'
re frightened, it
'
ll hurt, you prepare yourself.… But this isn
'
t a tooth, it
'
s everything, the whole of you, your whole life…being pulled out.… And what is it? Nobody knows.… And I am sick at heart and terrified.
"

She fell silent. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Yura said nothing. A moment later Anna Ivanovna went on.

"
You
'
re clever, talented.… That makes you different.… You surely know something.… Comfort me.
"

"
Well, what is there for me to say?
"
replied Yura. He fidgeted on his chair, got up, paced the room, and sat down again.
"
In the first place, you
'
ll feel better tomorrow! There are clear indications—I
'
d stake my life on it—that you
'
ve passed the crisis. And then—death, the survival of consciousness, faith in resurrection.… You want to know my opinion as a scientist? Perhaps some other time? No? Right now? Well, as you wish. But it
'
s difficult like that, all of a sudden.
"
And there and then he delivered a whole impromptu lecture, astonished that he could do it.

"
Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ
'
s words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn
'
t big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They
'
d be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for the animal life.

"
But all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn
'
t notice it.

"
Will you feel pain? Do the tissues feel their disintegration? In other words, what will happen to your consciousness? But what is consciousness? Let
'
s see. A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one
'
s own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a light directed outward, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we don
'
t stumble. It
'
s like the headlights on a locomotive—turn them inward and you
'
d have a crash.

"
So what will happen to your consciousness?
Your
consciousness, yours, not anyone else
'
s. Well, what are
you
?
There
'
s the point. Let
'
s try to find out. What is it about you that you have always known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels? No. However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity—in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people. And now listen carefully. You in others—this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life—your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you—the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it.

"
And now one last point. There is nothing to fear. There is no such thing as death. Death has nothing to do with us. But you said something about being talented—that it makes one different. Now, that does have something to do with us. And talent in the highest and broadest sense means talent for life.

"
There will be no death, says St. John. His reasoning is quite simple. There will be no death because the past is over; that
'
s almost like saying there will be no death because it is already done with, it
'
s old and we are bored with it. What we need is something new, and that new thing is life eternal.
"

He was pacing up and down the room as he was talking. Now he walked up to Anna Ivanovna
'
s bed and putting his hand on her forehead said,
"
Go to sleep.
"
After a few moments she began to fall asleep.

Yura quietly left the room and told Egorovna to send in the nurse.
"
What
'
s come over me?
"
he thought.
"
I
'
m becoming a regular quack—muttering incantations, laying on the hands.…
"

Next day Anna Ivanovna was better.

Anna Ivanovna continued to improve. In the middle of December she tried to get up but she was still weak. The doctors told her to stay in bed and have a really good rest.

She often sent for Yura and Tonia and for hours on end talked to them of her childhood, spent on her grandfather
'
s estate, Varykino, on the river Rynva, in the Urals. Neither Yura nor Tonia had ever been there, but listening to her, Yura could easily imagine those ten thousand acres of impenetrable virgin forest as black as night, and, thrusting into it like a curved knife, the bends of the swift stream with its rocky bed and steep cliffs on the Krueger side.

For the first time in their lives Yura and Tonia were getting evening clothes, Yura a dinner jacket and Tonia a pale satin party dress with a suitably modest neckline.

They were going to wear them at the traditional Christmas party at the Sventitskys
'
on the twenty-seventh. When the tailor and the seamstress delivered the clothes, Yura and Tonia tried them on, were delighted, and had not yet taken them off when Egorovna came in asking them to go to Anna Ivanovna.

They went to her room in their new clothes. On seeing them, she raised herself on her elbow, looked them over, and told them to turn around.

"
Very nice,
"
she said.
"
Charming. I had no idea they were ready. Let me have another look, Tonia. No, it
'
s all right, I thought the yoke puckered a bit. Do you know why I
'
ve called you? But first I want a word with you, Yura.
"