Doctor Zhivago (14 page)

Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.

That summer she had arrived exhausted by the many duties she had undertaken. She was easily upset. Generous and understanding by nature, she developed a new suspiciousness and a tendency to nurse petty grievances.

The Kologrivovs were as fond of her as ever and wanted her to stay on with them, but now that Lipa had grown up she felt that she had become useless to them. She refused her salary. They had to press it on her. At the same time she needed the money, and it would have been embarrassing and unfeasible to earn it independently while she was their guest.

Lara felt that her position was false and unendurable. She imagined that they all found her a burden and were only putting a good face on it. She was a burden to herself. She longed to run away from herself and from the Kologrivovs—anywhere—but according to her standards, she must first repay the money she had borrowed, and at the moment she had no means of doing it. She felt that she was a hostage—all through Rodia
'
s stupid fault—and was trapped in impotent exasperation.

She suspected slights at every turn. If the Kologrivovs
'
friends were attentive to her she was sure that they regarded her as a submissive
"
ward
"
and an easy prey. If they left her alone, that proved that she did not exist for them.

Her fits of moodiness did not prevent her from sharing in the amusements of the many house guests. She swam, went boating, joined in night picnics by the river, and danced and let off fireworks with the rest. She took part in amateur theatricals and with even more zest in shooting competitions. Short Mauser rifles were used in these contests, but she preferred Rodia
'
s light revolver and became very skillful in its use.
"
Pity I
'
m a woman,
"
she said, laughing,
"
I
'
d have made an expert duellist.
"
But the more she did to distract herself, the more wretched she felt and the less she knew what she wanted.

When they went back to town it was worse than ever, for to her other troubles were now added her tiffs with Pasha (she was careful not to quarrel with him seriously; she regarded him as her last refuge). Pasha was beginning to show a certain self-assurance. His tone was becoming a little didactic, and this both amused and irritated her.

Pasha, Lipa, the Kologrivovs, money—everything whirled inside her head. She was disgusted with life. She was beginning to lose her mind. She was obsessed with the idea of breaking with everything she had ever known or experienced, and starting on something new. In this state, at Christmastime in the year 1911, she arrived at a fatal decision. She would leave the Kologrivovs now, at once, and become independent, and she would get the money for this from Komarovsky. It seemed to her that after all there had been between them and the years of independence she had won for herself, he must help her chivalrously, disinterestedly, without explanations or disgraceful conditions.

With this in mind she set out for Petrovka Street on the night of the twenty-seventh. Rodia
'
s revolver, loaded and with the safety catch off, was inside her muff. Should Komarovsky refuse or humiliate her in any way, she intended to shoot him.

She walked through the festive streets in a terrible excitement, seeing nothing. The intended revolver shot had already gone off in her heart—and it was a matter of complete indifference whom the shot was aimed at. This shot was the only thing that she was conscious of. She heard it all the way to Petrovka Street, and it was aimed at Komarovsky, at herself, at her own fate, and at the wooden target on the Duplyanka oak tree.

"
Don
'
t touch my muff!
"

Emma Ernestovna had put out her hand to help her off with her coat; she had received her with Oh
'
s and Ah
'
s, telling her that Victor Ippolitovich was out but she must stay and wait for him.

"
I can
'
t. I
'
m in a hurry. Where is he?
"

He was at a Christmas party. Clutching the scrap of paper with the address on it, Lara ran down the familiar gloomy staircase with its stained-glass coats of arms and started off for the Sventitskys
'
house in Flour Town.

Only now, when she came out for the second time, did she take a look around her. It was winter. It was the city. It was night.

It was bitter cold. The streets were covered with a thick, black, glassy layer of ice, like the bottom of beer bottles. It hurt her to breathe. The air was dense with gray sleet and it tickled and pricked her face like the gray frozen bristles of her fur cape. Her heart thumping, she walked through the deserted streets past the steaming doors of cheap teashops and restaurants. Faces as red as sausages and horses
'
and dogs
'
heads with beards of icicles emerged from the mist. A thick crust of ice and snow covered the windows, and the colored reflections of lighted Christmas trees and the shadows of merrymakers moved across their chalk-white opaque surfaces as on magic lantern screens; it was as though shows were being given for the benefit of pedestrians.

In Kamerger Street Lara stopped.
"
I can
'
t go on. I can
'
t bear it.
"
The words almost slipped out.
"
I
'
ll go up and tell him everything.
"
Pulling herself together, she went in through the heavy door.

Pasha, his face red from the effort, his tongue pushing out his cheek, stood in front of the mirror struggling with a collar, a stud, and the starched buttonhole of his shirt front. He was going to a party. So chaste and inexperienced was he that Lara embarrassed him by coming in without knocking and finding him with this minor incompleteness in his dress. He at once noticed her agitation. She could hardly keep on her feet. She advanced pushing the hem of her skirt aside at each step as if she were fording a river.

He hurried toward her.
"
What
'
s the matter?
"
he said in alarm.
"
What has happened?
"

"
Sit down beside me. Sit down, don
'
t bother to finish dressing. I
'
m in a hurry, I must go in a minute. Don
'
t touch my muff. Wait, turn the other way for a minute.
"

He complied. Lara was wearing a tailored suit. She took off her coat, hung it up, and transferred Rodia
'
s revolver from the muff to a pocket. Then she went back to the sofa.

"
Now you can look,
"
she said.
"
Light a candle, and turn off the electricity.
"

She liked to sit in the dim light of candles, and Pasha always kept a few spare ones. He replaced the stump in the candlestick with a new candle, put it on the window sill, and lit it. The flame choked and spluttered, shooting off small stars, and sharpened to an arrow. A soft light filled the room. In the sheet of ice covering the windowpane a black eyelet began to form at the level of the flame.

"
Listen, Pasha,
"
said Lara.
"
I am in trouble. You must help me. Don
'
t be frightened and don
'
t question me. But don
'
t ever think we can be like other people. Don
'
t take it so lightly. I am in constant danger. If you love me, if you don
'
t want me to be destroyed, we must not put off our marriage.
"

"
But that
'
s what I
'
ve always wanted,
"
broke in Pasha.
"
Just name the day. I
'
m ready when you are. Now tell me plainly what is worrying you. Don
'
t torment me with riddles.
"

But Lara evaded his question, imperceptibly changing the subject. They talked a long time about a number of things that had nothing to do with her distress.

That winter Yura was preparing a scientific paper on the nervous elements of the retina for the University Gold Medal competition. Though he had qualified only in general medicine, he had a specialist
'
s knowledge of the eye. His interest in the physiology of sight was in keeping with other sides of his character—his creative gifts and his preoccupation with imagery in art and the logical structure of ideas.

Tonia and Yura were driving in a hired sleigh to the Sventitskys
'
Christmas party. After six years of late childhood and early adolescence spent in the same house they knew everything there was to know about each other. They had habits in common, their own special way of snorting at each other
'
s jokes. Now they drove in silence, their lips tightly closed against the cold, occasionally exchanging a word or two, and absorbed in their own thoughts.

Yura was thinking about the date of his competition and that he must work harder at his paper. Then his mind, distracted by the festive, end-of-the-year bustle in the streets, jumped to other thoughts. He had promised Gordon an article on Blok for the mimeographed student paper that he edited; young people in both capitals were mad about Blok, Yura and Gordon particularly. But not even these thoughts held his mind for long. He and Tonia rode on, their chins tucked into their collars, rubbing their frozen ears, and each of them thinking of something else. But on one point their thoughts converged.

The recent scene at Anna Ivanovna
'
s bedside had transformed them. It was as though their eyes had opened, and they appeared to each other in a new light.

Tonia, his old friend, who had always been taken for granted and had never needed explaining, had turned out to be the most inaccessible and complicated being he could imagine. She had become a woman. By a stretch of imagination he could visualize himself as an emperor, a hero, a prophet, a conqueror, but not as a woman.

Now that Tonia had taken this supreme and most difficult task on her slender and fragile shoulders (she seemed slender and fragile to him, though she was a perfectly healthy girl), he was filled with the ardent sympathy and timid wonder that are the beginning of passion.

Tonia
'
s attitude to Yura underwent a similar change.

It occurred to Yura that perhaps they should not, after all, have gone out. He was worried about Anna Ivanovna. They had been on the point of leaving when, hearing that she was feeling less well, they had gone to her room, but she had ordered them off to the party as sharply as before. They had gone to the window to have a look at the weather. As they came out, the net curtains had clung to Tonia
'
s new dress, trailing after her like a wedding veil. They all noticed this and burst out laughing.

Yura looked around him and saw what Lara had seen shortly before. The moving sleigh was making an unusually loud noise, which was answered by an unusually long echo coming from the ice-bound trees in the gardens and streets. The windows, frosted and lighted from inside, reminded him of precious caskets made of smoky topaz. Behind them glowed the Christmas life of Moscow, candles burned on trees, and guests in fancy dress milled about playing hide-and-seek and hunt-the-ring.

It suddenly occurred to Yura that Blok reflected the Christmas spirit in all domains of Russian life—in this northern city and in the newest Russian literature, under the starry sky of this modern street and around the lighted tree in a twentieth-century drawing room. There was no need to write an article on Blok, he thought, all you had to do was to paint a Russian version of a Dutch Adoration of the Magi with snow in it, and wolves, and a dark fir forest.

As they drove through Kamerger Street Yura noticed that a candle had melted a patch in the icy crust on one of the windows. The light seemed to look into the street almost consciously, as if it were watching the passing carriages and waiting for someone.

"
A candle burned on the table, a candle burned…,
"
he whispered to himself—the beginning of something confused, formless; he hoped that it would take shape of itself. But nothing more came to him.