Doctor Zhivago (18 page)

At this moment she became aware of another peculiar sound, coming from the yard, through the open window. She pulled the curtains and leaned out.

A hobbled horse was moving across the yard with short, limping jumps. Lara did not know whose it was or how it had strayed into the yard. It was completely light though a long way to sunrise. The sleeping city seemed dead. It was bathed in the gray-blue coolness of the early hours. Lara closed her eyes. The characteristic sound of the hobbled horse
'
s steps, so unlike anything else, transported her to some wonderful, remote village.

There was a ring at the door. Lara pricked up her ears. Someone got up from the table to open. It was Nadia! Lara ran to meet her. Nadia had come straight from the train, so fresh and enchanting that it seemed as if she brought with her the scent of the lilies of the valley of Duplyanka. The two friends stood speechless with emotion and, hugging each other, could only cry.

Nadia had brought Lara the congratulations and good wishes of the whole family and a present from her parents. She took a jewel case out of her travelling bag, snapped it open, and held out a very beautiful necklace.

There were gasps of delight and astonishment. A guest who had been drunk but had recovered a little said:

"
It
'
s pink hyacinth. Yes, yes, pink, believe it or not. That
'
s what it is. It
'
s just as valuable as diamonds.
"

But Nadia said that the stones were yellow sapphires.

Lara put Nadia next to her at table and made her eat and drink. The necklace lay beside her plate, and she could not stop looking at it. The stones had rolled into a hollow on the mauve-cushioned lining of the case and looked now like dew and now like a cluster of small grapes.

Meanwhile those of the guests who had sobered up were again drinking to keep company with Nadia, whom they soon made tipsy.

Soon everyone in the flat was fast asleep. Most of them, planning to go to the station with Lara and Pasha in the morning, stayed the night. A good many had been snoring before Nadia came, and Lara herself never knew afterwards how she came to be lying fully dressed on the sofa next to Ira Lagodina.

She was wakened by the sound of loud voices near by. They were the voices of strangers who had come into the yard to recover their horse. As she opened her eyes she said to herself:
"
What on earth can Pasha be doing pottering about in the middle of the room?
"
But when the man she had taken for Pasha turned his head she saw a pockmarked scarecrow whose face was cut by a deep scar from brow to chin. She realized it was a burglar and tried to shout but could not utter a sound. She remembered her necklace and raising herself cautiously on her elbow looked where she had left it on the table.

The necklace was still there among the bread crumbs and unfinished pieces of caramel; the thief hadn
'
t noticed it among the litter. He was only rummaging in the suitcase she had packed so carefully and making a mess of her work. That was all she could think of at the moment, half asleep and still tipsy as she was. Indignant, she tried to shout and again found she couldn
'
t. Then she dug her knee into Ira
'
s stomach, and when Ira yelped with pain she too began to scream. The thief dropped everything and ran. Some of the men jumped up and tried to chase him without quite knowing what it was all about, but by the time they got outside the door he had vanished.

The commotion woke everyone up, and Lara, whose tipsiness had suddenly gone, did not allow them to go back to sleep. She made them coffee and packed them off home until it was time to go to the station.

Then she set to work feverishly stuffing the bed linen into the hampers, strapping up the luggage and tying it with ropes, and begging Pasha and the janitor
'
s wife just not to bother her by trying to help.

Everything got done in time. The Antipovs did not miss their train. It started smoothly, as though wafted away by the hats their friends were waving after them. When they stopped waving and bellowed something three times—probably
"
Hurrah!
"
—the train put on speed.

For the third day the weather was wretched. It was the second autumn of the war. The successes of the first year had been followed by reverses. Brusilov
'
s Eighth Army, which had been concentrated in the Carpathians ready to pour down the slopes into Hungary, was instead drawing back, caught by the ebb of the general retreat. The Russians were evacuating Galicia, which they had occupied in the first months of the fighting.

Dr. Zhivago, until recently known as Yura but now addressed more and more often as Yurii Andreievich, stood in the corridor of the gynecological section of the hospital, outside the door of the maternity ward to which he had just brought his wife Tonia—Antonina Alexandrovna. He had said goodbye to her and was waiting for the midwife, to tell her where she could reach him in case of need and to ask her how he could get in touch with her.

He was in a hurry: he had to visit two patients and get back to his hospital as soon as possible, and there he was, wasting precious time, staring out of the window at the slanting streaks of rain buffeted by the autumn wind like a cornfield in a storm.

It was not yet very dark. He could see the back yards of the hospital, the glassed-in verandas of the private houses in Devichie Pole, and the branch trolley line leading to one of the hospital blocks.

The rain poured with a dreary steadiness, neither hurrying nor slowing down for all the fury of the wind, which seemed enraged by the indifference of the water. Gusts of wind shook the creeper on one of the houses as if intending to tear it up by the roots, swung it up into the air, and dropped it in disgust like a discarded rag.

A truck with two trailers drove past the veranda to the hospital entrance. Wounded men were carried in.

The Moscow hospitals were desperately overcrowded, especially since the battle of Lutsk. The wounded were put in the passages and on landings. The general overcrowding was beginning to affect the women
'
s wards.

Yurii Andreievich turned away from the window yawning with fatigue. He had nothing to think about. Suddenly he remembered an incident at the Hospital of the Holy Cross, where he worked. A woman had died a few days earlier in the surgical ward. Yurii Andreievich had diagnosed echinococcus of the liver, but everyone thought he was wrong. An autopsy was to be made today, but their prosector was a habitual drunkard and you never could tell how careful he would be.

Night fell suddenly. Nothing more was visible outside. As at the waving of a magic wand, lights sprang up in all the windows.

The head gynecologist came out of Tonia
'
s ward through the narrow lobby separating it from the corridor. He was of mammoth size, and always responded to questions by shrugging his shoulders and staring at the ceiling. These silent gestures were meant to suggest that, whatever the advances of science, there were more things in heaven and earth, friend Horatio, than science ever dreamt on.

He passed Yurii Andreievich with a nod and a smile, flipped his podgy hands a few times to intimate that there was nothing for it but patience, and went off down the corridor to have a smoke in the waiting room.

After him came his assistant, who was as garrulous as her superior was taciturn.

"
If I were you I
'
d go home,
"
she told Yurii Andreievich.
"
I
'
ll call you up tomorrow at the Holy Cross. It
'
s most unlikely that anything will happen between now and then. There
'
s every reason to expect a natural birth; there shouldn
'
t be any need for surgical intervention. But of course the pelvis is narrow, the child
'
s head is in the occipito-posterior position, there are no pains, and the contractions are slight. All this gives grounds for anxiety. However, it
'
s too soon to say. It all depends on how the pains develop once labor begins. Then we
'
ll know.
"

When he telephoned the following day, the hospital porter who took the call told him to wait while he made inquiries; after keeping him in misery for a good ten minutes he came back with the following inadequate and crudely worded information:
"
They say, tell him he
'
s brought his wife too soon, he
'
s to take her back.
"

Infuriated, Yurii Andreievich told him to get the nurse on the telephone.
"
The symptoms may be misleading,
"
the nurse said.
"
We
'
ll know more in a day or two.
"

On the third day he was told that labor had begun the night before, the water had broken at dawn, and there had been strong pains with short intervals since the early morning.

He rushed headlong to the hospital. As he walked down the passage to the door, which by mistake had been left half open, he heard Tonia
'
s heart-rending screams; she screamed like the victims of an accident dragged with crushed limbs from under the wheels of a train.

He was not allowed to see her. Biting his knuckle until he drew blood, he went over to the window; the same slanting rain was pouring down as on the two preceding days.

A nurse came out of the ward, and he heard the squealing of a newborn child.
"
She
'
s safe, she
'
s safe,
"
Yurii Andreievich muttered joyfully to himself.

"
It
'
s a son. A little boy. Congratulations on a safe delivery,
"
said the nurse in a singsong.
"
You can
'
t go in yet. When they
'
re ready we
'
ll show you. Then you
'
ll have to give her a nice present. She
'
s had a bad time. It
'
s the first one. There
'
s always trouble with the first.
"

"
She
'
s safe, she
'
s safe.
"
Yurii Andreievich was happy. He did not understand what the nurse was telling him, and why she was including him in her congratulations as if he had played a part in what had happened. For what had he actually had to do with it? Father—son; he did not see why he should be proud of this unearned fatherhood, he felt that this son was a gift out of the blue. He was scarcely aware of all this. The main thing was that Tonia—Tonia, who had been in mortal danger—was now happily safe.

He had a patient living near the hospital. He went to see him and was back in half an hour. Both the door of the lobby and that of the ward were again ajar. Without knowing what he was doing, Yurii Andreievich slipped into the lobby.

The huge gynecologist, in his white coat, rose as though from under the ground in front of him, barring the way.

"
Where do you think you
'
re going?
"
he whispered breathlessly so that the new mother should not hear.
"
Are you out of your mind? After she lost all that blood, risk of sepsis, not to speak of psychological shock! And you call yourself a doctor!
"

"
I didn
'
t mean to…Do let me have just a glance. Just from here, through the crack.
"

"
Oh, well, that
'
s different. All right, if you must. But don
'
t let me catch you…If she sees you, I
'
ll wring your neck.
"

Inside the ward two women in white uniforms stood with their backs to the door; they were the midwife and the nurse. Squirming on the palm of the nurse
'
s hand lay a tender, squealing, tiny human creature, stretching and contracting like a dark red piece of rubber. The midwife was putting a ligature on the navel before cutting the cord. Tonia lay on a surgical bed of adjustable height in the middle of the room. She lay fairly high. Yurii Andreievich, exaggerating everything in his excitement, thought that she was lying, say, at the level of one of those desks at which you write standing up

Raised higher, closer to the ceiling than ordinary mortals usually are, Tonia lay exhausted in the cloud of her spent pain. To Yurii Andreievich she seemed like a barque lying at rest in the middle of a harbor after putting in and being unloaded, a barque that plied between an unknown country and the continent of life across the waters of death with a cargo of immigrant new souls. One such soul had just been landed, and the ship now lay at anchor, relaxed, its flanks unburdened and empty. The whole of her was resting, her strained masts and hull, and her memory washed clean of the image of the other shore, the crossing and the landing.