Doctor Zhivago (19 page)

And as no one had explored the country where she was registered, no one knew the language in which to speak to her.

At Yurii Andreievich
'
s hospital everyone congratulated him. He was astonished to see how fast the news had travelled.

He went into the staff room, known as the Rubbish Dump. With so little space in the overcrowded hospital, it was used as a cloakroom; people came in from outside wearing their snow boots, they forgot their parcels and littered the floor with papers and cigarette ends.

Standing by the window, the flabby, elderly prosector was holding up a jar with some opaque liquid against the light and examining it over the top of his glasses.

"
Congratulations,
"
he said, without looking around.

"
Thank you. How kind of you.
"

"
Don
'
t thank me. I
'
ve had nothing to do with it. Pichuzhkin did the autopsy. But everyone is impressed—echinococcus it was. That
'
s a real diagnostician, they
'
re all saying. That
'
s all everyone is talking about.
"

Just then the medical director came in, greeted them both, and said:
"
What the devil is happening to this place? What a filthy mess it is! By the way, Zhivago, it was echinococcus after all! We were wrong. Congratulations. There
'
s another thing. It
'
s a nuisance. They
'
ve been reviewing the lists of exemptions again. I can
'
t stop them this time. There
'
s a terrible shortage of medical personnel. You
'
ll be smelling gunpowder before long.
"

The Antipovs had done much better in Yuriatin than they had hoped to. The Guishars were remembered well. This had helped Lara over the difficulties of setting up house in a new place.

Lara had her hands full and plenty to think about. She took care of the house and of their three-year-old daughter, Katenka. Marfutka, their red-haired maid, did her best but could not get all the work done. Larisa Feodorovna shared all her husband
'
s interests. She herself taught at the girls
'
gymnasium. She worked without respite and was happy. This was exactly the kind of life she had dreamed of.

She liked Yuriatin. It was her native town. It stood on the big river Rynva, navigable except in its upper reaches, and one of the Ural railways passed through it.

The approach of winter in Yuriatin was always heralded by the owners of boats, when they took them from the river and transported them on carts to the town, to be stored in back yards. There they lay in the open air waiting for the spring. The boats with their light upturned bottoms in the yards meant in Yuriatin what the migration of storks or the first snow meant in other places. Such a boat lay in the yard of the house rented by the Antipovs. Katenka played in the shelter of its white hull as in a summerhouse.

Larisa Feodorovna liked Yuriatin
'
s provincial ways, the long vowels of its northern accent, and the naïve trustfulness of its intelligentsia, who wore felt boots and gray flannel sleeveless coats. She was drawn to the land and to the common people.

Paradoxically, it was her husband, Pavel Pavlovich, the son of a Moscow railway worker, who turned out to be an incorrigible urbanite. He judged the people of Yuriatin much more harshly than she. Their crudeness and ignorance irritated him.

He had an extraordinary capacity, it now appeared, for reading quickly and storing up the knowledge he picked up. He had read a great deal in the past, partly thanks to Lara. During the years of his provincial seclusion, he became so well read that even Lara no longer seemed to him well-informed. He towered high above his fellow teachers and complained that he felt stifled among them. Now in wartime, their standard, commonplace, and somewhat stale patriotism was out of tune with his own, more complicated feelings about his country.

Pavel Pavlovich had graduated in classics. He taught Latin and ancient history. But from his earlier
Realgymnasium
days he had kept a half-forgotten passion for the exact sciences, physics and mathematics, and it had now suddenly revived in him. Teaching himself at home, he had reached university standard in these subjects, and dreamed of taking his degree, specializing in some branch of mathematics, and moving with his family to Petersburg. Studying late into the night had affected his health. He began to suffer from insomnia.

His relations with his wife were good but lacked simplicity. Her kindness and her fussing over him oppressed him, but he would not criticize her for fear that she might take some quite innocent word of his for a reproach—a hint, perhaps, that her blood was bluer than his, or that she had once belonged to someone else. His anxiety lest she suspect him of having some absurdly unfair idea about her introduced an element of artificiality into their life. Each tried to behave more nobly than the other, and this complicated everything.

One night they had guests—the headmistress of Lara
'
s school, several fellow teachers of her husband
'
s, the member of an arbitration court on which Pavel Pavlovich too had recently served, and a few others. They were all, from Pavel Pavlovich
'
s point of view, complete fools. He was amazed at Lara
'
s amiability toward them, and he could not believe that she sincerely liked any of them.

After the visitors had gone, Lara took a long time airing and tidying the rooms and washing dishes in the kitchen with Marfutka. Then she made sure that Katenka was properly tucked up and Pasha asleep, quickly undressed, turned off the light, and lay down next to him as naturally as a child getting into bed with its mother.

But Antipov was only pretending that he was asleep. As so often recently, he had insomnia. He knew that he would lie awake for three or four hours. To walk himself to sleep, and to escape from the still smoky air of the room, he got up quietly, put on his fur coat and cap over his night clothes, and went outside.

It was a clear, frosty autumn night. Thin sheets of ice crumbled under his steps. The sky, shining with stars, threw a pale blue flicker like the flame of burning alcohol over the black earth with its clumps of frozen mud.

The Antipovs lived at the other end of town from the river harbor. The house was the last in the street, and beyond it lay a field cut by a railway with a grade crossing and a guard
'
s shelter.

Antipov sat down on the overturned boat and looked at the stars. The thoughts to which he had become accustomed in the past few years assailed him with alarming strength. It seemed to him that sooner or later they would have to be thought out to the end, and that it might as well be done now.

This can
'
t go on, he thought. He could have foreseen it long ago, before they were married. He had caught on late. Even as a child he had been fascinated by her, and she could make him do whatever she liked. Why hadn
'
t he had the sense to renounce her in time, that winter before their marriage, when she herself had insisted on it? Wasn
'
t it clear that it was not he whom she loved, but the noble task she had set herself in relation to him, and that for her he was the embodiment of her own heroism? But what had her mission, however meritorious or inspired, to do with real family life? The worst of it was that he loved her as much as ever. She was stunningly beautiful. And yet—was he sure that it was love even on his side? Or was it a bewildered gratitude for her beauty and magnanimity? Who could possibly sort it all out! The devil himself would be stumped.

So what was he to do? He must set his wife and daughter free from this counterfeit life. This was even more important than to liberate himself. Yes, but how? Divorce? Drown himself? What disgusting rubbish! He rebelled against the very thought.
"
As if I
'
d ever do anything of the sort! So why rehearse this melodrama even in my mind?
"

He looked up at the stars as if asking them for advice. They flickered on, small or large, quick or slow, some blue and some in all the hues of the rainbow. Suddenly they were blotted out, and the house, the yard, and Antipov sitting on his boat were thrown into relief by a harsh, darting light, as though someone were running from the field toward the gate waving a torch. An army train, puffing clouds of yellow, flame-shot smoke into the sky, rolled over the grade crossing going westward, as countless others had rolled by, night and day, for the past year.

Pavel Pavlovich smiled, got up, and went to bed. He had found a way out of his dilemma.

When Larisa Feodorovna learned of Pasha
'
s decision, she was stunned and at first would not believe her ears.
"
It
'
s absurd,
"
she thought,
"
a whim. I won
'
t take any notice, and he
'
ll forget it.
"

But it appeared that he had been getting ready for the past two weeks. He had sent in his papers to the recruiting office, the gymnasium had found a substitute teacher, and he had been notified that he was admitted to the military school at Omsk.

Lara wailed like a peasant woman and, grabbing Pasha
'
s hands, threw herself at his feet.
"
Pasha, Pashenka,
"
she screamed,
"
don
'
t leave us. Don
'
t do it, don
'
t. It isn
'
t too late, I
'
ll see to everything. You haven
'
t even had a proper medical examination, and with your heart…You
'
re ashamed to change your mind? And aren
'
t you ashamed to sacrifice your family to some crazy notion? You, a volunteer! All your life you
'
ve laughed at Rodia, and now you
'
re jealous of him. You have to swagger about in an officer
'
s uniform too, you have to do your own bit of saber-rattling. Pasha, what
'
s come over you? I don
'
t recognize you. What
'
s changed you like this? Tell me honestly, for the love of Christ, without any fine phrases, is this really what Russia needs?
"

Suddenly she realized that it wasn
'
t that at all. Though she could not understand all of it, she grasped the main thing. Pasha misunderstood her attitude to him. He rebelled against the motherly feeling that all her life had been a part of her affection for him and could not see that such a love was something more, not less, than the ordinary feeling of a woman for a man.

She bit her lip and, shrinking as if she had been beaten, and swallowing her tears, set about silently packing his things.

After he had left, it seemed to her that the whole town was silent, and even that there were fewer crows flying about in the sky.
"
Madam, madam,
"
Marfutka would say reproachfully, trying to call her back to herself.
"
Mama, Mama,
"
Katenka babbled, pulling at her sleeve. This was the greatest defeat of her life. Her best, brightest hopes had collapsed.

Her husband
'
s letters from Siberia told her all about his moods. He had seen his mistake. He badly missed his wife and daughter. After a few months he was commissioned lieutenant before term and then, just as unexpectedly, was sent to the front. His journey took him nowhere near Yuriatin, and he was not in Moscow long enough to see anyone there.

His letters from the front were less depressed than those from the Omsk school had been. He wanted to distinguish himself so that, as a reward for some military exploit or as a result of some light wound, he could go home on leave and see his family. Soon his opportunity was within sight. Brusilov
'
s forces had broken through and were attacking. Antipov
'
s letters stopped coming. At first Lara was not worried. She put down his silence to the military operations: he could not write when his regiment was on the move. But in the autumn the advance slowed down, the troops were digging themselves in, and there was still no word from him. His wife began to be worried, and to make inquiries, at first locally, in Yuriatin, then by mail in Moscow and at his old field address. There was no reply; nobody seemed to know anything.

Like other local ladies, Larisa Feodorovna had been giving a hand at the military ward attached to the town hospital. Now she trained seriously and qualified as a nurse, got leave of absence from her school for six months, and, putting the house in Marfutka
'
s care, took Katenka to Moscow. She left her with Lipa, whose husband, Friesendank, was a German subject and had been interned with other enemy civilians at Ufa.