Doctor Zhivago (20 page)

Convinced of the futility of trying to get any news by mail, she had decided to go and look for Pasha. With this in mind, she got a job as a nurse on a hospital train going to Mezo-Laborch, on the Hungarian border, the last address Pasha had given her.

A Red Cross train, equipped through voluntary contributions collected by the Tatiana Committee for Aid to the Wounded, arrived at divisional headquarters. It was a long train mostly made up of shabby, short freight cars; the only first-class coach carried prominent people from Moscow with presents for the troops. Among them was Gordon. He knew that his childhood friend Zhivago was attached to the divisional hospital; hearing that it was in a near-by village, he obtained the necessary permit to travel in the area just behind the lines, and got a lift in a carriage going to the village.

The driver was a Byelorussian or a Lithuanian who spoke broken Russian. The current spy scare reduced his conversation to a stale official patter. Discouraged by his ostentatious loyalty, Gordon travelled most of the way in silence.

At headquarters, where they were used to moving armies and measured distances in hundred-mile stages, he had been told that the village was quite near—within fifteen miles at most; in reality, it was more like fifty.

All along the way, an unfriendly grunting and grumbling came from the horizon on their left. Gordon had never been in an earthquake, but he decided (quite rightly) that the sullen, scarcely distinguishable, distant sound of enemy artillery could best be compared to volcanic tremors and rumblings. Toward evening, a pink glow flared up over the skyline on that side and went on flickering until dawn.

They passed ruined villages. Some were abandoned; in others people were living in cellars deep underground. Piles of refuse and rubble were aligned as the houses had been. These gutted settlements could be encompassed in a glance, like barren desert. Old women scratched about in the ashes, each on the ruins of her own home, now and then digging something up and putting it away, apparently feeling as sheltered from the eyes of strangers as if their walls were still around them. They looked up at Gordon and gazed after him as he drove past, seeming to ask him how soon the world would come to its senses and peace and order be restored to their lives.

After dark the carriage ran into a patrol and was ordered off the main road. The driver did not know the new by-pass. They drove about in circles for a couple of hours without getting anywhere. At dawn they came to a village that had the name they were looking for, but nobody knew anything about a hospital. It turned out that there were two villages of the same name. At last, in the morning, they found the right one. As they drove down the village road, which smelled of camomile and iodoform, Gordon decided not to stay the night but to spend the day with Zhivago and go back that evening to the railway station where he had left his other friends. But circumstances kept him there for more than a week.

During those days the front line began to move. To the south of the village where Gordon found himself, Russian forces succeeded in breaking through the enemy positions. Supporting units followed, widening the gap, but they fell behind and the advance units were cut off and captured. Among the prisoners was Lieutenant Antipov, who was obliged to give himself up when his platoon surrendered.

There were false rumors about him. He was believed to have been killed by a shell and buried by the explosion. This was told on the authority of his friend, Lieutenant Galiullin, who had been watching through field glasses from an observation post when Antipov led the attack.

What Galiullin had seen was the usual picture of an attacking unit. The men advanced quickly, almost at a run, across the no man
'
s land, an autumn field with dry broom swaying in the wind and motionless, spiky gorse. Their object was either to flush the Austrians out of their trenches and engage them with bayonets or to destroy them with hand grenades. To the running men the field was endless. The ground seemed to slip under their feet like a bog. Their lieutenant was running, first in front of them, then beside them, waving his revolver above his head, his mouth split from ear to ear with hurrahs which neither he nor they could hear. At intervals they threw themselves onto the ground, got up all together, and ran on shouting. Each time one or two who had been hit fell with the rest but in a different way, toppling like trees chopped down in a wood, and did not get up again.

"
They
'
re shooting long! Get the battery,
"
Galiullin said anxiously to the artillery officer who stood next to him
"
No. wait. It
'
s all right.
"

The attackers were on the point of engaging the enemy. The artillery barrage stopped. In the sudden silence the observers heard their own hearts pounding as if they were in Antipov
'
s place, had brought their men to the edge of the enemy trench, and were expected within the next few minutes to perform wonders of resourcefulness and courage. At that moment two German sixteen-inch shells burst in front of the attackers. Black clouds of dust and smoke hid what followed.
"
Ya Allah! Finished. They
'
re done for,
"
whispered Galiullin, white-lipped, believing that the lieutenant and his men had been killed. Another shell came down close to the observation post. Bent double, the observers hurried to a safer distance.

Galiullin had shared Antipov
'
s dugout. After Antipov
'
s comrades resigned themselves to the idea that he was dead, Galiullin, who had known him well, was asked to take charge of his belongings and keep them for his widow, a large number of whose photographs had been found among his things.

An enlisted man recently promoted to lieutenant, the mechanic Galiullin, son of Gimazetdin, the janitor of Tiverzin
'
s tenement, was that very Yusupka whom, as an apprentice in the distant past, the foreman Khudoleiev had beaten up. It was to his old tormentor that he was now indebted for his promotion.

On getting his commission, he had found himself, against his will and for no reason that he knew of, in a soft job in a small-town garrison behind the lines. There he commanded a troop of semi-invalids whom instructors as decrepit as themselves took every morning through the drill they had forgotten. Galiullin supervised the changing of the guard in front of the commissary. Nothing else was expected of him. He did not have a care in the world when, among the replacements consisting of older reservists sent from Moscow and put under his orders, there turned up the all too familiar figure of Piotr Khudoleiev.

"
Well, well, an old friend,
"
said Galiullin, grinning sourly.

"
Yes, sir,
"
said Khudoleiev, standing at attention and saluting.

It was impossible that this should be the end of it. The very first time the lieutenant caught the private in a fault at drill he bawled him out, and when it seemed to him that his subordinate was not looking him straight in the eye but somehow sideways, he hit him in the jaw and put him on bread and water in the guardhouse for two days.

From now on every move of Galiullin
'
s smacked of revenge. But this game, in their respective positions and with rules enforced by the stick, struck Galiullin as unsporting and mean. What was to be done? Both of them could not be in the same place. But what pretext could an officer find for transferring a private from his unit, and where, if it were not for disciplinary reasons, could he transfer him? On the other hand, what grounds could Galiullin think of to apply for his own transfer? Giving the boredom and uselessness of garrison duty as his reasons, he asked to be sent to the front. This earned him a good mark, and when, at the first engagement, he showed his other qualities it turned out that he had the makings of an excellent officer and he was quickly promoted to first lieutenant.

Galiullin had met Antipov in 1905, when Pasha Antipov spent six months with the Tiverzins and Yusupka went to play with him on Sundays. There too he had once or twice met Lara. He had heard nothing of either of them since. When Antipov came from Yuriatin and joined the regiment, Galiullin was struck by the change in his old friend. The shy, mischievous, and girlish child had turned into an arrogant, know-it-all misanthrope. He was intelligent, very brave, taciturn, and sarcastic. Sometimes, looking at him, Galiullin could have sworn that he saw in his gloomy eyes, as inside a window, something beyond, an idea that had taken firm hold of him: a longing for his daughter or for the face of his wife. Antipov seemed like one bewitched, as in a fairy tale. And now Antipov was gone, and Galiullin was left with his papers, his photographs, and the unsolved secret of his transformation on his hands.

As was bound to happen sooner or later, Lara
'
s inquiries for her husband reached Galiullin. He meant to write to her, but he was busy, he had no time to write properly, yet he wished to prepare her for the blow. He kept postponing a long, detailed letter to her until he heard that she was somewhere at the front as a nurse. And he did not know where to address his letter to her now.

"
Will there be horses today?
"
Gordon asked every time Dr. Zhivago came home to his midday meal. They were living in a Galician peasant house.

"
Not a chance. Anyway, where would you go? You can
'
t go anywhere. There
'
s a terrible muddle. Nobody knows what
'
s what. To the south we have outflanked or broken through the German lines in several places, and I am told some of our overextended units were encircled. To the north, the Germans have crossed the Sventa, at a point that was supposed to be impassable. That is their cavalry, about a corps in strength. They are blowing up railways, destroying supply stores, and in my opinion trying to surround us. That
'
s the picture, and you talk about horses. Come on, Karpenko,
"
he said, turning to his orderly,
"
set the table, and make it quick. What are we having for dinner? Calves
'
feet? Good!
"

The Medical Unit, with its hospital and its dependencies, was scattered all over the village, which by a miracle was still unharmed. The houses glittered with Western-style lattice windows stretching from wall to wall, and not so much as a pane was damaged.

The end of a hot, golden autumn had turned into an Indian summer. In the daytime the doctors and officers opened windows, swatted at the black swarms of flies along the sills and the low white ceilings, unbuttoned their tunics and hospital coats, and, dripping with sweat, sipped scalding-hot soup or tea. At night they squatted in front of the open stove, blew on the damp logs which kept going out, their eyes smarting with smoke, and cursed the orderlies for not knowing how to build a fire.

It was a still night. Gordon and Zhivago lay on two bunks facing each other. Between them were the dinner table and the low window running the whole length of the wall. The room was overheated and filled with tobacco smoke. They had opened the two end lattices to get a breath of the fresh autumn night air, which made the panes sweat. They were talking, as they had done all these nights and days, and as usual the horizon in the direction of the front was flickering with a pink glow. When the even, incessant chatter of gunfire was occasionally interrupted by a deep bang that shook the ground as though a heavy steel-bound trunk were being dragged across the floor, scraping the paint, Zhivago interrupted the conversation as if out of respect for the sound, paused for a while, and said,
"
That
'
s a Bertha, a German sixteen-inch. A little fellow that weighs twenty-four hundred pounds.
"
And then, resuming the conversation, he would forget what they had been talking about.

"
What
'
s that smell that hangs over the whole village?
"
asked Gordon.
"
I noticed it as soon as I arrived. It
'
s a nauseatingly sweet, cloying smell, rather like mice.
"

"
I know what you mean. That
'
s hemp—they grow a lot of it here. The plant itself has that nagging, clinging, carrion smell. And then in the battle zone, the dead often remain undiscovered in the hemp fields for a long time and begin to decay. Of course the smell of corpses is everywhere. That
'
s only natural. Hear that? It
'
s the Bertha again.
"

In the past few days they had talked of everything in the world. Gordon had learned his friend
'
s ideas about the war and its effect on people
'
s thinking. Zhivago had told him how hard he found it to accept the ruthless logic of mutual extermination, to get used to the sight of the wounded, especially to the horror of certain wounds of a new sort, to the mutilation of survivors whom the technique of modern fighting had turned into lumps of disfigured flesh.