Doctor Zhivago (21 page)

Going about with him day after day, Gordon too had seen terrible sights. Needless to say, he was aware of the immorality of being an idle spectator of other men
'
s courage, of how they mastered, by an inhuman effort, their fear of death, of the sacrifices they made and the risks they ran. But he did not think that merely crying over them was any less immoral. He believed in behaving simply and honestly according to the circumstances in which life placed him.

That it was possible to faint at the sight of wounds he learned from his own experience when they visited a first-aid station run by a mobile Red Cross unit just behind the front line.

They drove to a clearing in a wood that had been badly damaged by artillery fire. Twisted gun carriages lay upside down in the broken and trampled undergrowth. A riding horse was tethered to a tree. A little farther in the wood was the frame structure of the forester
'
s house; half its roof had been blown away. The first-aid station was in the house and in two big gray tents across the way.

"
I shouldn
'
t have brought you,
"
said Zhivago.
"
The trenches are within half a mile and our batteries are just over there, behind the wood. You can hear what
'
s going on. So don
'
t play the hero, I wouldn
'
t believe you if you did. You
'
re bound to be scared stiff, it
'
s only natural. Any moment the situation may change, and shells will be dropping here.
"

Tired young soldiers in enormous boots and dusty tunics which were black with sweat on the chest and shoulder-blades sprawled on their backs or on their stomachs by the side of the road. They were the survivors of a decimated unit that had been taken out of the front line after four days of heavy fighting and was being sent to the rear for a short rest. They lay as if they were of stone, without the strength to smile or to swear, and no one turned his head when several carts came rumbling swiftly down the road. They were ammunition carts, without springs, loaded with wounded men whom they jolted, cracking their bones and twisting their guts, as they jogged along at a trot to the first-aid station. There the wounded would be hastily bandaged and the most urgent cases operated on. They had been picked up in appalling numbers on the battlefield in front of the trenches half an hour ago during a short lull in the artillery fire. A good half of them were unconscious.

When the carts stopped in front of the porch, orderlies came down the steps with stretchers and unloaded them. A nurse raised the flap on one of the tents and stood looking out; she was off duty. Two men who had been arguing loudly in the wood behind the tents, their voices echoing among the tall young trees, but their words indistinguishable, came out and walked along the road toward the house. One of them, an excited young lieutenant, was shouting at the Medical Officer of the mobile unit: there had been an artillery park in the clearing and he wanted to know where it had been moved. The doctor did not know, it was not his business; he asked the lieutenant to leave him alone and to stop shouting—there were wounded men here and he was busy. But the little lieutenant went on cursing the Red Cross, the artillery command, and everybody else. Zhivago walked up to the doctor; they greeted each other and went into the house. The lieutenant, still swearing loudly with a slight Tartar accent, untied his horse, vaulted into the saddle, and galloped down the road into the woods. The nurse was still looking on.

Suddenly her face was distorted with horror.
"
What are you doing? You
'
re out of your minds!
"
she shouted at two lightly wounded soldiers who were walking without assistance between the stretchers. She ran out toward them.

On one stretcher lay a man who had been mutilated in a particularly monstrous way. A large splinter from the shell that had mangled his face, turning his tongue and lips into a red gruel without killing him, had lodged in the bone structure of his jaw, where the cheek had been torn out. He uttered short groans in a thin inhuman voice; no one could take these sounds for anything but an appeal to finish him off quickly, to put an end to his inconceivable torment.

The nurse had got the impression that the two lightly wounded men who were walking beside the stretcher had been so moved by his cries that they were about to pull out the terrible piece of iron with their bare hands.

"
What
'
s the matter with you? You can
'
t do that. The surgeon will do it, he has special instruments…if it has to be done.
"
(O God, O God, take him away, don
'
t let me doubt that You exist.)

Next moment, as he was carried up the steps, the man screamed, and with one great shudder he gave up the ghost.

The man who had just died was Private Gimazetdin; the excited officer who had been shouting in the wood was his son, Lieutenant Galiullin; the nurse was Lara. Gordon and Zhivago were the witnesses. All these people were there together, in one place. But some of them had never known each other, while others failed to recognize each other now. And there were things about them which were never to be known for certain, while others were not to be revealed until a future time, a later meeting.

In this area the villages had been miraculously preserved. They constituted an inexplicably intact island in the midst of a sea of ruins. One day at sunset Gordon and Zhivago were driving home. In one village they saw a young Cossack surrounded by a crowd laughing boisterously, as the Cossack tossed a copper coin into the air, forcing an old Jew with a gray beard and a long caftan to catch it. The old man missed every time. The coin flew past his pitifully spread-out hands and dropped into the mud. When the old man bent to pick it up, the Cossack slapped his bottom, and the onlookers held their sides, groaning with laughter: this was the point of the entertainment. For the moment it was harmless enough, but no one could say for certain that it would not take a more serious turn. Every now and then, the old man
'
s wife ran out of the house across the road, screaming and stretching out her arms to him, and ran back again in terror. Two little girls were watching their grandfather, out of the window and crying.

The driver, who found all this extremely comical, slowed down so that the passengers could enjoy the spectacle. But Zhivago called the Cossack, bawled him out, and ordered him to stop baiting the old man.

"
Yes, sir,
"
he said readily.
"
We meant no harm, we were only doing it for fun.
"

Gordon and Zhivago drove on in silence.

"
It
'
s terrible,
"
said Yurii Andreievich when they were in sight of their own village.
"
You can
'
t imagine what the wretched Jewish population is going through in this war. The fighting happens to be in their Pale. And as if punitive taxation, the destruction of their property, and all their other sufferings were not enough, they are subjected to pogroms, insults, and accusations that they lack patriotism. And why should they be patriotic? Under enemy rule, they enjoy equal rights, and we do nothing but persecute them. This hatred for them, the basis of it, is irrational. It is stimulated by the very things that should arouse sympathy—their poverty, their overcrowding, their weakness, and this inability to fight back. I can
'
t understand it. It
'
s like an inescapable fate.
"

Gordon did not reply.

Once again they were lying on their bunks on either side of the long low window, it was night, and they were talking.

Zhivago was telling Gordon how he had once seen the Tsar at the front. He told his story well.

It was his first spring at the front. The headquarters of his regiment was in the Carpathians, in a deep valley, access to which from the Hungarian plain was blocked by this army unit.

At the bottom of the valley was a railway station. Zhivago described the landscape, the mountains overgrown with mighty firs and pines, with tufts of clouds catching in their tops, and sheer cliffs of gray slate and graphite showing through the forest like worn patches in a thick fur. It was a damp, dark April morning, as gray as the slate, locked in by the mountains on all sides and therefore still and sultry. Mist hung over the valley, and everything in it steamed, everything rose slowly—engine smoke from the railway station, gray vapors from the fields, the gray mountains, the dark woods, the dark clouds.

At that time the sovereign was making a tour of inspection in Galicia. It was learned suddenly that he would visit Zhivago
'
s unit, of which he was the honorary Colonel. He might arrive at any moment. A guard of honor was drawn up on the station platform. They waited for about two oppressive hours, then two trains with the imperial retinue went by quickly one after the other. A little later the Tsar
'
s train drew in.

Accompanied by the Grand Duke Nicholas, the Tsar inspected the grenadiers. Every syllable of his quietly spoken greeting produced an explosion of thunderous hurrahs whose echoes were sent back and forth like water from swinging buckets.

The Tsar, smiling and ill at ease, looked older and more tired than on the rubles and medals. His face was listless, a little flabby. He kept glancing apologetically at the Grand Duke, not knowing what was expected of him, and the Grand Duke, bending down respectfully, helped him in his embarrassment not so much by words as by moving an eyebrow or a shoulder.

On that warm gray morning in the mountains, Zhivago felt sorry for the Tsar, was disturbed at the thought that such diffident reserve and shyness could be the essential characteristics of an oppressor, that a man so weak could imprison, hang, or pardon.

"
He should have made a speech—
'
I, my sword, and my people
'
—like the Kaiser. Something about
'
the people
'
—that was essential. But you know he was natural, in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities. After all, that kind of theatricalism is unthinkable in Russia. For such gestures are theatrical, aren
'
t they? I suppose that there were such things as
'
peoples
'
under the Caesars—Gauls or Scythians or Illyrians and so on. But ever since, they have been mere fiction, which served only as subjects for speeches by kings and politicians:
'
The people, my people.
'

"
Now the front is flooded with correspondents and journalists. They record their
'
observations
'
and gems of popular wisdom, they visit the wounded and construct new theories about the people
'
s soul. It
'
s a new version of Dahl
[9]
and just as bogus—linguistic graphomania, verbal incontinence. That
'
s one type—and then there
'
s the other: clipped speech,
'
sketches and short scenes,
'
skepticism and misanthropy. I read a piece like that the other day:
'
A gray day, like yesterday. Rain since morning, slush. I look out of the window and see the road. Prisoners in an endless line. Wounded. A gun is firing. It fires today as yesterday, tomorrow as today and every day and every hour.
'
Isn
'
t that subtle and witty! But what has he got against the gun? How odd to expect variety from a gun! Why doesn
'
t he look at himself, shooting off the same sentences, commas, lists of facts day in, day out, keeping up his barrage of journalistic philanthropy as nimble as the jumping of a flea? Why can
'
t he get it into his head that it
'
s for him to stop repeating himself—not for the gun—that you can never say something meaningful by accumulating absurdities in your notebook, that facts don
'
t exist until man puts into them something of his own, a bit of free human genius—of myth.
"

"
You
'
ve hit the nail on the head,
"
broke in Gordon.
"
And now I
'
ll tell you what I think about that incident we saw today. That Cossack tormenting the poor patriarch—and there are thousands of incidents like it—of course it
'
s an ignominy—but there
'
s no point in philosophizing, you just hit out. But the Jewish question as a whole—there philosophy does come in—and then we discover something unexpected. Not that I
'
m going to tell you anything new—we both got our ideas from your uncle.