Doctor Zhivago (3 page)

He was not unconscious for long. When he came to, he heard his uncle calling him from above. He answered and began to climb. Suddenly he remembered that he had not prayed for his missing father, as Maria Nikolaievna had taught him to.

But his fainting spell had left him with a sense of lightness and well-being that he was unwilling to lose. He thought that nothing terrible would happen if he prayed for his father some other time, as if saying to himself,
"
Let him wait.
"
Yura did not remember him at all.

In a second-class compartment of the train sat Misha Gordon, who was travelling with his father, a lawyer from Gorenburg. Misha was a boy of eleven with a thoughtful face and big dark eyes; he was in his second year of gymnasium. His father, Grigory Osipovich Gordon, was being transferred to a new post in Moscow. His mother and sisters had gone on some time before to get their apartment ready.

Father and son had been travelling for three days.

Russia, with its fields, steppes, villages, and towns, bleached lime-white by the sun, flew past them wrapped in hot clouds of dust. Lines of carts rolled along the highways, occasionally lumbering off the road to cross the tracks; from the furiously speeding train it seemed that the carts stood still and the horses were marking time.

At big stations passengers jumped out and ran to the buffet; the sun setting behind the station garden lit their feet and shone under the wheels of the train.

Every motion in the world taken separately was calculated and purposeful, but, taken together, they were spontaneously intoxicated with the general stream of life which united them all. People worked and struggled, each set in motion by the mechanism of his own cares. But the mechanisms would not have worked properly had they not been regulated and governed by a higher sense of an ultimate freedom from care. This freedom came from the feeling that all human lives were interrelated, a certainty that they flowed into each other—a happy feeling that all events took place not only on the earth, in which the dead are buried, but also in some other region which some called the Kingdom of God, others history, and still others by some other name.

To this general rule Misha was an unhappy, bitter exception. A feeling of care remained his ultimate mainspring and was not relieved and ennobled by a sense of security. He knew this hereditary trait in himself and watched morbidly and self-consciously for symptoms of it in himself. It distressed him. Its presence humiliated him.

For as long as he could remember he had never ceased to wonder why, having arms and legs like everyone else, and a language and way of life common to all, one could be different from the others, liked only by few and, moreover, loved by no one. He could not understand a situation in which if you were worse than other people you could not make an effort to improve yourself. What did it mean to be a Jew? What was the purpose of it? What was the reward or the justification of this impotent challenge, which brought nothing but grief?

When Misha took the problem to his father he was told that his premises were absurd, and that such reasonings were wrong, but he was offered no solution deep enough to attract him or to make him bow silently to the inevitable.

And making an exception only for his parents, he gradually became contemptuous of all grownups who had made this mess and were unable to clear it up. He was sure that when he was big he would straighten it all out.

Now, for instance, no one had the courage to say that his father should not have run after that madman when he had rushed out onto the platform, and should not have stopped the train when, pushing Grigory Osipovich aside, and flinging open the door, he had thrown himself head first out of the express like a diver from a springboard into a swimming pool.

But since it was his father who had pulled the emergency release, it looked as if the train had stopped for such an inexplicably long time because of them.

No one knew the exact cause of the delay. Some said that the sudden stop had damaged the air brakes, others that they were on a steep gradient and one engine could not make it. A third view was that as the suicide was a prominent person, his lawyer, who had been with him on the train, insisted on officials being called from the nearest station, Kologrivovka, to draw up a statement. This was why the assistant engineer had climbed up the telegraph pole: the inspection handcar must be on its way.

There was a faint stench from the lavatories, not quite dispelled by eau de cologne, and a smell of fried chicken, a little high and wrapped in dirty wax paper. As though nothing had happened, graying Petersburg ladies with creaking chesty voices, turned into gypsies by the combination of soot and cosmetics, powdered their faces and wiped their fingers on their handkerchiefs. When they passed the door of the Gordons
'
compartment, adjusting their shawls and anxious about their appearance even while squeezing themselves through the narrow corridor, their pursed lips seemed to Misha to hiss:
"
Aren
'
t we sensitive! We
'
re something special. We
'
re intellectuals. It
'
s too much for us.
"

The body of the suicide lay on the grass by the embankment. A little stream of blood had run across his forehead, and, having dried, it looked like a cancel mark crossing out his face. It did not look like his blood, which had come from his body, but like a foreign appendage, a piece of plaster or a splatter of mud or a wet birch leaf.

Curious onlookers and sympathizers surrounded the body in a constantly changing cluster, while his friend and travelling companion, a thickset, arrogant-looking lawyer, a purebred animal in a sweaty shirt, stood over him sullenly with an expressionless face. Overcome by the heat, he was fanning himself with his hat. In answer to all questions he shrugged his shoulders and said crossly without even turning around:
"
He was an alcoholic. Can
'
t you understand? He did it in a fit of D.T.
'
s.
"

Once or twice a thin old woman in a woollen dress and lace kerchief went up to the body. She was the widow Tiverzina, mother of two engineers, who was travelling third class on a pass with her two daughters-in-law. Like nuns with their mother superior, the two quiet women, their shawls pulled low over their foreheads, followed her in silence. The crowd made way for them.

Tiverzina
'
s husband had been burned alive in a railway accident. She stood a little away from the body, where she could see it through the crowd, and sighed as if comparing the two cases.
"
Each according to his fate,
"
she seemed to say.
"
Some die by the Lord
'
s will—and look what
'
s happened to him—to die of rich living and mental illness.
"

All the passengers came out and had a look at the corpse and went back to their compartments only for fear that something might be stolen.

When they jumped out onto the track and picked flowers or took a short walk to stretch their legs, they felt as if the whole place owed its existence to the accident, and that without it neither the swampy meadow with hillocks, the broad river, nor the fine house and church on the steep opposite side would have been there. Even the diffident evening sun seemed to be a purely local feature. Its light probed the scene of the accident timidly, like a cow from a nearby herd come for a moment to take a look at the crowd.

Misha had been deeply shaken by the event and had at first wept with grief and fright. In the course of the long journey the suicide had come several times to their compartment and had talked with Misha
'
s father for hours on end. He had said that he found relief in the moral decency, peace, and understanding which he discovered in him and had asked him endless questions about fine points in law concerning bills of exchange, deeds of settlement, bankruptcy, and fraud.
"
Is that so?
"
he exclaimed at Gordon
'
s answers.
"
Can the law be as lenient as that? My lawyer takes a much gloomier view.
"

Each time that this nervous man calmed down, his travelling companion came from their first-class coach to drag him off to the restaurant to drink champagne. He was the thickset, arrogant, clean-shaven, well-dressed lawyer who now stood over his body, showing not the least surprise. It was hard to escape the feeling that his client
'
s ceaseless agitation had somehow been to his advantage.

Misha
'
s father described him as a well-known millionaire, Zhivago, a good-natured profligate, not quite responsible for his actions. When he had come to their compartment, he would, unrestrained by Misha
'
s presence, talk about his son, a boy of Misha
'
s age, and about his late wife; then he would go on about his second family, whom he had deserted as he had the first. At this point he would remember something else, grow pale with terror, and begin to lose the thread of his story.

To Misha he had shown an unaccountable affection, which probably reflected a feeling for someone else. He had showered him with presents, jumping out to buy them at the big stations, where the bookstalls in the first-class waiting rooms also sold toys and local souvenirs.

He had drunk incessantly and complained that he had not slept for three months and that as soon as he sobered up for however short a time he suffered torments unimaginable to any normal human being.

At the end, he rushed into their compartment, grasped Gordon by the hand, tried to tell him something but found he could not, and dashing out onto the platform threw himself from the train.

Now Misha sat examining the small wooden box of minerals from the Urals that had been his last gift. Suddenly there was a general stir. A handcar rolled up on the parallel track. A doctor, two policemen, and a magistrate with a cockade in his hat jumped out. Questions were asked in cold businesslike voices, and notes taken. The policemen and the guards, slipping and sliding awkwardly in the gravel, dragged the corpse up the embankment. A peasant woman began to wail. The passengers were asked to go back to their seats, the guard blew his whistle, and the train started on.

"
Here
'
s old Holy Oil,
"
Nika thought savagely, looking around the room for a way of escape. The voices of the guests were outside the door, and retreat was cut off. The room had two beds, his own and Voskoboinikov
'
s. With scarcely a moment
'
s thought he crept under the first.

He could hear them calling and looking for him in other rooms, surprised at his absence. Finally they entered the bedroom.

"
Well, it can
'
t be helped,
"
said Nikolai Nikolaievich.
"
Run along, Yura. Perhaps your friend will turn up later and you can play with him then.
"
They sat talking about the student riots in Petersburg and Moscow, keeping Nika in his absurd and undignified confinement for about twenty minutes. At last they went out onto the veranda. Nika quietly opened the window, jumped out, and went off into the park.

He had had no sleep the night before and was out of sorts. He was in his fourteenth year and was sick and tired of being a child. He had stayed awake all night and had gone out at dawn. The rising sun had cast the long dewy shadows of trees in loops over the park grounds. The shadow was not black but dark gray like wet felt. The heady fragrance of the morning seemed to come from this damp shadow on the ground, with strips of light in it like a girl
'
s fingers.

Suddenly a streak of quicksilver, as shiny as the dew on the grass, flowed by him a few paces away. It flowed on and on and the ground did not absorb it. Then, with an unexpectedly sharp movement, it swerved aside and vanished. It was a grass snake. Nika shuddered.

He was a strange boy. When he was excited he talked aloud to himself, imitating his mother
'
s predilection for lofty subjects and paradox.

"
How wonderful to be alive,
"
he thought.
"
But why does it always hurt? God exists, of course. But if He exists, then it
'
s me.
"
He looked up at an aspen shaking from top to bottom, its wet leaves like bits of tinfoil.
"
I
'
ll order it to stop.
"
With an insane intensity of effort, he willed silently with his whole being, with every ounce of his flesh and blood:
"
Be still,
"
and the tree at once obediently froze into immobility. Nika laughed with joy and ran off to the river to bathe.

His father, the terrorist Dementii Dudorov, condemned to death by hanging but reprieved by the Tsar, was now doing forced labor. His mother was a Georgian princess of the Eristov family, a spoiled and beautiful woman, still young and always infatuated with one thing or another—rebellions, rebels, extremist theories, famous actors, unhappy failures.