Doctor Zhivago (30 page)

"
And when is he sober, I
'
d like to know. Anyway, I
'
ve had enough of him. What worries me is, Sasha might go to sleep again before you
'
ve seen him. If it weren
'
t for typhus on trains…You haven
'
t any lice on you?
"

"
I don
'
t think so. I travelled comfortably—the same as before the war. I
'
d better have a quick wash, though; I
'
ll wash more thoroughly afterwards. Which way are you going? Don
'
t we go through the drawing room any more?
"

"
Oh, of course, you don
'
t know. Father and I thought and thought and we decided to give up a part of the ground floor to the Agricultural Academy. It
'
s too much to heat in winter, anyway. Even the top floor is too big. So we
'
ve offered it to them. They haven
'
t taken it over yet, but they
'
ve moved in their libraries and their herbariums and their specimens of seed. I only hope we don
'
t get rats—it
'
s grain, after all. But at the moment they
'
re keeping the rooms spick-and-span. By the way, we don
'
t say
'
rooms
'
any more, it
'
s called
'
living space
'
now. Come on, this way. Aren
'
t you slow to catch on! We go up the back stairs. Understand? Follow me, I
'
ll show you.
"

"
I
'
m very glad you
'
ve given up those rooms. The hospital I
'
ve been in was also in a private house. Endless suites of rooms, here and there the parquet flooring still left. Potted palms sticking out their paws like ghosts over the beds—some of the wounded from the battle zone used to wake up screaming—they weren
'
t quite normal, of course—shell-shocked—we had to remove the plants. What I mean is, there really was something unhealthy in the way rich people used to live. Masses of superfluous things. Too much furniture, too much room, too much emotional refinement, too many circumlocutions. I
'
m very glad we
'
re using fewer rooms. We should give up still more.
"

"
What
'
s that parcel you
'
ve got? There
'
s something sticking out of it, it looks like a bird
'
s beak. It
'
s a duck! How lovely! A wild drake! Where did you get it? I can
'
t believe my eyes. It
'
s worth a fortune these days.
"

"
Somebody made me a present of it on the train. I
'
ll tell you later, it
'
s a long story. What shall I do? Shall I leave it in the kitchen?
"

"
Yes, of course. I
'
ll send Niusha down at once to pluck and clean it. They say there will be all sorts of horrors this winter, famine, cold.
"

"
Yes, that
'
s what they are saying everywhere. Just now, I was looking out of the window in the train—I thought, what is there in the whole world worth more than a peaceful family life and work? The rest isn
'
t in our hands. It does look as if there is a bad time coming for a lot of people. Some are trying to get out, they talk of going south, to the Caucasus, or farther still. I wouldn
'
t want to do that, myself. A grown-up man should share his country
'
s fate. To me it
'
s obvious. But for you it
'
s different. I wish you didn
'
t have to go through it all. I
'
d like to send you away to some safe place—to Finland, perhaps. But if we stand gossiping half an hour on every step we
'
ll never get upstairs.
"

"
Wait a minute. I forgot to tell you. I
'
ve got news for you—and what news! Nikolai Nikolaievich is back.
"

"
What Nikolai Nikolaievich?
"

"
Uncle Kolia.
"

"
Tonia! It can
'
t be! Is it really true?
"

"
It is true. He was in Switzerland. He came all the way around through London and Finland.
"

"
Tonia! You
'
re not joking? Have you seen him? Where is he? Can
'
t we get him now, at once?
"

"
Don
'
t be so impatient. He
'
s staying with someone in the country. He promised to be back the day after tomorrow. He
'
s changed a lot. You
'
ll be disappointed. He stopped in Petersburg on the way, he
'
s got Bolshevized. Father gets quite hoarse arguing with him. But why do we stop on every step. Let
'
s go. So you too have heard there
'
s a bad time ahead—hardships, dangers, anything might happen.
"

"
I think so myself. Well, what of it? We
'
ll manage, it can
'
t be the end of everything. We
'
ll wait and see, the same as other people.
"

"
They say there won
'
t be any firewood, or water, or light. They
'
ll abolish money. No supplies will be coming in. Now we
'
ve stopped again! Come along. Listen, they say there are wonderful iron stoves for sale in the Arbat. Small ones. You can burn a newspaper and cook a meal. I
'
ve got the address. We must get one before they
'
re all gone.
"

"
That
'
s right. We
'
ll get one. Good idea. But just think of it, Uncle Kolia! I can
'
t get over it.
"

"
Let me tell you what I want to do. We
'
ll set aside a corner somewhere on the top floor, say two or three rooms, communicating ones, and we
'
ll keep those for ourselves and Father and Sashenka and Niusha, and we
'
ll give up all the rest of the house. We
'
ll put up a partition and have our own door, and it will be like a separate apartment. We
'
ll put one of those iron stoves in the middle room, with a pipe through the window, and we
'
ll do all our laundry, and our cooking, and our entertaining, all in this one room. That way we
'
ll get the most out of the fuel, and who knows, with God
'
s help, we
'
ll get through the winter.
"

"
Of course we
'
ll get through it. There
'
s no question. That
'
s a fine idea. And you know what? We
'
ll have a housewarming. We
'
ll cook the duck and we
'
ll invite Uncle Kolia.
"

"
Lovely. And I
'
ll ask Gordon to bring some drink. He can get it from some laboratory or other. Now look, this is the room I was thinking of. All right? Put your suitcase down and go get your hamper. We could ask Dudorov and Shura Shlesinger to the housewarming as well. You don
'
t mind? You haven
'
t forgotten where the washroom is? Spray yourself with some disinfectant. In the meantime I
'
ll go in to Sashenka, and send Niusha down, and when we
'
re ready I
'
ll call you.
"

The most important thing for him in Moscow was his little boy. He had been mobilized almost as soon as Sashenka was born. He hardly knew him.

One day, while Tonia was still in hospital, he went to see her; he was already in uniform and was about to leave Moscow. He arrived at the babies
'
feeding time and was not allowed in.

He sat down in the waiting room. From the nursery, at the end of the passage beyond the maternity ward, came the squealing chorus of ten or twelve babies
'
voices. Several nurses came down the corridor, hurrying so that the newborn babies should not catch cold, taking them to their mothers, bundled up like shopping parcels, one under each arm.

"
Wa, wa,
"
yelled the babies all on one note, almost impassively, without feeling, as if it were all in the day
'
s work. Only one voice stood out from the others. It was also yelling
"
wa, wa,
"
and it did not express any more suffering than the rest, but it was deeper and seemed to shout less out of duty than with a deliberate, sullen hostility.

Yurii Andreievich had already decided that his child was to be called Alexander in honor of his father-in-law. For some reason he imagined that the voice he had singled out was that of his son; perhaps it was because this particular cry had its own character and seemed to foreshadow the future personality and destiny of a particular human being; it had its own sound-coloring, which included the child
'
s name, Alexander, so Yurii Andreievich imagined.

He was not mistaken. It turned out later that this had in fact been Sashenka
'
s voice. It was the first thing he had known about his son.

The next thing was the photographs Tonia sent to him at the front. They showed a cheerful, handsome, chubby little fellow with a cupid
'
s-bow mouth, standing up on a blanket, bandy-legged and with its fist up as if it were doing a peasant dance. Sashenka had been a year old at the time and trying to take his first steps; now he was two and was beginning to talk.

Yurii Andreievich picked up his suitcase, put it on to the card table by the window, and began to unpack. What had the room been used for in the past, he wondered. He could not recognize it. Tonia must have changed the furniture or the wallpaper or redecorated it in some way.

He took out his shaving kit. A bright full moon rose between the pillars of the church tower exactly opposite the window. When it lit up the top layer of clothes and books inside the suitcase, the light in the room changed and he realized where he was.

It had been Anna Ivanovna
'
s storeroom, where she used to put broken chairs and tables and old papers. Here she had kept her family archives and, in the summer, the trunks of winter clothes. During her lifetime the corners were cluttered up to the ceiling with junk, and the children were not allowed in. Only at Christmas or Easter, when huge crowds of children came to parties and the whole of the top floor was thrown open to them, was it unlocked and they played bandit in it, hiding under the tables, dressing up, and blackening their faces with cork.

The doctor stood thinking of all this, then he went down the back stairs to get his wicker hamper from the hall.

In the kitchen Niusha squatted in front of the stove, plucking the duck on a piece of newspaper. When he came in carrying his hamper she jumped up with a shy, graceful movement, blushing crimson, shook the feathers from her apron, and, after greeting him respectfully, offered to help him. He thanked her, saying he could manage, and went up. His wife called him from a couple of rooms farther on:
"
You can come in now, Yura.
"

He went into the room, which was Tonia
'
s and his old classroom. The boy in the crib was not nearly so handsome as in his photograph, but he was the exact image of Yurii Andreievich
'
s mother, Maria Nikolaievna Zhivago, a more striking likeness than any of her portraits.

"
Here
'
s Daddy, here
'
s your Daddy, wave your hand like a good boy,
"
Antonina Alexandrovna was saying. She lowered the net of the crib to make it easier for the father to kiss the boy and pick him up.