Doctor Zhivago (35 page)

The old life and the new order had not yet come in contact. They were not yet openly hostile to each other, as when the civil war broke out a year later, but there was no connection between the two. They stood apart, confronting each other, incompatible.

There were new elections everywhere—in administration of buildings, organizations of all kinds, government offices, public services. Commissars invested with dictatorial powers were appointed to each, men of iron will in black leather jackets, armed with means of intimidation and guns, who shaved rarely and slept even more rarely.

They knew the slinking bourgeois breed, the ordinary holders of cheap government bonds, and they spoke to them without the slightest pity and with Mephistophelean smiles, as to petty thieves caught in the act.

These were the people who reorganized everything in accordance with the plan, and company after company, enterprise after enterprise became Bolshevized.

The Hospital of the Holy Cross was now known as the Second Reformed. Many things had changed in it. Part of the staff had been dismissed and others had resigned because they did not find work sufficiently rewarding. These were doctors with a fashionable practice and high fees, and glib talkers. They left out of self-interest but asserted that they had made a civic gesture of protest and looked down on those who had stayed on, almost boycotting them. Zhivago had stayed.

In the evenings husband and wife had conversations of this sort:

"
Don
'
t forget Wednesday, at the Doctors
'
Union; they
'
ll have two sacks of frozen potatoes for us in the basement. I
'
ll let you know what time I can get away. We
'
ll have to go together and take the sled.
"

"
All right, Yurochka, there
'
s plenty of time. Why don
'
t you go to bed now, it
'
s late. I wish you
'
d rest, you can
'
t do everything.
"

"
There
'
s an epidemic. Exhaustion is lowering resistance. You and Father look terrible. We must do something. If only I knew what. We don
'
t take enough care of ourselves. Listen. You aren
'
t asleep?
"

"
No.
"

"
I
'
m not worried about myself, I
'
ve got nine lives, but if by any chance I should get ill, you will be sensible, won
'
t you, you mustn
'
t keep me at home. Get me into the hospital at once.
"

"
Don
'
t talk like that. Pray God you
'
ll keep well. Why play Cassandra?
"

"
Remember, there aren
'
t any honest people left, or any friends. Still less any experts. If anything should happen don
'
t trust anyone except Pichuzhkin. That is if he
'
s still there, of course. You aren
'
t asleep?
"

"
No.
"

"
The pay wasn
'
t good enough, so off they went; now it turns out they had principles and civic sentiments. You meet them in the street, they hardly shake hands, just raise an eyebrow:
'
So you
'
re working for
them
?
'
—
'
I am,
'
I said,
'
and if you don
'
t mind, I am proud of our privations and I respect those who honor us by imposing them on us.
'
"

For a long time most people
'
s daily food consisted of thin millet boiled in water and soup made of herring heads; the herring itself was used as a second course. A sort of kasha was also made of unground wheat or rye.

A woman professor who was a friend of Antonina Alexandrovna
'
s taught her to bake bread in an improvised Dutch oven. The idea was to sell some of the bread and so cover the cost of heating the tile stove as in the old days, instead of using the iron stove, which continued to smoke and gave almost no heat.

Antonina Alexandrovna
'
s bread was good but nothing came of her commercial plans. They had to go back to the wretched iron stove. The Zhivagos were hard up.

One morning, after Yurii Andreievich had gone to work, Antonina Alexandrovna put on her shabby winter coat—she was so run down that she shivered in it even in warm weather—and went out
"
hunting.
"
There were only two logs left. For about half an hour she wandered through the alleys in the neighborhood where you could sometimes catch a peasant from one of the villages outside Moscow selling vegetables and potatoes. In the main streets, peasants with loads were liable to be arrested. Soon she found what she was looking for. A sturdy young fellow in a peasant
'
s coat walked back with her, pulling a sleigh that looked as light as a toy, and followed her cautiously into the yard.

Covered up by sacking inside the sleigh was a load of birch logs no thicker than the balusters of an old-fashioned country house in a nineteenth-century photograph. Antonina Alexandrovna knew their worth—birch only in name, the wood was of the poorest sort and too freshly cut to be suitable for burning. But as there was no choice, it was pointless to argue.

The young peasant carried five or six armloads up to the living room and took in exchange Tonia
'
s small mirror wardrobe. He carried it down and packed it in his sleigh to take away as a present for his bride. In discussing a future deal in potatoes, he asked the price of the piano.

When Yurii Andreievich came home he said nothing about his wife
'
s purchase. It would have been more sensible to chop up the wardrobe, but they could never have brought themselves to do it.

"
There
'
s a note for you on the table, did you see it?
"
she said.

"
The one sent on from the hospital? Yes, I
'
ve had the message already. It
'
s a sick call. I
'
ll certainly go. I
'
ll just have a little rest first. But it
'
s pretty far. It
'
s somewhere near the Triumphal Arch, I
'
ve got the address.
"

"
Have you seen the fee they are offering you? You
'
d better read it. A bottle of German cognac or a pair of stockings! What sort of people are they, do you imagine? Vulgar. They don
'
t seem to have any idea of how we live nowadays.
Nouveaux riches
,
I suppose.
"

"
Yes, that
'
s from a supplier.
"

Suppliers, concessionaires, and authorized agents were names then given to small businessmen to whom the government, which had abolished private trade, occasionally made concessions at moments of economic difficulties, charging them with the procurement of various goods.

They were not former men of substance or dismissed heads of old firms—such people did not recover from the blow they had received. They were a new category of businessmen, people without roots who had been scooped up from the bottom by the war and the revolution.

Zhivago had a drink of hot water and saccharin whitened with milk and went off to see his patient.

Deep snow covered the street from wall to wall, in places up to the level of the ground-floor windows. Silent half-dead shadows moved all over this expanse carrying a little food or pulling it along on sleds. There was almost no other traffic.

Old shop signs still hung here and there. They had no relation to the small new consumer shops and co-operatives, which were all empty and locked, their windows barred or boarded up.

The reason they were locked and empty was not only that there were no goods but that the reorganization of all aspects of life, including trade, had so far remained largely on paper and had not yet affected such trifling details as the boarded-up shops.

The house to which the doctor went was at the end of Brest Street near the Tver Gate.

It was an old barracklike stone building with an inside courtyard, and three wooden staircases rose along the courtyard walls.

That day the tenants were at their general meeting, in which a woman delegate from the borough council participated, when a military commission suddenly turned up to check arms licenses and to confiscate unlicensed weapons. The tenants had to go back to their flats, but the head of the commission asked the delegate not to leave, assuring her that the search would not take long and the meeting could be resumed within a short time.

When the doctor arrived, the commission had almost finished but the flat where he was going had not yet been searched. Zhivago was stopped on the landing by a soldier with a rifle, but the head of the commission heard them arguing and ordered the search to be put off until after the doctor had examined his patient.

The door was opened by the master of the house, a polite young man with a sallow complexion and dark, melancholy eyes. He was flustered by a number of things—because of his wife
'
s illness, the impending search, and his profound reverence for medical science and its representatives.

To save the doctor time and trouble he tried to be as brief as possible, but his very haste made his speech long and incoherent.

The flat was cluttered with a mixture of expensive and cheap furniture, hastily bought as an investment against the rapid inflation. Sets were supplemented by odd pieces.

The young man thought his wife
'
s illness had been caused by nervous shock. He explained with many digressions that they had recently bought an antique clock. It was a broken-down chiming clock, and they had bought it for a song merely as a remarkable example of the clockmaker
'
s art (he took the doctor into the next room to see it). They had even doubted whether it could be repaired. Then, one day, suddenly the clock, which had not been wound for years, had started of itself, played its complicated minuet of chimes, and stopped. His wife was terrified, the young man said; she was convinced that her last hour had struck, and now there she was delirious, refused all food, and did not recognize him.

"
So you think it
'
s nervous shock,
"
Yurii Andreievich said doubtfully.
"
May I see her now?
"

They went into another room, which had a porcelain chandelier, a wide double bed, and two mahogany bedside tables. A small woman with big black eyes lay near the edge of the bed, the blanket pulled up above her chin. When she saw them she freed one arm from under the bedclothes and waved them back, the loose sleeve of her dressing gown falling back to her armpit. She did not recognize her husband, and as if she were alone in the room, she began to sing something sad in a low voice, which upset her so much that she cried, whimpering like a child and begging to
"
go home.
"
When the doctor went up to the bed she turned her back on him and refused to let him touch her.

"
I ought to examine her,
"
he said,
"
but it doesn
'
t really matter. It
'
s quite clear that she
'
s got typhus—a severe case, poor thing; she must be feeling pretty wretched. My advice to you is to put her in a hospital. I know you
'
d see to it that she had everything she needed at home, but it
'
s most important that she should have constant medical supervision in the first few weeks. Could you get hold of any sort of transportation—a cab or even a cart? Of course she
'
ll have to be well wrapped up. I
'
ll give you an admission order.
"

"
I
'
ll try, but wait a moment. Is it really typhus? How horrible!
"

"
I am afraid so.
"

"
Look, I know I
'
ll lose her if I let her go—couldn
'
t you possibly look after her here? Come as often as you possibly can—I
'
ll be only too happy to pay you anything you like.
"