Doctor Zhivago (4 page)

She adored Nika, turning his name, Innokentii, into a thousand impossibly tender and silly nicknames such as Inochek or Nochenka, and took him to Tiflis to show him off to her family. There, what struck him most was a straggly tree in the courtyard of their house. It was a clumsy, tropical giant, with leaves like elephant
'
s ears which sheltered the yard from the scorching southern sky. Nika could not get used to the idea that it was a plant and not an animal.

It was dangerous for the boy to bear his father
'
s terrible name. Ivan Ivanovich wished him to adopt his mother
'
s and intended, with her consent, to petition the Tsar for permission to make the change. When lying under the bed, indignant at all the world, he had thought among other things of this. Who did Voskoboinikov think he was to meddle so outrageously with his life? He
'
d teach him where he got off.

And that Nadia! Just because she was fifteen, did that give her the right to turn up her nose and talk down to him as if he were a child? He
'
d show her!
"
I hate her,
"
he said several times to himself.
"
I
'
ll kill her. I
'
ll take her out in the boat and drown her.
"

His mother was a fine one, too. Of course she
'
d lied to him and Voskoboinikov when she went away. She hadn
'
t gone anywhere near the Caucasus, she had simply turned around at the nearest junction and gone north to Petersburg, and was now having a lovely time with the students shooting at the police, while he was supposed to rot alive in this silly dump. But he
'
d outsmart them all. He
'
d kill Nadia, quit school, run away to his father in Siberia, and start a rebellion.

The pond had water lilies all around the edge. The boat cut into this growth with a dry rustle; the pond water showed through like juice in a watermelon where a sample wedge has been cut out.

Nika and Nadia were picking the lilies. They both took hold of the same tough rubbery stem; it pulled them together, so that their heads bumped, and the boat was dragged in to shore as by a boathook. There the stems were shorter and more tangled; the white flowers, with their glowing centers looking like blood-specked egg yolks, sank and emerged dripping with water.

Nadia and Nika kept on picking flowers, tipping the boat more and more, lying in it almost side by side.

"
I
'
m sick of school,
"
said Nika.
"
It
'
s time I began my life—time I went out into the world and earned my living.
"

"
And I meant to ask you about square root equations. My algebra is so bad I nearly had to take another exam.
"

Nika thought there was a hidden barb in those words. Naturally, she was putting him in his place, reminding him he was a baby. Square root equations! Why, he hadn
'
t even begun algebra.

Feigning indifference to conceal his feelings, he asked, realizing at the same moment how silly it was:
"
Whom will you marry when you
'
re grown up?
"

"
That
'
s a very long way off. Probably no one. I haven
'
t thought about it.
"

"
I hope you don
'
t think I
'
m interested.
"

"
Then why do you ask?
"

"
You
'
re stupid.
"

They began to quarrel. Nika remembered his early morning misogyny. He threatened to drown her if she didn
'
t stop calling him names.
"
Just try,
"
said Nadia. He grabbed her around the waist. They fought, lost their balance, and fell in.

They could both swim, but the lilies caught at their arms and legs and they were out of their depth. Finally, wading through the sticky mud, they climbed out, water streaming from their shoes and pockets. Nika was the more exhausted of the two.

They were sitting side by side, drenched to the skin. No later than last spring, after such an adventure, they would have shouted, cursed, or laughed. But now they were silent, catching their breath, overcome by the absurdity of the whole thing. Nadia seethed with inner indignation, and Nika ached all over, as if someone had beaten him with a club and cracked his ribs.

In the end Nadia said quietly, like an adult:
"
You really are mad,
"
and Nika said in an equally adult tone:
"
I
'
m sorry.
"

They walked home dripping water like two water carts. Their way took them up the dusty slope swarming with snakes near the place where Nika had seen the grass snake that morning.

He remembered the magic elation that had filled him in the night, and his omnipotence at dawn when nature obeyed his will. What order should he give it now, he wondered. What was his dearest wish? It struck him that what he wanted most was to fall into the pond again with Nadia, and he would have given much to know if this would ever happen.

The war with Japan was not yet over when it was unexpectedly overshadowed by other events. Waves of revolution swept across Russia, each greater and more extraordinary than the last.

It was at this time that Amalia Karlovna Guishar, the widow of a Belgian engineer and herself a Russianized Frenchwoman, arrived in Moscow from the Urals with her two children—her son Rodion and her daughter Larisa. She placed her son in the military academy and her daughter in a girls
'
gymnasium, where, as it happened, Nadia Kologrivova was her classmate.

Madame Guishar
'
s husband had left her his savings, stocks which had been rising and were now beginning to fall. To stop the drain on her resources and to have something to do she bought a small business; this was Levitskaia
'
s dressmaking establishment near the Triumphal Arch; she took it over from Levitskaia
'
s heirs together with the firm
'
s good will, its clientele, and all its seamstresses and apprentices.

This she did on the advice of Komarovsky, a lawyer who had been a friend of her husband
'
s and was now the man to whom she turned for counsel and help, a cold-blooded businessman who knew the Russian business world like the back of his hand. It was with him that she had arranged her move by correspondence; he had met her and the children at the station and had driven them to the other end of Moscow, to the Montenegro Hotel in Oruzheiny Pereulok, where he had booked their room. He had also persuaded her to send Rodia to the military academy and Lara to the school of his choice. He joked carelessly with the boy and stared at the girl so that he made her blush.

They stayed about a month at the Montenegro before moving into the small three-room apartment adjoining the workshop.

This was the most disreputable part of Moscow—slums, cheap bars frequented by cabmen,
[1]
whole streets devoted to vice, dens of
"
fallen women.
"

The children were not surprised by the dirt in the rooms, the bedbugs, and the wretchedness of the furniture. Since their father
'
s death their mother had lived in constant fear of destitution. Rodia and Lara were used to being told that they were on the verge of ruin. They realized that they were different from the children of the street, but, like children brought up in an orphanage, they had a deep-seated fear of the rich.

Their mother was a living example of this fear. Madame Guishar was a plump blonde of about thirty-five subject to spells of palpitation alternating with her fits of silliness. She was a dreadful coward and was terrified of men. For this very reason, out of fear and confusion, she drifted continually from lover to lover.

At the Montenegro the family lived in Room 23: Room 24, ever since the Montenegro had been founded, had been occupied by the cellist Tyshkevich, a bald, sweaty, kindly man in a wig who joined his hands prayerfully and pressed them to his breast when he was trying to be persuasive, and who threw back his head and rolled his eyes in ecstasy when he played at fashionable parties and concert halls. He was rarely in, spending whole days at the Bolshoi Theater or the Conservatory. As neighbors they helped each other out, and this brought them together.

Since the presence of the children sometimes embarrassed Madame Guishar during Komarovsky
'
s visits, Tyshkevich would leave her his key so that she could receive her friend in his room. Soon she took his altruism so much for granted that on several occasions she knocked on his door asking him in tears to protect her from her benefactor.

The workshop was in a one-story house near the corner of Tverskaia Street. Near by was the Brest railway with its engine depots, warehouses, and lodgings for the employees.

In one of them lived Olia Demina, a clever girl who worked at Madame Guishar
'
s and whose uncle was employed at the freight yard.

She was a quick apprentice. She had been singled out by the former owner of the workshop and was now beginning to be favored by the new one. Olia had a great liking for Lara Guishar.

Nothing had changed since Levitskaia
'
s day. The sewing machines whirred frantically under the tread of tired seamstresses or their flitting hands. Here and there a woman sat on a table sewing quietly with a broad sweep of the arm as she pulled the needle and long thread. The floor was littered with scraps. You had to raise your voice to make yourself heard above the clatter of the machines and the modulated trills of Kirill Modestovich, the canary in its cage in the window (the former owner had carried with her to the grave the secret of the bird
'
s improbable name).

In the reception room the customers clustered in a picturesque group around a table heaped with fashion magazines. Standing, sitting, or bending over the table in the poses they had seen in the pictures, they discussed models and patterns. In the manager
'
s chair at another table sat Faina Silantievna Fetisova, Madame Guishar
'
s assistant and senior cutter, a bony woman with warts in the hollows of her flabby cheeks. A cigarette in a bone holder clamped between her yellowed teeth, squinting her yellowish eyes and blowing a stream of yellow smoke from her nose and mouth, she jotted in a notebook the measurements, orders and addresses, and requests of the thronging clients.

Madame Guishar had no experience of running a workshop. She felt that she was not quite the boss, but the staff were honest and Fetisova was reliable. All the same, these were troubled times and she was afraid to think of the future; she had moments of paralyzing despair.

Komarovsky often went to see them. As he walked through the workshop on his way to their apartment, startling the fashionable ladies at their fittings so that they darted behind the screens playfully parrying his ambiguous jokes, the seamstresses, disapproving, muttered sneeringly:
"
Here comes his lordship,
"
"
Amalia
'
s heartache,
"
"
old goat,
"
"
lady-killer.
"

An object of even greater hatred was his bulldog Jack; he sometimes took it with him on a lead on which it pulled with such violent jerks that Komarovsky followed stumbling and lurching with outstretched hands like a blind man after his guide.

One spring day Jack sank his teeth in Lara
'
s leg and tore her stocking.

"
I
'
ll kill that demon,
"
Olia whispered hoarsely into Lara
'
s ear.

"
Yes, it really is a horrid dog; but how can you do that, silly?
"

"
Ssh, don
'
t talk so loud, I
'
ll tell you. You know those stone Easter eggs—the ones on your Mama
'
s chest of drawers.…
"

"
Well, yes, they
'
re made of glass and marble.
"

"
That
'
s it. Bend down and I
'
ll whisper. You take them and dip them in lard—the filthy beast will guzzle them and choke himself, the devil. That
'
ll do it.
"