Doctor Zhivago (42 page)

"
He
'
s after Galeiev.
"

"
Who
'
s that?
"

"
Hetman Galeiev. They say he
'
s outside Yuriatin with a Czech covering force. He
'
s seized the harbors, the pest, and he
'
s hanging on. Hetman Galeiev.
"

"
Never heard of him.
"

"
Or it may be Prince Galileiev. I can
'
t quite remember the name.
"

"
There aren
'
t any such princes. Must be Ali Kurban. You
'
ve mixed them up.
"

"
May be Kurban.
"

"
That
'
s more like it.
"

Toward morning Yurii Andreievich woke up a second time. He had had a pleasant dream. The feeling of bliss and liberation was still with him. Again the train was standing still, perhaps at the same station as before, possibly at another. Once more there was the sound of the waterfall, perhaps a different waterfall but more probably the same one.

He went back to sleep almost at once, and as he was dozing off he dimly heard the sound of running feet and of some commotion. Kostoied was quarrelling with the commander of the convoy and they were shouting at each other. The air was even more pleasant than before. It had a breath of something new in it, something that had not been there earlier—something magical, springlike, white, blackish, thin and insubstantial, like a snow flurry in May when the wet, melting flakes falling on the earth make it seem black rather than white. It was something transparent, blackish-white, sweet-smelling—
"
Wild cherry,
"
Yurii Andreievich decided in his sleep.

Next morning Antonina Alexandrovna said:

"
Really, Yura, you
'
re extraordinary, you
'
re a mass of contradictions. Sometimes a fly will wake you up and you can
'
t get back to sleep till morning, and here you slept through all this row and I simply couldn
'
t get you to wake up. Prituliev and Vasia have escaped, just think of it! And so have Tiagunova and Ogryzkova! Can you imagine such a thing! Wait, that isn
'
t all. Voroniuk as well. It
'
s true, I tell you, he
'
s run away. Now listen. How they managed it, together or separately, and in what order—it
'
s all a complete mystery. Voroniuk, of course, I understand—once he found the others had gone, he would have to try to save his skin. But what about the rest? Did they really all vanish of their own free will, or was somebody done away with? For instance, if the women are to be suspected, did Tiagunova kill Ogryzkova or was it the other way around? Nobody knows. The commander of the escort has been running up and down the train like a lunatic.
'
You
'
re not to start the train. I order you in the name of the law not to move till I
'
ve caught my prisoners.
'
And the commanding officer shouts back:
'
I
'
m taking replacements up to the front, I
'
m not waiting for your lousy crew. What an idea!
'
Then they both went for Kostoied.
'
You, a syndicalist, an educated man, how could you sit by and let a simple soldier, an ignorant child of nature, act in such a reckless manner! And you a populist!
'
[15]
And Kostoied gave them as good as he got. That
'
s interesting,
'
he says.
'
The prisoner has to look after his guard, does he? Well, really, the day that happens the hens will start to crow.
'
I was shaking you as hard as I could.
'
Yura,
'
I cried,
'
get up, there
'
s been an escape.
'
But nothing doing. If a gun had gone off in your ear you wouldn
'
t have heard it.… But I
'
ll tell you more later.… Look! Father, Yura, look, isn
'
t the view superb!
"

Through the opening in the window they could see the country covered with spring floods as far as eye could reach. Somewhere a river had overflowed its banks and the water had come right up to the embankment. In the foreshortened view from the bunk it looked as if the train were actually gliding on the water.

Only here and there was its smoothness broken by streaks of a metallic blue, but over all the rest of its surface the hot morning sun was chasing glassy patches of light as smooth and oily as melted butter that a cook brushes with a feather on a pie crust.

In this shoreless flood were sunk the shafts of the white clouds, their pediments submerged together with the fields, the hollows, and the bushes.

And somewhere in the middle of the flood there was a narrow strip of land with a row of doubled trees growing up and down and suspended between earth and sky.

"
Look, a family of ducks!
"
Alexander Alexandrovich cried out.

"
Where?
"

"
Near the island. More to the right. Damn, they
'
ve flown. We
'
ve frightened them.
"

"
Yes, I see them now,
"
said Yurii Andreievich.
"
I must have a talk with you, Alexander Alexandrovich. Some other time.… As for our labor conscripts and the women, good for them. And I
'
m sure there wasn
'
t any murder. They just broke free like the water.
"

The white northern night was ending. Everything could be seen clearly—the mountain, the thicket, and the ravine—but seemed unreal, as though made up.

The wood, which had several blossoming wild cherries in it, was just coming into leaf. It grew under an overhanging cliff, on a narrow ledge above another precipice.

The waterfall, though not far away, could be seen only from the edge of the ravine beyond the thicket. Vasia was tired from walking to see it, to experience the joy and terror of the spectacle.

The waterfall had no equal anywhere around, nothing that could match it. This uniqueness endowed it with an awesome quality; it was like a living and conscious creature, a local dragon or winged serpent who levied tribute and preyed upon the countryside.

Halfway down, it broke on a sharp rock and divided in two. The top was almost motionless, but the two lower columns weaved slightly from side to side as if the water were continually slipping and righting itself, shaken but always recovering.

Vasia had spread his sheepskin on the ground and was lying at the edge of the thicket. When it grew lighter, a large bird with heavy wings flew down from the mountain, soared in a smooth circle around the wood, and settled on a pine close to where he lay. He looked up enchanted at its dark blue throat and gray-blue breast and whispered its Urals name,
ronzha
.
Then he got up, picked up his sheepskin, flung it over his shoulders, and crossed the clearing to speak to his companion.

"
Come on, Auntie Polia. Goodness, how cold you are! I can hear your teeth chattering. Well, what are you staring at, why are you so frightened? We
'
ve got to go, I
'
m telling you, we must get to a village. They
'
ll hide us, they won
'
t harm their own kind. If we go on like this we
'
ll die of starvation. We
'
ve had nothing to eat for two days. Uncle Voroniuk must have raised a terrible hullabaloo, they must all be out looking for us. We have to go, Auntie; to put it plainly, we
'
ve got to run. I don
'
t know what to do with you, Auntie, not a word out of you for two whole days. You worry too much, honest to God, you do. What are you so unhappy about? It isn
'
t as if you
'
d meant to push Auntie Katia Ogryzkova off the train, you just caught her sideways, by accident, I saw you. She picked herself up off the grass—I saw her with my own eyes—and she got up and ran away. She and Uncle Prokhor, Prokhor Kharitonovich, are sure to catch up with us, we
'
ll all be together again. The main thing is to stop worrying, then you
'
ll find your tongue again.
"

Tiagunova got up, took Vasia
'
s hand, and said softly:

"
All right, let
'
s go, lamb.
"

Their timbers creaking, the cars climbed up the steep hill. Below the bank there was a thicket, its top not quite reaching the level of the track. Lower still were fields. The floods had just withdrawn and the grass was strewn with sand and pieces of timber. The boards must have been washed down from somewhere higher up the hill where they had been stacked preparatory to floating them downstream.

The young wood below the embankment was still almost as bare as in winter. Only in the buds that spotted it all over like drops of candle grease there was something not in accord with the rest, something superfluous, some disturbance, perhaps dirt or an inflammation causing them to swell, and the disturbance, superfluity, and dirt were the signs of life, which had already set the most forward of the trees on fire with its green leafy flame.

Here and there a birch stretched itself like a martyr pierced by the barbs and arrows of its opening shoots, and you knew its smell by just looking at it, the smell of its glistening resin, which is used for making varnish.

Soon the tracks drew level with the place where the logs washed down by the flood might have come from. A cutting through the wood showed at a bend of the tracks; it was littered all over with chips and shavings, and there was a pile of timber in the middle. The engine braked and the train shuddered and stopped on the curve of the hill, bending slightly in a wide arc.

A few short barking hoots and shouts came from the engine, but the passengers did not need these signals to know that the engineer had stopped to take in a supply of fuel.

The freight-car doors rolled open, and a crowd the size of the population of a small town poured out. Only the sailors stayed in the front cars; they were excused from all chores.

There was not enough small firewood in the clearing to fill the tender, and some of the large timber had to be cut down to the right size. The engine crew had saws as part of their equipment and these were issued to volunteers, one to each pair, the doctor and his father-in-law among them.

Grinning sailors stuck their heads out of their doors. They were a curious mixture of middle-aged workingmen, straight from their emergency training, and boys just out of naval college who looked as if they had got in by mistake among the staid fathers of families and who joked and played the fool with the older sailors to keep themselves from thinking. All of them felt that their hour of trial was at hand.

Jokes and guffaws followed the work parties.

"
Hey, Grandfather! I
'
m not shirking, I
'
m too young to work, my nanny won
'
t let me.
"
"
Hey, Marva, don
'
t saw off your skirt, you
'
ll catch cold!
"
"
Hey, young one, don
'
t go to the wood, come and be my wife instead!
"

There were several trestles in the clearing. Yurii Andreievich and Alexander Alexandrovich went up to one of them and began to saw.

This was the moment of spring when the earth emerges from the snow looking much as when the snow had trapped it six months earlier. The wood smelled of damp and was heaped with last year
'
s leaves like an unswept room where people have been tearing up letters, bills, and receipts for years.

"
Don
'
t go so fast, you
'
ll tire yourself,
"
said the doctor, giving a slower and more even movement to the saw.
"
What about a rest?
"