Doctor Zhivago (44 page)

An army electrician was crawling about on the floor mending a broken wire. When he reached the desk by the door the young officer got up to make room for him. At the next table a typist in an army leather jacket was struggling with her typewriter; its carriage had slipped and got stuck. The young officer stood over her and examined the cause of the mishap from above while the electrician crawled in under her desk and examined it from below. The old-style colonel got up and joined them, and all four busied themselves with the typewriter.

This made Yurii Andreievich feel better. These people must know his fate better than he did; it was hardly likely that they would be so unconcerned and so busy with trifles in the presence of a man whom they considered doomed.

"
And yet who knows?
"
he reflected.
"
Why are they so unconcerned? Guns are going off and people are dying, and they calmly prognosticate heat—not the heat of the battle but of the weather. Perhaps, after all, they have seen so much that they have no sensibility left.
"

To occupy himself, he stared across the room through the window opposite.

He could see the edge of the tracks and higher up the hill the station and the suburb of Razvilie.

Three flights of unpainted wooden steps led from the platforms to the station building.

At the end of the tracks there was a large graveyard for old engines. Locomotives without tenders, with smokestacks shaped like the tops of knee boots or like beakers, stood smokestack to smokestack amid piles of scrap.

The engine graveyard below and the human graveyard above, the crumpled iron on the tracks and the rusty iron of the roofs and shop signs of the suburb, composed a single picture of neglect and age under the white sky scalded by the early morning heat.

Living in Moscow, Yurii Andreievich had forgotten how many shop signs there still were in other towns and how much of the façades they covered. Some of those he was seeing now were so large that he could read them easily from where he stood, and they came down so low over the crooked windows of the sagging one-story buildings that the squat little houses were almost hidden by them like the faces of village children in their fathers
'
caps.

The mist had gone from the west, and now what remained of it in the east stirred, swayed, and parted like the curtain of a stage.

And there, on a hill above Razvilie and a mile or two beyond it, stood a large town, the size of a provincial capital. The sun warmed its colors and the distance simplified its lines. It clung to the summit of the hill in tiers, house by house and street by street, with a big church in the middle on the top, as in a cheap color print of a desert monastery or of Mount Athos.

"
Yuriatin,
"
the doctor thought excitedly.
"
The town I used to hear about so often from Anna Ivanovna and from Nurse Antipova. How strange that I should see it in these circumstances!
"

At that moment the attention of the military was diverted from the typewriter to something they could see from one of the other windows, and the doctor looked around.

A group of prisoners was being taken under guard up the station steps. Among them was a boy in a school uniform who was wounded in the head. He had received first aid, but a trickle of blood seeped through the bandage and he kept smudging it with his hand over his dark sweaty face. Walking between two Red Army men at the tail of the procession, he attracted notice not only by his resolute air, his good looks, and the pathos of so young a rebel
'
s plight, but by the utter absurdity of his own and his two companions
'
gestures. They were doing exactly the opposite of what they should have done.

He was still wearing his school cap. It slithered continually from his bandaged head, and instead of taking it off and carrying it in his hand he rammed it back each time, disturbing the bandage and the wound, and in this his two guards assisted him readily.

In this absurdity, so contrary to common sense, the doctor saw a profound symbol. He longed to rush out and address the boy in words that were impatiently welling up inside him. He longed to shout to him and to the people in the railway coach that salvation lay not in loyalty to forms but in throwing them off.

He turned away. Strelnikov came in with long, vigorous strides and stood in the middle of the room.

How was it possible that he, a doctor, with his countless acquaintances, had never until this day come across anything so definite as this man
'
s personality? How was it that they had never been thrown together, that their paths had not crossed?

In some inexplicable way it was clear at once that this man was entirely a manifestation of the will. So completely was he the self he resolved to be that everything about him seemed inevitable, exact, perfect—his well-proportioned, handsomely set head, his impetuous step, his long legs, his knee boots which may well have been muddy but looked polished, and his gray serge tunic which may have been creased but looked as if it were made of the best linen and had just been pressed.

Such was the irresistible effect of his brilliance, his unaffected ease, and his sense of being at home in any conceivable situation on earth.

He must certainly, Yurii Andreievich thought, be possessed of a remarkable gift, but it was not necessarily the gift of originality. This talent, which showed itself in his every movement, might well be the talent of imitation. In those days everyone modelled himself on someone else—they imitated heroes of history, or the men who had struck their imagination by winning fame in the fighting at the front or in the streets, or those who had great prestige with the people, or this or that comrade who had won distinction, or simply one another.

Strelnikov politely concealed any surprise or annoyance he may have felt at the presence of a stranger. He addressed his staff, treating him as if he belonged among them.

He said:
"
Congratulations. We have driven them back. It all seems more like playing at war than serious business, because they are as Russian as we are, only stuffed with nonsense—they won
'
t give it up, so we have to beat it out of them. Their commander was my friend. His origin is even more proletarian than mine. We grew up in the same house. He has done a great deal for me in my life and I am deeply indebted to him. And here I am rejoicing that we have thrown them back beyond the river and perhaps even farther. Hurry up with that connection, Gurian, we need the telephone, we can
'
t possibly manage with only messengers and the telegraph. Have you noticed how hot it is? I managed to get in an hour
'
s sleep, just the same. Oh, yes!
"
He turned to the doctor, remembering that he had been waked up to deal with some nonsense in connection with this man.

"
This man?
"
Strelnikov thought, looking him over sharply.
"
Nonsense! He
'
s nothing like him. Fools!
"
He laughed, and said to Yurii Andreievich:

"
My apologies, comrade. They mistook you for someone else. My sentries got mixed up. You are free to go. Where are the comrade
'
s work papers? Ah, here are your documents. May I just have a glance…Zhivago…Zhivago…Doctor Zhivago…Moscow…How about going to my place for a moment? This is the secretariat, I
'
m in the next car. This way, I won
'
t keep you long.
"

Who, in fact, was Strelnikov?

That he should have reached and held his position was remarkable, for he was a non-Party man. He had been totally unknown because, though born in Moscow, he had gone straight from the university to the provinces as a teacher, and in the war had been taken prisoner, reported missing, believed killed, and had only recently come back from German captivity.

He was recommended and vouched for by Tiverzin, a railway worker of advanced political views in whose family he had lived as a child. Those who controlled appointments were impressed by him: in those days of inordinate rhetoric and political extremism his revolutionary fervor, equally unbridled, was remarkable for its genuineness. His fanaticism was not an imitation but was his own, a natural consequence of all his previous life.

Strelnikov justified the confidence of the authorities.

His fighting record over the past few months included the actions at Nizhni Kelmes and Ust-Nemdinsk, the suppression of the Gubysov peasants who had put up armed resistance to food levies, and of the men of the 14th Infantry who had plundered a food convoy. He had also dealt with Stenka Razin soldiers, who had started an uprising in the town of Turkatui and gone over to the Whites, and with the mutiny at Chirkin Us, where a loyal commander had been killed.

In each case, he had taken his enemies by surprise and had investigated, tried, sentenced, and enforced his sentence with speed, severity, and resolution.

He had brought the epidemic of desertions in this whole region under control and had successfully reorganized the recruiting bodies. As a result, conscription went ahead and the Red Army reception centers were working overtime.

Finally, when the White pressure from the north increased and the position became admittedly grave, Strelnikov was entrusted with new responsibilities, military, strategic, and operational. His interventions produced immediate results.

Strelnikov (
"
the shooter
"
) knew that rumor had nicknamed him Razstrelnikov, the Executioner. He took this in his stride; he was disturbed by nothing.

He was a native of Moscow, and his father was a worker who had been sent to prison for taking part in the revolution of 1905. He did not participate in the revolutionary movement in those years, first because he was too young, and at the university because young men who come from a poor background value higher education more and work harder than the children of the rich. The ferment among other students left him uninvolved. He absorbed an immense amount of information and after taking his degree in the humanities trained himself later in science and mathematics.

Exempted from the army, he enlisted voluntarily, was commissioned, sent to the front, and captured, and on hearing of the revolution in Russia he escaped in 1917 and came home. He had two characteristic features, two passions: an unusual power of clear and logical reasoning, and a great moral purity and sense of justice; he was ardent and honorable.

But he would not have made a scientist of the sort who break new ground. His intelligence lacked the capacity for bold leaps into the unknown, the sudden flashes of insight that transcend barren, logical deductions.

And if he were really to do good, he would have needed, in addition to his principles, a heart capable of violating them—a heart which knows only of particular, not of general, cases, and which achieves greatness in little actions.

Filled with the loftiest aspirations from his childhood, he had looked upon the world as a vast arena where everyone competed for perfection, keeping scrupulously to the rules. When he found that this was not so, it did not occur to him that his conception of the world order might have been oversimplified. He nursed his grievance and with it the ambition to judge between life and the dark forces that distorted it, and to be life
'
s champion and avenger.

Embittered by his disappointment, he was armed by the revolution.

"
Zhivago,
"
repeated Strelnikov when they were settled in his room.
"
Zhivago…Trade. I think. Or upper class…Well, of course, a Moscow doctor…Going to Varykino. That
'
s strange, why should you leave Moscow for such a provincial hole?
"

"
That
'
s just the idea. In search of quiet, seclusion, and obscurity.
"

"
Well, well, how romantic! Varykino? I know most of the places around here. That used to be Krueger
'
s estate. You aren
'
t related to him, by any chance? You don
'
t happen to be his heir?
"

"
Why the irony? Being his
'
heir
'
has nothing to do with it. Though it is true that my wife ...
"

"
Ah, so you see! But if you
'
re feeling nostalgic for the Whites I
'
m going to disappoint you. You
'
re too late. We
'
ve cleared the district.
"

"
You
'
re still making fun of me?
"

"
And then, a doctor. An army medical officer. And we
'
re at war. That really is my business. You
'
re a deserter. The Greens
[16]
are also seeking refuge in the woods. Your reasons?
"