Doctor Zhivago (50 page)

"
I have given up practicing medicine, and I don
'
t tell anyone that I am a physician, because I don
'
t want to restrict my freedom. But there are always some good souls who get wind of the fact that there is a doctor in Varykino. So they trudge twenty miles to consult me, and bring a chicken or eggs, or butter, or something. And there is no way to persuade them that I don
'
t want to be paid, because people don
'
t believe in the effectiveness of free medical advice. So my practice brings in a little. But our chief mainstay, Mikulitsyn
'
s and ours, is Samdeviatov.

"
He is a fantastically complicated character. I can
'
t make him out. He is a genuine supporter of the revolution and he fully deserves the confidence that the Yuriatin Soviet has in him. With all the powers they have given him he could requisition the Varykino timber without so much as telling Mikulitsyn or us, and he knows that we wouldn
'
t protest. On the other hand, if he felt like robbing the state, he could fill his pocket and again no one would say a word. He has no need to bribe or share with anybody. What, then, is it that makes him take care of us; help the Mikulitsyns, and everyone in the district, for instance, the stationmaster at Torfianaia? All the time he is on the road, getting hold of something to bring us. He is just as familiar with Dostoievsky
'
s
Possessed
as with the Communist Manifesto, and he talks about them equally well. I have the impression that if he didn
'
t complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.
"

A little later the doctor wrote:

"
We are living in two rooms in a wooden annex at the back of the old house. When Anna Ivanovna was a child Krueger used it for special servants—the dressmaker, the housekeeper, and the retired nurse.

"
It was pretty dilapidated when we came, but we repaired it fairly quickly. With the help of experts we rebuilt the stove, which serves both rooms. We have rearranged the flues and it gives more heat.

"
In this part of the grounds the old garden has vanished, obliterated by new growth. But now, in winter, when everything is inanimate, living nature no longer covers the dead; in snowy outline the past can be read more clearly.

"
We have been lucky. The autumn was dry and warm. It gave us time to dig up the potatoes before the rains and the cold weather. Not counting those we gave back to Mikulitsyn, we had twenty sacks. We put them in the biggest bin in the cellar and covered them with old blankets and hay. We also put down two barrels of salted cucumbers and two of sauerkraut prepared by Tonia. Fresh cabbages hang in pairs from the beams. There are carrots buried in dry sand, and radishes and beets and turnips, and plenty of peas and beans are stored in the loft. There is enough firewood in the shed to last us till spring.

"
I love the warm, dry winter breath of the cellar, the smell of earth, roots, and snow that hits you the moment you raise the trap door as you go down in the early hours before the winter dawn, a weak, flickering light in your hand.

"
You come out; it is still dark. The door creaks or perhaps you sneeze or the snow crunches under your foot, and hares start up from the far cabbage patch and hop away, leaving the snow crisscrossed with tracks. In the distance dogs begin to bark and it is a long time before they quiet down. The cocks have finished their crowing and have nothing left to say. Then dawn breaks.

"
Besides the tracks of the hares, the endless snowy plain is patterned by those of lynxes, stretching across it neatly, like strings of beads. The lynx walks like a cat, putting one paw down in front of the other, and they say it travels many miles in a night.

"
Traps are set for them, but instead of the lynxes the wretched hares get caught, half buried in the snow, and are taken out, frozen stiff.

"
At the beginning, during spring and summer, we had a very hard time. We drove ourselves to the utmost. But now we can relax in the winter evenings. Thanks to Samdeviatov, who supplies us with kerosene, we sit around a lamp. The women sew or knit, Alexander Alexandrovich or I read aloud. The stove is hot, and I, as the appointed stoker, watch it for the right moment to close the damper so as not to waste any heat. If a charred log prevents the fire from drawing properly, I remove it and run out with it smoking and fling it as far as possible into the snow. It flies through the air like a torch, throwing off sparks and lighting up the white rectangular lawns of the sleeping park and then buries itself, hissing, in a snowdrift.

"
We read and reread
War and Peace
,
Evgenii Onegin
and Pushkin
'
s other poems, and Russian translations of Stendhal
'
s
The Red and the Black
,
Dickens
'
s
Tale of Two Cities
,
and Kleist
'
s short stories.
"

As spring approached, the doctor wrote:

"
I believe Tonia is pregnant. I told her and she doesn
'
t believe it, but I feel sure of it. The early symptoms are unmistakable to me, I don
'
t have to wait for the later, more certain ones.

"
A woman
'
s face changes at such a time. It isn
'
t that she becomes less attractive, but her appearance is no longer quite under her control. She is now ruled by the future which she carries within her, she is no longer alone. Her loss of control over her appearance makes her seem physically at a loss; her face dims, her skin coarsens, her eyes shine in a different way, not as she wants them to, it is as if she couldn
'
t quite cope with all these things and has neglected herself.

"
Tonia and I have never drifted apart, but this year of work has brought us even closer together. I have noticed how efficient, strong, and tireless she is, how cleverly she plans her work, so as to waste as little time as possible between one job and another.

"
It has always seemed to me that every conception is immaculate and that this dogma, concerning the Mother of God, expresses the idea of all motherhood.

"
At childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone. At this vital moment the man
'
s part is as irrelevant as if he had never had anything to do with it, as though the whole thing had dropped from heaven.

"
It is the woman, by herself, who brings forth her progeny, and carries it off to some remote corner of existence, a quiet, safe place for a crib. Alone, in silence and humility, she feeds and rears the child.

"
The Mother of God is asked to
'
pray zealously to her Son and her God,
'
and the words of the psalm are put into her mouth:
'
My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For He hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
'
It is because of her child that she says this, He will magnify her (
'
For He that is mighty hath done to me great things
'
): He is her glory. Any woman could say it. For every one of them, God is in her child. Mothers of great men must have been familiar with this feeling, but then, all women are mothers of great men—it isn
'
t their fault if life disappoints them later.
"

"
We go on endlessly rereading
Evgenii Onegin
and the poems. Samdeviatov came yesterday and brought presents—nice things to eat and kerosene for the lamps. We have endless discussions about art.

"
I have always thought that art is not a category, not a realm covering innumerable concepts and derivative phenomena, but that, on the contrary, it is something concentrated, strictly limited. It is a principle that is present in every work of art, a force applied to it and a truth worked out in it. And I have never seen art as form but rather as a hidden, secret part of content. All this is as clear to me as daylight. I feel it in every bone of my body, but it
'
s terribly difficult to express or to define this idea.

"
A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways—by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in
Crime and Punishment
that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov
'
s crime.

"
Primitive art, the art of Egypt, Greece, our own—it is all, I think, one and the same art through thousands of years. You can call it an idea, a statement about life, so all-embracing that it can
'
t be split up into separate words; and if there is so much as a particle of it in any work that includes other things as well, it outweighs all the other ingredients in significance and turns out to be the essence, the heart and soul of the work.
"

"
A slight chill, a cough, probably a bit of temperature. Gasping all day long, the feeling of a lump in my throat. I am in a bad way. It is my heart. The first symptoms that I have inherited my poor mother
'
s heart—she suffered from it all her life. Can it really be that? So soon? If so, my tenure in this world is short.

"
A faint smell of charcoal in the room. A smell of ironing. Tonia is ironing, every now and then she gets a coal out of the stove and puts it in the iron, and the lid of the iron snaps over it like a set of teeth. It reminds me of something, but I can
'
t think of what. Must be my condition.

"
To celebrate Samdeviatov
'
s gift of soap we have had two washing days and Sashenka has been running wild. As I write he sits astride the crosspiece under the table and, imitating Samdeviatov, who takes him out in his sleigh whenever he comes, pretends that he is giving me a ride.

"
As soon as I feel better I must go to the town library and read up on the ethnography and history of the region. They say the library has had several important donations and is exceptionally good. I have an urge to write. But I
'
ll have to hurry. It will be spring before we know where we are—and then there
'
ll be no time for reading or writing.

"
My headache gets worse and worse. I slept badly. Had a muddled dream of the kind you forget as you wake up. All that remained in my memory was the part that woke me up. It was a woman
'
s voice, I heard it in my dream, sounding in the air. I remembered it and kept hearing it in my mind and going through the list of our women friends—I tried to think of someone who spoke in that deep, soft, husky voice. It didn
'
t belong to any of them. I thought it might be Tonia
'
s, and that I had become so used to her that I no longer heard the tone of her voice. I tried to forget that she was my wife and to become sufficiently detached to find out. But it wasn
'
t her voice either. It remains a mystery.

"
About dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something that has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it
'
s just the contrary.

"
Often it
'
s something you paid no attention to at the time—a vague thought that you didn
'
t bother to think out to the end, words spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed—these are the things that return at night, clothed in flesh and blood, and they become the subjects of dreams, as if to make up for having been ignored during waking hours.
"

"
A clear, frosty night. Unusual brilliance and perfection of everything visible. Earth, sky, moon, and stars, all seem cemented, riveted together by the frost. Shadows of trees lie across the paths, so sharp that they seem carved in relief. You keep thinking you see dark figures endlessly cross the road at various places. Big stars hang in the woods between branches like blue lanterns. Small ones are strewn all over the sky like daisies in a summer field.

"
We go on discussing Pushkin. The other night we talked about the early poems he wrote as a schoolboy. How much depended on his choice of meter!

"
In the poems with long lines, his ambition did not extend beyond the Arzamas Literary Circle; he wanted to keep up with the grownups, impress his uncle with mythologism, bombast, faked epicureanism and sophistication, and affected a precocious worldly wisdom.