Doctor Zhivago (53 page)

"
True. It is like a labyrinth. I
'
d never have found my way. Why is it like this? Is the flat being redecorated?
"

"
Oh no, nothing like that. It belongs to someone else, I don
'
t even know who it is. I had my own flat in the school building. When the school was taken over by the Town Housing Department, Katenka and I were given part of this house. The owners had gone away, leaving all their furniture. There was an awful lot of it. I don
'
t want other people
'
s things, so I put it all into these two rooms and whitewashed the windows to keep out the sun. Don
'
t let go of my hand or you
'
ll get lost. Here we are, we turn right, now we
'
re out of the maze, here
'
s my door. It will be lighter in a second. Watch the step.
"

As he followed her into the room he was struck by the view from the window facing the door. It looked out on the yard and over the low roofs of the houses beyond it to the vacant lots by the river. Goats and sheep grazed there, and their long woolly coats swept the ground like long skirts. There too was the familiar billboard:
"
Moreau & Vetchinkin. Mechanical seeders. Threshing machines.
"

Reminded by it of the day of his arrival from Moscow, the doctor proceeded to describe it to Larisa Feodorovna. Forgetting there was a rumor that Strelnikov was her husband, he told her of his meeting with the commissar in the train. This part of his story made a deep impression on her.

"
You saw Strelnikov?
"
she asked eagerly.
"
I won
'
t tell you now, but really it is extraordinary. It
'
s as if you were predestined to meet. I
'
ll tell you all about it sometime, you
'
ll be amazed. If I
'
m not mistaken, he made a good rather than a bad impression on you?
"

"
Yes, on the whole. He ought to have repelled me. We had actually passed through the country where he had brought death and destruction. I expected to see a brutal soldier or a revolutionary Jack-the-Ripper, but he was neither. It
'
s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him. It shows he isn
'
t a type. If he were, it would be the end of him as a man. But if you can
'
t place him in a category, it means that at least a part of him is what a human being ought to be. He has risen above himself, he has a grain of immortality.
"

"
They say he is not a Party member.
"

"
Yes, I think that
'
s true. What is it that makes one like him? He is a doomed man. I believe that he
'
ll come to a bad end. He will atone for the evil he has done. Revolutionaries who take the law into their own hands are horrifying not because they are criminals, but because they are like machines that have got out of control, like runaway trains. Strelnikov is as mad as the others, only his madness does not spring from theories, but from the ordeals he has gone through. I don
'
t know his secret, but I am sure he has one. His alliance with the Bolsheviks is accidental. So long as they need him, they put up with him, and he happens to be going their way. The moment they don
'
t need him they
'
ll throw him overboard with no regret, and crush him, as they have done with other military experts.
"

"
You think so?
"

"
I am sure of it.
"

"
Is there no escape for him? Couldn
'
t he run away?
"

"
Where could he run, Larisa Feodorovna? You could do that in the old days, under the Tsars. But just you try nowadays!
"

"
Too bad. You
'
ve made me feel sorry for him. You
'
ve changed, you know. You used to speak more calmly about the revolution, you were less harsh about it.
"

"
That
'
s just the point, Larisa Feodorovna. There are limits to everything. In all this time something definite should have been achieved. But it turns out that those who inspired the revolution aren
'
t at home in anything except change and turmoil, they aren
'
t happy with anything that
'
s on less than a world scale. For them transitional periods, worlds in the making, are an end in themselves. They aren
'
t trained for anything else, they don
'
t know anything except that. And do you know why these never-ending preparations are so futile? It
'
s because these men haven
'
t any real capacities, they are incompetent. Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. Life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so breathtakingly serious! So why substitute this childish harlequinade of immature fantasies, these schoolboy escapades? But enough of this. It
'
s my turn to ask questions. We arrived on the morning of the local upheaval. Were you in it?
"

"
I should say I was! There were fires all around us, it
'
s a wonder the house didn
'
t burn down. It was pretty badly shaken, as I told you. To this day there
'
s an unexploded shell in the yard just inside the gate. Looting, bombardment, all kinds of horrors—as at every change of government. But by then we were used to it, it wasn
'
t the first time. And the things that went on under the Whites! Murders to settle old accounts, extortions, blackmail—a real orgy! But I haven
'
t told you the most extraordinary thing. Our Galiullin! He turned up with the Czechs as a most important personage—a sort of Governor-General.
"

"
I know. I heard about it. Did you see him?
"

"
Very often. You can
'
t think how many people I managed to save, thanks to him, how many I hid. In all fairness, he behaved perfectly, chivalrously, not like all those small fry—little Cossack captains, policemen, and what not. Unfortunately, it was the small fry who set the tone, not the decent people. Galiullin helped me a lot, bless him. We are old friends, you know. When I was a little girl I often went to the house where he grew up. Most of the tenants were railway workers. I saw a lot of poverty as a child. That
'
s why my attitude to the revolution is different from yours. It
'
s closer to me. There
'
s a lot of it I understand from the inside. But that Galiullin, that the son of a janitor should become a White Colonel—perhaps even a General! There aren
'
t any soldiers in my family, I don
'
t know much about army ranks. And by profession I am a history teacher.… Anyway, that
'
s how it was. Between us, we managed to help quite a lot of people. I used to go and see him. We talked about you. I
'
ve always had friends and connections in every government—and also sorrows and disappointment from all of them. It
'
s only in mediocre books that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don
'
t you think you
'
d have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?—Ah, there you are!
"

A little girl of about eight came in, her hair done up in finely braided pigtails. Her narrow eyes had a sly, mischievous look and went up at the corners when she laughed. She knew her mother had a visitor, having heard his voice outside the door, but she thought it necessary to put on an air of surprise. She curtsied and looked at the doctor with the fearless, unblinking stare of a lonely child who had begun to think early in life.

"
My daughter, Katenka. I hope you
'
ll be friends!
"

"
You showed me her photograph in Meliuzeievo. How she
'
s grown and changed since then!
"

"
I thought you were out. I didn
'
t hear you come in.
"

"
I took the key out of the crack and there was an enormous rat in it—as big as this! You should have seen me jump! I nearly died of fright.
"

She made an absurd face, opening her eyes wide and rounding her mouth like a fish out of water.

"
Off you go now. I
'
ll get Uncle to stay to dinner, and call you when the kasha is ready.
"

"
Thank you, I wish I could stay. But we have dinner at six since I
'
ve started coming to town and I try not to be late. It takes me over three hours to get home—nearly four. That is why I came so early. I
'
m afraid I
'
ll have to go soon.
"

"
You can stay another half hour.
"

"
I
'
d love to.
"

"
And now, since you have been so frank with me, I
'
ll be frank with you. The Strelnikov you met is my husband, Pasha, Pavel Pavlovich Antipov, whom I went to look for at the front and in whose death I so rightly refused to believe.
"

"
What you say does not come as a surprise. I was prepared for something of the sort. I heard that rumor, but I didn
'
t believe it for a moment. That
'
s why I spoke about him to you so freely, ignoring the rumor, which is sheer nonsense. I
'
ve seen this man. How could anyone connect him with you? What do you have in common with him?
"

"
And yet it
'
s true. Strelnikov is Antipov, my husband. I share the general belief. Katenka knows it and is proud of her father. Strelnikov is his pseudonym—he has an assumed name, like all active revolutionaries. For some reason he must live and act under an alias.

"
It was he who took Yuriatin, and shelled us, knowing that we were here, and never once tried to find out if we were alive, in order not to reveal his identity. Of course it was his duty. If he had asked me I would have told him to do just that. You might say that my being safe and the Town Soviet
'
s giving me a reasonable place to live in shows that he is secretly looking after us. But that he should actually have been here and resisted the temptation to have a look at us—it
'
s inconceivable! It
'
s beyond me, it isn
'
t natural, it
'
s like the ancient Roman virtue, one of those newfangled ideas. But I mustn
'
t let myself be influenced by your way of looking at things. You and I don
'
t really think alike. When it comes to the intangible, the marginal choices, we understand each other. But when it comes to the big issues, to one
'
s outlook on life, we don
'
t see eye to eye. But to go back to Strelnikov.…

"
Now he
'
s in Siberia, and you are right—I have heard him accused of things that make my blood run cold. He is out there, in command of one of our most advanced positions, and he is fighting and beating poor old Galiullin, his childhood friend and his comrade in arms in the German war. Galiullin knows who he is, and he knows that I am his wife, but he has had the delicacy—I can
'
t value it too highly—never to refer to it, though goodness knows he goes mad with rage at the sound of Strelnikov
'
s name.

"
Yes, that
'
s where he is now, in Siberia. But he was here for a long time, living in that railway car where you saw him. I kept hoping I
'
d run into him by accident. Sometimes he went to the staff headquarters, which were in the building where Komuch—the Constituent Assembly Army—used to have its headquarters. And by an odd coincidence, the entrance was through the wing where Galiullin used to see me. I was always going there to ask him to help somebody or to stop some horrible business or other. For instance, there was that affair at the military academy, which made a lot of noise at the time. If an instructor was unpopular the cadets ambushed him and shot him, saying he was a Bolshevik sympathizer. And then there was the time when they started beating up the Jews. Incidentally, if you do intellectual work of any kind and live in a town, as we do, half of your friends are bound to be Jews. Yet in times when there are pogroms, when all these terrible, despicable things are done, we don
'
t only feel sorry and indignant and ashamed, we feel wretchedly divided, as if our sympathy came more from the head than from the heart and had an aftertaste of insincerity.