Doctor Zhivago (62 page)

"
Palykh? Lajos told me.
"

"
Yes. Go to see him. Examine him.
"

"
He
'
s a mental case?
"

"
I suppose so. He says he sees will-o
'
-the-wisps. Hallucinations, evidently. Insomnia. Headaches.
"

"
All right, I might as well go and see him now, since I
'
m free at the moment. When does the meeting begin?
"

"
I think they
'
re coming now. But why bother? As you see, I
'
m not going either. They
'
ll manage without us.
"

"
Then I
'
ll go and see Pamphil. Though I can hardly keep my eyes open, I
'
m so sleepy. Liberius Averkievich likes to philosophize at night, and he
'
s worn me out with his talk. Where do I find Pamphil?
"

"
You know the birch grove beyond the rubbish pit?
"

"
Yes, I think I know it.
"

"
You
'
ll find some commanders
'
tents in a clearing. We
'
ve put one of them at Pamphil
'
s disposal. He
'
s got his family coming, they
'
re in the convoy. That
'
s where you
'
ll find him—in one of the tents—he
'
s got battalion commander status as a reward for revolutionary merit.
"

On his way to see Pamphil, the doctor was overcome with fatigue. It was the cumulative effect of several sleepless nights. He could go back to his dugout and lie down, but he was afraid of staying there, for at any moment Liberius might come in and disturb him. He stopped in a glade scattered with golden leaves from the surrounding woods. They lay in a checkerboard pattern, and so did the low rays of the sun falling on their golden carpet. This double, crisscross brightness made your head spin and sent you to sleep like small print or a monotonous murmur.

The doctor lay down on the silkily rustling leaves, his head on his arm and his arm on a pillow of moss at the foot of a tree. He dozed off at once. The dazzle of light and shadow that had put him to sleep now covered him with its patchwork so that his body, stretched on the ground, was indistinguishable from the kaleidoscopic brilliance of the rays and leaves, invisible as if he had put on a magic cap.

But soon the very force of his desire and need for sleep aroused him. Direct causes operate only within certain limits; beyond them they produce the opposite effect. His wakeful consciousness, not finding any rest, worked feverishly of its own momentum. Thoughts whirled and wheeled inside his head, his mind was knocking like a faulty engine. This inner confusion worried and exasperated him,
"
That swine Liberius,
"
he thought indignantly.
"
As if there weren
'
t enough things in the world to drive people mad, he has to take a sane man and turn him deliberately into a neurotic by keeping him a prisoner and boring him with his friendship and chatter. Someday I
'
ll kill him.
"

Folding and unfolding like a scrap of colored stuff, a brown speckled butterfly flew across the sunny side of the clearing. The doctor watched it sleepily. Choosing a background with a color like its own, it settled on the brown speckled bark of a pine and became indistinguishable from it, vanishing as completely as Yurii Andreievich, hidden by the play of light and shadow, had vanished.

His mind turned to its accustomed round of thoughts—he had touched on them indirectly in many medical works—concerning will and purposefulness as superior forms of adaptation; mimicry and protective coloring; the survival of the fittest; and the hypothesis that the path of natural selection is the very path leading to the formation and emergence of consciousness. And what was subject? What was object? How was their identity to be defined? In the doctor
'
s reflections, Darwin was next to Schelling, the butterfly that had just flown by next to modern painting and Impressionist art. He thought of creation, the creature, creativeness, the instincts of creation and simulation.

Once again he fell asleep but woke up a moment later. A soft, muffled conversation near by had disturbed him. The few words he overheard were enough to tell him that it concerned some secret and illicit plan. He had not been seen, the conspirators had no suspicion of his presence. The slightest movement that would betray it now might cost him his life. Yurii Andreievich remained quiet and listened.

Some of the voices he recognized. They were those of the scum of the partisans, hangers-on such as Goshka, Sanka, Koska, and their usual follower Terentii Galuzin, young good-for-nothings who were at the bottom of every kind of outrage and disorder. Zakhar Gorazdykh was also there, an even more sinister personality who was mixed up in the affair of the vodka brewing but was not being prosecuted just now because he had denounced the chief offenders. What surprised Yurii Andreievich was the presence of Sivobluy, a partisan of the crack
"
Silver Company
"
who was one of the commander
'
s bodyguards. In keeping with a tradition going back to Stenka Razin and Pugachev, this favorite, known to be in the confidence of the chief, was nicknamed
"
The Hetman
'
s Ear.
"
And yet he too seemed to be in the conspiracy.

The plotters were negotiating with delegates from the advanced positions of the enemy. The delegates were inaudible, so softly did they speak to the traitors, and Yurii Andreievich could only guess that they were speaking when an occasional silence seemed to interrupt the whispering.

Zakhar Gorazdykh, the drunkard, was doing most of the talking, cursing every other moment in his hoarse, wheezing voice. He seemed to be the ringleader.

"
Now, you others, listen. The chief thing is, we
'
ve got to keep it quiet. If anybody talks—you see this knife?—I
'
ll rip his guts. Is that clear? Now you know as well as I do—we
'
re stuck. There
'
s no way out for us. We
'
ve got to earn our pardon. We
'
ve got to work such a trick as nobody
'
s seen before. They want him taken alive. Now they say their boss Gulevoy is coming.
"
(They corrected him—
"
Galiullin
"
—but he did not catch the name and said
"
General Galeiev.
"
)
"
That
'
s our chance. There won
'
t be another like it. Here
'
re their delegates. They
'
ll tell you all about it. They say we
'
ve got to take him alive. Now you tell them, you others.
"

Now the others, the delegates, began to speak. Yurii Andreievich could not catch a word, but from the length of the pause he judged that they explained the proposal in detail. Then Gorazdykh spoke again.

"
Hear that, boys? You see what a nice fellow he is. Why should we pay for him? He isn
'
t even a man—he
'
s a half-wit of some sort, a monk or a hermit. You stop grinning, Terioshka. I
'
ll give you something to grin about, you stupid ass. I wasn
'
t talking about you. I
'
m telling you—he
'
s a hermit, that
'
s what he is. Let him have his way and he
'
ll turn you all into monks—eunuchs. What does he tell you? No cursing, no getting drunk, all this stuff about women. How can you live like that? Tonight we
'
ll get him down to the ford. I
'
ll see that he comes. Then we
'
ll all fall on him together. It won
'
t be hard. That
'
s nothing. What
'
s difficult is that they want him alive. Tie him up, they say. Well, if it doesn
'
t work out that way I
'
ll deal with him myself, I
'
ll finish him off with my own hands. They
'
ll send their people along to help.
"

He went on explaining the plan, but gradually they moved away and the doctor ceased to hear them.

"
That
'
s Liberius they
'
re plotting to hand over to the Whites or to kill, the swine,
"
he thought with horror and indignation, forgetting how often he had himself wished his tormentor dead. How was it to be prevented? He decided to go back to Kamennodvorsky and tell him of the plot without mentioning any names, and also to warn Liberius.

But when he got back, Kamennodvorsky had gone; only his assistant was keeping an eye on the smoldering fire to prevent its spreading.

The crime did not take place. It was forestalled. The conspiracy, as it turned out, was known. That day the details were disclosed and the plotters seized. Sivobluy had played the role of
agent provocateur
.
Yurii Andreievich felt even more disgusted.

It was learned that the partisans
'
families were now within two days
'
journey of the camp. The partisans were getting ready to welcome them and soon afterwards to move on. Yurii Andreievich went to Pamphil Palykh.

He found him at the entrance to his tent, an ax in his hand. In front of him was a tall heap of birch saplings; he had cut them down but had not yet stripped them. Some had fallen where they stood and, toppling with their whole weight, had dug the sharp ends of their broken branches into the damp ground. Others he had dragged from a short distance and piled on top of the rest. Shuddering and swaying on their springy branches, these trees lay neither on the ground nor close together. It seemed as though with outstretched arms they were fending off Pamphil, who had cut them down, and that their tangled green foliage was barring his way to his tent.

"
It
'
s for my dear guests,
"
explained Pamphil.
"
My wife and children. The tent is too low. And the rain comes through. I
'
ve cut these down for joints to make a roof.
"

"
I shouldn
'
t count on their allowing you to have them in your tent, Pamphil. Who has ever heard of civilians, women and children, being allowed to live inside a camp? They
'
ll stay with the wagons somewhere just outside, you
'
ll be able to see them as much as you like in your spare time, but I shouldn
'
t think they
'
d be allowed to live in your tent. But that isn
'
t what I
'
ve come about. They tell me you
'
re getting thin, you can
'
t eat or sleep. Is that true? I must say you look all right. Though you could do with a haircut.
"

Pamphil was a huge man with black tousled hair and beard and a bumpy forehead that looked double; a thickening of the frontal bone, like a ring or a steel band pressed over his temples, gave him a beetling, glowering look.

When at the beginning of the revolution it had been feared that, as in 1905, the upheaval would be a short-lived episode in the history of the educated upper classes and leave the deeper layers of society untouched, everything possible had been done to spread revolutionary propaganda among the people to upset them, to stir them up and lash them into fury.

In those early days, men like Pamphil Palykh, who needed no encouragement to hate intellectuals, officers, and gentry with a savage hatred, were regarded by enthusiastic left-wing intellectuals as a rare find and greatly valued. Their inhumanity seemed a marvel of class-consciousness, their barbarism a model of proletarian firmness and revolutionary instinct. By such qualities Pamphil had established his fame, and he was held in great esteem by partisan chiefs and Party leaders.

To Yurii Andreievich this gloomy and unsociable giant, soulless and narrow-minded, seemed subnormal, almost a degenerate.

"
Come into the tent,
"
said Pamphil.