Doctor Zhivago (63 page)

"
No, why? It
'
s pleasanter out in the open. Anyway, I couldn
'
t get in.
"

"
All right. Have it your own way. After all, it is a stinking hole. We can sit on the trees.
"

They sat down on the springy birch saplings, and Pamphil told the doctor the story of his life.
"
They say a
tale is soon told. But mine is a long story. I couldn
'
t tell it in three years. I don
'
t know where to begin.

"
Well, I
'
ll try. My wife and I, we were young. She looked after the house. I worked in the fields. It wasn
'
t a bad life. We had children. They drafted me into the army. They sent me to the war. Well, the war. What should I tell you about the war? You
'
ve seen it, Comrade Doctor. Then the revolution. I saw the light. The soldiers
'
eyes were opened. Not the Fritzes, who are Germans, were the enemies, but some of our own people.
'
Soldiers of the world revolution, down your rifles, go home, get the bourgeois!
'
And so on. You know it all yourself, Comrade Army Doctor. Well, to go on. Then came the civil war. I joined the partisans. Now I
'
ll have to leave out a lot or I
'
ll never end. After all that, what do I see now, at the present moment? That parasite, he
'
s brought up the two Stavropolsky regiments from the Russian front, and the first Orenburg Cossack as well. I
'
m not a child am I? Don
'
t I understand? Haven
'
t I served in the army? We
'
re in trouble, Doctor, it
'
s all up with us. What he wants to do, the swine, is to fall on us with all that scum. He wants to surround us.

"
But I
'
ve got a wife and children. If he comes out on top, how will they get away? They
'
re innocent, of course, they have nothing to do with it, but this won
'
t stop him. He
'
ll tie up my wife with a rope and he
'
ll torture her to death on my account, my wife and my children, he
'
ll break every bone in their bodies, he
'
ll tear them apart. And you ask, why don
'
t I sleep. A man could be made of iron, but a thing like that is to make you lose your mind.
"

"
What an odd fellow you are, Pamphil. I can
'
t make you out. For years you
'
ve been away from them, you didn
'
t even know where they were and you didn
'
t worry. Now you
'
re going to see them in a day or two, and instead of being happy about it you act as though it were their funeral.
"

"
That was before, now it
'
s different. He
'
s beating us, the White bastard. Anyway, it isn
'
t me we
'
re talking about. I
'
ll soon be dead. But I can
'
t take my little ones with me into the next world, can I? They
'
ll stay and they
'
ll fall into his dirty paws. He
'
ll squeeze the blood out of them, drop by drop.
"

"
Is that why you see will-o
'
-the-wisps? I was told you keep seeing things.
"

"
Well, Doctor, I haven
'
t told you everything. I
'
ve kept back the most important thing. Now, I
'
ll tell you the whole truth if you want it, I
'
ll say it to your face, but you mustn
'
t hold it against me.

"
I
'
ve done away with a lot of your kind, there
'
s a lot of officers
'
blood on my hands. Officers, bourgeois. And it
'
s never worried me. Spilled it like water. Names and numbers all gone out of my head. But there
'
s one little fellow I can
'
t get out of my mind. I killed that youngster and I can
'
t forget it. Why did I have to kill him? He made me laugh, and I killed him for a joke, for nothing, like a fool.

"
During the February revolution that was. Under Kerensky. We were having a mutiny. We were near a railway station. We
'
d left the front. They sent a young fellow, an agitator, to talk us into going back. To fight on to victory. Well, that little cadet came to talk us into being good. Just like a chicken, he was.
'
Fight on to victory
'
—that was his slogan. He got up on a water butt shouting that slogan, the water butt was on the railway platform. He got up there, you see, so as to make his call to battle come from higher up, and suddenly the lid turned upside down under him and he fell right in. Right into the water. You can
'
t think how funny he looked. Made me split my sides laughing! I was holding a rifle. And I was laughing my head off. Couldn
'
t stop. It was just as if he was tickling me. And then, I aimed and fired and killed him on the spot. I can
'
t think how it happened. Just as though somebody had pushed me.

"
Well, that
'
s my will-o
'
-the-wisp. I see that station at night. At the time it was funny, but now I
'
m sorry.
"

"
Was that at Biriuchi station near the town of Meliuzeievo?
"

"
Can
'
t remember.
"

"
Were you in the Zybushino rebellion?
"

"
Can
'
t remember.
"

"
Which front were you at? Was it the western front? Were you in the west?
"

"
Somewhere like that. It could have been in the west. I can
'
t remember.
"

The convoy with the partisans
'
families, complete with children and belongings, had long been following the main partisan force. After it, behind the wagons, came vast herds of cattle, mainly cows—several thousand of them.

With the arrival of the womenfolk a new figure appeared in the camp. This was Zlydarikha or Kubarikha, a soldier
'
s wife who was a cattle healer, a veterinarian, and also, secretly, a witch. She went about in a little pancake hat cocked on her head and a pea-green Royal Scots Fusiliers overcoat, which formed part of the British equipment supplied to the Supreme Ruler, and she assured everyone that she had made them out of a prisoner
'
s cap and uniform. She said that the Reds had liberated her from the Kezhemsk jail where for some unknown reason Kolchak had kept her.

The partisans had now moved to a new campground. They were supposed to stay there only until the neighborhood had been reconnoitered and suitable winter quarters found. But as a result of unforeseen developments they were to spend the winter there.

This new camp was quite unlike the old one. The forest around it was a dense, impenetrable taiga. On one side, away from the camp and the highway, there was no end to it. In the early days, while the tents were being pitched and Yurii Andreievich had more leisure, he had explored the forest in several directions and found that one could easily get lost in it. Two places had struck him in the course of these excursions and remained in his memory.

One was at the edge of the taiga, just outside the camp. The forest was autumnally bare, so that you could see into it as through an open gate; here a splendid, solitary, rust-colored rowan tree had alone kept its leaves. Growing on a mound that rose above the low, squelchy, hummocky marsh, it reached into the sky holding up the flat round shields of its hard crimson berries against the leaden, late-autumn sky. Small birds with feathers as bright as frosty dawns—bullfinches and tomtits—settled on the rowan tree and picked the largest berries, stretching out their necks and throwing back their heads to swallow them.

There seemed to be a living intimacy between the birds and the tree, as if it had watched them for a long time refusing to do anything, but in the end had had pity on them and given in and fed them like a nurse unbuttoning her blouse to give breast to a baby.
"
Well, all right, all right,
"
it seemed to be saying with a smile,
"
eat me, have your fill.
"

The other place was even more remarkable. This was on a height that fell off steeply on one side. Looking down, you felt that at the bottom of the escarpment there should be something different from what was on top—a stream or a hollow or a wild field overgrown with seedy, uncut grass. But in fact it was a repetition of the same thing, only at a giddy depth, as if the forest had simply sunk to a lower level with all its trees, so that the treetops were now underfoot. There must have been a landslide there at some time.

It was as if the grim, gigantic forest, marching at cloud level, had stumbled, lost its footing, and hurtled down, all in one piece, and would have dropped right through the earth if it had not, by a miracle, saved itself at the last moment—so that there it was now, safe and sound, rustling below.

But what made the high place in the forest remarkable was something else. All along its edge it was locked in by granite boulders standing on end, looking like the flat stones of prehistoric dolmens. When Yurii Andreievich came across this stony platform for the first time, he was ready to swear that it was not of natural origin, that it bore the mark of human hands. It might well have been the site of an ancient pagan shrine, where prayers and sacrifices had once been offered by unknown worshippers.

It was here that the death sentence against eleven ringleaders of the conspiracy and two male nurses condemned for brewing vodka was executed one cold, sullen morning.

Twenty of the most loyal partisans, including a core of the commander
'
s bodyguard, brought the condemned men to the spot. Then the escort closed around them in a semicircle, rifle in hand, and advancing at a quick, jostling pace drove them to the edge of the platform, where there was no way out except over the precipice.

As a result of questioning, long imprisonment, and maltreatment they had lost their human appearance. Black, hairy, and haggard, they were as terrible as ghosts.

They had been disarmed when they were arrested, and it had not even occurred to anyone to search them again before the execution. Such a search would have seemed superfluous and vile, a cruel mockery of men so close to death.

But now, suddenly, Rzhanitsky, a friend of Vdovichenko, who walked beside him and who, like him, was an old anarchist, fired three shots at the guards, aiming at Sivobluy. He was an excellent marksman but his hand shook in his excitement and he missed. Once again, tactfulness and pity for their former comrades kept the guards from falling on him or shooting him down at once for his attempt. Rzhanitsky had three unspent bullets left in his revolver, but maddened by his failure and perhaps, in his agitation, forgetting that they were there, he flung his Browning against the rocks. It went off a fourth time, wounding one of the condemned men, Pachkolia, in the foot.

Pachkolia cried out, clutched his foot, and fell, screaming with pain. The two men nearest him, Pafnutkin and Gorazdykh, raised him and dragged him by the arms, so that he should not be trampled to death by his comrades, who no longer knew what they were doing. Unable to put down his wounded foot, Pachkolia hopped and limped toward the rocky ledge where the doomed men were being driven, and he screamed without stopping. His inhuman shrieks were infectious. As though at a given signal, everyone lost his self-control. An indescribable scene followed. The men swore loudly, begged for mercy, prayed and cursed.

The young Galuzin, who still wore his yellow-braided school cap, removed it, fell on his knees, and, still kneeling, edged backward following the rest of the crowd toward the terrible stones. Bowing repeatedly to the ground before the guards and crying loudly, he chanted, quite beside himself:

"
Forgive me, comrades, I
'
m sorry, I won
'
t do it again, please let me off. Don
'
t kill me. I haven
'
t lived yet. I want to live a little longer, I want to see my mother just once more. Please let me off, comrades, please forgive me. I
'
ll do anything for you. I
'
ll kiss the ground under your feet. Oh, help, help, Mother, I
'
m done for!
"