Doctor Zhivago (66 page)

"
You have to know everything these days, Agafia my girl, every single thing. What every bird is and every stone and every herb. That bird, for example, that
'
s a starling. And that beast is a badger.

"
Now, another thing, suppose you take a fancy to someone, you just tell me. I
'
ll make him pine for you, whoever he is—your Forester, the one who is your chief, if you like, or Kolchak or Ivan Tsarevich—anyone. You think I
'
m boasting? I am not. Now look, I
'
ll tell you. When winter comes with blizzards and whirlwinds and snowspouts chasing each other in the fields, I will stick a knife into such a pillar of snow, right up to the hilt, and when I take it out of the snow, it will be red with blood. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Well, there you are! And you thought I was boasting. Now, how can it be, you tell me, that blood should come out of a snowspout that is made only of wind and snow? That
'
s just it, my dear, that whirlwind isn
'
t just wind and snow, it
'
s a were-wolf, a changeling that
'
s lost its little bewitched child and is looking for it, it goes about the fields crying and looking for it. That is what I struck with my knife, that is why there is blood on it. Now, with that knife I can cut away the footprint of any man, and I can sew it with a silk thread to your skirt, and that man—whoever he is, Kolchak, or Strelnikov, or any new Tsar they set up—will follow you step by step wherever you go. And you thought I was telling lies! You thought it was:
'
Come to me, all ye poor and proletarians of the world.
'

"
And many other things there are, such as stones raining from heaven, so that a man may go forth out of his house and the stones rain upon him. Or, as some have seen, horsemen riding through the sky, the horse
'
s hoofs hitting the tops of the houses. Or as sorcerers prophesied of old, saying:
'
In this woman there is corn, in that one honey, in a third marten fur.
'
And the knight opened the shoulder of the woman, as if it were a casket, and with his sword took out of her shoulder blade a measure of corn or a squirrel or a honeycomb.
"

Occasionally we experience a deep and strong feeling. Such a feeling always includes an element of pity. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim. In the case of some men, compassion for a woman exceeds all measure and transports her to an unreal, entirely imaginary world. Such men are jealous of the very air she breathes, of the laws of nature, of everything that happened in the world before she was born.

Yurii Andreievich was sufficiently well read to suspect that Kubarikha
'
s last words repeated the opening passage of an ancient chronicle, either of Novgorod or Epatievo, but so distorted by copyists and the sorcerers and bards who had transmitted them orally for centuries that its original meaning had been lost. Why, then, had he succumbed so completely to the tyranny of the legend? Why did this gibberish, this absurd talk, impress him as if it were describing real events?

Lara
'
s left shoulder had been cut open. Like a key turning in the lock of a secret safe, the sword unlocked her shoulder blade and the secrets she had kept in the depths of her soul came to light. Unfamiliar towns, streets, rooms, countrysides unrolled like a film, whole reels of film, unfolding, discharging their contents.

How he loved her! How beautiful she was! In exactly the way he had always thought and dreamed and wanted! Yet what was it that made her so lovely? Was it something that could be named and analyzed? No, a thousand times no! She was lovely by virtue of the matchlessly simple and swift line that the Creator had, at a single stroke, drawn all around her, and in this divine form she had been handed over, like a child tightly wrapped in a sheet after its bath, into the keeping of his soul.

And what had happened to him now, where was he? In a Siberian forest with the partisans, who were encircled and whose fate he was to share. What an unbelievable, absurd predicament! Once again everything in his head and before his eyes became confused, blurred. At that moment, instead of snowing as had been expected, it began to drizzle. Like a huge banner stretching across a city street, there hung before him in the air, from one side of the forest glade to the other, a blurred, greatly magnified image of a single, astonishing, idolized head. The apparition wept, and the rain, now more intense, kissed and watered it.

"
Go along now,
"
said the witch to Agafia.
"
I have charmed your cow, she will get well. Pray to the Mother of God, who is the abode of light and the book of the living word.
"

There was fighting on the western border of the taiga. But the taiga was so immense that the battles were like border warfare on the edges of a great kingdom, and the camp hidden in its heart was so full of people that however many went away to fight, there seemed always to be more people left.

The rumble of the distant battle hardly ever reached the camp. Suddenly, several shots rang out in the forest. They followed one another at very close intervals, and all at once turned into a quick, ragged fusillade. People started up and ran quickly to their tents or wagons, and a general commotion began. Everyone got ready for battle.

It proved to be a false alarm. But then a growing crowd streamed toward the place where the shots had been fired.

They stood around a bleeding stump of a man lying on the ground. His right arm and left leg had been chopped off. It was inconceivable how, with his remaining arm and leg, he had crawled to the camp. The chopped-off arm and leg were tied in terrible bleeding chunks onto his back with a small wooden board attached to them; a long inscription on it said, with many words of abuse, that the atrocity was in reprisal for similar atrocities perpetrated by such and such a Red unit—a unit that had no connection with the Forest Brotherhood. It also said that the same treatment would be meted out to all the partisans unless, by a given date, they submitted and gave up their arms to the representatives of General Vitsyn
'
s army corps.

Fainting repeatedly from loss of blood, the dying man told them in a faltering voice of the tortures and atrocities perpetrated by Vitsyn
'
s investigating and punitive squads. His own sentence of death had been allegedly commuted; instead of hanging him, they had cut off his arm and leg in order to send him into the camp and strike terror among the partisans. They had carried him as far as the outposts of the camp, where they had put him down and ordered him to crawl, urging him on by shooting into the air.

He could barely move his lips. To make out his almost unintelligible stammering, the crowd around him bent low. He was saying:
"
Be on your guard, comrades. He has broken through.
"

"
Patrols have gone out in strength. There
'
s a big battle going on. We
'
ll hold him.
"

"
There
'
s a gap. He wants to surprise you. I know.… I can
'
t go on, men. I am spitting blood. I
'
ll die in a moment.
"

"
Rest a bit. Keep quiet.—Can
'
t you see it
'
s bad for him, you heartless beasts!
"

The man started again:
"
He went to work on me, the devil. He said: You will bathe in your own blood until you tell me who you are. And how was I to tell him, a deserter is just what I am? I was running from him to you.
"

"
You keep saying
'
he.
'
Who was
it
that got to work on you?
"

"
Let me just get my breath.… I
'
ll tell you. Hetman, Bekeshin. Colonel, Strese. Vitsyn
'
s men. You don
'
t know out here what it
'
s like. The whole town is groaning. They boil people alive. They cut strips out of them. They take you by the scruff of the neck and push you inside, you don
'
t know where you are, it
'
s pitch black. You grope about—you are in a cage, inside a freight car. There are more than forty people in the cage, all in their underclothes. From time to time they open the door and grab whoever comes first—out he goes. As you grab a chicken to cut its throat. I swear to God. Some they hang, some they shoot, some they question. They beat you to shreds, they put salt on the wounds, they pour boiling water on you. When you vomit or relieve yourself they make you eat it. As for children and women—O God!
"

The unfortunate was at his last gasp. He cried out and died without finishing the sentence. Somehow they all knew it at once and took off their caps and crossed themselves.

That night, the news of a far more terrible incident flew around the camp.

Pamphil had been in the crowd surrounding the dying man. He had seen him, heard his words, and read the threatening inscription on the board.

His constant fear for his family in the event of his own death rose to a new climax. In his imagination he saw them handed over to slow torture, watched their faces distorted by pain, and heard their groans and cries for help. In his desperate anguish—to forestall their future sufferings and to end his own—he killed them himself, felling his wife and three children with that same, razor-sharp ax that he had used to carve toys for the two small girls and the boy, who had been his favorite.

The astonishing thing was that he did not kill himself immediately afterward. What could he be thinking of? What could he look forward to? What intentions could he have, what plans? It was a clear case of insanity, and nothing could save him now.

While Liberius, the doctor, and the members of the army soviet debated what to do with him, he roamed freely about the camp, his head hung low over his chest, his dirty-yellow eyes glowering unseeingly. An obtuse vague grimace of inhuman, unconquerable suffering never left his face.

No one was sorry for him. Everyone avoided him. Some people said he should be lynched, but they were not heeded.

There was nothing in the world left for him to do. At dawn he vanished from the camp, fleeing from himself like a dog with rabies.

High winter came with its severe frosts. Torn, seemingly disconnected sounds and shapes rose out of the icy mist, stood still, moved, and vanished. The sun was not the sun to which the earth was used, it was a changeling. Its crimson ball hung in the forest and from it, stiffly and slowly as in a dream or in a fairy tale, amber-yellow rays of light as thick as honey spread and, catching in the trees, froze to them in midair.

Invisible feet in felt boots, touching the ground softly with padded soles, yet making the snow screech angrily at each step, moved in all directions, while the hooded and fur-jacketed torsos belonging to them sailed separately through the upper air, like heavenly bodies.

Friends stopped and talked, their faces close together, flushed as at the steam baths, with beards bristling like iced loofahs. Clouds of dense, clammy steam puffed out of their mouths, too large for the clipped, frost-bitten words they accompanied.

Walking along the footpath, the doctor ran into Liberius.

"
Hello, stranger! Come to my dugout this evening. Spend the night. We
'
ll have a good talk. There is news.
"

"
Is the courier back? Any news from Varykino?
"

"
Not a word about your people or mine. This, however, leads me to the comforting conclusion that they must have got away in time, otherwise we would be sure to have heard something. We
'
ll talk about it tonight. I
'
ll expect you.
"

Going into the dugout that evening, the doctor repeated his question:
"
What have you heard about our families? Just tell me that.
"

"
You never want to see further than your nose. So far as I know, they are safe and sound. But the point is that the news is first-rate. Have some cold veal.
"

"
No, thanks. Come on now, don
'
t change the subject.
"

"
Are you sure you won
'
t? Well, I
'
ll have a bite. Though bread and vegetables are what we really need. There
'
s a lot of scurvy about. We should have got in more nuts and berries last autumn when the women were there to pick them. Well, as I was saying, our affairs are in excellent shape. What I
'
ve always prophesied is coming true. The worst is over. Kolchak
'
s forces are retreating all along the line. It
'
s a complete rout. Now do you see? What did I always tell you? Do you remember how you used to moan?
"