Doctor Zhivago (7 page)

Soon after the manifesto of October 17th several revolutionary organizations called for a big demonstration. The route was from the Tver Gate to the Kaluga Gate at the other end of the town. But this was a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth. The planners quarrelled and one after the other withdrew from participation. Then, learning that crowds had nevertheless gathered on the appointed morning, they hastily sent representatives to lead the demonstrators.

In spite of Tiverzin
'
s efforts to dissuade her, his mother joined the demonstrators, and the gay and sociable Pasha went with her.

It was a dry frosty November day with a still, leaden sky and a few snowflakes coming down one by one. They spun slowly and hesitantly before settling on the pavement like fluffy gray dust.

Down the street people came pouring in a torrent—faces, faces, faces, quilted winter coats and sheepskin hats, men and women students, old men, children, railwaymen in uniform, workers from the trolley depot and the telephone exchange in knee boots and leather jackets, girls and schoolboys.

For some time they sang the
"
Marseillaise,
"
the
"
Varshavianka,
"
and
"
Victims You Fell.
"
Then a man who had been walking backwards at the head of the procession, singing and conducting with his cap, which he used as a baton, turned around, put his cap on his head, and listened to what the other leaders around him were saying. The singing broke off in disorder. Now you could hear the crunch of innumerable footsteps on the frozen pavement.

The leaders had received a message from sympathizers that Cossacks were waiting to ambush the procession farther down the street. The warning had been given by telephone to a near-by pharmacy.

"
What of it?
"
said the organizers.
"
We must keep calm and not lose our heads, that
'
s the main thing. We must occupy the first public building we come to, warn the people, and scatter.
"

An argument began about the best building to go to. Some suggested the Society of Commercial Employees, others the Technical School, and still others the School of Foreign Correspondence.

While they were still arguing they reached the corner of a school building, which offered shelter every bit as good as those that had been mentioned.

When they drew level with the entrance the leaders turned aside, climbed the steps of the semicircular porch, and motioned the head of the procession to halt. The doors opened and the procession—coat to coat and cap to cap—moved into the entrance hall and up the stairs.

"
The auditorium, the auditorium,
"
shouted a few voices in the rear, but the crowd continued to press forward, scattering down corridors and straying into the classrooms. When the leaders at last succeeded in shepherding it into the auditorium, they tried several times to warn it of the ambush, but no one listened to them. Stopping and going inside a building were taken as an invitation to an impromptu meeting, which in fact began at once.

After all the walking and singing people were glad to sit quietly for a while and let others do their work for them, shouting themselves hoarse. The crowd, welcoming the rest, overlooked the minor differences between the speakers, who agreed on all essential points. In the end it was the worst orator of the lot who received the most applause. People made no effort to follow him and merely roared approval at his every word, no one minding the interruptions and everyone agreeing out of impatience to everything he said. There were shouts of
"
Shame,
"
a telegram of protest was drafted, and suddenly the crowd, bored with the speaker
'
s droning voice, stood up as one man and forgetting all about him poured out in a body—cap to cap and row after row—down the stairs and out into the street. The procession was resumed.

While the meeting was on, it had begun to snow. The street was white. The snow fell thicker and thicker.

When the dragoons charged, the marchers at the rear first knew nothing of it. A swelling noise rolled back to them as of great crowds shouting
"
Hurrah,
"
and individual screams of
"
Help!
"
and
"
Murder
"
were lost in the uproar. Almost at the same moment, and borne, as it were, on this wave of sound along the narrow corridor that formed as the crowd divided, the heads and manes of horses, and their saber-swinging riders, rode by swiftly and silently.

Half a platoon galloped through, turned, re-formed, and cut into the tail of the procession. The massacre began.

A few minutes later the avenue was almost deserted. People were scattering down the side streets. The snow was lighter. The afternoon was dry like a charcoal sketch. Then the sun, setting behind the houses, pointed as though with a finger at everything red in the street—the red tops of the dragoons
'
caps, a red flag trailing on the ground, and the red specks and threads of blood on the snow.

A groaning man with a split skull was crawling along the curb. From the far end of the street to which the chase had taken them several dragoons were riding back abreast at a walk. Almost at the horses
'
feet Marfa Tiverzina, her shawl knocked to the back of her head, was running from side to side screaming wildly:
"
Pasha! Pasha!
"

Pasha had been with her all along, amusing her by cleverly mimicking the last speaker at the meeting, but had vanished suddenly in the confusion when the dragoons charged.

A blow from a nagaika had fallen on her back, and though she had hardly felt it through her thickly quilted coat she swore and shook her fist at the retreating horsemen, indignant that they had dared to strike an old woman like herself, and in public at that.

Looking anxiously from side to side, she had the luck finally to spot the boy across the street. He stood in a recess between a grocer
'
s shop and a private stone house, where a group of chance passers-by had been hemmed in by a horseman who had mounted the sidewalk. Amused by their terror, the dragoon was making his horse perform volts and pirouettes, backing it into the crowd and making it rear slowly as in a circus turn. Suddenly he saw his comrades riding back, spurred his mount, and in a couple of bounds took his place in the file.

The crowd dispersed and Pasha, who had been too frightened to utter a sound, rushed to Marfa Gavrilovna.

The old woman grumbled all the way home.
"
Accursed murderers! People are happy because the Tsar has given them freedom, but these damned killers can
'
t stand it. They must spoil everything, twist every word inside out.
"

She was furious with the dragoons, furious with the whole world, and at the moment even with her own son. When she was in a temper it seemed to her that all the recent troubles were the fault of
"
Kuprinka
'
s bunglers and fumblers,
"
as she called them.

"
What do they want, the half-wits? They don
'
t know themselves, just so long as they can make mischief, the vipers. Like that chatterbox. Pasha dear, show me again how he went on, show me, darling. Oh! I
'
ll die laughing. You
'
ve got him to the life. Buzz, buzz, buzz—a real bumblebee!
"

At home she fell to scolding her son. Was she of an age to have a curly-headed oaf on a horse belt her on her behind?

"
Really, Mother, who d
'
you take me for? You
'
d think I was the Cossack captain or the Chief of Police.
"

Nikolai Nikolaievich saw the fleeing demonstrators from his window. He realized who they were and watched to see if Yura were among them. But none of his friends seemed to be there though he thought that he had caught sight of the Dudorov boy—he could not quite remember his name—that desperado who had so recently had a bullet extracted from his shoulder and who was again hanging about in places where he had no business to be.

Nikolai Nikolaievich had arrived from Petersburg that autumn. He had no apartment in Moscow and he did not wish to go to a hotel, so he had put up with some distant relatives of his, the Sventitskys. They had given him the corner room on the second floor.

The Sventitskys were childless, and the two-story house that their late parents had rented from time immemorial from the Princes Dolgoruky was too big for them. It was part of the untidy cluster of buildings in various styles with three courtyards and a garden that stood on the Dolgorukys
'
property, bounded by three narrow side streets and known by the ancient name of Flour Town. In spite of its four windows, the study was darkish. It was cluttered up with books, papers, rugs, and prints. It had a balcony forming a semicircle around the corner of the house. The double glass door of the balcony was hermetically sealed for the winter.

The balcony door and two of the windows looked out on an alley that ran into the distance, with its sleigh tracks and the irregular line of its houses and fences.

Purple shadows reached into the room from the garden. The trees, laden with hoarfrost, their branches like smoky streaks of candle wax, looked in as if they wished to rest their burden on the floor of the study.

Nikolai Nikolaievich stood gazing into the distance. He thought of his last winter in Petersburg—Gapon,
[2]
Gorky, the visit to Prime Minister Witte, modern, fashionable writers. From that bedlam he had fled to the peace and quiet of the ancient capital to write the book he had in mind. But he had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. Lectures every day—University Courses for Women, the Religious Philosophical Society, the Red Cross and the Strike Fund—not a moment to himself. What he needed was to get away to Switzerland, to some remote canton in the woods, to the peace of lakes, mountains, sky, and the echoing, ever-responsive air.

Nikolai Nikolaievich turned away from the window. He felt like going out to call on someone or just to walk about the streets, but he remembered that Vyvolochnov, the Tolstoyan, was coming to see him about some business or other. He paced up and down the room, his thoughts turning to his nephew.

When Nikolai Nikolaievich had moved from his retreat on the Volga to Petersburg he had left Yura in Moscow, where he had many relatives—the Vedeniapins, the Ostromyslenskys, the Seliavins, the Mikhaelises, the Sventitskys, and the Gromekos. At first Yura was foisted on the slovenly old chatterbox Ostromyslensky, known among the clan as Fedka. Fedka lived in sin with his ward Motia and therefore saw himself as a disrupter of the established order and a champion of progressive thought. He did not justify his kinsman
'
s confidence, and even took the money given him for Yura
'
s upkeep and spent it on himself. Yura was transferred to the professorial family of the Gromekos and was still with them.

The atmosphere at the Gromekos
'
was eminently suitable, Nikolai Nikolaievich thought. They had their daughter, Tonia, who was Yura
'
s age, and Misha Gordon, who was Yura
'
s friend and classmate, living with them.

"
And a comical triumvirate they make,
"
thought Nikolai Nikolaievich. The three of them had soaked themselves in
The Meaning of Love
and
The Kreutzer Sonata
and had a mania for preaching chastity. It was right, of course, for adolescents to go through a frenzy of purity, but they were overdoing it a bit, they had lost all sense of proportion.

How childish and eccentric they were! For some reason, they called the domain of the sensual, which disturbed them so much,
"
vulgar,
"
and used the expression in and out of place. A most ineptly chosen term!
"
Vulgar
"
was applied to instinct, to pornography, to exploitation of women, and almost to the whole physical world. They blushed or grew pale when they pronounced the word.

"
If I had been in Moscow,
"
thought Nikolai Nikolaievich,
"
I would not have let it go so far. Modesty is necessary, but within limits…Ah! Nil Feoktistovich, come in!
"
he exclaimed, going out to meet his visitor.

A fat man in a gray Tolstoyan shirt with a broad leather belt, felt boots, and trousers bagging at the knees entered the room. He looked like a good soul with his head in the clouds. A pince-nez on a wide black ribbon quivered angrily on his nose. He had begun to take his things off in the hall but had not removed his scarf and came in with it trailing on the floor and his round felt hat still in his hand. These encumbrances prevented him from shaking hands with Nikolai Nikolaievich and even from saying How-do-you-do.