Doctor Zhivago (70 page)

In some places the skirting had come away from the floor. It took him a little over an hour to pack the cracks with broken glass. The door fitted well, and once it was closed the bedroom should be ratproof.

There was a Dutch stove in a corner of the room, with a tiled cornice not quite reaching the ceiling. In the kitchen there was a stack of logs. Yurii Andreievich decided to rob Lara of a couple of armfuls and, getting down on one knee, he gathered them up and balanced them on his left arm. Carrying them into the bedroom, he stacked them near the stove and had a look inside to see how it worked and in what condition it was. He had meant to lock the door but the latch was broken; he wedged it firmly with paper; then he laid the fire at his leisure and lit it.

As he put in more logs, he noticed that the cross section of one of them was marked with the letters
"
K.D.
"
He recognized them with surprise. In the old Krueger days when timber rejected by the factories was sold for fuel, the boles were stamped before they were cut up into sections to show where they came from.
"
K.D.
"
stood for Kulabish Division in Varykino.

The discovery upset him. These logs in Lara
'
s house must mean that she was in touch with Samdeviatov and that he provided for her as he had once supplied the doctor and his household with all their needs. He had always found it irksome to accept his help. Now his embarrassment at being in his debt was complicated by other feelings.

It was hardly likely that Samdeviatov helped Lara out of sheer goodness of heart. He thought of Samdeviatov
'
s free and easy ways and of Lara
'
s rashness as a woman. There must surely be something between them.

The dry Kulabish logs crackled merrily and stormed into a blaze, and, as they caught, Yurii Andreievich
'
s blind jealousy turned from the merest suppositions into certainty.

But so tormented was he on every side that one anxiety drove out another. He could not get rid of his suspicions, but his mind leapt from subject to subject, and the thought of his family, flooding it again, submerged for a time his jealous fantasies.

"
So you are in Moscow, my dear ones?
"
It seemed to him now that the seamstress had given him an assurance of their safe arrival.
"
So you made all that long journey once again, and this time without me. How did you manage on the way? Why was Alexander Alexandrovich called back? Was it to return to his chair at the Academy? How did you find the house? How silly of me! I don
'
t even know whether the house is still standing. Lord, how hard and painful it all is! If only I could stop thinking. I can
'
t think straight. What
'
s the matter with me, Tonia? I think I
'
m ill. What will become of us? What will become of you, Tonia, Tonia darling, Tonia? And Sashenka? And Alexander Alexandrovich? And myself? Why hast Thou cast me off? O Light everlasting! Why are we always separated, my dear ones? Why are you always being swept away from me? But we
'
ll be together again, we
'
ll be reunited, won
'
t we, darling? I
'
ll find you, even if I have to walk all the way to get to you. We
'
ll see each other, we
'
ll be together, we
'
ll be all right again, won
'
t we?

"
Why doesn
'
t the earth swallow me up, why am I such a monster that I keep forgetting that Tonia was to have another child, and that she has surely had it? This isn
'
t the first time I
'
ve forgotten it. How did she get through her confinement? To think that they all stopped in Yuriatin on their way to Moscow! It
'
s true that Lara didn
'
t know them, but here is a complete stranger, a seamstress, a hairdresser who has heard all about them, and Lara says nothing about them in her note. How could she be so careless, so indifferent? It
'
s as strange as her saying nothing about knowing Samdeviatov.
"

Yurii Andreievich now looked around the room with a new discernment. All its furnishings belonged to the unknown tenants who had long been absent and in hiding. There was nothing of Lara
'
s among them, and they could tell him nothing of her tastes. The photographs on the walls were of strangers. However that might be, he suddenly felt uncomfortable under the eyes of all these men and women. The clumsy furniture breathed hostility. He felt alien and unwanted in this bedroom.

What a fool he had been to keep remembering this house and missing it, what a fool to have come into this room not as into an ordinary room but as if into the heart of his longing for Lara! How silly his way of feeling would seem to anyone outside! How different was the way strong, practical, efficient, handsome males, such as Samdeviatov, lived and spoke and acted! And why should Lara be expected to prefer his weakness and the dark, obscure, unrealistic language of his love? Did she need this confusion? Did she herself want to be what she was to him?

And what was she to him, as he had just put it? Oh, that question he could always answer.

A spring evening. The air punctuated with scattered sounds. The voices of children playing in the streets coming from varying distances as if to show that the whole expanse is alive. And this vast expanse is Russia, his incomparable mother; famed far and wide, martyred, stubborn, extravagant, crazy, irresponsible, adored, Russia with her eternally splendid, and disastrous, and unpredictable adventures. Oh, how sweet to be alive! How good to be alive and to love life! Oh, the ever-present longing to thank life, thank existence itself, to thank them as one being to another being.

This was exactly what Lara was. You could not communicate with life and existence, but she was their representative, their expression, in her the inarticulate principle of existence became sensitive and capable of speech.

And all that he had just reproached her with in a moment of doubt was untrue, a thousand times untrue! Everything about her was perfect, flawless.

Tears of admiration and repentance filled his eyes. Opening the stove door, he poked the fire; he pushed the logs that were ablaze and had turned into pure heat to the back and brought forward into the draft those that were less incandescent. Leaving the door open, he sat before the open flames, delighting in the play of light and the warmth on his face and hands. The warmth and light brought him completely to his senses. He missed Lara unbearably and he longed for something that could bring him into touch with her at that very moment.

He drew her crumpled letter from his pocket. It was folded so that the back of the page he had read earlier was outside, and now he saw that there was something written on it. Smoothing it out, he read it by the dancing firelight:

"
You surely know what
'
s happened to your family. They are in Moscow. Tonia has had a little girl.
"
After that several lines were crossed out, then:
"
I
'
ve crossed it out because it
'
s silly to write about it. We
'
ll talk our fill when we meet. I
'
m rushing out, I must get hold of a horse. I don
'
t know what I
'
ll do if I can
'
t. It
'
s so difficult with Katenka.…
"
The rest of the sentence was smudged and illegible.

"
She got the horse from Samdeviatov,
"
Yurii Andreievich reflected calmly.
"
If she had anything to conceal, she wouldn
'
t have mentioned it.
"

When the stove was hot Yurii Andreievich closed the flue and had something to eat. After that he felt so sleepy that he lay down on the sofa without undressing and at once fell fast asleep. The loud, insolent noise of the rats behind the walls and the door did not reach him. He had two bad dreams, one after the other.

He was in Moscow in a room with a glass door. The door was locked. For greater safety he was keeping hold of it by the handle and pulling it toward himself. From the other side, his little boy, Sashenka, dressed in a sailor suit and cap, was knocking, crying and begging to be let in. Behind the child, splashing him and the door with its spray, there was a waterfall. It was making a tremendous noise. Either the water was pouring from a burst pipe (a usual occurrence in those days) or else the door was a barrier against some wild countryside, a mountain gorge filled with the sound of its raging torrent and the millennial cold and darkness of its caves.

The noise of the tumbling water terrified the boy. It drowned his cries, but Yurii Andreievich could see him trying, over and over again, to form the word
"
Daddy
"
with his lips.

Heartbroken, Yurii Andreievich longed with all his being to take the boy in his arms, press him to his chest, and run away with him as fast as his feet would carry him.

Yet, with tears pouring down his face he kept hold of the handle of the locked door, shutting out the child, sacrificing him to a false notion of honor, in the name of his alleged duty to another woman, who was not the child
'
s mother and who might at any moment come into the room from another door.

He woke up drenched in sweat and tears.
"
I
'
ve got a fever, I am sick,
"
he thought.
"
This isn
'
t typhus. This is some sort of exhaustion that is taking the form of a dangerous illness—an illness with a crisis, it will be just like any serious infection, and the only question is which is going to win, life or death. But I
'
m too sleepy to think.
"
He dropped off to sleep again.

He dreamed of a dark winter morning in a bustling Moscow street. Judging by the early morning traffic, the trolleys ringing their bells, and the yellow pools of lamplight on the gray snow-covered street, it was before the revolution.

He dreamed of a big apartment with many windows, all on the same side of the house, probably no higher than the third story, with drawn curtains reaching to the floor.

Inside, people were lying about asleep in their clothes like travellers, and the rooms were untidy like a railway car, with half-eaten legs and wings of roast chicken and other remnants of food scattered about on greasy bits of newspaper. The shoes that the many friends, relatives, callers, and homeless people, all sheltering in the apartment, had removed for the night, were standing in pairs on the floor. The hostess, Lara, in a dressing gown tied hastily around her waist, moved swiftly and silently from room to room, hurrying about her chores, and he was following her step by step, muttering clumsy irrelevant explanations and generally making a nuisance of himself. But she no longer had a moment to give him and took no notice of his mutterings except for turning to him now and then with a tranquil, puzzled look or bursting into her inimitable, candid, silvery laughter. This was the only form of intimacy that remained between them. And how distant, cold, and compellingly attractive was this woman to whom he had sacrificed all he had, whom he had preferred to everything, and in comparison with whom everything seemed to him worthless!

It was not he but something greater than himself that wept and sobbed in him, and shone in the darkness with bright, phosphorescent words. And with weeping soul, he too wept. He felt pity for himself.

"
I am ill,
"
he realized in intervals of clarity between sleep, and delirium, and unconsciousness.
"
I must have some form of typhus that isn
'
t described in textbooks, that we didn
'
t study at school. I ought to get myself something to eat or I
'
ll die of starvation.
"

But the moment he tried to raise himself on his elbow he found that he was incapable of moving, and fainted or fell asleep.

"
How long have I been lying here?
"
he wondered during one such interval of clarity.
"
How many hours? How many days? When I lay down it was early spring. But now the windows are so thick with hoarfrost that the room is dark.
"

In the kitchen, rats were rattling the plates, scurrying up the walls, and heavily flopping down and squealing in their disgusting contralto voices.

And he again fell asleep, and on awakening discovered that the snowy windows had filled with a pink light, glowing like red wine in crystal glasses. And he wondered whether it was dawn or dusk.