Doctor Zhivago (72 page)

"
Wait a moment before you tell me about your husband. I am not jealous of him. I told you I can be jealous only of my inferiors, not of my equals. Tell me first about this other man.
"

"
Which man?
"

"
This wrecker who spoiled our life. Who was he?
"

"
A fairly well-known Moscow lawyer. A friend of my father
'
s. When Father died and we were very badly off he gave my mother financial help. He was unmarried, rich. I
'
ve probably made him sound a lot more interesting than he is by painting him so black. He couldn
'
t be more ordinary. I
'
ll tell you his name if you like.
"

"
You needn
'
t. I know it. I saw him once.
"

"
Really?
"

"
In a hotel room, when your mother took poison. It was late at night. You and I were both still at school.
"

"
Oh, I remember. You came with someone else. You stood in the shadow, in the hallway. I don
'
t know if I would have remembered by myself, but I think you reminded me of it once, it must have been in Meliuzeievo.
"

"
Komarovsky was there.
"

"
Was he? Quite possible. It wasn
'
t unusual for us to be in the same place. We often saw each other.
"

"
Why are you blushing?
"

"
At the sound of Komarovsky
'
s name coming from you. I
'
m no longer used to hearing it, I was taken by surprise.
"

"
There was a school friend of mine who went with me that night, and this is what he told me there in the hotel. He recognized Komarvosky as a man he had happened to see once before. As a child, during a journey, this boy, Misha Gordon, witnessed the suicide of my father—the millionaire industrialist. They were in the same train. Father jumped deliberately from the moving train and was killed. He was accompanied on the journey by Komarovsky, who was his lawyer. He made Father drink, he got his business into a muddle, he brought him to the point of bankruptcy, and he drove him to suicide. It was his fault that my father killed himself and that I was left an orphan.
"

"
It isn
'
t possible! It
'
s extraordinary! Can it really be true? So he was your evil genius, too! It brings us even closer! It must be predestination!
"

"
He is the man of whom I shall always be incurably, insanely jealous.
"

"
How can you say such a thing? It isn
'
t just that I don
'
t love him—I despise him.
"

"
Can you know yourself as well as that? Human nature, and particularly woman
'
s, is so mysterious and so full of contradictions. Perhaps there is something in your loathing that keeps you in subjection to him more than to any man whom you love of your own free will, without compulsion.
"

"
What a terrible thing to say! And as usual, the way you put it makes me feel that this thing, unnatural as it is, seems to be true. But how horrible if it is!
"

"
Don
'
t be upset. Don
'
t listen to me. I only meant that I am jealous of a dark, unconscious element, something irrational, unfathomable. I am jealous of your toilet articles, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe which could get into your blood and poison you. And I am jealous of Komarovsky, as if he were an infectious disease. Someday he will take you away, just as certainly as death will someday separate us. I know this must seem obscure and confused, but I can
'
t say it more clearly. I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely.
"

"
Tell me more about your husband—
'
One writ with me in sour misfortune
'
s book,
'
as Shakespeare says.
"

"
Where did he say that?
"

"
In
Romeo and Juliet
.
"

"
I told you a lot in Meliuzeievo when I was looking for him, and then here, when I heard how his men arrested you and took you to his train. I may have told you—or perhaps I only thought I did—how I once saw him from a distance when he was getting into his car. But you can imagine how many guards there were around him! I found him almost unchanged. The same handsome, honest, resolute face, the most honest face I
'
ve ever seen in my life. The same manly, straightforward character, not a shadow of affectation or make-believe. And yet I did notice a difference, and it alarmed me.

"
It was as if something abstract had crept into this face and made it colorless. As if a living human face had become an embodiment of a principle, the image of an idea. My heart sank when I noticed it. I realized that this had happened to him because he had handed himself over to a superior force, but a force that is deadening, and pitiless and will not spare him in the end. It seemed to me that he was a marked man and that this was the seal of his doom. But perhaps I
'
m confused about it. Perhaps I
'
m influenced by what you said when you described your meeting with him. After all, in addition to what we feel for each other, I am influenced by you in so many ways!
"

"
Tell me about your life with him before the revolution.
"

"
Very early, when I was still a child, purity became my ideal. He was the embodiment of it. You know we grew up almost in the same house. He, Galiullin, and I. As a little boy he was infatuated with me. He used almost to faint whenever he saw me. I probably shouldn
'
t be talking this way. But it would be worse to pretend I didn
'
t know. It was the kind of all-absorbing childish passion that a child conceals because his pride won
'
t let him show it, but one look at his face is enough to tell you all about it. We saw a lot of each other. He and I were as different as you and I are alike. I chose him then and there in my heart. I decided that as soon as we were old enough I would marry this wonderful boy, and in my own mind I became engaged to him.

"
You know it
'
s extraordinary how gifted he is! His father was a signal man, or a crossing guard, I don
'
t know which, and by sheer brains and hard work he reached, I was going to say the level, but it
'
s more like the summit, of present academic knowledge in two fields—classics and mathematics! After all, that
'
s something!
"

"
But then what spoiled your marriage, if you loved each other so much?
"

"
Ah, that
'
s hard to answer. I
'
ll try to tell you. But it
'
s strange that I, an ordinary woman, should explain to you, who are so wise, what is happening to human life in general and to life in Russia and why families get broken up, including yours and mine. Ah, it isn
'
t a matter of individuals, of being alike or different in temperament, of loving or not loving! All customs and traditions, all our way of life, everything to do with home and order, has crumbled into dust in the general upheaval and reorganization of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that
'
s left is the naked human soul stripped to the last shred, for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself. You and I are like Adam and Eve, the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with—and now at the end of it we are just as naked and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in the world in all the thousands of years between them and us, and it is in memory of all those vanished marvels that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.
"

She was silent for a while, then she went on more calmly:

"
I
'
ll tell you. If Strelnikov became Pashenka again, if he stopped his raging and rebelling; if time turned back; if by some miracle, somewhere, I could see the window of our house shining, the lamplight on Pasha
'
s desk and his books, even if it were at the end of the earth—I would crawl to it on my knee
'
s. Everything in me would respond. I could never hold out against the call of the past, of loyalty. There is nothing I wouldn
'
t sacrifice, however precious. Even you. Even our love, so carefree, so spontaneous, so natural. Oh, forgive me! I don
'
t mean that. It isn
'
t true!
"

She threw herself into his arms, sobbing. But very soon she controlled herself and, wiping away her tears, said:

"
Isn
'
t it the same call of duty that drives you back to Tonia? Oh, God, how miserable we are! What will become of us? What are we to do?
"

When she had recovered she went on:

"
But I haven
'
t answered your question about what it was that spoiled our happiness. I came to understand it very clearly afterward. I
'
ll tell you. It isn
'
t only our story. It has become the fate of many others.
"

"
Tell me, my love, you who are so wise.
"

"
We were married two years before the war. We were just beginning to make a life for ourselves, we had just set up our home, when the war broke out. I believe now that the war is to blame for everything, for all the misfortunes that followed and that hound our generation to this day. I remember my childhood well. I can still remember a time when we all accepted the peaceful outlook of the last century. It was taken for granted that you listened to reason, that it was right and natural to do what your conscience told you to do. For a man to die by the hand of another was a rare, an exceptional event, something quite out of the ordinary. Murders happened in plays, newspapers, and detective stories, not in everyday life.

"
And then there was the jump from this peaceful, naïve moderation to blood and tears, to mass insanity, and to the savagery of daily, hourly, legalized, rewarded slaughter.

"
I suppose one must always pay for such things. You must remember better than I do the beginning of disintegration, how everything began to break down all at once—trains and food supplies in towns, and the foundations of the family, and moral standards.
"

"
Go on. I know what you
'
ll say next. How well you see all these things. What a joy to listen to you!
"

"
It was then that untruth came down on our land of Russia. The main misfortune, the root of all the evil to come, was the loss of confidence in the value of one
'
s own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people
'
s notions, notions that were being crammed down everybody
'
s throat. And then there arose the power of the glittering phrase, first the Tsarist, then the revolutionary.

"
This social evil became an epidemic. It was catching. And it affected everything, nothing was left untouched by it. Our home, too, became infected. Something went wrong in it. Instead of being natural and spontaneous as we had always been, we began to be idiotically pompous with each other. Something showy, artificial, forced, crept into our conversation—you felt you had to be clever in a certain way about certain world-important themes. How could Pasha, who was so discriminating, so exacting with himself, who distinguished so unerringly between reality and appearance, how could he fail to notice the falsehood that had crept into our lives?

"
And at this point he made his fatal, terrible mistake. He mistook the spirit of the times, the social, universal evil, for a private and domestic one. He listened to our clichés, to our unnatural official tone, and he thought it was because he was second-rate, a nonentity, that we talked like this. I suppose you find it incredible that such trivial things could matter so much in our married life. You can
'
t imagine how important this was, what foolish things this childish nonsense made him do.