Doctor Zhivago (74 page)

"
Yes, I know, I
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ve often seen her.
"

"
I
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m surprised at you. In your place I
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d have fallen in love with her at once. I don
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t know where you men keep your eyes! She
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s such a marvel! Pretty, graceful, intelligent, well read, kind, clear-headed.
"

"
Her sister gave me a haircut the day I arrived—Glafira, the seamstress.
"

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I know. They both live with their oldest sister, Avdotia, the one who
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s a librarian. They are a good honest working family. I thought of asking them—if it comes to the worst, if you and I are arrested—if they would look after Katenka. I haven
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t made up my mind yet.
"

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Only if there really isn
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t any other way out. Pray God, it won
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t come to that.
"

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They say Sima is a bit odd—not quite right in the head. It
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s true she is not quite normal, but that
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s only because she
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s so profound and original. She
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s not an intellectual, but she
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s phenomenally educated. You and she are extraordinarily alike in your views. I think I should be quite happy about Katenka if she brought her up.
"

Once again he had been to the station and had again come back without having accomplished anything. Everything was still undecided. He and Lara were faced with the unknown. The weather was cold and dark as before the first snow. The sky, particularly where large patches of it could be seen, as at intersections, had a wintry look.

When Yurii Andreievich came home, he found that Lara had a visitor, Sima. They were having a conversation that was more like a lecture Sima was delivering to her hostess. Yurii Andreievich did not want to be in their way. He also wanted to be alone a little. The women were talking in the next room. The door between the two rooms was open; through the curtain that hung to the floor he could hear all they were saying.

"
I
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ll go on with my sewing but don
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t take any notice of it, Sima dear. I
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m listening. I attended lectures on history and philosophy. Your way of thinking interests me very much. Moreover, it
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s a great relief to listen to you. We haven
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t slept much the last few nights, worrying about Katenka. I know it
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s my duty as her mother to see to it that she is safe if anything happens to us. I ought to think it out calmly and sensibly, but I
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m not very good at that. It makes me sad to realize it. I am depressed from exhaustion and sleeplessness. It steadies me to listen to you. And then, it
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s going to snow any minute. It
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s lovely when it
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s snowing to listen to long, intelligent talk. If you glance out of the corner of your eye at the window when it
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s snowing you always feel as if someone were coming to the door across the yard, have you noticed? Go on, Sima dear. I
'
m listening.
"

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Where did we leave off last time?
"

Yurii Andreievich did not catch Lara
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s reply. He listened to what Sima was saying:

"
It
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s possible to use words such as
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culture,
'
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epochs.
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But people understand them in so many different ways. Because their meaning is ambiguous, I won
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t use them. I
'
ll replace them with other words.

"
I would say that man is made up of two parts, of God and work. Each succeeding stage in the development of the human spirit is marked by the achievement over many generations of an enormously slow and lengthy work. Such a work was Egypt. Greece was another. The theology of the Old Testament prophets was a third. The last in time, not yet superseded by anything else and still being accomplished by all who are inspired, is Christianity.

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To show you the completely new thing it brought into the world in all its freshness—not as you know it and are used to it but more simply, more directly—I should like to go over a few extracts from the liturgy—only a very few, and abridged at that.

"
Most liturgical texts bring together the concepts of the Old and the New Testament and put them side by side. For instance, the burning bush, the exodus from Egypt, the youths in the fiery furnace, Jonah and the whale are presented as parallels to the immaculate conception and the resurrection of Christ.

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Such comparisons bring out, very strikingly, I think, the way in which the Old Testament is old and the Gospel is new. In a number of texts Mary
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s motherhood is compared to the crossing of the Red Sea by the Jews. For instance there is one verse that begins:
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The Red Sea is the likeness of the virgin bride,
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and goes on to say that
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as the sea was impenetrable after its crossing by the Israelites, the Immaculate One was incorrupt after the birth of Emmanuel.
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That is to say, after the Jews crossed the Red Sea it became impassable, as before, and the Virgin after giving birth to our Lord was as immaculate as before. A parallel is drawn between the two events. What kind of events are they? Both are supernatural, both are recognized as miracles. What, then, was regarded as miraculous in each epoch—the ancient, primitive epoch and the later, post-Roman epoch which was far more advanced?

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In the first miracle you have a popular leader, the patriarch Moses, dividing the waters by a magic gesture, allowing a whole nation—countless numbers, hundreds of thousands of people—to go through, and when the last man is across the sea closes up again and submerges and drowns the pursuing Egyptians. The whole picture is in the spirit of antiquity—the elements obeying the magician, great jostling multitudes like Roman armies on the march, a people and a leader. Everything is visible, audible, overpowering.

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In the second miracle you have a girl—an everyday figure who would have gone unnoticed in the ancient world—quietly, secretly bringing forth a child, bringing forth life, bringing forth the miracle of life, the
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universal life,
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as He was afterwards called. The birth of her child is not only a violation of human laws as interpreted by the scribes, since it was out of wedlock; it also contradicts the laws of nature. She gives birth not by virtue of a natural process but by a miracle, by an inspiration. And from now on, the basis of life is to be that inspiration which the Gospel strives to make the foundation of life, contrasting the commonplace with the unique, the weekday with the holiday, and repudiating all compulsion.

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What an enormously significant change! How did it come about that an individual human event, insignificant by ancient standards, was regarded as equal in significance to the migration of a whole people? Why should it have this value in the eyes of heaven?—For it is through the eyes of heaven that it must be judged, it is before the face of heaven and in the sacred light of its own uniqueness that it all takes place.

"
Something in the world had changed. Rome was at an end. The reign of numbers was at an end. The duty, imposed by armed force, to live unanimously as a people, as a whole nation, was abolished. Leaders and nations were relegated to the past.

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They were replaced by the doctrine of individuality and freedom. Individual human life became the life story of God, and its contents filled the past expanses of the universe. As it says in a liturgy for the Feast of the Annunciation, Adam tried to be like God and failed, but now God was made man so that Adam should be made God.

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I
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ll come back to this in a minute,
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said Sima.
"
But now I
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d like to digress a little. With respect to the care of the workers, the protection of the mother, the struggle against the power of money, our revolutionary era is a wonder, unforgettable era of new, permanent achievements, but as regards its interpretation of life and the philosophy of happiness that is being propagated, it
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s simply impossible to believe that it is meant to be taken seriously, it
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s such a comic survival of the past. If all this rhetoric about leaders and peoples had the power to reverse history, it would set us back thousands of years to the Biblical times of shepherd tribes and patriarchs. But fortunately this is impossible.

"
Now a few words about Christ and Mary Magdalene—this isn
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t from the Gospel but from the prayers for one of the days in Holy Week, I think it
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s Tuesday or Wednesday. You know it all, Larisa Feodorovna, without me; I only want to remind you of something, I am not trying to teach you.

"
As you know, the word
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passion
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in Slavonic means in the first place suffering, the passion of Christ—
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Christ entering upon His passion.
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The liturgy also uses it in its later Russian connotation of
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lust
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and
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vice,
'
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My soul is enslaved by passions, I have become like the beasts of the field,
'
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Being cast out of paradise, let us become worthy to be readmitted to it by mastering our passions,
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and so on. It may be wrong of me, but I don
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t like the Lenten texts on the curbing of the senses and the mortification of the flesh. They are curiously flat and clumsy and without the poetry of other spiritual writings. I always think they were composed by fat monks. Not that I care if they themselves broke the rules and deceived other people or if they lived according to their conscience—it
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s not they that I
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m concerned with, but with the actual content of these passages. All these acts of contrition give too much importance to various infirmities of the flesh and to whether it is fat or famished—it
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s repulsive. It seems to me to raise something dirty, unimportant, inconsequential, to a dignity that does not belong to it. Forgive me for all these digressions.

"
I have always wondered why Mary Magdalene is mentioned on the very eve of Easter, just before the death and resurrection of Christ. I don
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t know the reason for it, but this reminder of what life is seems so timely at the moment of His taking leave of it and shortly before he rises again. Now listen to how the reminder is made—what genuine passion there is in it and what an uncompromising directness.

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There is some doubt as to whether this does refer to the Magdalene or to one of the other Marys, but anyway, she begs our Lord:

"
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Unbind my debt as I unbind my hair.
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It means:
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As I loosen my hair, do Thou release me from my guilt.
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Could any expression of repentance, of the thirst to be forgiven, be more concrete, more tangible?

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And later on in the liturgy for the same day there is another, more detailed passage, and this time it almost certainly refers to Mary Magdalene.

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Again she repents in a terribly tangible way over her past, saying that every night her flesh burns because of her old, inveterate habits.
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For the night is to me the flaring up of lust, the dark, moonless zeal of sin.
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She begs Christ to accept her tears of repentance and be moved by the sincerity of her sighs, so that she may dry His most pure feet with her hair—reminding Him that in the rushing waves of her hair Eve took refuge when she was overcome with fear and shame in paradise.
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Let me kiss Thy most pure feet and water them with my tears and dry them with the hair of my head, which covered Eve and sheltered her in its rushing waves when she was afraid in the cool of the day in paradise.
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And immediately after all this about her hair, she exclaims:
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Who can fathom the multitude of my sins or the depths of Thy mercy?
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What familiarity, what equality between God and life, God and the individual, God and a woman!
"