Doctor Zhivago (79 page)

"
I am glad you reminded me, I was also thinking of something like that today. But I have no faith in our future here. On the contrary, I have a foreboding that we
'
ll soon be swept away, somewhere even more distant. But so long as we still have this breathing space, I want to ask you a favor. Will you give up a few hours in the next few evenings and put down all the poems I have heard from you at different times? Half of them you
'
ve lost and the rest you
'
ve never written down, and I
'
m afraid you
'
ll forget them and they
'
ll be lost altogether as you say has often happened before.
"

At the end of the day they washed in plenty of hot water, and Lara bathed Katenka. Feeling blissfully clean, Yurii Andreievich sat down at the table before the window, his back to the room where Lara, wrapped in a bath towel and fragrant with soap, her hair twisted in a turban with another towel, was putting Katenka to bed and tucking her up. Enjoying the foretaste of concentrated work, he took in what was going on around him with a happy, diffuse attentiveness.

It was one in the morning when Lara, who had been pretending, finally went to sleep. Her nightdress and Katenka
'
s, like the freshly laundered linen on the beds, shone clean and lacy. Even in those days, Lara managed somehow to get starch.

The stillness that surrounded Yurii Andreievich breathed with happiness and life. The lamplight fell softly yellow on the white sheets of paper and gilded the surface of the ink inside the inkwell. Outside, the frosty winter night was pale blue. To see it better, Yurii Andreievich stepped into the next room, cold and dark, and looked out of the window. The light of the full moon on the snow-covered clearing was as viscid as white of egg or thick white paint. The splendor of the frosty night was inexpressible. His heart was at peace. He went back into the warm, well-lit room and began to write.

Careful to convey the living movement of his hand in his flowing writing, so that even outwardly it should not lose individuality and grow numb and soulless, he set down, gradually improving them and moving further and further away from the original as he made copy after copy, the poems that he remembered best and that had taken the most definite shape in his mind—
"
Christmas Star,
"
"
Winter Night,
"
and a number of others of the same kind, which later were forgotten, mislaid, and never found again.

From these old, completed poems, he went on to others that he had begun and left unfinished, getting into their spirit and sketching the sequels, though without the slightest hope of finishing them now. Finally getting into his stride and carried away, he started on a new poem.

After two or three stanzas and several images by which he himself was struck, his work took possession of him and he felt the approach of what is called inspiration. At such moments the relation of the forces that determine artistic creation is, as it were, reversed. The dominant thing is no longer the state of mind the artist seeks to express but the language in which he wants to express it. Language, the home and receptacle of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in terms of sonority but in terms of the impetuousness and power of its inward flow. Then, like the current of a mighty river polishing stones and turning wheels by its very movement, the flow of speech creates in passing, by virtue of its own laws, meter and rhythm and countless other forms and formations, which are even more important, but which are as yet unexplored, insufficiently recognized, and unnamed.

At such moments Yurii Andreievich felt that the main part of the work was being done not by him but by a superior power which was above him and directed him, namely the movement of universal thought and poetry in its present historical stage and the one to come. And he felt himself to be only the occasion, the fulcrum, needed to make this movement possible.

This feeling relieved him for a time of self-reproach, of his dissatisfaction with himself, of the sense of his own insignificance. He looked up, he looked around him.

He saw the two sleeping heads on their snow-white pillows. The purity of their features, and of the clean linen and the clean rooms, and of the night, the snow, the stars, the moon, surged through his heart in a single wave of meaning, moving him to a joyful sense of the triumphant purity of being.
"
Lord! Lord!
"
he whispered,
"
and all this is for me? Why hast Thou given me so much? Why hast Thou admitted me to Thy presence, allowed me to stray into Thy world, among Thy treasures, under Thy stars, and to the feet of my luckless, reckless, uncomplaining love, who fills my eyes with perpetual delight?
"

At three in the morning Yurii Andreievich looked up from his papers. He came back from his remote, selfless concentration, home to reality and to himself, happy, strong, peaceful. Suddenly the stillness of the open country stretching into the distance outside the window was broken by a mournful, plaintive sound.

He went into the unlit adjoining room to look through the window, but while he had been working the glass had frosted over. He dragged away the roll of carpet that had been pushed against the front door to stop the draft, threw his coat over his shoulders, and went out.

He was dazzled by the white glow playing on the shadowless, moonlit snow and could at first see nothing. Then the long, whimpering, deep-bellied howl sounded around, muffled by the distance, and he noticed four long shadows, no thicker than pencil strokes, at the edge of the clearing just beyond the gully.

The wolves stood in a row, their heads raised and their muzzles pointing at the house, baying at the moon or at its silver reflection on the windows. But scarcely had Yurii Andreievich realized that they were wolves when they turned and trotted off like dogs, almost as if they could read his thoughts. He lost sight of them before he noticed the direction in which they had vanished.

"
That
'
s the last straw!
"
he thought.
"
Is their lair quite close? Perhaps in the gully? How terrible! And Samdeviatov
'
s horse in the barn! They must have scented it.
"

He decided for the time being not to tell Lara, lest he upset her. Going back, he shut all the doors between the cold rooms and the heated part of the house, pushed rugs and clothes against the cracks to keep out the draft, and went back to his desk. The lamplight was bright and welcoming as before. But he was no longer in the mood to write. He couldn
'
t settle down. He could think of nothing but wolves and of looming dangers and complications of every kind. Moreover, he was tired.

Lara woke up.
"
Are you still burning, my precious bright light?
"
she whispered in a husky voice heavy with sleep.
"
Come and sit beside me for a moment. I
'
ll tell you my dream.
"

He put out the light.

Another day of quiet madness went by. They had found a child
'
s sled in the house. Katenka, flushed bright red and bundled up in her coat, glided, shrieking with laughter, down the unswept paths from the snow-chute Yurii Andreievich had made for her by packing the snow hard with his spade and pouring water on it. Endlessly, she climbed back to the top of the mound, pulling the sled by a string, her smile never leaving her face.

It was freezing; the air was getting noticeably colder, but it was sunny. The snow was yellow at noon, with orange seeping into its honey color like an aftertaste at sunset.

The laundering and washing that Lara had done the day before had made the house damp. The steam had covered the windows with thick hoarfrost and left black streaks of damp on the wallpaper. The rooms were dark and cheerless. Yurii Andreievich carried logs and water and went on with his inspection of the house, making more and more discoveries, and he helped Lara with her endless chores.

In the rush of some task or other their hands would meet and join, and then they set down whatever they were carrying, weak and giddy with the irresistible onslaught of their tenderness, all thought driven from their heads. And the moments went by until it was late and they both remembered, horrified, that Katenka had been left alone much too long or that the horse was unwatered and unfed, and rushed off, conscience-stricken, to make up for their omissions.

Yurii Andreievich had not slept enough; there was a pleasant haze in his head, like tipsiness, and he ached all over with a nagging blissful weakness. He waited impatiently for the night, to go back to his interrupted writing.

The preliminary part of the work was being done outside his consciousness, during the drowsiness that filled him and veiled his surroundings and his thoughts. The diffuse mistiness in which everything was enveloped marked the stage preceding the distinctness of the final embodiment. Like the confusion of a first rough draft, the wearisome inactivity of the day was a necessary preparation for the night.

Although he felt exhausted, nothing was left untouched, unchanged. Everything was being altered and transformed.

Yurii Andreievich felt that his dream of remaining in Varykino would not come true, that the hour of his parting with Lara was at hand; he would inevitably lose her and with her the will to live and perhaps life itself. He was sick at heart, yet his greatest torment was his impatience for the night, his longing so to express his grief that everyone should be moved to tears.

The wolves he had been remembering all day long were no longer wolves on the snowy plain under the moon, they had become a theme, they had come to symbolize a hostile force bent upon destroying him and Lara and on driving them from Varykino.

The thought of this hostility developed in him and by evening it loomed like a prehistoric beast or some fabulous monster, a dragon whose tracks had been discovered in the ravine and who thirsted for his blood and lusted after Lara.

The night came and once again the doctor lit the lamp on the table. Lara and Katenka went to bed earlier than the night before.

What he had written that night fell into two parts. Clean copies—improved versions of earlier poems—were set out in his best penmanship. New work was written in an illegible scrawl full of gaps and abbreviations.

In deciphering these scribbles, he went through the usual disappointments. Last night these rough fragments had moved him to tears, and he himself had been surprised by some felicitous passages. Now these very passages seemed to him distressingly and conspicuously strained.

It had been the dream of his life to write with an originality so discreet, so well concealed, as to be unnoticeable in its disguise of current and customary forms; all his life he had struggled for a style so restrained, so unpretentious that the reader or the hearer would fully understand the meaning without realizing how he assimilated it. He had striven constantly for an unostentatious style, and he was dismayed to find how far he still remained from his ideal.

Last night he had tried to convey, by words so simple as to be almost childish and suggesting the directness of a lullaby, his feeling of mingled love and fear and longing and courage, in such a way that it should speak for itself, almost apart from the words.

Looking over these rough sketches now, he found that they needed a connecting theme to give unity to the lines, which for lack of it fell apart. He crossed out what he had written and began to write down the legend of St. George and the dragon in the same lyrical manner. At first he used a broad, spacious pentameter. The regularity of the rhythm, independent of the meaning and inherent in the meter itself, annoyed him by its doggerel artificiality. He gave up the pompous meter and the caesura and cut down the lines to four beats, as you cut out useless words in prose. The task was now more difficult but more engaging. The result was livelier but still too verbose. He forced himself to even shorter lines. Now the words were crammed in their trimeters, and Yurii Andreievich felt wide awake, roused, excited; the right words to fill the short lines came, prompted by the measure. Things scarcely named in the lines evoked concrete images. He heard the horse
'
s hoofs ringing on the surface of the poem, as you hear the ambling of a horse in one of Chopin
'
s ballades. St. George was galloping over the boundless expanse of the steppe. He could watch him, as he grew smaller in the distance. He wrote in a feverish hurry, scarcely able to keep up with the words as they poured out, always to the point and tumbling into place of themselves.

He had not noticed Lara getting out of bed and coming across to the table. She seemed very thin in her long nightdress and taller than she really was. He started with surprise when she appeared beside him, pale, frightened, stretching out her hand and whispering:

"
Do you hear? A dog howling. Even two of them, I think. Oh, how terrible! It
'
s a very bad omen. We
'
ll bear it somehow till the morning, and then we
'
ll go, we
'
ll go! I won
'
t stay here any longer.
"