Doctor Zhivago (82 page)

He almost waved away the tangible beauty of the hour, like a crowd of persistent friends, almost saying to the lingering afterglow:
"
Thank you, thank you, I
'
ll be all right.
"

Still standing on the veranda, he turned his face to the shut door, his back to the world.
"
My bright sun has set,
"
he kept repeating inwardly, as though trying to engrave these words in his memory. He did not have the strength to utter all these words aloud.

He went into the house. A double monologue was going on in his mind, two different kinds of monologue, the one dry and businesslike, the other addressed to Lara, like a river in flood.

"
Now I
'
ll go to Moscow,
"
ran, his thoughts.
"
The first job is to survive. I must not force myself to sleep. Instead, I must work all through the night till I drop with exhaustion. Yes, and another thing, light the stove in the bedroom at once, there is no reason why I should freeze tonight.
"

But there was also this other inward conversation:
"
I
'
ll stay with you a little, my unforgettable delight, for as long as my arms and my hands and my lips remember you. I
'
ll put my grief for you in a work that will endure and be worthy of you. I
'
ll write your memory into an image of aching tenderness and sorrow. I
'
ll stay here till this is done, then I too will go. This is how I will portray you, I
'
ll trace your features on paper as the sea, after a fearful storm has churned it up, traces the form of the greatest, farthest-reaching wave on the sand. Seaweed, shells, cork, pebbles, the lightest, most imponderable things that it could lift from its bed, are cast up in a broken, sinuous line on the sand. This line endlessly stretching into the distance is the frontier of the highest tide. That was how life
'
s storm cast you up on my shore, O my pride, that is how I
'
ll portray you.
"

He went in, locked the door behind him, and took off his coat. When he went into the bedroom, which Lara had tidied up so well and so carefully that morning and which her hurried packing had again turned inside out, when he saw the disarranged bed and the things thrown about in disorder on the chairs and floor, he knelt down like a little boy, leaned his breast against the hard edge of the bedstead, buried his head in the bedclothes, and wept freely and bitterly as children do. But not for long. Soon he got up, hastily dried his face, looked around him with tired, absent-minded surprise, got out the bottle of vodka Komarovsky had left, drew the cork, poured half a glass, added water and snow, and with a relish almost equal in strength to the hopelessness of the tears he had shed drank long, greedy gulps.

Something unaccountable was going on in Yurii Andreievich. He was slowly losing his mind. Never before had he led such a strange existence. He neglected the house, he stopped taking proper care of himself, he turned night into day and had lost count of time since Lara had left.

He drank vodka and he wrote about Lara; but the more he crossed out and rewrote what he had written the more the Lara of his poems and notebooks grew away from her living prototype, from the Lara who was Katia
'
s mother off on a journey with her daughter.

The reason for his revision and rewriting was his search for strength and exactness of expression, but they also followed the promptings of an inward reticence that forbade him to disclose his personal experiences and the real events in his past with too much freedom, lest he offend or wound those who had directly taken part in them. As a result, his feeling, still pulsing and warm, was gradually eliminated from his poems, and romantic morbidity yielded to a broad and serene vision that lifted the particular to the level of the universal and familiar. He was not deliberately striving for such a goal, but this broad vision came of its own accord as a consolation, like a message sent to him by Lara from her travels, like a distant greeting from her, like her appearance in a dream or the touch of her hand on his forehead, and he loved this ennobling imprint.

At the same time that he was working on his lament for Lara he was also scribbling the end of the notes he had accumulated over the years concerning nature, man, and various other things. As had always happened to him whenever he was writing, a host of ideas about the life of the individual and of society assailed him.

He reflected again that he conceived of history, of what is called the course of history, not in the accepted way but by analogy with the vegetable kingdom. In winter, under the snow, the leafless branches of a wood are thin and poor, like the hairs on an old man
'
s wart. But in only a few days in spring the forest is transformed, it reaches the clouds, and you can hide or lose yourself in its leafy maze. This transformation is achieved with a speed greater than in the case of animals, for animals do not grow as fast as plants, and yet we cannot directly observe the movement of growth even of plants. The forest does not change its place, we cannot lie in wait for it and catch it in the act of change. Whenever we look at it, it seems to be motionless. And such also is the immobility to our eyes of the eternally growing, ceaselessly changing history, the life of society moving invisibly in its incessant transformations.

Tolstoy thought of it in just this way, but he did not spell it out so clearly. He denied that history was set in motion by Napoleon or any other ruler or general, but he did not develop his idea to its logical conclusion. No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history
'
s organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshipped for decades thereafter, for centuries.

Mourning for Lara, he also mourned that distant summer in Meliuzeievo when the revolution had been a god come down to earth from heaven, the god of the summer when everyone. had gone crazy in his own way, and when everyone
'
s life had existed in its own right, and not as an illustration for a thesis in support of the rightness of a superior policy.

As he scribbled his odds and ends, he made a note reaffirming his belief that art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence. And his own ideas and notes also brought him joy, a tragic joy, a joy full of tears that exhausted him and made his head ache.

Samdeviatov came to see him. He brought him more vodka and told him of how Antipova and her daughter had left with Komarovsky. He came by the railway handcar. He scolded the doctor for not looking after the horse properly and took it back, unwilling to leave it for three or four more days as Yurii Andreievich wished, but promising to come back within the week, and personally take him away from Varykino for good.

Sometimes, after losing himself in his work, Yurii Andreievich suddenly remembered Lara as vividly as if she were before him, and broke down from tenderness and the sharpness of his loss. As in his childhood, when after his mother
'
s death he thought he heard her voice in the bird calls, in the summer magnificence of Kologrivov
'
s garden, so now his hearing, accustomed to Lara
'
s voice and expecting it as part of his life, played tricks on him and he heard her calling,
"
Yurochka!
"
from the next room.

He also had other hallucinations that week. Toward the end of it, he woke up in the night from a nonsensical nightmare about a dragon that had its lair underneath the house. He opened his eyes. A light flashed from the gully and he heard the crack and echo of a rifle shot. Strangely, a few moments after so unusual an experience, he went back to sleep, and in the morning told himself that it had been a dream.

This is what happened a day or two later. The doctor had at last convinced himself that he must be sensible, that if he wished to kill himself he could find a quicker and less painful method. He promised himself to leave as soon as Samdeviatov came for him.

A little before dusk, while it was still light, he heard loud crunching footsteps on the snow. Someone was calmly approaching the house with a firm, easy step.

Strange! Who could it be? Samdeviatov had his horse, he would not have come on foot, and Varykino was deserted.
"
They
'
ve come for me,
"
Yurii Andreievich decided.
"
A summons or an order to go back to town. Or they
'
ve come to arrest me. No, there would be two of them and they would have transportation to take me back. It
'
s Mikulitsyn,
"
he thought joyfully, imagining that he recognized the step. The stranger, still unidentified, fumbled at the door with its broken bolt, as if he had expected the padlock to be there; then he walked in confidently, certain of his way, opening the connecting doors and closing them carefully behind him.

Yurii Andreievich had been sitting at his desk with his back to the door. As he rose and turned to face it he found the stranger already in the doorway, where he had stopped dead.

"
Whom do you want to see?
"
The doctor mechanically blurted out these conventional words without thinking, and was not surprised when there was no reply.

The stranger was a powerful, well-built man with a handsome face. He was dressed in a fur jacket and trousers, and warm, goatskin boots, and he had a rifle slung over his shoulder on a strap.

Only the moment of his appearance took the doctor by surprise, not his arrival in itself. The traces of occupation in the house had prepared him for it. This, evidently, was the owner of the supplies he had found, which, as he knew, could not have been left by the Mikulitsyns. Something about him struck Yurii Andreievich as familiar, he felt he had seen him before. Neither did the caller look as astonished as might have been expected at the sight of Yurii Andreievich. Perhaps he had been told that the house was lived in, and even who was living in it. Perhaps he even recognized the doctor.

"
Who is he? Who is he?
"
The doctor racked his brains.
"
Where have I seen him, for heaven
'
s sake? Surely not…A hot morning in May, God knows in what year. The station at Razvilie. The Commissar
'
s coach, promising nothing good. Cut-and-dried ideas, a one-track mind, harsh principles, and integrity, absolute integrity…Strelnikov!
"

They had been talking for hours. They talked as only Russians in Russia can talk, particularly as they talked then, desperate and frenzied as they were in those anxious, frightened days. Night was falling, and it was getting dark.

Apart from the nervous garrulousness that was common in those days, Strelnikov had some personal reason for talking ceaselessly.

He went on and on, doing everything possible to keep the conversation going, in order to avoid being alone. Was it his conscience he was afraid of, or the sad memories that haunted him, or was he tormented by that self-dissatisfaction which makes a man so hateful and intolerable to himself that he is ready to die of shame? Or had he made some dreadful, irrevocable decision and was he unwilling to remain alone with it and anxious to delay its execution by chatting with the doctor and staying in his company?

Whatever it was, he was evidently keeping to himself some important secret that burdened him, while pouring out his heart all the more effusively on every other subject.

It was the disease, the revolutionary madness of the age, that at heart everyone was different from his outward appearance and his words. No one had a clear conscience. Everyone could justifiably feel that he was guilty, that he was a secret criminal, an undetected impostor. The slightest pretext was enough to launch the imagination on an orgy of self-torture. Carried away by their fantasy, people accused themselves falsely not only out of terror but out of a morbidly destructive impulse, of their own will, in a state of metaphysical trance, in a passion for self-condemnation which cannot be checked once you give it its head.

As an important military leader who had often presided at military courts, Strelnikov must have heard and read any number of confessions and depositions by condemned men. Now he was himself swayed by the impulse to unmask himself, to reappraise his whole life, to draw up a balance sheet, while monstrously distorting everything in his feverish excitement.

He spoke incoherently, jumping from confession to confession.

"
This all happened near Chita.… Were you surprised at all the outlandish things you found in the drawers and cupboards? All that comes from the requisitioning we did when the Red Army occupied eastern Siberia. Naturally, I didn
'
t bring it here all by myself. I
'
ve always had trustworthy, devoted people around me; life has been very good to me that way. These candles, matches, coffee, tea, writing materials, and so on all come from requisitioned military stores, partly Czech, partly English and Japanese. Odd, don
'
t you think?…
'
What do you think?
'
was my wife
'
s favorite expression, I suppose you noticed. I couldn
'
t make up my mind whether to tell you when I arrived, but I might as well admit it now—I came to see her and my daughter. The message saying that they were here didn
'
t reach me till too late. That
'
s how I missed them. When rumors and reports reached me of your intimacy with her and the name Dr. Zhivago was mentioned to me, for some inexplicable reason, out of the thousands of faces I
'
d seen in these years, I remembered a doctor of that name who had once been brought to me for questioning.
"