Doctor Zhivago (83 page)

"
And were you sorry you hadn
'
t had me shot?
"

Strelnikov ignored the question. Perhaps he had not even heard the interruption. Lost in his thoughts, he went on with his monologue.

"
Naturally, I was jealous—I
'
m jealous now, for that matter. What could you expect?…I came to this district only a few months ago, after my other hide-outs farther east were uncovered. I was to be court-martialed on a trumped-up charge. It wasn
'
t difficult to guess the outcome. I wasn
'
t guilty. I thought there might be a hope of defending myself and clearing my good name at some time in the future, in more propitious circumstances. So I decided to disappear while I still could, before they arrested me, and hide for the present, lead a hermit
'
s life, keep moving. Perhaps I would have succeeded if it hadn
'
t been for a young scoundrel who wheedled himself into my confidence.

"
It was while I was making my way westward across Siberia, on foot, keeping out of people
'
s way and starving. I used to sleep in snowdrifts, or in trains—there were endless rows of them standing buried in the snow all along the line.

"
Well, I came across this boy, a tramp, who said he had got away from a partisan shooting squad—they had lined him up with a lot of other condemned men, but he was only wounded, and he crawled out from under a pile of dead bodies and hid in the forest and recovered, and now he was moving from one hide-out to another, like me. That was his story, anyway. He was a good-for-nothing, vicious and backward; he had been kicked out of school because he was dull-witted.
"

The more details Strelnikov added to his description, the more certain the doctor felt that he knew the boy.

"
Was his name Terentii Galuzin?
"

"
Yes.
"

"
Then everything he said about the partisans and the shooting was true. He didn
'
t invent a word.
"

"
The only good thing about him was that he was devoted to his mother. His father had been shot as a hostage, and his mother was in prison, and the same thing was likely to happen to her. When he heard that, he made up his mind to do all he could to get her out. He went to the local Cheka, gave himself up, and offered to work for them. They agreed to give him a chance on condition he made some important betrayal. He told them where I was hiding. But fortunately I got away in time.

"
By a fantastic effort and after endless adventures, I got across Siberia and reached this part of the country. I am so well known here, I thought it was the last place they
'
d expect to find me; they wouldn
'
t suppose I
'
d have the nerve. And in fact, they went on for a long time looking for me around Chita, while I was hiding either in this house or in one or two others I knew were safe in the neighborhood. But now that
'
s out, they
'
re on my trail. Listen. It
'
s getting dark and I don
'
t like it because I haven
'
t been able to sleep for ages. You know what a torment that is. If any of my candles are still left—good, aren
'
t they, real tallow!—then let
'
s go on talking for a bit. Let
'
s go on talking for as long as you can stand it, right through the night, in luxury, by candlelight.
"

"
The candles are all there. I
'
ve opened only one box. I
'
ve been using the kerosene, which probably you also left.
"

"
Have you any bread?
"

"
No.
"

"
Then what have you been living on? But what a silly question! Potatoes, of course.
"

"
That
'
s right. Any amount of those. The people who used to live here were good housekeepers, they knew how to store them, they
'
re all safe and sound in the cellar, neither rotten nor frozen.
"
Strelnikov suddenly switched to the revolution.

"
None of this can mean anything to you. You couldn
'
t understand it. You grew up quite differently. There was the world of the suburbs, of the railways, of the slums and tenements. Dirt, hunger, overcrowding, the degradation of the worker as a human being, the degradation of women. And there was the world of the mother
'
s darlings, of smart students and rich merchants
'
sons; the world of impunity, of brazen, insolent vice; of rich men laughing or shrugging off the tears of the poor, the robbed, the insulted, the seduced; the reign of parasites, whose only distinction was that they never troubled themselves about anything, never gave anything to the world, and left nothing behind them.

"
But for us life was a campaign. We moved mountains for those we loved, and if we brought them nothing but sorrow, they did not hold it against us because in the end we suffered more than they did.

"
But before I go on, I ought to tell you something. This is the point. You
'
ve got to leave Varykino, don
'
t put it off if you value your life. They are closing in on me, and whatever happens to me will involve you. You are implicated already by the very fact of talking to me now. And apart from everything else, there are a lot of wolves around here; I had to shoot my way out of the Shutma the other night.
"

"
So it was you shooting.
"

"
Yes. Of course, you heard me. I was on my way to another hide-out, but before I got there I saw by various signs that it had been discovered. The people who were there having probably been shot. I won
'
t stay long with you. I
'
ll spend the night and leave in the morning.… Well, I
'
ll go on if I may.

"
Of course, it wasn
'
t only in Moscow or in Russia that there existed these elegant Tverskaia Yamskaia Streets with young rakes in fancy hats and spats rushing about with their girls in cabs. That street, the night life of the street, the night life of the past century, and the race horses and the rakes, existed in every city in the world. But what gave unity to the nineteenth century, what set it apart as one historical period? It was the birth of socialist thought. Revolutions, young men dying on the barricades, writers racking their brains in an effort to curb the brute insolence of money, to save the human dignity of the poor. Marxism arose, it uncovered the root of the evil and it offered the remedy, it became the great force of the century. And the elegant streets of the age were all that, as well as the dirt and the heroism, the vice and the slums, and the proclamations and the barricades.

"
You can
'
t think how lovely she was as a child, a schoolgirl. You have no idea. She had a school friend who lived in a tenement next door to us; most of the tenants were railway workers on the Brest line. It was called the Brest line in those days, it
'
s been renamed several times since. My father—he
'
s a member of the Yuriatin revolutionary court now—he was a track overseer. I used to go to that house and see her there. She was still a child, but even then, the alertness, the watchfulness, the restlessness of those days—it was all there, you could read it all in her face, her eyes. All the themes of the century—all the tears and the insults and the hopes, the whole accumulation of resentment and pride were written in her face and bearing, which expressed both girlish shyness and self-assured grace. She was a living indictment of the age. This is something, isn
'
t it? It
'
s predestination. Something nature endowed her with, something to which she had a birthright.
"

"
How well you speak of her. I too saw her in those days, just as you have described her. A schoolgirl, and yet at the same time the secret heroine of an unchildish drama. Her shadow on the wall was the shadow of helpless, watchful self-defense. That was how I saw her, and so I still remember her. You put it perfectly.
"

"
You saw and you remembered? And what did you do?
"

"
That
'
s another story altogether.
"

"
Yes. Well. So you see, the whole of this nineteenth century—its revolutions in Paris, its generations of Russian exiles starting with Herzen, its assassinations of Tsars, some only plotted, others carried out, the whole of the workers
'
movement of the world, the whole of Marxism in the parliaments and universities of Europe, the whole of this new system of ideas with its newness, the swiftness of its conclusion, its irony, and its pitiless remedies elaborated in the name of pity—all of this was absorbed and expressed in Lenin, who fell upon the old world as the personified retribution for its misdeeds.

"
And side by side with him there arose before the eyes of the world the vast figure of Russia bursting into flames like a light of redemption for all the sorrows and misfortunes of mankind. But why on earth am I telling you all this? To you it must be the tinkling of a cymbal—just words.

"
For the sake of this girl I studied and became a teacher, and went to Yuriatin, which I did not know at that time. For her sake I devoured piles of books and absorbed a great mass of knowledge, to be available to her if she asked for my help. To win her back after three years of marriage, I went to war, and when the war was over and I returned from captivity, I took advantage of having been listed as dead, and under an assumed name plunged headlong into the revolution, to pay back in full all the wrongs that she had suffered, to wash her mind clean of those memories, so that it should not be possible to return to the past, so that there should be no more Tverskaia-Yamskaias. And all the time they, she and my daughter, were next door, they were here! What an effort it cost me to resist the longing to rush to them, to see them! But I wanted to finish my life
'
s work first. Oh, what wouldn
'
t I give now for one look at them! When she came in it was as if the window flew open and the room filled with air and light.
"

"
I know how much you loved her. But forgive me, have you any idea of her love for you?
"

"
Sorry. What was that you said?
"

"
I asked you, had you any idea of how much she loved you—more than anyone in the world?
"

"
What makes you say that?
"

"
Because she told me so herself.
"

"
She said that? To you?
"

"
Yes.
"

"
Forgive me, I realize it
'
s an impossible thing to ask, but if it isn
'
t hopelessly indiscreet, if you can, will you tell me exactly what it was she said to you?
"

"
Gladly. She said that you were the embodiment of what a human being should be, a man whose equal she had never met, that you were unique in your genuineness, and that if she could go back to the home she had shared with you she would crawl to it on her knees from the end of the earth.
"

"
Forgive me, but if it isn
'
t intruding on something too intimate, can you remember the circumstances in which she said this?
"

"
She had been doing this room and she went outside to shake the carpet.
"

"
Sorry, which carpet? There are two.
"

"
That one, the larger one.
"

"
It would have been too heavy for her. Did you help her?
"

"
Yes.
"

"
Each of you held one end, and she leaned far back throwing up her arms high as on a swing and turning away her face from the blowing dust and squinted her eyes and laughed? Isn
'
t that how it was? How well I know her ways! And then you walked toward each other folding up the heavy carpet first in two and then in four, and she joked and made faces, didn
'
t she? Didn
'
t she?
"