Doctor Zhivago (84 page)

They stood up and went to different windows and looked out in different directions. After a time Strelnikov walked up to Yurii Andreievich, caught hold of his hands, pressed them to his breast, and went on as hurriedly as before:

"
Forgive me. I realize that I am touching on things that are dear and holy to you. But I should like to ask you more questions, if you
'
ll let me. Only please don
'
t go away. Don
'
t leave me alone. I
'
ll be going soon myself. Just think—six years of separation, six years of inconceivable self-restraint. But I kept thinking that freedom was not yet wholly won. When I
'
d won it, I thought, my hands would be untied and I could belong to my family. And now, all my calculations have come to nothing. They
'
ll arrest me tomorrow. You are near and dear to her. Perhaps you
'
ll see her one day and…But what am I saying! I
'
m mad. They
'
ll arrest me, and they won
'
t let me say a word in my own defense. They
'
ll come at me with shouts and curses and gag me. Don
'
t I know how it
'
s done!
"

At long last, Yurii Andreievich had a good sleep. For the first time in many nights he fell asleep the moment he lay down. Strelnikov spent the night; the doctor put him in the next room. The few times the doctor woke up and turned over or pulled the blankets up to his chin, he was conscious of the strong refreshment of sleep and he dropped off happily again at once. Toward morning he had several short, kaleidoscopic dreams of his childhood, so detailed and logical that he took them for reality.

He dreamed, for instance, that his mother
'
s watercolor showing a place on the Italian Riviera suddenly dropped from the wall, and he was aroused by a sound of breaking glass. He opened his eyes.
"
No, it can
'
t be that,
"
he thought.
"
It
'
s Antipov, Lara
'
s husband Strelnikov, scaring the wolves in the Shutma as Bacchus would say.
"
But no, what nonsense! It was the picture. There it was, lying in pieces on the floor, he assured himself, back in his dream.

He woke up late, with a headache from having slept too long. For a time he couldn
'
t think who or where he was.

Then he remembered:
"
Strelnikov is in here. It
'
s late. I must get dressed. He must be up by now. If not, I
'
ll wake him and make some coffee, and we
'
ll have it together.
"

"
Pavel Pavlovich!
"
he called out.

There was no answer.
"
He
'
s still asleep. He
'
s a sound sleeper, I must say.
"
He dressed unhurriedly and went into the next room. Strelnikov
'
s fur hat was on the table, but he was nowhere in the house.
"
Must have gone for a walk. And without his hat. Toughening himself up. I ought to be getting out of Varykino today, but it
'
s too late now. Again I
'
ve overslept, it
'
s the same thing every day.
"

He lit the kitchen range, picked up a bucket, and started toward the well. A few yards from the door, Strelnikov lay across the path with his head in a snowdrift. He had shot himself. The snow was a red lump under his left temple where he had bled. Drops of spurting blood that had mixed with the snow formed red beads that looked like rowanberries.

It remains to tell the brief story of the last eight or ten years of Zhivago
'
s life, during which he went more and more to seed, gradually losing his knowledge and skill as a doctor and a writer, emerging from his state of depression and resuming his work only to fall back, after a short flare-up of activity, into long periods of indifference to himself and to everything in the world. During these years the heart disease which he had himself diagnosed earlier but without realizing its gravity developed to an advanced stage.

He went to Moscow at the beginning of the NEP, the most ambiguous and hypocritical of all Soviet periods. He was even thinner, more neglected, and more unkempt than when he went to Yuriatin after escaping from the partisans. In the course of his journey he had again gradually discarded those of his clothes that had some value, exchanging them for bread and a few worn old rags to cover his nakedness. So he had lived off his second fur coat and suit, and arrived in the streets of Moscow dressed in a gray sheepskin hat, puttees, and a worn-out army overcoat stripped of all its buttons like a convict
'
s uniform. In this getup he was indistinguishable from the countless Red Army men who thronged the stations and the streets and squares of the capital.

He had not arrived alone. Following him wherever he went was a good-looking young peasant boy who was also dressed in old army clothes. They both turned up in the few surviving Moscow drawing rooms like those in which Yurii Andreievich had spent his childhood, where he was remembered and welcomed with his companion (after tactful inquiries as to whether they had been to the baths—typhus was still raging) and in which he was soon told of the circumstances of his family
'
s departure from Russia.

Both of them shied away from people, and their unsociability made them avoid going among people separately, for fear of becoming the center of attention and having to talk. Usually, when these two lanky figures made their appearance at any gathering of friends, they retired to some corner, where they could spend the evening in silence, without having to take part in the general conversation.

Dressed in his rags and accompanied everywhere by the boy, the tall, gaunt doctor looked like a peasant Seeker after Truth, and his companion like a patient, blindly devoted, and obedient disciple. Who was his young companion?

Yurii Andreievich had made the last stage of his journey by train but had covered the earlier and much longer part on foot.

The villages he went through looked no better than those he had seen in Siberia and the Urals, after running away from his captivity in the woods. Only then it had been winter, while now, at the end of the summer and the beginning of a warm, dry autumn, the weather made things easier.

Half the villages he passed were deserted, the fields abandoned and unharvested as after an enemy raid. Such were the effects of war—the civil war.

For two or three days at the end of September his road followed the steep bank of a river. The river flowing toward him was on his right. On his left the wide, unharvested fields stretched from the road to the cloudbanks on the horizon. At long intervals they were interrupted by woods, for the most part oak, maple, and elm. The woods ran to the river in deep gullies, which dropped precipitously and cut across the road.

In the unharvested fields the ripe grain spilled and trickled on the ground. Yurii Andreievich gathered it in handfuls, and at the worst, if he had no means of boiling it and making gruel, he stuffed it into his mouth and chewed it with great difficulty. The raw, half-chewed grain was almost indigestible.

Never in his life had he seen such dark-looking rye, rusty, brown, the color of old gold. Usually, when it is harvested in time, its color is much lighter.

These flame-colored fields blazing without fire, these fields silently proclaiming their distress, were coldly bordered by the vast, quiet sky, its face already wintry and shadowed by ceaselessly moving, long, flaky snow-clouds with black centers and white flanks.

Everything was moving slowly, regularly—the flowing river, the road running by it, and the doctor walking along the road in the same direction as the drifting clouds. Nor were the rye fields motionless. Their surface was alive, they were astir with an incessant crawling that suggested something foul and repellent.

Never had there been such a plague of mice. They had bred in unprecedented quantities. They scurried over the doctor
'
s face and hands and inside his sleeves and trousers at night, when he was caught by darkness and forced to sleep in the open, they raced across the road by day, gorged and teeming, and turned into squeaking, pulsing slush when they were trodden underfoot.

Shaggy, village curs, turned wild, followed him at a respectful distance, exchanging glances as if to decide on the best moment to fall on him and tear him to pieces. They fed on carrion, did not disdain mice, and eyed Yurii Andreievich from afar, moving after him confidently as though waiting for something. For some reason they never ventured into the wood and, whenever he came near one, gradually fell back, turned tail, and vanished.

The woods and the fields offered a complete contrast in those days. Deserted by man, the fields looked orphaned as if his absence had put them under a curse. The forest, however, well rid of him, flourished proudly in freedom as though released from captivity.

Usually the nuts are not allowed to ripen, as people, and particularly village children, pick them green, breaking off whole branches. But now the wooded sides of hills and gullies were thick with rough, golden foliage dusted and coarsened by the sun. Festive among it were bulging clusters of nuts, three or four, as if tied together, ripe and ready to fall from the branches. Yurii Andreievich cracked and crunched them in quantity. He stuffed his pockets and his bag full of them; for a whole week he fed on hazelnuts.

The fields appeared to him as something seen in the fever of a dangerous illness, and the woods, by contrast, in the lucidity of health regained. God, so it seemed to him, dwelled in the woods, while the fields echoed with the sardonic laughter of the devil.

At this point of his journey, Yurii Andreievich came to a deserted, burned-out village. All the houses had stood in one row on the side of the road opposite the river. The strip of land between the road and the edge of the steep riverbank had not been built on.

Only a few houses, blackened by the fire, were still standing, but they too were empty, uninhabited. Nothing was left of the others but piles of charred rubble with black chimneys rising out of them.

The cliffs facing the river were honeycombed with pits where the villagers had quarried rock for millstones; this had been their means of livelihood. Three such unfinished stones were lying on the ground in front of the last house in the row, one of the few that had remained standing. Like the others, this house was uninhabited.

Yurii Andreievich went inside. It was a still afternoon, but the moment he entered it was as if a gust of wind burst into the house. Tufts of straw and hay slithered across the floors, remnants of paper flapped on the walls, and the whole place stirred and rustled. Like the countryside, it swarmed with mice which scampered off, squeaking, in all directions.

He came out. The sun was setting behind the fields in back of the village. A warm, golden glow flooded the opposite bank, and its fading brilliance was reflected by pools and on bushes, some of which reached out into the middle of the stream. Yurii Andreievich crossed the road and sat down on one of the millstones that lay on the grass.

A fair, shaggy head came up over the edge of the bank, then shoulders, then arms. Someone was climbing up the cliff path with a bucket of water. Seeing the doctor, he stopped, still visible only from the waist up.

"
Would you like a drink of water? If you won
'
t hurt me, I won
'
t hurt you.
"

"
Thank you. Yes, I
'
d like a drink. But come over here, don
'
t be frightened. Why should I hurt you?
"

The water carrier was a boy in his teens, barefoot, ragged, and dishevelled.

In spite of his friendly words, he pierced the doctor with a worried, suspicious stare. For some reason the boy was strangely agitated. Finally, putting down his bucket, he rushed toward the doctor but stopped halfway, muttering:

"
It isn
'
t…It can
'
t be…I must be dreaming. Pardon me, comrade, if I ask you, but haven
'
t I seen you before? Yes! Yes! Surely! You
'
re the doctor, aren
'
t you?
"

"
And who are you?
"

"
Don
'
t you recognize me?
"

"
No.
"

"
We were in the same train from Moscow, in the same car. They
'
d conscripted me for labor. I was in the convoy.
"