Doctor Zhivago (85 page)

It was Vasia Brykin. He threw himself on the ground before the doctor, kissed his hands, and wept.

The burned ruins were those of his native village, Veretenniki. His mother was dead. When the village was destroyed, Vasia hid in a cave in the quarries, but his mother, thinking he had been taken off to town, went mad with grief and drowned herself in the river—that very river Pelga which flowed at the foot of the cliff where they were sitting and talking. His sisters Alia and Aria were said to be in an orphanage in another district, but he knew nothing certain about them. He went on to Moscow with the doctor, and on the way told him of many terrible happenings.

"
That
'
s last winter
'
s corn going to waste in the fields. We
'
d just finished sowing it when our troubles began. It was after Aunt Polia went away. Do you remember Aunt Polia?
"

"
No. I never even knew her. Who is she?
"

"
You never knew Aunt Polia? She was with us in the train! Tiagunova. The one who was plump and fair, and looked you straight in the eye.
"

"
That
'
s the one who was always braiding and undoing her hair?
"

"
That
'
s it! The one with the pigtail, that
'
s the one!
"

"
Yes, I remember her. Wait a moment, now I come to think of it, I met her later in a town in Siberia, we met in the street.
"

"
You don
'
t mean it! You met Aunt Polia!
"

"
What
'
s the matter with you, Vasia? Why are you shaking my hands like a madman? If you
'
re not careful you
'
ll pull them off. And what are you blushing for, like a girl?
"

"
Well, tell me quickly, how is she? Tell me.
"

"
She was all right when I saw her. She spoke about you and your people. Didn
'
t she say she
'
d been staying with you, or have I got it wrong?
"

"
Of course she did, of course she did. She stayed with us. My mother loved her like her own sister. She
'
s quiet and a good worker, very clever with her hands. We had plenty of everything in the house as long as she was living with us. But they made her life a misery in Veretenniki with all their talk.

"
There was a man in the village called Rotten Kharlam. He was making up to Polia. He
'
s a slanderer, and he had no nose. She wouldn
'
t even look at him. He had a grudge against me for that. He spoke evil about me and Polia. In the end she left, she couldn
'
t stand it any more. And that was the beginning of all our troubles.

"
There was a terrible murder near here. A widow who lived all by herself on a farm, up toward Buiskoie. Used to walk about in a man
'
s shoes with elastic straps. She kept a fierce dog chained to a long wire, which ran all around the house. Gorlan, she called it. She did all the work around the house and on the farm by herself, without any help. Well, last year the winter came before anyone expected it. The snow was early, and the old woman hadn
'
t dug up her potatoes. So she comes to Veretenniki and says,
'
Help me,
'
she says,
'
I
'
ll pay you either in money or a share of the potatoes.
'

"
I said I
'
d do it, but when I got to the farm Kharlam was there, he
'
d taken the job on before me and she hadn
'
t bothered to tell me. Well, I wasn
'
t going to fight him about it, so we did the work together. It was wicked weather—rain and snow and mud and slush. We dug and we dug, and we burned the tops to dry the potatoes in the smoke. When we
'
d finished she settled with us, fair and square, and she let Kharlam go, but she gave me a wink as much as to say, I should stay on or come back later.

"
So I went back again and she said:
'
I don
'
t want to give up my surplus to the state. You
'
re a good boy,
'
she says,
'
I know you won
'
t give me away. You see, I
'
m not hiding anything from you. I would dig a pit myself, but you see what it
'
s like outside. I
'
ve left it too late, it
'
s winter, I can
'
t manage by myself. If you dig it for me, you won
'
t be sorry.
'

"
So I made the pit in the proper way for a hiding place, wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, like a jug, and we started a fire again and warmed and dried the pit with the smoke—all in a howling blizzard. Then we put the potatoes into the pit and the earth back on top. A very neat job it was. Of course, I didn
'
t say a word to a living soul, not even to my mother or my sisters. God forbid!

"
Well, hardly a month went by before the farm was robbed. People coming past from Buiskoie said the door was wide open, and the whole place was cleaned out. No sign of the widow, and Gorlan had broken his chain and bolted.

"
A bit later still, there was a thaw just before the New Year. On St. Basil
'
s Eve it rained, so the snow got washed off the high ground, you could see the bare soil. Then Gorlan came back to the farm and found the place where the potatoes were buried, and started rooting up the earth. He dug and dug and threw the earth back, and there were the old woman
'
s feet sticking up out of the hole, in those shoes with elastic straps she used to wear—horrible!

"
Everyone in Veretenniki was sorry for the old woman. No one suspected Kharlam, and can you blame them? It was unthinkable. He wouldn
'
t have had the nerve. If he had done it, he would have run away, far from here.

"
The kulaks, in the village, were very pleased about the murder. Here
'
s a chance to stir up trouble, they thought.
'
See what those town people are doing to you,
'
they said.
'
They did it on purpose to frighten you, so you wouldn
'
t hide your grain and bury your potatoes. And you think it
'
s bandits from the woods that killed her, fools that you are! Just you go on doing what the town people tell you. They
'
ve got a lot more up their sleeves, they
'
ll take everything, they
'
ll starve you out. If you want to know what
'
s good for you, then listen to us, we
'
ll teach you some sense. When they come to take away what you
'
ve earned by the sweat of your brow, tell them, We haven
'
t so much as a grain of rye, let alone surpluses. And in case of trouble, use your pitchforks. And anyone who
'
s against the village had better look out!
"
Well, the old fellows talked and held village meetings, and that was just what Kharlam wanted. Off he went to the town with his tale.
'
Fine goings on in the village,
'
he says,
'
and what are you doing about it? A Poor Peasants
'
Committee, that
'
s what we need. Give the word and I
'
ll have them all at each other
'
s throats in no time.
'
Then he made off somewhere, and never showed up in our parts again.

"
What came after happened of itself. Nobody informed. Nobody
'
s to blame. They sent Red Army men from the town, and they set up a court. And they started on me. That was because of what Kharlam had told them. I
'
d dodged the labor service. I
'
d run away. And I
'
d killed the old woman and stirred up the village, they said. They locked me up, but luckily I thought to pull up one of the floor boards and get away. I hid in a cave in the old quarry. The village was burned over my head—I never saw it, and my own mother drowned herself in a hole in the ice and I never knew. It all happened by itself. They
'
d put the Red Army men in a house by themselves and given them liquor, and they all got dead drunk. In the night the house happened to catch fire, and the fire spread to the other houses, from one to the next. Our village people, when it started, jumped out of their houses and ran away. But the people from town—mind you, nobody set fire to them—naturally, they were all burned to death. Nobody told our people to run away or to stay away from their burned-out homes, but they were afraid that something else would happen. The kulaks spread a rumor that every tenth man would be shot. When I came out of the cave, they
'
d all gone, I didn
'
t find a soul, they
'
re wandering around somewhere.
"

The doctor and Vasia arrived in Moscow in the spring of 1922 at the beginning of the NEP. The weather was fine and warm. Sunshine glancing off the golden domes of the Church of the Saviour played on the square below where grass was growing in the cracks between the paving stones.

The ban on private enterprise had been lifted and trade within certain narrow limits was allowed. Deals were made on the scale of the turnover of a rag-and-bone merchant in a flea market; their pettiness led to speculation and abuses. No new wealth was created by these transactions and they did nothing to relieve the squalor of the town, but fortunes were made out of the futile reselling of goods already sold a dozen times over.

The owners of several modest private libraries got down their books from their shelves and collected them all in one place. They notified the Town Soviet of their wish to start a co-operative bookshop. They applied for premises and obtained the use of some shoestore or florist
'
s, which had been empty and closed down since the first days of the revolution, and there, under its spacious vaults, they sold out their small haphazard collections.

Professors
'
wives who, when times had been hard before, had secretly baked white rolls and sold them in defiance of the regulations, now sold them openly at some bicycle repair shop or other which had been requisitioned and left unused all these years. They changed sides, accepted the revolution, and no longer used their genteel language.

In Moscow Yurii Andreievich said:

"
You
'
ll have to work at something, Vasia.
"

"
I
'
d like to study.
"

"
That goes without saying.
"

"
Another thing I want to do is draw my mother
'
s picture from memory.
"

"
That
'
s a good idea too. But for that you
'
d have to know how to draw. Have you ever tried?
"

"
When I was apprenticed to my uncle I used to play around with charcoal when he wasn
'
t looking.
"

"
Well, why not? We
'
ll see what can be done.
"

Vasia did not show any great talent for drawing but he had enough aptitude to enter a school of industrial design. With the help of his friends, Yurii Andreievich got him into what had been the Stroganov Institute, where he first took a course in general subjects and then specialized in printing, binding, and book design.

The doctor and Vasia combined their efforts. The doctor wrote booklets on various subjects and Vasia set them up and printed them in small editions, as part of his training at the Institute. They were then distributed through the secondhand bookshops that had been recently opened by their friends.

These booklets contained Yurii Andreievich
'
s philosophy, his views on medicine, his definitions of health and sickness, reflections on the doctrine of evolution, his theory of individuality as the biological basis of the organism, and thoughts about religion and history (which had much in common with those of his uncle and Sima), as well as his poems, short stories, and sketches of the Pugachev country he had visited.