Doctor Zhivago (86 page)

They were written in an easy conversational style but were anything but works of popularization, since they advanced opinions that were controversial, hypothetical, and untested, though always lively and original. The booklets found an easy sale among collectors.

In those days everything became a specialty, including versification and the art of translation; theoretical studies were written on all possible subjects, and institutes were founded right and left. There arose all sorts of Palaces of Thought, Academies of Artistic Ideas. Yurii Andreievich acted as medical consultant to half of these pseudo-cultural institutions.

For a long time he and Vasia remained friends and lived together. During that period they moved from one dilapidated place to another, each uninhabitable and uncomfortable in a different way.

Immediately on arriving in Moscow, Yurii Andreievich had revisited his old home in Sivtsev Vrazhok. He was told that his family had not stayed there when they returned to Moscow. After their deportation, the rooms registered in their name had been given to new tenants and there was not a sign of their belongings. Yurii Andreievich himself was avoided by his former neighbors, who regarded him as dangerous to know.

Markel was no longer there. He had gone up in the world and had been appointed house manager at Flour Town. The manager
'
s flat had been put at his disposal, but he preferred the old porter
'
s lodge, which had floors of beaten earth but which also had running water and an enormous Russian stove. All the pipes and radiators in the buildings burst in the cold weather, but the porter
'
s lodge was always warm and dry, and the water did not freeze.

There came a time when the friendship between Yurii Andreievich and Vasia cooled. Vasia had developed remarkably. He no longer thought or spoke like the ragged, barefoot, dishevelled boy from Veretenniki. The obviousness, the self-evidence of the truths proclaimed by the revolution attracted him increasingly, and the doctor
'
s language, with its obscurities and its imagery, now struck him as the voice of error, doomed, conscious of its weakness and therefore evasive.

The doctor was making calls on various government departments. He was trying to obtain the political rehabilitation of his family and permission for them to return to Russia. At the same time he applied for a foreign passport for himself and permission to bring his family back from Paris.

Vasia was astonished at how lukewarm and half-hearted his efforts were. Yurii Andreievich seemed always to be in a hurry to decide that he was not getting anywhere, and he spoke with too much conviction and almost with satisfaction of the futility of undertaking anything further.

Vasia found fault with him more and more often, and although Yurii Andreievich did not take offense at being justly criticized, his relationship with Vasia gradually deteriorated. Finally their friendship broke up, and they parted company. The doctor left the room that they had shared to Vasia and moved to Flour Town, where Markel was all-powerful and had set aside for him a corner at the back of what had been the Sventitskys
'
. It consisted of a derelict bathroom, a room with a single window adjoining it, and the dilapidated, crumbling kitchen and back entrance. After he had moved in, Yurii Andreievich gave up medicine, neglected himself, stopped seeing his friends, and lived in great poverty.

It was a gray Sunday in winter. Smoke was rising in columns from the roofs and in thin black streams from the windows, which, in spite of the regulations, were still used as outlets for the metal pipes of stoves. The amenities of town life had still not been restored. The tenants of Flour Town went about unwashed and suffered from boils and colds.

As on every Sunday, Markel Shchapov and his family were all at home.

They were having dinner at a large kitchen table. At this same table in days gone by, at the time of the bread rationing, all the tenants
'
coupons were collected and cut, snipped, counted, sorted, and wrapped in pieces of paper or tied into bundles according to their category before being taken to the baker
'
s at dawn; and here too, later on in the morning, the loaves were cut and broken and crumbled to make up each tenant
'
s apportioned weight. But all this was now only a memory. Food rationing had been replaced by other forms of control, and the Shchapovs at their midday meal ate their fill and champed and chewed with relish.

Half the room was taken up by the broad Russian stove, which stood in the middle and had bedding on its flat top and quilts hanging down over the sides.

Near the entrance was a faucet, and here the pipes were not frozen. Benches ran down two sides of the room; under them were kept the family belongings in trunks and bundles. The table was on the left and had a plate rack fixed above it.

The room was very hot. The stove was going full blast. In front of it stood Markel
'
s wife, Agafia; her sleeves were rolled up above her elbows and she was using a long pair of tongs to move the pots inside the oven, crowding them together or spacing them out according to need. Her sweating face was in turn lit by the blaze in the oven and misted over by steam. Pushing the pots to one side, she pulled out from behind them a pastry on an iron sheet, flipped it over, and put it back to brown. Yurii Andreievich came in with two buckets.

"
Good appetite.
"

"
Make yourself at home. Sit down and have dinner with us.
"

"
Thank you, I
'
ve had mine.
"

"
We know what you call dinner. Why don
'
t you sit down and have something hot? You needn
'
t turn up your nose at it—it
'
s good stuff, baked potatoes, pie with kasha.
"

"
No thanks, really.… I
'
m sorry to keep on opening the door and letting in the cold. I want to take up as much water as I can. I
'
ve cleaned the bathtub, now I
'
m filling that and the wash tubs. I
'
ll come in half a dozen times and then I won
'
t trouble you again for a long time. Forgive me for bothering you like this, but I can
'
t get water anywhere else.
"

"
Help yourself. If you asked for syrup, we haven
'
t got any, but there
'
s plenty of water. Take as much as you like, we won
'
t even charge you for it!
"

They all laughed.

When Yurii Andreievich came for the third time to fill his fifth and sixth buckets, the tone had changed.

"
My sons-in-law have been asking me who you are. I told them but they don
'
t believe me. You go on running the water, don
'
t mind me. Only don
'
t slop it on the floor, clumsy! Don
'
t you see, you
'
ve splashed some in the doorway. If it freezes over I can
'
t see you coming to hack it up with a crowbar. And shut the door properly, you oaf, there
'
s a draft coming in. Yes, so I was telling them who you are but they won
'
t believe it. The money that was spent on you! All that learning, and where has it got you, I
'
d like to know?
"

When Yurii Andreievich came in for the fifth or sixth time, Markel frowned.

"
Just once more and that
'
s that. There
'
s a limit to everything, old man. If our little Marina didn
'
t keep sticking up for you, I
'
d lock the door, no matter how high-born you are. You remember our Marina, don
'
t you? There she is, the dark one at the end of the table. She
'
s gone all red, look.
'
Don
'
t hurt his feelings, Dad,
'
she keeps telling me. As if anybody wants to hurt your feelings. She
'
s a telegrapher at the Central Post Office—she knows foreign languages.
'
He
'
s unfortunate,
'
she says. She
'
s so sorry for you, she
'
d go through fire and water for you! As if I
'
m to blame that you
'
re a poor fish! You shouldn
'
t have run away to Siberia, leaving your house at a bad time. It
'
s your own fault. Look at us here—we sat it out through the famine and the White blockade, we didn
'
t flinch—so here we are, safe and sound. Blame yourself. If you
'
d taken proper care of Tonia, she wouldn
'
t be traipsing abroad now. Well, it
'
s your business, what do I care. Only what I
'
d like to know, begging your pardon, is what do you want with all this water? Hired yourself out to make a skating rink or something? You and your water! I can
'
t even get mad at you, you
'
re such a wet rag!
"

Again they all laughed. Marina, however, looked around angrily, flared up, and began to chide them. Yurii Andreievich was astonished by the sound of her voice, though he could not as yet have said why.

"
There
'
s a lot of cleaning to be done in the house, Markel. I
'
ve got to scrub the floors and wash some of my things as well.
"

The Shchapovs were amazed.

"
Aren
'
t you ashamed of yourself, saying such things, let alone doing them? You
'
ll be starting a Chinese laundry next.
"

"
Let me send my daughter up,
"
said Agafia.
"
She
'
ll do your washing and scrubbing, and your mending, if there is any. You don
'
t need to be afraid of him, my dear. You can see how well brought up he is, he wouldn
'
t hurt a fly.
"

"
What an idea, Agafia Tikhonovna! I wouldn
'
t dream of letting Marina do my scrubbing. Why on earth should she dirty her hands for me? I
'
ll manage all right.
"

"
You can dirty your hands and I can
'
t, is that it?
"
Marina broke in.
"
Why are you so difficult, Yurii Andreievich? Would you really drive me out if I came up to see you?
"

Marina could have been a singer. She had a pure, well-modulated voice of great range and strength. She did not speak loudly, but her voice gave the impression of being stronger than was needed for ordinary conversation; it seemed to have a life of its own, as though it did not belong to her. It seemed to come from behind her back or from the next room. This voice was her protection, her guardian angel; no one could wish to hurt or distress a woman with such a voice.

It was from this water-carrying on a Sunday that a friendship sprang up between the doctor and Marina. She would often come and help him with his housework. One day she stayed with him and did not again go back to the lodge. Thus she became Yurii Andreievich
'
s third wife, though he was not divorced from the first, and they did not register their marriage. They had children. Markel and Agafia spoke of their daughter, not without pride, as the doctor
'
s wife. Her father grumbled that there had never been a proper wedding either in church or at the registry, but his wife said:
"
Are you out of your mind? With Tonia still alive, that would be bigamy.
"
—
"
It
'
s you that
'
s stupid,
"
said Markel.
"
What
'
s Tonia got to do with it? It
'
s just the same as if she were dead. There
'
s no law to protect her.
"

Yurii Andreievich sometimes said jokingly that theirs was a romance in twenty buckets, as you might have a novel in twenty chapters.

Marina forgave the doctor his eccentricities, the dirt and disorder he made in the house, his moods and his fancies; they were those of a man who was letting himself go and knew it. She bore with his grumbling, his tempers, and his nerves.