Doctor Zhivago (87 page)

Her devotion went even further. At times they were destitute through his fault, and in order not to leave him alone at such moments she would give up her own job at the post office, where her work was so highly thought of that she was always taken back after her enforced absence. In obedience to Yurii Andreievich
'
s whim, she would go out with him, doing odd jobs from house to house. They chopped wood for a good many of the tenants on the different floors. Some of them, particularly speculators who had made fortunes at the beginning of the NEP and artists and scholars who were close to the government, were setting up house on a comfortable scale. One day Yurii Andreievich and Marina, stepping carefully in their felt boots so as not to dirty the carpet with sawdust, were carrying wood into the study of a tenant who remained insultingly engrossed in something he was reading and did not honor them with so much as a glance. It was his wife who gave the orders and who paid them.

"
What has the pig got his nose in?
"
the doctor wondered. The scholar was scribbling furiously in the margins of his book. As he passed him with a bundle of logs, Yurii Andreievich glanced over his shoulder. On the desk lay a pile of the early editions of the booklets that he had written and Vasia had printed.

Yurii Andreievich and Marina were now living in Spiridonovka Street, and Gordon had a room in Malaia Bronnaia Street near by. Marina and the doctor had two daughters, Kapka (Capitolina), who was five years old, and the baby Klazhka (Claudia), who was only six months.

The early summer of 1929 was very hot. People who lived in the same neighborhood would go to see each other, hatless and in their shirtsleeves.

Gordon
'
s room was part of a curious structure, which had once been the premises of a fashionable tailor. The shop had been on two floors, connected by a spiral staircase, and both looking out onto the street through one large plate-glass window, on which the tailor
'
s name and occupation were traced in gold letters.

The premises were now divided into three. By means of floor boards an extra room had been fitted into the space between the lower and the upper levels. It had what was, for a living room, a curious window, about three feet high, starting at floor level and with part of the gold letters remaining. From outside through the gaps in the lettering, anyone in the room could be seen up to the knees. This was Gordon
'
s room. With him at the moment were Zhivago, Dudorov, Marina, and the children, who, unlike the grownups, were entirely visible through the glass. Marina soon left with the little girls, and the three men remained alone.

They were having one of those unhurried, lazy summer conversations that go on between men who were at school together and have many years of friendship behind them.

To carry on a conversation naturally and intelligently, a man must have an adequate supply of words. Of the three, only Yurii Andreievich answered this requirement.

The other two were always at a loss for an expression. They did not possess the gift of eloquence. At a loss for words, they paced up and down, puffed at their cigarettes, gesticulated, and repeated themselves. (
"
That, plainly, is dishonest, old man! Dishonest, yes, yes, that
'
s what it is, dishonest.
"
)

They were unaware that such dramatic excesses, far from showing their warmth and breadth of character, expressed intellectual poverty.

Both Gordon and Dudorov moved among cultured academicians, they spent their lives among good books, good thinkers, good composers and good music, which was as good yesterday as today (but always good!), and they did not know that the misfortune of having average taste is a great deal worse than the misfortune of having no taste at all.

Neither Dudorov nor Gordon realized that even their admonitions to Zhivago were prompted less by a friendly wish to influence his conduct than by their inability to think with freedom and to guide the conversation at will. Like a runaway cart, the conversation took them where they did not want to go. Unable to steer it, they were bound, sooner or later, to bump into something, and to be hit. And so, in their sermonizing, time and again they got off their tracks.

To Zhivago, their unconscious motives, their artificial emotionalism, and their strained reasoning were transparent. But he could hardly say to them:
"
Dear friends, how desperately commonplace you are—you and your circle, the names and the authorities you always quote, their glamour and art which you so much admire! The only bright and vital thing about you is that you are my contemporaries and friends!
"
How could anyone confess to such a thought? So, in order to spare their feelings, he listened meekly.

Dudorov had recently come back from his first deportation. His civil rights had been restored, and he had been allowed to resume his regular work at the university.

Now he was telling his friends about his experiences as a deportee. He spoke sincerely and without hypocrisy. He was not motivated by fear; he really believed in what he was saying.

He said that the arguments of the prosecution, his treatment in prison and after he came out, and particularly his private talks with the examining judge had
"
aired
"
his brains, re-educated him politically, opened his eyes to many things he had not seen before, and made him more mature as a person.

These reflections appealed to Gordon just because they were so hackneyed. He nodded his head with sympathy and agreed with Dudorov in everything. It was the very triteness of the feelings and expressions that moved him most; he mistook Dudorov
'
s reflection of prescribed feeling for a genuine expression of humanity.

Dudorov
'
s pious platitudes were in the spirit of the times. But it was precisely their conformism, their transparent sanctimoniousness, that exasperated Yurii Andreievich. Men who are not free, he thought, always idealize their bondage. So it was in the Middle Ages, and later the Jesuits always exploited this human trait. Zhivago could not bear the political mysticism of the Soviet intelligentsia, though it was the very thing they regarded as their highest achievement, or as it would have been called in those days,
"
the spiritual ceiling of the age.
"
But this he also kept to himself in order not to hurt the feelings of his friends.

What did interest him in Dudorov
'
s story was his account of a cellmate of his, Bonifatii Orletsov, a follower of Tikhon, the Patriarch of Moscow. Orletsov had a six-year-old daughter, Christina. The arrest and subsequent fate of her beloved father had been a terrible blow to her. Terms such as
"
obscurantist priest
"
and
"
disenfranchised
"
seemed to her the stigma of dishonor. Dudorov felt that in her childish ardor she had vowed someday to remove that stigma from her family name. This goal, conceived at such an early age and nursed with burning resolution, made of her even now an enthusiastic champion of Communist ideals.

"
I must go,
"
said Yurii Andreievich.
"
Don
'
t be cross with me, Misha. It
'
s hot and stuffy in here. I need to get some air.
"

"
But the window is open, look, down there on the floor.… I
'
m sorry, we
'
ve been smoking too much. We keep forgetting that we shouldn
'
t smoke with you here. It isn
'
t my fault that it gets so stuffy, it
'
s the idiotic way the window is made. You should find me another room.
"

"
I must be off, Misha. We
'
ve talked enough. Thank you both for your concern.… I
'
m not pretending, you know. It
'
s an illness I
'
ve got, sclerosis of the heart. The walls of the heart muscle wear out and get thin, and one fine day they may burst. I
'
m not yet forty, you know, and it isn
'
t as if I were a drunkard, or burned the candle at both ends!
"

"
Nonsense! We aren
'
t playing your funeral march yet. You
'
ll last us out.
"

"
Microscopic forms of cardiac hemorrhages have become very frequent in recent years. They are not always fatal. Some people get over them. It
'
s a typical modern disease. I think its causes are of a moral order. The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn
'
t just a fiction, it
'
s a part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can
'
t be forever violated with impunity. I found it painful to listen to you, Innokentii, when you told us how you were re-educated and became mature in jail. It was like listening to a circus horse describing how it broke itself in.
"

"
I must stand up for Dudorov,
"
said Gordon.
"
You
'
ve got unused to simple human words, they don
'
t reach you any more.
"

"
It may very well be, Misha. But in any case, you must let me go now. I can hardly breathe. I swear, I
'
m not exaggerating.
"

"
Wait a moment, you
'
re just looking for excuses. We won
'
t let you go until you
'
ve given us an honest, straightforward answer. Do you or don
'
t you agree that it
'
s time you changed your ways and reformed? What are you going to do about it? To start with, you must clarify your situation with Tonia and Marina. They are human beings, women who feel and suffer, not disembodied ideas existing only in your head. And second, it
'
s a scandal that a man like you should go to waste. You
'
ve got to wake up and shake off your inertia, pull yourself together and look at things without this impermissible arrogance, yes, yes, without this inexcusable haughtiness in regard to everyone, you must go back to work and take up your practice.
"

"
All right, I
'
ll give you my answer. I
'
ve been thinking something of this sort myself recently, so I can really promise you that there
'
s going to be a change. I think everything will come out all right. And quite soon, at that. You
'
ll see. I really mean it. It
'
s already begun. I have an incredible, passionate desire to live, and to live always means to strive to move higher, toward perfection, and to achieve it.

"
I am glad that you stand up for Marina, Misha, just as you always stood up for Tonia. But after all, I have no quarrel with either of them, I am not at war with them, or with anyone else for that matter. You used to reproach me at first because Marina said
'
you
'
to me and called me Yurii Andreievich, while I said
'
thou
'
and
'
Marina
'
to her—as though it didn
'
t distress me too! But you know that the deeper causes of this unnatural behavior were removed long ago, and now we treat each other as equals.

"
Now I can tell you another piece of good news. I
'
ve been getting letters again from Paris. The children are growing up, they have a lot of French friends of their own age. Sasha is about to graduate from the
é
cole primaire
and Masha is soon going to it. I
'
ve never seen her, you know. I have a feeling in spite of everything that although they
'
ve become French citizens, they
'
ll soon be back and that everything will be straightened out in some way or other.

"
It seems that Tonia and my father-in-law know about Marina and our children. I didn
'
t tell them in my letters, but they must have heard about it from others. Naturally, Alexander Alexandrovich, as a father, feels outraged and hurt. That would explain why our correspondence was interrupted for almost five years. I used to correspond with them, you know, after I got back to Moscow, and then they suddenly stopped writing.