Doctor Zhivago (90 page)

"
Yes, I
'
ve heard that version, but I don
'
t believe it. Pavel Pavlovich wasn
'
t a man to commit suicide.
"

"
But it
'
s quite certain. Antipov shot himself in that house where, my brother said, you were living before you went to Vladivostok. It happened very soon after you left. My brother found his body. He buried him. How is it you weren
'
t told?
"

"
I was told something different.… So it
'
s really true, he shot himself? People said so but I didn
'
t believe it. And in that very house? It doesn
'
t seem possible. It
'
s very important to me, that detail. You don
'
t know, I suppose, whether he and Zhivago ever met, whether they got to know each other?
"

"
From what Yurii told me, they had a long conversation.
"

"
Is it possible! Well, thank God, thank God, that
'
s better.
"
Antipova slowly crossed herself.
"
What an extraordinary, preordained coincidence! Will you let me come back to this and ask you more about it later? Every detail is so dear to me. But this isn
'
t the moment, don
'
t you think? I couldn
'
t, I
'
m too upset. I
'
ll keep quiet a little, I
'
ll rest and collect my thoughts. What do you think?
"

"
Of course! Of course!
"

"
Don
'
t you really think so?
"

"
Yes, naturally.
"

"
Oh, yes. I nearly forgot. You asked me not to go away after the cremation. All right. I promise. I won
'
t disappear. I
'
ll come back here with you and stay wherever you tell me and for as long as necessary. We
'
ll go through Yurochka
'
s manuscripts. I
'
ll help you. It
'
s true, I might be useful to you. It will comfort me a great deal. I know his writing so well, every twist of it. I know it with my heart, with my life
'
s blood. And then, you know, there
'
s something I want to ask you, too. I
'
ll need your help. Didn
'
t I hear you were a lawyer? Or anyway, you know all the present customs and regulations. And another thing, I need to know what government department to apply to for information. So few people can tell one things like that. What do you think? I
'
ll need your advice about something terrible, something really terrible. It
'
s about a child. But we
'
ll talk about it later, when we come back from the crematorium. All my life I
'
ve had to keep looking for people. Tell me, suppose in some quite imaginary case it was necessary to trace a child, a child who had been turned over to strangers to be brought up by them, is there any centralized source of information about all the children
'
s homes throughout the country? And is there any record of all the waifs and strays, has anything like that ever been done or attempted? No, don
'
t tell me now, please don
'
t. We
'
ll talk about it later. I
'
m so frightened. Life is so terrifying—what do you think? I don
'
t know about later on, when my daughter comes and joins me, but for the moment I don
'
t see why I shouldn
'
t stay in this flat. Katia has a remarkable talent for music and for acting, she
'
s marvellous at imitating people and she acts out entire scenes that she makes up herself, and she sings whole operatic arias, all by ear. She
'
s a remarkable child. What do you think? I want her to go to the junior classes either at the drama school or the Conservatory, whichever will take her, and I must apply for a scholarship, that
'
s really why I
'
ve come without her at the moment, to make the arrangements; when I
'
ve fixed it and I
'
ll go back. Things are so complicated, don
'
t you think, you can
'
t explain everything. But we
'
ll talk about it later. Now I
'
ll wait a bit, I
'
ll pull myself together, I
'
ll keep quiet and collect my thoughts and try to forget my anxieties. Besides, we
'
ve kept Yurii
'
s friends out of the room much too long. Twice I thought I heard someone knocking. And there
'
s something going on outside, they
'
ve probably come from the undertaker
'
s. I
'
ll stay here quietly for a bit, but you
'
d better open the door and let them come in. It
'
s time, don
'
t you think? Wait, wait. There ought to be a footstool near the coffin, otherwise people can
'
t reach up to Yurochka. I tried to on tiptoe, but it
'
s very difficult. And Marina Markelovna and the children, they
'
ll need it. Besides, it
'
s prescribed in the ritual:
'
And you shall kiss me with a last kiss.
'
Oh, I can
'
t bear it. It
'
s all so terrible. What do you think?
"

"
I
'
ll let them in. But just one thing before I do that. You have said so many baffling things and raised so many questions that are evidently painful to you that I don
'
t know what to tell you. But there
'
s one thing I want you to know. Please count on my help in everything. I offer it to you willingly, with all my heart. And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune. To do nothing and to despair is to neglect our duty. Now I
'
m going to let the mourners in. You
'
re right about the footstool, I
'
ll get one.
"

But Antipova was no longer listening. She never heard him opening the door nor the people pouring in from the corridor, nor the directions he gave to the undertaker
'
s men and the chief mourners; she heard neither the shuffling of the crowd nor Marina
'
s sobs, neither the coughing of the men nor the tears and cries of the women.

The ceaseless, monotonous noise made her feel sick and giddy. It took all her strength not to faint. Her heart was bursting and her head ached. Lowering her head, she withdrew into memories, reflections, conjectures. She escaped into them, sank into them, as though carried forward for a time, for a few hours, into some future that she might not live to see, a future that aged her by several decades, a future where she was an old woman. In her thoughts she seemed to touch the very bottom of her unhappiness.

"
No one is left. One has died. The other has killed himself. And only that one is left alive who should have been killed, whom I tried to kill and missed, that stranger who had nothing in common with me, that complete cipher who turned my life into a chain of crimes beyond my knowing. And that monster of mediocrity is busy dashing about in the mythical byways of Asia known only to stamp collectors, and not one of those who are near to me and whom I need is left.

"
Ah, it was at Christmastime, and I had set out to shoot that caricature of vulgarity when I had that talk in this very room, lit only by a candle, with Pasha, who was still a boy, and Yura, whose body they are taking leave of now, had not yet come into my life.
"

She strained her memory to reconstruct that Christmas conversation with Pasha, but she could remember nothing except the candle burning on the window sill and melting a round patch in the icy crust on the glass.

Did she divine that Yurii, whose dead body was lying on the table, had seen the candle as he was driving past, and noticed it, and that from the moment of his seeing its light from the street (
"
A candle burned on the table, a candle burned ...
"
) his life took its fatal course?

Her thoughts scattered. She thought:
"
But what a pity he isn
'
t having a church funeral. The burial service is so grand and solemn! It
'
s more than most people deserve when they die, but it would have been so appropriate for Yurochka! He would have deserved all that, he would have justified and given meaning to
'
the lament over the grave which is the hymn of Alleluiah.
'
"

Now she felt a wave of pride and relief, as always at the thought of Yurii and as in the short intervals of her life that she had spent beside him. Now, too, she was enveloped in the air of that freedom and unconcern that he had always emanated. She got up impatiently from her chair. Something incomprehensible was happening to her. She wanted, if only for a few moments, to break free with Yurii
'
s help into the open, out of the sorrows that imprisoned her, to feel again the joy of liberation. Such a joy, it seemed to her, would be the joy of taking leave of him, of using the right and the occasion to weep her fill over him unhindered. With a passionate haste, she looked around her at the crowd, with eyes as smarting, unseeing, and tearful as if an oculist had put caustic eye-drops into them, and all the people began to move, shuffle, and walk out of the room, leaving her at last alone, behind half-closed doors. She went up to the table with the coffin on it, quickly crossing herself, got up on the footstool Evgraf had brought, made three sweeping signs of the cross over the body, and pressed her lips to the cold forehead and hands. She brushed aside the impression that the cold forehead was somehow smaller, like a hand clenched into a fist, she managed not to notice it. For a moment she stood still and silent, neither thinking nor crying, bowed over the coffin, the flowers, and the body, shielding them with her whole being, her head, her breast, her heart, and her arms, as big as her heart.

She was shaken by her repressed sobs. She fought her tears as long as she could, but at times it was beyond her strength and they burst from her, pouring down her cheeks and onto her dress, her hands, and the coffin, to which she clung.

She neither spoke nor thought. Sequences of ideas, notions, insights, truths drifted and sailed freely through her mind, like clouds in the sky, as happened so often before during their nighttime conversations. It was such things that had brought them happiness and liberation in those days. A spontaneous mutual understanding, warm, instinctive, immediate.

Such an understanding filled her now, a dark, indistinct knowledge of death, preparedness for death, a preparedness that removed all feeling of helplessness in its presence. It was as if she had lived twenty lives, and had lost Yurii countless times, and had accumulated such experience of the heart in this domain that everything she felt and did beside this coffin was exactly right and to the point.

Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people
'
s songs.

They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the
"
blaze of passion
"
often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the wide expanses they saw on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, took more delight in their love than they themselves did.

Ah, that was just what had united them and had made them so akin! Never, never, even in their moments of richest and wildest happiness, were they unaware of a sublime joy in the total design of the universe, a feeling that they themselves were a part of that whole, an element in the beauty of the cosmos.

This unity with the whole was the breath of life to them. And the elevation of man above the rest of nature, the modern coddling and worshipping of man, never appealed to them. A social system based on such a false premise, as well as its political application, struck them as pathetically amateurish and made no sense to them.