Doctor Zhivago (23 page)

Yurii Andreievich heard from Moscow that Gordon and Dudorov had published his book without his permission, and that it was praised and regarded as showing great literary promise; that Moscow was going through a disturbed, exciting time and was on the eve of something important, that there was growing discontent among the masses, and that grave political events were imminent.

It was late at night. Yurii Andreievich was terribly sleepy. He dozed intermittently and imagined that the excitement of the past days was keeping him awake. A drowsy, sleepily breathing wind yawned and stirred outside the window. The wind wept and complained,
"
Tonia, Sasha, I miss you, I want to go home, I want to go back to work.
"
And to the muttering of the wind Yurii Andreievich slept and woke and slept again in a quick, troubled alternation of joy and suffering, as fleeting and disturbing as the changing weather, as the restless night.

It occurred to Lara that after all the devotion Galiullin had shown to Pasha
'
s memory, the pains he had taken to look after his things, she had not so much as asked him who he was and where he came from.

To make up for her omission and not seem ungrateful she asked him all about himself when she made her next morning round.

"
Merciful heaven,
"
she wondered aloud. Twenty-eight Brest Street, the Tiverzins, the revolution of 1905, that winter! Yusupka? No, she couldn
'
t remember having met him, he must forgive her. But that year, that year, and that house! That
'
s true, there had really been such a house and such a year! How vividly it all came back to her! The gunfire and—what was it she had called it then?—
"
Christ
'
s judgment
"
! How strong, how piercingly sharp were the feelings you experienced for the first time as a child!
"
Forgive me, do forgive me, Lieutenant, what did you say your name is? Yes, yes, you did tell me once. Thank you, Osip Gimazetdinovich, I can
'
t thank you enough for reminding me, for bringing it all back to my mind.
"

All day long she went about thinking of
"
that house
"
and kept talking to herself.

To think of it, Brest Street, No. 28! And now they were shooting again, but how much more frightening it was now! You couldn
'
t say,
"
The boys are shooting
"
this time. The children had all grown up, the boys were all here, in the army, all those humble people who had lived in that house and in others like it and in villages that also were like it. Extraordinary, extraordinary!

All the patients who were not bedridden rushed in from the other rooms, hobbling noisily on crutches or running, or walking with canes, and shouted vying with each other:

"
Big news! Street fighting in Petersburg! The Petersburg garrison has joined the insurgents! The revolution!
"

The small town was called Meliuzeievo and lay in the fertile, black-soil country. Black dust hung over its roofs like a cloud of locusts. It was raised by the troops and convoys passing through the town; they moved in both directions, some going to the front and others away from it, and it was impossible to tell whether the war were still going on or had ceased.

Every day newly created offices sprang up like mushrooms. And they were elected to everything—Zhivago, Lieutenant Galiullin, and Nurse Antipova, as well as a few others from their group, all of them people from the big cities, well-informed and experienced.

They served as temporary town officials and as minor commissars in the army and the health department, and they looked upon this succession of tasks as an outdoor sport, a diversion, a game of blindman
'
s buff. But more and more they felt that it was time to stop and to get back to then ordinary occupations and their homes.

Zhivago and Antipova were often brought together by their work.

The rain turned the black dust into coffee-colored mud and the mud spread over the streets, most of them unpaved.

The town was small. At the end of almost every street you could see the steppe, gloomy under the dark sky, all the vastness of the war, the vastness of the revolution.

Yurii Andreievich wrote to his wife:

"
The disintegration and anarchy in the army continue. Measures are being taken to improve discipline and morale. I have toured units stationed in the neighborhood.

"
By way of a postscript, though I might have mentioned it much earlier, I must tell that I do a lot of my work with a certain Antipova, a nurse from Moscow who was born in the Urals.

"
You remember the girl student who shot at the public prosecutor on that terrible night of your mother
'
s death? I believe she was tried later. I remember telling you that Misha and I had once seen her, when she was still a schoolgirl, at some sordid hotel where your father took us. I can
'
t remember why we went, only that it was a bitterly cold night. I think it was at the time of the Presnia uprising. Well, that girl was Antipova.

"
I have made several attempts to go home, but it is not so simple. It is not so much the work—we could hand that over easily enough—the trouble is the trip. Either there are no trains at all or else they are so overcrowded that there is no way of finding a seat.

"
But of course it can
'
t go on like this forever, and some of us, who have resigned or been discharged, including Antipova, Galiullin, and myself, have made up our minds that whatever happens we shall leave next week. We
'
ll go separately; it gives us a better chance.

"
So I may turn up any day out of the blue, though I
'
ll try to send a telegram.
"

Before he left, however, he received his wife
'
s reply. In sentences broken by sobs and with tear stains and ink spots for punctuation, she begged him not to come back to Moscow but to go straight to the Urals with that wonderful nurse whose progress through life was marked by portents and coincidences so miraculous that her own, Tonia
'
s, modest life could not possibly compete with it.

"
Don
'
t worry about Sasha
'
s future,
"
she wrote.
"
You will never need to be ashamed of him. I promise you to bring him up in those principles which as a child you saw practiced in our house.
"

Yurii Andreievich wrote back at once:
"
You must be out of your mind, Tonia! How could you imagine such a thing? Don
'
t you know, don
'
t you know well enough, that if it were not for you, if it were not for my constant, faithful thoughts of you and of our home, I would never have survived these two terrible, devastating years of war? But why am I writing this—soon we
'
ll be together, our life will begin again, everything will be cleared up.

"
What frightens me about your letter is something else. If I really gave you cause to write in such a way, my behavior must have been ambiguous and I am at fault not only before you but before that other woman whom I am misleading. I
'
ll apologize to her as soon as she is back. She is away in the country. Local councils, which formerly existed only in provincial capitals and county seats, are being set up in the villages, and she has gone to help a friend of hers who is acting as instructor in connection with these legislative changes.

"
It may interest you to know that although we live in the same house I don
'
t know to this day which is Antipova
'
s room. I
'
ve never bothered to find out.
"

Two main roads ran from Meliuzeievo, one going east, the other west. One was a mud track leading through the woods to Zybushino, a small grain center that was administratively a subdivision of Meliuzeievo although it was ahead of it in every way. The other was gravelled and went through fields, boggy in winter but dry in summer, to Biriuchi, the nearest railway junction.

In June Zybushino became an independent republic. It was set up by the local miller Blazheiko and supported by deserters from the 212th Infantry who had left the front at the time of the upheavals, kept their arms, and come to Zybushino through Biriuchi.

The republic refused to recognize the Provisional Government and split off from the rest of Russia. Blazheiko, a religious dissenter who had once corresponded with Tolstoy, proclaimed a new millennial Zybushino kingdom where all work and property were to be collectivized, and referred to the local administration as an Apostolic Seat.

Zybushino had always been a source of legends and exaggerations. It is mentioned in documents dating from the Times of Troubles
[10]
and the thick forests surrounding it teemed with robbers even later. The prosperity of its merchants and the fabulous fertility of its soil were proverbial. Many popular beliefs, customs, and oddities of speech that distinguished this whole western region near the front originated in Zybushino.

Now amazing stories were told about Blazheiko
'
s chief assistant. It was said that he was deaf and dumb, that he acquired the gift of speech at moments of inspiration, and then lost it again.

The republic lasted two weeks. In July a unit loyal to the Provisional Government entered the town. The deserters fell back on Biriuchi. Several miles of forest had once been cleared along the railway line on both sides of the junction, and there, among the old tree stumps overgrown with wild strawberries, the piles of timber depleted by pilfering, and the tumble-down mud huts of the seasonal laborers who had cut the trees, the deserters set up their camp.

The hospital in which Zhivago convalesced and later served as a doctor, and which he was not preparing to leave, was housed in the former residence of Countess Zhabrinskaia. She had offered it to the Red Cross at the beginning of the war.

It was a two-story house on one of the best sites of the town, at the corner of the main street and the square, known as the
Platz
,
where soldiers had drilled in the old days and where meetings were held now.

Its position gave it a good view of the neighborhood; in addition to the square and the street it overlooked the adjoining farm (owned by a poor, provincial family who lived almost like peasants) as well as the Countess
'
s old garden at the back.

The Countess had a large estate in the district, Razdolnoie, and had used the house only for occasional business visits to the town and as a rallying point for the guests who came from near and far to stay at Razdolnoie in summer.

Now the house was a hospital, and its owner was in prison in Petersburg, where she had lived.

Of the large staff, only two women were left, Ustinia, the head cook, and Mademoiselle Fleury, the former governess of the Countess
'
s daughters, who were now married.

Gray-haired, pink-cheeked, and dishevelled, Mademoiselle Fleury shuffled about in bedroom slippers and a floppy, worn-out housecoat, apparently as much at home in the hospital as she had been in the Zhabrinsky family. She told long stories in her broken Russian, swallowing the ends of her words in the French manner, gesticulated, struck dramatic poses, and burst into hoarse peals of laughter that ended in coughing fits.

She believed that she knew Nurse Antipova inside out and thought that the nurse and the doctor were bound to be attracted to each other. Succumbing to her passion for matchmaking, so deep-rooted in the Latin heart, she was delighted when she found them in each other
'
s company, and would shake her finger and wink slyly at them. This puzzled Antipova and angered the doctor; but, like all eccentrics, Mademoiselle cherished her illusions and would not be parted from them at any price.

Ustinia was an even stranger character. Her clumsy, pear-shaped figure gave her the look of a brood hen. She was dry and sober to the point of maliciousness, but her sober-mindedness went hand in hand with an imagination unbridled in everything to do with superstition. Born in Zybushino and said to be the daughter of the local sorcerer, she knew countless spells and would never go out without first muttering over the stove and the keyhole to protect the house in her absence from fire and the Evil One. She could keep quiet for years, but once she was roused nothing would stop her. Her passion was to defend the truth.

After the fall of the Zybushino republic, the Meliuzeievo Executive Committee launched a campaign against the local anarchistic tendencies. Every night peaceful meetings were held at the
Platz
,
attended by small numbers of citizens who had nothing better to do and who, in the old days, used to gather for gossip outside the fire station. The Meliuzeievo cultural soviet encouraged them and invited local and visiting speakers to guide the discussions. The visitors believed the tales about the talking deaf-mute to be utter nonsense and were anxious to say so. But the small craftsmen, the soldiers
'
wives, and former servants of Meliuzeievo did not regard these stories as absurd and stood up in his defense.