Doctor Zhivago (31 page)

Sashenka, though doubtless frightened and repelled, let the unshaven stranger get quite close and bend over him, then he jerked himself upright, clutching the front of his mother
'
s dress with one hand, and angrily swung the other arm and slapped him in the face. Terrified by his own daring, he then threw himself into his mother
'
s arms and burst into bitter tears.

"
No, no,
"
Tonia scolded him.
"
You mustn
'
t do that, Sashenka. What will Daddy think? He
'
ll think Sasha is a bad boy. Now, show how you can kiss, kiss Daddy. Don
'
t cry, silly, it
'
s all right.
"

"
Let him be, Tonia,
"
the doctor said.
"
Don
'
t bother him, and don
'
t upset yourself. I know the kind of nonsense you are thinking—that it
'
s not accidental, it
'
s a bad sign—but that
'
s all rubbish. It
'
s only natural. The boy has never seen me. Tomorrow he
'
ll have a good look at me and we
'
ll become inseparable.
"

Yet he went out of the room depressed and with a feeling of foreboding.

Within the next few days he realized how alone he was. He did not blame anyone. He had merely got what he had asked for.

His friends had become strangely dim and colorless. Not one of them had preserved his own outlook, his own world. They had been much more vivid in his memory. He must have overestimated them in the past. Under the old order, which enabled those whose lives were secure to play the fools and eccentrics at the expense of the others while the majority led a wretched existence, it had been only too easy to mistake the foolishness and idleness of a privileged minority for genuine character and originality. But the moment the lower classes had risen, and the privileges of those on top had been abolished, how quickly had those people faded, how unregretfully had they renounced independent ideas—apparently no one had ever had such ideas!

The only people to whom Yurii Andreievich now felt close were his wife, her father, and two or three of his colleagues, modest rank-and-file workers, who did not indulge in grandiloquent phrases.

The party with duck and vodka was given as planned, a few days after his return. By then he had seen all those who came to it, so that the dinner was not in fact the occasion of their reunion.

The large duck was an unheard-of luxury in those already hungry days, but there was no bread with it, and because of this its splendor was somehow pointless—it even got on one
'
s nerves.

The alcohol (a favorite black-market currency) had been brought by Gordon in a medicine bottle with a glass stopper. Antonina Alexandrovna never let go of the bottle, and now and then diluted a small portion of the alcohol with more or less water, according to her inspiration. It was discovered that it is easier to hold a number of consistently strong drinks than ones of varying strength. This, too, was annoying.

But the saddest thing of all was that their party was a kind of betrayal. You could not imagine anyone in the houses across the street eating or drinking in the same way at the same time. Beyond the windows lay silent, dark, hungry Moscow. Its shops were empty, and as for game and vodka, people had even forgotten to think about such things.

And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness, so that duck and vodka, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not even duck and vodka. And this was most vexing of all.

The guests too inspired unhappy reflections. Gordon had been all right in the days when he was given to gloomy thoughts and expressed them sullenly and clumsily. He was Zhivago
'
s best friend, and in the gymnasium many people had liked him.

But now he had decided to give himself a new personality, and the results of his efforts were unfortunate. He played the merry fellow, he was jovial, cracked jokes, and often exclaimed,
"
What fun!
"
and
"
How amusing!
"
—expressions that did not belong to his vocabulary, for Gordon had never looked upon life as an entertainment.

While they were waiting for Dudorov he told the story of Dudorov
'
s marriage, which he thought was comical, and which was circulating among his friends. Yurii Andreievich had not yet heard it.

It turned out that Dudorov had been married for about a year and then divorced his wife. The improbable gist of this story consisted in the following:

Dudorov had been drafted into the army by mistake. While he was serving and his case was being investigated, he was constantly punished for absent-mindedly forgetting to salute officers in the street. For a long time after his discharge he would raise his arm impulsively whenever an officer came in sight, and often he imagined epaulettes where there were none.

In this latter period his behavior was erratic in other ways as well. At one point—so the rumor went—while waiting for a steamer at a Volga port, he made the acquaintance of two young women, sisters, who were waiting for the same steamer. Confused by the presence of a large number of army men and the memories of his misadventures as a soldier, he fell in love with the younger sister, and proposed to her on the spot.
"
Amusing, isn
'
t it?
"
Gordon said. But he had to interrupt his story when its hero was heard at the door. Dudorov entered the room.

Like Gordon, he had become the opposite of what he had been. He had always been flippant and featherbrained: now he was a serious scholar. As a schoolboy he had been expelled for helping political prisoners escape; he had then tried several art schools, but in the end had become a student of the humanities. During the war he graduated from the university a few years behind his schoolmates. Now he held two chairs—those of Russian history and of general history. He was even the author of two books, one on the land policies of Ivan the Terrible, the other a study of Saint-Just.

Here at the party he spoke amiably about everyone and everything, in a voice that was muffled as though by a cold, staring dreamily at a certain fixed point in the distance like a man delivering a lecture.

Toward the end of the evening, when Shura Shlesinger burst in and added to the general noise and excitement, Dudorov, who had been Zhivago
'
s childhood friend, asked him several times, addressing him with the formal
"
you
"
rather than the usual
"
thou,
"
whether he had read Mayakovsky
'
s
War and the World
and
Flute-Spine
.

Missing Yurii Andreievich
'
s reply in all the noise, he asked him again a little later:
"
Have you read
Flute-Spine
and
Man
?
"

"
I told you, Innokentii. It
'
s not my fault that you don
'
t listen. Well, all right, I
'
ll say it again. I
'
ve always liked Mayakovsky. He is a sort of continuation of Dostoievsky. Or rather, he
'
s a Dostoievsky character writing lyrical poems—one of his young rebels, the
'
Raw Youth
'
or Hippolyte or Raskolnikov. What an all-devouring poetic energy! And his way of saying a thing once and for all, uncompromisingly, straight from the shoulder! And above all, with what daring he flings all this in the face of society and beyond, into space!
"

But the main attraction of the evening was, of course, Uncle Kolia. Antonina Alexandrovna had been mistaken in thinking that he was out of town; he had come back the day of his nephew
'
s return. They had met a couple of times already and had got over their initial exclamations and had talked and laughed together to their heart
'
s content.

The first time had been on a dull, gray night with a drizzle, fine as watery dust. Yurii Andreievich went to see him at his hotel. The hotels were already refusing to take people in except at the recommendation of the town authorities, but Nikolai Nikolaievich was well known and had kept some of his old connections.

The hotel looked like a lunatic asylum abandoned by its staff—the stairways and corridors empty, everything in a state of chaos.

Through the large window of his unswept room the huge square of those mad days looked in, deserted and frightening, more like a square in a nightmare than the one plainly to be seen in front of the hotel.

For Yurii Andreievich the encounter was a tremendous, unforgettable event. He was seeing the idol of his childhood, the teacher who had dominated his mind as a boy.

His gray hair was becoming to him, and his loose foreign suit fitted him well. He was very young and handsome for his years.

Admittedly, he was overshadowed by the grandeur of the events; seen beside them, he lost in stature. But it never occurred to Yurii Andreievich to measure him by such a yardstick.

He was surprised at Nikolai Nikolaievich
'
s calm, at his light and detached tone in speaking of politics. He was more self-possessed than most Russians could be at that time. It marked him as a new arrival, and it seemed old-fashioned and a little embarrassing.

But it was something very different from politics that filled those first few hours of their reunion, that made them laugh and cry and throw their arms around each other
'
s necks, and punctuated their first feverish conversation with frequent moments of silence.

Theirs was a meeting of two artists, and although they were close relatives, and the past arose and lived again between them and memories surged up and they informed each other of all that had happened during their separation, the moment they began to speak of the things that really matter to creative minds, all other ties between them vanished, their kinship and difference of age were forgotten, all that was left was the confrontation of elemental forces, of energies and principles.

For the last ten years Nikolai Nikolaievich had had no opportunity to speak about the problems of creative writing as freely and intimately as now. Nor had Yurii Andreievich ever heard views as penetrating, apt, and inspiring as on that occasion.

Their talk was full of exclamations, they paced excitedly up and down the room, marvelling at each other
'
s perspicacity, or stood in silence by the window drumming on the glass, deeply moved by the exalting discovery of how completely they understood each other.

Such was their first meeting, but later the doctor had seen his uncle a few times in company, and then Nikolai Nikolaievich was completely different, unrecognizable.

He felt that he was a visitor in Moscow and persisted in acting like one. Whether it was Petersburg that he regarded as his home, or some other place, remained uncertain. He enjoyed his role of a social star and political oracle, and possibly he imagined that Moscow would have political salons in the style of Madame Roland
'
s in Paris on the eve of the Convention.

Calling on his women friends at their hospitable apartments in quiet Moscow back streets, he amiably teased them and their husbands on their backwardness and parochialism. He showed off his familiarity with newspapers, as he had done formerly with books forbidden by the Church, and Orphic texts.

It was said that he had left a new young love, much unfinished business, and a half-written book in Switzerland, and had only come for a dip into the stormy waters of his homeland, expecting, if he came out safe and sound, to hasten back to his Alps.

He was pro-Bolshevik, and often mentioned two left-wing Social Revolutionaries who shared his views, a journalist who wrote under the pseudonym of Miroshka Pomor and a pamphleteer, Sylvia Koteri.

"
It
'
s frightful, what you
'
ve come down to, Nikolai Nikolaievich,
"
Alexander Alexandrovich chided him.
"
You and your Miroshkas! What a cesspool! And then that Lydia Pokori.
"

"
Koteri,
"
corrected Nikolai Nikolaievich,
"
and Sylvia.
"

"
Pokori or Potpourri, who cares. Names won
'
t change anything.
"

"
All the same, it happens to be Koteri,
"
Nikolai Nikolaievich insisted patiently. They had dialogues of this sort: