Doctor Zhivago (34 page)

The logs flared up and crackled. The stove was ablaze. Its iron body was covered with red-hot spots like a consumptive flush. The smoke in the room thinned out and soon vanished.

The room grew lighter. The windows, which Yurii Andreievich had recently fixed according to the prosector
'
s recipe, gave off the warm, greasy smell of putty. An acrid smell of charred fir bark and the fresh, toilet-water scent of aspen came from the wood drying by the stove.

Nikolai Nikolaievich burst into the room as impetuously as the wind coming through the open window.

"
They
'
re fighting in the street,
"
he reported.
"
There is a regular battle between the cadets who support the Provisional Government and the garrison soldiers who support the Bolsheviks. There is skirmishing all over the city. I got into trouble coming here—once at the corner of Bolshaia Dmitrovka and once at the Nikitsky Gate. Now you can
'
t get through directly, you have to go around. Hurry up, Yura! Put your coat on, let
'
s go. You
'
ve got to see it. This is history. This happens once in a lifetime.
"

But he stayed talking for a couple of hours. Then they had dinner, and by the time he was ready to go home and was dragging the doctor out, Gordon burst in, in exactly the same way as Nikolai Nikolaievich and with much the same news.

Things had progressed, however. There were new details. Gordon spoke of increasing rifle fire and of passers-by killed by stray bullets. According to him, all traffic had stopped. He had got through by a miracle, but now the street was cut off.

Nikolai Nikolaievich refused to believe him and dashed out but was back in a minute. He said bullets whistled down the street knocking chips of brick and plaster off the corners. There was not a soul outside. All traffic had stopped. That week Sashenka caught a cold.

"
I
'
ve told you a hundred times, he
'
s not to play near the stove,
"
Yurii Andreievich scolded.
"
It
'
s much worse to let him get too hot than cold.
"

Sashenka had a sore throat and a fever. He had a special, overwhelming terror of vomiting, and when Yurii Andreievich tried to examine his throat he pushed away his hand, clenching his teeth, yelling and choking. Neither arguments nor threats had the slightest effect on him. At one moment, however, he inadvertently yawned, and the doctor quickly took advantage of this to insert a spoon into his son
'
s mouth and hold down his tongue for long enough to get a look at his raspberry-colored larynx and swollen tonsils covered with alarming white spots.

A little later, by means of a similar maneuver, he got a specimen and, as he had a microscope at home, was able to examine it. Fortunately, it was not diphtheria.

But on the third night Sashenka had an attack of nervous croup. His temperature shot up and he could not breathe. Yurii Andreievich was helpless to ease his suffering and could not bear to watch it. Antonina Alexandrovna thought the child was dying. They carried him about the room in turn, and this seemed to make him feel better.

They needed milk, mineral water, or soda water for him. But the street fighting was at its height. Gun and rifle fire never ceased for a moment. Even if Yurii Andreievich had crossed the battle zone at the risk of his life, he would not have found anyone about in the streets beyond it. All life in the city was suspended until the situation would be definitively clarified.

Yet there could be no doubt about the outcome. Rumors came from all sides that the workers were getting the upper hand. Small groups of cadets were fighting on, but they were cut off from each other and from their command.

The Sivtzev quarter was held by soldiers
'
units who were pressing on toward the center. Soldiers who had fought against Germany and young working boys sat in a trench they had dug down the street; they were already getting to know the people who lived in the neighborhood and joked with them as they came and stood outside their gates. Traffic in this part of the town was being restored.

Gordon and Nikolai Nikolaievich, who had got stuck at the Zhivagos
'
, were released from their three days
'
captivity. Zhivago had been glad of their presence during Sashenka
'
s illness, and his wife forgave them for adding to the general disorder. But they had felt obliged to repay the kindness of their hosts by entertaining them with ceaseless talk. Yurii Andreievich was so exhausted by three days of pointless chatter that he was happy to see them go.

They learned that their guests had got home safely. But military operations continued, several streets were still closed, and the doctor could not yet go to his hospital. He was impatient to return to his work and the manuscript he had left in the drawer of the staff-room desk.

Only here and there did people come out in the morning and walk a short distance to buy bread. When they saw a passer-by carrying a milk bottle, they would surround him trying to find out where he had got it.

Occasionally the firing resumed all over the town, and the streets were cleared again. It was said that the two sides were engaged in negotiations, whose course, favorable or unfavorable, was reflected in the varying intensity of the firing.

At about 10 P.M. one evening in late October (Old Style) Yurii Andreievich went without any particular necessity to call on one of his colleagues. The streets he passed were deserted. He walked quickly. The first thin powdery snow was coming down, scattered by a rising wind.

He had turned down so many side streets that he had almost lost count of them when the snow thickened and the wind turned into a blizzard, the kind of blizzard that whistles in a field covering it with a blanket of snow, but which in town tosses about as if it had lost its way.

There was something in common between the disturbances in the moral and in the physical world, near and far on the ground and in the air. Here and there resounded the last salvoes of islands of resistance. Bubbles of dying fires rose and broke on the horizon. And the snow swirled and eddied and smoked at Yurii
'
s feet, on the wet streets and pavements.

A newsboy running with a thick batch of freshly printed papers under his arm and shouting
"
Latest news!
"
overtook him at an intersection.

"
Keep the change,
"
said the doctor. The boy peeled a damp sheet off the batch, thrust it into his hand, and a minute later was engulfed in the snowstorm.

The doctor stopped under a street light to read the headlines. The paper was a late extra printed on one side only; it gave the official announcement from Petersburg that a Soviet of People
'
s Commissars had been formed and that Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat were established in Russia. There followed the first decrees of the new government and various brief news dispatches received by telegraph and telephone.

The blizzard lashed at the doctor
'
s eyes and covered the printed page with gray, rustling pellets of snow. But it was not the snowstorm that prevented him from reading. The historic greatness of the moment moved him so deeply that it took him some time to collect himself.

To read the rest of the news he looked around for a better lit, sheltered place. He found that he was standing once again at that charmed spot, the intersection of Serebriany and Molchanovka, in front of a tall, five-story building with a glass door and a spacious, well-lit lobby.

He went in and stood under the electric light, next to the staircase, reading the news.

Footsteps sounded above him. Someone was coming down the stairs, stopping frequently, as though hesitating. At one point, he actually changed his mind and ran up again. A door opened somewhere and two voices welled out, so distorted by echoes that it was impossible to tell whether men or women were speaking. Then the door banged and the same steps ran down, this time resolutely.

Yurii Andreievich was absorbed in his paper and had not meant to look up, but the stranger stopped so suddenly at the foot of the stairs that he raised his head.

Before him stood a boy of about eighteen in a reindeer cap and a stiff reindeer coat worn, as in Siberia, fur side out. He was dark and had narrow Kirghiz eyes. His face had an aristocratic quality, the fugitive spark and reticent delicacy that give an impression of remoteness and are sometimes found in people of a complex, mixed parentage.

The boy obviously mistook Yurii Andreievich for someone else. He looked at him, puzzled and shy, as if he knew him but could not make up his mind to speak. To put an end to the misunderstanding Yurii Andreievich measured him with a cold, discouraging glance.

The boy turned away confused and walked to the entrance. There he looked back once again before going out and banging the heavy glass door shut behind him.

Yurii Andreievich left a few minutes after him. His mind was full of the news; he forgot the boy and the colleague he had meant to visit, and set out straight for home. But he was distracted on the way by another incident, one of those details of everyday life that assumed an inordinate importance in those days.

Not far from his house he stumbled in the dark over an enormous pile of timber near the curb. There was an institution of some sort in the street, to which the government had probably supplied fuel in the form of boards from a dismantled house in the outskirts of the town. Not all of it would go into the yard, and the rest had been left outside. A sentry with a rifle was on duty by this pile; he paced up and down the yard and occasionally went out into the street.

Without thinking twice, Yurii Andreievich took advantage of a moment when the sentry
'
s back was turned and the wind had raised a cloud of snow into the air to creep up on the dark side, avoiding the lamplight, carefully loosen a heavy beam from the very bottom, and pull it out. He loaded it with difficulty on his back, immediately ceasing to feel its weight (your own load is not a burden), and, hugging the shadow of the walls, took the wood safely home.

Its arrival was timely; they had run out of firewood. The beam was chopped up, and the pieces were stacked. Yurii Andreievich lit the stove and squatted in front of it in silence, while Alexander Alexandrovich moved up his armchair and sat warming himself.

Yurii Andreievich took the newspaper out of the side pocket of his coat and held it out to him.

"
Seen that? Have a look.
"

Still squatting on his heels and poking the fire, he talked to himself.

"
What splendid surgery! You take a knife and with one masterful stroke you cut out all the old stinking ulcers. Quite simply, without any nonsense, you take the old monster of injustice, which has been accustomed for centuries to being bowed and scraped and curtsied to, and you sentence it to death.

"
This fearlessness, this way of seeing the thing through to the end, has a familiar national look about it. It has something of Pushkin
'
s uncompromising clarity and of Tolstoy
'
s unwavering faithfulness to the facts.
"

"
Pushkin, you said? Wait a second. Let me finish. I can
'
t read and listen at the same time,
"
said Alexander Alexandrovich under the mistaken impression that his son-in-law was addressing him.

"
And the real stroke of genius is this. If you charged someone with the task of creating a new world, of starting a new era, he would ask you first to clear the ground. He would wait for the old centuries to finish before undertaking to build the new ones, he
'
d want to begin a new paragraph, a new page.

"
But here, they don
'
t bother with anything like that. This new thing, this marvel of history, this revelation, is exploded right into the very thick of daily life without the slightest consideration for its course. It doesn
'
t start at the beginning, it starts in the middle, without any schedule, on the first weekday that comes along, while the traffic in the street is at its height. That
'
s real genius. Only real greatness can be so unconcerned with timing and opportunity.
"

Winter came, just the kind of winter that had been foretold. It was not as terrifying as the two winters that followed it, but it was already of the same sort, dark, hungry, and cold, entirely given to the breaking up of the familiar and the reconstruction of all the foundations of existence, and to inhuman efforts to cling to life as it slipped out of your grasp.

There were three of them, one after the other, three such terrible winters, and not all that now seems to have happened in 1917 and 1918 really happened then—some of it may have been later. These three successive winters have merged into one and it is difficult to tell them apart.