Doctor Zhivago (37 page)

"
My hour for typhus has struck,
"
said Yurii Andreievich, laughing. He told her about his patient and the chiming clock.

But he did not get typhus until much later. In the meantime the Zhivagos were tried to the limits of endurance. They had nothing and they were starving. The doctor went to see the Party member he had once saved, the one who had been the victim of a robbery. This man did everything he could for the doctor, but the civil war was just beginning and he was hardly ever in Moscow; moreover, he regarded the privations people had to suffer in those days as only natural, and he himself went hungry, though he concealed it

Yurii Andreievich tried to get in touch with the supplier in Brest Street. But in the intervening months the young man had disappeared and nothing was known about his wife, who had recovered. Galiullina was out when Yurii Andreievich called, most of the tenants were new, and Demina was at the front.

One day he received an allocation of wood at the official price. He had to bring it from the Vindava Station. Walking home along the endless stretches of Meshchanskaia Street—keeping an eye on the cart loaded with his unexpected treasure—he noticed that the street looked quite different; he found that he was swaying from side to side, his legs refusing to carry him. He realized that he was in for a bad time, that he had typhus. The driver picked him up when he fell down and slung him on top of the wood. The doctor never knew how he got home.

He was delirious off and on for two weeks. He dreamed that Tonia had put two streets on his desk, Sadovaia Karetnaia on his left and Sadovaia Triumphalnaia on his right, and had lit the table lamp; its warm orange glow lit up the streets and now he could write. So he was writing.

He was writing what he should have written long ago and had always wished to write but never could. Now it came to him quite easily, he wrote eagerly and said exactly what he wanted to say. Only now and then a boy got in his way, a boy with narrow Kirghiz eyes, in an unbuttoned reindeer coat worn fur side out, as in the Urals or Siberia.

He knew for certain that this boy was the spirit of his death or, to put it quite plainly, that he was his death. Yet how could he be his death if he was helping him to write a poem? How could death be useful, how was it possible for death to be a help?

The subject of his poem was neither the entombment nor the resurrection but the days between; the title was
"
Turmoil.
"

He had always wanted to describe how for three days the black, raging, worm-filled earth had assailed the deathless incarnation of love, storming it with rocks and rubble—as waves fly and leap at a seacoast, cover and submerge it—how for three days the black hurricane of earth raged, advancing and retreating.

Two lines kept coming into his head:

"
We are glad to be near you,
"
and
"
Time to wake up.
"

Near him, touching him, were hell, dissolution, corruption, death, and equally near him were the spring and Mary Magdalene and life. And it was time to awake. Time to wake up and to get up. Time to arise, time for the resurrection.

He began to get better. At first he took everything for granted, like a halfwit. He remembered nothing, he could see no connection between one thing and another and was not surprised at anything. His wife fed him on white bread and butter and sugared tea; she gave him coffee. He had forgotten that such things did not exist, and he enjoyed their taste like poetry or like fairy tales, as something right and proper for a convalescent. Soon, however, he began to think and wonder.

"
How did you get all this?
"
he asked his wife.

"
Your Grania got it for us.
"

"
What Grania?
"

"
Grania Zhivago.
"

"
Grania Zhivago?
"

"
Well, yes, your brother Evgraf, from Omsk. Your half brother. He came every day while you were ill.
"

"
Does he wear a reindeer coat?
"

"
That
'
s right. So you did see him. You were unconscious nearly all the time. He said he had run into you on the stairs in some house or other. He knew you—he meant to speak to you, but apparently you frightened him to death! He worships you, he reads every word you write. The things he got for us! Rice, raisins, sugar! He
'
s gone back now. He wants us to go there too. He
'
s a strange boy, a bit mysterious. I think he must have some sort of connection with the government out there. He says we ought to get away for a year or two, get away from the big towns,
'
go back to the land
'
for a bit, he says. I thought of the Krueger place and he said it was a very good idea. We could grow vegetables and there
'
s the forest all around. There isn
'
t any point in dying without a struggle, like sheep.
"

In April that year Zhivago set out with his whole family for the former Varykino estate, near the town of Yuriatin, far away in the Urals.

The end of March brought the first warm days of the year, false heralds of spring which were always followed by a severe cold spell.

The Zhivagos were hurriedly getting ready to leave. To disguise the bustle, the tenants—there were more of them now than sparrows in the street—were told that the apartment was having a spring cleaning for Easter.

Yurii Andreievich had opposed the move. So far, he had thought that it would come to nothing and had not interfered with the preparations, but they had advanced and were about to be completed. The time had come to discuss the matter seriously.

He reiterated his doubts at a family council made up of himself, his wife, and his father-in-law.
"
Do you think I
'
m wrong?
"
he asked them after stating his objections.
"
Do you still insist on going?
"

"
You say that we must manage as best we can for the next couple of years,
"
said his wife,
"
until land conditions are settled, then we might get a vegetable garden near Moscow. But how are we to endure until then? That
'
s the crucial point, and you haven
'
t told us.
"

"
It
'
s sheer madness to count on such things,
"
her father backed her up.

"
Very well then, you win,
"
Yurii Andreievich said.
"
What bothers me is that we are going blindfold, to a place we know nothing about. Of the three people who lived at Varykino, Mother and Grandmother are dead, and Grandfather Krueger is being held as a hostage—that is, if he is still alive.

"
You know he made a fictitious sale in the last year of the war, sold the forests and the factories or else put the title deeds in the name of someone else, a bank or a private person, I don
'
t know. We don
'
t know anything, in fact. To whom does the estate belong now? I don
'
t mean whose property it is, I don
'
t care if we lose it, but who is in charge there? Who runs it? Is the timber being cut? Are the factories working? And above all, who is in power in that part of the country, or rather, who will be by the time we get there?

"
You are relying on the old manager, Mikulitsyn, to see us through, but who is to tell us if he is still there? Or whether he is still alive? Anyway what do we know about him except his name—and that we only remember because Grandfather had such difficulty in pronouncing it.

"
However, what is there to argue about? You have made up your minds, and I
'
ve agreed. Now we must find out exactly what one does about travelling these days. There is no point in putting it off.
"

Yurii Andreievich went to the Yaroslavsky Station to make inquiries.

Endless queues of passengers moved along raised gangways between wooden handrails. On the stone floors lay people in gray army coats who coughed, spat, shifted about, and spoke in voices that resounded incongruously loudly under the vaulted ceilings.

Most of these people had recently had typhus and been discharged from the overcrowded hospitals as soon as they were off the critical list. Yurii Andreievich, as a doctor, knew the necessity for this, but he had had no idea that there could be so many of these unfortunates or that they were forced to seek refuge in railway stations.

"
You must get a priority,
"
a porter in a white apron told him.
"
Then you must come every day to ask if there is a train. Trains are rare nowadays, it
'
s a question of luck. And of course
"
(he rubbed two fingers with his thumb)
"
a little flour or something…Wheels don
'
t run without oil, you know, and what
'
s more
"
(he tapped his Adam
'
s apple)
"
you won
'
t get far without a little vodka.
"

About that time Alexander Alexandrovich was asked several times to act as consultant to the Higher Economic Council, and Yurii Andreievich to treat a member of the government who was dangerously ill. Both were paid in what was then the highest currency—credit slips for an allotment of articles from the first of the newly opened distribution centers.

The center was an old army warehouse next to the Simonov Monastery. The doctor and his father-in-law went through the monastery and the barrack yard and straight through a low stone door into a vaulted cellar. It sloped down and widened at its farther end, where a counter ran across from wall to wall; behind it stood an attendant, weighing, measuring, and handing out goods with calm unhurried movements, crossing off the items on the list with broad pencil strokes and occasionally replenishing his stock from the back of the store.

There were not many customers.
"
Containers,
"
said the storekeeper, glancing at the slips. The professor and the doctor held out several large and small pillowcases and, with bulging eyes, watched them being filled with flour, cereals, macaroni, sugar, suet, soap, matches, and something wrapped in paper that was later found to be Caucasian cheese.

Overwhelmed by the storekeeper
'
s generosity and anxious not to waste his time, they hurriedly stuffed their bundles into big sacks and slung them over their shoulders.

They came out of the vault intoxicated not by the mere thought of food but by the realization that they too were of use in the world and did not live in vain and had deserved the praise and thanks that Tonia would shower on them at home.

While the men disappeared for whole days into government offices, seeking travel documents and registering the apartment so that they should be able to go back to it on their return to Moscow, Antonina Alexandrovna sorted the family belongings.

Walking up and down the three rooms now officially assigned to the Zhivagos, she weighed even the smallest article twenty times in her hand before deciding whether to put it into the pile of things they were taking with them. Only a small part of their luggage was intended for their personal use; the rest would serve as currency on the way and in the first weeks after their arrival.

The spring breeze came in through the partly open window, tasting faintly of newly cut white bread. Cocks were crowing and children playing and shouting in the yard. The more the room was aired the more noticeable became the smell of mothballs from the open trunks in which the winter clothes had been packed.

As for the choice of things to be taken or left behind, there existed a whole theory, developed by those who had left earlier and communicated their observations to friends at home. The simple, indisputable rules of this theory were so distinctly present in Antonina Alexandrovna
'
s mind that she imagined hearing them repeated by some secret voice coming from outside with the chirruping of sparrows and the cries of playing children.

"
Lengths for dresses,
"
she pondered,
"
but luggage is checked on the way, so this is dangerous unless they are tacked up to look like clothes. Materials and fabrics, clothes, preferably coats if they
'
re not too worn. No trunks or hampers (there won
'
t be any porters); be sure to take nothing useless and tie up everything in bundles small enough for a woman or a child to carry. Salt and tobacco have been found very useful but risky. Money in Kerenkas.
[13]
Documents are the hardest thing to carry safely.
"
And so on and so on.