Doctor Zhivago (49 page)

"
I wonder if you realize what a volcano we are sitting on even without you here?
"

"
Just a moment, Lenochka. My wife is quite right. Things are bad enough without you. It
'
s a dog
'
s life, a madhouse. I am caught between two fires. Between those who make my life a misery because my son is a Red, a Bolshevik, the people
'
s favorite, and those who want to know why I was elected to the Constituent Assembly. Nobody is pleased, I have no one to turn to. And now you! A nice thought, to have to face a firing squad on your account!
"

"
Oh, come! Be sensible. What
'
s the matter with you!
"

A little later he relented.

"
Well, there isn
'
t any point in squabbling in the yard. We can go inside. Not, of course, that I can see any good coming of it, but
'
we see as in a glass darkly.
'
Still, we aren
'
t Janizaries, we aren
'
t heathens, we won
'
t drive you out into the forest to be eaten by bears. I think, Lenochka, we
'
d better put them in the palm room for the moment, next to the study. We
'
ll see later where they can settle down, we might find them some place in the park. Do come inside. Bring their things in, Bacchus, give the guests a hand.
"

Bacchus did as he was told, muttering:
"
Mother of God! They
'
ve got no more stuff than pilgrims! Nothing but little bundles, not a single trunk.
"

The night was cold. They washed, and the women got the room ready for the night. Sashenka, who from long custom expected to have his childish utterances greeted with raptures and therefore prattled obligingly, was upset because for once he had no success, no one took any notice of him. He was disappointed that the black foal had not been brought into the house, and when he was told sharply to be quiet he burst into tears, afraid that he might be sent back to the baby shop where, he believed, his parents had bought him. His fear was genuine, and he wanted to share it with everyone around him, but his charming absurdities on this occasion failed to produce the usual effect. Ill at ease in a strange house, the grownups seemed to him to be in more than their usual hurry as they went about silently absorbed in their tasks. Sashenka was offended, and he sulked. He was made to eat and put to bed with difficulty. When at last he was asleep, Ustinia, the Mikulitsyns
'
maid, took Niusha to her room to give her supper and initiated her into the secrets of the household. Antonina Alexandrovna and the men were invited to tea with the Mikulitsyns.

Alexander Alexandrovich and Yurii Andreievich first went out on the veranda for a breath of air.

"
What a lot of stars!
"
said Alexander Alexandrovich.

It was very dark. Standing only a few steps apart, the two men could not see each other. Lamplight streamed from a window behind them into the ravine. In its shaft shrubs, trees, and other vague shapes rose cloudily in the cold mist. But the two men were outside this light, which only thickened the darkness around them.

"
First thing tomorrow we must have a look at the annex he
'
s got in mind for us, and if it
'
s any good we must start repairing it at once. Then, by the time we
'
ve got it fitted up the ground will have thawed out and we can start digging the beds without losing any time. Didn
'
t he say he
'
d let us have some seed potatoes?
"

"
He certainly did. He promised us other seed as well. I heard him say so with my own ears. As for the place he offers us, we saw it as we were crossing the park. You know where it is? It
'
s the annex behind the main house, you can hardly see it for thistles. It
'
s wooden, though the house is of stone. I pointed it out to you, do you remember? I thought it would be a good place for the seedbeds. It looked to me as if there might have been a flower garden once, at least it looked like that from a distance, but I may have been mistaken. The soil in the old flower beds must have been well manured; I imagine it might still be pretty good.
"

"
I don
'
t know, we
'
ll have a look tomorrow. I should think it
'
s rank with weeds and hard as stone by now. There must have been a kitchen garden somewhere for the house. Possibly we can use it. We
'
ll find out tomorrow. Probably there
'
s still frost in the mornings. There
'
s sure to be a frost tonight. Anyway, what bliss to be here at last—that
'
s something to be thankful for. It
'
s a good place. I like it.
"

"
They are nice people. He especially. She
'
s a bit affected. There is something she doesn
'
t like about herself. That
'
s why she talks such a lot and why she makes herself sillier than she is. It
'
s as if she were in a hurry to distract your attention from her looks, before you
'
ve had time to get a bad impression. And her forgetting to take off her hat and wearing it around her neck isn
'
t absent-mindedness either—it really is becoming to her.
"

"
Well, we
'
d better go back or they
'
ll think we
'
re rude.
"

On their way to the dining room, where their hosts and Antonina Alexandrovna were having tea at the round table under the hanging lamp, they went through Mikulitsyn
'
s dark study.

It had an enormous window the length of the wall, overlooking the ravine. Earlier, while it was still light, the doctor had noticed the view from it over the gully and the plain beyond, which they had crossed with Bacchus. At the window stood a draftsman
'
s table which also took up the width of the wall. A gun lying lengthways on it and leaving plenty of room at either end further emphasized the great width of the table.

Now, as they went through, Yurii Andreievich once more thought with envy of the window with its vast view, the size and position of the table, and the spaciousness of the well-furnished room, and it was the first thing he spoke of to his hosts as he entered the dining room.

"
What a wonderful place you have! What a splendid study, it must be a perfect place to work in, a real inspiration.
"

"
A glass or a cup? And do you like it strong or weak?
"

"
Yurochka, do look at this. It
'
s a stereoscope, Averkii Stepanovich
'
s son made it when he was a child.
"

"
He still hasn
'
t grown up and settled down, even though he has captured district after district for the Soviets from Komuch.
"

"
What
'
s Komuch?
"

"
It
'
s the army of the Siberian Government; it
'
s fighting to restore the Constituent Assembly.
"

"
We
'
ve been hearing praise of your son all day long. You must be very proud of him.
"

"
Those stereoscopic photographs of the Urals—they are his work too, and he took them with a homemade camera.
"

"
Wonderful cookies! Are they made with saccharin?
"

"
Good gracious, no! Where would we get saccharin in our wilderness? It
'
s honest to God sugar. Didn
'
t you see me put sugar in your tea?
"

"
Of course it is! I was looking at the photographs. And it
'
s real tea, isn
'
t it?
"

"
Certainly! It
'
s jasmine tea.
"

"
How on earth do you get it?
"

"
We have a sort of magician. A friend of ours. He
'
s a public figure of the new sort. Very left-wing. He
'
s the official representative of the Provincial Economic Council. He takes our timber to town and gets us flour and butter through his friends. Pass me the sugar bowl, Siverka
"
(that was what she called Averkii).
"
And now, I wonder, can you tell me the year of Griboiedov
'
s death?
"

"
He was born in 1795, I think. But just when he was killed, I don
'
t remember.
"

"
More tea?
"

"
No, thank you.
"

"
Now here
'
s something for you. Tell me the date of the Treaty of Nimwegen and which countries signed it.
"

"
Don
'
t torment them, darling. They
'
ve hardly recovered from their journey.
"

"
And now this is what I
'
d like to know. How many kinds of lenses are there, and when are the images real, reversed, natural, or inverted?
"

"
How do you come to know so much about physics?
"

"
We had an excellent science teacher in Yuriatin, he taught both in the boys
'
school and in ours. I can
'
t tell you how good he was. He was a wonder. It was all so clear when he explained it to you! His name was Antipov. He was married to a teacher too. All the girls were mad about him, they all fell in love with him. He went off to the war as a volunteer and was killed. Some people say this scourge of ours, Commissar Strelnikov, is Antipov risen from the dead. But that
'
s only a silly rumor, of course. It
'
s most unlikely. Though, who can tell, anything is possible. Another cup?
"

In the winter, when Yurii Andreievich had more time, he began a notebook. He wrote:
"
How often, last summer, I felt like saying with Tiutchev:

'
What a summer, what a summer!

This is magic indeed.

And how, I ask you, did it come

Just like that, out of the blue?
'

What happiness, to work from dawn to dusk for your family and for yourself, to build a roof over their heads, to till the soil to feed them, to create your own world, like Robinson Crusoe, in imitation of the Creator of the universe, and, as your own mother did, to give birth to yourself, time and again.

"
So many new thoughts come into your head when your hands are busy with hard physical work, when your mind has set you a task that can be achieved by physical effort and that brings its reward in joy and success, when for six hours on end you dig or hammer, scorched by the life-giving breath of the sky. And it isn
'
t a loss but a gain that these transient thoughts, intuitions, analogies are not put down on paper but forgotten. The town recluse whipping up his nerves and his imagination with strong black coffee and tobacco doesn
'
t know the strongest drug of all—good health and real necessity.

"
I am not going further than this. I am not preaching Tolstoyan austerity and the return to the land, I am not trying to improve on socialism and its solution to the agrarian problem. I am merely stating a fact, I am not building a system on the basis of our own accidental experience. Our example is debatable and unsuitable for deductions. Our economy is too mixed. What we produce ourselves—potatoes and vegetables—is only a small part of what we need; the rest comes from other sources.

"
Our use of the land is illegal. We have taken the law into our own hands, and we conceal what we are doing from the state. The wood we cut is stolen, and it is no excuse that we steal from the state or that the property once belonged to Krueger. We can do all this thanks to Mikulitsyn
'
s tolerant attitude (he lives in much the same way as we do), and we can do it safely because we are far from the town, where, fortunately, nothing is known, for the time being, about our illegal activities.