Doctor Zhivago (56 page)

Oh, but what nonsense was she wasting her time thinking about! Did they matter? Were they Russia
'
s misfortune? Her misfortune was the towns. Not that the country stood or fell by the towns. But the towns were educated, and the country people had had their heads turned, they envied the education of the towns and tried to copy their ways and could not catch up with them, so now they were neither one thing nor the other.

Or perhaps it was the other way around, perhaps ignorance was the trouble? An educated man can see through walls, he knows everything in advance, while the rest of us are like people in a dark wood. We only miss our hats when our heads have been chopped off. Not that the educated people were having an easy time now. Look at the way the famine was driving them out of the towns! How confusing all this was! Even the devil couldn
'
t make head or tail of it!

And yet, it was the country people who knew how to live. Look at her relatives, the Selitvins, Shelaburins, Pamphil Palykh, the brothers Nestor and Pankrat Modykh. They relied on their own hands and their own heads, they were their own masters. The new farmsteads along the highway were a lovely sight. Forty acres of arable land, with sheep, horses, pigs, cows, and enough corn in the barns for three years ahead! And their farming machines! They even had harvesters! Kolchak was buttering them up, trying to get them on his side, and so were the commissars, to get them into the forest army. They had come back from the war with St. George Crosses and everyone was after them, wanting to employ them as instructors. Epaulettes or no epaulettes, if you knew your job you were always in demand. You would always land on your feet.

But it was time she went home. It wasn
'
t decent for a woman to be wandering about the streets so late. It wouldn
'
t have mattered so much if she had been in her own garden. But it was so muddy, it was like a bog. Anyway, she thought, she felt a little better now.

Thus entangled in her reflections and having quite lost the thread of them, Galuzina went home. But before she went inside, she stood for a moment in front of the porch, going over a few more things in her mind.

She thought of the people who were lording it in Khodatskoie now; she knew more or less what they were like, they were former political exiles from the capitals, Tiverzin, Antipov, the anarchist
"
Black Banner
"
Vdovichenko, the local locksmith
"
Mad Dog
"
Gorsheny. They were cunning and they knew their own minds, they had stirred up plenty of trouble in their day, they were sure to be plotting something again now. They couldn
'
t live unless they were up to something. They spent their lives dealing with machines, and they were cold and merciless as machines. They went about in sweaters under their jackets, they smoked through bone cigarette holders, and they drank boiled water for fear of catching something. Poor Vlas was wasting his time, these men would turn everything upside down, they would always get their way.

Then she thought about herself. She knew she was a fine woman, with a mind of her own, intelligent and well preserved; all in all, she was not a bad person. But none of her qualities was appreciated in this Godforsaken hole—nor anywhere else, for all she knew. The indecent song about the silly old woman Sentetiurikha, which was well known throughout the Urals, came into her mind, but only the first two lines could be quoted:

"
Sentetiurikha sold her cart

And bought a balalaika
.…
"

After this came nothing but obscenities. They sang it in Krestovozdvizhensk, aiming it, she suspected, at herself. She sighed bitterly and went into the house.

She went straight to her bedroom, without stopping in the hall to take off her coat. The room looked out into the garden. Now, at night, the massed shadows on this side of the window and outside it almost repeated each other. The limp, drooping shapes of the curtains were like the limp, drooping shapes of the bare, dark trees in the garden with their uncertain outlines. The velvety darkness in the garden, where the winter was almost over, was being warmed by the dark purple heat of the coming spring bursting out of the ground. And there was a similar interaction of two elements inside the room with its dusty curtains, where the airless darkness was softened by the warm dark violet tones of the coming Feast.

The Virgin in the icon, freeing her dark, narrow hands from the silver covering, held them up, seeming to hold in each the first and last letters of her Greek name,
M
ήτηρ θεού
,
Mother of God. The garnet-colored icon lamp, dark as an inkwell in its gold bracket, scattered its star-shaped light, splintered by the cut glass, on the bedroom carpet.

Taking off her coat and kerchief, Galuzina made an awkward movement and felt her old pain, a stitch in the side under her shoulder blade. She gave a frightened cry and murmured:
"
Mighty protectress of the sorrowful, chaste Mother of God, help of the afflicted, shelter of the universe ...
"
Halfway through the prayer she burst into tears. When the pain died down, she began to undo her dress, but the hooks at the back slipped through her fingers and got lost in the soft crinkled stuff. She had difficulty in finding them.

Her ward Ksiusha woke up and came into the room.

"
Why are you in the dark, Mother? Shall I bring a lamp?
"

"
No, don
'
t. There
'
s enough light.
"

"
Let me undo your dress, Mother. Don
'
t tire yourself.
"

"
My fingers are all thumbs, I could cry. And that tailor didn
'
t have the sense to sew the hooks on so that you can get at them. I
'
ve got a notion to rip them all off and throw them at his ugly face.
"

"
How well they sang at the monastery! It
'
s so still, you could hear it from the house.
"

"
The singing was all right, but I
'
m not feeling so well, my girl. I
'
ve got that stitch again—here and here. Everywhere.… It
'
s such a nuisance, I don
'
t know what to do.
"

"
The homeopath, Stydobsky, helped you the last time.
"

"
He
'
s always telling you to do something impossible. He
'
s a quack, your homeopath. That
'
s one thing. And the other thing is that he
'
s gone away. He
'
s gone, I tell you, he
'
s left town. And he isn
'
t the only one, they
'
ve all rushed off just before the holiday—as if they expected an earthquake or something.
"

"
Well, then, what about that Hungarian doctor, the one who is a prisoner of war? His treatment did you good.
"

"
That
'
s no use either. I tell you, there isn
'
t a soul left. Kerenyi Lajos is with the other Hungarians beyond the demarcation line. They
'
ve conscripted him for the Red Army.
"

"
But you know, Mother, you
'
re imagining a lot of it. A nervous heart. In a case like yours suggestion can do wonders; it
'
s what the peasants do, after all. Do you remember that soldier
'
s wife who conjured away your pain? What was her name?
"

"
Well, really! You take me for an ignorant fool! It wouldn
'
t surprise me if you sang
'
Sentetiurikha
'
behind my back.
"

"
Mother! How can you say such a thing! It
'
s a sin. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You
'
d do much better to help me remember that woman
'
s name. It
'
s on the tip of my tongue. I won
'
t have any peace till it comes back to me.
"

"
She has more names than petticoats. I don
'
t know which is the one you
'
re thinking of. They call her Kubarikha and Medvedikha and Zlydarikha and I don
'
t know how many other names besides. She isn
'
t around here any more. No more guest appearances. She
'
s gone. Vanished. They locked her up in the Kezhemsk jail for practicing abortion and making pills and powders of some sort. But sooner than be bored in jail she escaped and got away somewhere to the Far East. I tell you, everyone has run away—Vlas and Terioshka and your Aunt Polia—Aunt Polia of the loving heart. Apart from the two of us, fools that we are, there isn
'
t an honest woman left in town, I
'
m not joking. And no medical help of any sort. If anything happened, you couldn
'
t get a doctor. They say there
'
s one in Yuriatin, some famous professor from Moscow, the son of a Siberian merchant who committed suicide. But just when I was thinking of sending for him, the Reds cut the road in twelve places.… Now, off to bed with you, and I
'
ll try to get some sleep too. By the way, that student of yours, Blazhe
ï
n, he
'
s turned your head. What
'
s the good of saying no?—you
'
re getting red as a beet. He
'
ll be sweating all night long over some photographs I gave him to develop, poor boy. They don
'
t sleep in that house, and they keep everyone else awake as well. Their Tomik is barking, you can hear him all over town, and our wretched crow is cawing its head off up in the apple tree. Looks as if I
'
ll have another sleepless night.… Now what are you so cross about? Don
'
t be so touchy. What are students for if not for girls to fall in love with!
"

"
What
'
s that dog howling for? Go and see what
'
s the matter with it, it can
'
t be making all that noise for nothing. Wait a minute, Lidochka, quiet, hold it! We
'
ve got to find out what
'
s what or we
'
ll have the police on us before we know it. Stay here, Ustin, and you, Sivobluy. They
'
ll manage without you.
"

Lidochka, the representative of the Central Committee, did not hear the partisan leader asking him to stop and continued his tired patter:

"
By its policy of looting, requisitioning, violence, shooting, and torture the bourgeois militarist regime in Siberia is bound to open the eyes of the gullible. It is hostile not only to the working class but, in fact, to the whole of the toiling peasantry. The toiling peasantry of Siberia and the Urals must understand that only in alliance with the city proletariat and the soldiers, only in alliance with the poor Kirghiz and Buriat peasants ...
"

At last he became aware of the interruptions, stopped, wiped his sweaty face with his handkerchief, and wearily shut his puffy eyes.

"
Have a rest. Have a drink of water,
"
whispered those who were standing closest to him.

The worried partisan leader was reassured.

"
What
'
s all the fuss about? Everything is in order. The signal lamp is in the window and the lookout, if I may use a picturesque expression, has his eyes glued to space. I don
'
t see why we shouldn
'
t go on with the discussion of the report. Go on, Comrade Lidochka.
"

The wood kept in the large barn in the photographers
'
yard had been moved aside, and the illegal meeting was being held in the cleared space screened from the small darkroom at the entrance by a wall of logs as high as the ceiling. In case of emergency there was a way of escape through a trap door to an underground passage that came out in a lonely alley at the back of the monastery.

The speaker, who had a sallow complexion, a beard from ear to ear, and a black cotton cap on his bald head, suffered from nervous perspiration and sweated profusely. He kept relighting the stump of his cigarette in the stream of hot air over the kerosene lamp, puffing greedily. Bending low over his scattered papers, he looked them over nervously with his near-sighted eyes, as if he were sniffing them, and continued in his flat, tired voice: