Doctor Zhivago (59 page)

The Mayor of the village of Ermolaï, an old fisherman, Otviazhistin, said:

"
You might have imagined it, Your Excellency. And why should people not be talking in a village? It isn
'
t a churchyard. Maybe they were talking. People aren
'
t dumb animals. Or perhaps the devil was shaking someone in his sleep.
"

"
Come, come! Stop playing the village idiot! The devil indeed! You
'
ve all been getting too big for your boots here. You
'
ll get so clever you
'
ll talk yourselves into Bolshevism, next.
"

"
Merciful goodness, how can you say that, Your Excellency, Mr. Colonel! Our village yokels are so ignorant, they can
'
t read the prayerbook, what would they want with Bolshevism!
"

"
That
'
s how you all talk, until you
'
re caught. Have the shop searched from top to bottom. Turn everything inside out, and see that you look under the counters.
"

"
Yes, Your Excellency.
"

"
I want Pafnutkin, Riabikh, and Nekhvalenykh, dead or alive. I don
'
t care if you have to dredge them up from the bottom of the sea. And that Galuzin puppy as well. I don
'
t care how many patriotic speeches his Papa makes. He can talk the hind leg off a donkey, but he won
'
t catch us napping. There
'
s bound to be something fishy when a shopkeeper goes around making speeches. It
'
s suspicious. It
'
s unnatural. We have information that the Galuzins hide political criminals and hold illegal meetings in their house in Krestovozdvizhensk. Get me the brat. I haven
'
t yet decided what to do with him, but if there
'
s anything against him, I won
'
t think twice about stringing him up as a lesson to the others.
"

The searchers moved away. When they were quite far away, Koska whispered to Terioshka, who was nearly dead with fright:

"
Hear that?
"

"
Yes,
"
he whispered in a changed voice.

"
Well, there
'
s only one place for me and you and Sanka and Goshka now; that
'
s the forest. I don
'
t mean we
'
ll have to stay there for good—just until they calm down. Then we
'
ll see, we might come back.
"

It was more than a year since Yurii Andreievich had been taken prisoner by the partisans. The limits of his freedom were very ill defined. The place of his captivity was not surrounded by walls; he was not under guard, and no one watched his movements. The partisan force was constantly on the move, and Yurii Andreievich moved with it. It did not remain apart from the local population through whose lands and settlements it passed; it mixed and indeed dissolved in it.

On the surface, this captivity, this dependence, seemed to be nonexistent, as though the doctor were free and merely failed to take advantage of his freedom. His captivity, his dependence, were not different from other forms of compulsion in life, which are often equally invisible and intangible, and seem to be nonexistent and merely a figment of the imagination, a chimera. But although he was not fettered, chained, or watched, the doctor had to submit to his unfreedom, imaginary though it appeared.

Each of his three attempts at escaping from the partisans had ended in capture. He did not suffer any penalties, but he was playing with fire, and he did not try again.

He was favored by the partisan chief, Liberius Mikulitsyn, who liked his company and made him sleep in his tent. Yurii Andreievich found this enforced companionship irksome.

During this period, the partisans were constantly moving eastward. At times this movement was part of the general campaign to drive Kolchak from western Siberia; at other times, when the Whites struck from the rear, threatening to encircle the partisans, the same eastward marches turned into retreats. For a long time the doctor could not understand these subtleties.

The partisans moved parallel to the highway and occasionally they made use of it. The villages and small towns along it were Red or White according to the fortunes of war. It was difficult to tell from their outward appearance in whose power they were at any particular moment.

While the peasant army was passing through the villages or small towns, everything else in them sank into insignificance. The houses on both sides of the road seemed to shrink into the ground, and the riders, horses, guns, and big jostling riflemen splashing through the mud loomed higher than the houses.

One day, in one such small town, the doctor was ordered to take over a stock of British medical supplies abandoned by the White officers
'
unit under General Kappel and now seized by the partisans.

It was a bleak, rainy afternoon with only two colors: wherever the light fell it was white, everywhere else it was black; and the doctor
'
s mood was of the same bleak simplification unsoftened by transitions and half-tones.

The road, completely destroyed by the frequent movements of troops, was nothing but a river of black mud. It could be forded in only a few places, which could be reached by hugging the houses for hundreds of yards. It was in these circumstances, at Pazhinsk, that the doctor met Pelagia Tiagunova, who had been his fellow passenger in the train from Moscow.

She recognized him first. It took him some moments to remember the woman who kept looking at him from across the street, as from the opposite bank of a canal, with an expression suggesting a readiness to greet him if he knew her or to remain anonymous if he did not.

Finally he did remember her, and, together with the picture of the overcrowded freight car, the labor conscripts and their guards, and the woman with a braid over her shoulder, there flashed into his mind an image of his family. Sharp details of the journey crowded in on him, and the faces of his dear ones, whom he missed desperately, rose vividly in his memory.

He nodded to her to go farther up the street to a place where it could be crossed on stones protruding from the mud and, walking in the same direction, went over and greeted her.

She told him many things about the past two years. Reminding him of Vasia, the boy with the handsome, unspoiled face, who had been unlawfully conscripted and who had shared their car, she described her stay with his mother in their village, Veretenniki. She had been very happy among them, but the village treated her as an outsider. She had been falsely accused of having a love affair with Vasia and in the end had had to leave if she were not to be pecked to death. She had settled with her married sister, Olga Galuzina, in Krestovozdvizhensk. Rumors that Prituliev had been seen in the neighborhood had brought her to Pazhinsk. The rumors had proved false and she had found herself stranded in the little town, where she had later got work.

In the meanwhile, misfortune had overtaken her friends. Veretenniki had been raided in reprisal for withholding food supplies. It was said that Vasia
'
s house had been burned down and that a member of his family had perished. And at Krestovozdvizhensk, Pelagia
'
s brother-in-law, Vlas Galuzin, had either been put in jail or been shot, and her nephew had vanished without a trace. Her sister had starved for some time but was now working for her keep in the village of Zvonarskaia as a servant in a family of peasants who were related to her.

It so happened that Tiagunova had a job as assistant at the Pazhinsk pharmacy, whose stock the doctor was about to requisition. All the pharmacist
'
s dependents, including herself, were faced with ruin by this measure. But the doctor was powerless to call it off. Tiagunova was present at the taking over of the stock.

The doctor
'
s cart pulled up at the back of the shop. Sacks, cases, and bottles packed in wickerware were carried out.

The employees watched the operation dejectedly, and their feelings seemed to infect the pharmacist
'
s thin, mangy mare watching sadly from her stable. The rainy day was drawing to its close. The sky cleared a little. Hemmed in by the clouds, the setting sun peered out and splashed the yard with dark bronze rays, casting a sinister glow on the puddles of liquid manure. The wind did not stir them; the muddy slops were too heavy. But the rain water on the road rippled and glistened with cinnabar reflections.

The troops moved on along the street, walking or riding around the deeper pools. The requisitioned supplies were found to contain a whole jar of cocaine, to which the partisan chief had recently become addicted.

The doctor was up to his neck in work. In winter there was typhus and in summer dysentery, and on top of all that there were the wounded, whose numbers kept increasing now that the fighting was renewed.

In spite of setbacks and frequent retreats, the ranks of the partisans were continually swollen by new insurgents from the settlements through which the peasant hordes passed and by deserters from the enemy. In the eighteen months the doctor had spent with the partisans, their army had increased tenfold, actually reaching the number of which Liberius Averkievich had boasted at the underground meeting at Krestovozdvizhensk.

Yurii Andreievich had several newly appointed medics and two chief assistants, both former prisoners of war—Kerenyi Lajos, a Hungarian Communist who had been a doctor in the Austrian army, and the Croat, Angelar, who had had some medical training. With the former, Yurii Andreievich spoke in German; the latter more or less understood Russian.

According to the Red Cross International Convention, the army medical personnel must not take part in the military operations of the belligerents. But on one occasion the doctor was forced to break this rule. He was in the field when an engagement began and he had to share the fate of the combatants and shoot in self-defense.

The front line, where he was caught by enemy fire, was at the edge of a forest. He threw himself down on the ground next to the unit
'
s telephonist. The forest was at their back, in front of them was a field, and across this open, undefended space the Whites were attacking.

The Whites were now close enough for the doctor to see their faces. They were boys, recent volunteers from the civilian population of the capitals, and older men mobilized from the reserve. The tone was set by the youngsters, first-year students from the universities and last-year students from gymnasiums.

None of them were known to the doctor, yet half the faces looked familiar. Some of them reminded him of former classmates and he wondered if they were their younger brothers; others he felt he had noticed in a theater crowd or in the street in years gone by. Their expressive, handsome faces seemed to belong to people of his own kind.

Responding to duty as they understood it, they displayed enthusiasm and a reckless courage that was entirely out of place. Advancing in extended formation and excelling the parade ground smartness of the Imperial Guards, they walked defiantly upright, neither running nor throwing themselves to the ground, ignoring the irregularities of the terrain, behind which they might easily have taken cover. The bullets of the partisans mowed them down.

In the middle of the wide, bare field there was a dead tree, blasted by lightning or charred by fire, or scorched and splintered in the course of some earlier battles. Each of the advancing volunteers glanced at it, fighting the temptation to stop behind it for shelter and a surer aim, then, casting the thought aside, walked on.

The partisans had a limited supply of cartridges and were under orders to fire only at short range and at clearly visible targets.

Yurii Andreievich had no rifle; he lay on the grass watching the course of the engagement. All his sympathies were on the side of these heroically dying children. With all his heart he wished them success. They belonged to families who were probably akin to him in spirit, in education, in moral discipline and values.

It occurred to him to run out into the field and give himself up, thus obtaining his release. But that was dangerous, too dangerous. While he was running with his arms raised above his head he could be shot down from both sides, struck in the breast and in the back—by the partisans in punishment for his betrayal and by the Whites in misunderstanding of his motives. He knew this kind of situation, he had been in it before, he had considered all the possibilities of such escape plans and had rejected them as unfeasible. So resigning himself to his divided feelings, he lay on his belly on the grass, his face toward the clearing, and watched, unarmed, the course of the battle.

But to look on inactively while the mortal struggle raged all around was impossible, it was beyond human strength. It was not a question of loyalty to the side that held him captive or of defending his own life, but of submitting to the order of events, to the laws governing what went on around him. To remain an outsider was against the rules. You had to do what everyone was doing. A battle was going on. He and his comrades were being shot at. He had to shoot back.