Doctor Zhivago (60 page)

So when the telephonist at his side jerked convulsively and then lay still, he crept over to him, took his cartridge bag and rifle, and, going back to his place, emptied the gun, shot after shot.

But as pity prevented him from aiming at the young men whom he admired and with whom he sympathized, and simply to shoot into the air would be too silly, he fired at the blasted tree, choosing those moments when there was no one between his sights and his target. He followed his own technique.

Setting the sights and gradually improving his aim as he pressed the trigger slowly and not all the way down, as if not in fact intending to release the bullet, so that in the end the shot went off of itself and as it were unexpectedly, he fired with the precision of old habit at the dead wood of the lower branches, lopping them off and scattering them around the tree.

But alas!—however carefully he tried to avoid hitting anyone, every now and then a young attacker would move into his firing line at the crucial moment. Two of them he wounded, and one who fell near the tree seemed to have lost his life.

At last the White command, convinced of the futility of the attack, ordered a retreat.

The partisans were few. Part of their main force was on a march and others had engaged a larger enemy detachment some way off. Not to disclose their weakness, they refrained from pursuing the retreating Whites.

Angelar joined the doctor in the clearing with two medics carrying stretchers. Telling him to attend to the wounded, the doctor bent over the telephonist in the vague hope that he might still be breathing and could be revived. But when he undid his shirt and felt his heart, he found that it had stopped.

An amulet hung by a silk cord from the dead man
'
s neck. The doctor took it off. It contained a sheet of paper, worn and rotted at the folds, sewn into a piece of cloth.

Written on the paper, which almost fell apart in the doctor
'
s fingers when he unfolded it, were excerpts from the Ninety-first Psalm with such changes in the wording as often creep into popular prayers through much repetition, making them deviate increasingly from the original. The Church Slavonic text was transliterated into Russian script.

The words of the psalm,
"
He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High,
"
had become the title,
"
Dwell High.
"
The verse
"
Thou shall not be afraid for the terror by night nor for the arrow that flieth by day
"
was changed into the exhortation:
"
Do not be afraid of the arrows of flying war.
"
When the psalm says:
"
He hath known my name,
"
the paper said:
"
He postpones my name,
"
and
"
I will be with him in trouble: I will deliver him
"
was garbled into
"
I will relieve him from darkness.
"

The text was believed to be miraculous and a protection against bullets. It had been worn as a talisman by soldiers in the last imperialist war. Decades later prisoners were to sew it into their clothes and mutter its words in jail when they were summoned at night for interrogation.

Leaving the telephonist, Yurii Andreievich went out into the field to the young White Guardsman whom he had killed. The boy
'
s handsome face bore the marks of innocence and of all-forgiving suffering.
"
Why did I kill him?
"
thought the doctor.

He undid the boy
'
s coat and opened it. Some careful hand—probably his mother
'
s—had embroidered his name and surname, Seriozha Rantsevich, in carefully traced cursive letters on the lining. From the opening of Seriozha
'
s shirt there slipped out and hung suspended by a chain a cross, a locket, and some other small flat gold case, rather like a snuffbox, dented as if a nail had been driven into it. A paper fell out. The doctor unfolded it and could not believe his eyes. It was the same Ninety-first Psalm but this time printed in its full and original Slavonic text.

At this moment Seriozha groaned and stirred. He was alive. It appeared afterward that he had only been stunned as the result of a slight internal injury. The bullet had been stopped by his mother
'
s amulet and this had saved him. But what was to be done with this unconscious man now?

It was a time when savagery was at its height. Prisoners did not reach headquarters alive and enemy wounded were knifed in the field.

In the existing state of the partisan force, with its high turnover of deserters to and from the enemy, it was possible, if the strictest secrecy were kept, to pass Rantsevich off as a recently enlisted ally.

Yurii Andreievich took off the outer clothing of the dead telephonist and, with the help of Angelar, in whom he confided, exchanged it for that of the boy.

He and Angelar nursed Seriozha back to health. When he was well they released him, although he did not conceal from them that he meant to go back to Kolchak
'
s army and continue fighting the Reds.

In the autumn the partisans took up quarters in Fox
'
s Thicket, a small wood on a steep hill with a swift stream foaming around three sides of it and biting into the shores.

The Whites had wintered in it the year before and had dug themselves in with the help of the neighboring villagers, but they had left in the spring without destroying their fortifications. Now their dugouts and communication trenches were used by the partisans.

The doctor shared a dugout with Liberius Mikulitsyn, who had kept him awake by chattering for two nights running.

"
I wonder what my esteemed parent, my respected Papa, is doing at this moment.
"

"
God, how I hate this buffoonery,
"
the doctor thought, with a sigh.
"
And yet he
'
s the living image of his father.
"

"
Judging from our previous talks, you got to know him quite well. You seem to have formed a not unfavorable opinion of him. What can you say on the subject, my dear sir?
"

"
Liberius Averkievich, tomorrow we have the pre-election meeting. And there is the trial of the medics who have been brewing vodka coming up—Lajos and I have still got to go through the evidence. I have to see him tomorrow for that purpose. And I haven
'
t slept for two nights. Can
'
t we put this conversation off? I
'
m dead tired.
"

"
Well, anyway, just tell me what you think of the old bird.
"

"
To begin with, your father is quite young. I don
'
t know why you refer to him that way. Well, all right, I
'
ll tell you. As I
'
ve often said to you, I am very bad at sorting out the various shades of socialism, and I can
'
t see much difference between Bolsheviks and other socialists. Your father is one of those to whom Russia owes its recent disorders and disturbances. He is a revolutionary type, a revolutionary character. Like yourself, he represents the principle of ferment in Russian life.
"

"
Is that meant as praise or blame?
"

"
Once again, I beg you to put off this discussion to a more convenient time. And I must really draw your attention to your excessive consumption of cocaine. You have been willfully depleting the stock of which I am in charge. You know perfectly well that it is needed for other purposes, as well as that it is a poison and I am responsible for your health.
"

"
You cut the study group again last night. You have an atrophied social sense, just like an illiterate peasant woman or a bourgeois diehard. And yet you are a doctor, you are well read, I believe you even write. How do you explain it?
"

"
I don
'
t. Apparently it can
'
t be helped. You should be sorry for me.
"

"
Why the mock modesty? If instead of using that sarcastic tone you took the trouble to find out what we do in our classes, you wouldn
'
t be so supercilious.
"

"
Heavens, Liberius Averkievich, I
'
m not being supercilious. I have the utmost respect for your educational work. I
'
ve read the discussion notes you circulate. I know your ideas on the moral improvement of the soldier, they
'
re quite excellent. All you say about what the soldier
'
s attitude should be to the people
'
s army, to his fellows, to the weak, the helpless, to women, and about honor and chastity—it
'
s almost the teaching of the Dukhobors. All that kind of Tolstoyism I know by heart. My own adolescence was full of those aspirations toward a better life. How could I laugh at such things?

"
But, first, the idea of social betterment as it is understood since the October revolution doesn
'
t fill me with enthusiasm. Second, it is so far from being put into practice, and the mere talk about it has cost such a sea of blood, that I
'
m not sure that the end justifies the means. And last—and this is the main thing—when I hear people speak of reshaping life it makes me lose my self-control and I fall into despair.

"
Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.
"

"
And yet, you know, if you came to our meetings, if you kept in touch with our splendid, our magnificent people, you wouldn
'
t feel half so low. You wouldn
'
t suffer from this melancholia. I know what it comes from. You see us being beaten and you can
'
t see a ray of hope ahead. But one should never panic, my friend. I could tell you much worse things—to do with me personally, not to be made public for the moment—and yet I don
'
t lose my head. Our setbacks are purely temporary, Kolchak is bound to lose in the end. You mark my words. You
'
ll see, we
'
ll win in the long run. So cheer up!
"

"
It
'
s unspeakable,
"
thought the doctor.
"
How can anyone be so dense, so childish! I spend my time dinning into him that our ideas are diametrically opposed, he has captured me by force, he is keeping me against my will, and yet he imagines that his setbacks fill me with dismay and that his hopes can cheer me up! How can anyone be as blind as this? For him the fate of the universe is less important than the victory of the revolution.
"

Yurii Andreievich said nothing, merely shrugging his shoulders and making no secret of his almost uncontrollable exasperation at Liberius
'
s naïveté. Nor did this escape Liberius
'
s notice.

"
You are angry, Jupiter, therefore you must be wrong,
"
he said.

"
Do, for God
'
s sake, understand once and for all that none of this means anything to me.
'
Jupiter
'
and
'
Never panic
'
and
'
Anyone who says
A
must say
B
'
and
'
The Moor has done his work, the Moor can go
'
—none of these clichés, these vulgar commonplaces, appeal to me. I
'
ll say
A
but I won
'
t say
B
— whatever you do. I
'
ll admit that you are Russia
'
s liberators, the shining lights, that without you it would be lost, sunk in misery and ignorance, and I still don
'
t give a damn for any of you, I don
'
t like you and you can all go to the devil.