Doctor Zhivago (88 page)

"
Now, quite recently, they
'
ve begun writing again, all of them, even the children. They write very warmly and affectionately. For some reason they
'
ve relented. Perhaps Tonia has found someone else; I hope with all my heart she has. I don
'
t know. I too write from time to time.… But I really can
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t stay any longer. I must go or I
'
ll get an attack. Goodbye.
"

Next morning Marina came running in to Gordon, greatly distressed. There was no one she could leave the children with, so in one arm she carried the baby wrapped in a blanket and with her free hand she was pulling Kapka, who trailed behind and dragged her feet.

"
Is Yura here, Misha?
"
she asked in a frightened voice.

"
Didn
'
t he go home last night?
"

"
No.
"

"
Then he must have spent the night at Innokentii
'
s.
"

"
I
'
ve come from there. Innokentii is at the university, but the neighbors know Yura and they say he hasn
'
t been there.
"

"
Where can he be, then?
"

Marina put Klazhka down on the sofa, and then she began to sob hysterically.

For two days Gordon and Dudorov did not dare to leave Marina alone and took turns watching her and hunting for the doctor. They called at all the places he might conceivably have gone to—Flour Town, Sivtsev Vrazhok, all the Palaces of Thought and Academies of Ideas he had ever been employed in; they looked up every friend of his they had ever heard him talk about and whose address they could discover—but with no success.

They did not report him as missing to the police. Although he was registered and had no police record, it was better not to draw the attention of the authorities to a man who, by the standards of the day, lived anything but an exemplary life. They decided not to put them on his track except as a last resort.

On the third day, letters from Yurii Andreievich came by different mails for all three of them—Gordon, Dudorov, and Marina. He was full of regret for the trouble and anxiety he had caused them, he begged them not to worry about him, and he implored them by everything that was holy to give up their search for him, saying that it would in any case be fruitless.

He told them that in order to rebuild his life as completely and rapidly as possible, he wished to spend some time by himself, concentrating on his affairs, and that as soon as he was settled in a job and reasonably certain of not falling back into his old ways he would leave his hiding place and return to Marina and the children.

He told Gordon that he was sending him a money order for Marina and asked him to get a nurse for the children, so that Marina could go back to work. He explained that he was not sending the money to her address for fear of someone seeing the receipt and her thus being exposed to the risk of robbery.

The money soon came, and the amount far exceeded the standards of Yurii and his friends. The nurse was hired. Marina went back to work at the post office. She was still greatly upset but, accustomed as she was to Yurii Andreievich
'
s oddities, she eventually resigned herself to his latest whim. All three of them went on looking for him, but gradually they came to the conclusion that it was as futile as he had warned them it would be. They could find no trace of him.

Yet all the time he was living within a stone
'
s throw, right under their eyes and noses, in the very middle of the district they were combing for him.

On the day of his disappearance he left Gordon and went out into Bronnaia Street a little before dusk. He turned straight toward home, but almost immediately, within less than a hundred yards, he ran into his half brother Evgraf, who was coming down the street toward him. He had neither seen him nor heard of him for more than three years. It turned out that Evgraf had just arrived in Moscow; as usual, he came quite unexpectedly, and he shrugged off all questions with a smile or a joke. On the other hand, from the few questions he asked Yurii Andreievich, he gathered the gist of his troubles at once, and then and there, between one corner and another as they walked along the narrow, twisting, crowded street, he worked out a practical plan to rescue him. It was his idea that Yurii Andreievich should disappear and remain in hiding for some time.

He took a room for him in Kamerger Street, as it was still called, near the Arts Theater. He provided him with money. He took steps to get him a good position in a hospital, with plenty of opportunity for going on with his research, and assisted him by his patronage. Finally, he gave him his word that the ambiguity of his family
'
s situation in Paris would be resolved. Either Yurii Andreievich would go to them or they would come to him. All these things Evgraf undertook to see to himself. As usual, his brother
'
s help put new heart into Yurii Andreievich. As always before, the riddle of his power remained unsolved. Yurii Andreievich did not even try to penetrate the secret.

His room faced south. It almost adjoined the theater and looked out over the rooftops opposite; beyond them, the summer sun stood over Okhotny Ryad, and the street below was in shadow.

To Yurii Andreievich the room was more than a place for work, more than his study. At this time of devouring activity, when the pile of notebooks on his desk was too small to hold all his plans and ideas and the surplus floated in the air like apparitions—as unfinished pictures stand with their faces to the walls in a painter
'
s studio—his living room was to him a banqueting room of the spirit, a cupboard of mad dreams, a storeroom of revelations.

Fortunately, Evgraf
'
s negotiations with the hospital dragged on, and the start of Yurii Andreievich
'
s new job was indefinitely postponed. The delay gave him time to write.

He began by trying to sort out those of his earlier poems of which he could remember snatches or of which Evgraf somehow got him the texts. (These were manuscripts, some in his own hand, some copies made by others.) But the disorderliness of the material made him squander his energy even more than he was inclined to do by nature. He soon gave it up and turned to new work.

He would make the rough draft of an article, like the notes he had kept when he first went to Varykino, or put down the middle, or the end, or the beginning of a poem as it came into his mind. There were times when he could hardly keep pace with his thoughts, even in his shorthand made up of initials and abbreviations.

He was in a hurry. Whenever his imagination flagged he whipped it up by making drawings in the margins of his notebooks. The drawings were always of forest cuttings or of street intersections marked by the sign:
"
Moreau & Vetchinkin
.
Mechanical seeders
.
Threshing machines
.
"

The articles and poems were all on the same theme, the city.

These notes were found later among his papers:

"
When I came back to Moscow in 1922 I found it deserted and half destroyed. So it had come out of the ordeals of the first years after the revolution; so it remains to this day. Its population has decreased, no new houses are being built, and the old ones are left in disrepair.

"
But even in this condition it is still a big modern city, and cities are the only source of inspiration for a new, truly modern art.

"
The seemingly incongruous and arbitrary jumble of things and ideas in the work of the Symbolists (Blok, Verhaeren, Whitman) is not a stylistic caprice. This is a new order of impressions, taken directly from life.

"
Just as they hurry their succession of images through the lines of their poems, so the street in a busy town hurries past us, with its crowds and its broughams and carriages at the end of the last century, or its streetcars and subways at the beginning of ours.

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Pastoral simplicity doesn
'
t exist in these conditions. When it is attempted, its pseudo-artlessness is a literary fraud, not inspired by the countryside but taken from the shelves of academic archives. The living language of our time, born spontaneously and naturally in accord with its spirit, is the language of urbanism.

"
I live at a busy intersection. Moscow, blinded by the sun and the white heat of its asphalt-paved yards, scattering reflections of the sun from its upper windows, breathing in the flowering of clouds and streets, is whirling around me, turning my head and telling me to turn the heads of others by writing poems in its praise. For this purpose, Moscow has brought me up and made me an artist.

"
The incessant rumbling by day and night in the street outside our walls is as inseparable from the modern soul as the opening bars of an overture are inseparable from the curtain, as yet secret and dark, but already beginning to crimson in the glow of the footlights. The city, incessantly moving and roaring outside our doors and windows, is an immense introduction to the life of each of us. It is in these terms that I should like to write about the city.
"

There are no such poems in what has been preserved of Zhivago
'
s work. Or does the one entitled
"
Hamlet
"
belong to this category?

One morning at the end of August, Yurii Andreievich took the trolley at a stop at a corner of Gazetny Street which went up along Nikita Street to the Kudrinskaia terminal. He was going for the first time to his job at the Botkin Hospital, which was then known as the Soldatenko Hospital. He had been there before only once or twice for reasons connected with his job.

He had no luck with his trolley; it had a defective motor and kept getting into trouble of every sort. Either its way was blocked by a cart in front of it with its wheels caught in the grooves of the rails, or the insulation went wrong on the roof or under the floor and the current short-circuited with a flash and a crackle.

The driver would step off the front platform, walk around the trolley with a wrench, and squat down and tinker with the machinery between the rear platform and the wheels.

The ill-fated trolley blocked the traffic all along the line. The whole street was dammed up with other trolleys that had already been stopped, and still others kept joining. The end of the line now reached as far back as the riding school and beyond. Passengers from cars in the rear moved to the front car, hoping to gain time, and got into the very car that was the cause of all the trouble. It was a hot morning, and the car was crowded and stuffy. Above the crowds running about in the street from one trolley to another, a dark lilac thundercloud was creeping higher and higher up the sky. A storm was gathering.

Yurii Andreievich sat on a single seat on the left, pressed against the window. He could see the left side of Nikita Street, where the Conservatory was situated. With the vague attention of a man thinking of something else, he watched the people walking and driving past on that side, missing no one.

A gray-haired old lady, in a light straw hat with linen daisies and cornflowers and a tight old-fashioned lilac dress, was trudging along the pavement, panting and fanning herself with a flat parcel that she was carrying in her hand. Tightly corseted, exhausted by the heat, and streaming with sweat, she kept mopping her damp lips and eyebrows with a small lace handkerchief.

Her course was parallel to that of the trolley. Yurii Andreievich had already lost sight of her several times, whenever the trolley had started up after a stop for repairs and passed her. She had again come back into his field of vision when it broke down once more and she overtook it.

Yurii Andreievich thought of the problems in school arithmetic in which you are asked how soon and in what order trains, starting at different times and going at different speeds, get to their destinations; he tried to remember the general method of solving them, but it escaped him and he went on from these school memories to others and to still more complicated speculations.

He tried to imagine several people whose lives run parallel and close together but move at different speeds, and he wondered in what circumstances some of them would overtake and survive others. Something like a theory of relativity governing the hippodrome of life occurred to him, but he became confused and gave up his analogies.

There was a flash of lightning and a roll of thunder. The ill-starred trolley was stuck for the nth time; it had stopped halfway down the hill from Kudrinskaia to the Zoo. The lady in lilac appeared in the frame of the window, passed beyond it, and moved on. The first heavy drops of rain fell on the street, the sidewalk, and the lady. A gusty wind whipped past the trees, flapped the leaves, tugged at the lady
'
s hat, ballooned her skirt, and suddenly
"
died down.