Doctor Zhivago (89 page)

The doctor felt an attack of nausea coming on. Surmounting his weakness, he got up from his seat and jerked the window straps up and down trying to open the window. But he could not budge it.

People shouted to him that the window was fastened with screws, but the doctor, fighting against his attack and seized by a sort of panic, was not aware that the people were addressing him, or of the meaning of their words. He continued his attempts to open the window and again gave three sharp tugs at the strap—up, down, and toward himself. Suddenly he felt a sharp pain, greater than any he had ever experienced before; he realized that something had broken in him, he had done something irreparable, fatal, that this was the end. At this moment the trolley started, but after going only a short way down the Presnia it stopped again.

By a superhuman effort of the will, Yurii Andreievich pushed through the solid crowd down the center passage, swaying and stumbling, and came out on the rear platform; people blocked his way and snapped at him. The fresh air seemed to revive him and he thought that perhaps everything was not lost, that he was better.

He began to squeeze his way through the crush on the rear platform, provoking kicks and more abuse. Ignoring the resentful cries, he broke through the crowd, got down from the standing trolley into the street, took a step, another, a third, collapsed on the stone paving, and did not get up again.

There arose a hubbub of talk, arguments, suggestions. Several people got off the trolley and surrounded him. They soon found that he was not breathing and his heart had stopped. The group around the body was joined by others who stepped off the sidewalks, some relieved and others disappointed that the dead man had not been run over and his death had nothing to do with the trolley. The crowd grew larger. The lady in lilac came up too, stood a moment, looked at the body, listened to the talk, and went on. She was a foreigner, but she understood that some people were in favor of putting the body on the trolley and taking it to the hospital, while others said that the police should be called. She did not wait to learn the outcome.

The lady in lilac was a Swiss national; she was Mademoiselle Fleury, from Meliuzeievo, and she was now very, very old. For twelve years she had been writing to the authorities in Moscow for permission to return to her native country, and quite recently her application had been granted. She had come to Moscow for her exit visa and was now on her way to her embassy to collect it, fanning herself as she went along with her documents, which were done up in a bundle and tied with a ribbon. So she walked on, overtaking the trolley for the tenth time and quite unaware that she had overtaken Zhivago and survived him.

Through the open door of the passage could be seen one end of the room with the table placed at an angle in the corner. On the table the coffin, like a roughly carved canoe, pointed at the door with its lower, narrow end, which bore the feet of the corpse. It was the same table at which Yurii Andreievich had done his writing; the room had no other. The manuscripts had been put away in a drawer, and the coffin stood on the top. His head was raised on a mound of pillows, and his body lay in the coffin as on a hillside.

He was surrounded by a great many flowers, whole bushes of white lilac, hard to find at this season, cyclamen and cineraria in pots and baskets. The flowers screened the light from the windows. The light filtered thinly through the banked flowers to the waxen face and hands of the corpse and the wood and lining of the coffin. Shadows lay on the table in a pattern of leaves and branches as if they had just stopped swaying.

The custom of cremating the dead had by this time become widespread. In the hope of a pension for the children, and to ensure their education and Marina
'
s position at the post office, it had been decided to dispense with a church service and simply have a civil cremation. The proper authorities had been notified and their representatives were expected.

In the interval the room seemed empty, like premises vacant between the going of one set of tenants and the coming of another. The stillness was broken only by the unwitting shuffling of the mourners, as they tiptoed in to take their leave of the dead. There were not many of them, but nevertheless a good many more than might have been expected. The news of the death of this almost unknown man had spread with amazing speed. Among the people were many who had known him at different times in his life, though he had afterwards lost touch with them and forgotten them. His poetry and scientific work attracted an even greater number of unknown friends who had never met the man but had been drawn to him and had now come to see him for the first and last time.

In these hours when the silence, unaccompanied by any ceremony, became oppressive as if it were an almost tangible privation, only the flowers compensated for the absence of the ritual and the chant.

They did more than blossom and smell sweet. Perhaps hastening the return to dust, they poured forth their scent as in a choir and, steeping everything in their exhalation, seemed to take over the function of the Office of the Dead.

The vegetable kingdom can easily be thought of as the nearest neighbor of the kingdom of death. Perhaps the mysteries of evolution and the riddles of life that so puzzle us are contained in the green of the earth, among the trees and the flowers of graveyards. Mary Magdalene did not recognize Jesus risen from the grave,
"
supposing Him to be the gardener.…
"

When Yurii Andreievich
'
s body was taken to the flat in Kamerger Street (this had been his last registered address), his friends, notified of his death and shaken by it, came in, straight from the landing through the wide-open door, bringing Marina with them. Half out of her mind with shock and grief, she threw herself down on the floor, beating her head against the edge of the long wooden chest in the hallway. The body had been left there until the coffin (which had already been ordered) was delivered and the living room was put in order. She was in a flood of tears, now whispering, now crying out, choking over her words and breaking into loud lamentations. She grieved with an abundance of speech, as peasants do, neither distracted nor embarrassed by strangers. She clung to the body and could scarcely be torn away when the time came for it to be carried into the room, washed, and placed in the coffin. All this had been the day before. Today the frenzy of her grief had abated, giving way to a weary numbness; she sat in silence, though still only half conscious of herself or her surroundings.

Here she had stayed the rest of the preceding day and all through the night, never leaving the room. Here the baby had been brought for her to feed, and Kapka and her young nurse had come and gone.

She was accompanied by her friends Gordon and Dudorov, who also were numb with grief. Markel, her father, would sit down on the bench by her side and sob and blow his nose into his handkerchief loudly. Her weeping mother and sisters came and went.

But there were two people in the gathering, a man and a woman, who stood out from all the rest. They did not claim any closer tie with the deceased than the others. They did not compete in sorrow with Marina, her daughters, or his friends. But although they made no claims, they evidently had their own special rights over the dead man, and no one questioned or disputed the undeclared authority that they had unaccountably assumed. These were the people who had apparently taken it upon themselves to arrange the funeral, and they had seen to everything from the first with unruffled calm, as if it gave them satisfaction. Their composure was remarkable and it produced a strange impression, as if they were involved not only in the funeral but also in the death, not in the sense of having directly or indirectly caused it but as people who, once it had occurred, had given their consent to it, were reconciled, and did not see it as the most important event in the story of Zhivago. Few of the mourners knew them, a few others surmised who they were, but most had no idea.

Yet whenever this man, whose narrow Kirghiz eyes both expressed and aroused curiosity, came into the room with the casually beautiful woman by his side, they all, including even Marina, at once, without protest, as if by agreement, got up from where they had been sitting on the chairs and stools placed in a row against the wall, and went out, crowding uncomfortably into the corridor and the hallway and leaving the couple alone, behind half-closed doors, like two experts who needed, quietly, unhindered, to accomplish something directly concerned with the funeral, and vitally important.

So it was now. They remained alone, sat down on two chairs near the wall, and at once began to talk.

"
What have you found out, Evgraf Andreievich?
"

"
The cremation is to be tonight. In half an hour they
'
ll come from the Medical Workers
'
Union to get the body and take it to their club. The civil ceremony is at four. Not one of his papers was in order; his workbook was out of date, he had an old union card, which he hadn
'
t changed for the new one, and his dues hadn
'
t been paid up for years. All that had to be put in order, that was why I took so long. Before they take him away—that
'
s quite soon, we ought to get ready—I
'
ll leave you here alone as you asked.… Sorry. That
'
s the telephone. I
'
ll just be a moment.
"

Evgraf went out into the corridor crowded with the doctor
'
s colleagues, his school friends, junior members of the hospital staff, and people from the publishing world. Marina, her arms around both her children, sheltered them in the folds of the coat she had thrown over her shoulders (it was a cold day), and sat on the edge of the wooden bench waiting to go back into the living room, as a visitor who has gone to see a prisoner in jail waits for the guard to admit her. The corridor and hall were overcrowded. The front door was open and a great many people were standing or strolling about smoking on the landing. Others stood talking on the flight of stairs leading down to the ground floor, the louder and more freely the lower down and closer to the street they were.

Straining to hear above the sustained murmur and speaking in a decorously muffled voice, his hand over the receiver, Evgraf answered questions over the telephone about the funeral arrangements and the circumstances of the doctor
'
s death. Then he went back into the living room and the conversation was resumed.

"
Please don
'
t vanish after the cremation, Larisa Feodorovna. I don
'
t know where you are staying, don
'
t disappear without letting me know. I have a great favor to ask you. I
'
d like as soon as possible—tomorrow or the day after—to begin sorting my brother
'
s papers. I
'
ll need your help. You know so much about him, probably more than anyone else. You mentioned that you had come from Irkutsk only a couple of days ago and not for long, and that you came up here for some other reason, not knowing it had been my brother
'
s flat in recent months or what had happened to him. I didn
'
t understand all you said and I am not asking you to explain, but please don
'
t go away without leaving me your address. It would be best if we could spend the few days that we still need to go through these manuscripts in the same room, or at least quite near, perhaps in two other rooms in this house. It could be arranged. I know the manager.
"

"
You say you didn
'
t understand what I said. What is there to understand? I arrived in Moscow, checked my things at the station, and went for a walk through some old Moscow streets. Half of it I couldn
'
t recognize, I
'
ve been away so long I
'
d forgotten. Well, I walked and walked, down Kuznetsky Most and up Kuznetsky Pereulok, and suddenly I saw something terribly, extraordinarily familiar—Kamerger Street. That was where my husband, Antipov, who was shot, used to live as a student—in this house and in this very room where you and I are sitting now. I
'
ll go in, I thought; who knows, the old tenants might still be there, I
'
ll look them up. You see, I didn
'
t know it had all changed—no one so much as remembers their name—I didn
'
t find that out till later, the day after and today, gradually, by asking people. But you were there, I don
'
t know why I
'
m telling you. I was thunderstruck—the door wide open, people all over the place, a coffin in the room, a dead man. Who is it? I come in, I come up and look. I thought I had lost my mind. But you were there, you saw me, didn
'
t you? Why on earth am I telling you?
"

"
Wait a moment, Larisa Feodorovna, I must interrupt you. I
'
ve already told you, neither my brother nor I ever suspected that there was anything extraordinary about this room—for instance, that Antipov once lived here. But even more amazing is something you said just now. I
'
ll tell you in a moment. About Antipov, Strelnikov, at one time at the beginning of the civil war I used to hear of him very often, almost every day, and I met him two or three times, never realizing, of course, that his name would come to mean so much to me for family reasons. But forgive me, I may have misheard you, I thought you said—it could only have been a slip of the tongue—that he
'
d been shot. You must surely know that he shot himself?
"