“Well, brother, some other time,” said the head of the section, and he waved his hand as if to say “Enough of your rails. There are more important matters.”
The spouses went rolling off.
6
Three or four hours later, closer to dusk, two figures, who had not been on the surface earlier, emerged as if from under the ground in the field to one side of the tracks and, looking back frequently, began to hurry off. They were Antipov and Tiverzin.
“Let’s make it quick,” said Tiverzin. “I’m not afraid of being tailed by spies, but once this diddling around is over, they’ll climb out of the dugout and catch up with us, and I can’t stand the sight of them. If everything’s dragged out like this, there’s no point fussing and fuming. There’s no need for a committee, and for playing with fire, and burrowing under the ground! You’re a good one, too, supporting all this slop from the Nikolaevsky line.”
“My Darya’s got typhoid fever. I’d like to get her to the hospital. Until I do, my head’s not good for anything.”
“They say they’re handing out wages today. I’ll go to the office. If it wasn’t payday, as God is my witness, I’d spit on you all and personally put an end to all this dithering without a moment’s delay.”
“In what way, may I ask?”
“Nothing to it. Go down to the boiler room, give a whistle, and the party’s over.”
They said good-bye and went off in different directions.
Tiverzin went along the tracks towards the city. On his way he met people coming from the office with their pay. There were a great many of them. Tiverzin judged by the look of it that almost everyone on station territory had been paid.
It was getting dark. Idle workers crowded on the open square near the office, lit by the office lights. At the entrance to the square stood Fuflygin’s carriage. Fuflygina sat in it in the same pose, as if she had not left the carriage since morning. She was waiting for her husband, who was getting his money in the office.
Wet snow and rain unexpectedly began to fall. The driver climbed down from the box and began to raise the leather top. While he rested his foot on the back and stretched the tight braces, Fuflygina admired the mess of watery silver beads flitting past the light of the office lamps. She cast her unblinking, dreamy gaze over the crowding workers with such an air, as though in case of need this gaze could pass unhindered through them, as through fog or drizzle.
Tiverzin happened to catch that expression. He cringed. He walked past without greeting Fuflygina, and decided to draw his salary later, so as to avoid running into her husband in the office. He walked on into the less well lit side of the workshops, where the turntable showed black with its tracks radiating towards the engine depot.
“Tiverzin! Kuprik!” several voices called to him from the darkness. In front of the workshops stood a bunch of people. Inside there was shouting and a child’s weeping could be heard. “Kiprian Savelyevich, step in for the boy,” said some woman in the crowd.
The old master Pyotr Khudoleev was again giving a habitual hiding to his victim, the young apprentice Yusupka.
Khudoleev had not always been a torturer of apprentices, a drunkard and a heavy-fisted brawler. Time was when merchants’ and priests’ daughters from the industrial suburbs near Moscow cast long glances at the dashing workman. But Tiverzin’s mother, to whom he proposed just after she graduated from the diocesan girls’ school, refused him and married his comrade, the locomotive engineer Savely Nikitich Tiverzin.
In the sixth year of her widowhood, after the terrible death of Savely Nikitich (he was burned up in 1888 in one of the sensational train collisions of that time), Pyotr Petrovich renewed his suit, and again Marfa Gavrilovna refused him. After that Khudoleev started drinking and became violent, settling accounts with the whole world, which was to blame, as he was convinced, for his present misfortunes.
Yusupka was the son of the yard porter Gimazetdin from the Tiverzins’ courtyard. Tiverzin protected the boy in the workshops. This added heat to Khudoleev’s dislike of him.
“Look how you’re holding your file, you slope-head,” Khudoleev shouted, pulling Yusupka’s hair and beating him on the neck. “Is that any way to file down a casting? I’m asking you, are you going to foul up the work for me, you Kasimov bride,2 allah-mullah, slant-eyes?”
“Ow, I won’t, mister, ow, ow, I won’t, I won’t, ow, that hurts!”
“A thousand times he’s been told, first bring the mandril under, then tighten the stop, but no, he’s got his own way. Nearly broke the spendler on me, the son of a bitch.”
“I didn’t touch the spindle, mister, by God, I didn’t.”
“Why do you tyrannize the boy?” asked Tiverzin, squeezing through the crowd.
“Don’t poke your nose in other people’s business,” Khudoleev snapped.
“I’m asking you, why do you tyrannize the boy?”
“And I’m telling you to shove the hell off, social commander. Killing’s too good for him, the scum, he nearly broke the spendler on me. He can go on his knees to me for getting off alive, the slant-eyed devil—I just boxed his ears and pulled his hair a little.”
“So according to you, Uncle Khudolei, he should have his head torn off for it? You really ought to be ashamed. An old master, gray in your hair, but no brains in your head.”
“Shove off, shove off, I said, while you’re still in one piece. I’ll knock your soul through your shoes for teaching me, you dog’s ass! You got made on the ties, fish-blood, right under your father’s nose. I know your mother, the wet-tail, all too well, the mangy cat, the skirt-dragger!”
What came next took no more than a minute. They each grabbed the first thing that came to hand among the heavy tools and pieces of iron that lay about on the machines, and they would have killed each other if at that same moment people had not rushed in a mob to pull them apart. Khudoleev and Tiverzin stood, their heads lowered, their foreheads almost touching, pale, with bloodshot eyes. They were unable to speak from agitation. Their arms were seized and held tightly from behind. At moments, gathering their strength, they would try to tear free, their whole bodies writhing and dragging the comrades who were hanging on to them. Hooks and buttons were torn from their clothes, their jackets and shirts were pulled from their bared shoulders. The disorderly uproar around them would not quiet down.
“The chisel! Take the chisel from him—he’ll split his skull.” “Easy, easy, Uncle Pyotr, we’ll sprain your arm.” “Are we just going to keep dancing around them? Pull them apart, lock them up, and be done with it.”
Suddenly, with a superhuman effort, Tiverzin shook off the tangle of bodies holding him and, breaking free of them, found himself running for the door. They were about to rush after him, but, seeing that he had something else in mind, let him go. He went out, slamming the door, and marched off without looking back. He was surrounded by autumnal dampness, night, darkness. “You reach them a hand and they bite it off,” he muttered, having no idea where he was going or why.
This world of baseness and falsity, where a well-fed little lady dares to look like that at witless working people, and the drunken victim of this order finds pleasure in jeering at one of his own kind, this world was now more hateful to him than ever. He walked quickly, as if the speed of his pace could bring closer the time when everything in the world would be as reasonable and harmonious as it now was in his feverish head. He knew that their strivings in recent days, the disorders on the line, the speeches at meetings, and their decision to go on strike—not yet brought to fulfillment, but also not renounced—were all separate parts of that great path which still lay before them.
But now his excitement had reached such a degree that he was impatient to run the whole of that distance at once, without stopping for breath. He did not realize where he was going with such long strides, but his feet knew very well where they were taking him.
Tiverzin did not suspect for a long time that, after he and Antipov left the dugout, the committee had
decided to start the strike that same evening. The members of the committee at once assigned who among them was to go where and who would relieve whom. When the hoarse, gradually clearing and steadying signal burst from the engine repair shop, as if from the bottom of Tiverzin’s soul, a crowd from the depot and the freight yard was already moving towards the city from the semaphore at the entrance, merging with a new crowd which, at Tiverzin’s whistle, had dropped their work in the boiler room.
For many years Tiverzin thought that he alone had stopped all work and movement on the railway that night. Only later trials, in which he was judged collectively and the accusations did not include inciting to strike, led him out of that error.
People came running out, asking: “Why is the whistle blowing?” The response came from the darkness: “Are you deaf? Can’t you hear? It’s the alarm. There’s a fire.” “But where is it?” “Must be somewhere, since the whistle’s blowing.”
Doors banged, new people came out. Other voices were heard. “Go on—a fire! Country hicks! Don’t listen to the fool. It’s what’s called a walkout, understand? Here’s my hat and here’s the door, I’m not your servant anymore. Let’s go home, boys.”
More and more people joined in. The railway was on strike.
7
Tiverzin came home two days later, chilled, sleepy, and unshaven. The night before there had been a sudden cold snap, unprecedented for that time of year, and Tiverzin was dressed for fall. At the gate he was met by the yard porter Gimazetdin.
“Thank you, Mr. Tiverzin,” he began. “You not let Yusup be hurt, you make us all pray God forever.”
“Are you out of your mind, Gimazetdin? What kind of ‘mister’ am I to you? Drop all that, please. Speak quickly, you see how freezing it is.”
“Why freezing, you warm, Savelyich. Yesterday we bring your mother, Marfa Gavrilovna, full shed of firewood from freight yard, birch only, good firewood, dry firewood.”
“Thank you, Gimazetdin. There’s something else you wanted to tell me. Be quick, please, you can see I’m cold.”
“I wanted to tell you, no sleep home, Savelyich, must hide. Policeman asked, police chief asked, who come to see you. I say no one come. An assistant come, the engine team comes, railway people. But strangers—no, no!”
The house where the bachelor Tiverzin lived with his mother and his married younger brother belonged to the neighboring church of the Holy Trinity. This house was inhabited partly by certain of the clergy, by two associations of fruit- and meat-sellers who hawked their wares from stands in town, but mostly by minor employees of the Moscow–Brest railway.
The house was of stone with wooden galleries. They surrounded on four sides a dirty, unpaved courtyard. Dirty and slippery wooden stairways led up to the galleries. They smelled of cats and pickled cabbage. To the landings clung outhouses and closets with padlocks.
Tiverzin’s brother had been called up as a private in the war and had been wounded at Wafangkou.3 He was recovering in the Krasnoyarsk hospital, where his wife and two daughters had gone to visit him and receive him when he was dismissed. Hereditary railwaymen, the Tiverzins were light-footed and went all over Russia on free company passes. At the time, the apartment was quiet and empty. Only the mother and son were living in it.
The apartment was on the second floor. On the gallery outside the front door stood a barrel, which was filled by a water carrier. When Kiprian Savelyevich got up to his level, he discovered that the lid of the barrel had been moved aside and a metal mug stood frozen to the crust of ice that had formed on the water.
“Prov and nobody else,” thought Tiverzin with a smirk. “Can’t drink enough, got a hole in him, guts on fire.”
Prov Afanasyevich Sokolov, a psalm-reader, a stately and not yet old man, was a distant relation of Marfa Gavrilovna.
Kiprian Savelyevich tore the mug from the ice crust, put the lid on the barrel, and pulled the handle of the doorbell. A cloud of domestic smell and savory steam moved to meet him.
“You’ve really heated it up, mama. It’s warm here, very nice.”
His mother fell on his neck, embraced him, and wept. He stroked her head, waited a little, and moved her away gently.
“A stout heart takes cities, mama,” he said softly. “My path goes from Moscow right to Warsaw.”
“I know. That’s why I’m crying. It’s going to be bad for you. Take yourself off somewhere, Kuprinka, somewhere far away.”
“Your dear little friend, your kindly shepherd boy,4 Pyotr Petrovich, almost split my skull.” He meant to make her laugh. She did not understand the joke and earnestly replied:
“It’s a sin to laugh at him, Kuprinka. You should pity him. A hopeless wretch, a lost soul.”
“They’ve taken Pashka Antipov. Pavel Ferapontovich. They came at night, made a search, raked everything over. Led him away in the morning. Worse still, his Darya’s in the hospital with typhoid. Little Pavlushka—he’s in a progressive high school—is alone at home with his deaf aunt. What’s more, they’re being chased out of the apartment. I think we’ll have to take the boy in. Why did Prov come?”
“How do you know he did?”
“I saw the barrel uncovered and the mug standing on it. It must have been bottomless Prov, I thought, guzzling water.”
“You’re so sharp, Kuprinka. That’s right, it was Prov, Prov Afanasyevich. He ran by to ask if he could borrow some firewood. I gave it to him. But what a fool I am—firewood! He brought such news and it went clean out of my head. You see, the sovereign has signed a manifesto so that everything will be turned a new way, nobody’s offended, the muzhiks get the land, and everybody’s equal to the nobility.5 The ukase has been signed, just think of it, it only has to be made public. A new petition came from the Synod to put it into the litany or some sort of prayer of thanksgiving, I’m afraid to get it wrong. Provushka told me, and I went and forgot.”
8
Patulya Antipov, the son of the arrested Pavel Ferapontovich and the hospitalized Darya Filimonovna, came to live with the Tiverzins. He was a neat boy with regular features and dark blond hair parted in the middle. He kept smoothing it with a brush and kept straightening his jacket and his belt with its school buckle. Patulya could laugh to the point of tears and was very observant. He imitated everything he saw and heard with great likeness and comicality.
Soon after the manifesto of October 17, there was a big demonstration from the Tver to the Kaluga gate. This was an initiative in the spirit of “too many cooks spoil the broth.” Several of the revolutionary organizations that took part in the enterprise squabbled with each other and gave it up one by one, but when they learned that on the appointed morning people took to the streets even so, they hastened to send their representatives to the demonstration.
Despite Kiprian Savelyevich’s protests and dissuasions, Marfa Gavrilovna went to the demonstration with the cheerful and sociable Patulya.
It was a dry, frosty day in early November, with a still, leaden sky and a few snowflakes, so few that you could almost count them, swirling slowly and hesitantly before they fell to earth and then, in a fluffy gray dust, filled the potholes in the road.
Down the street the people came pouring, a veritable babel, faces, faces, faces, quilted winter coats and lambskin hats, old men, girl students and children, railwaymen in uniform, workers from the tram depot and the telephone station in boots above their knees and leather jackets, high school and university students.
For some time they sang the “Varshavianka,” “You Fell Victims,” and the “Marseillaise,” but suddenly the man who had been walking backwards ahead of the marchers and conducting the singing by waving a papakha6 clutched in his hand, stopped directing, put his hat on, and, turning his back to the procession, began to listen to what the rest of the leaders marching beside him were saying. The singing faltered and broke off. You could hear the crunching steps of the numberless crowd over the frozen pavement.
Some well-wishers informed the initiators of the march that
there were Cossacks lying in wait for the demonstrators further ahead. There had been a phone call to a nearby pharmacy about the prepared ambush.
“So what?” the organizers said. “The main thing then is to keep cool and not lose our heads. We must immediately occupy the first public building that comes our way, announce the impending danger to people, and disperse one by one.”
They argued over which would be the best place to go. Some suggested the Society of Merchant’s Clerks, others the Technical Institute, still others the School of Foreign Correspondents.
During the argument, the corner of a government building appeared ahead of them. It also housed an educational institution, which as a suitable shelter was no whit worse than the ones enumerated.
When the walkers drew level with it, the leaders went up onto the semicircular landing in front of it and made signs for the head of the procession to stop. The many-leafed doors of the entrance opened, and all the marchers, coat after coat and hat after hat, began pouring into the vestibule of the school and climbing its main stairway.
“To the auditorium, to the auditorium!” solitary voices shouted behind them, but the crowd continued to flow further on, dispersing through the separate corridors and classrooms.
When they managed to bring the public back and they were all seated on chairs, the leaders tried several times to announce to the assembly that a trap had been set for them ahead, but no one listened to them. This stopping and going into the building was taken as an invitation to an improvised meeting, which began at once.
After all the marching and singing, people wanted to sit silently for a while and have someone else do the work and strain his throat for them. Compared to the chief pleasure of resting, the insignificant disagreements among the speakers, who were at one with each other in almost everything, seemed a matter of indifference.
Doctor Zhivago Page 6