If mama finds out, she’ll kill her. Kill her and then take her own life.
How did it happen? How could it happen? Now it’s too late. She should have thought earlier.
Now she’s—what is it called?—now she’s—a fallen woman. She’s a woman from a French novel, and tomorrow she will go to school and sit at the same desk with those girls, who, compared to her, are still unweaned babies. Lord, Lord, how could it happen!
Someday, many, many years from now, when it was possible, she would tell Olya Demina. Olya would clutch her by the head and start howling.
Outside the window the drops prattled, the thaw was talking away. Someone in the street banged on the neighbors’ gate. Lara did not raise her head. Her shoulders shook. She was weeping.
13
“Ah, Emma Ernestovna, dearest, that’s of no importance. It’s tiresome.”
He was flinging things around on the carpet and sofa, cuffs and shirt fronts, and opening and closing the drawers of the chest, not understanding what he wanted.
He needed her desperately, and to see her that Sunday was impossible. He rushed about the room like a beast, unable to settle anywhere.
She was incomparable in her inspired loveliness. Her arms amazed one, as one can be astonished by a lofty way of thinking. Her shadow on the wallpaper of the hotel room seemed the silhouette of her uncorruption. The nightshirt stretched over her breasts was ingenuous and taut, like a piece of linen on an embroidery frame.
Komarovsky drummed his fingers on the windowpane in rhythm with the horses’ hoofs unhurriedly clattering over the asphalt of the street downstairs. “Lara”—he whispered and closed his eyes, and her head mentally appeared in his hands, her sleeping head with its eyelashes lowered, knowing not that it had been gazed at sleeplessly for hours on end. Her shock of hair, scattered in disorder over the pillow, stung Komarovsky’s eyes with the smoke of its beauty and penetrated his soul.
His Sunday stroll did not come off. Komarovsky went several steps down the sidewalk with Jack and stopped. He imagined Kuznetsky, Satanidi’s jokes, the stream of acquaintances he was going to meet. No, it was beyond his strength! How repugnant it had all become! Komarovsky turned back. The surprised dog rested his disapproving gaze on him from below and reluctantly trudged after him.
“What is this bedevilment?” he thought. “What does it all mean?” Was it awakened conscience, a feeling of pity or repentance? Or was it worry? No, he knew she was safe at home. Why, then, could he not get her out of his head!
Komarovsky went through the front door, went upstairs to the landing, and turned. There was a Venetian window with ornamental coats of arms in the corners of the glass. It cast colored reflections on the floor and the windowsill. Halfway up the next flight Komarovsky stopped.
Do not give in to this gnawing, martyrizing anguish! He is not a boy, he must realize how it would be for him if, from a means of diversion, this girl, his late friend’s daughter, this child, should turn into the object of his madness. Come to your senses! Be true to yourself, don’t change your habits. Otherwise everything will fly to pieces.
Komarovsky squeezed the wide banister with his hand until it hurt, closed his eyes for a moment, and, resolutely turning back, began to go downstairs. On the landing with the sun reflections he caught the adoring gaze of his bulldog. Jack was looking at him from below, raising his head like a slobbering old dwarf with sagging cheeks.
The dog did not like the girl, tore her stockings, growled and snarled at her. He was jealous of Lara, as if fearing that his master might get infected by her with something human.
“Ah, so that’s it! You’ve decided everything will be as before—Satanidi, the meanness, the jokes? Take that, then, take that, take that, take that!”
He started kicking the bulldog and beating him with his cane. Jack made his escape, howling and squealing, and, his behind twitching, hobbled up the stairs to scratch at the door and complain to Emma Ernestovna.
Days and weeks went by.
14
Oh, what a vicious circle it was! If Komarovsky’s irruption into Lara’s life had aroused only her revulsion, Lara would have rebelled and broken free. But things were not so simple.
The girl was flattered that a handsome, graying man who could have been her father, who was applauded in assemblies and written about in the newspapers, spent money and time on her, called her goddess, took her to theaters and concerts and, as they say, “improved her mind.”
And here she was still an immature schoolgirl in a brown dress, a secret participant in innocent school conspiracies and pranks. Komarovsky’s lovemaking somewhere in a carriage under the coachman’s nose or in the secluded back of a loge before the eyes of the whole theater fascinated her by its covert boldness and prompted the little demon awakened in her to imitation.
But this naughty schoolgirl daring was quickly passing. An aching sense of brokenness and horror at herself had long been taking root in her. And she wanted to sleep all the time. From not sleeping enough at night, from tears and eternal headaches, from schoolwork and general physical fatigue.
15
He was her curse, she hated him. Every day she went over these thoughts afresh.
Now she’s his slave for life. How has he enslaved her? How does he extort her submission, so that she succumbs, plays up to his desires, and delights him with the shudders of her unvarnished shame? Is it his age, mama’s financial dependence on him, his skill in frightening her, Lara? No, no, no. That’s all nonsense.
It’s not she who is subordinate to him, but he to her. Doesn’t she see how he languishes after her? She has nothing to be afraid of, her conscience is clear. It is he who should be ashamed and frightened, if she should expose him. But the thing is that she will never do it. For that she does not have enough baseness, which is Komarovsky’s main strength in dealing with the subordinate and weak.
That is where they differ. And that also makes for the horror of life all around. How does it stun you—with thunder and lightning? No, with sidelong glances and whispers of calumny. It’s all trickery and ambiguity. A single thread is like a spiderweb, pull and it’s gone, but try to free yourself and you get even more entangled.
And the base and weak rule over the strong.
16
She said to herself: “And what if I was married? How would it be different?” She entered on the path of sophistry. But at times a hopeless anguish came over her.
How can he not be ashamed to lie at her feet and implore her: “It can’t go on like this. Think what I’ve done to you. You’re sliding down a steep slope. Let’s tell your mother. I’ll marry you.”
And he wept and insisted, as if she were arguing and disagreeing. But it was all just phrases, and Lara did not even listen to those tragic, empty-sounding words.
And he went on taking her, under a long veil, to the private rooms of that terrible restaurant, where the waiters and customers followed her with their gazes as if undressing her. And she only asked herself: Does one humiliate the person one loves?
Once she had a dream. She is under the ground, all that remains of her is her left side with its shoulder and her right foot. A clump of grass is growing from her left nipple, and aboveground they are singing: “Dark eyes and white breasts” and “Tell Masha not to cross the river.”
17
Lara was not religious. She did not believe in rites. But sometimes, in order to endure life, she needed it to be accompanied by some inner music. She could not invent such music each time for herself. This music was the word of God about life, and Lara went to church to weep over it.
Once at the beginning of December, when Lara’s inner state was like Katerina’s in The Storm,12 she went to pray with such a feeling as if the earth were about to open under her and the church’s vaults to collapse. And it would serve her right. And everything would be over. Only it was a pity she had taken that chatterbox, Olya Demina, with her.
“Prov Afanasyevich,” Olya whispered in her ear.
“Shh. Let me be, please. What Prov Afanasyevich?”
“Prov Afanasyevich Sokolov. Mother’s second cousin. The one who’s reading.”
“Ah, she means the psalm-reader. Tiverzin’s relation. Shh. Be quiet. Don’t bother me, please.”
They had come at the beginning of the service. The psalm “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name” was being sung.13
The church was rather empty and echoing. Only towards the front were people crowded in a compact group. It was a newly built church. The colorless glass of the window did not brighten in any way the gray, snow-covered lane and the people driving or walking up and down it. The church warden stood by that window and, loud enough for the whole church to hear, paying no attention to the service, admonished some deaf woman, a ragged holy fool, and his voice was of the same conventional, everyday sort as the window and the lane.
While Lara, slowly going around the praying people, copper money clutched in her hand, went to the door to buy candles for herself and Olya, and went back just as carefully, so as not to push anyone, Prov Afanasyevich managed to rattle off the nine beatitudes,14 like something well-known to everyone without him.
Blessed are the poor in spirit … Blessed are those who mourn … Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness …
Lara walked, suddenly shuddered, and stopped. That was about her. He says: Enviable is the lot of the downtrodden. They have something to tell about themselves. They have everything before them. So He thought. It was Christ’s opinion.
18
Those were the Presnya days.15 They found themselves in the zone of the uprising. A few steps away from them, on Tverskaya, a barricade was being built. It could be seen from the living-room window. People were fetching buckets of water from their courtyard to pour over the barricade and bind the stones and scraps of metal it was made of in an armor of ice.
The neighboring courtyard was a gathering place of the people’s militia, a sort of first-aid station or canteen.
Two boys used to come there. Lara knew them both. One was Nika Dudorov, a friend of Nadya’s, at whose house Lara had made his acquaintance. He was of Lara’s ilk—direct, proud, and taciturn. He resembled Lara and did not interest her.
The other was a student at a progressive school, Antipov, who lived with old Tiverzina, Olya Demina’s grandmother. When visiting Marfa Gavrilovna, Lara began to notice what effect she had on the boy. Pasha Antipov was still so childishly simple that he did not conceal the bliss her visits afforded him, as if Lara were some sort of birch grove during summer vacation, with clean grass and clouds, and he could express his calfish raptures to her unhindered, with no fear of being laughed at for it.
As soon as she noticed the sort of influence she had on him, Lara unconsciously began to take advantage of it. However, she busied herself with the more serious taming of that soft and yielding nature after several years, at a much later season of her friendship with him, when Patulya already knew that he loved her to distraction and that in his life there was no more turning back.
The boys were playing at the most dreadful and adult of games, at war, and moreover of a sort that you were hanged or exiled for taking part in. Yet the ends of their bashlyks16 were tied at the back with such knots that it gave them away as children and showed that they still had papas and mamas. Lara looked at them as a big girl looks at little boys. There was a bloom of innocence on their dangerous amusements. They imparted the same stamp to everything else. To the frosty evening, overgrown with such shaggy hoarfrost that its thickness made it look not white but black. To the blue courtyard. To the house opposite, where the boys were hiding. And, above all, to the pistol shots that cracked from it all the time. “The boys are shooting,” thought Lara. She thought it not of Nika and Patulya, but of the whole shooting city. “Good, honest boys,” she thought. “They’re good, that’s why they’re shooting.”
19
They learned that cannon fire might be directed at the barricade and that their house was in danger. It was too late to think of moving in with acquaintances somewhere in another part of Moscow: their area was surrounded. They had to look for a niche closer by, within the circle. They remembered the Montenegro.
It turned out that they were not the first. The entire hotel was occupied. Many had found themselves in their situation. But being remembered of old, they were promised quarters in the linen room.
They gathered everything necessary into three bundles, so as not to attract attention with suitcases, and began putting off the move to the hotel from day to day.
Owing to the patriarchal customs that reigned in the shop, work went on until the last minute, despite the strike. Then, in the cold, dull twilight, the outside door bell rang. Someone came with claims and reproaches. The owner was asked to come to the door. To soothe these passions, Faïna Silantievna went out to the front hall.
“Come here, girls!” she soon called the seamstresses there and began introducing them in turn to the visitor. He greeted each of them separately with a handshake, feelingly and clumsily, and left, having come to some agreement with Fetisova.
Returning to the big room, the seamstresses began wrapping themselves in shawls and flinging their arms up over their heads, putting them through the sleeves of tight-fitting fur coats.
“What’s happened?” asked Amalia Karlovna, just coming in.
“They’ve tooken us out, madame. We’re on strike.”
“Maybe I … Have I done you any wrong?” Mme Guichard burst into tears.
“Don’t be upset, Amalia Karlovna. We’re not angry with you, we’re very grateful to you. But the talk’s not about you and us. It’s the same now with everybody, the whole world. And how can you go against everybody?”
They all went home, even Olya Demina and Faïna Silantievna, who whispered to the mistress as she was leaving that she had staged this strike for the benefit of her and the business. But she would not be appeased.
“What black ingratitude! Just think how mistaken one can be about people! This girl on whom I spent so much of my soul! Well, all right, let’s say she’s a child. But that old witch!”
“Try to understand, mama, they can’t make an exception for you,” Lara comforted her. “Nobody’s angry with you. On the contrary. Everything that’s going on around us now is being done in the name of man, in defense of the weak, for the good of women and children. Yes, yes, don’t shake your head so mistrustfully. It will be better someday for me and you because of it.”
But her mother did not understand anything.
“It’s always this way,” she said, sobbing. “My thoughts are confused to begin with, and then you blurt things out that just make me roll my eyes. They dump on my head, and it turns out to be in my own interest. No, truly, I must have gone soft in the brain.”
Rodya was at the corps. Lara and her mother wandered about the empty house alone. The unlit street looked into the rooms with vacant eyes. The rooms returned the same gaze.
“Let’s go to the hotel, mama, before it gets too dark. Do you hear, mama? Without putting it off, right now.”
“Filat, Filat,” they called the yard porter. “Filat, dearest, take us to the Montenegro.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Take the bundles, and another thing, Filat, please look after the place in the meantime. And don’t forget seed and water for Kirill Modestovich. And keep everything locked. Oh, and please come to see us there.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Thank you, Filat. Christ save you. Well, let’s sit down before we go, and God be with us.”
They went outside and did not recognize the air, as after a long illness. Through the frosty expanse, polished like new, round, smooth sounds, as if turned on a lathe, rolled lightly in all directions. Salvoes and gunshots smacked, splatted, and slapped, flattening the distances into a pancake.
Much as Filat tried to dissuade them, Lara and Amalia Karlovna considered these shots b
lanks.
“You’re a little fool, Filat. Judge for yourself, how could they not be blanks if you can’t see who’s shooting. Who do you think is shooting, the Holy Spirit or something? Of course they’re blanks.”
At one of the intersections a patrol stopped them. They were searched by grinning Cossacks, who brazenly felt them from head to foot. Their visorless caps with chin straps were cocked dashingly over the ear. They all looked one-eyed.
What luck, thought Lara, she will not see Komarovsky for the whole time that they are cut off from the rest of the city! She cannot break with him on account of her mother. She cannot say: Mama, don’t receive him. Or else everything will be given away. So what? Why be afraid of that? Ah, God, let it all go to the devil, as long as it’s over. Lord, Lord, Lord! She’ll fall senseless in the middle of the street right now from revulsion. What did she just remember?! How is it called, that horrible painting with the fat Roman in it, in that first private room where it all began? The Woman or the Vase.17 Why, of course. A famous painting. The Woman or the Vase. And she was not yet a woman then, to be likened to such a treasure. That came later. The table was so sumptuously set.
“Where are you running like crazy? I can’t go so fast,” Amalia Karlovna wailed behind her, breathing heavily and barely keeping up with her.
Lara was moving quickly. Some force bore her up, as if she were walking on air—a proud, inspiring force.
“Oh, how perkily the gunshots crack,” she thought. “Blessed are the violated, blessed are the ensnared. God give you good health, gunshots! Gunshots, gunshots, you’re of the same opinion!”
20
The Gromeko brothers’ house stood at the corner of Sivtsev Vrazhek and another lane. Alexander Alexandrovich and Nikolai Alexandrovich Gromeko were professors of chemistry, the first at the Petrovskaya Academy, the second at the university. Nikolai Alexandrovich was a bachelor; Alexander Alexandrovich was married to Anna Ivanovna, née Krüger, the daughter of a steel magnate and owner of abandoned, unprofitable mines on the enormous forest dacha18 that belonged to him near Yuryatin in the Urals.
Doctor Zhivago Page 8