The jokers accompanied the sawyers, men and women, with loud banter:
“Hey, grandpa! Tell them—I’m a nursling, my mama hasn’t weaned me, I can’t do physical labor. Hey, Mavra, see you don’t saw your skirt off, it’ll be drafty! Hey, girl, don’t go to the forest, better marry me instead!”
26
In the forest there were several sawhorses made from stakes tied crosswise, their ends driven into the ground. One turned out to be free. Yuri Andreevich and Alexander Alexandrovich set themselves to sawing on it.
It was that time of spring when the earth comes out from under the snow looking almost the same as when it went under the snow six months earlier. The forest exuded dampness and was all littered with last year’s leaves, like an untidied room in which people had torn up receipts, letters, and notices for many years of their lives and had had no time to sweep them away.
“Not so fast, you’ll get tired,” the doctor said to Alexander Alexandrovich, making the saw go more slowly and measuredly, and suggested that they rest.
The forest was filled with the hoarse ringing of other saws going back and forth, now all in rhythm, now discordantly. Somewhere far, far away the first nightingale was testing its strength. A blackbird whistled at still longer intervals, as if blowing through a clogged flute. Even the steam from the engine’s piston rose into the sky with a singsong burble, as if it were milk coming to the boil over a spirit lamp in a nursery.
“You wanted to talk about something,” Alexander Alexandrovich reminded the doctor. “You haven’t forgotten? It was like this: we were passing a flooded field, ducks were flying, you fell to thinking and said: ‘I must talk with you.’ ”
“Ah, yes. I don’t know how to put it briefly. You see, we’re going ever deeper … The whole region here is in ferment. We’ll arrive soon. It’s not known what we’ll find at our destination. Just in case, we must come to an agreement. I’m not talking about convictions. It would be absurd to find them out or establish them in a five-minute talk in a spring forest. We know each other well. The three of us—you, I, and Tonya—along with many others in our time, make up a single world, differing from each other only in the degree of our comprehension. I’m not talking about that. That’s an ABC. I’m talking about something else. We must agree beforehand on how to behave under certain circumstances, so as not to blush for each other and not to put the stain of disgrace on each other.”
“Enough. I understand. I like the way you pose the question. You’ve found precisely the necessary words. Here’s what I’ll tell you. Do you remember the night when you brought the leaflet with the first decrees, in winter, during a blizzard? Do you remember how incredibly unconditional it was? That straightforwardness was winning. But these things live in their original purity only in the heads of their creators, and then only on the first day of their proclamation. The very next day the Jesuitism of politics turns them inside out. What can I say to you? This philosophy is alien to me. This power is against us. They didn’t ask me to consent to this breakup. But they trusted me, and my actions, even if I was forced into them, placed me under obligation.
“Tonya asks if we’ll come in time to start a vegetable garden, if we’ll miss the time for planting. What can I answer? I don’t know the local soil. What are the climatic conditions? The summer’s too short. Does anything at all ripen here?
“Yes, but can we be going such a distance to take up gardening? Even the old saying, ‘Why walk a mile for a pint of beer,’ is impossible here, because there are, unfortunately, two or three thousand of those miles. No, frankly speaking, we’re dragging ourselves so far with a totally different purpose. We’re going to try to vegetate in the contemporary way and somehow get in on squandering grandfather’s former forests, machinery, and inventory. Not on restoring his property, but on wasting it, on the socialized blowing of thousands in order to exist on a kopeck, and like everybody else, to be sure, in a contemporary, incomprehensibly chaotic form. Shower me with gold, I still wouldn’t take the factory on the old basis even as a gift. It would be as wild as starting to run around naked or forgetting how to read and write. No, the history of property in Russia is over. And personally, we Gromekos already lost the passion for money grubbing in the previous generation.”
27
It was so hot and stuffy that it was impossible to sleep. The doctor’s head was bathed in sweat on the sweat-soaked pillow.
He carefully got down from the edge of the berth and quietly, so as not to waken anyone, slid the car door aside.
Dampness breathed in his face, sticky, as when your face runs into a spiderweb in a cellar. “Mist,” he guessed. “Mist. The day will probably be sultry, scorching. That’s why it’s so hard to breathe and there’s such an oppressive heaviness on the heart.”
Before getting down on the tracks, the doctor stood for a while in the doorway, listening all around.
The train was standing in some very big station of the junction category. Besides the silence and the mist, the cars were immersed in some sort of nonbeing and neglect, as if they had been forgotten—a sign that the train was standing in the very back of the yard, and that between it and the far-off station building there was a great distance, occupied by an endless network of tracks.
Two sorts of sounds rang out faintly in the distance.
Behind, where they had come from, could be heard a measured slapping, as if laundry were being rinsed or the wind were flapping the wet cloth of a flag against the wood of a flagpole.
From ahead came a low rumble, which made the doctor, who had been at war, shudder and strain his ears.
“Long-range cannon,” he decided, listening to the even, calmly rolling noise on a low, restrained note.
“That’s it. We’ve come right to the front,” the doctor thought, shook his head, and jumped down from the car to the ground.
He went several steps forward. After the next two cars, the train ended. It stood without an engine, which had gone somewhere with the detached front cars.
“That’s why they showed such bravado yesterday,” thought the doctor. “They clearly felt that, once they arrived, they’d be thrown right into the fire on the spot.”
He went around the end of the train, intending to cross the tracks and find the way to the station. At the corner of the car, a sentry with a rifle surged up as if out of the ground. He snapped softly:
“Where are you going? Your pass!”
“What station is this?”
“No station. Who are you?”
“I’m a doctor from Moscow. Traveling with my family on this train. Here are my papers.”
“Your papers are crap. Think I’m fool enough to go reading in the dark and ruin my eyes? There’s mist, see? I can tell what kind of doctor you are a mile away without any papers. That’s your doctors there, banging away from twelve-inchers. You really ought to be knocked off, but it’s too early. Back with you, while you’re still in one piece.”
“I’m being taken for someone else,” thought the doctor. To get into an argument with the sentry was meaningless. It truly was better to withdraw before it was too late. The doctor turned in the opposite direction.
The cannon fire behind his back died down. That direction was the east. There in the haze of the mist the sun rose and peeped dimly between the scraps of floating murk, the way naked people in a bathhouse flash through clouds of soapy steam.
The doctor walked along the cars of the train. He passed them all and went on walking further. With each step, his feet sank ever deeper into the loose sand.
The sounds of measured slapping came closer. The ground sloped down. After a few steps the doctor stopped in front of outlines that the mist endowed with incongruously large dimensions. Another step, and the sterns of boats pulled up onto the bank emerged from the murk. He was standing on the bank of a wide river, its lazy ripples slowly and wearily lapping against the sides of fishermen’s boats and the planks of the docks on shore.
“Who gave you permissio
n to hang around here?” another sentry asked, detaching himself from the bank.
“What river is this?” the doctor shot back against his own will, though with all the forces of his soul he was determined not to ask anything after his recent experience.
Instead of an answer, the sentry put a whistle between his teeth, but he had no time to use it. The first sentry, whom he had intended to summon by his whistling, and who, as it turned out, had been inconspicuously following behind Yuri Andreevich, came up to his comrade himself. The two began to talk.
“Nothing to think about here. You can tell the bird by its flight. ‘What station is this? What river is this?’ Thought he’d distract our attention by it. What do you think—straight to the jetty, or to the car first?”
“To the car, I suppose. Whatever the chief says. Your identity papers,” barked the second sentry, and he grabbed the wad of papers the doctor handed him.
“Keep an eye on him,” he said to some unknown person, and together with the first sentry, he went down the tracks towards the station.
Then, to clarify the situation, a man lying on the sand, evidently a fisherman, grunted and stirred:
“Lucky for you they want to take you to the man himself. It may be your salvation. Only don’t blame them. It’s their duty. The time of the people. Maybe it’s for the best. But meanwhile, don’t say anything. You see, they mistook you for somebody. They’ve been hunting and hunting for some man. So they thought it was you. Here he is, they think, the enemy of the workers’ power—we’ve caught him. A mistake. In case of something, you should insist on seeing the chief. Don’t let these two have you. These class-conscious ones are a disaster, God help us. It wouldn’t cost them a cent to do you in. They’ll say, ‘Let’s go,’ but don’t go. You say, ‘I want to see the chief.’ ”
From the fisherman Yuri Andreevich learned that the river he was standing beside was the famous navigable river Rynva, that the station by the river was Razvilye, the riverside factory suburb of the city of Yuriatin. He learned that Yuriatin itself, which lay a mile or two further up, kept being fought over, and now seemed finally to have been won away from the Whites. The fisherman told him that there had been disorders in Razvilye as well, and they also seemed to have been put down, and there reigned such silence all around, because the area adjacent to the station had been cleared of civilian inhabitants and surrounded by a strict cordon. He learned, finally, that among the trains standing on the tracks with various military institutions housed in them, there was the special train of the regional army commissar Strelnikov, to whose car the doctor’s papers were taken.
From there a new sentry came after some time to fetch the doctor, one unlike his predecessors in that he dragged his rifle butt on the ground or set it down in front of him, as if carrying a drunken friend under the arm, who otherwise would have fallen down. He led the doctor to the army commissar’s car.
28
In one of the two saloon cars, connected by a leather passageway, which the sentry, having given the guard the password, climbed into with the doctor, laughter and movement could be heard, which instantly ceased on their appearance.
The sentry led the doctor down a narrow corridor to the wide middle section. Here there was silence and order. In the clean, comfortable room, neat, well-dressed people were working. The doctor had quite a different picture of the headquarters of the nonparty military specialist who in a short period of time had become the glory and terror of the whole region.
But the center of his activity was probably not here, but somewhere ahead, at frontline headquarters, closer to the scene of military activity, while here were his personal quarters, his small home office, and his mobile camp bed.
That was why it was quiet here, like the corridors of hot sea baths, laid with cork and rugs on which attendants in soft shoes step inaudibly.
The middle section of the car was a former dining room, carpeted over and turned into a dispatch room. There were several desks in it.
“One moment,” said a young officer who was sitting closest to the entrance. After that everyone at the desks thought it their right to forget about the doctor and stop paying attention to him. The same officer dismissed the sentry with an absentminded nod, and the man withdrew, the butt of his rifle clanking against the metal crossbars of the corridor.
The doctor saw his papers from the threshold. They lay on the edge of the last desk, in front of a more elderly officer of the old colonel type. He was some sort of military statistician. Humming something under his breath, he glanced at reference books, scrutinized army maps, compared, juxtaposed, cut out, and glued in something. He passed his gaze over all the windows in the room, one after the other, and said: “It’s going to be hot today,” as if he had drawn this conclusion from surveying all the windows, and it was not equally clear from each of them.
A military technician was crawling over the floor among the desks, fixing some broken wires. When he crawled under the young officer’s desk, the man got up so as not to hinder him. Next to him a girl, a copying clerk, in a man’s khaki jacket, was struggling over a broken typewriter. The carriage had gone too far to the side and gotten stuck in the frame. The young officer stood behind her stool and, together with her, studied the cause of the breakage from above. The military technician crawled over to the typist and examined the lever and gears from below. Getting up from his place, the commander of the colonel type went over to them. Everyone became occupied with the typewriter.
This reassured the doctor. It was impossible to suppose that people better initiated than he into his probable destiny would give themselves so lightheartedly to trifles in the presence of a doomed man.
“Though who knows about them?” he thought. “Where does their serenity come from? Beside them cannons boom, people are killed, and they make a forecast of a hot day, not in the sense of hot fighting, but of hot weather. Or have they seen so much that everything has gone dull in them?”
And, having nothing else to do, he began looking from his place across the entire room through the windows opposite.
29
In front of the train on this side stretched the rest of the tracks, and the Razvilye station could be seen on a hill in the suburb of the same name.
An unpainted wooden stairway with three landings led from the tracks up to the station.
The railway tracks on this side seemed to be a great engine graveyard. Old locomotives without tenders, with smokestacks shaped like cups or boot tops, stood turned stack to stack amidst piles of scrapped cars.
The engine graveyard below and the graveyard of the suburb, the crumpled iron on the tracks and the rusty roofs and signboards of the city’s outskirts, merged into one spectacle of abandonment and decrepitude under the white sky scalded by the early morning heat.
In Moscow, Yuri Andreevich forgot how many signboards there were in cities and what a great portion of the façades they occupied. The local signboards reminded him of it. Half of them were written in such big letters that they could be read from the train. They came down so low over the crooked little windows of the lopsided one-story buildings that the squatty houses disappeared under them, like peasant boys’ heads with their fathers’ caps pulled down over them.
By that time the mist had dispersed completely. Traces of it remained only on the left side of the sky, far to the east. But now they, too, stirred, moved, and parted like a theater curtain.
There, some two miles from Razvilye, on a hill higher than the suburbs, appeared a large city, a district or provincial capital. The sun lent its colors a yellowish tinge, the distance simplified its lines. It clung to the elevation in tiers, like Mount Athos or a hermits’ skete in a cheap print, house above house, street above street, with a big cathedral in the middle on its crown.
“Yuriatin!” the doctor realized with emotion. “The subject of the late Anna Ivanovna’s memories and of the nurse Antipova’s frequent remarks! How many times did I hear the name of the city from them, and it’s in s
uch circumstances that I’m seeing it for the first time!”
At that moment the attention of the military bent over the typewriter was attracted by something outside the window. They turned their heads there. The doctor also followed their gaze.
Several captured or arrested men were being led up the stairs to the station, among them a high school boy who was wounded in the head. He had been bandaged somewhere, but blood seeped from under the bandage, and he smeared it with his hand over his sunburnt, sweaty face.
The student, between two Red Army men who wound up the procession, caught one’s attention not only by the resolution that his handsome face breathed, but by the pity evoked by such a young rebel. He and his two escorts attracted one’s gaze by the senselessness of their actions. They constantly did the opposite of what they should.
The cap kept falling off the student’s bandaged head. Instead of taking it off and carrying it in his hand, he would straighten it and pull it down further, to the detriment of his dressed wound, and the two Red Army men readily helped him.
In this absurdity, contrary to common sense, there was something symbolic. And, yielding to its significance, the doctor also wanted to run out to the landing and stop the student with a ready phrase that was bursting from him. He wanted to cry out both to the boy and to the people in the car that salvation lay not in faithfulness to forms, but in liberation from them.
The doctor shifted his gaze aside. In the middle of the room stood Strelnikov, who had just come in with straight, impetuous strides.
How could he, the doctor, amidst such a host of indefinite acquaintances, not have known up to now such definiteness as this man? How had life not thrown them together? How had their paths not crossed?
For some unknown reason it became clear at once that this man represented the consummate manifestation of will. He was to such a degree what he wanted to be that everything on him and in him inevitably seemed exemplary: his proportionately constructed and handsomely placed head, and the impetuousness of his stride, and his long legs in high boots, which may have been dirty but seemed polished, and his gray flannel tunic, which may have been wrinkled but gave the impression of ironed linen.
Doctor Zhivago Page 31