“So, judging by your words, you know Samdevyatov?”
“Who doesn’t know that magician! Our hope and provider. Without him we’d all have turned our toes up long ago. Yes, he says, render them all possible assistance. Yes, sir, I say. I promised. So you’ll have a horse, if need be, or anything else I can do to help. Where are you headed for?”
“Varykino. Is it far from here?”
“Varykino? That’s why I keep thinking who on earth your daughter reminds me of so much. So you’re headed for Varykino! Then everything’s explained. Ivan Ernestovich and I built that road together. I’ll get busy and fit you out. We’ll call a man, get hold of a cart. Donat! Donat! Here are the things, take them to the waiting room meanwhile. And what about a horse? Run over to the tea room, brother, and ask if there isn’t one. Seems like Vakkh was hanging around here this morning. Ask if he maybe hasn’t gone. Tell them there’s four people to be taken to Varykino, with no luggage to speak of. Newcomers. Look lively. And some fatherly advice for you, madam. I’m purposely not asking you about the degree of your relation to Ivan Ernestovich, but be careful on that account. Don’t go unbuttoning yourself to just anybody. Think what times these are.”
At the name of Vakkh, the travelers glanced at each other in amazement. They still remembered the late Anna Ivanovna’s stories about the legendary blacksmith who forged indestructible iron guts for himself, and other local tall tales and fables.
8
A lop-eared, white-haired, shaggy old man was driving them behind a white, just foaled mare. Everything on him was white for different reasons. His new bast shoes had not yet darkened from wear, and his pants and shirt had grown faded and bleached with time.
Behind the white mare, kicking up his wobbly, soft-boned legs, ran a curly-headed foal, black as night, looking like a hand-carved toy.
Sitting at the sides of the cart, which jolted over the potholes in the road, the travelers clung to the edges so as not to fall. There was peace in their souls. Their dream was coming true, they were nearing the goal of their journey. With generous largesse and luxury, the pre-evening hours of the wonderful, clear day lingered, delayed.
The road went now through forest, now through open clearings. In the forest, the bumping over snags threw the travelers into a heap, and they huddled, frowned, pressed close to each other. In the open places, where it was as if space itself doffed its hat out of fullness of feeling, they straightened up, settled more freely, shook their heads.
It was mountainous country. The mountains, as always, had their own look, their physiognomy. They stood dark in the distance, mighty, arrogant shadows, silently scrutinizing the people in the cart. A comforting rosy light followed the travelers across the field, reassuring them and giving them hope.
They liked everything, were surprised at everything, and most of all at the incessant babble of their whimsical old driver, in which traces of vanished old Russian forms, Tartar layers, and regional peculiarities were mixed with unintelligibilities of his own invention.
When the foal lagged behind, the mare stopped and waited for him. He smoothly overtook her in wavy, splashing leaps. With awkward steps of his long, close-set legs, he came to the cart from the side and, thrusting his tiny head on its long neck behind the shaft, sucked at his mother.
“I still don’t understand,” Antonina Alexandrovna shouted to her husband, her teeth chattering from the jolts, spacing out the words so as not to bite off the tip of her tongue at an unforeseen bump. “Is it possible that this is the same Vakkh mama told us about? Well, you remember, all sorts of balderdash. A blacksmith, his guts hurt in a fight, fashioned new ones for himself. In short, the blacksmith Vakkh Iron Belly. I understand it’s all just a tall tale. But can it be a tale about him? Can he be the same one?”
“Of course not. First of all, you say yourself it’s just a tall tale, folklore. Second, in mama’s time this folklore was already over a hundred years old, as she said. But why so loud? The old man will hear and get offended.”
“He won’t hear anything—he’s hard of hearing. And if he does hear, he won’t make sense of it—he’s a bit off.”
“Hey, Fyodor Nefyodych!” the old man urged the mare on, addressing her with a masculine name for no apparent reason, knowing perfectly well, and better than his passengers, that she was a mare. “What anathematic heat! Like the Hebrew youths in the Persian furnace! Hup, you unpastured devil. I’m talking to you, Mazeppa!”8
He would unexpectedly strike up snatches of popular songs composed in the local factories in former times.
Farewell to the central office,
Farewell to the pit yard and boss,
I’m sick to death of the master’s bread,
I’ve drunk my fill of stagnant water.
A swan goes swimming by the shore,
Paddling the water with his feet.
It isn’t wine that makes me tipsy,
Vanya’s been taken for a soldier.
But me, Masha, I’m a bright one,
But me, Masha, I’m no fool.
I’ll go off to Selyaba town,
Get hired by the Sentetyurikha.
“Hey, little sod, you’ve forgotten God! Look, people, at this carrion of a beast! You give her the whip, she gives you the slip. Hup, Fedya-Nefedya, where’ll that get ya? This here forest’s called the taiga, there’s no end to it. There’s a force of peasant folk in it, ho, ho! There’s the Forest Brotherhood in it. Hey, Fedya-Nefedya, stopped again, you devil, you goblin!”
Suddenly he turned around and, looking point-blank at Antonina Alexandrovna, said:
“What notion’s got into you, young’un, think I don’t sense where you come from? You’re a simple one, ma’am, I must say. Let the earth swallow me up, but I recognize you! That I do! Couldn’t believe my blinkers, a live Grigov!” (The old man called eyes “blinkers” and Krüger “Grigov.”) “You wouldn’t happen to be his granddaughter? Ain’t I got an eye for Grigov? I spent my whole life around him, broke my teeth on him. In all kinds of handiwork, all the jobs. As a pit-prop man, a winch man, a stable man. Hup, shake a leg! She’s stopped again, the cripple! Angels in China-land, I’m talking to you, ain’t I?
“Here you’re asking what Vakkh is he, that blacksmith maybe? You’re real simple, ma’am, such a big-eyed lady, but a fool. Your Vakkh, he was Postanogov by name. Postanogov Iron Belly, it’s fifty years he’s been in the ground, between the boards. And us now, on the contrary, we’re Mekhonoshin. Same name, namesakes, but the last name’s different—Efim, but not him.”
The old man gradually told his passengers in his own words what they already knew about the Mikulitsyns from Samdevyatov. He called him Mikulich and her Mikulichna. The manager’s present wife he called the second-wed, and of “the little first, the deceased one,” he said that she was a honey-woman, a white cherub. When he got on to the partisan leader Liberius and learned that his fame had not yet reached Moscow, that seemed incredible to him:
“You haven’t heard? Haven’t heard of Comrade Forester? Angels in China-land, what’s Moscow got ears for?”
Evening was beginning to fall. The travelers’ own shadows, growing ever longer, raced ahead of them. Their way lay across a wide empty expanse. Here and there, sticking up high, grew woody stalks of goosefoot, thistles, loosestrife, in solitary stands, with clusters of flowers at their tips. Lit from below, from the ground, by the rays of the sunset, their outlines rose up ghostly, like motionless mounted sentinels posted thinly across the field.
Far ahead, at the end, the plain came up against the transverse ridge of a rising height. It stood across the road like a wall, at the foot of which a ravine or river could be surmised. As if the sky there were surrounded by a fence, with the country road leading to its gates.
At the top of the rise appeared the elongated form of a white, one-story house.
“See the lookout on the knob?” Vakkh asked. “That’s your Mikulich and Mikulichna. And under them there’s a split, a ravine, it’s c
alled Shutma.”
Two gunshots, one after the other, rang out from that direction, generating multiple fragmented echoes.
“What’s that? Can it be partisans, grandpa? Shooting at us?”
“Christ be with you. What partizhans? It’s Stepanych scarifying wolves in Shutma.”
9
The first meeting of the new arrivals with the hosts took place in the yard of the director’s little house. A painful scene, at first silent, then confusedly noisy and incoherent, was played out.
Elena Proklovna was returning to the yard from her evening walk in the forest. The sun’s evening rays stretched behind her from tree to tree across the whole forest, almost the same color as her golden hair. Elena Proklovna was dressed in light summer clothes. She was red-cheeked and was wiping her face, flushed from walking, with a handkerchief. Her open neck was crossed in front by an elastic band, which held the hanging straw hat thrown behind her back.
Her husband was coming home from the opposite direction with a gun, climbing up from the ravine and intending to see at once to the cleaning of the sooty barrels, in view of the defects he had noticed in the discharge.
Suddenly, out of the blue, over the stones of the paved driveway, Vakkh drove up dashingly and loudly with his surprise.
Very soon, having climbed out of the cart with all the rest, Alexander Alexandrovich, falteringly, taking off his hat, then putting it on again, gave the first explanations.
The genuine, unaffected stupefaction of the nonplussed hosts and the unfeigned, sincere embarrassment of the wretched guests, burning with shame, lasted for several moments. The situation was clear without explanations, not only to the participants, Vakkh, Nyusha, and Shurochka. The oppressive feeling communicated itself to the mare and the colt, to the golden rays of the sun, and to the mosquitoes circling around Elena Proklovna and settling on her face and neck.
“I don’t understand,” Averky Stepanovich finally broke the silence. “I don’t understand, don’t understand a thing and never will. What have we got here, the south, the Whites, the land of plenty? Why did your choice fall precisely on us? Why have you come here, here, why on earth to us?”
“I wonder if you’ve thought of what a responsibility it is for Averky Stepanovich?”
“Lenochka, don’t interrupt. Yes, precisely. She’s perfectly right. Have you thought of what a burden it is for me?”
“For God’s sake. You haven’t understood us. What are we talking about? About a very small thing, a nothing. There’s no encroachment on you, on your peace. A corner in some empty, dilapidated building. A spot of land nobody needs, gone to waste, for a vegetable garden. And a load of firewood from the forest when nobody’s looking. Is that so much to ask, is it some sort of infringement?”
“Yes, but the world is wide. What have we to do with it? Why is this honor bestowed precisely on us and not on somebody else?”
“We knew about you and hoped you had heard about us. That we’re no strangers to you and will not be coming to strangers ourselves.”
“Ah, so it’s a matter of Krüger, of you being his relatives? How can you open your mouth and acknowledge such things in our time?”
Averky Stepanovich was a man with regular features, wore his hair thrown back, stepped broadly on his whole foot, and in summer belted his Russian shirt with a tasseled strip of braid. In older times such men went and became river pirates; in modern times they constituted the type of the eternal student, the lesson-giving dreamer.
Averky Stepanovich gave his youth to the liberation movement, the revolution, and only feared that he would not live to see it or that, once it broke out, its moderation would not satisfy his radical and bloody lust. And then it came, overturning all his boldest suppositions, and he, a born and steadfast lover of the workers, who had been among the first to found a factory workers’ committee at the “Mighty Sviatogor” and set up workers’ control in it, was left with nothing for his trouble, excluded, in an empty village, deserted by the workers, who here mostly followed the Mensheviks. And now this absurdity, these uninvited last remnants of the Krügers, seemed to him a mockery of fate, a purposely mean trick, and they made the cup of his patience run over.
“No, that’s beyond me. Inconceivable. Do you realize what a danger you are to me, what position you put me in? I really must be going out of my mind. I don’t understand anything and never will.”
“I wonder if you can conceive of what a volcano we’re sitting on here even without you?”
“Wait, Lenochka. My wife is perfectly right. It’s no sweet time even without you. A dog’s life, a madhouse. Between two fires all the time, and no way out. Some hang it on us that we’ve got such a red son, a Bolshevik, a people’s darling. Others don’t like it that I myself was elected to the Constituent Assembly. Nobody’s pleased, so just flounder about. And now you. How very merry to go and get shot over you!”
“What are you saying! Come to your senses! For God’s sake!”
After a while, exchanging wrath for mercy, Mikulitsyn said:
“Well, we’ve been yelping in the yard, and enough. We can continue in the house. Of course, I don’t see anything good ahead, but these be the dark waters in the clouds, the shadow-scripted murk of secrecy.9 However, we’re not Janissaries, not heathens. We won’t drive you into the forest as a meal for Bruin the bear. I think, Lenok, they’ll be best off in the palm room, next to the study. And then we’ll discuss where they can settle. I think we’ll install them in the park. Please come in. Welcome. Bring the things in, Vakkh. Give the newcomers a hand.”
In carrying out the order, Vakkh merely sighed:
“Unwedded Mother! Wanderers have as much stuff. Just little bundles. Not a single sweetcase!”
10
A cold night set in. The newcomers washed. The women got busy turning the room allotted to them into night lodgings. Shurochka, who was unconsciously accustomed to having adults receive his infantile utterances in baby talk with delight, and who therefore, adapting himself to their taste, was pouring out his twaddle animatedly and zealously, felt disconcerted. Today his babble had no success, no one paid any attention to him. He was displeased that the black colt had not been brought into the house, and, when they told him to be quiet, he burst into tears, afraid that, being a bad and unsuitable boy, he would be sent back to the baby shop, from which, as he thought, he had been delivered to his parents when he was born. He loudly voiced his genuine fears to all around him, but his sweet absurdities did not make the usual impression. Constrained by staying in a strange house, the adults moved about more hurriedly than usual and were silently immersed in their cares. Shurochka felt hurt and blubbered, as nannies say. He was given something to eat and, with some trouble, put to bed. At last he fell asleep. Mikulitsyn’s Ustinya took Nyusha to her room, to give her supper and initiate her into the mysteries of the house. Antonina Alexandrovna and the men were invited to evening tea.
Alexander Alexandrovich and Yuri Andreevich asked permission to absent themselves for a moment and went out to the porch for a breath of fresh air.
“So many stars!” said Alexander Alexandrovich.
It was dark. Standing two steps apart on the porch, the son- and father-in-law could not see each other. But behind them, from around the corner of the house, the light of a lamp fell from the window into the ravine. In its column, bushes, trees, and some other vague objects showed mistily in the damp air. The bright strip did not take in the conversing men and made the darkness around them still thicker.
“Tomorrow morning we’ll have to examine the outbuilding he intends for us, and if it’s fit to live in, start repairing it at once. While we’re getting that corner in shape, the soil will thaw, the earth will warm up. Then, without losing a moment, we’ll get to the garden beds. Between words in the conversation, I thought I heard him promise to help us with seed potatoes. Or did I hear wrong?”
“He promised, he promised. And other seed. I heard it with my own ears. And the corner he’s offe
ring us we saw in passing as we crossed the park. You know where? It’s the rear of the manor house, drowning in nettles. It’s made of wood, but the house itself is stone. I showed you from the cart, remember? I’d dig the beds there. I think it’s the remains of a flower garden. It seemed so to me from a distance. Maybe I’m mistaken. The paths will have to be avoided, passed over, but the soil of the old flower beds was probably well manured and rich in humus.”
“We’ll see tomorrow. I don’t know. The ground is probably terribly overgrown with grass and hard as a rock. The manor must have had a kitchen garden. Maybe the plot’s still there and lying fallow. It will all become clear tomorrow. There are probably still morning frosts here. There will certainly be a frost during the night. How fortunate that we’re already here, in place. We can congratulate each other on that. It’s good here. I like it.”
“Very nice people. He especially. She’s a bit affected. She’s displeased with herself, there’s something in her she doesn’t like. Hence this tireless, fussily false garrulousness. As if she’s hastening to distract attention from her appearance, to forestall an unfavorable impression. And that she forgets to take her hat off and carries it on her shoulders is not absentmindedness either. It really becomes her.”
“Anyhow, let’s go in. We got stuck out here too long. It’s awkward.”
On their way to the lighted dining room, where, at a round table under a hanging lamp, the hosts and Antonina Alexandrovna were sitting by the samovar and drinking tea, the father- and son-in-law passed through the director’s dark study.
In it there was a wide, single-pane window across the whole wall, high above the ravine. From the window, as the doctor had managed to notice earlier, while it was still light, the view opened onto the distance far beyond the ravine and the plain across which Vakkh had taken them. By the window stood a planning or drafting table, wide, also across the whole wall. On it a big fowling piece lay lengthwise, leaving empty space to right and left, and thereby emphasizing the great width of the table.
Doctor Zhivago Page 34