Doctor Zhivago

by Boris Pasternak

  “It was during the February revolution. Under Kerensky. We were rioting. It happened at the railroad. They sent us a young agitator, to rouse us for the attack with his tongue. So we’d make war to a victorious conclusion. A little cadet comes to pacify us with his tongue. Such a puny fellow. He had this slogan: to a victorious conclusion. He jumped with his slogan onto a firefighting tub that was there at the station. So he jumped up on the tub to call us to battle from higher up, and suddenly the lid gave way under his feet and he fell into the water. A misstep. Oh, how funny! I just rolled with laughter. I thought I’d die. Oh, it was killing. And I had a gun in my hands. And I was laughing my head off, and that was it, no help for it. Same as if he was tickling me. Well, so I aimed and—bang—right on the spot. I don’t understand myself how it came out that way. As if somebody nudged my arm.

  “So there’s my fleetlings. By night I seem to see that station. It was funny then, but now I’m sorry.”

  “Was it in the town of Meliuzeevo, the Biriuchi station?”

  “I forget.”

  “Was it a riot with the people of Zybushino?”

  “I forget.”

  “What front was it? At what front? The western?”

  “Something like that. It’s all possible. I forget.”

  Part Twelve

  THE FROSTED ROWAN

  1

  The families of the partisans had long been following the body of the army in carts, with their children and chattels. At the tail of the refugee train, far behind, countless herds of cattle were driven, mostly cows, some several thousand of them.

  Along with the partisans’ wives a new person appeared in the camp, an army wife, Zlydarikha or Kubarikha, a cattle doctor, a veterinarian, and secretly also a sorceress.

  She went about in a forage cap cocked to one side and the gray-green greatcoat of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, from the British uniforms supplied to the Supreme Ruler, and assured people that she had had these things made from a prisoner’s hat and smock, and that the Reds had supposedly freed her from the jail in Kezhem, where Kolchak had held her for some unknown reason.

  At that time the partisans were halted in a new place. It was assumed that this would be a brief halt, until the area was reconnoitered and a place was found for a long and settled wintering over. But later on circumstances took a different turn and forced the partisans to stay there and spend the winter.

  This new halting place was in no way like the recently abandoned Fox Point. It was dense, impassable forest, the taiga. To one side, away from the road and the camp, there was no end to it. During the first days, while the army was setting up a new bivouac and preparing to live in it, Yuri Andreevich had more leisure. He went deep into the forest in several directions with the aim of exploring it and convinced himself that it would be very easy to get lost in it. Two spots caught his attention, and he remembered them from that first round.

  At the way out of the camp and the forest, which was now autumnally bare and could be seen through, as if gates had been thrown open into its emptiness, there grew a solitary, beautiful, rusty-red-leafed rowan tree, the only one of all the trees to keep its foliage. It grew on a mound above a low, hummocky bog, and reached right up to the sky, into the dark lead of the prewinter inclemency, the flatly widening corymbs of its hard, brightly glowing berries. Small winter birds, bullfinches and tomtits, with plumage bright as frosty dawns, settled on the rowan tree, slowly and selectively pecked the larger berries, and, thrusting up their little heads and stretching their necks, swallowed them with effort.

  Some living intimacy was established between the birds and the tree. As if the rowan saw it all, resisted for a long time, then surrendered, taking pity on the little birds, yielded, unbuttoned herself, and gave them the breast, like a nurse to a baby. “Well, what can I do with you? Go on, eat, eat me. Feed yourselves.” And she smiled.

  The other place in the forest was still more remarkable.

  It was on a height. This height, like a drumlin, ended on one side in a sheer drop. It seemed that below, under the drop, there should have been something other than what was above—a river, or a ravine, or an abandoned, unmowed meadow overgrown with grass. However, below there was a repetition of the same thing as above, only at a dizzying depth, on another level, where the treetops were low down under one’s feet. This was probably the result of a landslide.

  It was as if this severe, cloud-propping, mighty forest had stumbled once, just as it was, and plunged down, and should have fallen through the earth into Tartarus, but at the decisive moment had miraculously kept itself on earth and now, safe and sound, could be seen rustling below.

  But this forest height was remarkable not for that, but for another particularity. It was shut in all around its edge by vertical blocks of granite standing on end. They were like the flat-trimmed slabs of prehistoric dolmens. When Yuri Andreevich came to this platform for the first time, he was ready to swear that the place and its stones were not of natural origin at all, but bore the traces of human hands. Here in ancient times there might have been some sort of pagan shrine of unknown idol worshippers, the place of their rituals and sacrifices.

  In this place on a cold, gray morning the death sentence was carried out on the eleven men found guilty of the conspiracy and the two moonshining orderlies.

  Some twenty men from among the partisans most loyal to the revolution, with a core of special guards from headquarters, brought them here. The convoy closed in on the condemned men in a semicircle and, pointing their rifles, at a quick, close-packed pace, pushed them, drove them into the rocky corner of the platform, from which they had no way out except to leap into the abyss.

  The interrogations, the long imprisonment, and the humiliations they had been subjected to had deprived them of their human image. They were shaggy, blackened, exhausted, and frightful as ghosts.

  They had been disarmed at the very beginning of the investigation. It did not occur to anyone to search them a second time before the execution. That seemed like an unnecessary meanness, a mockery of people in the face of death.

  Suddenly Rzhanitsky, a friend of Vdovichenko’s, who was walking beside him and, like him, was an old ideological anarchist, fired three times at the line of the convoy, aiming at Sivobluy. Rzhanitsky was an excellent shot, but his hand shook from agitation and he missed. Again the same delicacy and pity for their former comrades kept the guards from falling upon Rzhanitsky or responding to his attempt by shooting ahead of time, before the general command. Rzhanitsky had three unspent shots left, but in his excitement, perhaps forgetting about them and vexed at having missed, he hurled his Browning against the stones. The blow fired off the Browning a fourth time, wounding the condemned Pachkolia in the foot.

  The orderly Pachkolia cried out, clutched his foot, and fell, uttering quick shrieks of pain. Pafnutkin and Gorazdykh, who were nearest to him, picked him up, held him under the arms, and dragged him, so that he would not be trampled by his alarmed comrades, because they no longer knew what they were doing. Pachkolia went towards the stony edge, where the condemned men were being crowded, hopping, limping, unable to step on his wounded foot, and kept crying out. His inhuman howls were infectious. As if on signal, they all lost control of themselves. Something unimaginable began. Swearing poured out, prayers and entreaties were heard, curses resounded.

  The adolescent Galuzin, throwing from his head the yellow-braided high school cap he was still wearing, sank to his knees and like that, without getting up from them, crept backwards in the crowd towards the frightful stones. He bowed quickly to the ground in front of the convoy, cried and sobbed, pleading with them half unconsciously, in singsong:

  “I’m guilty, brothers, have mercy on me, I won’t do it again. Don’t destroy me. Don’t kill me. I haven’t lived yet, I’m too young to die. I want to go on living, I want to see mama, my mama, one more time. Forgive me, brothers, have mercy. I’ll kiss your feet. I’ll carry water for you on my back. Ah, terrible, terrible—mama, mama,
I’m lost.”

  From the midst someone wailed, no one could see who:

  “Dear, good comrades! How can it be? Come to your senses. We’ve shed blood together in two wars. We stood, we fought for the same cause. Have pity, let us go. We’ll never forget your kindness, we’ll earn it, we’ll prove it in action. Are you deaf that you don’t answer? Aren’t you Christians?”

  To Sivobluy they shouted:

  “Ah, you Judas, you Christ-seller! What sort of traitors are we compared to you? May you be throttled yourself, you dog, you three-time traitor! You swore an oath to your tsar and you killed your lawful tsar, you swore loyalty to us and you betrayed us. Go and kiss your Forester devil, till you betray him. And you will betray him.”

  Vdovichenko remained true to himself even on the verge of the grave. Holding high his head with its gray, flying hair, he loudly addressed Rzhanitsky, like communard to communard, for everyone to hear:

  “Don’t humiliate yourself, Boniface! Your protests won’t reach them. These new Oprichniki,1 these executioners of the new torture chambers, won’t understand you. Don’t lose heart. History will sort it all out. Posterity will nail the Bourbons of the commissarocracy and their black cause to the pillory. We die martyrs to ideas at the dawn of the world revolution. Long live the revolution of the spirit! Long live universal anarchy!”

  A volley of twenty guns, produced on some soundless command caught only by the firing squad, mowed down half of the condemned men, most of whom fell dead. The rest were finished off with a second volley. The boy, Terenty Galuzin, twitched longer than anyone else, but in the end he, too, lay still, stretched out on the ground.

  2

  The idea of shifting camp for the winter to another place further east was not renounced at once. Reconnoitering and scouting out the area to the other side of the high road, along the watershed of the Vytsk-Kezhem, went on for a long time. Liberius often absented himself from camp to the taiga, leaving the doctor alone.

  But it was already too late to move, and there was nowhere to move to. This was the time of greatest unsuccess for the partisans. Before their final collapse, the Whites decided to have done with the irregular forest units at one blow, once and for all, and, in a general effort on all fronts, surrounded them. The partisans were hemmed in on all sides. This would have been a catastrophe for them if the radius of the circle had been smaller. They were saved by the intangible vastness of the encirclement. On the doorstep of winter, the enemy was unable to draw its flanks through the boundless, impassable taiga and surround the peasant troops more tightly.

  In any case, movement anywhere at all became impossible. Of course, if there had existed a plan of relocation that promised definite military advantages, it would have been possible to break through, to fight their way out of the encirclement to a new position.

  But no such plan had been worked out. People were exhausted. Junior commanders, disheartened themselves, lost influence over their subordinates. The senior ones gathered every evening in military council, offering contradictory solutions.

  They had to abandon the search for another wintering site and fortify their camp for the winter deep inside the thicket they occupied. In wintertime, with the deep snow, it became impassable for the enemy, who were in short supply of skis. They had to entrench themselves and lay in a big stock of provisions.

  The partisan quartermaster, Bisyurin, reported an acute shortage of flour and potatoes. There were plenty of cattle, and Bisyurin foresaw that in winter the main food would be meat and milk.

  There was a lack of winter clothes. Some of the partisans went about half dressed. All the dogs in the camp were strangled. Those who knew how to work with leather made coats for the partisans out of dogskin with the fur outside.

  The doctor was denied means of transportation. The carts were now in demand for more important needs. During the last march, the gravely ill had been carried by foot for thirty miles on stretchers.

  Of medications, all Yuri Andreevich had left were quinine, iodine, and Glauber’s salts. The iodine necessary for operations and dressings was in crystals. It had to be dissolved in alcohol. They regretted having destroyed the production of moonshine, and the less guilty moonshiners, who had been acquitted, were approached and charged with repairing the broken still or constructing a new one. The abolished making of moonshine was set going anew for medical purposes. People in the camp only winked and shook their heads. Drunkenness reappeared, contributing to the developing degradation in the camp.

  The level of distillation they achieved reached almost two hundred proof. Liquid of such strength dissolved the crystal preparations very well. At the beginning of winter, Yuri Andreevich used this same alcohol, infused with quinine bark, to treat cases of typhus, which set in again with the coming of cold weather.

  3

  In those days the doctor saw Pamphil Palykh and his family. His wife and children had spent the whole previous summer fleeing along dusty roads under the open sky. They were frightened by the horrors they had lived through and expected new ones. Their wanderings had put an indelible stamp on them. Pamphil’s wife and the three children, a son and two daughters, had light, sun-bleached, flaxen hair and white, stern eyebrows on dark, weather-beaten, tanned faces. The children were too small to bear any signs of what they had endured, but from their mother’s face the shocks and dangers she had experienced had driven all the play of life and left only the dry regularity of the features, the lips pressed into a thread, the strained immobility of suffering, ready for self-defense.

  Pamphil loved them all, especially the children, to distraction, and with a deftness that amazed the doctor sculpted wooden toys for them with the corner of a sharply honed axe—hares, bears, cocks.

  When they arrived, Pamphil cheered up, took heart, began to recover. But then it became known that, owing to the harmful influence the presence of the families had on the mood of the camp, the partisans would be obliged to separate from their kinfolk, the camp would be freed of unnecessary nonmilitary appendages, and the refugee train would set up camp for the winter, under sufficient guard, somewhere further away. There was more talk about this separation than actual preparation for it. The doctor did not believe in the feasibility of the measure. But Pamphil turned gloomy and his former fleetlings returned.

  4

  On the threshold of winter, for several reasons, the camp was gripped by a long stretch of anxiety, uncertainty, menacing and confusing situations, strange incongruities.

  The Whites carried out the plan of surrounding the insurgents. At the head of the accomplished operation stood the generals Vitsyn, Quadri, and Basalygo. These generals were famous for their firmness and inflexible resolution. Their names alone instilled terror in the wives of the insurgents in the camp and in the peaceful population, who still had not left their native places and remained behind in their villages, outside the enemy line.

  As has already been said, it was impossible to see how the enemy circle could be tightened. On that account they could rest easy. However, to remain indifferent to this encirclement was also not possible. Submission to circumstances would morally strengthen the enemy. It was necessary to attempt to break out of the trap, unthreatening as it was, for the sake of military display.

  To that end large forces of the partisans were detached and concentrated against the western bend of the circle. After many days of hot fighting, the partisans inflicted a defeat on the enemy and, breaching their line at that point, came at them from the rear.

  Through the freed space formed by the breach, access to the insurgents was opened in the taiga. New crowds of refugees came pouring in to join them. This influx of peaceful country people was not limited to direct relations of the partisans. Frightened by the punitive measures of the Whites, all the neighboring peasantry moved from their places, abandoning their hearths and naturally drawing towards the peasant forest army, in which they saw their defense.

  But in the camp they were trying to get rid of their own hanger
s-on. The partisans could not be bothered with the newcomers and strangers. They went out to meet the fugitives, stopped them on the road, and turned them aside, towards the mill in the Chilim clearing, on the Chilimka River. This cleared space, formed from the farmsteads that had grown up around the mill, was called the Steadings. The plan was to set up a winter camp for the refugees in these Steadings and store the provisions allotted to them.

  While these decisions were being made, things were taking their own course, and the camp command could not keep up with them.

  The victory over the enemy had complications. Having let the partisan group that had beaten them pass into their territory, the Whites closed in and restored their breached line. For the unit that got to the rear of them and was separated from their own forces, the return to the taiga after their foray was cut off.

  Something was also going wrong with the refugee women. It was easy to miss them in the dense, impassable thicket. Those sent to meet them lost track of the fleeing women and came back without them, while the women in a spontaneous flow moved deep into the taiga, performing miracles of resourcefulness on their way, felling trees on both sides, building bridges and log paths, making roads.

  All this went contrary to the intentions of the forest headquarters and turned Liberius’s plans and projects upside down.

  5

  That was what he was raging about as he stood with Svirid not far from the high road, a small stretch of which passed through the taiga in that place. His officers were standing on the road, arguing about whether or not to cut the telegraph lines that ran along it. The last decisive word belonged to Liberius, and he was chattering away with a wandering trapper. Liberius waved his hand to let them know that he would come to them presently, that they should wait and not go away.