Doctor Zhivago

by Boris Pasternak

  For a long time, Svirid had been unable to stomach the condemnation and shooting of Vdovichenko, guilty of nothing except that his influence rivaled Liberius’s authority and introduced a split in the camp. Svirid wanted to leave the partisans, to live freely by himself as before. But not a chance. He had got himself hired, had sold himself—he would meet the same fate as the executed men if he left the Forest Brotherhood now.

  The weather was the most terrible that could be imagined. A sharp, gusty wind carried torn shreds of clouds, dark as flakes of flying soot, low over the earth. Suddenly snow began to pour from them with the convulsive haste of some white madness.

  In a moment the distance was covered by a white shroud, the earth was spread with a white sheet. The next moment the sheet burnt up, melted away. The soil appeared, black as coal, as did the black sky drenched from above with the slanting streaks of distant downpours. The earth could not take any more water into itself. In moments of brightening, the clouds parted, as if to air out the sky, windows were opened on high, shot through with a cold, glassy whiteness. The standing water, unabsorbed by the soil, responded from the ground with the same thrust-open casements of puddles and lakes, filled with the same brilliance.

  The drizzle slid like smoke over the turpentine-resinous needles of the evergreen forest without penetrating them, as water does not go through oilcloth. The telegraph wires were strung with beadlike raindrops. They hung crowded, one against another, and did not fall.

  Svirid was among those who had been sent into the depths of the forest to meet the refugee women. He wanted to tell his chief about what he had witnessed. About the muddle that resulted from the clash of different, equally impracticable orders. About the atrocities committed by the weakest, most despairing part of the horde of women. Young mothers, trudging on foot, carrying bundles, sacks, and nursing babies, losing their milk, run off their feet and crazed, abandoned their children on the road, shook the flour out of the sacks, and turned back. Better a quick death than a long death from starvation. Better the enemy’s hands than the teeth of some beast in the forest.

  Others, the stronger ones, gave examples of endurance and courage unknown to men. Svirid had many more things to report. He wanted to warn the chief about the danger of a new insurrection hanging over the camp, more threatening than the one that had been crushed, but found no words, because the impatience of Liberius, who hurried him irritably, completely deprived him of the gift of speech. And Liberius interrupted Svirid every moment, not only because people were waiting for him on the road and nodding and shouting to him, but because in the last two weeks he had been constantly addressed with such considerations and knew all about it.

  “Don’t hurry me, comrade chief. I’m no talker as it is. The words stick in my teeth, I choke on them. What am I saying to you? Go to the refugee train, talk some sense into these runaway women. It’s all gone haywire with them there. I ask you, what is it with us, ‘All against Kolchak!’ or female slaughter?”

  “Make it short, Svirid. See, they’re calling me. Don’t lay it on thick.”

  “Now there’s this demon woman, Zlydarikha, deuce knows who the wench is. Sign me up to look after the cattle, she says, I’m a vitalinarian …”

  “Veterinarian, Svirid.”

  “Like I said—a vitalinarian, to treat animals in their vitals. But now you can forget your cattle, she’s turned out to be a heretic witch from the Old Believers,2 serves cow liturgies, leads the refugee women astray. It’s your own fault, she says, see where you get when you go running after the red flag with your skirts pulled up. Next time don’t do it.”

  “I don’t understand what refugees you’re talking about. Our partisan wives, or some others?”

  “Others, sure enough. The new ones, from different parts.”

  “But there was an order for them to go to the Steadings, to the Chilim mill. How did they wind up here?”

  “The Steadings, sure. There’s nothing but ashes left of your Steadings, it’s all burned down. The mill and the whole place is in cinders. They got to Chilimka and saw a barren waste. Half of them lost their minds, howled away, and went back to the Whites. The others swung around and are coming here, a whole train of them.”

  “Through the thicket, through the bog?”

  “Ever heard of axes and saws? Our men were sent to protect them—they helped out. Some twenty miles of road have been cut. With bridges, the hellcats. Talk about wenches after that! They do such things, the shrews, it takes you three days to figure it out.”

  “A fine goose you are! Twenty miles of road, you jackass, what’s there to be glad about? It plays right into Vitsyn and Quadri’s hands. The way into the taiga is open. They can roll in their artillery.”

  “Cover them. Cover them. Send a covering detachment, and that’s the end of it.”

  “By God, I could have thought of that without you.”

  6

  The days grew shorter. By five o’clock it was getting dark. Towards dusk Yuri Andreevich crossed the road in the place where Liberius had wrangled with Svirid the other day. The doctor was heading for the camp. Near the clearing and the mound on which the rowan tree grew, considered the camp’s boundary marker, he heard the mischievous, perky voice of Kubarikha, his rival, as he jokingly called the quack wisewoman. His competitor, with loud shrieks, was pouring out something merry, rollicking, probably some folk verses. There were listeners. She was interrupted by bursts of sympathetic laughter, men’s and women’s. Afterwards everything became quiet. They all probably left.

  Then Kubarikha began to sing differently, to herself and in a low voice, thinking she was completely alone. Taking care not to step into the swamp, Yuri Andreevich slowly made his way in the darkness down the footpath that skirted the boggy clearing in front of the rowan tree, then stopped as if rooted to the spot. Kubarikha was singing some old Russian song. Yuri Andreevich did not know it. Might it be her own improvisation?

  A Russian song is like water in a mill pond. It seems stopped up and unmoving. But in its depths it constantly flows through the sluice gates, and the calm of its surface is deceptive.

  By all possible means, by repetitions, by parallelisms, it holds back the course of the gradually developing content. At a certain limit, it suddenly opens itself all at once and astounds us. Restraining itself, mastering itself, an anguished force expresses itself in this way. It is a mad attempt to stop time with words.

  Kubarikha was half singing, half speaking:

  A little hare was running over the white world,

  Over the white world, aye, over the white snow.

  He ran, little flop-ears, past a rowan tree,

  He ran, little flop-ears, and complained to the rowan.

  Me, I’m a hare, and my heart’s all timid,

  My heart’s all timid, it’s so easily frightened.

  I’m a hare and I’m scared of the wild beast’s track,

  Of the wild beast’s track, of the hungry wolf’s belly.

  Have pity on me, rowan bush,

  Rowan bush, beautiful rowan tree.

  Don’t give your beauty to the wicked enemy,

  To the wicked enemy, to the wicked raven.

  Strew your red berries in handfuls to the wind,

  To the wind, over the white world, over the white snow,

  Roll them, scatter them to the place I was born in,

  To the last house there by the village gate,

  To the last window there, aye, in the last room,

  Where my little recluse has hidden away,

  My dearest one, my longed-for one.

  Speak into the ear of the one I long for

  A hot word, an ardent word for me.

  I languish in chains, a soldier-warrior,

  I lose heart, a soldier, in this foreign land.

  But I’ll escape yet from this bitter bondage,

  Escape to my berry, to my beautiful one.3

  7

  The army wife Kubarikha was putting a spell on a sic
k cow belonging to Pamphil’s wife, Agafya Fotievna, known as Palykha or, in simple speech, Fatevna. The cow had been taken from the herd and put in the bushes, tied to a tree by the horns. The cow’s owner sat by its front legs on a stump, and by the hind legs, on a milking stool, sat the sorceress.

  The rest of the countless herd was crowded into a small clearing. The dark forest stood around it in a wall of triangular firs, tall as the hills, which seemed to sit on the ground on the fat behinds of their broadly spread lower branches.

  In Siberia they raised a certain prize-winning Swiss breed. Almost all of the same colors, black with white spots, the cows were no less exhausted than the people by the privations, the long marches, the unbearable crowding. Squeezed together side by side, they were going crazy from the crush. In their stupefaction, they forgot their sex and, bellowing, climbed onto one another like bulls, straining to drag up the heavy weight of their udders. The heifers they covered up, raising their tails, tore away from underneath them and, breaking down bushes and branches, ran towards the thicket, where old shepherds and herdsboys rushed shouting after them.

  And, as if locked into the tight circle outlined by the treetops in the winter sky, the snowy black and white clouds over the forest clearing crowded just as stormily and chaotically, rearing and piling up on each other.

  The curious, standing in a bunch further off, annoyed the wisewoman. She looked them up and down with an unkindly glance. But it was beneath her dignity to admit that they were hampering her. Her artistic vanity stopped her. And she made it look as if she did not notice them. The doctor observed her from the back rows, hidden from her.

  It was the first time he had taken a good look at her. She was wearing her inevitable British forage cap and gray-green interventionist greatcoat with the lapels casually turned back. However, with the haughty features of suppressed passion, which gave a youthful blackness to the eyes and eyebrows of this no-longer-young woman, the extent of her indifference to what she was or was not wearing was clearly written on her face.

  But the appearance of Pamphil’s wife astonished Yuri Andreevich. He barely recognized her. She had aged terribly in a few days. Her bulging eyes were ready to pop from their sockets. On her neck, stretched like a shaft, a swollen vein throbbed. That was what her secret fears had done to her.

  “She gives no milk, my dear,” said Agafya. “I thought she was in between, but no, it’s long since time for milk, but she’s still milkless.”

  “In between, hah! Look, there’s an anthrax sore on her teat. I’ll give you some herbal ointment to rub in. And, needless to say, I’ll whisper in her ear.”

  “I’ve got another trouble—my husband.”

  “I can put a charm on him to stop him playing around. It can be done. He’ll stick to you, there’ll be no tearing him off. Tell me your third trouble.”

  “He doesn’t play around. It’d be good if he did. The trouble’s just the opposite, that he clings to me and the children with all his might, his soul pines for us. I know what he thinks. He thinks they’ll separate the camps, and we’ll be sent the other way. Basalygo’s men will lay hands on us, and he won’t be there to protect us. They’ll torture us and laugh at our torments. I know his thoughts. He may do something to himself.”

  “I’ll think on it. We’ll quench your grief. Tell me your third trouble.”

  “There is no third. It’s just the cow and my husband.”

  “You’re poor in troubles, mother! See how merciful God is to you. Couldn’t find your like with a candle in daylight. Two sorrows on your poor little head, and one of them’s a pitying husband. What’ll you give for the cow? And I’ll start reciting.”

  “What do you want?”

  “A loaf of bread and your husband.”

  People burst out laughing around them.

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “Well, if that’s too much, I’ll knock off the bread. We’ll settle on the husband alone.”

  The laughter around them increased tenfold.

  “What’s the name? Not the husband’s, the cow’s.”

  “Beauty.”

  “Half the herd here is called Beauty. Well, all right. God bless us.”

  And she began to recite a spell on the cow. At first her sorcery really had to do with cattle. Then she got carried away and gave Agafya a whole lesson in magic and its use. Yuri Andreevich listened spellbound to this delirious tissue, as he had once listened to the flowery babble of the driver Vakkh, when they came from European Russia to Siberia.

  The army wife was saying:

  “Auntie Morgesya, come be our guest. Not tomorrow but today, take the sickness away. Frumpkin, mumpkin, away with the lumpkin. Beauty, don’t flinch, you’ll tip over the bench. Forget your bad dream and give us a stream. Witchery, twitchery, stir your kettles, scrape off the scab and throw it in the nettles. Sharp as a sword is the wisewoman’s word.

  “You’ve got to know everything, Agafyushka, biddings, forbiddings, spells for avoiding, spells for defending. You look now and think it’s the forest. But it’s the unclean powers coming to meet the angelic host, just like ours with Basalygo’s.

  “Or, for instance, look where I’m pointing. Not there, my dear. Look with your eyes, not with the back of your head, look where I point my finger. There, there. What do you think it is? You think it’s the wind twisty-twining one birch branch around another? You think it’s a bird decided to build a nest? As if it was. That’s a real devilish thing. It’s a water nymph making a wreath for her daughter. She heard people going by and left off. Got scared. At night she’ll finish plaiting it, you’ll see.

  “Or, again, take your red banner. What do you think? You think it’s a flag? And yet, see, it’s not a flag at all, it’s the plaguie-girl’s fetching raspberry kerchief—fetching, I say, and why is it fetching? To wave and wink at the young lads, to fetch young lads for the slaughter, for death, to inflict the plague on them. And you believed it was a flag—come to me, prolety and poorlety of all lands.

  “Now you’ve got to know everything, Mother Agafya, everything, everything, and I mean everything. What bird, what stone, what herb. A bird, now, for instance—that bird there would be a fairy-starling. That animal there would be a badger.

  “Now, for instance, if you’ve a mind to make love to somebody, just say so. I’ll cast a pining spell on anybody you like. Your chief here, the Forester, if you like, or Kolchak, or Ivan Tsarevich.4 You think I’m boasting, lying? But I’m not lying. Well, look, listen. Winter will come, the blizzard will send whirlwinds thronging over the fields, it will spin up pillars. And into that snowy pillar, into that snow-whirl I’ll stick a knife for you, plunge it into the snow up to the hilt, and pull it out of the snow all red with blood. Have you ever seen such a thing? Eh? And you thought I was lying. And how is it, tell me, that blood can come from a stormy whirl? Isn’t it just wind, air, snowy powder? But the fact is, my pet, that the storm is not wind, it’s a changeling she-werewolf that’s lost her young one, and searches for him in the field, and weeps because she can’t find him. And my knife will go into her. That’s why the blood. And with this knife I’ll cut out the footprint of anybody you like, and take it and sew it to your hem with silk. And be it Kolchak, or Strelnikov, or some new tsar, he’ll follow in your tracks wherever you go. And you thought I was lying, you thought—come to me, barefooty and prolety of all lands.

  “Or else, for instance, stones fall from the sky now, fall like rain. A man steps out of his house and stones fall on him. Or some have seen horsemen riding in the sky, the horses touching the rooftops with their hooves. Or there were magicians in olden times would discover: this woman’s got grain in her, or honey, or marten fur. And the knights in armor would bare the woman’s shoulder, like opening a coffer, and with a sword take from her shoulder blade a measure of wheat, or a squirrel, or a honeycomb.”

  A great and powerful feeling is sometimes met with in the world. There is always an admixture of pity in it. The object of our ad
oration seems the more the victim to us, the more we love. In some men compassion for a woman goes beyond all conceivable limits. Their responsiveness places her in unrealizable positions, not to be found in the world, existing only in imagination, and on account of her they are jealous of the surrounding air, of the laws of nature, of the millennia that went by before her.

  Yuri Andreevich was educated enough to suspect in the sorceress’s last words the beginning of some chronicle, the Novgorod or the Ipatyev,5 which layers of distortion had rendered apocryphal. For centuries they had been mangled by witch doctors and storytellers, who transmitted them orally from generation to generation. Still earlier they had been confused and garbled by scribes.

  Why, then, did the tyranny of the legend fascinate him so? Why did he react to the unintelligible nonsense, to the senseless fable, as if it were a statement of reality?

  Lara’s left shoulder had been opened. As a key is put into the secret door of an iron safe built into a closet, her shoulder blade had been unlocked by the turn of a sword. In the depths of the revealed inner cavity, the secrets kept by her soul appeared. Strange towns she had visited, strange streets, strange houses, strange expanses drew out in ribbons, in unwinding skeins of ribbons, ribbons spilling out in bundles.

  Oh, how he loved her! How beautiful she was! Just as he had always thought and dreamed, as he had needed! But in what, in which side of her? In anything that could be named or singled out by examination? Oh, no, no! But in that incomparably simple and impetuous line with which the Creator had outlined her entirely at one stroke, from top to bottom, and in that divine contour had handed her to his soul, like a just-bathed child tightly wrapped in linen.

  But now where is he and how is it with him? Forest, Siberia, partisans. They are surrounded, and he will share the common lot. What devilry, what fantasy! And again things grew dim in Yuri Andreevich’s eyes and head. Everything swam before him. At that moment, instead of the expected snow, rain began to drizzle. Like a poster on an enormous length of fabric stretched over a city street, there hung in the air from one side of the forest clearing to the other the diffuse, greatly magnified phantom of an astonishing, adored head. And the head wept, and the increasing rain kissed it and poured over it.