“Go,” the sorceress said to Agafya, “I’ve put a spell on your cow, she’ll get well. Pray to the Mother of God. For she is the chamber of light and the book of the living word.”6
8
Fighting was going on at the western border of the taiga. But the taiga was so immense that it all seemed to be playing out at the far confines of the state, and the camp lost in its thicket was so populous that, however many of its men went to fight, still more always remained, and it was never empty.
The noise of the distant battle barely reached the thick of the camp. Suddenly several shots rang out in the forest. They followed each other in quick succession and all at once turned into rapid, disorderly gunfire. Those surprised in the place where the shooting was heard dashed off in all directions. Men from the camp reserves ran to their carts. Turmoil ensued. Everyone began to put themselves into military readiness.
Soon the turmoil died down. It turned out to be a false alarm. But now again people began streaming towards the place where the shooting had been. The crowd grew. New people joined those already there.
The crowd surrounded a bloody human stump that was lying on the ground. The mutilated man was still breathing. He had had his right arm and left leg chopped off. It was inconceivable how, with his remaining arm and leg, the wretch had managed to crawl to the camp. The chopped off arm and leg, terrible, bloody lumps, were tied to his back, as was a wooden plank with a long inscription which, among choice curses, said that this had been done in revenge for the atrocities of such-and-such Red detachment, to which the partisans of the Forest Brotherhood had no relation. Besides which, it was added that the same would be done to all of them, unless the partisans submitted by the term stated and laid down their arms before the representatives of the troops of Vitsyn’s corps.
Bleeding profusely, faltering, with a weak voice and a thick tongue, losing consciousness every moment, the mangled, suffering man told of the tortures and ordeals in the court-martial and punitive units to the rear of General Vitsyn. The hanging to which he had been condemned had been replaced, in the guise of mercy, by cutting off his arm and leg and sending him to the partisan camp to terrify them. He had been carried as far as the advance posts of the camp’s sentry line, then put on the ground and told to crawl by himself, while they urged him on from a distance by firing in the air.
The tortured man could barely move his lips. To make out his indistinct mumbling, they bent down and leaned over him to listen. He was saying:
“Watch out, brothers. He’s broken through you.”
“We’ve sent a covering detachment. There’s a big fight there. We’ll hold him.”
“A breakthrough. A breakthrough. He wants to do it unexpectedly. I know. Aie, I can’t go on, brothers. See, I’m losing blood, I’m spitting blood. It’s all over for me.”
“Lie there, catch your breath. Keep quiet. Don’t let him talk, you brutes! You see it’s bad for him.”
“He didn’t leave a living spot on me, the bloodsucker, the dog. You’ll bathe in your own blood for me, he says, tell me who you are. And how can I tell him, brothers, when I’m a real diselter if there ever was one. Yes. I went over from him to you.”
“You keep saying ‘him.’ Which of them worked on you like this?”
“Aie, brothers, my insides are on fire. Let me catch my breath a little. I’ll tell you right now. The ataman Bekeshin. Colonel Strese. Vitsyn’s men. You here in the forest don’t know anything. There’s groaning in the city. They boil iron out of living people. They cut living people up for straps. They drag you who knows where by the scruff of the neck. It’s pitch-dark. You feel around—it’s a cage, a railroad car. More than forty people in just their underwear. The cage keeps opening and a paw comes in. The first one it falls on. Out he goes. Same as a chicken to be slaughtered. By God. One gets hanged, another gets a bayonet, another gets interrogated. They beat you to a pulp, sprinkle salt on your wounds, pour boiling water over you. If you puke or shit your pants, they make you eat it. And what they do with little kids, with women—oh, Lord!”
The wretched man was at his last gasp. He did not finish, cried out, and gave up the ghost. Somehow they all understood it at once and began taking their hats off and crossing themselves.
In the evening more news, much more horrible than this, spread through the camp.
Pamphil Palykh had been in the crowd that stood around the dying man. He had seen him, heard his story, read the inscription full of threats on the plank.
His constant fear for the fate of his family in case of his death came over him to an unprecedented degree. In imagination he already saw them handed over to slow torture, saw their faces disfigured by torment, heard their moans and calls for help. To deliver them from future sufferings and shorten his own, in a frenzy of anguish he finished them off himself. He cut down his wife and three children with that same razor-sharp axe with which he had carved wooden toys for the girls and his beloved son, Flenushka.7
It is astonishing that he did not lay hands on himself right after he did it. What was he thinking of? What could lie ahead for him? What prospects, what intentions? He was clearly deranged, an irrevocably finished being.
While Liberius, the doctor, and the members of the military council sat discussing what was to be done with him, he wandered freely about the camp, his head lolling on his chest, looking from under his brows with his dull yellow eyes and seeing nothing. A witless, vagrant smile of inhuman, invincible suffering never left his face.
No one pitied him. Everyone recoiled from him. Voices were raised calling for lynch law against him. They were not seconded.
There was nothing for him to do in the world. At dawn he disappeared from the camp, as an animal maddened by rabies flees from its own self.
9
Winter had long since come. It was freezing cold. Torn-up sounds and forms appeared with no evident connection from the frosty mist, stood, moved, vanished. Not the sun we are accustomed to on earth, but the crimson ball of some other substitute sun hung in the forest. From it, strainedly and slowly, as in a dream or a fairy tale, rays of amber yellow light, thick as honey, spread and on their way congealed in the air and froze to the trees.
Barely touching the ground with rounded soles, and at each step awakening a fierce creaking of the snow, invisible feet in felt boots moved in all directions, while the figures attached to them, in hoods and sheepskin jackets, floated through the air separately, like luminaries circling through the heavenly sphere.
Acquaintances stopped, got into conversation. They brought their faces close to each other, crimson as in a bathhouse, with frozen scrub brushes of beards and mustaches. Billows of dense, viscous steam escaped in clouds from their mouths and in their enormity were incommensurate with the frugal, as if frostbitten, words of their laconic speech.
On a footpath Liberius and the doctor ran into each other.
“Ah, it’s you? Long time no see! I invite you to my dugout this evening. Spend the night. We’ll talk, just like the old days. There’s new information.”
“The messenger’s back? Any news of Varykino?”
“The report doesn’t make a peep about my family or yours. But I draw comforting conclusions precisely from that. It means they saved themselves in time. Otherwise there would have been mention of them. Anyhow, we’ll talk about it when we meet. So I’ll be waiting for you.”
In the dugout the doctor repeated his question:
“Just tell me, what do you know about our families?”
“Again you don’t want to look beyond your nose. Ours are evidently alive, in safety. But they’re not the point. There’s splendid news. Want some meat? Cold veal.”
“No, thanks. Don’t get side-tracked. Stick to business.”
“Big mistake. I’ll have a go at it. There’s scurvy in the camp. People have forgotten what bread and vegetables are. We should have done better at organizing the gathering of nuts and berries in the fall, while the refugee women were here. I was sayi
ng, our affairs are in splendid shape. What I’ve always predicted has come true. The ice has broken. Kolchak is retreating on all fronts. It’s a total, spontaneously unfolding defeat. You see? What did I say? And you kept whining.”
“When did I whine?”
“All the time. Especially when we were pressed by Vitsyn.”
The doctor recalled that past fall, the execution of the rebels, Palykh’s murder of his wife and children, the bloody carnage and human slaughter of which no end was in sight. The atrocities of the Whites and the Reds rivaled each other in cruelty, increasing in turns as if multiplied by each other. The blood was nauseating, it rose to your throat and got into your head, your eyes were swollen with it. This was not whining at all, it was something else entirely. But how explain it to Liberius?
There was a smell of fragrant smoke in the dugout. It settled on the palate, tickled the nose and throat. The dugout was lighted by paper-thin splinters set in an iron trivet on a tripod. When one went out, the burnt end fell into a bowl of water underneath, and Liberius set up and lit a new one.
“See what I’m burning. We’re out of oil. The wood’s too dry. The splinter burns up quickly. Yes, there’s scurvy in the camp. You categorically refuse the veal? Scurvy. Where are you looking, doctor? Why don’t you gather the staff, shed light on the situation, give a lecture to the superiors about scurvy and the means of fighting it?”
“Don’t torment me, for God’s sake. Exactly what do you know about our families?”
“I’ve already told you that there’s no exact information about them. But I didn’t finish telling you what I know of the general military news. The civil war is over. Kolchak is utterly crushed. The Red Army is driving him down the railroad line, to the east, to throw him into the sea. Another part of the Red Army is hastening to join us, so that together we can start destroying his many scattered units in the rear. The south of Russia has been cleared. Why aren’t you glad? Isn’t that enough for you?”
“Not true. I am glad. But where are our families?”
“They’re not in Varykino, and that’s a great blessing. As I supposed, Kamennodvorsky’s summer legends—remember those stupid rumors about the invasion of Varykino by some mysterious race of people?—have not been confirmed, but the place is completely deserted. Something seems to have happened there after all, and it’s very good that both families got away in good time. Let’s believe they’re safe. According to my intelligence, that’s the assumption of the few people left.”
“And Yuriatin? What’s going on there? Whose hands is it in?”
“Also something incongruous. Undoubtedly a mistake.”
“What, precisely?”
“Supposedly the Whites are still there. It’s absolutely absurd, a sheer impossibility. I’ll make that obvious to you right now.”
Liberius set up a new splinter and, folding a crumpled, tattered, large-scale map so that the right section showed and unnecessary parts were turned back, began to explain, pencil in hand.
“Look. In all these sectors the Whites have been driven back. Here, and here, and here, all around. Are you following attentively?”
“Yes.”
“They can’t be towards Yuriatin. Otherwise, with their communications cut, they’d inevitably fall into a trap. Their generals can’t fail to understand that, however giftless they are. You’re putting your coat on? Where are you going?”
“Excuse me for a moment. I’ll be right back. It smells of shag and wood fumes here. I don’t feel well. I’ll catch my breath outside.”
Climbing up and out of the dugout, the doctor used his mitten to brush the snow off the thick log placed by the entrance as a seat. He sat down on it, leaned forward, and, propping his head in both hands, fell to thinking. As if there had been no winter taiga, no forest camp, no eighteen months spent with the partisans. He forgot about them. Only his family stood there in his imagination. He made conjectures about them, one more terrible than the other.
Here is Tonya going across a field in a blizzard with Shurochka in her arms. She wraps him in a blanket, her feet sink into the snow, she barely manages to pull them out, and the snowstorm covers her, the wind throws her to the ground, she falls and gets up, too weak to stand on her legs, weakened and giving way under her. Oh, but he keeps forgetting, forgetting. She has two children, and she is nursing the younger one. Both her arms are taken up, like the refugee women of Chilimka who lost their minds from grief and a strain that was beyond their endurance.
Both her arms are taken up, and there is no one around who can help. No one knows where Shurochka’s papa is. He is far away, always far away, apart from them all his life, and is he a papa, are real papas like that? And where is her own father? Where is Alexander Alexandrovich? Where is Nyusha? Where are all the rest? Oh, better not to ask yourself these questions, better not to think, better not to go into it.
The doctor got up from the log, intending to go down into the dugout. Suddenly his thoughts took a different direction. He decided not to go back down to Liberius.
He had long ago stashed away some skis, a bag of rusks, and everything necessary for an escape. He had buried these things in the snow outside the guarded boundary of the camp, under a big silver fir, which he had also marked with a special notch to be sure. He headed there, down a footpath trampled in the snowdrifts. It was a clear night. A full moon was shining. The doctor knew where the guards were posted for the night and successfully avoided them. But by the clearing with the ice-covered rowan tree a sentry called to him from a distance and, standing straight on his skis as they gathered momentum, came gliding towards him.
“Stop or I’ll shoot! Who are you? Give the password.”
“What, are you out of your mind, brother? It’s me. Don’t you recognize me? I’m your Doctor Zhivago.”
“Sorry! Don’t be angry, Comrade Zhivak. I didn’t recognize you. But even though you’re Zhivak, I won’t let you go any further. Everything’s got to be done right.”
“Well, as you will. The password is ‘Red Siberia,’ and the response is ‘Down with the interventionists.’ ”
“That’s another story. Go wherever you like. Why the devil are you wandering about at night? Sick people?”
“I’m not sleepy, and I got thirsty. I thought I might stroll about and eat some snow. I saw this rowan tree with frozen berries on it. I wanted to go and chew some.”
“There’s a squire’s whim for you, to go berrying in winter. Three years we’ve been beating and beating, and haven’t beaten it out of you. No consciousness. Go get your rowan berries, oddball. What do I care?”
And, picking up more and more speed, the sentry went off, standing straight on his long, whistling skis, and moved away over the untouched snow further and further beyond the bare winter bushes, skimpy as balding heads. And the footpath the doctor was following brought him to the just-mentioned rowan tree.
It was half covered with snow, half with frozen leaves and berries, and it stretched out two snowy branches to meet him. He remembered Lara’s big white arms, rounded, generous, and, taking hold of the branches, he pulled the tree towards him. As if in a conscious answering movement, the rowan showered him with snow from head to foot. He was murmuring, not realizing what he was saying, and unaware of himself:
“I shall see you, my beauty, my princess, my dearest rowan tree, my own heart’s blood.”
The night was clear. The moon was shining. He made his way deeper into the taiga, to his secret silver fir, dug up his things, and left the camp.
Part Thirteen
OPPOSITE THE HOUSE WITH FIGURES
1
Bolshaya Kupecheskaya Street descended the crooked hill to Malaya Spasskaya and Novosvalochny. The houses and churches of the higher parts of the town peered down on it.
At the corner stood the dark gray house with figures. The huge quadrangular stones of its foundation, cut on a slant, were blackened with freshly pasted-up issues of government newspapers, government decrees and resolut
ions. Stopping for a long time on the sidewalk, small groups of passersby silently read this literature.
It was dry after the recent thaw. Turning cold. The frost was noticeably hardening. It was quite light at a time when, just recently, it would have been getting dark. Winter had recently departed. The emptiness of the vacated space was filled with light, which would not go away and lingered through the evenings. It stirred you, drew you into the distance, frightened and alerted you.
The Whites had recently left the town, surrendering it to the Reds. The shooting, the bloodshed, the military alarms were over. That, too, frightened and alerted you, like the departure of winter and the augmentation of the spring days.
The notice that the passersby in the street read by the light of the lengthened day announced:
“For the information of the populace. Work booklets for those eligible can be obtained for 50 rubles each in the Provisions Section of the Yuriatin City Council, at 5 Oktiabrskaya, formerly General-gubernatorskaya, Street, room 137.
“Nonpossession of a work booklet, or incorrect or, still more so, false entries, will be punished with full wartime severity. Precise instructions for the use of work booklets are published in the B.Y.E.C., No. 86 (1013), of the current year and posted in the Provisions Section of the Yuriatin City Council, room 137.”
Another announcement reported on the sufficiency of food supplies available in the city, though they had supposedly been concealed by the bourgeoisie in order to disorganize distribution and sow chaos in the matter of provisioning. The announcement ended with the words:
“Those caught hoarding and concealing food supplies will be shot on the spot.”
A third announcement offered:
“In the interests of the correct organizing of food distribution, those not belonging to exploiter elements are to unite into consumers’ communes. Details can be obtained in the Provisions Section of the Yuriatin City Council, 5 Oktiabrskaya, formerly General-gubernatorskaya, Street, room 137.”
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