Doctor Zhivago

by Boris Pasternak

  “And when it comes to the hair, cut it short, please.”

  “I’ll try. Such an intellectual, and pretending to be a know-nothing! We don’t count in weeks now, but in tens of days. Today is the seventeenth, and on numbers with a seven barbers have the day off. As if you didn’t know.”

  “I honestly didn’t. Why should I pretend? I told you. I come from far away. I’m not from here.”

  “Sit still. Don’t jump. It’s easy to get cut. So you’re a newcomer? How did you get here?”

  “On my own two feet.”

  “Along the high road?”

  “Partly, and the rest by the railway line. There’s no end of trains under the snow! All sorts, deluxe, special.”

  “Well, there’s just a little bit left. I’ll snip it off, and that’s it. On family business?”

  “What family business! I was working for the former union of credit associations. A traveling agent. They sent me around on inspection. I got stuck devil knows where in eastern Siberia. No way to get back. There are no trains. I had to go on foot, no help for it. I walked for a month and a half. The things I’ve seen, it would take more than a lifetime to tell.”

  “And you oughtn’t to tell. I’m going to teach you a bit of wisdom. Now wait. Here’s a mirror. Take your hand from under the sheet and hold it. Look at yourself. Well, how do you find it?”

  “I think you’ve cut too little. It could be shorter.”

  “It won’t hold its shape. As I said, you oughtn’t to tell anything. It’s better to keep mum about all that now. Credit associations, deluxe trains under the snow, agents and inspections—it’s better if you even forget the words. You’ll get into a real mess with them! Don’t put your foot in it, it’s not the season. Better lie that you’re a doctor or a teacher. Well, there, I’ve chopped your beard off roughly, now we’ll give you a real shave. We’ll soap you up, zip-zap, and you’ll get ten years younger. I’ll go put some water on to boil.”

  “Who is this woman!” the doctor thought while she was away. “There’s a feeling that we may have some points of contact and I should know her. Something I’ve seen or heard. She probably reminds me of someone. But, devil take it, who precisely?”

  The seamstress returned.

  “Well, now we’ll have a shave. Yes, so it’s better never to say anything unnecessary. That’s the eternal truth. Silence is golden. About those special trains and credit associations. Better to invent something about being a doctor or a teacher. And as for seeing all sorts of sights, keep it to yourself. Who’ll be surprised at it now? Does the razor bother you?”

  “It hurts a little.”

  “It scrapes, it must scrape, I know. Bear with it, dearie. No way to avoid it. Your hair has grown and turned coarse, the skin’s not used to it. Yes. Sights won’t surprise anybody now. People have been tried and tested. We’ve drunk our cup of grief. Such things went on here under the Whites! Robberies, murders, abductions. Hunting people down. For instance, there was this petty satrap, from Sapunov’s men, and, you see, he took a dislike to a certain lieutenant. He sends soldiers to ambush him near the Zagorodny woods, across from Krapulsky’s house. He’s disarmed and taken under escort to Razvilye. And Razvilye at that time was the same for us as the provincial Cheka is now. Golgotha. Why are you shaking your head? Scrapes, does it? I know, dearie, I know. Nothing to be done. Here I’ve got to shave against the grain, and your hair’s stiff as bristles. Stiff. A tricky place. His wife is in hysterics. The lieutenant’s wife. ‘Kolya! My Kolya!’ And goes straight to the chief. Only ‘straight’ is just a manner of speaking. Who’s going to let her? Connections. A woman on the next street had access to the chief and interceded for everybody. He was an exceptionally humane man, not like the others, compassionate. General Galiullin. And all around there was lynch law, atrocities, dramas of jealousy. Just like in Spanish novels.”

  “She’s talking about Lara,” the doctor guessed, but by way of precaution he said nothing and did not enter into more detailed questioning. Yet when she said “Just like in Spanish novels,” she again reminded him terribly of someone. Precisely by this inappropriate phrase, spoken out of place.

  “Now, of course, it’s quite a different story. Let’s say there’s still more than enough investigations, denunciations, executions even now. But the idea is totally different. First, they’re new to power. They’ve been ruling less than no time, they still haven’t acquired a taste for it. Second, whatever you may say, they’re for the simple folk, that’s where their strength lies. There were four of us sisters, including me. And all working women. Naturally we lean towards the Bolsheviks. One sister died, she was married to a political. Her husband worked as a manager at one of the local factories. Their son, my nephew, is the leader of our village rebels—a celebrity, you might say.”

  “So that’s what it is!” it dawned on Yuri Andreevich. “She’s Liberius’s aunt, Mikulitsyn’s notorious sister-in-law, hairdresser, seamstress, switchwoman, a jack-of-all-trades whom everybody knows. I’ll keep quiet like before, however, so as not to give myself away.”

  “My nephew was drawn to the people from childhood. He grew up near his father, among the workers at the Mighty Sviatogor. The Varykino factories, maybe you’ve heard of them? Ah, what are we doing, the two of us! I’m a forgetful fool! Half the chin’s smooth, the other half unshaven. I’m talking away. And what are you doing, not stopping me? The soap on your face has dried up. I’ll go and heat some water. It’s grown cold.”

  When Tuntseva came back, Yuri Andreevich asked:

  “Varykino—it’s some sort of blessed backwoods, a wild place, where no shocks ever reach?”

  “Well, ‘blessed,’ so to speak. That wild place got into maybe a worse pickle than we did. Some bands of men passed through Varykino, no one knows who. They didn’t speak our language. They went from house to house, taking people out and shooting them. And then left without a word. The bodies just stayed there unattended on the snow. It happened in the winter. Why do you keep jumping all the time? I almost cut your throat with the razor.”

  “But you said your brother-in-law lived in Varykino. Did he, too, suffer from these horrors?”

  “No, why? God is merciful. He and his wife got out of there in time. The new wife, the second one. Where they are, nobody knows, but it’s certain they’re safe. Recently there were new people there. A Moscow family, visitors. They left even earlier. The younger man, a doctor, the head of the family, disappeared without a trace. Well, what does it mean, ‘without a trace’? It’s just a way of speaking, that it was without a trace, so as not to get upset. But in reality we’ve got to assume he’s dead, killed. They searched and searched, but didn’t find him. Meanwhile the other man, the older one, was called home. He’s a professor. Of agronomy. I heard he got a summons from the government. They passed through Yuriatin before the Whites came for the second time. You’re up to it again, dear comrade? If you fidget and jump like that under the razor, it won’t be long before the client’s throat is cut. You ask too much from a barber.”

  “So they’re in Moscow!”

  7

  “In Moscow! In Moscow!” echoed in his soul with every step, as he went up the cast-iron stairs for the third time. The empty apartment met him again with an uproar of leaping, tumbling, scattering rats. It was clear to Yuri Andreevich that he would not get a wink of sleep next to these vermin, however worn out he was. He began his preparations for the night by stopping up the rat holes. Fortunately, there were not so many of them in the bedroom, far less than in the rest of the apartment, where the floors and baseboards were in less good condition. But he had to hurry. Night was falling. True, there waited for him on the kitchen table, perhaps in expectation of his coming, a lamp taken down from the wall and half filled, and, next to it in an open matchbox, several matches, ten in number, as Yuri Andreevich counted. But the one and the other, the kerosene and the matches, he had better use sparingly. In the bedroom he also discovered a night lamp—a bowl with a wick an
d some traces of lamp oil, which the rats had probably drunk almost to the bottom.

  In some places, the edges of the baseboards had come away from the floor. Yuri Andreevich filled the cracks with several layers of broken glass, the sharp ends pointing inwards. The bedroom door fitted well to the doorstep. It could be closed tightly and, when shut, totally separated the room with the stopped-up holes from the rest of the apartment. In a little more than an hour, Yuri Andreevich managed to do it all.

  A tile stove cut off one corner of the bedroom, with a tile cornice that did not reach the ceiling. In the kitchen there was a supply of firewood, about ten bundles. Yuri Andreevich decided to rob Lara of a couple of armloads, and going on one knee, he began to pile the wood on his left arm. He brought it to the bedroom, set it down by the stove, familiarized himself with its mechanism, and quickly checked the condition it was in. He wanted to lock the door, but the lock turned out to be in disrepair, and therefore, tucking in some paper to make it tight and keep it from opening, Yuri Andreevich unhurriedly began making a fire in the stove.

  While putting wood into the firebox, he saw a mark on the butt end of one of the logs. He recognized it with surprise. It was the trace of an old brand mark, the two initial letters K and D, which indicated what warehouse the logs came from before they were cut up. Long ago, when Krüger was still there, they had branded with these letters the ends of logs from the Kulabyshev plot in Varykino, when the factory sold off its extra unneeded fuel supplies.

  The presence of this sort of firewood in Lara’s household proved that she knew Samdevyatov and that he looked after her, just as he had once supplied all the needs of the doctor and his family. This discovery was a knife in the doctor’s heart. He had been burdened by Anfim Efimovich’s help even before. Now the embarrassment of these favors was complicated by other feelings.

  It was unlikely that Anfim was Larissa Fyodorovna’s benefactor just for the beauty of it. Yuri Andreevich pictured Anfim Efimovich’s free and easy ways and Lara’s recklessness as a woman. It could not be that there was nothing between them.

  In the stove the dry Kulabyshev wood was beginning to burn furiously, with a concerted crackling, and as it caught fire, Yuri Andreevich’s jealous blindness, having started from weak suppositions, arrived at complete certainty.

  But his soul was tormented on all sides, and one pain came to replace another. He had no need to drive these suspicions away. His thoughts, without effort, of themselves, jumped from subject to subject. Reflections about his family, rushing upon him with renewed force, overshadowed his jealous fits for a time.

  “So you’re in Moscow, my dear ones?” It already seemed to him that Tuntseva had certified their safe arrival for him. “Meaning that you repeated that long, difficult trip without me? How was the journey? What sort of business was Alexander Alexandrovich summoned for? Probably an invitation from the Academy to start teaching there again? What did you find at home? Come now, you don’t mean that home still exists? Oh, Lord, how difficult and painful! Oh, don’t think, don’t think! How confused my thoughts are! What’s wrong with me, Tonya? I seem to be falling ill. What will become of me and of you all, Tonya, Tonechka, Tonya, Shurochka, Alexander Alexandrovich? O Light that never sets, why hast Thou rejected me from Thy presence?1 Why are you borne away from me all my life? Why are we always apart? But we’ll soon be united, we’ll come together, right? I’ll reach you on foot, if it can’t be otherwise. We’ll see each other. Everything will go well again, right?

  “But how can the earth not swallow me up, if I keep forgetting that Tonya was supposed to give birth and probably did give birth? It’s not the first time that I’ve shown this forgetfulness. How did her delivery go? How did she give birth? They stopped in Yuriatin on their way to Moscow. True, Lara doesn’t know them, but still this seamstress and hairdresser, a total stranger, wasn’t ignorant of their fate, yet Lara doesn’t say a word about them in her note. What strange inattention, smacking of indifference! As inexplicable as passing over in silence her relations with Samdevyatov.”

  Here Yuri Andreevich looked around at the walls of the bedroom with a different, discerning eye. He knew that, of the things standing or hanging around him, not one belonged to Lara, and that the furnishings of the former owners, unknown and in hiding, in no way testified to Lara’s taste.

  But all the same, be that as it may, he suddenly felt ill at ease among the men and women in enlarged photographs gazing from the walls. A spirit of hostility breathed on him from the crude furnishings. He felt himself foreign and superfluous in this bedroom.

  And he, fool that he was, had remembered this house so many times, had missed it, and had entered this room, not as a space, but as his yearning for Lara! How ridiculous this way of feeling probably was from outside! Was this how strong, practical people like Samdevyatov, handsome males, lived and behaved and expressed themselves? And why should Lara prefer his spinelessness and the obscure, unreal language of his adoration? Did she have such need of this confusion? Did she herself want to be what she was for him?

  And what was she for him, as he had just put it? Oh, to this question he always had the answer ready.

  There outside is the spring evening. The air is all marked with sounds. The voices of children playing are scattered at various distances, as if to signify that the space is alive throughout. And this expanse is Russia, his incomparable one, renowned far and wide, famous mother, martyr, stubborn, muddle-headed, whimsical, adored, with her eternally majestic and disastrous escapades, which can never be foreseen! Oh, how sweet it is to exist! How sweet to live in the world and to love life! Oh, how one always longs to say thank you to life itself, to existence itself, to say it right in their faces!

  And that is what Lara is. It is impossible to talk to them, but she is their representative, their expression, the gift of hearing and speech, given to the voiceless principles of existence.

  And untrue, a thousand times untrue, was all that he had said about her in a moment of doubt. How precisely perfect and irreproachable everything is in her!

  Tears of admiration and repentance clouded his vision. He opened the door of the stove and stirred inside with a poker. He pushed the burning, pure heat to the very back of the firebox and moved the as yet unburnt logs towards the front, where the draft was stronger. For some time he did not close the door. He enjoyed feeling the play of warmth and light on his face and hands. The shifting glimmer of the flames finally sobered him. Oh, how he missed her now, how he needed at that moment something tangible that came from her!

  He took her crumpled note from his pocket. He unfolded it the other side up, not the way he had read it earlier, and only now noticed that there was writing on the other side as well. Having smoothed out the crumpled paper, he read in the dancing light of the burning stove:

  “About your family you know. They are in Moscow. Tonya gave birth to a daughter.” This was followed by several crossed-out lines. Then there was: “I crossed it out, because it’s silly in a note. We’ll talk our fill face-to-face. I’m in a hurry, running to get a horse. I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t get one. With Katenka it will be hard …” The end of the phrase was smudged and he could not make it out.

  “She ran to get a horse from Anfim, and probably got it, since she’s gone,” Yuri Andreevich reflected calmly. “If her conscience weren’t completely clear on that account, she wouldn’t have mentioned that detail.”

  8

  When the fire burned out, the doctor closed the flue and had a bite to eat. After eating he was overcome by a fit of invincible drowsiness. He lay down on the sofa without undressing and fell fast asleep. He did not hear the deafening and shameless uproar the rats raised outside the door and walls of the room. He had two oppressive dreams, one after the other.

  He was in a room in Moscow, facing a glass door locked with a key, which, to make sure, he also held shut by pulling the door handle towards him. Outside the door, his boy Shurochka, in a child’s coat, sailor’s trousers
and hat, pretty and miserable, thrashed and wept, asking to be let in. Behind the child, showering him and the door with spray, was a roaring and rumbling waterfall, either from burst pipes, an everyday phenomenon of that epoch, or perhaps there really was some wild mountain gorge coming right up to the door, with a furiously rushing stream and an age-old accumulation of cold and darkness.

  The crash and roar of falling water frightened the boy to death. What he was crying could not be heard; the noise drowned out the boy’s cries. But Yuri Andreevich could see that his lips were forming the word “Papa! Papa!”

  Yuri Andreevich’s heart was breaking. He wished with all his being to seize the boy in his arms, press him to his breast, and run off with him without looking back. But, flooding himself with tears, he pulled the handle of the locked door towards him, not letting the boy in, sacrificing him to falsely understood feelings of honor and duty before another woman, who was not the boy’s mother and who at any moment might come into the room from the other side.

  Yuri Andreevich woke up in sweat and tears. “I have a fever. I’m falling ill,” he thought at once. “It’s not typhus. It’s some sort of heavy, dangerous fatigue that has taken the form of a sickness, some illness with a crisis, as in all serious infections, and the whole question is what will win out, life or death. But how I want to sleep!” And he fell asleep again.

  He dreamed of a dark winter morning on a busy lit-up street in Moscow, by all tokens before the revolution, judging by the early street animation, the ringing of the first trams, the light of the street lamps that streaked with yellow the gray, predawn snow on the pavements.

  He dreamed of a long, drawn-out apartment with many windows, all on one side, low over the street, probably on the second floor, with curtains lowered to the floor. In the apartment people in traveling clothes slept in various postures without undressing, and there was disorder, as on a train, leftover food on greasy, spread-out newspapers, gnawed bones of roast chicken, wings and legs, lay about, and on the floor in pairs, taken off for the night, stood the shoes of relatives and acquaintances, passersby and homeless people, come for a short stay. The hostess, Lara, in a hastily tied morning robe, rushed about the apartment from one end to the other, bustling quickly and noiselessly, and he followed on her heels, being a nuisance, trying giftlessly and inappropriately to clarify something, and she no longer had a moment for him, and to all his explanations she merely responded in passing by turning her head to him, by quiet, perplexed glances and innocent bursts of her incomparable, silvery laughter, the only forms of intimacy still left to them. And how distant, cold, and attractive she was, to whom he had given everything, whom he preferred to everything, and in contrast to whom he diminished and depreciated everything!