9
Not he, but something more general than he, sobbed and wept in him with tender and bright words, which shone like phosphorus in the darkness. And together with his weeping soul, he himself wept. He felt sorry for himself.
“I’m falling ill, I am ill,” he reflected in moments of lucidity, between the spells of sleep, feverish raving, and oblivion. “It’s some kind of typhus after all, not described in textbooks, which we didn’t study in medical school. I must prepare something, I must eat, otherwise I’ll die of hunger.”
But at the first attempt to raise himself on one elbow, he became convinced that he had no strength to stir, and either lay in a faint or fell asleep.
“How long have I been lying here, still dressed?” he reflected in one of these flashes. “How many hours? How many days? When I collapsed, spring was beginning. And now there’s frost on the window. So loose and dirty it makes the room dark.”
In the kitchen, rats overturned plates with a clatter, ran up the wall on the other side, let their heavy hulks drop to the floor, their weepy contralto voices squealing disgustingly.
And again he slept, and woke up to discover that the windows in the snowy net of frost were suffused with a rosy, burning glow, which shone in them like red wine poured in crystal glasses. And he did not know and asked himself what glow this was, of dawn or sunset?
Once he imagined human voices somewhere quite near, and he lost heart, deciding that this was the beginning of madness. With tears of pity for himself, he murmured against heaven in a voiceless whisper for having turned away from him and abandoned him. “O Light that never sets, why has Thou rejected me from Thy presence, and why has the alien darkness surrounded me, cursed as I am?”
And suddenly he realized that he was not dreaming and this was the fullest truth, that he was undressed and washed, and was lying in a clean shirt, not on the sofa, but on a freshly made bed, and that, mingling her hair with his and his tears with hers, Lara was weeping with him, and sitting by his bed, and leaning towards him. And he fainted from happiness.
10
In his recent delirium he had reproached heaven for its indifference, but now heaven in all its vastness had descended to his bed, and two big woman’s arms, white to the shoulders, reached out to him. His vision went dark with joy and, as one falls into oblivion, he dropped into bottomless bliss.
All his life he had been doing something, had been eternally busy, had worked about the house, had treated people, thought, studied, produced. How good it was to stop doing, striving, thinking, and to give himself for a time to this working of nature, to become a thing himself, a design, a work of her merciful, exquisite, beauty-lavishing hands!
Yuri Andreevich was recovering quickly. Lara nourished him, nursed him by her care, by her swan-white loveliness, by the moist-breathed, throaty whispering of her questions and answers.
Their hushed conversations, even the most trifling ones, were as filled with meaning as Plato’s dialogues.
Still more than by the communion of souls, they were united by the abyss that separated them from the rest of the world. They both had an equal aversion to all that was fatally typical in modern man, his studied rapturousness, his shrill elation, and that deadly winglessness which is assiduously spread by countless workers in the sciences and the arts, so that genius will go on being an extreme rarity.
Their love was great. But everyone loves without noticing the unprecedentedness of the feeling.
For them, however—and in this they were exceptional—those instants when the breath of passion flew like a breath of eternity into their doomed human existence, were moments of revelation and of learning ever new things about themselves and life.
11
“You absolutely must return to your family. I won’t keep you for a single extra day. But you see what’s going on. As soon as we merged with Soviet Russia, we were swallowed up by its devastation. Siberia and the East are plugging its holes. You don’t know anything. During your illness there have been such changes in town! The stores from our warehouses are being transported to the center, to Moscow. For her it’s a drop in the ocean, these supplies disappear into her as into a bottomless barrel, while we’re left without provisions. The mails don’t work, passenger transportation has ceased, express trains loaded with grain are all that run. There’s murmuring in town again, as there was before the Gajda uprising,2 and again the Cheka rages in response to the signs of discontent.
“So where are you going to go like that, skin and bones, your soul barely keeping in your body? And on foot again? You won’t make it! Recover, get your strength back, then it’s another matter.
“I won’t venture to give advice, but in your place, before setting out for your family, I’d find a job for a while, in your specialty of course, they value that, I’d go to our board of health, for example. It’s still in the old medical center.
“Otherwise, judge for yourself. The son of a Siberian millionaire who blew his brains out, your wife the daughter of a local industrialist and landowner. Was with the partisans and ran away. Whatever you say, that’s quitting the military-revolutionary ranks, it’s desertion. In no case should you stay out of things, with no legal status. My situation isn’t very firm either. And I’m also going to work, I’m joining the provincial education department. The ground’s burning under my feet, too.”
“How do you mean? What about Strelnikov?”
“It’s burning because of Strelnikov. I told you before how many enemies he had. The Red Army is victorious. Now the nonparty military, who were close to the top and know too much, are going to get it in the neck. And lucky if it’s in the neck and not in the back, so as to leave no traces. Among them, Pasha is in the first rank. He’s in great danger. He was in the Far East. I heard he escaped and is in hiding. They say he’s being sought. But enough about him. I don’t like to cry, and if I add even one more word about him, I can feel I’ll start howling.”
“You loved him, even now you still love him very much?”
“But I’m married to him, he’s my husband, Yurochka. He has a lofty, shining character. I’m deeply guilty before him. I didn’t do anything bad to him, it would be wrong to say so. But he’s of enormous importance, a man of great, great uprightness, and I’m trash, I’m nothing beside him. That’s my guilt. But enough of that, please. I’ll come back to it myself some other time, I promise. How wonderful your Tonya is! A Botticelli. I was there at her delivery. She and I became terribly close. But of that, too, some other time, I beg you. Yes, so, let’s the two of us find work. We’ll both go to work. Each month we’ll get billions in salary. Until the last coup, we were using Siberian money. It was abolished quite recently, and for a long time, all through your illness, we lived without currency. Yes. Just imagine. It’s hard to believe, but we somehow managed. Now a whole trainload of paper money has been delivered to the former treasury, about forty cars, they say, not less. It’s printed on big sheets in two colors, blue and red, like postage stamps, and divided into little squares. The blue ones are worth five million a square, the red ones ten million. They fade quickly, the printing is bad, the colors run.”
“I’ve seen that money. It was introduced just before we left Moscow.”
12
“What were you doing so long in Varykino? There’s nobody there, it’s empty. What kept you there?”
“Katenka and I were cleaning your house. I was afraid you’d stop there first thing. I didn’t want you to find your home in such a state.”
“What state? Messy, disorderly?”
“Disorder. Filth. I cleaned it.”
“How evasively monosyllabic. You’re not telling everything, you’re hiding something. But as you will, I won’t try to find out. Tell me about Tonya. How did they christen the girl?”
“Masha. In memory of your mother.”
“Tell me about them.”
“Let me do it sometime later. I told you, I can barely keep back my tears.”
“This
Samdevyatov, the one who gave you the horse, is an interesting figure. What do you think?”
“Most interesting.”
“I know Anfim Efimovich very well. He was a friend of our house here, he helped us in these new places.”
“I know. He told me.”
“You’re friends, probably? He tries to be useful to you, too?”
“He simply showers me with kindnesses. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
“I can easily imagine. You’re probably in close, friendly relations, on simple terms? He’s probably making up to you for all he’s worth?”
“I’ll say. Relentlessly.”
“And you? Sorry. I’m overstepping the limits of the permissible. What right do I have to question you? Forgive me. It’s indelicate.”
“Oh, please. You’re probably interested in something else—what sort of relations we have? You want to know whether anything more personal has crept into our good acquaintance? Of course not. I’m obliged to Anfim Efimovich for a countless number of things, I’m roundly in debt to him, but even if he showered me with gold, if he gave his life for me, it wouldn’t bring me a step closer to him. I have an inborn hostility to people of that alien cast. In practical matters, these enterprising, self-assured, peremptory people are irreplaceable. In matters of the heart, such strutting, mustachioed male self-satisfaction is disgusting. I understand intimacy and life quite differently. But that’s not all. In the moral respect, Anfim reminds me of another, far more repulsive man, who is to blame for my being this way, thanks to whom I am what I am.”
“I don’t understand. Just how are you? What are you getting at? Explain. You’re the best of all people in the world.”
“Ah, Yurochka, how can you? I’m being serious with you, and you pay me compliments like in a drawing room. You ask how I am? I’m broken, I have a crack in me for all my life. I was made a woman prematurely, criminally early, and initiated into life from its worst side, in the false, boulevard interpretation of a self-confident aging parasite from former times, who profited from everything and allowed himself everything.”
“I can guess. I supposed there was something. But wait. It’s easy to imagine your unchildish pain of that time, the fear of frightened inexperience, the first offense of an immature girl. But that’s a thing of the past. I mean to say—to grieve over it now is not your concern, it’s that of the people who love you, like myself. It’s I who should tear my hair and feel desperate at being late, at not being with you then already, so as to prevent what happened, if it is truly a grief for you. Astonishing. It seems I can be deeply, mortally, passionately jealous only of what is beneath me or distant from me. Rivalry with a superior man calls up totally different feelings in me. If a man close to me in spirit and whom I love should fall in love with the same woman as I, I would have a feeling of sad brotherhood with him, not of dispute and competition. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to share the object of my adoration with him for a second. But I would withdraw with a feeling of suffering quite different from jealousy, not as smoldering and bloody. The same would happen if I should run into an artist who won me over with his superior ability in works similar to mine. I would probably renounce my search and not duplicate his attempts, which had defeated me.
“But I’ve gotten sidetracked. I don’t think I’d love you so deeply if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don’t like the righteous ones, who never fell, never stumbled. Their virtue is dead and of little value. The beauty of life has not been revealed to them.”
“And I’m thinking precisely of that beauty. It seems to me that what’s needed in order to see it is intact imagination, primary perception. And that is just what was taken from me. Perhaps I would have formed my own view of life, if I hadn’t seen it, from the very first steps, with someone else’s vulgarizing stamp on it. But that’s not all. Because of the interference in my just-beginning life of an immoral, self-gratifying mediocrity, my subsequent marriage to a big and remarkable man did not work out, though he loved me deeply and I responded in the same way.”
“Wait. Tell me about your husband later. I told you, jealousy is usually aroused in me by an inferior, not an equal. I’m not jealous of your husband. But that one?”
“What ‘that one’?”
“That profligate, the one who ruined you. Who is he?”
“A well-known Moscow lawyer. He was my father’s associate, and after papa’s death he supported mama materially, when we were living in poverty. A bachelor with a fortune. I’m probably making him far too interesting and unsuitably significant by besmirching him like this. A very ordinary phenomenon. If you like, I’ll tell you his last name.”
“Never mind. I know it. I saw him once.”
“Really?”
“One time in a hotel room, when your mother poisoned herself. Late in the evening. We were still children, schoolboys.”
“Ah, I remember that time. You came and stood in the dark, in the front hall of the room. I might never have recalled that scene myself, but you helped me once to bring it back from oblivion. You reminded me of it, I think, in Meliuzeevo.”
“Komarovsky was there.”
“Was he? Quite possible. It was easy to find me with him. We were often together.”
“Why are you blushing?”
“From the sound of ‘Komarovsky’ on your lips. From the unwontedness and the unexpectedness.”
“A comrade of mine was with me, a schoolmate. Here’s what he told me right then in the hotel room. He recognized Komarovsky as a man he had seen one time by chance, in unforeseen circumstances. Once, while on a journey, this schoolboy, Mikhail Gordon, was eyewitness to the suicide of my father—a millionaire industrialist. Misha was riding on the same train with him. My father threw himself from the moving train with the intention of ending his life, and he was killed. He was in the company of Komarovsky, his lawyer. Komarovsky had encouraged my father’s drinking, gotten his affairs embroiled, driven him to bankruptcy, pushed him onto the path of ruin. He’s to blame for his suicide and for my being left an orphan.”
“It can’t be! What a portentous detail! Is it really true? So he was your evil genius, too? How that brings us together! Simply some sort of predestination!”
“It’s of him that I’m insanely, irremediably jealous over you.”
“What? Why, I not only don’t love him. I despise him.”
“Do you know your whole self so well? Human nature, especially woman’s, is so obscure and contradictory! In some corner of your aversion, you may be in greater subjection to him than to any other man, whom you love by your own goodwill, without constraint.”
“How horrible, what you’re saying. And, as usual, you say it so pointedly that this unnaturalness seems like the truth to me. But then how terrible it is!”
“Calm yourself. Don’t listen to me. I wanted to say that with you I’m jealous of what is obscure, unconscious, of something in which explanations are unthinkable, of something that cannot be puzzled out. I’m jealous of your toilet things, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of infectious diseases borne on the air, which may affect you and poison your blood. And, as of such an infection, I’m jealous of Komarovsky, who will one day take you from me, just as one day we will be separated by my death or yours. I know that this must seem like a heaping up of obscurities to you. I can’t say it in a more orderly and comprehensible way. I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.”
13
“Tell me more about your husband. ‘One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book,’ as Shakespeare says.”
“Where is it from?”
“Romeo and Juliet.”3
“I told you a lot about him in Meliuzeevo, when I was searching for him. And then here in Yuriatin, when you and I first met and I learned from your own words that he had wanted to arrest you on his train. I think I told you, but maybe I didn’t and it only seems so to me, that I saw him once from a distance when he was getting into a car. But you can imagine ho
w protected he was! I found him almost unchanged. The same handsome, honest, resolute face, the most honest of any I’ve ever seen in the world. Not a trace of showing off, a manly character, a complete absence of posturing. He was always that way, and has remained that way. And yet I noticed one change, and it alarmed me.
“It was as if something abstract had entered into that look and discolored it. A living human face had turned into the embodiment, the principle, the portrayal of an idea. My heart was wrung when I noticed it. I realized it was the consequence of the powers whose hands he had given himself into, sublime but deadening and merciless powers, which someday would also not spare him. It seemed to me that he was marked, and that this was the finger of doom. But maybe I’m confused. Maybe your expressions sank into me, when you described your meeting to me. Besides the feelings we have in common, I also borrow a lot from you!”
“No, tell me about your life before the revolution.”
“Early in childhood I began to dream of purity. He was its realization. We were almost from the same courtyard. He and I and Galiullin. I was his childhood passion. He swooned, he went cold when he saw me. It’s probably not good for me to say it and know it. But it would be still worse if I pretended not to know. I was his childhood passion, that enslaving infatuation which one conceals, which a child’s pride doesn’t allow him to reveal, and which is written without words on his face and is obvious to everybody. We were friends. He and I are people as different as you and I are similar. Right then I chose him with my heart. I decided to join my life with this wonderful boy’s as soon as we had both made our way, and mentally I became engaged to him right then.
Doctor Zhivago Page 49