Again there was guffawing at the table. Marina glanced around at her family with a displeased look, blushed, and started reprimanding them. Yuri Andreevich heard her voice, was struck by it, but did not understand its secret yet.
“There’s a lot of cleaning to be done in the house, Markel. I have to tidy up. Wash the floors. Do some laundry.”
There was surprise at the table.
“Aren’t you ashamed even to say such things, let alone do them, as if you’re a Chinese laundry or something!”
“Yuri Andreevich, if you’ll allow me, I’ll send my daughter to you. She’ll come to your place, do the laundry, the scrubbing. If you need, she can mend things. Don’t be afraid of the gentleman, dear daughter. You see how well-breeded he is, not like some others. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“No, what are you saying, Agafya Tikhonovna, there’s no need. I’ll never agree that Marina should dirty and soil herself for me. Why should she work for me? I’ll see to it all myself.”
“You can dirty yourself, and I can’t? You’re so intractable, Yuri Andreevich. Why do you wave me away? And if I invite myself as a guest, will you really drive me out?”
Marina might have become a singer. She had a pure, melodious voice of great pitch and strength. Marina spoke softly, but in a voice that was stronger than conversation required and that did not merge with Marina, but could be conceived as separate from her. It seemed to come from another room, to be located behind her back. This voice was her defense, her guardian angel. One does not want to insult or sadden a woman with such a voice.
With this Sunday water carrying the doctor’s friendship with Marina began. She often came to help him around the house. One day she stayed with him and never went back to the porter’s lodge. Thus she became the third, not officially registered, wife of Yuri Andreevich, who was not divorced from the first. Children came along. Father and mother Shchapov, not without pride, began to call their daughter a doctor’s wife. Markel grumbled that Yuri Andreevich did not marry Marina in church or sign up in the registry office. “What, are you daft?” his wife protested. “With Antonina alive, what would that be? Bigamy?” “You’re a fool yourself,” replied Markel. “Why look at Tonka? Tonka’s the same as if she doesn’t exist. No law will defend her.”
Yuri Andreevich sometimes said jokingly that their intimacy was a novel of twenty buckets, as there are novels of twenty chapters or twenty letters.
Marina forgave the doctor his strange quirks, which had already formed by then, the whims of a man gone to seed and aware of his fall, and forgave the dirt and disorder that he spread around him. She put up with his grumbling, sharpness, irritability.
Her self-sacrifice went still further. When through his fault they fell into voluntary, self-created poverty, Marina, so as not to leave him alone in those intervals, would abandon her job, where she was so valued and where she was eagerly taken back after these forced interruptions. Submitting to Yuri Andreevich’s fantasy, she would go with him through the courtyards looking for odd jobs. They did woodcutting for tenants living on various floors. Some of them, particularly the speculators grown rich at the beginning of the NEP and people of science and art who were close to the government, began fixing up their apartments and furnishing them. One day Marina and Yuri Andreevich, stepping carefully on the rugs in their felt boots, so as not to track in sawdust from outside, brought a load of firewood to the study of an apartment owner, who was insultingly immersed in some reading and did not bestow so much as a glance on the sawyers. The lady of the house negotiated, gave orders, and paid them.
“What is the swine so riveted to?” The doctor became curious. “What is he marking up so furiously with his pencil?” Going around the desk with the firewood, he peeked over the reading man’s shoulder. On the desk lay Yuri Andreevich’s little books in Vasya’s early art school editions.
7
Marina and the doctor lived on Spiridonovka. Gordon was renting a room nearby on Malaya Bronnaya. Marina and the doctor had two girls, Kapka and Klashka. Kapitolina (Kapka) was going on seven; the recently born Klavdia was six months old.
The beginning of the summer of 1929 was hot. Acquaintances from two or three streets away ran to visit each other without hats or jackets.
Gordon’s room was strangely organized. In its place there used to be a fashionable dressmaker’s shop with two sections, a lower and an upper one. From the street, these two levels had a single plate-glass window. The gold inscription on the glass gave the dressmaker’s last name and the nature of his occupation. Inside, behind the glass, there was a spiral staircase from the lower to the upper section.
Now this space had been divided in three.
By means of an additional floor, the shop had gained an intermediary entresol, with a window strange for an inhabited room. It was a meter high and was at floor level. It was covered with remnants of the gold lettering. Through the spaces between them, the legs of those in the room could be seen up to the knees. Gordon lived in this room. Sitting with him were Zhivago, Dudorov, Marina and the children. Unlike the adults, the children filled the entire window frame. Soon Marina and the children left. The three men remained alone.
They were having a conversation, one of those lazy, unhurried summer conversations conducted among schoolmates whose friendship dates back countless years. How are they usually conducted?
There are some who possess a sufficient stock of words and are satisfied with it. They speak and think naturally and coherently. Only Yuri Andreevich was in that position.
His friends were lacking in necessary expressions. They did not possess the gift of speech. To make up for their poor vocabulary, they paced the room as they talked, smoked cigarettes, waved their arms, repeated the same thing several times. (“That’s dishonest, brother; dishonest is what it is; yes, yes, dishonest.”)
They were not aware that the excessive dramatics of their intercourse in no way signified ardor and breadth of character, but, on the contrary, expressed an insufficiency, a blank.
Gordon and Dudorov belonged to a good professional circle. They spent their lives among good books, good thinkers, good composers, good, always, yesterday and today, good and only good music, and they did not know that the calamity of mediocre taste is worse than the calamity of tastelessness.
Gordon and Dudorov did not know that even the reproaches that they showered on Zhivago were suggested to them not by devotion to their friend and the wish to influence him, but only by their inability to think freely and guide the conversation as they willed. The speeding cart of the conversation carried them where they had no wish to go. They were unable to turn it and in the end were bound to run into something and hit against something. And so, rushing at full speed, they smashed with all their sermons and admonitions into Yuri Andreevich.
He could see clearly the springs of their pathos, the shakiness of their sympathy, the mechanism of their reasonings. However, he could not very well say to them: “Dear friends, oh, how hopelessly ordinary you and the circle you represent, and the brilliance and art of your favorite names and authorities, all are. The only live and bright thing in you is that you lived at the same time as me and knew me.” But how would it be if one could make such declarations to one’s friends! And so as not to distress them, Yuri Andreevich meekly listened to them.
Dudorov had recently finished his first term of exile and come back. He was restored to his rights, of which he had been temporarily deprived. He received permission to resume his lectures and university occupations.
Now he initiated his friends into his feelings and state of soul in exile. He spoke with them sincerely and unhypocritically. His observations were not motivated by cowardice or extraneous considerations.
He said that the arguments of the prosecution, his treatment in prison and after leaving it, and especially his one-on-one interviews with the interrogator had aired out his brain and re-educated him politically, that his eyes had been opened to many things, that he had grown as a human
being.
Dudorov’s reasonings were close to Gordon’s heart precisely in their triteness. He nodded his head sympathetically to Innokenty and agreed with him. The stereotyped character of what Dudorov said and felt was just what Gordon found especially moving. He took the imitativeness of these copybook sentiments for their universality.
Innokenty’s virtuous orations were in the spirit of the time. But it was precisely the conformity, the transparency of their hypocrisy that exasperated Yuri Andreevich. The unfree man always idealizes his slavery. So it was in the Middle Ages; it was on this that the Jesuits always played. Yuri Andreevich could not bear the political mysticism of the Soviet intelligentsia, which was its highest achievement, or, as they would have said then, the spiritual ceiling of the epoch. Yuri Andreevich concealed this feeling from his friends as well, so as not to quarrel.
But he was interested in something quite other, in Dudorov’s account of Vonifaty Orletsov, his cell mate, a priest and a follower of Tikhon.4 The arrested man had a six-year-old daughter, Christina. The arrest and subsequent trial of her beloved father were a shock to her. The words “servant of a cult” and “disenfranchised” and the like seemed to her a stain of dishonor. It may be that in her ardent child’s heart, she vowed to wash this stain from her father’s name someday. This goal, so far removed and set so early, burning in her as an inextinguishable resolution, made of her even then a childishly enthusiastic follower of everything that seemed to her most irrefutable in Communism.
“I’m leaving,” said Yuri Andreevich. “Don’t be angry with me, Misha. It’s stuffy in here, and hot outside. I don’t have enough air.”
“You can see the vent window on the floor is open. Forgive us for smoking. We always forget that we shouldn’t smoke in your presence. Is it my fault that it’s arranged so stupidly here? Find me another room.”
“Well, so I’m leaving, Gordosha. We’ve talked enough. I thank you for caring about me, dear comrades. It’s not a whimsy on my part. It’s an illness, sclerosis of the heart’s blood vessels. The walls of the heart muscle wear out, get thin, and one fine day can tear, burst. And I’m not forty yet. I’m not a drunkard, not a profligate.”
“It’s too early to be singing at your funeral. Nonsense. You’ll live a long while yet.”
“In our time the frequency of microscopic forms of cardiac hemorrhages has increased greatly. Not all of them are fatal. In some cases people survive. It’s the disease of our time. I think its causes are of a moral order. A constant, systematic dissembling is required of the vast majority of us. It’s impossible, without its affecting your health, to show yourself day after day contrary to what you feel, to lay yourself out for what you don’t love, to rejoice over what brings you misfortune. Our nervous system is not an empty sound, not a fiction. It’s a physical body made up of fibers. Our soul takes up room in space and sits inside us like the teeth in our mouth. It cannot be endlessly violated with impunity. It was painful for me to hear you tell about your exile, Innokenty, how you grew during it, and how it re-educated you. It’s as if a horse were to tell how it broke itself in riding school.”
“I’ll stand up for Dudorov. You’ve simply lost the habit of human words. They’ve ceased to reach you.”
“That may well be, Misha. In any case, excuse me, let me go. It’s hard for me to breathe. By God, I’m not exaggerating.”
“Wait. That’s nothing but dodging. We won’t let you go until you give us a straight, sincere answer. Do you agree that you’ve got to change, to mend your ways? What do you intend to do in that respect? You ought to clarify your relations with Tonya and with Marina. They’re living beings, women capable of suffering and feeling, and not some bodiless ideas hovering in your head in arbitrary combinations. Besides, it’s a shame that a man like you should go to waste uselessly. You must wake up from your sleep and indolence, rouse yourself, make out what’s around you without this unjustified haughtiness, yes, yes, without this inadmissible arrogance, find a job, take up practice.”
“Very well, I’ll answer you. I myself have often thought in that same spirit lately, and therefore I can promise you a thing or two without blushing for shame. It seems to me that everything will get settled. And quite soon. You’ll see. No, by God. Everything’s getting better. I have an incredible, passionate desire to live, and to live means always to push forward, towards higher things, towards perfection, and to achieve it.
“I’m glad, Gordon, that you defend Marina, as before you were always Tonya’s defender. But I have no dispute with them, I don’t make war on them or anybody else. You reproached me at first that she addresses me formally in response to my informality and calls me by my name and patronymic, as if it doesn’t weigh on me as well. But the deeper incoherence that underlies that unnaturalness has long been removed, everything’s smoothed over, and equality has been re-established.
“I can tell you some more good news. They’ve started writing to me from Paris again. The children have grown; they feel quite at ease among their French peers. Shura is finishing their primary school, école primaire. Manya is just beginning. I don’t know my daughter at all. For some reason I have the feeling that, despite their receiving French citizenship, they will soon return, and everything will be set right in some unknown way.
“By many tokens, my father-in-law and Tonya know about Marina and the girls. I didn’t write to them about it. These circumstances must have reached them from elsewhere. Alexander Alexandrovich is naturally offended in his paternal feelings; it’s painful for him on account of Tonya. That explains the nearly five-year break in our correspondence. I did correspond with them for a while after I came to Moscow. And suddenly they stopped answering. Everything stopped.
“Now, quite recently, I’ve begun to receive letters again from there. From all of them, even the children. Warm, tender letters. Something’s softened. Maybe there are changes with Tonya, some new friend. God grant it’s so. I don’t know. I also sometimes write to them. But I really can’t go on. I must leave or I’ll start suffocating. Good-bye.”
The next day Marina came running to Gordon more dead than alive. She had no one to leave the children with and carried the little one, Klasha, wrapped tightly in a blanket, pressing her to her breast with one hand, and with the other dragged the lagging and protesting Kapa by the hand.
“Is Yura here, Misha?” she asked in a voice not her own.
“Didn’t he spend the night at home?”
“No.”
“Well, then he’s at Innokenty’s.”
“I was there. Innokenty has classes at the university. But his neighbors know Yura. He didn’t show up there.”
“Then where is he?”
Marina placed the swaddled Klasha on the sofa. She became hysterical.
8
For two days Gordon and Dudorov never left Marina’s side. They took turns keeping watch on her, afraid of leaving her alone. In the intervals they went in search of the doctor. They ran around to all the places they supposed he might be wandering in, went to Flour Town and to the Sivtsev house, visited all the Palaces of Thought and Houses of Ideas that he had ever worked in, went to see all the old acquaintances they had any idea of and whose addresses they were able to find. The search yielded no results.
They did not inform the police, so as not to remind the authorities of a man who, though he was registered and had no criminal record, was, in the notions of that time, far from exemplary. They decided to put the police on his trail only in the last extremity.
On the third day, Marina, Gordon, and Dudorov received letters at different times from Yuri Andreevich. They were full of regrets regarding the anxieties and fears he had caused them. He begged them to forgive him and to calm themselves, and adjured them by all that was holy to stop their search for him, which in any case would lead to nothing.
He told them that with the aim of the speediest and fullest remaking of his life, he wanted to be left alone for a time, in order to go about his affairs in a c
oncentrated way, and once he was somewhat set in his new pursuits and was convinced that, after the break that had taken place, there would be no return to the old ways, he would leave his hiding place and return to Marina and the children.
He told Gordon in his letter that he had transferred money for Marina to his name. He asked him to hire a nanny for the children, so as to free Marina to go back to work. He explained that he was wary of sending money directly to her address, for fear that the sum showing on the notice would expose her to the danger of being robbed.
The money soon came, far exceeding the doctor’s scale and the standards of his friends. A nanny was hired for the children. Marina was taken back at the telegraph. For a long time she could not calm down, but, being accustomed to Yuri Andreevich’s past oddities, she finally reconciled herself to this new escapade as well. Despite Yuri Andreevich’s pleas and warnings, his friends and Marina continued to search for him, and his prediction kept being confirmed. They did not find him.
Doctor Zhivago Page 59