9
And meanwhile he was living a few steps away from them, right under their noses and in full view, within the narrow circle of their search.
When he left Gordon’s on the day of his disappearance, it was still light. He went down Bronnaya, heading for his home in Spiridonovka, and at once, before going a hundred steps, ran into his half brother, Evgraf Zhivago, coming in the opposite direction. Yuri Andreevich had not seen him for more than three years and knew nothing about him. As it turned out, Evgraf was in Moscow by chance, having arrived quite recently. As usual, he dropped from the sky and was impervious to questions, getting off with silent little smiles and jokes. Instead, passing over petty everyday details, after two or three questions to Yuri Andreevich, he straightaway entered into all his sorrows and quandaries, and right there, at the narrow turns of the crooked lane, amidst the jostling of passersby going in both directions, he came up with a practical plan of how to help his brother and save him. Yuri Andreevich’s disappearance and remaining in hiding were Evgraf’s idea, his invention.
He rented a room for Yuri Andreevich in a lane that was then still called Kamergersky, next to the Art Theater. He provided him with money and took steps to have the doctor accepted at some hospital, in a good position that would open prospects for scientific work. He protected his brother in every way in all the aspects of his life. Finally, he gave his brother his word that his family’s unsettled position in Paris would be resolved in one way or another. Either Yuri Andreevich would go to them, or they would come to him. Evgraf promised to take all these matters upon himself and arrange everything. His brother’s support inspired Yuri Andreevich. As always before, the riddle of his power remained unexplained. Yuri Andreevich did not even try to penetrate this mystery.
10
The room faced south. Its two windows looked onto the roofs opposite the theater, beyond which, high above the Okhotny Ryad, stood the summer sun, leaving the pavement of the lane in shadow.
The room was more than a place of work for Yuri Andreevich, more than his study. In this period of devouring activity, when his plans and projects could not find enough room in the notes piled on his desk, and the images of his thoughts and visions hung in the air on all sides, as an artist’s studio is encumbered with a multitude of started works turned face to the wall, the doctor’s living room was a banquet hall of the spirit, a storeroom of ravings, a larder of revelations.
Fortunately, negotiations with the hospital authorities were taking a long time; the moment of starting work kept being put off to an indefinite future. He could take advantage of this opportune delay and write.
Yuri Andreevich began putting in order what had already been written, fragments he remembered, or what Evgraf found somewhere and brought to him, part of them in Yuri Andreevich’s own manuscripts, part in someone else’s typewritten copies. The chaotic state of the material made Yuri Andreevich squander his energy even more than his own nature predisposed him to do. He soon abandoned this work and, instead of reconstructing the unfinished, went on to writing new things, carried away by fresh sketches.
He composed rough drafts of articles, like those fleeting notes from the time of his first stay in Varykino, and wrote down separate pieces of poems that came to him, beginnings, ends, and middles all mixed up, unsorted. Sometimes he could barely manage his rushing thoughts; the first letters of words and the abbreviations of his swift handwriting could not keep up with them.
He hurried. When his imagination grew weary and the work began to lag, he speeded it and whipped it up with drawings in the margins. They represented forest clearings and city intersections with the billboard “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers” standing in the middle of them.
The articles and poems were on one theme. Their subject was the city.
11
Afterwards this note was found among his papers:
“In the year ’22, when I returned to Moscow, I found her emptied and half ruined. As she came out of the ordeals of the first years of the revolution, so she has remained to this day. Her population has thinned out, new houses are not built, the old ones are not renovated.
“But even in that state, she remains a big modern city, the only inspiration of a new, truly contemporary art.
“The disorderly listing of things and notions, which look incompatible and are placed side by side as if arbitrarily, in the symbolists, Blok, Verhaeren, Whitman, is not at all a stylistic caprice. It is a new order of impressions observed in life and copied from nature.
“Just as they drive sequences of images through their lines, so a busy city street of the end of the nineteenth century sails along and draws past us its crowds, coaches, and carriages, and then, at the beginning of the next century, the cars of its electric trams and subways.
“Pastoral simplicity has no source in these conditions. Its false artlessness is a literary counterfeit, an unnatural mannerism, a phenomenon of a bookish order, picked up not in the countryside, but from the bookshelves of academic libraries. The living language, live-formed and answering naturally to the spirit of today, is the language of urbanism.
“I live on a crowded city intersection. Summer Moscow, blinded by the sun, her asphalt courtyards scorching, the windows of the upper floors scattering reflections and breathing in the flowering of clouds and boulevards, whirls around me and makes my head spin and wants me, for her glory, to make the heads of others spin. To that end she has brought me up and given art into my hands.
“Constantly noisy, day and night, the street outside my wall is as closely connected with the contemporary soul as the opening overture is with the theater curtain, filled with darkness and mystery, still lowered, but already set aglow by the flames of the footlights. Ceaselessly stirring and murmuring outside the doors and windows, the city is a vastly enormous introduction to the life of each of us. It is just along these lines that I would like to write about the city.”
In the notebook of Zhivago’s poems that has been preserved, no such poems are to be found. Perhaps the poem “Hamlet” belonged to that category?
12
One morning at the end of August, Yuri Andreevich got on the tram at the stop on the corner of Gazetny Lane, to go up Nikitskaya from the university to Kudrinskaya Square. He was going for the first time to his job at the Botkin Hospital, which was then called Soldatenkovskaya. It was all but his first visit to it in an official capacity.
Yuri Andreevich was not in luck. He got on a defective car which was meeting with all kinds of disasters. First a cart with its wheels stuck in the grooves of the rails held it up by blocking the way. Then faulty insulation under the floor or on the roof of the car caused a short circuit and something crackled and burned.
The driver would stop the car and with wrenches in his hands would come down from the front platform and, going around the car, would crouch down and immerse himself in repairing its mechanism between the wheels and the rear platform.
The ill-fated car blocked traffic along the whole line. The street was filled with trams it had already made stop and newly arriving and gradually accumulating ones. Their line reached the Manège and stretched back further. Passengers from the cars behind came to the front one that was the cause of it all, hoping to gain something by it. On that hot morning, the jam-packed car was cramped and stifling. A black and purple cloud crept from behind the Nikitsky Gates, rising ever higher in the sky over the crowd of passengers running across the pavement. A thunderstorm was approaching.
Yuri Andreevich was sitting on a single seat on the left side of the car, squeezed up against the window. The left-hand sidewalk of Nikitskaya, where the Conservatory was, remained in his view all the time. Willy-nilly, with the dulled attention of a man thinking about something else, he stared at the people walking or riding on that side and did not miss a single one.
A gray-haired old lady in a light straw hat with cloth daisies and cornflowers, and in a tight-fitting old-fashioned lilac dress, puffing and fanning herself w
ith a flat parcel she carried in her hand, trudged along that side. She was tightly corseted, weary from the heat, and, sweating profusely, kept wiping her wet lips and eyebrows with a small lace handkerchief.
Her path lay parallel to that of the tram. Yuri Andreevich had already lost sight of her several times when the repaired tram started up again and got ahead of her. And she returned to his field of vision several times, when a new breakdown stopped the tram and the lady caught up with it.
Yuri Andreevich recalled school problems on the calculation of the time and order of arrival of trains starting at different moments and moving at different speeds, and he wanted to recall the general method of solving them, but failed to do so and, without finishing, skipped from these memories to other, much more complicated reflections.
He thought about several existences developing side by side, moving next to each other at different speeds, and about one person’s fate getting ahead of another’s fate in life, and who outlives whom. He imagined something like a principle of relativity in the arena of life, but, getting thoroughly confused, he dropped these comparisons as well.
Lightning flashed, thunder rolled. The luckless tram got stuck yet again on the descent from Kudrinskaya to the Zoological Garden. The lady in purple appeared a little later in the frame of the window, went past the tram, began to move off. The first big drops of rain fell on the sidewalk and pavement, and on the lady. A gust of dusty wind dragged over the trees, brushing leaves against leaves, began tearing the lady’s hat off and tucking her skirts under, and suddenly died down.
The doctor felt a rush of debilitating nausea. Overcoming his weakness, he got up from the seat and began jerking the window straps up and down, trying to open the window. It did not yield to his efforts.
They shouted to the doctor that the frame was screwed permanently to the jamb, but, fighting against the attack and seized by some sort of anxiety, he did not take these shouts as addressed to him and did not grasp their meaning. He continued his attempts and again tugged at the frame in three different movements, up, down, and towards himself, and suddenly felt an unprecedented, irreparable pain inside, and realized that he had torn something internally, that he had committed something fatal, and that all was lost. At that moment the car began to move, but having gone a little way down Presnya, it stopped again.
By an inhuman effort of will, staggering and barely making his way through the congested throng standing in the aisle between the seats, Yuri Andreevich reached the rear platform. They snarled at him and would not let him pass. He fancied that the breath of air had refreshed him, that perhaps all was not lost yet, that he felt better.
He began to squeeze through the crowd on the rear platform, provoking more abuse, kicks, and anger. Paying no attention to the shouts, he broke through the crowd, climbed down from the standing tram onto the pavement, took one step, another, a third, collapsed on the cobbles, and did not get up again.
Noise, talk, arguments, advice arose. Several persons got down from the platform and surrounded the fallen man. They soon established that he was not breathing and that his heart had stopped. People from the sidewalks came over to the little group around the body, some reassured, others disappointed that the man had not been run over and that his death had no connection with the tram. The crowd grew. The lady in purple also came up to the group, stood for a while, looked at the dead man, listened to the talk, and went on. She was a foreigner, but she understood that some suggested carrying the body into the tram car and taking it to the hospital, while others said that the police must be called. She went on without waiting to see what decision they would come to.
The lady in purple was the Swiss subject Mademoiselle Fleury from Meliuzeevo, now very, very old. For twelve years she had been pleading in writing for the right to leave for her native country. Quite recently her efforts had been crowned with success. She had arrived in Moscow to obtain an exit visa. She was going that day to pick it up at the consulate, fanning herself with her documents tied with a ribbon. And she went on, getting ahead of the tram for the tenth time and, without knowing it in the least, went ahead of Zhivago and outlived him.
13
Through the doorway from the corridor one could see the corner of the room, with a table standing at an angle to it. From the table to the doorway peered the narrowing lower end of a crudely hollowed-out, boatlike coffin, with the dead man’s feet resting against it. This was the same table at which Yuri Andreevich used to write. There was no other in the room. The manuscripts had been put in the drawer, and the table had been put under the coffin. The pillows under the head had been plumped up high, the body in the coffin lay as if on the rising slope of a hill.
It was surrounded by a multitude of flowers, whole bushes of white lilacs, rare at that season, cyclamens, cineraria in pots and baskets. The flowers blocked the light from the windows. The light barely seeped through the flowers onto the dead man’s waxen face and hands, onto the wood and lining of the coffin. On the table lay a beautiful pattern of shadows that seemed as if it had just stopped swaying.
The custom of burning the dead in a crematorium was widespread by then.5 In hopes of obtaining a pension for the children, out of concern for their future at school, and from an unwillingness to damage Marina’s situation at work, they renounced a church funeral and decided to have nothing but a civil cremation. Application had been made to the relevant organizations. Representatives were expected.
In expectation of them, the room stood empty, as premises are vacated between the departure of old tenants and the moving in of new ones. The silence was broken only by the decorous tiptoeing and accidental shuffling of those who came for the leavetaking. They were few, but still far more than one might have expected. The news of the death of a man almost without name had spread all around their circle with miraculous speed. A good number of people turned up who had known the dead man at various periods of his life and at various times had lost track of or forgotten him. His scientific thought and his muse were found to have a still greater number of unknown friends, who had never seen the man they were drawn to, and who came to look at him for the first time and to give him a last parting glance.
In those hours when the general silence, not filled by any ceremony, became oppressive in that almost tangible lack, the flowers alone were a substitute for the missing singing and the absent rite.
They did not simply blossom and give off fragrance, but, as if in a chorus, perhaps hastening the corruption by it, poured out their perfume and, endowing everyone with their sweet-scented power, seemed to perform something.
The kingdom of plants so easily offers itself as the nearest neighbor to the kingdom of death. Here, in the earth’s greenery, among the trees of the cemetery, amidst the sprouting flowers rising up from the beds, are perhaps concentrated the mysteries of transformation and the riddles of life that we puzzle over. Mary did not at first recognize Jesus coming from the tomb and took him for the gardener walking in the cemetery. (“She, supposing him to be the gardener …”)6
14
When the dead man was brought to his last address in Kamergersky, his friends, informed of his death and shaken by the news, came running from the front entrance to the wide open door of the apartment with Marina, half-crazed by the terrible news. She was beside herself for a long time, thrashed on the floor, and beat her head against the edge of a long chest with a seat and back that stood in the front hall and on which the body was laid until the coffin came and the untidied room was put in order. She was bathed in tears and whispered and cried out, choking on the words, half of which escaped her against her will like the wailing of mourners. She babbled at random, the way simple people lament, not embarrassed by or noticing anyone. Marina clutched at the body and could not be torn away from it, so that the dead man could be transferred to the room, now tidied and freed of extra furniture, to be washed and placed in the delivered coffin. All that was yesterday. Today the violence of her suffering had eased, giving way to dull
dejection, but she was still as beside herself as before, said nothing, and was oblivious of herself.
She had sat there through all the rest of the previous day and that night without going anywhere. Here Klava had been brought to her to be nursed and taken away, and Kapa had come with her young nanny and then gone.
She was surrounded by her own people, by Dudorov and Gordon, as grief-stricken as herself. Her father, Markel, quietly sobbing and deafeningly blowing his nose, came and sat with her on the bench. Here also came her weeping mother and sisters.
And there were two persons in this human flow, a man and a woman, who stood out from them all. They claimed no greater closeness to the dead man than those listed above. They did not vie in their grief with Marina, her daughters, and the dead man’s friends, and acknowledged their precedence. These two had no claims, but had some entirely special rights of their own to the deceased. These incomprehensible and undeclared powers with which the two were somehow invested were of concern to no one, and no one disputed them. Precisely these people had apparently taken upon themselves the cares of the funeral and its arrangement from the very beginning, and had seen it through with such unruffled calm as though it gave them satisfaction. This loftiness of spirit struck everyone’s eye and produced a strange impression. It seemed that these people were involved not only in the funeral, but in the death itself, not as perpetrators or indirect causes, but as persons who, after the fact, accepted this event, reconciled with it, and did not see it as having the greatest importance. Some knew these people, others guessed about them, still others, who were in the majority, had no idea who they were.
But when this man, whose keen, narrow Kirghiz eyes aroused curiosity, and this effortlessly beautiful woman came into the room where the coffin was, all who sat, stood, or moved about in it, not excepting Marina, without objection, as if by arrangement, cleared the premises, stepped aside, got up from the chairs and stools placed along the walls, and, crowding together, went out to the corridor and the front hall, leaving the man and woman alone behind the closed doors, like two initiates called to perform in silence, without hindrance and undisturbed, something immediately concerned with the burial and vitally important. That is what happened now. The two, left alone, sat on two stools by the wall and began to talk business.
Doctor Zhivago Page 60