Pavel Pavlovich smiled, got up from the boat, and went to bed. The desired way out had been found.
7
Larissa Fyodorovna was stunned and at first did not believe her ears when she learned of Pasha’s decision. “Absurd. Another whim,” she thought. “Pay no attention, and he’ll forget all about it himself.”
But it turned out that her husband’s preparations had already begun two weeks ago, the papers were in the recruiting office, there was a replacement at school, and from Omsk notification had come of his admission to the military school there. The time of his departure was near.
Lara howled like a peasant woman and, seizing Antipov’s hands, fell at his feet.
“Pasha, Pashenka,” she cried, “why are you leaving me and Katenka? Don’t do it! Don’t! It’s not too late. I’ll straighten it all out. And you haven’t even been seen properly by a doctor. With your heart. You’re ashamed? And aren’t you ashamed to sacrifice your family to some sort of madness? As a volunteer! All your life you’ve made fun of banal Rodka, and suddenly you’re envious! You want to rattle a saber, to play the officer. What’s wrong with you, Pasha, I don’t recognize you! You’re like somebody else! What’s got into you? Kindly tell me, tell me honestly, for Christ’s sake, without ready-made phrases, is this what Russia needs?”
Suddenly she understood that this was not the point at all. Unable to make sense of the particulars, she grasped the main thing. She perceived that Patulya was mistaken about her attitude towards him. He did not appreciate the maternal feeling that she had mixed all her life with her tenderness towards him, and he did not perceive that such love was greater than ordinary woman’s love.
She bit her lip, all shrunken inwardly, as if she had been beaten, and, saying nothing and silently swallowing her tears, set about preparing her husband for the road.
When he left, it seemed to her that the whole town became silent and that there was even a smaller number of crows flying in the sky. “Mistress, mistress,” Marfutka called out to her unsuccessfully. “Mama, mama,” Katenka prattled endlessly, tugging at her sleeve. This was the most serious defeat in her life. Her best, her brightest hopes had collapsed.
Through his letters from Siberia, Lara knew all about her husband. Things soon became clearer to him. He missed his wife and daughter very much. In a few months, Pavel Pavlovich graduated early as a second lieutenant and was just as unexpectedly assigned to active duty. He traveled with the utmost urgency far from Yuriatin and in Moscow had no time to see anyone.
His letters from the front began to come, more lively and not so sad as from the school in Omsk. Antipov wanted to distinguish himself, so that in reward for some military exploit or as the result of a slight wound he could ask for leave to see his family. The possibility of promotion presented itself. Following a recently accomplished breakthrough, which was later named for Brusilov, the army went on the offensive.9 Letters from Antipov ceased. At first that did not worry Lara. She explained Pasha’s silence by the unfolding military action and the impossibility of writing on the march.
In the fall the army’s advance came to a halt. The troops dug themselves in. But there was still no news from Antipov. Larissa Fyodorovna began to worry and made inquiries, first in Yuriatin and then by mail to Moscow and to the front, to the old field address of Pasha’s unit. No one knew anything, no reply came from anywhere.
Like many lady benefactresses in the district, from the beginning of the war Larissa Fyodorovna had helped as much as she could in the hospital set up in the community clinic of Yuriatin.
Now she began seriously to study the basics of medicine and passed an examination at the clinic to qualify as a nurse.
In that quality she asked for a six-month leave from her work at the school, left Marfutka in charge of the apartment in Yuriatin, and, taking Katenka with her, went to Moscow. There she installed her daughter with Lipochka, whose husband, the German subject Friesendank, along with other civilian prisoners, was interned in Ufa.
Convinced of the uselessness of her search from afar, Larissa Fyodorovna decided to transfer it to the scene of recent events. With that aim, she went to work as a nurse on a hospital train that was going through the town of Lisko to Mezo-Laborszh on the Hungarian border. That was the name of the place from which Pasha had written her his last letter.
8
A train-bathhouse, fitted out on donations from St. Tatiana’s committee for aid to the wounded,10 arrived in staff headquarters at the front. In the first-class carriage of the long train composed of short, ugly freight cars, visitors arrived, activists from Moscow with gifts for the soldiers and officers. Among them was Gordon. He had learned that the division infirmary in which, according to his information, his childhood friend Zhivago worked, was located in a nearby village.
Gordon obtained the necessary permission to circulate in the frontline zone, and, pass in hand, went to visit his friend in a wagon that was headed in that direction.
The driver, a Belorussian or Lithuanian, spoke Russian poorly. The fear known as spymania had reduced all speech to a single formal, predictable pattern. The display of good intentions in discourse was not conducive to conversation. Passenger and driver went the greater part of the way in silence.
At headquarters, where they were used to moving whole armies and measuring distances by hundred-mile marches, they assured him that the village was somewhere nearby, around twelve or fifteen miles away. In reality it turned out to be more than sixty.
For the whole way, along the horizon to the left of the direction they were moving in, there was an unfriendly growling and rumbling. Gordon had never in his life been witness to an earthquake. But he reasoned correctly that the sullen and peevish grumbling of enemy artillery, barely distinguishable in the distance, was most comparable to underground tremors and rumblings of a volcanic origin. Towards evening, the lower part of the sky in that direction flushed with a rosy, quivering fire, which did not go out until morning.
The driver took Gordon past ruined villages. Some of them had been abandoned by their inhabitants. In others, people huddled in cellars deep underground. The villages had become heaps of rubble and broken brick, which stretched along the same lines as the houses once had done. These burned-down settlements could be surveyed at a glance from end to end, like barren wastes. On their surface, old women rummaged about, each in her own burnt debris, digging up something from the ashes and hiding it away each time, imagining they were hidden from strangers’ eyes, as if the former walls were still around them. They met and followed Gordon with their gaze, as if asking if the world would soon come to its senses and return to a life of peace and order.
During the night the travelers came upon a patrol. They were told to turn off the main road, go back, and skirt this area by a roundabout country road. The driver did not know the new way. They spent some two hours senselessly wandering about. Before dawn the traveler and his driver arrived at a settlement that bore the required name. No one there had heard anything about a field hospital. It soon became clear that there were two villages of the same name in the area, this one and the one they were looking for. In the morning they reached their goal. As they drove along the outskirts, which gave off a smell of medicinal chamomile and iodoform, he thought he would not stay overnight with Zhivago, but, after spending the day in his company, would head back in the evening to the railway station and the comrades he had left. Circumstances kept him there for more than a week.