The driver, who found it all killingly funny, slowed the horses’ pace to give the gentlemen time to amuse themselves. But Zhivago, calling the Cossack over, reprimanded him and told him to stop the mockery.
“Yes, sir,” the man said readily. “We didn’t mean nothing, it was just for laughs.”
For the rest of the way Zhivago and Gordon were silent.
“It’s terrible,” Yuri Andreevich began, when their own village came in sight. “You can hardly imagine what a cup of suffering the unfortunate Jewish populace has drunk during this war. It’s being conducted right within the pale of their forced settlement. And for all they’ve endured, for the sufferings, the taxes, and the ruin, they have the added reward of pogroms, taunts, and the accusation that these people lack patriotism. But where are they to get it, when they enjoy all rights with the enemy, and with us they’re only subjected to persecution? The very hatred of them, the basis of it, is contradictory. What vexes people is just what should touch them and win them over. Their poverty and overcrowding, their weakness and inability to fend off blows. Incomprehensible. There’s something fateful in it.”
Gordon made no reply.
12
And here again they were lying on two sides of the long, narrow window, it was night, and they were talking.
Zhivago was telling Gordon how he had seen the sovereign at the front. He told it well.
It was his first spring at the front. The headquarters of the unit to which he had been attached was in the Carpathians, in a hollow, the entrance to which, from the Hungarian valley, was blocked by that army unit.
At the bottom of the hollow there was a railway station. Zhivago described to Gordon the external appearance of the place, the mountains overgrown with mighty firs and pines, with white tufts of clouds caught among them, and the stone cliffs of gray slate and graphite, which showed through the forest like worn spots in thick fur. It was a damp, dark April morning, gray as that slate, locked in by the heights on all sides and therefore still and stuffy. Steaming hot. Steam hung over the hollow, and everything fumed, everything drew upwards in streams of smoke, engine smoke from the station, gray steam from the meadows, gray mountains, dark forests, dark clouds.
In those days the sovereign was making the rounds of Galicia. Suddenly it became known that he would visit the unit stationed here, of which he was the honorary colonel.
He might come at any moment. An honor guard was stationed on the platform to meet him. An hour or two of wearisome waiting followed. Then quickly, one after another, two trains came with the suite. Shortly afterwards the tsar’s train arrived.
Accompanied by the grand duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the sovereign inspected the lined-up grenadiers. With every syllable of his quiet greeting he raised up bursts and splashes of thunderously rolling hurrahs, like water dancing in swaying buckets.
The embarrassed and smiling sovereign gave the impression of a man older and more gone to seed than he appeared on rubles and medals. He had a listless, slightly puffy face. He kept casting guilty sidelong glances at Nikolai Nikolaevich, not knowing what was required of him in the given circumstances, and Nikolai Nikolaevich, respectfully bending towards his ear, not even with words but with the movement of an eyebrow or a shoulder, helped him out of his difficulty.
The tsar was pitiable on that gray and warm mountain morning, and it was eerie to think that such timorous reserve and shyness could be the essence of an oppressor, that this weakness could punish and pardon, bind and loose.
“He should have pronounced something on the order of ‘I, my sword, and my people,’ like Wilhelm,11 or something in that spirit. But certainly about the people, that’s indispensable. But, you understand, he was natural in a Russian way and tragically above such banality. In Russia this theatricality is unthinkable. Because it is theatricality, isn’t it? I can understand that there were still such peoples in Caesar’s time, some sort of Gauls, or Suevians, or Illyrians. But from then on it’s only been a fiction, existing so that tsars and activists and kings could make speeches about it: ‘The people, my people.’
“Now the front is flooded with correspondents and journalists. They note down ‘observations,’ the utterances of popular wisdom, make the rounds of the wounded, construct a new theory of the people’s soul. It’s a sort of new Dahl,12 just as contrived, a linguistic graphomania of verbal incontinence. That’s one type. But there’s another. Clipped speech, ‘jottings and sketches,’ skepticism, misanthropy. For instance, in one of them (I read it myself), there are such sentences as: ‘A gray day, like yesterday. Rain and slush since morning. I look through the window at the road. Prisoners strung out in an endless line. Wounded being transported. A cannon fires. It fires again, today as yesterday, tomorrow as today, and so on every day and every hour …’ Just look, how perceptive and witty! Though why is he offended at the cannon? What a strange pretension, to demand diversity from a cannon! Instead of the cannon, why isn’t he astonished at himself, firing off lists, commas, phrases, day in and day out, why doesn’t he stop this barrage of journalistic philanthropy, as hasty as a hopping flea? How is it he doesn’t understand that it’s he, not the cannon, who should be new and not repeat himself, that the accumulation of a great quantity of senselessness in a notebook will never arrive at any sense, that facts don’t exist until a man puts something of his own into them, some share of whimsical human genius, something of the fantastic.”
“Strikingly true,” Gordon interrupted him. “Now I’ll answer you concerning the scene we witnessed today. That Cossack mocking the poor patriarch, along with thousands of cases like it, is, of course, an example of the most elementary baseness, which should occasion, not philosophizing, but a punch in the nose, that’s clear. But to the question of the Jews as a whole, philosophy is applicable, and then it turns its unexpected side to us. But here I’m not telling you anything new. All these thoughts, in me as in you, come from your uncle.
“ ‘What is a people?’ you ask. Must we make a fuss over it, and doesn’t he do more for it who, without thinking of it, by the very beauty and triumph of his deeds, raises it to universality and, having glorified it, makes it eternal? Well, of course, of course. And what kind of peoples can we talk about in Christian times? They’re not simple peoples, but converted, transformed peoples, and the whole point is precisely in the transformation, not in faithfulness to old principles. Let’s remember the Gospel. What did it say on this subject? First, it wasn’t an assertion: this is so and that is so. It was a naïve and timid suggestion. The suggestion was: Do you want to exist in a new way, as never before, do you want the blessedness of the spirit? And everyone accepted the suggestion, caught up for millennia.
“When it said that in the Kingdom of God there are no Greeks and Jews, did it merely mean to say that everyone is equal before God?13 No, there was no need for that; the Greek philosophers, the Roman moralists, the prophets of the Old Testament knew that before. But it said: in that new way of existence and new form of communion, conceived in the heart and known as the Kingdom of God, there are no peoples, there are persons.