“You just said that a fact is senseless unless one puts sense into it. Christianity, the mystery of the person, is precisely what needs to be put into the fact for it to acquire meaning for man.
“And we talked about average figures, who have nothing to say to life and the world as a whole, about second-rate forces interested in narrowness, in having the talk always be about some people or other, preferably a small one, that should suffer, so that it’s possible to sit and talk endlessly and thrive on their own pity. Jewry is fully and completely the victim of this element. Its own notion of itself as a people laid upon it the deadening necessity of being and remaining a people and only that over the centuries, during which, by a power that had once come from its own midst, the whole world was delivered from this humiliating task. How astounding it is! How could it have happened? This festivity, this deliverance from the bedevilment of mediocrity, this soaring above the dull-witted workaday world—all this was born on their soil, spoke their language, and belonged to their tribe. And they saw and heard it and let it slip. How could they have let a spirit of such all-absorbing beauty and power leave them, how could they think that next to its triumph and reign they would remain as the empty shell this miracle had once cast off? To whose profit is this voluntary martyrdom, who needs these centuries of the mockery and bloodletting of so many utterly blameless old men, women, and children, so fine and so capable of good and of the heart’s communion! Why are the people-loving writers of all peoples so lazy and giftless? Why do the rulers of this people’s minds never go beyond the two easily accessible forms of world sorrow and ironizing wisdom? Why, faced with the risk of exploding from the irrevocability of their duty, as a steam boiler explodes from pressure, did they not disband this troop that fights and gets beaten nobody knows what for? Why didn’t they say: ‘Come to your senses. Enough. There’s no need for more. Don’t call yourselves by the old name. Don’t cling together, disperse. Be with everyone. You are the first and best Christians in the world. You are precisely that which you have been set against by the worst and weakest among you.”
13
The next day, coming to dinner, Zhivago said:
“So you couldn’t wait to leave, and now you’ve called it down on us. I can’t say, ‘You’re in luck,’ because what kind of luck is it that we’re pressed back or beaten again? The way east is free, and we’re being squeezed from the west. All army medical units are ordered to pack up. Tomorrow or the day after, we’ll be on our way. Where—nobody knows. And of course Mikhail Grigorievich’s laundry hasn’t been washed, has it, Karpenko. The eternal story. It’s that woman, that woman … but ask him what woman, he doesn’t know himself, the blockhead.”
He did not listen to what his medical orderly spun out to justify himself, and paid no attention to Gordon, who was upset that he had been wearing Zhivago’s linen and was leaving in his shirt. Zhivago went on.
“Ah, this camp life, these Gypsy wanderings. When we moved in here, none of it was to my liking—the stove was in the wrong place, the ceiling was low, it was dirty and stuffy. And now for the life of me I can’t remember where we were stationed before this. And it seems I could spend all my life here, looking at the stove in the corner, with sun on the tiles and the shadow of a roadside tree moving over it.”
They began unhurriedly to pack.
During the night they were awakened by noise and shouts, gunshots and running feet. There was a sinister glow over the village. Shadows flitted past the windows. The owners of the house woke up and began stirring behind the wall.
“Run out, Karpenko, ask what’s the cause of this bedlam,” said Yuri Andreevich.
Soon everything became known. Zhivago himself dressed hastily and went to the hospital to verify the rumors, which proved correct. The Germans had broken the resistance in this sector. The line of defense had moved closer to the village and kept getting closer. The village was under fire. The hospital and offices were quickly removed, without waiting for the order to evacuate. Everything was supposed to be finished before dawn.
“You’ll go with the first echelon. The carriage is leaving now, but I told them to wait for you. Well, good-bye. I’ll come with you and see that you get seated.”
They were running to the other end of the village, where the detachment was formed up. Running past the houses, they bent down and hid behind their projecting parts. Bullets hummed and whined in the street. From intersections with roads leading to the fields, they could see shrapnel exploding over them in umbrellas of flame.
“And what about you?” Gordon asked as they ran.
“I’ll come later. I must go home and get my things. I’ll be in the second party.”
They said good-bye at the village gate. The carriage and the several carts that made up the train set off, driving into each other and gradually forming a line. Yuri Andreevich waved to his departing friend. The flames of a burning barn lit them up.
Again trying to stay close to the cottages, under cover of their corners, Yuri Andreevich quickly headed back to his place. Two houses before his own porch, he was knocked off his feet by the blast of an explosion and wounded by a shrapnel bullet. Yuri Andreevich fell in the middle of the road, covered with blood, and lost consciousness.
14
The hospital in the rear was lost in one of the little towns in the western territory, on a railway line, near general headquarters. Warm days set in at the end of February. In the ward for convalescent officers, at the request of Yuri Andreevich, who was a patient there, the window next to his bed had been opened.
Dinnertime was approaching. The patients filled the remaining time however they could. They had been told that a new nurse had come to the hospital and would make her rounds for the first time that day. Lying across from Yuri Andreevich, Galiullin was looking through the just-arrived editions of Speech and The Russian Word and exclaiming indignantly at the blanks in the print left by the censors. Yuri Andreevich was reading letters from Tonya, a number of which had accumulated and were delivered all at once by the field post. The wind stirred the pages of the letters and newspapers. Light footsteps were heard. Yuri Andreevich raised his eyes from a letter. Lara came into the ward.
Yuri Andreevich and the lieutenant each recognized her on his own, without knowing about the other. She did not know either of them. She said:
“Good afternoon. Why is the window open? Aren’t you cold?”—and she went up to Galiullin. “What’s your complaint?” she asked and took his wrist to count the pulse, but at the same moment she let go of it and sat down on a chair by his cot, perplexed.
“How unexpected, Larissa Fyodorovna,” said Galiullin. “I served in the same regiment as your husband and knew Pavel Pavlovich. I have his belongings ready for you.”
“It can’t be, it can’t be,” she repeated. “What an amazing chance. So you knew him? Tell me quickly, how did it all happen? So he died buried under the earth? Don’t conceal anything, don’t be afraid. I know everything.”
Galiullin did not have the heart to confirm her information, which was based on rumors. He decided to lie in order to calm her.
“Antipov was taken prisoner,” he said. “He got too far ahead with his unit during an attack and found himself alone. They surrounded him. He was forced to surrender.”
But Lara did not believe Galiullin. The stunning suddenness of the conversation agitated her. She could not hold back the rising tears and did not want to cry in front of strangers. She got up quickly and left the ward, to regain her composure in the corridor.