After a moment she came back, outwardly calm. She deliberately did not look at Galiullin in the corner, so as not to start crying again. Going straight to Yuri Andreevich’s bed, she said absentmindedly and by rote:
“Good afternoon. What’s your complaint?”
Yuri Andreevich had observed her agitation and tears, wanted to ask her what was the matter, wanted to tell her how he had seen her twice in his life, as a schoolboy and as a university student, but he thought it would come out as too familiar and she would misunderstand him. Then he suddenly remembered the dead Anna Ivanovna in her coffin and Tonya’s cries that time in Sivtsev Vrazhek, restrained himself, and, instead of all that, said:
“Thank you. I’m a doctor myself, and I treat myself on my own. I have no need of anything.”
“Why is he offended with me?” Lara thought and looked in surprise at this snub-nosed, in no way remarkable stranger.
For several days there was changing, unstable weather, with a warm, endlessly muttering wind in the nights, which smelled of wet earth.
And all those days strange information came from headquarters, alarming rumors arrived from home, from inside the country. Telegraph connections with Petersburg kept being interrupted. Everywhere, at every corner, political conversations went on.
Each time she was on duty, the nurse Antipova made two rounds, in the morning and in the evening, and exchanged inconsequential remarks with patients in other wards, with Galiullin and Yuri Andreevich. “A strange, curious man,” she thought. “Young and unfriendly. Snub-nosed, and you couldn’t call him very handsome. But intelligent in the best sense of the word, with an alive, winning mind. But that’s not the point. The point is that I must quickly finish my obligations here and get transferred to Moscow, closer to Katenka. And in Moscow I must apply to be discharged as a nurse and go back home to Yuriatin, to my work at the school. It’s all clear about poor Patulechka, there’s no hope, and so there’s no more need to stay on as a heroine of the battlefield, the whole thing was cooked up for the sake of finding him.”
How is it there with Katenka now? Poor little orphan (here she began to cry). Some very sharp changes have been noticeable recently. Not long ago there was a sacred duty to the motherland, military valor, lofty social feelings. But the war is lost, that’s the main calamity, and all the rest comes from that, everything is dethroned, nothing is sacred.
Suddenly everything has changed, the tone, the air; you don’t know how to think or whom to listen to. As if you’ve been led all your life like a little child, and suddenly you’re let out—go, learn to walk by yourself. And there’s no one around, no family, no authority. Then you’d like to trust the main thing, the force of life, or beauty, or truth, so that it’s them and not the overturned human principles that guide you, fully and without regret, more fully than it used to be in that peaceful, habitual life that has gone down and been abolished. But in her case—Lara would catch herself in time—this purpose, this unconditional thing will be Katenka. Now, without Patulechka, Lara is only a mother and will give all her forces to Katenka, the poor little orphan.
Yuri Andreevich learned from a letter that Gordon and Dudorov had released his book without his permission, that it had been praised and a great literary future was prophesied for him, and that it was very interesting and alarming in Moscow now, the latent vexation of the lower classes was growing, we were on the eve of something important, serious political events were approaching.
It was late at night. Yuri Andreevich was overcome by a terrible sleepiness. He dozed off intermittently and fancied that, after the day’s excitement, he could not fall asleep, that he was not asleep. Outside the window, the sleepy, sleepily breathing wind kept yawning and tossing. The wind wept and prattled: “Tonya, Shurochka, how I miss you, how I want to be home, at work!” And to the muttering of the wind, Yuri Andreevich slept, woke up, and fell asleep in a quick succession of happiness and suffering, impetuous and alarming, like this changing weather, like this unstable night.
Lara thought: “He showed so much care, preserving this memory, these poor things of Patulechka’s, and I’m such a pig, I didn’t even ask who he is or where he’s from.”
During the next morning’s round, to make up for her omission and smooth over the traces of her ingratitude, she asked Galiullin about it all and kept saying “oh” and “ah.”
“Lord, holy is Thy will! Twenty-eight Brestskaya Street, the Tiverzins, the revolutionary winter of 1905! Yusupka? No, I didn’t know Yusupka, or I don’t remember, forgive me. But that year, that year and that courtyard! It’s true, there really was such a courtyard and such a year!” Oh, how vividly she suddenly felt it all again! And the shooting then, and (God, how did it go?) “Christ’s opinion!” Oh, how strongly, how keenly you feel as a child, for the first time! “Forgive me, forgive me, what is your name, Lieutenant? Yes, yes, you already told me once. Thank you, oh, how I thank you, Osip Gimazetdinovich, what memories, what thoughts you’ve awakened in me!”
All day she went about with “that courtyard” in her soul, and kept sighing and reflecting almost aloud.
Just think, twenty-eight Brestskaya! And now there’s shooting again, but so much more terrible! This is no “the boys are shooting” for you. The boys have grown up, and they’re all here, as soldiers, all simple people from those courtyards and from villages like this one. Amazing! Amazing!
Rapping with their canes and crutches, invalids and non-bedridden patients from other wards came, ran, and hobbled into the room, and started shouting at the same time:
“An event of extraordinary importance. Disorder in the streets of Petersburg. The troops of the Petersburg garrison have gone over to the side of the insurgents. Revolution.”
Part Five
FAREWELL TO THE OLD
1
The little town was called Meliuzeevo. It was in the black earth region.1 Over its roofs, like a swarm of locusts, hung the black dust raised by the troops and wagon trains that kept pouring through it. They moved from morning to evening in both directions, from the war and to the war, and it was impossible to say exactly whether it was still going on or was already over.
Each day, endlessly, like mushrooms, new functions sprang up. And they were elected to them all. Himself, Lieutenant Galiullin, and the nurse Antipova, and a few more persons from their group, all of them inhabitants of big cities, well-informed and worldly-wise people.
They filled posts in the town government, served as commissars in minor jobs in the army and in medical units, and looked upon these succeeding occupations as an outdoor amusement, like a game of tag. But more and more often they wanted to leave this tag and go home to their permanent occupations.
Work often and actively threw Zhivago and Antipova together.
2
In the rain, the black dust in the town turned to a dark brown slush of a coffee color, which covered its mostly unpaved streets.
It was not a big town. From any place in it, at each turn, the gloomy steppe, the dark sky, the vast expanses of the war, the vast expanses of the revolution opened out.
Yuri Andreevich wrote to his wife:
“The disorganization and anarchy in the army continue. Measures are being taken to improve the discipline and martial spirit of the soldiers. I made a tour of the units stationed nearby.
“Finally, instead of a postscript, though I might have written you about this much earlier—I work here alongside a certain Antipova, a nurse from Moscow, born in the Urals.