“But now, take it and like it. This unprecedented thing, this miracle of history, this revelation comes bang in the very thick of the ongoing everydayness, with no heed to its course. It begins not from the beginning but from the middle, without choosing the dates beforehand, on the first weekday to come along, at the very peak of tramways plying the city. That’s real genius. Only what is greatest can be so inappropriate and untimely.”
9
Winter came, precisely as had been predicted. It was not yet as scary as the two that followed it, but was already of their kind, dark, hungry, and cold, all a breaking up of the habitual and a rebuilding of the foundations of existence, all an inhuman effort to hold on to life as it slipped away.
There were three of them in a row, these dreadful winters, one after another, and not all that now seems to have happened in the year of 1917 to 1918 actually happened then, but may have taken place later. These successive winters merged together and it was hard to tell one from another.
The old life and the new order did not yet coincide. There was no sharp hostility between them, as a year later in the time of the civil war,12 but there was insufficient connection. They were two sides, standing apart, one facing the other, and not overlapping each other.
Administrative re-elections were held everywhere: in house committees, in organizations, at work, in public service institutions. Their makeup was changing. Commissars with unlimited power were appointed everywhere, people of iron will, in black leather jackets, armed with means of intimidation and with revolvers, who rarely shaved and still more rarely slept.
They were well acquainted with the petty bourgeois breed, the average holder of small government bonds, the groveling conformist, and never spared him, talking to him with a Mephistophelean smirk, as with a pilferer caught in the act.
These people controlled everything as the program dictated, and enterprise after enterprise, association after association became Bolshevik.
The Krestovozdvizhensky Hospital was now called the Second Reformed. Changes took place in it. Some of the personnel were fired, but many left on their own, finding the job unprofitable. These were well-paid doctors with a fashionable practice, darlings of society, phrase mongers and fine talkers. They did not fail to present their leaving out of mercenary considerations as a demonstration from civic motives, and they began to behave slightingly towards those who stayed, all but to boycott them. Zhivago was one of those scorned ones who stayed.
In the evenings the following conversations would take place between husband and wife:
“Don’t forget to go to the basement of the Medical Society on Wednesday for frozen potatoes. There are two sacks there. I’ll find out exactly what time I’ll be free, so that I can help you. We must do it together on a sled.”
“All right. There’s no rush, Yurochka. You should go to bed quickly. It’s late. The chores won’t all get done anyway. You need rest.”
“There’s a widespread epidemic. General exhaustion weakens resistance. It’s frightening to look at you and papa. Something must be done. Yes, but what precisely? We’re not cautious enough. We must be more careful. Listen. Are you asleep?”
“No.”
“I’m not afraid for myself, I’m sturdy enough, but if, contrary to all expectation, I should come down with something, please don’t be silly and keep me at home. Take me to the hospital instantly.”
“What are you saying, Yurochka! God help you. Why croak of doom?”
“Remember, there are neither honest people nor friends anymore. Still less anyone knowledgeable. If something happens, trust only Pichuzhkin. If he himself stays in one piece, of course. Are you asleep?”
“No.”
“The devils, they went where the rations are better, and now it turns out it was civic feelings, principles. We meet, and they barely shake hands. ‘You work with them?’ And they raise their eyebrows. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘and don’t take it amiss, but I’m proud of our privations, and I respect the people who honor us by subjecting us to these privations.’ ”
10
For a long period the invariable food of the majority was boiled millet and fish soup made from herring heads. The bodies of the herring were fried as a second course. People ate unground rye and wheat. They boiled the grain into a porridge.
A professor’s wife whom Antonina Alexandrovna knew taught her to bake boiled dough bread on the bottom of a Dutch heating stove, partly for sale, so that the extra and the income from it would justify using the tile stove as in the old days. This would enable them to give up the tormenting iron stove, which smoked, heated poorly, and did not retain its warmth at all.
Antonina Alexandrovna baked very good bread, but nothing came of her commerce. She had to sacrifice her unrealizable plans and bring the dismissed little stove back into action. The Zhivagos lived in want.
One morning Yuri Andreevich left for work as usual. There were two pieces of wood left in the house. Putting on a little winter coat, in which she shivered from weakness even in warm weather, Antonina Alexandrovna went out “for booty.”
She spent about half an hour wandering the nearby lanes, where muzhiks sometimes turned up from their suburban villages with vegetables and potatoes. You had to catch them. Peasants carrying loads were arrested.
She soon came upon the goal of her search. A stalwart young fellow in a peasant coat, walking in company with Antonina Alexandrovna beside a light, toylike sleigh, warily led it around the corner to the Gromekos’ courtyard.
In the bast body of the sleigh, under a mat, lay a small heap of birch rounds, no thicker than the old-fashioned banisters in photographs from the last century. Antonina Alexandrovna knew what they were worth—birch in name only, it was stuff of the worst sort, freshly cut, unsuitable for heating. But there was no choice, she could not argue.
The young peasant made five or six trips upstairs carrying the wretched logs, and in exchange dragged Antonina Alexandrovna’s small mirrored wardrobe downstairs and loaded it on the sleigh as a present for his young wife. In passing, as they made future arrangements about potatoes, he asked the price of the piano standing by the door.
On his return, Yuri Andreevich did not discuss his wife’s purchase. To chop the given-away wardrobe to splinters would have been more profitable and expedient, but they could not have brought themselves to do it.
“Did you see the note on the desk?” asked his wife.
“From the head of the hospital? They spoke to me, I know about it. It’s a call to a sick woman. I’ll certainly go. I’ll just rest a little and go. It’s quite far. Somewhere by the Triumphal Arch. I wrote down the address.”
“They’re offering a strange honorarium. Did you see? Read it anyway. A bottle of German cognac or a pair of lady’s stockings for the visit. Some enticement! Who can it be? Bad tone, and total ignorance of our present-day life. Nouveaux riches of some sort.”
“Yes, a state purveyor.”
Along with concessionaires and authorized agents, this title was used to designate small private entrepreneurs, for whom the state authorities, having abolished private trade, made small allowances at moments of economic crisis, concluding contracts and deals with them for various provisions.
Their number did not include the fallen heads of old firms, proprietors on a grand scale. They never recovered from the blow they received. Into this category fell the ephemeral dealers, stirred up from the bottom by war and revolution, new and alien people without roots.
After drinking boiled water with saccharine, whitened by milk, the doctor went to the sick woman.
The sidewalks and roadways were buried under deep snow, which covered the streets from one row of houses to the other. In places the covering of snow reached the ground-floor windows. Across the whole width of this space moved silent, half-alive shadows, lugging some sort of meager provisions on their backs or pulling them on sleds. Almost no one drove.