“So my typhus hour has struck,” joked Yuri Andreevich, and he told his family about the sick woman and her chimes.
14
But he came down with typhus much later. In the meantime, the distress of the Zhivago family reached the limit. They were in want and were perishing. Yuri Andreevich sought out the party man he had once saved, the robbery victim. He did all he could for the doctor. However, the civil war had begun. His protector was traveling all the time. Besides, in accordance with his convictions, the man considered the hardships of the time natural and concealed the fact that he himself was starving.
Yuri Andreevich tried turning to the purveyor by the Tver Gate. But in the months that had passed, even his tracks had grown cold, and of his wife, who had recovered, there was nothing to be heard. The complement of tenants in the house had changed. Demina was at the front, the manager Galiullina was not there when Yuri Andreevich came.
Once by means of a coupon he received firewood at the official price, but had to transport it from the Vindava Station. He accompanied the driver and his nag, hauling this unexpected wealth down the endless Meshchanskaya Street. Suddenly the doctor noticed that Meshchanskaya had ceased somehow to be Meshchanskaya, that he was reeling and his legs would not support him. He realized that he was in for it, things were bad, and it was typhus. The driver picked up the fallen man. The doctor did not remember how they brought him home, somehow placed on top of the firewood.
15
He was delirious for two weeks with some breaks. He dreamed that Tonya put the two Sadovaya streets on his desk, Sadovaya-Karetnaya to the left and Sadovaya-Triumphalnaya to the right, and moved his desk lamp close to them, hot, searching, orange. The streets became light. He could work. And now he is writing.
He is writing heatedly and with extraordinary success something he had always wanted to write and should long ago have written, but never could, and now it is coming out well. And only occasionally is he hindered by a boy with narrow Kirghiz eyes, in an unbuttoned reindeer coat like they wear in Siberia or the Urals.
It is perfectly clear that this boy is the spirit of his death, or, to put it simply, is his death. But how can he be death, when he is helping him to write a poem, can there be any benefit from death, can there be any help from death?
He is writing a poem not about the Resurrection and not about the Entombment, but about the days that passed between the one and the other. He is writing the poem “Disarray.”
He had always wanted to describe how, in the course of three days, a storm of black, wormy earth besieges, assaults the immortal incarnation of love, hurling itself at him with its clods and lumps, just as the breaking waves of the sea come rushing at the coast and bury it. How for three days the black earthy storm rages, advances, and recedes.
And two rhymed lines kept pursuing him: “Glad to take up” and “Have to wake up.”
Hell, and decay, and decomposition, and death are glad to take up, and yet, together with them, spring, and Mary Magdalene,13 and life are also glad to take up. And—have to wake up. He has to wake up and rise. He has to resurrect.
16
He began to recover. At first, blissfully, he sought no connections between things, he admitted everything, remembered nothing, was surprised at nothing. His wife fed him white bread and butter, gave him tea with sugar, made him coffee. He forgot that this was impossible now and was glad of the tasty food, as of poetry and fairy tales, which were lawful and admissible in convalescence. But when he began to reflect for the first time, he asked his wife:
“Where did you get it?”
“All from your Granya.”
“What Granya?”
“Granya Zhivago.”
“Granya Zhivago?”
“Why, yes, your brother Evgraf, from Omsk. Your half brother. While you were lying unconscious, he kept visiting us.”
“In a reindeer coat?”
“Yes, yes. So you noticed him through your unconsciousness? He ran into you on the stairs of some house, I know, he told me. He knew it was you and wanted to introduce himself, but you put a scare into him! He adores you, can’t read enough of you. He digs up such things! Rice, raisins, sugar! He’s gone back to his parts. And he’s calling us there. He’s so strange, mysterious. I think he has some sort of love affair with the authorities. He says we should leave the big city for a year or two, ‘to sit on the earth.’ I asked his advice about the Krügers’ place. He strongly recommends it. So that we could have a kitchen garden and a forest nearby. We can’t just perish so obediently, like sheep.”
In April of that year the whole Zhivago family set out for the far-off Urals, to the former estate of Varykino near the town of Yuriatin.
Part Seven
ON THE WAY
1
The last days of March came, days of the first warmth, false harbingers of spring, after which each year an intense cold spell sets in.
In the Gromeko house hurried preparations were being made for the journey. To the numerous inhabitants, whose density in the house was now greater than that of sparrows in the street, this bustle was explained as a general cleaning before Easter.
Yuri Andreevich was against the trip. He did not interfere with the preparations, because he considered the undertaking unfeasible and hoped that at the decisive moment it would fall through. But the thing moved ahead and was near completion. The time came to talk seriously.
He once again expressed his doubts to his wife and father-in-law at a family council especially organized for that purpose.
“So you think I’m not right, and, consequently, we’re going?” he concluded his objections. His wife took the floor:
“You say, weather it out for a year or two, during that time new land regulations will be established, it will be possible to ask for a piece of land near Moscow and start a kitchen garden. But how to survive in the meantime, you don’t suggest. Yet that is the most interesting thing, that is precisely what it would be desirable to hear.”
“Absolute raving,” Alexander Alexandrovich supported his daughter.
“Very well, I surrender,” Yuri Andreevich agreed. “The only thing that pulls me up short is the total uncertainty. We set out, eyes shut, for we don’t know where, not having the least notion of the place. Of three persons who lived in Varykino, two, mama and grandmother, are no longer alive, and the third, Grandfather Krüger, if he’s alive, is being held hostage and behind bars.
“In the last year of the war, he did something with the forests and factories, sold them for the sake of appearances to some straw man, or to some bank, or signed them away conditionally to someone. What do we know about that deal? Whose land is it now—that is, not in the sense of property, I don’t care, but who is responsible for it? What department? Are they cutting the forest? Are the factories working? Finally, who is in power there, and who will be by the time we get there?
“For you, the safety anchor is Mikulitsyn, whose name you like so much to repeat. But who told you that the old manager is still alive and still in Varykino? And what do we know about him, except that grandfather had difficulty pronouncing his name, which is why we remember it?
“But why argue? You’re set on going. I’m with you. We must find out how it’s done now. There’s no point in putting it off.”
2
Yuri Andreevich went to the Yaroslavsky train station to make inquiries about it.
The flow of departing people was contained by a boardwalk with handrails laid across the halls, on the stone floors of which lay people in gray overcoats, who tossed and turned, coughed and spat, and when they talked to each other, each time it was incongruously loudly, not taking into account the force with which their voices resounded under the echoing vaults.