“Larissa Fyodorovna!”
“By what miracle? By what chance?”
“Put your buckets down. I’ll carry them.”
“I never turn back halfway, never abandon what I’ve started. If you’ve come to me, let’s go.”
“And to whom else?”
“Who knows with you?”
“Anyway, let me take the yoke from your shoulders. I can’t stand idle while you work.”
“Work, is it! I won’t let you. You’ll splash water all over the stairs. Better tell me what wind blew you here. You’ve been around for more than a year, and still couldn’t decide, couldn’t find time?”
“How do you know?”
“Word gets around. And I saw you, finally, in the library.”
“Why didn’t you call out to me?”
“You won’t make me believe you didn’t see me yourself.”
Following Larissa Fyodorovna, who was swaying slightly under the swaying buckets, the doctor stepped under the low archway. This was the back entrance to the ground floor. Here, quickly squatting down, Larissa Fyodorovna set the buckets on the dirt floor, freed her shoulders from the yoke, straightened up, and began to wipe her hands with a little handkerchief she took from no one knows where.
“Come, I’ll take you, there’s an inner passage to the front entrance. It’s light there. You can wait there. And I’ll take the water up the back way, tidy things upstairs a little, change my clothes. See what sort of stairs we’ve got. Cast-iron steps with an openwork design. You can see everything through them from above. It’s an old house. It got jolted a bit during the days of the shelling. There was artillery fire. See, the stones have separated. There are holes, openings between the bricks. Katenka and I put the key to the apartment into this hole and cover it with a brick when we leave. Keep that in mind. You may come one day and not find me here, and then you’re welcome to open the door, come in, make yourself at home. And meanwhile I’ll come back. It’s here now, the key. But I don’t need it. I’ll go in from the back and open the door from inside. The one trouble is the rats. Hordes and hordes, there’s no getting rid of them. They jump all over us. The structure’s decrepit, the walls are shaky, there are cracks everywhere. Where I can, I plug them, I fight. It doesn’t do much good. Maybe someday you’ll come by and help me? Together we can bush up the floors and plinths. Hm? Well, stay on the landing, think about something. I won’t let you languish long, I’ll call you soon.”
Waiting to be called, Yuri Andreevich let his eyes wander over the peeling walls of the entrance and the cast-iron steps of the stairs. He was thinking: “In the reading room I compared the eagerness of her reading with the passion and ardor of actually doing something, of physical work. And, on the contrary, she carries water lightly, effortlessly, as if she were reading. She has this facility in everything. As if she had picked up the momentum for life way back in her childhood, and now everything is done with that momentum, of itself, with the ease of an ensuing consequence. She has it in the line of her back when she bends over, and in the smile that parts her lips and rounds her chin, and in her words and thoughts.”
“Zhivago!” rang out from the doorway of an apartment on the upper landing. The doctor went upstairs.
14
“Give me your hand and follow me obediently. There will be two rooms here where it’s dark and things are piled to the ceiling. You’ll stumble and hurt yourself.”
“True, it’s a sort of labyrinth. I wouldn’t find my way. Why’s that? Are you redoing the apartment?”
“Oh, no, not at all. It’s somebody else’s apartment. I don’t even know whose. We used to have our own, a government one, in the school building. When the building was taken over by the housing office of the Yuriatin City Council, they moved me and my daughter into part of this abandoned one. There were leftovers from the former owners. A lot of furniture. I don’t need other people’s belongings. I put all their things in these two rooms and whitewashed the windows. Don’t let go of my hand or you’ll get lost. That’s it. To the right. Now the jungle’s behind us. This is my door. There’ll be more light. The threshold. Don’t trip.”
When Yuri Andreevich went into the room with his guide, there turned out to be a window in the wall facing the door. The doctor was struck by what he saw through it. The window gave onto the courtyard of the house, onto the backs of the neighboring houses and the vacant lots by the river. Sheep and goats were grazing on them, sweeping the dust with their long wool as if with the skirts of unbuttoned coats. Besides, there was on them, facing the window, perched on two posts, a billboard familiar to the doctor: “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers.”
Under the influence of seeing the billboard, the doctor began from the first word to describe for Larissa Fyodorovna his arrival in the Urals with his family. He forgot about the rumor that identified Strelnikov with her husband and, without thinking, told her about his encounter with the commissar on the train. This part of the story made a special impression on Larissa Fyodorovna.
“You’ve seen Strelnikov?!” she asked quickly. “I won’t tell you any more right now. But how portentous! Simply some sort of predestination that you had to meet. I’ll explain to you after a while, you’ll simply gasp. If I’ve understood you rightly, he made a favorable impression on you rather than otherwise?”
“Yes, perhaps so. He ought to have repelled me. We passed through the areas of his reprisals and destructions. I expected to meet a brutal soldier or a murderous revolutionary maniac, and found neither the one nor the other. It’s good when a man deceives your expectations, when he doesn’t correspond to the preconceived notion of him. To belong to a type is the end of a man, his condemnation. If he doesn’t fall under any category, if he’s not representative, half of what’s demanded of him is there. He’s free of himself, he has achieved a grain of immortality.”
“They say he’s not a party member.”
“Yes, so it seems. What makes him so winning? He’s a doomed man. I think he’ll end badly. He’ll pay for the evil he’s brought about. The arbitrariness of the revolutionaries is terrible not because they’re villains, but because it’s a mechanism out of control, like a machine that’s gone off the rails. Strelnikov is as mad as they are, but he went crazy not from books, but from something he lived and suffered through. I don’t know his secret, but I’m certain he has one. His alliance with the Bolsheviks is accidental. As long as they need him, they’ll tolerate him, they’re going the same way. But the moment that need passes, they’ll cast him aside with no regret and trample on him, like so many military specialists before him.”
“You think so?”
“Absolutely.”
“But is there really no salvation for him? In flight, for instance?”
“Where to, Larissa Fyodorovna? That was before, under the tsars. Try doing it now.”
“Too bad. Your story has made me feel sympathy for him. But you’ve changed. Before, your judgment of the revolution wasn’t so sharp, so irritated.”
“That’s just the point, Larissa Fyodorovna, that there are limits to everything. There’s been time enough for them to arrive at something. But it turns out that for the inspirers of the revolution the turmoil of changes and rearrangements is their only native element, that they won’t settle for less than something on a global scale. The building of worlds, transitional periods—for them this is an end in itself. They haven’t studied anything else, they don’t know how to do anything. And do you know where this bustle of eternal preparations comes from? From the lack of definite, ready abilities, from giftlessness. Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. And life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so thrillingly serious! Why then substitute for it a childish harlequinade of immature inventions, these escapes of Chekhovian schoolboys to America?9 But enough. Now it’s my turn to ask. We were approaching the city on the morning of your coup. Was it a big mess for you then?”