“And, finally, if I proved that I was his wife, it’s no big deal! What have wives got to do with it? Is it the time for such things? The world proletariat, the remaking of the universe—that’s something else, that I understand. But an individual biped of some wifely sort, pah! It’s just some last little flea or louse!
“An adjutant went around asking questions. He let a few people in. I didn’t tell him my last name, and to the question about my business answered that it was personal. You could tell beforehand that it was a lost cause, a nonsuit. The adjutant shrugged his shoulders and looked at me suspiciously. So I never saw him even once.
“And you think he disdains us, doesn’t love us, doesn’t remember? Oh, on the contrary! I know him too well! He planned it this way from an excess of feeling! He needs to lay all these military laurels at our feet, so as not to come back empty-handed, but all in glory, a conqueror! To immortalize, to bedazzle us! Like a child!”
Katenka came into the room again. Larissa Fyodorovna took the bewildered little girl in her arms, began to rock her, tickle her, kiss her, and smothered her in her embrace.
16
Yuri Andreevich was returning on horseback from the city to Varykino. He had passed these places countless times. He was used to the road, had grown insensitive to it, did not notice it.
He was nearing the intersection in the forest where a side road to the fishing village of Vassilievskoe, on the Sakma River, branched off from the straight way to Varykino. At the place where they divided stood the third post in the area displaying an agricultural advertisement. Near this crossroads, the doctor was usually overtaken by the sunset. Now, too, night was falling.
It was over two months since, on one of his visits to town, he had not returned home in the evening, but had stayed with Larissa Fyodorovna, and said at home that he had been kept in town on business and had spent the night at Samdevyatov’s inn. He had long been on familiar terms with Antipova and called her Lara, though she called him Zhivago. Yuri Andreevich was deceiving Tonya and was concealing ever more grave and inadmissible things from her. This was unheard-of.
He loved Tonya to the point of adoration. The peace of her soul, her tranquillity, were dearer to him than anything in the world. He stood staunchly for her honor, more than her own father or than she herself. In defense of her wounded pride he would have torn the offender to pieces with his own hands. And here that offender was he himself.
At home, in his family circle, he felt like an unexposed criminal. The ignorance of the household, their habitual affability, killed him. In the midst of a general conversation, he would suddenly remember his guilt, freeze, and no longer hear or understand anything around him.
If this happened at the table, the swallowed bite stuck in his throat, he set his spoon aside, pushed the plate away. Tears choked him. “What’s the matter?” Tonya would ask in perplexity. “You must have found out something bad in the city? Somebody’s been sent to prison? Or shot? Tell me. Don’t be afraid of upsetting me. You’ll feel better.”
Had he betrayed Tonya, had he preferred someone else to her? No, he had not chosen anyone, had not compared. Ideas of “free love,” words like “the rights and demands of feeling,” were foreign to him. To talk and think of such things seemed vulgar to him. In his life he had never gathered any “flowers of pleasure,” had not counted himself among the demigods or supermen, had demanded no special benefits or advantages for himself. He was breaking down under the burden of an unclean conscience.
“What will happen further on?” he sometimes asked himself and, finding no answer, hoped for something unfeasible, for the interference of some unforeseen circumstances that would bring a resolution.
But now it was not so. He had decided to cut this knot by force. He was bringing home a ready solution. He had decided to confess everything to Tonya, to beg her forgiveness, and not to see Lara anymore.
True, not everything was smooth here. It remained insufficiently clear, as it now seemed to him, that he was breaking with Lara forever, for all eternity. That morning he had announced to her his wish to reveal everything to Tonya and the impossibility of further meetings, but he now had the feeling that he had said it to her too mildly, not resolutely enough.
Larissa Fyodorovna had not wanted to upset Yuri Andreevich with painful scenes. She understood how much he was suffering even without that. She tried to listen to his news as calmly as possible. Their talk took place in the empty room of the former owners, unused by Larissa Fyodorovna, which gave onto Kupecheskaya. Unfelt, unbeknownst to her, tears flowed down Lara’s cheeks, like the rainwater that now poured down the faces of the stone statues opposite, on the house with figures. Sincerely, without affected magnanimity, she repeated quietly: “Do what’s better for you, don’t think about me. I’ll get over it all.” And she did not know she was crying, and did not wipe her tears.
At the thought that Larissa Fyodorovna had misunderstood him and that he had left her in delusion, with false hopes, he was ready to turn and gallop back to the city, to finish what had been left unsaid, and above all to take leave of her much more ardently and tenderly, in greater accordance with what was to be a real parting for their whole lives, forever. He barely controlled himself and continued on his way.
As the sun went down, the forest became filled with cold and darkness. It began to smell of the leafy dampness of a steamed besom, as on going into a bathhouse. Motionless in the air, like floats on the water, spread hanging swarms of mosquitoes, whining in high-pitched unison, all on one note. Yuri Andreevich swatted countless numbers of them on his forehead and neck, and the resounding slaps of his palm on his sweaty body responded amazingly to the other sounds of his riding: the creaking of the saddle girths, the ponderous thud of hooves glancing, swiping, through the squelching mud, and the dry, popping salvos emitted by the horse’s guts. Suddenly, in the distance, where the sunset had gotten stuck, a nightingale began to trill.
“A-wake! A-wake!” it called and entreated, and it sounded almost like before Easter: “My soul, my soul! Arise, why are you sleeping!”10
Suddenly a very simple thought dawned on Yuri Andreevich. What’s the hurry? He would not go back on the word he had given himself. The exposure would be made. But where was it said that it must take place today? Nothing had been declared to Tonya yet. It was not too late to put off the explanation till next time. Meanwhile he would go to the city once more. The conversation with Lara would be brought to an end, with the depth and sincerity that redeem all suffering. Oh, how good! How wonderful! How astonishing that it had not occurred to him before!