and go soon.”
“Just half an hour more.”
“With pleasure.”
15
“And now—frankness for frankness. Strelnikov, whom you told about, is my husband Pasha, Pavel Pavlovich Antipov, whom I went to the front in search of and in whose imaginary death I so rightly refused to believe.”
“I’m not shocked and have been prepared. I’ve heard that fable and consider it nonsense. That’s why I forgot myself to such an extent that I spoke to you so freely and incautiously about him, as if this gossip didn’t exist. But these rumors are senseless. I saw the man. How could he be connected with you? What do you have in common?”
“And all the same it’s so, Yuri Andreevich. Strelnikov is Antipov, my husband. I agree with the general opinion. Katenka also knows it and is proud of her father. Strelnikov is his assumed name, a pseudonym, as with all revolutionary activists. For certain considerations, he must live and act under a different name.
“He took Yuriatin, poured shells on us, knew that we were here, never once asked if we were alive, so as not to violate his secret. That was his duty, of course. If he had asked us how to act, we would have advised him to do the same. You could also say that my immunity, the acceptable living quarters given me by the city council, and so on, are indirect proofs of his secret caring for us! All the same, you won’t persuade me of it. To be right here and resist the temptation to see us! My mind refuses to grasp that, it’s beyond my understanding. It’s something inaccessible to me—not life, but some Roman civic valor, one of the clever notions of today. But I’m falling under your influence and beginning to sing your tune. I wouldn’t want that. You and I are not of one mind. We may understand some elusive, optional thing in the same way. But in matters of broad significance, in philosophy of life, it’s better for us to be opponents. But let’s get back to Strelnikov. He’s in Siberia now, and you’re right, information about criticism of him, which chills my heart, has reached me, too. He’s in Siberia, at one of our advanced positions, in the process of defeating his courtyard friend and later frontline comrade, poor Galiullin, for whom his name and his marriage to me are no secret, and who, in his priceless delicacy, has never let me feel it, though he storms and rages and goes out of his mind at the mention of Strelnikov. Yes, well, so he’s now in Siberia.
“And while he was here (he spent a long time here and lived on the railway, in the car of a train, where you saw him), I kept trying to run into him accidentally, unexpectedly. He sometimes went to headquarters, housed where the military command of the Komuch, the army of the Constituent Assembly, used to be. And—strange trick of fate—the entrance to the headquarters was in the same wing where Galiullin used to receive me when I came to solicit for others. For instance, there was an incident in the cadet corps that made a lot of noise, the cadets began to ambush and shoot objectionable teachers on the pretext of their adherence to Bolshevism. Or when the persecution and slaughter of the Jews began. By the way. If we’re city dwellers and people doing intellectual work, half of our acquaintances are from their number. And in such periods of pogroms, when these horrors and abominations begin, we’re hounded, not only by indignation, shame, and pity, but by an oppressive feeling of duplicity, that our sympathy is half cerebral, with an unpleasant, insincere aftertaste.
“The people who once delivered mankind from the yoke of paganism, and have now devoted themselves in such great numbers to freeing it from social evil, are powerless to free themselves from themselves, from being faithful to an outlived, antediluvian designation, which has lost its meaning; they cannot rise above themselves and dissolve without a trace among others, whose religious foundations they themselves laid, and who would be so close to them if only they knew them better.
“Persecution and victimization probably oblige them to adopt this useless and ruinous pose, this shamefaced, self-denying isolation, which brings nothing but calamities, but there is also an inner decrepitude in it, many centuries of historical fatigue. I don’t like their ironic self-encouragement, humdrum poverty of notions, timorous imagination. It’s as irritating as old people talking about old age and sick people about sickness. Do you agree?”
“I haven’t thought about it. I have a friend, a certain Gordon, who is of the same opinion.”
“So I went there to watch for Pasha. In hopes of his coming or going. The governor-general’s office used to be in the wing. Now there’s a plaque on the door: ‘Complaints Bureau.’ Maybe you’ve seen it? It’s the most beautiful place in the city. The square in front of the door is paved with cut stone. Across the square is the city garden. Viburnums, maples, hawthorns. I stood on the sidewalk in the group of petitioners and waited. Naturally, I didn’t try to force my way in, I didn’t tell them I was his wife. Anyway, our last names aren’t the same. What has the voice of the heart got to do with it? Their rules are completely different. For instance, his own father, Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov, a worker and a former political exile, works in the court here, somewhere quite close by, just down the highway. In the place of his earlier exile. So does his friend Tiverzin. They’re members of the revolutionary tribunal. And what do you think? The son doesn’t reveal himself to the father either, and the father accepts it as proper, does not get offended. If the son is a cipher, it means nothing doing. They’re flint, not people. Principles. Discipline.
“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
