“But, first, the ideas of general improvement, as they’ve been understood since October, don’t set me on fire. Second, it’s all still so far from realization, while the mere talk about it has been paid for with such seas of blood that I don’t think the end justifies the means. Third, and this is the main thing, when I hear about the remaking of life, I lose control of myself and fall into despair.
“The remaking of life! People who can reason like that may have been around, but they’ve never once known life, never felt its spirit, its soul. For them existence is a lump of coarse material, not yet ennobled by their touch, in need of being processed by them. But life has never been a material, a substance. It is, if you want to know, a continually self-renewing, eternally self-recreating principle, it eternally alters and transforms itself, it is far above your and my dim-witted theories.”
“And yet attending meetings and socializing with our splendid, wonderful people would, I dare say, raise your spirits. You wouldn’t fall into melancholy. I know where it comes from. You’re depressed that they’re beating us and you don’t see any light ahead. But, my friend, one must never give way to panic. I know things that are much more terrible, concerning me personally—they’re not to be made public for now—and yet I don’t lose heart. Our failures are of a temporary nature. Kolchak’s downfall is inevitable. Remember my words. You’ll see. We’ll win. So take heart.”
“No, this is beyond anything!” the doctor thought. “What infantilism! What shortsightedness! I endlessly repeat to him about the opposition of our views, he took me by force and keeps me with him by force, and he imagines that his failures should upset me, and his calculations and hopes should fill me with high spirits. What self- blindness! The interests of the revolution and the existence of the solar system are the same for him.”
Yuri Andreevich cringed. He made no reply and only shrugged his shoulders, not even trying to conceal that Liberius’s naivete had overflowed the measure of his patience and he could hardly control himself. That did not escape Liberius.
“You are angry, Jupiter, therefore you are wrong,” he said.
“Understand, understand, finally, that all this is not for me. ‘Jupiter,’ ‘Don’t give way to panic,’ ‘Whoever says A must say B,’ ‘The Moor has done his work, the Moor can go’5—all these banalities, all these phrases are not for me. I’ll say A, but I won’t say B, even if you burst. I grant that you’re all bright lights and liberators of Russia, that without you she would perish, drowned in poverty and ignorance, and nevertheless I can’t be bothered with you, and I spit on you, I don’t like you, and you can all go to the devil.
“The rulers of your minds indulge in proverbs, but they’ve forgotten the main one, that love cannot be forced, and they have a deeply rooted habit of liberating people and making them happy, especially those who haven’t asked for it. You probably fancy that there’s no better place in the world for me than your camp and your company. I probably should even bless you and thank you for my captivity, for your having liberated me from my family, my son, my home, my work, from everything that’s dear to me and that I live by.
“Rumors have reached us of the invasion of Varykino by an unknown, non-Russian unit. They say it’s been devastated and looted. Kamennodvorsky doesn’t deny it. My family and yours supposedly managed to escape. Some mythical slant-eyed people in quilted jackets and papakhas crossed the ice of the Rynva in a terrible frost, and, without an ill word spoken, shot everything alive in the village, and then vanished as mysteriously as they appeared. What do you know about it? Is it true?”
“Nonsense. Made up. Unverified gibberish spread by gossip mongers.”
“If you’re as kind and magnanimous as you are in your exhortations about the moral education of the soldiers, set me free. I’ll go in search of my family—I don’t even know if they’re alive or where they are. And if not, then please stop talking and leave me alone, because all the rest is uninteresting to me, and I can’t answer for myself. And, finally, devil take it, don’t I have the right simply to want to sleep?”
Yuri Andreevich lay prone on the bunk, his face in the pillow. He tried as hard as he could not to listen to Liberius justifying himself, continuing to reassure him that by spring the Whites would certainly be crushed. The civil war would be over, there would be freedom, prosperity, and peace. Then no one would dare to keep the doctor. But until then he had to bear with it. After all they had endured, after so many sacrifices and so much waiting, they would not have long to wait now. And where would the doctor go? For his own sake it was impossible right now to let him go anywhere.
“He keeps grinding away, the devil! Giving his tongue a workout! How can he not be ashamed to chew the same cud for so many years?” Yuri Andreevich sighed to himself in indignation. “He loves listening to himself, the golden-tongue, the wretched dope addict. Night isn’t night for him, there’s no sleep, no life where he is, curse him. Oh, how I hate him! As God is my witness, I’ll kill him some day.
“Oh, Tonya, my poor girl! Are you alive? Where are you? Lord, she must have given birth long ago! How did the delivery go? Who have we got, a boy or a girl? My dear ones, how are you all? Tonya, my eternal reproach and my guilt! Lara, I’m afraid to name you, so as not to breathe out my soul along with your name. Lord! Lord! And this one here keeps speechifying, he won’t shut up, the hateful, unfeeling brute! Oh, someday I’ll lose control and kill him, kill him.”
6
Indian summer was over. The clear days of golden autumn set in. The little wooden tower of the volunteers’ undestroyed blockhouse jutted up from the ground in the western corner of Fox Point. It was there that Yuri Andreevich had arranged to meet his assistant, Dr. Lajos, to discuss some general matters. Yuri Andreevich went there at the appointed time. While waiting for his colleague, he began pacing the dirt rim of the collapsed entrenchment, went up and into the watchtower, and looked through the empty loopholes of the machine-gun nest at the forest spreading beyond the river into the distance.
Autumn had already sharply marked the boundary between the coniferous and deciduous worlds in the forest. The first bristled in its depths like a gloomy, almost black wall; the second shone through the open spaces in fiery, wine-colored patches, like an ancient town with a fortress and gold-topped towers, built in the thick of the forest from its own timber.
The earth in the ditch, under the doctor’s feet, and in the ruts of the forest road, chilled and hardened by the morning frost, was thickly strewn and choked with fallen willow leaves, dry, small, as if clipped, rolled into little tubes. Autumn smelled of those bitter brown leaves and of a multitude of other seasonings. Yuri Andreevich greedily breathed in the complex spiciness of ice-cold preserved apples, bitter dryness, sweet dampness, and blue September fumes, reminiscent of the smoky steam of a campfire doused with water or a just-extinguished blaze.
Yuri Andreevich did not notice how Lajos came up to him from behind.
“Greetings, colleague,” he said in German. They got down to business.
“We have three points. The moonshiners, the reorganization of the infirmary and the pharmacy, and third, at my insistence, the treatment of mental illnesses out of hospital, in field conditions. Maybe you don’t see the need for it, but, from my observations, we’re going out of our minds, my dear Lajos, and the modern sorts of madness take on an infectious, contagious form.”
