At the corner stood the dark gray house with figures. The huge quadrangular stones of its foundation, cut on a slant, were blackened with freshly pasted-up issues of government newspapers, government decrees and resolutions. Stopping for a long time on the sidewalk, small groups of passersby silently read this literature.
It was dry after the recent thaw. Turning cold. The frost was noticeably hardening. It was quite light at a time when, just recently, it would have been getting dark. Winter had recently departed. The emptiness of the vacated space was filled with light, which would not go away and lingered through the evenings. It stirred you, drew you into the distance, frightened and alerted you.
The Whites had recently left the town, surrendering it to the Reds. The shooting, the bloodshed, the military alarms were over. That, too, frightened and alerted you, like the departure of winter and the augmentation of the spring days.
The notice that the passersby in the street read by the light of the lengthened day announced:
“For the information of the populace. Work booklets for those eligible can be obtained for 50 rubles each in the Provisions Section of the Yuriatin City Council, at 5 Oktiabrskaya, formerly General-gubernatorskaya, Street, room 137.
“Nonpossession of a work booklet, or incorrect or, still more so, false entries, will be punished with full wartime severity. Precise instructions for the use of work booklets are published in the B.Y.E.C., No. 86 (1013), of the current year and posted in the Provisions Section of the Yuriatin City Council, room 137.”
Another announcement reported on the sufficiency of food supplies available in the city, though they had supposedly been concealed by the bourgeoisie in order to disorganize distribution and sow chaos in the matter of provisioning. The announcement ended with the words:
“Those caught hoarding and concealing food supplies will be shot on the spot.”
A third announcement offered:
“In the interests of the correct organizing of food distribution, those not belonging to exploiter elements are to unite into consumers’ communes. Details can be obtained in the Provisions Section of the Yuriatin City Council, 5 Oktiabrskaya, formerly General-gubernatorskaya, Street, room 137.”
The military were warned:
“Those who have not surrendered their weapons or who carry them without a proper, newly issued permit, will be prosecuted with the full severity of the law. Permits can be exchanged in the Yuriatin Revolutionary Committee, 6 Oktiabrskaya, room 63.”
2
A wild-looking man with a sack on his back and a stick in his hand, emaciated, long unwashed, which made him look swarthy, came up to the group of readers. His long hair had no gray in it yet, but his dark blond beard was turning gray. It was Doctor Yuri Andreevich Zhivago. His winter coat had probably long since been taken off him on the way, or else he had traded it for food. He was in someone else’s old clothes, with sleeves too short to keep him warm.
In his sack there remained an unfinished crust of bread, given him in the last outlying village he had passed through, and a hunk of lard. About an hour earlier, he had entered the city from the side of the railway, and it had taken him a whole hour of trudging to get from the city gates to this intersection, so weak he was and exhausted from walking the past few days. He stopped often and barely kept himself from falling to the ground and kissing the stones of the city, which he had had no hope of ever seeing again, and the sight of which delighted him as if it were a living being.
For a very long time, half his journey on foot, he had gone along the railroad tracks. It was all left in neglect and inactive, and all covered with snow. His way had led him past whole trains of the White Army, passenger and freight, overtaken by snowdrifts, the general defeat of Kolchak, and the exhaustion of fuel supplies. These trains, stopped in their course, forever standing, and buried under snow, stretched in an almost unbroken ribbon for many dozens of miles. They served as strongholds for armed bands of highway robbers, a refuge for criminal and political fugitives in hiding, the involuntary vagabonds of that time, but most of all as common graves and collective burial sites for those who died of cold and the typhus that raged all along the railway line and mowed down whole villages in the area.
This time justified the old saying: Man is a wolf to man. A wayfarer turned aside at the sight of another wayfarer; a man would kill the man he met, so as not to be killed himself. There were isolated cases of cannibalism. The human laws of civilization ended. Those of beasts were in force. Man dreamed the prehistoric dreams of the caveman.
Solitary shadows, occasionally sneaking along the roadside, fearfully crossing the path far ahead, and whom Yuri Andreevich carefully avoided when he could, often seemed familiar to him, seen somewhere. He fancied they belonged to the partisan camp. In most cases he was mistaken, but once his eye did not deceive him. The adolescent who crawled out of the snowdrift that covered the body of an international sleeping car, and who, having satisfied his need, darted back into the drift, was in fact from the Forest Brotherhood. He was Terenty Galuzin, supposedly shot dead. He had not been killed, had lain in a deep faint, come to, crawled from the place of execution, hidden in the forest, recovered from his wounds, and now, secretly, under another name, was making his way to his family in Krestovozdvizhensk, hiding from people in snowbound trains as he went.
These pictures and spectacles made the impression of something outlandish, transcendent. They seemed like parts of some unknown, other-planetary existences, brought to earth by mistake. And only nature remained true to history and showed itself to the eye as the artists of modern times portrayed it.
There were some quiet winter evenings, light gray, dark pink. Against the pale sunset, black birch tops were outlined, fine as handwriting. Black streams flowed under a gray mist of thin ice, between banks of white heaped snow, moistened from beneath by dark river water. And now such an evening, frosty, transparently gray, tenderhearted as pussy-willow fluff, promised to settle in after an hour or two opposite the house with figures in Yuriatin.
The doctor was going up to the board of the Central Printing Office on the stone wall of the house to look over the official information. But his gaze kept falling on the other side and up towards the several windows on the second floor of the house opposite. These windows giving onto the street had once been painted over with whitewash. In the two rooms inside, the owners’ furniture had been stored. Though frost covered the lower parts of the windowpanes with a thin, crystalline crust, he could see that the glass was now transparent and the whitewash had been removed. What did this change mean? Had the owners returned? Or had Lara gone away, and there were new tenants in the apartment, and everything in it was different now?
The uncertainty agitated the doctor. He was unable to control his agitation. He crossed the street, went into the hall through the front door, and began to go up the main stairs, so familiar and so dear to his heart. How often he had remembered, in the forest camp, the openwork pattern of the cast-iron steps, down to the last curlicue. At
