Marina forgave the doctor his strange quirks, which had already formed by then, the whims of a man gone to seed and aware of his fall, and forgave the dirt and disorder that he spread around him. She put up with his grumbling, sharpness, irritability.
Her self-sacrifice went still further. When through his fault they fell into voluntary, self-created poverty, Marina, so as not to leave him alone in those intervals, would abandon her job, where she was so valued and where she was eagerly taken back after these forced interruptions. Submitting to Yuri Andreevich’s fantasy, she would go with him through the courtyards looking for odd jobs. They did woodcutting for tenants living on various floors. Some of them, particularly the speculators grown rich at the beginning of the NEP and people of science and art who were close to the government, began fixing up their apartments and furnishing them. One day Marina and Yuri Andreevich, stepping carefully on the rugs in their felt boots, so as not to track in sawdust from outside, brought a load of firewood to the study of an apartment owner, who was insultingly immersed in some reading and did not bestow so much as a glance on the sawyers. The lady of the house negotiated, gave orders, and paid them.
“What is the swine so riveted to?” The doctor became curious. “What is he marking up so furiously with his pencil?” Going around the desk with the firewood, he peeked over the reading man’s shoulder. On the desk lay Yuri Andreevich’s little books in Vasya’s early art school editions.
7
Marina and the doctor lived on Spiridonovka. Gordon was renting a room nearby on Malaya Bronnaya. Marina and the doctor had two girls, Kapka and Klashka. Kapitolina (Kapka) was going on seven; the recently born Klavdia was six months old.
The beginning of the summer of 1929 was hot. Acquaintances from two or three streets away ran to visit each other without hats or jackets.
Gordon’s room was strangely organized. In its place there used to be a fashionable dressmaker’s shop with two sections, a lower and an upper one. From the street, these two levels had a single plate-glass window. The gold inscription on the glass gave the dressmaker’s last name and the nature of his occupation. Inside, behind the glass, there was a spiral staircase from the lower to the upper section.
Now this space had been divided in three.
By means of an additional floor, the shop had gained an intermediary entresol, with a window strange for an inhabited room. It was a meter high and was at floor level. It was covered with remnants of the gold lettering. Through the spaces between them, the legs of those in the room could be seen up to the knees. Gordon lived in this room. Sitting with him were Zhivago, Dudorov, Marina and the children. Unlike the adults, the children filled the entire window frame. Soon Marina and the children left. The three men remained alone.
They were having a conversation, one of those lazy, unhurried summer conversations conducted among schoolmates whose friendship dates back countless years. How are they usually conducted?
There are some who possess a sufficient stock of words and are satisfied with it. They speak and think naturally and coherently. Only Yuri Andreevich was in that position.
His friends were lacking in necessary expressions. They did not possess the gift of speech. To make up for their poor vocabulary, they paced the room as they talked, smoked cigarettes, waved their arms, repeated the same thing several times. (“That’s dishonest, brother; dishonest is what it is; yes, yes, dishonest.”)
They were not aware that the excessive dramatics of their intercourse in no way signified ardor and breadth of character, but, on the contrary, expressed an insufficiency, a blank.
Gordon and Dudorov belonged to a good professional circle. They spent their lives among good books, good thinkers, good composers, good, always, yesterday and today, good and only good music, and they did not know that the calamity of mediocre taste is worse than the calamity of tastelessness.
Gordon and Dudorov did not know that even the reproaches that they showered on Zhivago were suggested to them not by devotion to their friend and the wish to influence him, but only by their inability to think freely and guide the conversation as they willed. The speeding cart of the conversation carried them where they had no wish to go. They were unable to turn it and in the end were bound to run into something and hit against something. And so, rushing at full speed, they smashed with all their sermons and admonitions into Yuri Andreevich.
He could see clearly the springs of their pathos, the shakiness of their sympathy, the mechanism of their reasonings. However, he could not very well say to them: “Dear friends, oh, how hopelessly ordinary you and the circle you represent, and the brilliance and art of your favorite names and authorities, all are. The only live and bright thing in you is that you lived at the same time as me and knew me.” But how would it be if one could make such declarations to one’s friends! And so as not to distress them, Yuri Andreevich meekly listened to them.
Dudorov had recently finished his first term of exile and come back. He was restored to his rights, of which he had been temporarily deprived. He received permission to resume his lectures and university occupations.
Now he initiated his friends into his feelings and state of soul in exile. He spoke with them sincerely and unhypocritically. His observations were not motivated by cowardice or extraneous considerations.
He said that the arguments of the prosecution, his treatment in prison and after leaving it, and especially his one-on-one interviews with the interrogator had aired out his brain and re-educated him politically, that his eyes had been opened to many things, that he had grown as a human being.
Dudorov’s reasonings were close to Gordon’s heart precisely in their triteness. He nodded his head sympathetically to Innokenty and agreed with him. The stereotyped character of what Dudorov said and felt was just what Gordon found especially moving. He took the imitativeness of these copybook sentiments for their universality.
Innokenty’s virtuous orations were in the spirit of the time. But it was precisely the conformity, the transparency of their hypocrisy that exasperated Yuri Andreevich. The unfree man always idealizes his slavery. So it was in the Middle Ages; it was on this that the Jesuits always played. Yuri Andreevich could not bear the political mysticism of the Soviet intelligentsia, which was its highest achievement, or, as they would have said then, the spiritual ceiling of the epoch. Yuri Andreevich concealed this feeling from his friends as well, so as not to quarrel.
But he was interested in something quite other, in Dudorov’s account of Vonifaty Orletsov, his cell mate, a priest and a follower of Tikhon.4 The arrested man had a six-year-old daughter, Christina. The arrest and subsequent trial of her beloved father were a shock to her. The words “servant of a cult” and “disenfranchised” and the like seemed to her a stain of dishonor. It may be that in her ardent child’s heart, she vowed to wash this stain from her father’s name someday. This goal, so far removed and set so early, burning in her as an inextinguishable resolution, made of her even then a childishly enthusiastic follower of everything that seemed to her most irrefutable in Communism.
“I’m leaving,” said Yuri Andreevich. “Don’t be angry with me, Misha. It’s stuffy in here, and hot outside. I don’t
