One morning at the end of August, Yuri Andreevich got on the tram at the stop on the corner of Gazetny Lane, to go up Nikitskaya from the university to Kudrinskaya Square. He was going for the first time to his job at the Botkin Hospital, which was then called Soldatenkovskaya. It was all but his first visit to it in an official capacity.
Yuri Andreevich was not in luck. He got on a defective car which was meeting with all kinds of disasters. First a cart with its wheels stuck in the grooves of the rails held it up by blocking the way. Then faulty insulation under the floor or on the roof of the car caused a short circuit and something crackled and burned.
The driver would stop the car and with wrenches in his hands would come down from the front platform and, going around the car, would crouch down and immerse himself in repairing its mechanism between the wheels and the rear platform.
The ill-fated car blocked traffic along the whole line. The street was filled with trams it had already made stop and newly arriving and gradually accumulating ones. Their line reached the Manege and stretched back further. Passengers from the cars behind came to the front one that was the cause of it all, hoping to gain something by it. On that hot morning, the jam-packed car was cramped and stifling. A black and purple cloud crept from behind the Nikitsky Gates, rising ever higher in the sky over the crowd of passengers running across the pavement. A thunderstorm was approaching.
Yuri Andreevich was sitting on a single seat on the left side of the car, squeezed up against the window. The left-hand sidewalk of Nikitskaya, where the Conservatory was, remained in his view all the time. Willy-nilly, with the dulled attention of a man thinking about something else, he stared at the people walking or riding on that side and did not miss a single one.
A gray-haired old lady in a light straw hat with cloth daisies and cornflowers, and in a tight-fitting old-fashioned lilac dress, puffing and fanning herself with a flat parcel she carried in her hand, trudged along that side. She was tightly corseted, weary from the heat, and, sweating profusely, kept wiping her wet lips and eyebrows with a small lace handkerchief.
Her path lay parallel to that of the tram. Yuri Andreevich had already lost sight of her several times when the repaired tram started up again and got ahead of her. And she returned to his field of vision several times, when a new breakdown stopped the tram and the lady caught up with it.
Yuri Andreevich recalled school problems on the calculation of the time and order of arrival of trains starting at different moments and moving at different speeds, and he wanted to recall the general method of solving them, but failed to do so and, without finishing, skipped from these memories to other, much more complicated reflections.
He thought about several existences developing side by side, moving next to each other at different speeds, and about one person’s fate getting ahead of another’s fate in life, and who outlives whom. He imagined something like a principle of relativity in the arena of life, but, getting thoroughly confused, he dropped these comparisons as well.
Lightning flashed, thunder rolled. The luckless tram got stuck yet again on the descent from Kudrinskaya to the Zoological Garden. The lady in purple appeared a little later in the frame of the window, went past the tram, began to move off. The first big drops of rain fell on the sidewalk and pavement, and on the lady. A gust of dusty wind dragged over the trees, brushing leaves against leaves, began tearing the lady’s hat off and tucking her skirts under, and suddenly died down.
The doctor felt a rush of debilitating nausea. Overcoming his weakness, he got up from the seat and began jerking the window straps up and down, trying to open the window. It did not yield to his efforts.
They shouted to the doctor that the frame was screwed permanently to the jamb, but, fighting against the attack and seized by some sort of anxiety, he did not take these shouts as addressed to him and did not grasp their meaning. He continued his attempts and again tugged at the frame in three different movements, up, down, and towards himself, and suddenly felt an unprecedented, irreparable pain inside, and realized that he had torn something internally, that he had committed something fatal, and that all was lost. At that moment the car began to move, but having gone a little way down Presnya, it stopped again.
By an inhuman effort of will, staggering and barely making his way through the congested throng standing in the aisle between the seats, Yuri Andreevich reached the rear platform. They snarled at him and would not let him pass. He fancied that the breath of air had refreshed him, that perhaps all was not lost yet, that he felt better.
He began to squeeze through the crowd on the rear platform, provoking more abuse, kicks, and anger. Paying no attention to the shouts, he broke through the crowd, climbed down from the standing tram onto the pavement, took one step, another, a third, collapsed on the cobbles, and did not get up again.
Noise, talk, arguments, advice arose. Several persons got down from the platform and surrounded the fallen man. They soon established that he was not breathing and that his heart had stopped. People from the sidewalks came over to the little group around the body, some reassured, others disappointed that the man had not been run over and that his death had no connection with the tram. The crowd grew. The lady in purple also came up to the group, stood for a while, looked at the dead man, listened to the talk, and went on. She was a foreigner, but she understood that some suggested carrying the body into the tram car and taking it to the hospital, while others said that the police must be called. She went on without waiting to see what decision they would come to.
The lady in purple was the Swiss subject Mademoiselle Fleury from Meliuzeevo, now very, very old. For twelve years she had been pleading in writing for the right to leave for her native country. Quite recently her efforts had been crowned with success. She had arrived in Moscow to obtain an exit visa. She was going that day to pick it up at the consulate, fanning herself with her documents tied with a ribbon. And she went on, getting ahead of the tram for the tenth time and, without knowing it in the least, went ahead of Zhivago and outlived him.
13
Through the doorway from the corridor one could see the corner of the room, with a table standing at an angle to it. From the table to the doorway peered the narrowing lower end of a crudely hollowed-out, boatlike coffin, with the dead man’s feet resting against it. This was the same table at which Yuri Andreevich used to write. There was no other in the room. The manuscripts had been put in the drawer, and the table had been put under the coffin. The pillows under the head had been plumped up high, the body in the coffin lay as if on the rising slope of a hill.
It was surrounded by a multitude of flowers, whole bushes of white lilacs, rare at that season, cyclamens, cineraria in pots and baskets. The flowers blocked the light from the windows. The light barely seeped through the flowers onto the dead man’s waxen face and hands, onto the wood and lining of the coffin. On the table lay a beautiful pattern of shadows that seemed as if it had just stopped swaying.
The custom of burning the dead in a crematorium was widespread by then.5 In hopes of obtaining a pension for the children, out of concern for their future at school, and from an unwillingness to damage Marina’s situation at work, they renounced a church funeral and decided to have nothing but a civil cremation. Application had been made to the relevant organizations. Representatives were expected.
