“Well, why stand thinking, the train was already close, there was no time to think. I grabbed the lantern, because it still wasn’t very light, and rushed like mad to the tracks, swinging the lantern back and forth.
“Well, what more can I say? I stopped the train, thanks to its being slowed down by the wind, well, simply speaking, it was creeping along. I stopped the train, the engineer I knew, he stuck himself out the window of his cabin, asked something; I didn’t hear what he asked on account of the wind. I shout to the engineer, the railway post’s been attacked, there’s been murder and robbery, the robber’s in the house, do something, comrade uncle, we need urgent help. And as I was saying it, Red Army soldiers got out of the cars onto the tracks one after another, it was a military train, the soldiers came down the tracks, said: ‘What’s the matter?’—wondering what the story was, why the train had been stopped in the forest on a steep hill at night.
“They learned about it all, dragged the robber from the cellar, he squealed in a high voice, higher than Petenka’s, have mercy, good people, he said, don’t kill me, I won’t do it again. They dragged him to the tracks, tied his legs and arms to the rails, and ran the train over him alive—lynch law.
“I didn’t go to the house for my clothes, it was so scary. I begged—dear uncles, take me on the train. They took me with them on the train and drove off. Afterwards, it’s no lie, I went around half the world, foreign and our own, with homeless children, I’ve been everywhere. Such freedom, such happiness I got to know, after the woes of my childhood! But, true, there was all sorts of trouble and sin. That was all later, I’ll tell about it some other time. But then a railway worker from the train went to the signalman’s house to take charge of the government property and give orders about Auntie Marfusha, to arrange her life. They say she later died insane in the madhouse. But others say she got better and came out.”
Long after hearing all that, Gordon and Dudorov were silently pacing up and down on the grass. Then a truck arrived, turning awkwardly and cumbersomely from the road into the clearing. The boxes were loaded onto the truck. Gordon said:
“You realize who this linen girl Tanya is?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Evgraf will look after her.” Then, pausing briefly, he added: “It has already been so several times in history. What was conceived as ideal and lofty became coarse and material. So Greece turned into Rome, so the Russian enlightenment turned into the Russian revolution. Take Blok’s ‘We, the children of Russia’s terrible years,’4 and you’ll see the difference in epochs. When Blok said that, it was to be understood in a metaphorical sense, figuratively. The children were not children, but sons, offspring, the intelligentsia, and the terrors were not terrible, but providential, apocalyptic, and those are two different things. But now all that was metaphorical has become literal, and the children are children, and the terrors are terrifying—there lies the difference.”
5
Five or ten years went by, and one quiet summer evening they were sitting again, Gordon and Dudorov, somewhere high up by an open window over the boundless evening Moscow. They were leafing through the notebook of Yuri’s writings put together by Evgraf, which they had read many times and half of which they knew by heart. As they read, they exchanged observations and abandoned themselves to reflections. Midway through their reading it grew dark, they had difficulty making out the print and had to light the lamp.
And Moscow below and in the distance, the native city of the author and of half of what had befallen him, Moscow now seemed to them, not the place of these events, but the main heroine of a long story, which they had reached the end of that evening, with the notebook in their hands.
Though the brightening and liberation they had expected after the war did not come with victory, as had been thought, even so, the portents of freedom were in the air all through the postwar years, constituting their only historical content.
To the aging friends at the window it seemed that this freedom of the soul had come, that precisely on that evening the future had settled down tangibly in the streets below, that they themselves had entered into that future and henceforth found themselves in it. A happy, tender sense of peace about this holy city and about the whole earth, about the participants in this story who had lived till that evening and about their children, filled them and enveloped them in an inaudible music of happiness, which spread far around. And it was as if the book in their hands knew it all and lent their feelings support and confirmation.
THE POEMS OF YURI ZHIVAGO
1
The hum dies down. I step out on the stage.
Leaning against a doorpost,
I try to catch the echoes from far off
Of what my age is bringing.
The night’s darkness focuses on me
Thousands of opera glasses.
Abba Father, if only it can be,
Let this cup pass me by.
I love the stubbornness of your intent
And agree to play this role.
But now a different drama’s going on—
Spare me, then, this once.
But the order of the acts has been thought out,
And leads to just one end.
I’m alone, all drowns in pharisaism.
Life is no stroll through a field.
2
The sun heats up to the seventh sweat,
And the ravine, gone foolish, rages.
Like the work of a robust barnyard girl,
Spring’s affairs are in full swing.
The snow wastes away with anemia
In the branchwork of impotent blue veins,
But life is steaming in the cowshed,
And the pitchfork’s teeth are the picture of health.
Oh, these nights, these days and nights!
The drumming of drops towards the middle of day,
The dwindling of icicles on the eaves,
The sleepless babbling of the brooks!
Everything wide open, stables and cowshed,
Pigeons peck up oats from the snow,
And the lifegiver and culprit of it all—
Dung—smells of fresh air.
3
