them.
An unfortunate man, especially horribly and hideously mutilated, was being carried on a stretcher. The bottom of an exploded shell, which had split his face open, turning his tongue and teeth into a bloody gruel, but without killing him, was lodged between his jawbones in place of his torn-out cheek. In a thin little voice, resembling nothing human, the mangled man kept uttering short, broken moans, which no one could fail to understand as a plea to finish him off quickly and end his inconceivably prolonged suffering.
The nurse imagined that, under the influence of his moaning, the lightly wounded men walking beside him were about to pull this horrible iron splinter out of his cheek with their bare hands.
“No, you can’t do that! A surgeon will do it with special instruments. If it gets that far. (God, God, take him, don’t make me doubt Your existence!)”
The next moment, as he was being carried up the porch, the mutilated man cried out, shuddered all over, and gave up the ghost.
The mutilated man who had just died was Reserve Private Gimazetdin; the officer shouting in the wood was his son, Lieutenant Galiullin; the nurse was Lara; Gordon and Zhivago were the witnesses. They were all there, all side by side, and some did not recognize each other, while others had never known each other, and some things remained forever unascertained, while others waited till the next occasion, till a new meeting, to be revealed.
11
In this sector the villages had been preserved in some miraculous way. They made up an inexplicably intact island in the midst of a sea of destruction. Gordon and Zhivago were returning home in the evening. The sun was setting. In one of the villages they rode past, a young Cossack, to the unanimous guffawing of those around him, was making an old gray-bearded Jew in a long overcoat catch a five-kopeck copper coin he tossed in the air. The old man invariably failed to catch it. The coin, falling through his pathetically spread hands, fell in the mud. The old man bent down to pick it up, the Cossack slapped his behind, those standing around held their sides and moaned with laughter. This constituted the whole amusement. So far it was inoffensive, but no one could guarantee that it would not take a more serious turn. His old woman would come running from a cottage across the road, shouting and reaching her arms out to him, and each time would disappear again in fright. Two little girls looked at their grandfather through the window and wept.
The driver, who found it all killingly funny, slowed the horses’ pace to give the gentlemen time to amuse themselves. But Zhivago, calling the Cossack over, reprimanded him and told him to stop the mockery.
“Yes, sir,” the man said readily. “We didn’t mean nothing, it was just for laughs.”
For the rest of the way Zhivago and Gordon were silent.
“It’s terrible,” Yuri Andreevich began, when their own village came in sight. “You can hardly imagine what a cup of suffering the unfortunate Jewish populace has drunk during this war. It’s being conducted right within the pale of their forced settlement. And for all they’ve endured, for the sufferings, the taxes, and the ruin, they have the added reward of pogroms, taunts, and the accusation that these people lack patriotism. But where are they to get it, when they enjoy all rights with the enemy, and with us they’re only subjected to persecution? The very hatred of them, the basis of it, is contradictory. What vexes people is just what should touch them and win them over. Their poverty and overcrowding, their weakness and inability to fend off blows. Incomprehensible. There’s something fateful in it.”
Gordon made no reply.
12
And here again they were lying on two sides of the long, narrow window, it was night, and they were talking.
Zhivago was telling Gordon how he had seen the sovereign at the front. He told it well.
It was his first spring at the front. The headquarters of the unit to which he had been attached was in the Carpathians, in a hollow, the entrance to which, from the Hungarian valley, was blocked by that army unit.
At the bottom of the hollow there was a railway station. Zhivago described to Gordon the external appearance of the place, the mountains overgrown with mighty firs and pines, with white tufts of clouds caught among them, and the stone cliffs of gray slate and graphite, which showed through the forest like worn spots in thick fur. It was a damp, dark April morning, gray as that slate, locked in by the heights on all sides and therefore still and stuffy. Steaming hot. Steam hung over the hollow, and everything fumed, everything drew upwards in streams of smoke, engine smoke from the station, gray steam from the meadows, gray mountains, dark forests, dark clouds.
In those days the sovereign was making the rounds of Galicia. Suddenly it became known that he would visit the unit stationed here, of which he was the honorary colonel.
He might come at any moment. An honor guard was stationed on the platform to meet him. An hour or two of wearisome waiting followed. Then quickly, one after another, two trains came with the suite. Shortly afterwards the tsar’s train arrived.
Accompanied by the grand duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the sovereign inspected the lined-up grenadiers. With every syllable of his quiet greeting he raised up bursts and splashes of thunderously rolling hurrahs, like water dancing in swaying buckets.
The embarrassed and smiling sovereign gave the impression of a man older and more gone to seed than he appeared on rubles and medals. He had a listless, slightly puffy face. He kept casting guilty sidelong glances at Nikolai Nikolaevich, not knowing what was required of him in the given circumstances, and Nikolai Nikolaevich, respectfully bending towards his ear, not even with words but with the movement of an eyebrow or a shoulder, helped him out of his difficulty.
The tsar was pitiable on that gray and warm mountain morning, and it was eerie to think that such timorous reserve and shyness could be the essence of an oppressor, that this weakness could punish and pardon, bind and loose.
“He should have pronounced something on the order of ‘I, my sword, and my people,’ like Wilhelm,11 or something in that spirit. But certainly about the people, that’s indispensable. But, you understand, he was natural in a Russian way and tragically above such banality. In Russia this theatricality is unthinkable. Because it is theatricality, isn’t it? I can understand that there were still such peoples in Caesar’s time, some sort of Gauls, or Suevians, or Illyrians. But from then on it’s only been a fiction, existing so that tsars and activists and kings could make speeches about it: ‘The people, my people.’
“Now the front is flooded with correspondents and journalists. They note down ‘observations,’ the utterances of popular wisdom, make the rounds of the wounded, construct a new theory of the people’s soul. It’s a sort of new Dahl,12 just as contrived, a linguistic graphomania of verbal incontinence. That’s one type. But there’s another. Clipped speech, ‘jottings and sketches,’ skepticism, misanthropy. For instance, in one of them (I
