read it myself), there are such sentences as: ‘A gray day, like yesterday. Rain and slush since morning. I look through the window at the road. Prisoners strung out in an endless line. Wounded being transported. A cannon fires. It fires again, today as yesterday, tomorrow as today, and so on every day and every hour …’ Just look, how perceptive and witty! Though why is he offended at the cannon? What a strange pretension, to demand diversity from a cannon! Instead of the cannon, why isn’t he astonished at himself, firing off lists, commas, phrases, day in and day out, why doesn’t he stop this barrage of journalistic philanthropy, as hasty as a hopping flea? How is it he doesn’t understand that it’s he, not the cannon, who should be new and not repeat himself, that the accumulation of a great quantity of senselessness in a notebook will never arrive at any sense, that facts don’t exist until a man puts something of his own into them, some share of whimsical human genius, something of the fantastic.”
“Strikingly true,” Gordon interrupted him. “Now I’ll answer you concerning the scene we witnessed today. That Cossack mocking the poor patriarch, along with thousands of cases like it, is, of course, an example of the most elementary baseness, which should occasion, not philosophizing, but a punch in the nose, that’s clear. But to the question of the Jews as a whole, philosophy is applicable, and then it turns its unexpected side to us. But here I’m not telling you anything new. All these thoughts, in me as in you, come from your uncle.
“ ‘What is a people?’ you ask. Must we make a fuss over it, and doesn’t he do more for it who, without thinking of it, by the very beauty and triumph of his deeds, raises it to universality and, having glorified it, makes it eternal? Well, of course, of course. And what kind of peoples can we talk about in Christian times? They’re not simple peoples, but converted, transformed peoples, and the whole point is precisely in the transformation, not in faithfulness to old principles. Let’s remember the Gospel. What did it say on this subject? First, it wasn’t an assertion: this is so and that is so. It was a naive and timid suggestion. The suggestion was: Do you want to exist in a new way, as never before, do you want the blessedness of the spirit? And everyone accepted the suggestion, caught up for millennia.
“When it said that in the Kingdom of God there are no Greeks and Jews, did it merely mean to say that everyone is equal before God?13 No, there was no need for that; the Greek philosophers, the Roman moralists, the prophets of the Old Testament knew that before. But it said: in that new way of existence and new form of communion, conceived in the heart and known as the Kingdom of God, there are no peoples, there are persons.
“You just said that a fact is senseless unless one puts sense into it. Christianity, the mystery of the person, is precisely what needs to be put into the fact for it to acquire meaning for man.
“And we talked about average figures, who have nothing to say to life and the world as a whole, about second-rate forces interested in narrowness, in having the talk always be about some people or other, preferably a small one, that should suffer, so that it’s possible to sit and talk endlessly and thrive on their own pity. Jewry is fully and completely the victim of this element. Its own notion of itself as a people laid upon it the deadening necessity of being and remaining a people and only that over the centuries, during which, by a power that had once come from its own midst, the whole world was delivered from this humiliating task. How astounding it is! How could it have happened? This festivity, this deliverance from the bedevilment of mediocrity, this soaring above the dull- witted workaday world—all this was born on their soil, spoke their language, and belonged to their tribe. And they saw and heard it and let it slip. How could they have let a spirit of such all-absorbing beauty and power leave them, how could they think that next to its triumph and reign they would remain as the empty shell this miracle had once cast off? To whose profit is this voluntary martyrdom, who needs these centuries of the mockery and bloodletting of so many utterly blameless old men, women, and children, so fine and so capable of good and of the heart’s communion! Why are the people-loving writers of all peoples so lazy and giftless? Why do the rulers of this people’s minds never go beyond the two easily accessible forms of world sorrow and ironizing wisdom? Why, faced with the risk of exploding from the irrevocability of their duty, as a steam boiler explodes from pressure, did they not disband this troop that fights and gets beaten nobody knows what for? Why didn’t they say: ‘Come to your senses. Enough. There’s no need for more. Don’t call yourselves by the old name. Don’t cling together, disperse. Be with everyone. You are the first and best Christians in the world. You are precisely that which you have been set against by the worst and weakest among you.”
13
The next day, coming to dinner, Zhivago said:
“So you couldn’t wait to leave, and now you’ve called it down on us. I can’t say, ‘You’re in luck,’ because what kind of luck is it that we’re pressed back or beaten again? The way east is free, and we’re being squeezed from the west. All army medical units are ordered to pack up. Tomorrow or the day after, we’ll be on our way. Where— nobody knows. And of course Mikhail Grigorievich’s laundry hasn’t been washed, has it, Karpenko. The eternal story. It’s that woman, that woman … but ask him what woman, he doesn’t know himself, the blockhead.”
He did not listen to what his medical orderly spun out to justify himself, and paid no attention to Gordon, who was upset that he had been wearing Zhivago’s linen and was leaving in his shirt. Zhivago went on.
“Ah, this camp life, these Gypsy wanderings. When we moved in here, none of it was to my liking—the stove was in the wrong place, the ceiling was low, it was dirty and stuffy. And now for the life of me I can’t remember where we were stationed before this. And it seems I could spend all my life here, looking at the stove in the corner, with sun on the tiles and the shadow of a roadside tree moving over it.”
They began unhurriedly to pack.
During the night they were awakened by noise and shouts, gunshots and running feet. There was a sinister glow over the village. Shadows flitted past the windows. The owners of the house woke up and began stirring behind the wall.
“Run out, Karpenko, ask what’s the cause of this bedlam,” said Yuri Andreevich.
Soon everything became known. Zhivago himself dressed hastily and went to the hospital to verify the rumors, which proved correct. The Germans had broken the resistance in this sector. The line of defense had moved closer to the village and kept getting closer. The village was under fire. The hospital and offices were quickly removed, without waiting for the order to evacuate. Everything was supposed to be finished before dawn.
“You’ll go with the first echelon. The carriage is leaving now, but I told them to wait for you. Well, good-bye. I’ll come with you and see that you get seated.”
They were running to the other end of the village, where the detachment was formed up. Running past the houses, they bent down and hid behind their projecting parts. Bullets hummed and whined in the street. From intersections with roads leading to the fields, they could see shrapnel exploding over them in umbrellas of flame.
“And what about you?” Gordon asked as they ran.
“I’ll come later. I must go home and get my things. I’ll be in the second party.”
They said good-bye at the village gate. The carriage and the several carts that made up the train set off, driving into each other and gradually forming a line. Yuri Andreevich waved to his departing friend. The flames of a burning barn lit them up.
