During the next morning’s round, to make up for her omission and smooth over the traces of her ingratitude, she asked Galiullin about it all and kept saying “oh” and “ah.”
“Lord, holy is Thy will! Twenty-eight Brestskaya Street, the Tiverzins, the revolutionary winter of 1905! Yusupka? No, I didn’t know Yusupka, or I don’t remember, forgive me. But that year, that year and that courtyard! It’s true, there really was such a courtyard and such a year!” Oh, how vividly she suddenly felt it all again! And the shooting then, and (God, how did it go?) “Christ’s opinion!” Oh, how strongly, how keenly you feel as a child, for the first time! “Forgive me, forgive me, what is your name, Lieutenant? Yes, yes, you already told me once. Thank you, oh, how I thank you, Osip Gimazetdinovich, what memories, what thoughts you’ve awakened in me!”
All day she went about with “that courtyard” in her soul, and kept sighing and reflecting almost aloud.
Just think, twenty-eight Brestskaya! And now there’s shooting again, but so much more terrible! This is no “the boys are shooting” for you. The boys have grown up, and they’re all here, as soldiers, all simple people from those courtyards and from villages like this one. Amazing! Amazing!
Rapping with their canes and crutches, invalids and non-bedridden patients from other wards came, ran, and hobbled into the room, and started shouting at the same time:
“An event of extraordinary importance. Disorder in the streets of Petersburg. The troops of the Petersburg garrison have gone over to the side of the insurgents. Revolution.”
FAREWELL TO THE OLD
1
The little town was called Meliuzeevo. It was in the black earth region.1 Over its roofs, like a swarm of locusts, hung the black dust raised by the troops and wagon trains that kept pouring through it. They moved from morning to evening in both directions, from the war and to the war, and it was impossible to say exactly whether it was still going on or was already over.
Each day, endlessly, like mushrooms, new functions sprang up. And they were elected to them all. Himself, Lieutenant Galiullin, and the nurse Antipova, and a few more persons from their group, all of them inhabitants of big cities, well-informed and worldly-wise people.
They filled posts in the town government, served as commissars in minor jobs in the army and in medical units, and looked upon these succeeding occupations as an outdoor amusement, like a game of tag. But more and more often they wanted to leave this tag and go home to their permanent occupations.
Work often and actively threw Zhivago and Antipova together.
2
In the rain, the black dust in the town turned to a dark brown slush of a coffee color, which covered its mostly unpaved streets.
It was not a big town. From any place in it, at each turn, the gloomy steppe, the dark sky, the vast expanses of the war, the vast expanses of the revolution opened out.
Yuri Andreevich wrote to his wife:
“The disorganization and anarchy in the army continue. Measures are being taken to improve the discipline and martial spirit of the soldiers. I made a tour of the units stationed nearby.
“Finally, instead of a postscript, though I might have written you about this much earlier—I work here alongside a certain Antipova, a nurse from Moscow, born in the Urals.
“Do you remember, at the Christmas party on the dreadful night of your mother’s death, a girl shot at a prosecutor? It seems she was tried later. As I recall, I told you then that Misha and I had seen this girl when she was still in high school, in some trashy hotel rooms we had gone to with your father, for what purpose I don’t remember, at night, in the freezing cold, during an armed uprising on Presnya, as it now seems to me. That girl is Antipova.
“I have tried several times to go home. But it is not so simple. What mainly keeps us here is not the work, which we could turn over to others without any harm. The difficulties are presented by the trip itself. The trains either don’t run at all or come so full that it is impossible to get on them.
“However, to be sure, it cannot go on like this endlessly, and therefore several people who have recovered or have left the service or been discharged, including myself, Galiullin, and Antipova, have decided at all costs to leave starting next week, and, to make taking the train easier, to leave separately on different days.
“I may arrive any day now like a bolt from the blue. However, I will try to send you a telegram.”
But even before his departure, Yuri Andreevich had time to receive a reply from Antonina Alexandrovna.
In her letter, in which the construction of the sentences was broken by sobs, and tearstains and inkblots served as periods, Antonina Alexandrovna insisted that her husband should not return to Moscow, but go straight on to the Urals after that wonderful nurse, who journeys through life accompanied by such portents and coincidences, with which her, Tonya’s, modest path in life could not be compared.
“Don’t worry about Sashenka and his future,” she wrote. “You will not have to be ashamed for him. I promise to bring him up by those same principles that you saw an example of as a child in our home.”
“You’re out of your mind, Tonya,” Yuri Andreevich rushed to reply. “What suspicions! Don’t you know, or don’t you know well enough, that you, the thought of you, and faithfulness to you and our home saved me from death and all sorts of destruction during these two horrible and devastating years of war? Anyhow, there’s no need for words. Soon we’ll see each other, our former life will begin again, everything will become clear.
“But that you could reply to me like that frightens me in another way. If I gave you cause for such a reply, maybe I am indeed behaving ambiguously, and am therefore also to blame before this woman for misleading her, and will have to apologize to her. I will do so as soon as she comes back from making the round of several nearby villages. The zemstvo, which previously existed only in provinces and districts, is now being introduced on a lower level, in village neighborhoods. Antipova went to help her acquaintance, a woman who works as an instructor in these legislative innovations.
“It is remarkable that, living in the same house with Antipova, I am unaware to this day of where her room is, and I’ve never been interested in finding out.”
3
