“Galiullin!” She suddenly caught herself. “What Galiullin?” No, only half-awake could such an absurdity occur to her! What Galiullin, if even his tracks are cold? Didn’t she herself, together with Zhivago, hide him and change him into civilian clothes, and then explain about the roads and villages in the area, so he’d know where to escape to, when that dreadful lynching took place at the station and they killed Commissar Gintz, and chased Galiullin from Biriuchi as far as Meliuzeevo, shooting after him and searching for him all over town? Galiullin!
If those fellows hadn’t come rolling in, there’d be no stone left upon stone in the town. An armored division happened to be passing through. They stood up for the inhabitants and curbed the scoundrels.
The thunderstorm was weakening, moving away. The thunderclaps came from a distance, more rare and muffled. The rain stopped intermittently, but water continued to trickle down with a soft splashing from the leaves and gutters. Soundless glimmers of lightning came into Mademoiselle’s room, lit it up, and lingered there for an extra moment, as if searching for something.
Suddenly the knocking at the door, which had ceased for a long time, started again. Someone needed help and was knocking desperately and rapidly. The wind picked up again. More rain poured down.
“One moment!” Mademoiselle cried out, not knowing to whom, and frightened herself with her own voice.
An unexpected surmise dawned on her. Lowering her feet from the bed and putting on her slippers, she threw her house robe over her and ran to awaken Zhivago, so as not to feel so frightened alone. But he, too, had heard the knocking and was himself coming down to meet her with a candle. They had made the same assumptions.
“Zhivago, Zhivago! There’s knocking at the outside door, I’m afraid to open it by myself,” she cried in French, and added in Russian: “ ’Ave a luke. Ees Lar or Lieutenant Gaioul.”
Yuri Andreevich had also been awakened by the knocking, and thought that it must be someone they knew, either Galiullin, be hidden by something and coming back to the refuge where he could hide, or the nurse Antipova, forced by some difficulties to turn back from her journey.
In the front hall, the doctor handed Mademoiselle the candle, while he turned the key in the door and unbolted it. A gust of wind tore the door from his hand, blew out the candle, and showered them both with a cold spray of rain from outside.
“Who’s there? Who’s there? Is anybody there?” Mademoiselle and the doctor called out in turn into the darkness, but nobody answered. Suddenly they heard the former knocking in another place, from the back entrance, or, as it now seemed to them, at the window to the garden.
“It’s evidently the wind,” said the doctor. “But for the sake of a clear conscience, go to the back door anyway, to make sure, and I’ll wait here, so that we don’t cross each other, if it really is someone, and not from some other cause.”
Mademoiselle went off into the depths of the house, and the doctor went outside under the roof of the porch. His eyes, growing accustomed to the darkness, made out signs of the coming dawn.
Over the town, like halfwits, clouds raced swiftly, as if escaping pursuit. Their tatters flew so low that they almost caught in the trees leaning in the same direction, so that it looked as if someone were sweeping the sky with them, as if with bending besoms. Rain lashed at the wooden wall of the house, turning it from gray to black.
“Well?” the doctor asked Mademoiselle when she came back.
“You’re right. There’s nobody.” And she told him that she had gone around the whole house. In the butler’s pantry a window had been broken by a piece of a linden branch that struck the glass, and there were huge puddles on the floor, and it was the same in the room Lara had left behind, a sea, a veritable sea, a whole ocean.
“And here’s a shutter torn loose and beating against the window frame. You see? That’s the whole explanation.”
They talked a little more, locked the door, and went their ways to bed, both sorry that the alarm had proved false.
They had been certain that they would open the front door and the woman they knew so well would come in, wet to the skin and freezing, and they would bombard her with questions while she shook herself off. And then, having changed her clothes, she would come to dry herself by the lingering heat of the stove in the kitchen and would tell them about her countless misadventures, smoothing her hair and laughing.
They were so certain of it that, when they locked the door, the traces of their certainty remained by the corner of the house outside, in the form of the woman’s watermark or image, which continued to appear to them from around the turning.
10
The one considered to be indirectly responsible for the soldiers’ riot at the station was the Biriuchi telegraphist Kolya Frolenko.
Kolya was the son of a well-known Meliuzeevo watchmaker. He had been known in Meliuzeevo from the cradle. As a boy, he had visited someone among the Razdolnoe house staff and, under the surveillance of Mademoiselle, had played with her two charges, the countess’s daughters. Mademoiselle knew Kolya well. It was then that he had begun to understand a little French.
People in Meliuzeevo were used to seeing Kolya lightly dressed in any weather, without a hat, in canvas summer shoes, on a bicycle. Letting go of the handlebars, his body thrown back and his arms crossed on his chest, he rolled down the main street and around town and glanced at the poles and wires, checking the state of the network.
Some houses in town were connected with the station through a branch line of the railway telephone. The management of this line was in Kolya’s hands at the station control room.
There he was up to his ears in work: the railway telegraph, the telephone, and occasionally, in moments of the station chief Povarikhin’s brief absences, the signals and the block system, the apparatus for which was also in the control room.
The necessity of keeping an eye on the operation of several mechanisms at once made Kolya develop a special manner of speaking, obscure, abrupt, and full of riddles, to which Kolya resorted when he had no wish to answer someone or get into conversation. The word was that he had made too broad a use of this right on the day of the disorders.
By his omissions he had, in fact, deprived of force all of Galiullin’s good intentions in his phone calls from town, and, perhaps against his will, had given a fatal turn to the subsequent events.
