Nikolai Nikolaevich had done, with the same news.
But meanwhile events had moved ahead. There were new details. Gordon spoke about the intensified gunfire and the killing of passersby, accidentally struck by stray bullets. According to his words, traffic in the city had come to a standstill. By a miracle, he had gotten through to their lane, but the way back had closed behind him.
Nikolai Nikolaevich would not listen and tried to poke his nose outside, but came back after a minute. He said you could not go out into the lane, that there were bullets whistling through it, knocking bits of brick and plaster off the corners. There was not a soul in the streets; communication by the sidewalks was broken.
During those days Sashenka caught a cold.
“I’ve told you a hundred times not to put the child near the hot stove,” Yuri Andreevich said angrily. “Overheating is forty times more harmful than cold.”
Sashenka had a sore throat and developed a high fever. His distinctive quality was a supernatural, mystical fear of nausea and vomiting, the approach of which he imagined every moment.
Pushing aside Yuri Andreevich’s hand with the laryngoscope, he would not let him put it down his throat, closed his mouth, shouted and choked. No persuading or threatening worked. Suddenly by inadvertence Sashenka yawned widely and sweetly, and the doctor profited from the moment, with a lightning movement put the spoon into his son’s mouth, pressed his tongue down, and managed to get a glimpse of Sashenka’s raspberry-colored throat and swollen tonsils covered with white spots. Yuri Andreevich was alarmed by the look of them.
A little later, by way of a similar sleight of hand, the doctor managed to take a smear from Sashenka’s throat. Alexander Alexandrovich had his own microscope. Yuri Andreevich took it and carried out a makeshift analysis. Luckily, it was not diphtheria.
But on the third night, Sashenka had an attack of false croup. He was burning up and suffocating. Yuri Andreevich could not look at the poor child, powerless as he was to save him from suffering. Antonina Alexandrovna thought the boy was dying. They took him in their arms, carried him about the room, and he became better.
They had to get milk, mineral water, or soda for him to drink. But it was the height of the street fighting. The gunfire, as well as artillery fire, did not cease for a minute. Even if Yuri Andreevich were to risk his life and venture to make his way through the limits of the area crisscrossed by shooting, beyond the line of fire he would also not find any life, because it had come to a standstill throughout the city until the situation finally defined itself.
But it was already clear. Rumors came from all sides that the workers were gaining the upper hand. There was still resistance from isolated groups of junkers, which were cut off from each other and had lost touch with their commanders.
The Sivtsev neighborhood was within the circle of action of the units of soldiers pressing towards the center from the Dorogomilovo Gate. The soldiers from the German front and adolescent workers sitting in a trench dug in the lane already knew the inhabitants of the nearby houses and exchanged neighborly jokes with them when they peeked through the gates or came outside. Circulation in that part of the city was being restored.
Then Gordon and Nikolai Nikolaevich, who had been stuck at the Zhivagos’ for three days, left their captivity. Yuri Andreevich was glad of their presence during the difficult days of Sashenka’s illness, and Antonina Alexandrovna forgave them the muddle they introduced on top of the general disorder. But in gratitude for the hospitality, both had considered it their duty to entertain the hosts with endless talk, and Yuri Andreevich was so tired of that three-day pouring from empty into void that he was happy to part with them.
8
There was information that they had reached home safely, but precisely this test showed that the talk of a general cessation of hostilities was premature. Military action still went on in various places, it was impossible to cross through various neighborhoods, and the doctor was still unable to get to his hospital, which he had begun to miss and where his
Only within separate neighborhoods did people go out in the mornings a short distance from home to buy bread, stopping people carrying milk in bottles and crowding around them, asking where they had gotten it.
Occasionally the shooting resumed all over the city, scattering the public again. Everyone suspected that some sort of negotiations were going on between the sides, the successful or unsuccessful course of which was reflected in the intensifying or weakening of the shrapnel fire.
Once at the end of the old October, around ten o’clock in the evening, Yuri Andreevich was walking quickly down the street, going with no particular need to see a colleague who lived nearby. Those parts, usually lively, were now deserted. He met almost no one.
Yuri Andreevich walked quickly. The first thin snow was dusting down, with a strong and ever-strengthening wind that transformed it before Yuri Andreevich’s eyes into a snowstorm.
Yuri Andreevich was turning from one lane into another and had already lost count of the turns he had made, when the snow suddenly poured down very thickly and a blizzard set in, the kind of blizzard that skims shriekingly over the ground in an open field, and in the city thrashes about in a blind alley like a lost person.
Something similar was taking place in the moral world and in the physical, nearby and far away, on the ground and in the air. Somewhere, in little islands, the last volleys of the broken resistance rang out. Somewhere on the horizon, the weak glow of extinguished fires swelled and popped like bubbles. And the same rings and funnels, driven and whirled by the blizzard, smoked under Yuri Andreevich’s feet on the wet streets and sidewalks.
At one intersection he was overtaken by a paperboy running past with the shout “Latest news!” and carrying a big bundle of freshly printed sheets under his arm.
“Keep the change,” said the doctor. The boy barely managed to separate the damp page stuck to the bundle, thrust it into the doctor’s hands, and vanished into the blizzard as instantly as he had emerged from it.
The doctor went over to a street lamp burning two steps away to look through the headlines at once, without putting it off.
The special issue, printed on one side only, contained an official communique from Petersburg about the forming of the Soviet of People’s Commissars, the establishment of soviet power in Russia, and the introduction of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Then came the first decrees of the new power and the publication of various news items transmitted by telegraph and telephone.
The blizzard lashed at the doctor’s eyes and covered the printed lines of the newspaper with gray and rustling granular snow. But that did not hinder his reading. The grandeur and eternity of the moment astounded him and would not let him come to his senses.
