“Why, yes, your brother Evgraf, from Omsk. Your half brother. While you were lying unconscious, he kept visiting us.”
“In a reindeer coat?”
“Yes, yes. So you noticed him through your unconsciousness? He ran into you on the stairs of some house, I know, he told me. He knew it was you and wanted to introduce himself, but you put a scare into him! He adores you, can’t read enough of you. He digs up such things! Rice, raisins, sugar! He’s gone back to his parts. And he’s calling us there. He’s so strange, mysterious. I think he has some sort of love affair with the authorities. He says we should leave the big city for a year or two, ‘to sit on the earth.’ I asked his advice about the Krugers’ place. He strongly recommends it. So that we could have a kitchen garden and a forest nearby. We can’t just perish so obediently, like sheep.”
In April of that year the whole Zhivago family set out for the far-off Urals, to the former estate of Varykino near the town of Yuriatin.
ON THE WAY
1
The last days of March came, days of the first warmth, false harbingers of spring, after which each year an intense cold spell sets in.
In the Gromeko house hurried preparations were being made for the journey. To the numerous inhabitants, whose density in the house was now greater than that of sparrows in the street, this bustle was explained as a general cleaning before Easter.
Yuri Andreevich was against the trip. He did not interfere with the preparations, because he considered the undertaking unfeasible and hoped that at the decisive moment it would fall through. But the thing moved ahead and was near completion. The time came to talk seriously.
He once again expressed his doubts to his wife and father-in-law at a family council especially organized for that purpose.
“So you think I’m not right, and, consequently, we’re going?” he concluded his objections. His wife took the floor:
“You say, weather it out for a year or two, during that time new land regulations will be established, it will be possible to ask for a piece of land near Moscow and start a kitchen garden. But how to survive in the meantime, you don’t suggest. Yet that is the most interesting thing, that is precisely what it would be desirable to hear.”
“Absolute raving,” Alexander Alexandrovich supported his daughter.
“Very well, I surrender,” Yuri Andreevich agreed. “The only thing that pulls me up short is the total uncertainty. We set out, eyes shut, for we don’t know where, not having the least notion of the place. Of three persons who lived in Varykino, two, mama and grandmother, are no longer alive, and the third, Grandfather Kruger, if he’s alive, is being held hostage and behind bars.
“In the last year of the war, he did something with the forests and factories, sold them for the sake of appearances to some straw man, or to some bank, or signed them away conditionally to someone. What do we know about that deal? Whose land is it now—that is, not in the sense of property, I don’t care, but who is responsible for it? What department? Are they cutting the forest? Are the factories working? Finally, who is in power there, and who will be by the time we get there?
“For you, the safety anchor is Mikulitsyn, whose name you like so much to repeat. But who told you that the old manager is still alive and still in Varykino? And what do we know about him, except that grandfather had difficulty pronouncing his name, which is why we remember it?
“But why argue? You’re set on going. I’m with you. We must find out how it’s done now. There’s no point in putting it off.”
2
Yuri Andreevich went to the Yaroslavsky train station to make inquiries about it.
The flow of departing people was contained by a boardwalk with handrails laid across the halls, on the stone floors of which lay people in gray overcoats, who tossed and turned, coughed and spat, and when they talked to each other, each time it was incongruously loudly, not taking into account the force with which their voices resounded under the echoing vaults.
For the most part they were patients who had been sick with typhus. In view of the overcrowding of the hospitals, they were discharged the day after the crisis. As a doctor, Yuri Andreevich had run into such necessity himself, but he did not know that these unfortunates were so many and that the train stations served them as shelters.
“Get sent on an official mission,” a porter in a white apron told him. “You have to come and check every day. Trains are a rarity now, a matter of chance. And of course it goes without saying …” (the porter rubbed his thumb against his first two fingers). “Some flour or whatever. To grease the skids. Well, and this here …” (he upended an invisible shot glass) “… is a most sacred thing.”
3
Around that time Alexander Alexandrovich was invited to the Supreme Council of National Economy for several special consultations, and Yuri Andreevich to a gravely ill member of the government. Both were remunerated in the best form of that time—coupons to the first closed distribution center then established.1
It was located in some garrison warehouse by the St. Simon monastery. The doctor and his father-in-law crossed two inner courtyards, the church’s and the garrison’s, and straight from ground level, with no threshold, entered under the stone vault of a deep, gradually descending cellar. Its widening far end was partitioned crosswise by a long counter, at which a calm, unhurried storekeeper weighed and handed over provisions, occasionally going back to the storeroom for something, and crossing out items on a list with a broad stroke of the pencil as he handed them over.
There were few customers.
“Your bags,” the storekeeper said to the professor and the doctor, glancing fleetingly at their invoices. The two men’s eyes popped out as flour, grain, macaroni, and sugar poured into the covers for little ladies’ cushions and the bigger pillow cases they held open, along with lard, soap, and matches, and also a piece each of something wrapped in paper, which later, at home, turned out to be Caucasian cheese.
