their things into the droshky, except for Yuri Andreevich, who at his own request, light, without luggage, was allowed to go to the station on foot.
7
At the station, Antonina Alexandrovna and her father were already standing in a numberless line, squeezed between the barriers of wooden fences. Boarding was now done not from the platforms, but a good half mile down the tracks, by the exit semaphore, because there were not enough hands to clean the approach to the platforms, half of the station area was covered with ice and refuse, and the trains could not get that far.
Nyusha and Shurochka were not in the crowd with the mother and grandfather. They strolled freely under the enormous overhanging roof of the entrance, only rarely coming to see if it was time to join the adults. They smelled strongly of kerosene, which had been heavily applied to their ankles, wrists, and necks as protection against typhus lice.
Seeing her husband approaching, Antonina Alexandrovna beckoned to him with her hand, but, not letting him come nearer, she called out from a distance to tell him at which window mandates for official missions were stamped. He went there.
“Show me what kind of seals they gave you,” she asked when he came back. The doctor handed her a wad of folded papers over the barrier.
“That’s a travel warrant for the delegates’ car,” Antonina Alexandrovna’s neighbor said behind her, making out over her shoulder the stamp on the document. The neighbor in front, one of those formalist legalists who in every circumstance know all the rules in the world, explained in more detail:
“With that seal you have the right to demand seats in a first-class, in other words, in a passenger coach, if there are any on the train.”
The case was subjected to discussion by the whole line. Voices arose:
“Go find any first-class coaches. That’d be too fat. Nowadays you can say thank you if you get a seat on a freight car buffer.”
“Don’t listen to them, you’re on official business. Here, I’ll explain to you. At the present time separate trains have been canceled, and there’s one combined one, which is for the military, and for convicts, and for cattle, and for people. The tongue can say whatever it likes—it’s pliable. But instead of confusing somebody with talk, you ought to explain so he’ll understand.”
“So you’ve explained. What a smart one we’ve got here. A warrant for the delegates’ car is only half the matter. Take a look at them first, and then talk. What are you going to do with such striking faces in the delegates’ car? The delegates’ car is full of our likes. The sailor’s got a sharp eye, and he’s got a pistol on a cord. He sees straight off—propertied class, and what’s more a doctor, from the former masters. The sailor grabs his pistol and swats him like a fly.”
It is not known where the sympathy for the doctor and his family would have led, had it not been for a new circumstance.
People in the crowd had for some time been casting glances through the thick plate glass of the wide station windows. The long roofs of the platform, stretching into the distance, removed to the last degree the spectacle of the snow falling on the tracks. At such a distance, it seemed that the snowflakes hung in the air almost without moving, slowly sinking into it the way soggy bread crumbs fed to fish sink into the water.
People in groups and singly had long been going off into that depth. While they were few in number, these figures, indistinct through the quivering net of the snow, had been taken for railway workers walking over the ties in the line of duty. But now a whole throng of them came along. In the depths they were heading for, an engine began to smoke.
“Open the doors, you crooks!” people shouted in the line. The crowd heaved and surged towards the doors. The ones in back pushed those in front.
“Look what’s going on! Here we’re barred by the wall, and there they cut ahead without lining up. The cars will be crammed full, and we stand here like sheep! Open up, you devils, or we’ll break it down! Hey, boys, all together, heave!”
“The fools don’t know who they’re envying,” the all-knowing legalist said. “They’ve been mobilized, drafted as labor conscripts from Petrograd.3 They were sent first to Vologda, to the northern front, and now they’re being driven to the eastern front. Not of their own will. Under escort. To dig trenches.”
8
They had already been traveling for three days, but had not gone far from Moscow. The landscape along the way was wintry: the tracks, the fields, the forests, the roofs of the villages—everything lay under snow.
The Zhivago family had found themselves by luck on the left corner of the upper front bunk, by a dim, elongated window just under the ceiling, where they settled in a family circle, not breaking up their company.
Antonina Alexandrovna was traveling in a freight car for the first time. When they were getting on the train in Moscow, Yuri Andreevich had lifted the women up to the level of the car floor, along the edge of which rolled a heavy sliding door. Further on, the women got the knack of it and climbed into the car by themselves.
At first the cars had seemed to Antonina Alexandrovna like cattle sheds on wheels. These pens, in her opinion, were bound to fall apart at the first jolt or shake. But it was already the third day that they were being thrown forward or back or sideways on turns or as the momentum changed, and the third day that the axles went on knocking rapidly under the floor, like the sticks of a wind-up toy drum, and the trip went very well, and Antonina Alexandrovna’s apprehensions proved unjustified.
The long train, consisting of twenty-three cars (the Zhivagos were in the fourteenth), stretched only some one part of itself—the head, the tail, the middle—along the short platforms of the stations.
The front cars were for the military, in the middle rode the free public, at the end those mobilized by labor conscription.
There were about five hundred passengers of this category, people of all ages and the most diverse ranks and occupations.
The eight cars that this public occupied presented a motley spectacle. Alongside well-dressed rich people, Petersburg stockbrokers and lawyers, one could see—also recognized as belonging to the class of exploiters— cabdrivers, floor polishers, bathhouse attendants, Tartar junkmen, runaway madmen from disbanded asylums, small shopkeepers, and monks.
The first sat around the red-hot stoves without their jackets, on short, round blocks stood upright, telling each
