Thus acted the presence of giftedness, natural, knowing no strain, feeling itself in the saddle in any situation of earthly existence.
This man must have possessed some gift, not necessarily an original one. The gift that showed in all his movements might be the gift of imitation. They all imitated someone then. The glorious heroes of history. Figures seen at the front or in the days of disturbances in the cities and who struck the imagination. The most acknowledged authorities among the people. Comrades who came to the fore. Or simply each other.
Out of courtesy, he did not show that the presence of a stranger surprised or embarrassed him. On the contrary, he addressed everyone with such an air as if he included the doctor, too, in their company. He said:
“Congratulations. We’ve driven them off. This seems like a war game, and not the real thing, because they’re Russians as we are, only with a folly in them that they don’t want to part with and that we’ll have to knock out of them by force. Their commander used to be my friend. He’s of still more proletarian origin than I am. We grew up in the same courtyard. He did a lot for me in my life, I’m obliged to him. But I’m glad I’ve thrust him back across the river and maybe further. Repair the connection quickly, Guryan. We can’t go on with just messengers and the telegraph. Have you noticed how hot it is? I slept for an hour and a half even so. Ah, yes …” he recalled and turned to the doctor. He remembered the cause of his waking up. He had been awakened by some nonsense, by force of which this detainee was standing here.
“This one?” thought Strelnikov, measuring the doctor from head to foot with a searching look. “No resemblance. What fools!” He laughed and said to Yuri Andreevich:
“I beg your pardon, comrade. You’ve been taken for someone else. My sentries got it wrong. You’re free. Where’s the comrade’s work book? Ah, here are your papers. Excuse my indiscretion, I’ll allow myself a passing glance. Zhivago … Zhivago … Doctor Zhivago … Something to do with Moscow … You know, all the same let’s go to my place for a minute. This is the secretariat, and my car is the next one. If you please. I won’t keep you long.”
30
Who was this man, though? It was astonishing that a nonparty man, whom no one knew, because, though born in Moscow, he had left after finishing the university to teach in the provinces, then had been held prisoner for a long time during the war, had been missing until recently and presumed dead, could advance to such posts and hold on to them.
The progressive railway worker Tiverzin, in whose family Strelnikov had been brought up as a boy, had recommended him and vouched for him. The people upon whom appointments depended at that time trusted him. In days of excessive pathos and the most extreme views, Strelnikov’s revolutionism, which stopped at nothing, stood out by its genuineness, its fanaticism, not borrowed from another man’s singing, but prepared by the whole of his life and not accidentally.
Strelnikov had justified the trust put in him.
His service record in the recent period included the affairs at Ust-Nemda and Nizhni Kelmes, the affair of the Gubasovo peasants, who had shown armed resistance to a supply detachment, and the affair of the robbery of a supply train by the fourteenth infantry regiment at the Medvezhaya Poima station. In his service book was the affair of the Razinsky regiment, who raised a rebellion in the town of Turkatuy and, arms in hand, went over to the side of the White Guard, and the affair of a soldiers’ riot at the river wharf of Chirkin Us, with its murder of a commander who remained loyal to soviet power.
In all these places, he appeared like a bolt from the blue, judged, sentenced, carried out the sentences, quickly, severely, dauntlessly.
His traveling about on the train had put an end to the general desertion in the area. The revision of the recruiting organizations changed everything. The Red Army levy went successfully. The selection committees got to work feverishly.
Finally, in recent days, when the Whites began pushing from the north and the situation was acknowledged as threatening, Strelnikov was charged with new tasks, essentially military, strategic and operational. The results of his intervention were not slow in telling.
Strelnikov knew that rumor had nicknamed him Rasstrelnikov, “the Executioner.” He calmly took it in stride, he feared nothing.
He was a native of Moscow and the son of a worker who had taken part in the revolution of 1905 and had suffered for it. He himself had kept away from the revolutionary movement in those years because of his youth, and in the following years, when he was studying at the university, because young people from a poor milieu, when they got to do advanced studies, valued it more and studied more assiduously than the children of the rich. The ferment among the well-to-do students had not touched him. He had left the university with a vast amount of knowledge. He had, by his own efforts, supplemented his historico-philological education with a mathematical one.
By law he was not obliged to go into the army, but he had gone to war as a volunteer, had been taken prisoner as a lieutenant, and at the end of the year 1917 had escaped, on learning that there was revolution in Russia.
Two features, two passions, distinguished him.
He thought with outstanding clarity and correctness. And he possessed a rare degree of moral purity and fairness, was a man of warm and noble feelings.
But for the activity of a scientist laying out new paths, his mind lacked the gift of unexpectedness, that power which, with unforeseen discoveries, disrupts the fruitless harmony of empty foresight.
And for doing good, he, a man of principle, lacked the unprincipledness of the heart, which knows no general cases, but only particular ones, and which is great in doing small things.
From an early age Strelnikov had striven for the highest and brightest. He considered life an enormous arena in which people, honorably observing the rules, compete in the attainment of perfection.
When it turned out that this was not so, it never entered his head that he was wrong in simplifying the world order. Having driven the offense inside for a long time, he began to cherish the thought of one day becoming an arbiter between life and the dark principles that distort it, of stepping forth to its defense and avenging it.
Disappointment embittered him. The revolution armed him.
31
“Zhivago, Zhivago,” Strelnikov went on repeating to himself in his car, to which they had passed. “From merchants. Or the nobility. Well, yes: a doctor from Moscow. To Varykino. Strange. From Moscow and suddenly to such a godforsaken hole.”
