“Precisely with that purpose. In search of quiet. In a remote corner, in the unknown.”
“How poetic. Varykino? I know the area. Kruger’s former factories. His little relatives, by any chance? His heirs?”
“Why this mocking tone? What have ‘heirs’ got to do with it? Though, in fact, my wife …”
“Aha, you see. Pining for the Whites? I must disappoint you. It’s too late. The area’s been cleared.”
“You go on jeering?”
“And then—a doctor. An army doctor. And it’s a time of war. Just my line. A deserter. The Greens8 also seclude themselves in the forests. Seeking quiet. What grounds?”
“Twice wounded and discharged as unfit.”
“Now you’re going to present a letter from the People’s Commissariat of Education or the People’s Commissariat of Health, recommending you as ‘a completely soviet man,’ as a ‘sympathizer,’ and attesting to your ‘loyalty.’ We’re now having the Last Judgment on earth, my dear sir, we have apocalyptic beings with swords and winged beasts, and not fully sympathizing and loyal doctors. However, I’ve told you that you’re free, and I won’t go back on my word. But only this time. I have a presentiment that we’ll meet again, and then, watch out, the talk will be different.”
The threat and the challenge did not disturb Yuri Andreevich. He said:
“I know everything you think about me. For your part, you’re absolutely right. But the argument you want to draw me into is one I have mentally conducted all my life with an imaginary accuser, and I should think I’ve had time to come to some conclusion. It can’t be put in a couple of words. Allow me to leave without explaining, if I am indeed free, and if not—dispose of me. I have no need to justify myself before you.”
They were interrupted by the buzzing of the telephone. The connection was restored.
“Thank you, Guryan,” said Strelnikov, picking up the receiver and blowing into it several times. “Send someone to accompany Comrade Zhivago, my dear boy. So that nothing happens again. And get me Razvilye on the squawk box, please, the Cheka9 transport office in Razvilye.”
Left alone, Strelnikov telephoned the station:
“They’ve brought in a boy, he pulls his cap over his ears, but his head’s bandaged, it’s disgraceful. Yes. Give him medical aid, if necessary. Yes, like the apple of your eye, you’ll answer to me personally. A ration, if it’s needed. Right. And now about business. I’m speaking, I haven’t finished. Ah, the devil, some third person’s cut in. Guryan! Guryan! Disconnected.”
“He could be from my primary school class,” he thought, setting aside for a moment the attempt to finish the talk with the station. “He grew up and rebels against us.” Strelnikov mentally counted up the years of his teaching, and the war, and his captivity, to see if the sum would fit the boy’s age. Then, through the car window, he began searching the panorama visible on the horizon for that neighborhood above the river, at the exit from Yuriatin, where their lodgings had been. And what if his wife and daughter were still there? Go to them! Now, this minute! Yes, but is that thinkable? That was from a completely different life. He must first finish this new one, before going back to that interrupted one. Someday, someday it would happen. Yes, but when, when?
ARRIVAL
1
The train that had brought the Zhivago family to this place still stood on the back tracks of the station, screened by other trains, but there was a feeling that the connection with Moscow, which had stretched over the whole journey, had broken, had ended that morning.
From here on another territorial zone opened out, a different, provincial world, drawn to a center of gravity of its own.
The local people knew each other more intimately than in the capital. Though the area around the Yuriatin– Razvilye railway had been cleared of unauthorized persons and cordoned off by Red Army troops, local suburban passengers made their way to the line in some incomprehensible way—“infiltrated,” as they would say now. The cars were already packed with them, they crowded the doorways of the freight cars, they walked on the tracks alongside the train and stood on the embankments by the entrances to their cars.
All these people to a man were acquainted with each other, conversed from afar, greeted each other when they came near. They dressed and talked slightly differently than in the capitals, did not eat the same things, had other habits.
It was curious to learn what they lived by, what moral and material resources nourished them, how they struggled with difficulties, how they evaded the laws.
The answer was not slow to appear in the most vivid form.
2
Accompanied by the sentry who dragged his gun on the ground and propped himself up on it as on a staff, the doctor went back to his train.
It was sultry. The sun scorched the rails and the roofs of the cars. The ground, black with oil, burned with a yellow gleam, as if gilded.
The sentry furrowed the dust with his rifle butt, leaving a trail in the sand behind him. The gun knocked against the ties. The sentry was saying:
“The weather’s settled. It’s the perfect time for sowing the spring crops—oats, summer wheat, or, say, millet. It’s too early for buckwheat. We sow buckwheat on St. Akulina’s day.1 We’re from Morshansk, in Tambov province, not from here. Eh, comrade doctor! If it wasn’t for this civil hydra right now, this plague of counterrevolutionists, would I be lost in foreign parts at a time like this? It’s run among us like a black cat, this class war, and see what it does!”
3
“Thanks. I’ll do it myself,” Yuri Andreevich declined the offered aid. People bent down from the freight car and
