Doctor Zhivago (20 page)

Gordon obtained the necessary permission to circulate in the frontline zone, and, pass in hand, went to visit his friend in a wagon that was headed in that direction.

The driver, a Belorussian or Lithuanian, spoke Russian poorly. The fear known as spymania had reduced all speech to a single formal, predictable pattern. The display of good intentions in discourse was not conducive to conversation. Passenger and driver went the greater part of the way in silence.

At headquarters, where they were used to moving whole armies and measuring distances by hundred-mile marches, they assured him that the village was somewhere nearby, around twelve or fifteen miles away. In reality it turned out to be more than sixty.

For the whole way, along the horizon to the left of the direction they were moving in, there was an unfriendly growling and rumbling. Gordon had never in his life been witness to an earthquake. But he reasoned correctly that the sullen and peevish grumbling of enemy artillery, barely distinguishable in the distance, was most comparable to underground tremors and rumblings of a volcanic origin. Towards evening, the lower part of the sky in that direction flushed with a rosy, quivering fire, which did not go out until morning.

The driver took Gordon past ruined villages. Some of them had been abandoned by their inhabitants. In others, people huddled in cellars deep underground. The villages had become heaps of rubble and broken brick, which stretched along the same lines as the houses once had done. These burned-down settlements could be surveyed at a glance from end to end, like barren wastes. On their surface, old women rummaged about, each in her own burnt debris, digging up something from the ashes and hiding it away each time, imagining they were hidden from strangers’ eyes, as if the former walls were still around them. They met and followed Gordon with their gaze, as if asking if the world would soon come to its senses and return to a life of peace and order.

During the night the travelers came upon a patrol. They were told to turn off the main road, go back, and skirt this area by a roundabout country road. The driver did not know the new way. They spent some two hours senselessly wandering about. Before dawn the traveler and his driver arrived at a settlement that bore the required name. No one there had heard anything about a field hospital. It soon became clear that there were two villages of the same name in the area, this one and the one they were looking
for. In the morning they reached their goal. As they drove along the outskirts, which gave off a smell of medicinal chamomile and iodoform, he thought he would not stay overnight with Zhivago, but, after spending the day in his company, would head back in the evening to the railway station and the comrades he had left. Circumstances kept him there for more than a week.

In those days the front began to stir. Sudden changes were going on there. To the south of the place where Gordon ended up, one of our combined units, in a successful attack of its separate constituent parts, broke through the fortified positions of the enemy. Developing its strike, the attacking group kept cutting deeper into their disposition. After it followed auxiliary units, widening the breach. Gradually falling behind, they became separated from the head group. This led to its being captured. In these circumstances, Second Lieutenant Antipov was taken prisoner, forced into it by the surrender of his platoon.

False rumors went around about him. He was considered dead and buried under the earth in a shell crater. This was repeated from the words of his acquaintance Galiullin, a lieutenant serving in the same regiment, who supposedly saw him die through his binoculars from an observation post, when Antipov was leading his men in an attack.

Before Galiullin’s eyes was the habitual spectacle of a unit attacking. They were supposed to advance quickly, almost at a run, across the space that separated the two armies, an autumn field overgrown with dry wormwood swaying in the wind and prickly thistles motionlessly sticking up. By the boldness of their courage, the attackers were either to entice the Austrians lodged in the opposite trenches to come and meet their bayonets or to shower them with grenades and destroy them. To the running men the field seemed endless. The ground yielded under their feet like a shifting swamp. First ahead, then mixing with them, ran their lieutenant, brandishing his revolver over his head and shouting “Hurrah!” with his mouth ripped open from ear to ear, though neither he nor the soldiers running around him could hear it. At regular intervals the running men fell to the ground, got to their feet all at once, and with renewed shouting ran on further. Each time, together with them, but quite differently from them, individual men who had been hit fell full length, like tall trees cut down, and did not get up again.

“They’re overshooting. Phone the battery,” the alarmed Galiullin said to
the artillery officer standing next to him. “No, wait. They’re right to shift the aim deeper in.”

Just then the attackers moved in close to the enemy. The artillery fire stopped. In the ensuing silence, the hearts of the men standing at the observation post pounded hard and fast, as if they were in Antipov’s place and, like him, having led men to the edge of the Austrian trench, in the next moment had to display prodigies of resourcefulness and courage. Just then two sixteen-inch German shells exploded ahead of them, one after the other. Black columns of earth and smoke concealed all that followed. “Yeh Allah! That’s it! The bazaar’s over!” Galiullin whispered with pale lips, considering the lieutenant and his soldiers lost. A third shell landed just next to the observation post. Bending low to the ground, they all hurried away from it.

Galiullin had slept in the same dugout with Antipov. When the regiment became reconciled with the thought that he had been killed and would not come back, Galiullin, who had known Antipov well, was put in charge of his belongings, with a view to handing them over in the future to his wife, of whom many photographs were found among Antipov’s things.

A former second lieutenant from the volunteers, the mechanic Galiullin, son of the yard porter Gimazetdin from Tiverzin’s courtyard and in the distant past an apprentice to a locksmith, beaten by his master Khudoleev, owed his advancement to his former tormentor.

Having been made a second lieutenant, Galiullin, no one knew how and without his own will, wound up in a warm and cushy billet in one of the garrisons far in the rear. There he had command of a detachment of semi-invalids, whom equally decrepit veterans instructed in the mornings in a drill they had long forgotten. Besides that, Galiullin checked whether sentinels had been correctly placed at the supply depots. It was a carefree life—nothing more was required of him. Then suddenly, along with reinforcements consisting of militiamen from earlier drafts and coming from Moscow to be under his command, arrived Pyotr Khudoleev, who was all too well-known to him.

“Ah, an old acquaintance!” Galiullin said, smiling darkly.

“Yes, sir,” replied Khudoleev, standing to attention and saluting.

It could not end so simply. At the very first negligence in drill, the lieutenant yelled at the lower-ranking man, and when it seemed to him that the soldier was not looking him straight in the eye, but somehow vaguely to the side, he punched him in the teeth and put him in the guardhouse for two days on bread and water.

Now Galiullin’s every move smacked of revenge for past things. To settle accounts like this, under the discipline of the rod, was too unsporting and
ignoble a game. What was to be done? It was impossible for the two of them to remain in the same place any longer. But where and on what pretext could an officer transfer a soldier from his assigned unit, unless he sent him to a disciplinary one? On the other hand, what grounds could Galiullin think up for requesting his own transfer? Justifying himself by the boredom and uselessness of garrison duty, Galiullin asked to be sent to the front. This earned him a good reputation, and when, in the next action, he displayed his other qualities, it became clear that he was an excellent officer, and he was quickly promoted to first lieutenant.

Galiullin had known Antipov since the time at Tiverzin’s. In 1905, when Pasha Antipov had lived for half a year with the Tiverzins, Yusupka had gone to see him and play with him on Sundays. He had seen Lara there once or twice then. After that he had heard nothing about them. When Pavel Pavlovich left Yuriatin and landed in their regiment, Galiullin was struck by the change that had come over his old friend. The bashful, laughter-prone, prissy prankster, who looked like a girl, had turned into a nervous, all-knowing, scornful hypochondriac. He was intelligent, very brave, taciturn, and sarcastic. At times, looking at him, Galiullin was ready to swear that he could see in Antipov’s heavy gaze, as in the depths of a window, some second person, a thought firmly embedded in him, a longing for his daughter or the face of his wife. Antipov seemed bewitched, as in a fairy tale. And now he was no more, and in Galiullin’s hands there remained Antipov’s papers and photographs and the mystery of his transformation.

Sooner or later Lara’s inquiries had to reach Galiullin. He was preparing to answer her. But it was a hot time. He felt unable to give her a proper answer. He wanted to prepare her for the coming blow. And so he kept postponing a long, detailed letter to her, until he heard that she herself was somewhere at the front, as a nurse. And now he did not know where to address a letter to her.

“Well? Will there be horses today?” Gordon would ask Dr. Zhivago when he came home in the afternoon to the Galician cottage they were living in.

“Horses, hah! And where will you go, if there’s no way forward or back? There’s terrible confusion all around. Nobody understands anything. In the south, we’ve encircled the Germans or broken through them in several places, and they say that in the process several of our scattered units got into a pocket, and in the north, the Germans have crossed the Sventa, which was considered impassable at that point. It’s their cavalry, up to a corps in number.
They’re damaging railways, destroying depots, and, in my opinion, encircling us. Do you get the picture? And you say horses. Well, look lively, Karpenko, set the table and get a move on. What are we having today? Ah, calves’ feet. Splendid.”

The medical unit with the hospital and all its dependencies was scattered through the village, which by a miracle had gone unscathed. Its houses, with gleaming western-style, narrow, many-paned windows from wall to wall, were preserved to the last one.

It was Indian summer, the last days of a hot, golden autumn. During the day, the doctors and officers opened the windows, killed the flies that crawled in black swarms over the windowsills and low, white-papered ceilings, and, unbuttoning their tunics and field shirts, dripping with sweat, burned their tongues on hot cabbage soup or tea, and in the evenings squatted in front of the open stove, blowing on the dying coals under the damp firewood that refused to burn, and, their eyes tearful from the smoke, cursed their orderlies, who did not know how to heat a stove in human fashion.

It was a quiet night. Gordon and Zhivago lay facing each other on benches against the two opposite walls. Between them was the dinner table and a long, narrow window stretching from wall to wall. The room was overheated and filled with tobacco smoke. They opened the two end casements and breathed in the autumnal freshness of the night, which covered the glass with sweat.

As usual, they were talking, just as they had all those days and nights. As always, there was a pink glow on the horizon in the direction of the front, and when, into the steady growl of gunfire, which never ceased for a moment, there fell deeper, separately distinct and weighty blows, which seemed to shift the ground in the distance slightly to one side, Zhivago broke off the conversation out of respect for the sound, held the pause, and said: “That’s Bertha, a German sixteen-incher, there’s a ton of weight in the little thing,” and then went on with the conversation, forgetting what they had been talking about.

“What’s that smell all the time in the village?” asked Gordon. “I noticed it the first day. Such a sickly sweet, cloying smell. Like mice.”

“Ah, I know what you mean. It’s hemp. There are a lot of hemp fields here. Hemp by itself gives off an oppressive and obnoxious smell of carrion. Besides, in a zone of military action, when men are killed in a hemp field, they go unnoticed for a long time and begin to rot. There’s a putrid smell all over the place, it’s only natural. Another Bertha. Hear it?”

In the course of those days they discussed everything in the world. Gordon knew his friend’s thoughts about the war and the spirit of the time. Yuri
Andreevich told him how hard it was to get used to the bloody logic of mutual destruction, to the sight of the wounded, especially to the horrors of some modern wounds, to the mutilated survivors that present-day technology turned into hunks of disfigured flesh.

Each day Gordon landed somewhere as he accompanied Zhivago, and thanks to him he saw something. He was, of course, aware of the immorality of gazing idly at other men’s courage and at how some, with an inhuman effort of will, overcame the fear of death, with great sacrifice and at great risk. But an inactive and inconsequential sighing over it seemed to him in no way more moral. He considered that you ought to behave honestly and naturally according to the situation life puts you in.

That one can faint at the sight of the wounded he proved to himself when he went to a mobile Red Cross unit that was working to the west of them at a first-aid field station almost on the front line.

They came to the edge of a big wood half cut down by artillery fire. Smashed and twisted gun carriages lay upside down among the broken and trampled underbrush. A riding horse was tied to a tree. Further in was the wooden house of the forest service with half its roof blown off. The first-aid station was set up in the forestry office and in two big gray tents across the road from it, in the middle of the wood.

“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” said Zhivago. “Our trenches are very close by, a mile or so, and our batteries are over there behind the wood. Do you hear what’s going on? Don’t play the hero, please—I won’t believe you. Your heart’s in your boots right now, and that’s only natural. The situation may change any moment. Shells will start flying here.”