Doctor Zhivago (21 page)

On the ground by the forest road, spreading their legs in heavy boots, dusty and weary young soldiers lay on their stomachs or backs, their field shirts soaked with sweat on their chests and shoulder blades—the survivors of a greatly diminished detachment. They had been taken out of a battle that had been going on for four days and sent to the rear for a brief respite. The soldiers lay as if made of stone, they had no strength to smile or curse, and not one of them turned his head when from the road deep in the wood came the rumble of several quickly approaching carts. These were springless machine-gun carts coming at a trot, bouncing up and down, breaking the bones and spilling the guts of the wretched wounded men they were bringing to the dressing station, where they would be given first aid, bandaged up, and, in certain especially urgent cases, hastily operated on. Half an hour earlier, during a brief lull in the firing, they had been carried off the field beyond the trenches in appalling numbers. A good half of them were unconscious.

When they drew up to the porch of the office, orderlies came down with stretchers and started unloading the carts. Holding the lower flaps with her hands, a nurse peeked out of one of the tents. It was not her shift. She was free. In the wood behind the tent, two men were yelling loudly at each other. The fresh, tall wood resounded with the echoes of their argument, but the words could not be heard. When the wounded were brought, the arguers came out to the road and went towards the office. A hotheaded little officer was shouting at a doctor from the mobile unit, trying to find out from him where they had moved the artillery park formerly stationed there in the wood. The doctor knew nothing, it was not his concern. He begged the officer to leave him alone and not shout, because wounded men had been brought and he had work to do, but the little officer would not calm down and berated the Red Cross, and the artillery department, and everybody in the world. Zhivago went up to the doctor. They greeted each other and went to the forestry house. The officer, still cursing loudly with a slight Tartar accent, untied the horse from the tree, jumped onto it, and galloped down the road into the wood. And the nurse went on looking, looking …

Suddenly her face became distorted with horror.

“What are you doing? You’re out of your minds!” she cried to two lightly wounded men, who, with no external help, were walking between the stretchers to the dressing station, and, running out of the tent, she rushed towards them.

An unfortunate man, especially horribly and hideously mutilated, was being carried on a stretcher. The bottom of an exploded shell, which had split his face open, turning his tongue and teeth into a bloody gruel, but without killing him, was lodged between his jawbones in place of his torn-out cheek. In a thin little voice, resembling nothing human, the mangled man kept uttering short, broken moans, which no one could fail to understand as a plea to finish him off quickly and end his inconceivably prolonged suffering.

The nurse imagined that, under the influence of his moaning, the lightly wounded men walking beside him were about to pull this horrible iron splinter out of his cheek with their bare hands.

“No, you can’t do that! A surgeon will do it with special instruments. If it gets that far. (God, God, take him, don’t make me doubt Your existence!)”

The next moment, as he was being carried up the porch, the mutilated man cried out, shuddered all over, and gave up the ghost.

The mutilated man who had just died was Reserve Private Gimazetdin; the officer shouting in the wood was his son, Lieutenant Galiullin; the nurse was Lara; Gordon and Zhivago were the witnesses. They were all there, all
side by side, and some did not recognize each other, while others had never known each other, and some things remained forever unascertained, while others waited till the next occasion, till a new meeting, to be revealed.

In this sector the villages had been preserved in some miraculous way. They made up an inexplicably intact island in the midst of a sea of destruction. Gordon and Zhivago were returning home in the evening. The sun was setting. In one of the villages they rode past, a young Cossack, to the unanimous guffawing of those around him, was making an old gray-bearded Jew in a long overcoat catch a five-kopeck copper coin he tossed in the air. The old man invariably failed to catch it. The coin, falling through his pathetically spread hands, fell in the mud. The old man bent down to pick it up, the Cossack slapped his behind, those standing around held their sides and moaned with laughter. This constituted the whole amusement. So far it was inoffensive, but no one could guarantee that it would not take a more serious turn. His old woman would come running from a cottage across the road, shouting and reaching her arms out to him, and each time would disappear again in fright. Two little girls looked at their grandfather through the window and wept.

The driver, who found it all killingly funny, slowed the horses’ pace to give the gentlemen time to amuse themselves. But Zhivago, calling the Cossack over, reprimanded him and told him to stop the mockery.

“Yes, sir,” the man said readily. “We didn’t mean nothing, it was just for laughs.”

For the rest of the way Zhivago and Gordon were silent.

“It’s terrible,” Yuri Andreevich began, when their own village came in sight. “You can hardly imagine what a cup of suffering the unfortunate Jewish populace has drunk during this war. It’s being conducted right within the pale of their forced settlement. And for all they’ve endured, for the sufferings, the taxes, and the ruin, they have the added reward of pogroms, taunts, and the accusation that these people lack patriotism. But where are they to get it, when they enjoy all rights with the enemy, and with us they’re only subjected to persecution? The very hatred of them, the basis of it, is contradictory. What vexes people is just what should touch them and win them over. Their poverty and overcrowding, their weakness and inability to fend off blows. Incomprehensible. There’s something fateful in it.”

Gordon made no reply.

And here again they were lying on two sides of the long, narrow window, it was night, and they were talking.

Zhivago was telling Gordon how he had seen the sovereign at the front. He told it well.

It was his first spring at the front. The headquarters of the unit to which he had been attached was in the Carpathians, in a hollow, the entrance to which, from the Hungarian valley, was blocked by that army unit.

At the bottom of the hollow there was a railway station. Zhivago described to Gordon the external appearance of the place, the mountains overgrown with mighty firs and pines, with white tufts of clouds caught among them, and the stone cliffs of gray slate and graphite, which showed through the forest like worn spots in thick fur. It was a damp, dark April morning, gray as that slate, locked in by the heights on all sides and therefore still and stuffy. Steaming hot. Steam hung over the hollow, and everything fumed, everything drew upwards in streams of smoke, engine smoke from the station, gray steam from the meadows, gray mountains, dark forests, dark clouds.

In those days the sovereign was making the rounds of Galicia. Suddenly it became known that he would visit the unit stationed here, of which he was the honorary colonel.

He might come at any moment. An honor guard was stationed on the platform to meet him. An hour or two of wearisome waiting followed. Then quickly, one after another, two trains came with the suite. Shortly afterwards the tsar’s train arrived.

Accompanied by the grand duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the sovereign inspected the lined-up grenadiers. With every syllable of his quiet greeting he raised up bursts and splashes of thunderously rolling hurrahs, like water dancing in swaying buckets.

The embarrassed and smiling sovereign gave the impression of a man older and more gone to seed than he appeared on rubles and medals. He had a listless, slightly puffy face. He kept casting guilty sidelong glances at Nikolai Nikolaevich, not knowing what was required of him in the given circumstances, and Nikolai Nikolaevich, respectfully bending towards his ear, not even with words but with the movement of an eyebrow or a shoulder, helped him out of his difficulty.

The tsar was pitiable on that gray and warm mountain morning, and it was eerie to think that such timorous reserve and shyness could be the essence of an oppressor, that this weakness could punish and pardon, bind and loose.

“He should have pronounced something on the order of ‘I, my sword, and my people,’ like Wilhelm,
¹¹
or something in that spirit. But certainly about the people, that’s indispensable. But, you understand, he was natural in a Russian way and tragically above such banality. In Russia this theatricality is unthinkable. Because it is theatricality, isn’t it? I can understand that there were still such peoples in Caesar’s time, some sort of Gauls, or Suevians, or Illyrians. But from then on it’s only been a fiction, existing so that tsars and activists and kings could make speeches about it: ‘The people, my people.’

“Now the front is flooded with correspondents and journalists. They note down ‘observations,’ the utterances of popular wisdom, make the rounds of the wounded, construct a new theory of the people’s soul. It’s a sort of new Dahl,
¹²
just as contrived, a linguistic graphomania of verbal incontinence. That’s one type. But there’s another. Clipped speech, ‘jottings and sketches,’ skepticism, misanthropy. For instance, in one of them (I read it myself), there are such sentences as: ‘A gray day, like yesterday. Rain and slush since morning. I look through the window at the road. Prisoners strung out in an endless line. Wounded being transported. A cannon fires. It fires again, today as yesterday, tomorrow as today, and so on every day and every hour …’ Just look, how perceptive and witty! Though why is he offended at the cannon? What a strange pretension, to demand diversity from a cannon! Instead of the cannon, why isn’t he astonished at himself, firing off lists, commas, phrases, day in and day out, why doesn’t he stop this barrage of journalistic philanthropy, as hasty as a hopping flea? How is it he doesn’t understand that it’s he, not the cannon, who should be new and not repeat himself, that the accumulation of a great quantity of senselessness in a notebook will never arrive at any sense, that facts don’t exist until a man puts something of his own into them, some share of whimsical human genius, something of the fantastic.”

“Strikingly true,” Gordon interrupted him. “Now I’ll answer you concerning the scene we witnessed today. That Cossack mocking the poor patriarch, along with thousands of cases like it, is, of course, an example of the most elementary baseness, which should occasion, not philosophizing, but a punch in the nose, that’s clear. But to the question of the Jews as a whole, philosophy is applicable, and then it turns its unexpected side to us. But here I’m not telling you anything new. All these thoughts, in me as in you, come from your uncle.

“ ‘What is a people?’ you ask. Must we make a fuss over it, and doesn’t he do more for it who, without thinking of it, by the very beauty and triumph of his deeds, raises it to universality and, having glorified it, makes it
eternal? Well, of course, of course. And what kind of peoples can we talk about in Christian times? They’re not simple peoples, but converted, transformed peoples, and the whole point is precisely in the transformation, not in faithfulness to old principles. Let’s remember the Gospel. What did it say on this subject? First, it wasn’t an assertion: this is so and that is so. It was a naïve and timid suggestion. The suggestion was: Do you want to exist in a new way, as never before, do you want the blessedness of the spirit? And everyone accepted the suggestion, caught up for millennia.

“When it said that in the Kingdom of God there are no Greeks and Jews, did it merely mean to say that everyone is equal before God?
¹³
No, there was no need for that; the Greek philosophers, the Roman moralists, the prophets of the Old Testament knew that before. But it said: in that new way of existence and new form of communion, conceived in the heart and known as the Kingdom of God, there are no peoples, there are persons.

“You just said that a fact is senseless unless one puts sense into it. Christianity, the mystery of the person, is precisely what needs to be put into the fact for it to acquire meaning for man.

“And we talked about average figures, who have nothing to say to life and the world as a whole, about second-rate forces interested in narrowness, in having the talk always be about some people or other, preferably a small one, that should suffer, so that it’s possible to sit and talk endlessly and thrive on their own pity. Jewry is fully and completely the victim of this element. Its own notion of itself as a people laid upon it the deadening necessity of being and remaining a people and only that over the centuries, during which, by a power that had once come from its own midst, the whole world was delivered from this humiliating task. How astounding it is! How could it have happened? This festivity, this deliverance from the bedevilment of mediocrity, this soaring above the dull-witted workaday world—all this was born on their soil, spoke their language, and belonged to their tribe. And they saw and heard it and let it slip. How could they have let a spirit of such all-absorbing beauty and power leave them, how could they think that next to its triumph and reign they would remain as the empty shell this miracle had once cast off? To whose profit is this voluntary martyrdom, who needs these centuries of the mockery and bloodletting of so many utterly blameless old men, women, and children, so fine and so capable of good and of the heart’s communion! Why are the people-loving writers of all peoples so lazy and giftless? Why do the rulers of this people’s minds never go beyond the two easily accessible forms of world sorrow and ironizing wisdom? Why, faced with the risk of exploding from the irrevocability of their duty, as a steam boiler explodes from pressure, did they not disband this
troop that fights and gets beaten nobody knows what for? Why didn’t they say: ‘Come to your senses. Enough. There’s no need for more. Don’t call yourselves by the old name. Don’t cling together, disperse. Be with everyone. You are the first and best Christians in the world. You are precisely that which you have been set against by the worst and weakest among you.”