Doctor Zhivago (36 page)

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 other something and laughing
loudly. They were people with connections. They were not dejected. At home influential relations were interceding for them. In any case, they could buy themselves off further along the way.

The second, wearing boots and unbuttoned kaftans, or long, loose shirts over their pants and going barefoot, bearded or beardless, stood by the slid-open doors of the stuffy cars, holding on to the doorposts and the bars across the opening, looked sullenly at the area by the wayside and its inhabitants, and talked to no one. They did not have the necessary acquaintances. They had nothing to hope for.

Not all these people were placed in the cars authorized for them. A portion had been tucked into the middle of the train, mixed with the free public. There were people of that sort in the fourteenth car.

Usually, when the train approached some station, Antonina Alexandrovna, who was lying on the upper level, raised herself to the uncomfortable position she was forced into by the low ceiling, which prevented her from straightening up, hung her head over the side, and, through the chink of the slightly opened door, determined whether the place presented any interest from the point of view of barter and whether it was worthwhile getting down from the bunk and going outside.

And so it was now. The slowing pace of the train brought her out of her drowsiness. The multitude of switches over which the freight car jolted with increasingly loud bumps spoke for the importance of the station and the length of the forthcoming stop.

Antonina Alexandrovna sat bent over, rubbed her eyes, smoothed her hair, and, thrusting her hand into the knapsack, rummaged around and pulled out a towel embroidered with roosters, little figures, yokes, and wheels.

Just then the doctor woke up, jumped down from the berth first, and helped his wife climb down to the floor.

Meanwhile, past the open door of the car, following the switchmen’s boxes and lampposts, there already floated the trees of the station, weighed down by whole layers of snow, which looked like a welcome offering for the train, and the first to jump down from the still quickly moving train onto the pristine snow of the platform were the sailors, who, to get ahead of everyone, went running around the station building, where, in the shelter of the side wall, women selling forbidden food usually hid.

The sailors’ black uniforms, the flying ribbons of their peakless caps, and
their bell-bottomed trousers lent a dash and impetuosity to their steps and made everyone give way before them, as before downhill skiers or skaters racing at top speed.

Around the corner of the station, hiding behind one another and as nervous as if they were telling fortunes, peasant women from the nearby villages lined up with cucumbers, cottage cheese, boiled beef, and rye cheesecakes, which, under the quilted covers they were brought in, kept their aroma and warmth even in the cold. The women and girls, in kerchiefs tucked under their winter jackets, blushed like poppies at some of the sailors’ jokes, and at the same time feared them worse than fire, because it was mostly of sailors that all sorts of detachments were formed for combating speculation and forbidden free trade.

The peasant women’s confusion did not last long. The train was coming to a stop. Other passengers were arriving. The public intermingled. Trade became brisk.

Antonina Alexandrovna was making the rounds of the women, the towel thrown over her shoulder, looking as if she were going behind the station to wash with snow. She had already been called to from the lines several times:

“Hey, you, city girl, what are you asking for the towel?”

But Antonina Alexandrovna, without stopping, walked on further with her husband.

At the end of the line stood a woman in a black kerchief with free crimson designs. She noticed the embroidered towel. Her bold eyes lit up. She glanced sideways, made sure that danger did not threaten from anywhere, quickly went up close to Antonina Alexandrovna, and, throwing back the cover of her goods, whispered in a heated patter:

“Looky here. Ever seen the like? Aren’t you tempted? Well, don’t think too long—it’ll be snapped up. Give me the towel for the halfy.”

Antonina Alexandrovna did not catch the last word. She thought the woman had said something about a calf.

“What’s that, my dear?”

By a halfy the peasant woman meant half a hare, split in two and roasted from head to tail, which she was holding in her hands. She repeated:

“I said give me the towel for a halfy. Why are you looking at me? It’s not dog meat. My husband’s a hunter. It’s a hare, a hare.”

The exchange was made. Each side thought she had made a great gain and the opposite side was as great a loser. Antonina Alexandrovna was ashamed to have fleeced the poor woman so dishonestly. But the woman, pleased with the deal, hastened to put sin behind her and, calling the woman next to her, who was all traded out, strode home with her down a narrow path trampled in the snow, which led to somewhere far away.

Just then there was a commotion in the crowd. Somewhere an old woman shouted:

“Where are you off to, young sir? And the money? When did you give it to me, you shameless liar? Ah, you greedy gut, I shout at him, and he walks off and doesn’t look back. Stop, I said, stop, mister comrade! Help! Thief! Robbery! There he is, there, hold him!”

“Which one?”

“Him walking there, with the shaved mug, laughing.”

“The one with a hole on his elbow?”

“Yes, yes. Hold him, the heathen!”

“The one with the patched sleeve?”

“Yes, yes. Ah, dear God, I’ve been robbed!”

“What’s the story here?”

“He was buying pies and milk from this old woman, stuffed himself full, and pffft! She’s here, howling her head off.”

“It can’t be left like that. He’s got to be caught.”

“Go on, catch him. He’s all belts and cartridges. He’ll do the catching.”

In freight car 14 there were several men rounded up for the labor army. They were guarded by the convoy soldier Voroniuk. Three of them stood out for different reasons. They were: Prokhor Kharitonovich Pritulyev, known as “casheteer” in the car, a former cashier in a state wine shop in Petrograd; the sixteen-year-old Vasya Brykin, a boy from a hardware store; and the gray-haired revolutionary cooperator Kostoed-Amursky, who had been in all the forced labor camps of the old times and had opened a new series of them in the new time.

These recruits were all strangers to each other, picked up here and there, and gradually got to know each other during the trip. From their conver-sations it was learned that the cashier Pritulyev and the shopkeeper’s apprentice Vasya Brykin were fellow countrymen, both from Vyatka, and moreover were both born in places that the train was supposed to pass through sometime or other.

The tradesman Pritulyev from Malmyzh was a squat man with a brush cut, pockmarked and ugly. His gray jacket, black from sweat under the armpits, fitted him tightly, like the upper part of a sarafan on the fleshy bust of a woman. He was silent as a block of wood and, brooding about something for hours, picked the warts on his freckled hands until they bled and began to fester.

A year back he had been walking down Nevsky Prospect in the fall and at
the corner of Liteiny had happened upon a street roundup. They had asked for his documents. He turned out to be the holder of a ration card of the fourth category, prescribed for nonlaboring elements, with which he had never obtained anything. He had been picked up by that token and, together with many others arrested in the street on the same grounds, had been sent to barracks under guard. The party assembled in that way, on the example of one previously put together, which was now digging trenches at the Arkhangelsk front, was first supposed to be moved to Vologda, but was turned back halfway and sent through Moscow to the eastern front.

Pritulyev had a wife in Luga, where he had been working in the pre-war years, before his job in Petersburg. Having learned of his misfortune by hearsay, his wife rushed to look for him in Vologda, to deliver him from the labor army. But the path of the detachment differed from that of her search. Her efforts came to naught. Everything was confused.

In Petersburg, Pritulyev had cohabited with Pelageya Nilovna Tyagunova. He was stopped at the corner of Nevsky just at the moment when he had taken leave of her and was going another way on business, and in the distance, among the passersby flashing along Liteiny, he could still see her back, which soon disappeared.

This Tyagunova, a full-bodied, stately tradeswoman with beautiful hands and a thick braid, which, with a deep sigh, she kept tossing now over one shoulder, now over the other, onto her breast, accompanied Pritulyev on the troop train of her own free will.

It was not clear what good the women who clung to Pritulyev found in such a block of wood as he. Besides Tyagunova, in another car of the train, several cars closer to the engine, rode another acquaintance of Pritulyev, the towheaded and skinny girl Ogryzkova, to whom Tyagunova gave the abusive titles of “the nostril” and “the syringe,” among other insulting nicknames.

The rivals were at daggers drawn and avoided each other’s eye. Ogryzkova never showed herself in their car. It was a mystery where she managed to see the object of her adoration. Perhaps she was content to contemplate him from afar, at the general loading of wood and coal by the forces of all the passengers.

Vasya’s story was something else again. His father had been killed in the war. His mother had sent Vasya from the village to apprentice with his uncle in Petrograd.

That winter the uncle, who owned a hardware store in the Apraksin Arcade, was summoned to the soviet for explanations. He went through the wrong door and, instead of the room indicated on the summons, landed in the one next to it. By chance it was the anteroom of the commission for labor conscription. There were a great many people there, appearing in that section on subpoena. When enough of them had accumulated, Red Army soldiers came, surrounded them, and took them for the night to the Semyonovsky barracks, and in the morning dispatched them to the station, to be put on the train to Vologda.

The news of the detention of so great a number of inhabitants spread through the city. The next day a host of relations came to bid farewell to their dear ones at the station. Among them were Vasya and his aunt, who came to see the uncle off.

At the station the uncle started begging the sentry to let him out for a minute to see his wife. This sentry was Voroniuk, who was now escorting the group in freight car 14. Voroniuk refused to let the uncle out without a sure guarantee that he would come back. The uncle and aunt offered to leave their nephew under guard as such a guarantee. Voroniuk agreed. Vasya was taken inside the fence, the uncle was taken outside. The uncle and aunt never came back.

When the hoax was discovered, Vasya, who had not suspected any fraud, burst into tears. He fell at Voroniuk’s feet and kissed his hands, begging him to let him go, but nothing helped. The convoy guard was implacable, not out of cruelty of character. This was a troubled time, the order was strict. The convoy guard was answerable with his life for the number entrusted to his charge, which was established by roll call. That was how Vasya ended up in the labor army.

The cooperator Kostoed-Amursky, who enjoyed the respect of all the jailers under both the tsar and the present government, and who was always on a personal footing with them, more than once drew the attention of the head of the convoy to Vasya’s intolerable situation. The man acknowledged that it was indeed a blatant error, but that formal difficulties did not allow for touching upon this tangle during the journey, and he hoped to disentangle it once they arrived.

Vasya was a pretty young boy with regular features, like portrayals of the tsar’s bodyguards and God’s angels on popular prints. He was unusually pure and unspoiled. His favorite amusement was to sit on the floor at the feet of the adults, clasping his knees with both arms and throwing his head back, and listen to their talk and stories. The content of it could be reconstructed from the play of the facial muscles with which he held back the
tears that were about to flow or fought with the laughter that was choking him. The subject of the conversation was reflected in the impressionable boy’s face as in a mirror.

The cooperator Kostoed was sitting up above as a guest of the Zhivagos and sucking with a whistle on the shoulder of hare they had offered him. He feared drafts and chills. “How it blows! Where’s it coming from?” he asked and kept changing his place, seeking a sheltered spot. At last he settled himself so that he felt no cold wind and said: “Now it’s good,” finished gnawing the shoulder, licked his fingers, wiped them with a handkerchief, and, having thanked his hosts, observed: