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By Root 2044 0

the days of the shelling. There was artillery fire. See, the stones have separated. There are holes, openings between the bricks. Katenka and I put the key to the apartment into this hole and cover it with a brick when we leave. Keep that in mind. You may come one day and not find me here, and then you’re welcome to open the door, come in, make yourself at home. And meanwhile I’ll come back. It’s here now, the key. But I don’t need it. I’ll go in from the back and open the door from inside. The one trouble is the rats. Hordes and hordes, there’s no getting rid of them. They jump all over us. The structure’s decrepit, the walls are shaky, there are cracks everywhere. Where I can, I plug them, I fight. It doesn’t do much good. Maybe someday you’ll come by and help me? Together we can bush up the floors and plinths. Hm? Well, stay on the landing, think about something. I won’t let you languish long, I’ll call you soon.”

Waiting to be called, Yuri Andreevich let his eyes wander over the peeling walls of the entrance and the cast-iron steps of the stairs. He was thinking: “In the reading room I compared the eagerness of her reading with the passion and ardor of actually doing something, of physical work. And, on the contrary, she carries water lightly, effortlessly, as if she were reading. She has this facility in everything. As if she had picked up the momentum for life way back in her childhood, and now everything is done with that momentum, of itself, with the ease of an ensuing consequence. She has it in the line of her back when she bends over, and in the smile that parts her lips and rounds her chin, and in her words and thoughts.”

“Zhivago!” rang out from the doorway of an apartment on the upper landing. The doctor went upstairs.

14

“Give me your hand and follow me obediently. There will be two rooms here where it’s dark and things are piled to the ceiling. You’ll stumble and hurt yourself.”

“True, it’s a sort of labyrinth. I wouldn’t find my way. Why’s that? Are you redoing the apartment?”

“Oh, no, not at all. It’s somebody else’s apartment. I don’t even know whose. We used to have our own, a government one, in the school building. When the building was taken over by the housing office of the Yuriatin City Council, they moved me and my daughter into part of this abandoned one. There were leftovers from the former owners. A lot of furniture. I don’t need other people’s belongings. I put all their things in these two rooms and whitewashed the windows. Don’t let go of my hand or you’ll get lost. That’s it. To the right. Now the jungle’s behind us. This is my door. There’ll be more light. The threshold. Don’t trip.”

When Yuri Andreevich went into the room with his guide, there turned out to be a window in the wall facing the door. The doctor was struck by what he saw through it. The window gave onto the courtyard of the house, onto the backs of the neighboring houses and the vacant lots by the river. Sheep and goats were grazing on them, sweeping the dust with their long wool as if with the skirts of unbuttoned coats. Besides, there was on them, facing the window, perched on two posts, a billboard familiar to the doctor: “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers.”

Under the influence of seeing the billboard, the doctor began from the first word to describe for Larissa Fyodorovna his arrival in the Urals with his family. He forgot about the rumor that identified Strelnikov with her husband and, without thinking, told her about his encounter with the commissar on the train. This part of the story made a special impression on Larissa Fyodorovna.

“You’ve seen Strelnikov?!” she asked quickly. “I won’t tell you any more right now. But how portentous! Simply some sort of predestination that you had to meet. I’ll explain to you after a while, you’ll simply gasp. If I’ve understood you rightly, he made a favorable impression on you rather than otherwise?”

“Yes, perhaps so. He ought to have repelled me. We passed through the areas of his reprisals and destructions. I expected to meet a brutal soldier or a murderous revolutionary