Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [183]
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
“Get Pafnutkin, Ryabykh, Nekhvalenykh, dead or alive. From the ends of the earth. And that Galuzin pup. Never mind that his papa delivers patriotic speeches, he won’t fine-talk us. On the contrary. We’re not lulled by it. Once a shopkeeper starts orating, it means something’s wrong. It’s suspicious. It’s contrary to nature. There’s secret information that there are political exiles hidden in their courtyard in Krestovozdvizhensk, that secret meetings are held. Catch the boy. I haven’t decided yet what to do with him, but if something’s uncovered, I’ll hang him without pity as a lesson to the rest.”
The searchers moved on. When they had gone far enough away, Koska Nekhvalenykh asked Tereshka Galuzin, who was dead with fright:
“Did you hear?”
“Yes,” the boy whispered in a voice not his own.
“For you and me, and Sanka, and Goshka, the only road now is to the forest. I don’t say forever. Till they get reasonable. And when they come to their senses, then we’ll see. Maybe we’ll come back.”
Part Eleven
THE FOREST ARMY
1
It was the second year since Yuri Andreevich fell captive to the partisans. The limits of this bondage were very vague. The place of Yuri Andreevich’s imprisonment was not fenced in. He was not guarded, not watched over. The partisan troops were on the move all the time. Yuri Andreevich made the marches with them. The troops did not separate themselves, did not shut themselves off from the rest of the people, through whose settlements and regions they moved. They mixed with them, dissolved in them.
It seemed that this dependence, this captivity, did not exist, that the doctor was free and simply did not know how to take advantage of it. The doctor’s dependence, his captivity, in no way differed from other forms of constraint in life, equally invisible and intangible, which also seem like something nonexistent, a chimera and a fiction. Despite the absence of fetters, chains, and guards, the doctor was forced to submit to his unfreedom, which looked imaginary.
His three attempts to escape from the partisans ended in capture. They let him off for nothing, but it was playing with fire. He did not repeat them any more.
The partisan chief Liberius Mikulitsyn was indulgent towards him, had him sleep in his tent, liked his company. Yuri Andreevich was burdened by this imposed closeness.
2
This was the period of the almost continuous withdrawal of the partisans towards the east. At times this displacement was part of the general offensive plan for driving Kolchak out of western Siberia. At times, when the Whites turned the partisans’ rear in an attempt to surround them, movement in the same direction was converted into a retreat. For a long time the doctor could not comprehend these subtleties.
The little towns and villages along the highway, most often parallel to which, but sometimes along which, the partisans made this withdrawal, varied between White and Red, depending on changing military fortunes. It was rarely possible to determine by their outward appearance who was in power in them.
In moments when the peasant militia passed through these small towns and villages, the main thing in them became precisely this army filing through them. The houses on both sides of the road seemed to be absorbed and drawn down into the ground, and the horsemen, horses, guns sloshing through the mud, and the tall, jostling riflemen with rolled-up greatcoats seemed to grow higher on the road than the houses.
Once, in one of these small towns, the doctor took over a supply of British medications abandoned during the retreat by officers of Kappel’s formation1 and seized as war booty.
It was a dark, rainy, two-colored day. All that was lit up seemed white, all that was not lit up—black. And in his soul there was the same gloom of simplification, without the softening of transitions and halftones.
The road, utterly destroyed by