Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [209]
The Whites had recently left the town, surrendering it to the Reds. The shooting, the bloodshed, the military alarms were over. That, too, frightened and alerted you, like the departure of winter and the augmentation of the spring days.
The notice that the passersby in the street read by the light of the lengthened day announced:
“For the information of the populace. Work booklets for those eligible can be obtained for 50 rubles each in the Provisions Section of the Yuriatin City Council, at 5 Oktiabrskaya, formerly General-gubernatorskaya, Street, room 137.
“Nonpossession of a work booklet, or incorrect or, still more so, false entries, will be punished with full wartime severity. Precise instructions for the use of work booklets are published in the B.Y.E.C., No. 86 (1013), of the current year and posted in the Provisions Section of the Yuriatin City Council, room 137.”
Another announcement reported on the sufficiency of food supplies available in the city, though they had supposedly been concealed by the bourgeoisie in order to disorganize distribution and sow chaos in the matter of provisioning. The announcement ended with the words:
“Those caught hoarding and concealing food supplies will be shot on the spot.”
A third announcement offered:
“In the interests of the correct organizing of food distribution, those not belonging to exploiter elements are to unite into consumers’ communes. Details can be obtained in the Provisions Section of the Yuriatin City Council, 5 Oktiabrskaya, formerly General-gubernatorskaya, Street, room 137.”
The military were warned:
“Those who have not surrendered their weapons or who carry them without a proper, newly issued permit, will be prosecuted with the full severity of the law. Permits can be exchanged in the Yuriatin Revolutionary Committee, 6 Oktiabrskaya, room 63.”
2
A wild-looking man with a sack on his back and a stick in his hand, emaciated, long unwashed, which made him look swarthy, came up to the group of readers. His long hair had no gray in it yet, but his dark blond beard was turning gray. It was Doctor Yuri Andreevich Zhivago. His winter coat had probably long since been taken off him on the way, or else he had traded it for food. He was in someone else’s old clothes, with sleeves too short to keep him warm.
In his sack there remained an unfinished crust of bread, given him in the last outlying village he had passed through, and a hunk of lard. About an hour earlier, he had entered the city from the side of the railway, and it had taken him a whole hour of trudging to get from the city gates to this intersection, so weak he was and exhausted from walking the past few days. He stopped often and barely kept himself from falling to the ground and kissing the stones of the city, which he had had no hope of ever seeing again, and the sight of which delighted him as if it were a living being.
For a very long time, half his journey on foot, he had gone along the railroad tracks. It was all left in neglect and inactive, and all covered with snow. His way had led him past whole trains of the White Army, passenger and freight, overtaken by snowdrifts, the general defeat of Kolchak, and the exhaustion of fuel supplies. These trains, stopped in their course, forever standing, and buried under snow, stretched in an almost unbroken ribbon for many dozens of miles. They served as strongholds for armed bands of highway robbers, a refuge for criminal and political fugitives in hiding, the involuntary vagabonds of that time, but most of all as common graves and collective burial sites for those who died of cold and the typhus that raged all along the railway line and mowed down whole villages in the area.
This time justified the old saying: Man is a wolf to man. A wayfarer turned aside at the sight of another wayfarer; a man would kill the man he met, so as not to be killed himself. There were isolated cases of cannibalism. The human laws of civilization ended. Those of beasts were in force. Man dreamed the prehistoric dreams of the caveman.
Solitary shadows, occasionally