They stood face-to-face: heavyset Yura, Mikha, thinner, but also madder. Mikha jumped up and down in place, and with both fists at once, somehow, popped Yura in the face, awkwardly and painlessly.
Yura’s anger finally kicked in. He launched a single punch at Mikha’s nose. Blood gushed out instantly. Sanya groaned, as though he had taken the blow himself, and pulled out a clean hanky. The punch wasn’t exceedingly strong, but it was perfectly on the mark. From that moment on, Mikha’s nose would be a little crooked. It was sore for a long time. Most likely it had been broken.
The duel was, for all intents and purposes, over.
* * *
Meanwhile, when the students had already left for home, the two young elementary-school teachers were sitting with Andrei Ivanovich and drinking a modest nightcap. Only the cloakroom attendant and the cleaning lady, who sometimes stayed overnight in the utility room when her husband drank too much, were left behind. Katya Zueva, now without her tricorne newspaper hat, wearing her brown coat, its cuffs and hem lengthened with black wool, sat on a chair in the cloakroom waiting for Victor Yulievich.
When he came downstairs, she handed him a note.
“A letter for you.”
He looked puzzled—he had already forgotten about the game. “Oh? Thank you,” he said, stuffing it absentmindedly into his coat pocket.
He found the scrap of paper in his pocket the next morning. It said:
I can lend you his new novel. Do you want it?
—Katya
He didn’t immediately understand what she was talking about.
On January 3, Katya called for him, and, still in postal-worker mode, delivered him a typewritten manuscript.
* * *
Pasternak’s new novel was called Doctor Zhivago. The first pages—even those before the death of Maria Nikolaevna Zhivago—affected Victor Yulievich deeply. This was the continuation of that legacy of Russian literature he had thought was over and done with, lost forever. It seemed that this tradition had sprouted anew, in the present. Every line of the new novel echoed that tradition and spoke of the same thing—of the ordeals of the human heart in this world, of the growth of the human being, of physical death and moral triumph; in short, of the “creation and wonder” of life.
For the entire school break, Victor Yulievich was completely absorbed in Pasternak’s novel. He was enchanted by the poems, though they seemed to be tacked on at the end in a clumsy and gratuitous way—they were recognizably Pasternak, but with a newly minted directness and simplicity. This was, evidently, the “unprecedented simplicity” the poet had long dreamed of.
As soon as he had finished the book, he began reading it again from the beginning. He discovered in it more and more gems of thought, feeling, and word. At the same time, he discerned its weaknesses, and the weaknesses appealed to him as well. They forced one to think, to ponder. Victor Yulievich felt no fondness for Lara, a rather thinly drawn character who kept doing things that attested to her foolishness and narcissism. But boy, how the author loved her!
Victor Yulievich was dismayed by the insistent coincidences, chance meetings, and convergences, until he realized that they were all connected, the loose ends all tied up, during the scene describing Yury Andreevich’s death, the parallel movement of a streetcar carrying the dying Zhivago, and Mademoiselle Fleury, proceeding on foot, without haste, in the same direction, to freedom—one departing from the land of the living, the other leaving the land of her captivity.
A magnificent postscript to the classical tradition of Russian literature, Victor Yulievich thought, pronouncing his verdict.
On January 10, the last day of school break, Victor Yulievich phoned Katya. They met in front of the fabric store on Solyanka Street. He thanked her for the enormous happiness she had afforded him.
“As soon as I read the book, I realized there was someone I had to give it to,” she said.
Then she revealed something to him that he would on no account have asked her: how she had acquired the book. “My grandmother has known Boris Pasternak nearly her whole life. She typed out the novel for him. This is Grandmother’s copy.”
Victor Yulievich placed a warm hand over the babbling mouth. “Never tell that to anyone. And you didn’t tell me, either.”
He kept his hand over her lips, and they moved ever so slightly, as though she were whispering to him silently.
She had just turned seventeen. She was barely out of childhood, and she still displayed some of the ways and manners of a child. Her long, bare neck stuck out of her coat. She had no scarf. Her hat was a child’s bonnet that tied under her chin. Her light brown eyes showed hurt, and a film of tears.
“No, no one—just you. I knew you would like it. I was right, wasn’t I? You did like it?”
“More than you can know, Katya. More than you can ever know. A book like that changes one’s life. I will be grateful to you until the day I die.”
“Really?” Her eyelashes opened wide, and her eyes lit up.
My God, it’s Natasha Rostova! Natasha Rostova in the flesh!
It took his breath away.
* * *
After Katya finished school, they got married. The first to know about it were, of course, the LORLs. They were thrilled. By September, Katya’s belly was noticeable to anyone who was paying attention, and the LORLs were doubly happy.
These circumstances drew them still closer to their teacher. Now, after their sessions, they would occasionally share a good bottle of Georgian wine, which flowed freely at Victor Yulievich’s home. They even started calling him Vika—to his face. And he didn’t object, though he preserved the custom of using the old-fashioned and respectful form of “you” when addressing them.
The sessions of the Lovers of Russian Literature continued to be held in Ksenia Nikolayevna’s room, but Victor Yulievich and Katya now lived in an apartment that belonged to one of Katya’s relatives. He had moved to the Russian north, having gotten a better job, and offered them the use of the apartment, in a residence for railroad workers, with windows facing onto the rail yards. They began their new life together against the background of an unceasing twenty-four-hour refrain: train departing, train arriving …
THE LAST BALL
These were Victor Yulievich’s best years: a meaningful job, the adoration of his students, and a happy marriage—at least for now. He even earned a little extra on the side—two evenings a week, he gave private lessons.
He worked very hard, but the LORLs still gathered at his home on Wednesdays. The graduating class of ’57 was his favorite—he had been their class adviser since the sixth grade, knew all their mamas and papas, grannies and grandpas, and siblings. The fifteen-year age gap became less and less palpable. The boys were growing into young men, and the marriage of their teacher to one of their classmates made the gap in their ages still less significant.
At the end of 1956 they announced the birth of a daughter. On December 1, in her eighth month of pregnancy, Katya had given birth to a fine four-and-a-half-pound girl. They named her Ksenia, after her grandmother. But even this diplomatic gesture could not soothe the hurt Ksenia Nikolayevna had suffered after her son’s marriage. She couldn’t bear the thought that another woman would make Vika his breakfast, talk with him in the evenings, wait for him after school, and wake him up in the morning. Moreover, she felt a particular antagonism toward Katya—relations between a mother-in-law and her son’s wife are a chemical reaction in the blood. She believed that the underage girl had seduced him, perverted him, lured him with her wiles. In short, she had roped him into marriage.
Victor Yulievich’s colleagues at school took a different view of the matter. The teachers’ lounge was rife with backbiting rumors and gossip, which were especially ruthless and damning among the female teachers. When the little girl was born, the entire teaching staff experienced a thrill of malicious pleasure. Vera Lvovna, the mathematics teacher, counted off the months on her fingers, incontestably demonstrating that Zueva would have had to conceive in the third quarter of the school year to give birth in December.