Free Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

start the strike that same evening. The members of the committee at once assigned who among them was to go where and who would relieve whom. When the hoarse, gradually clearing and steadying signal burst from the engine repair shop, as if from the bottom of Tiverzin’s soul, a crowd from the depot and the freight yard was already moving towards the city from the semaphore at the entrance, merging with a new crowd which, at Tiverzin’s whistle, had dropped their work in the boiler room.
    For many years Tiverzin thought that he alone had stopped all work and movement on the railway that night. Only later trials, in which he was judged collectively and the accusations did not include inciting to strike, led him out of that error.
    People came running out, asking: “Why is the whistle blowing?” The response came from the darkness: “Are you deaf? Can’t you hear? It’s the alarm. There’s a fire.” “But where is it?” “Must be somewhere, since the whistle’s blowing.”
    Doors banged, new people came out. Other voices were heard. “Go on—a fire! Country hicks! Don’t listen to the fool. It’s what’s called a walkout, understand? Here’s my hat and here’s the door, I’m not your servant anymore. Let’s go home, boys.”
    More and more people joined in. The railway was on strike.
7
    Tiverzin came home two days later, chilled, sleepy, and unshaven. The night before there had been a sudden cold snap, unprecedented for that time of year, and Tiverzin was dressed for fall. At the gate he was met by the yard porter Gimazetdin.
    “Thank you, Mr. Tiverzin,” he began. “You not let Yusup be hurt, you make us all pray God forever.”
    “Are you out of your mind, Gimazetdin? What kind of ‘mister’ am I to you? Drop all that, please. Speak quickly, you see how freezing it is.”
    “Why freezing, you warm, Savelyich. Yesterday we bring your mother, Marfa Gavrilovna, full shed of firewood from freight yard, birch only, good firewood, dry firewood.”
    “Thank you, Gimazetdin. There’s something else you wanted to tell me. Be quick, please, you can see I’m cold.”
    “I wanted to tell you, no sleep home, Savelyich, must hide. Policeman asked, police chief asked, who come to see you. I say no one come. An assistant come, the engine team comes, railway people. But strangers—no, no!”
    The house where the bachelor Tiverzin lived with his mother and his married younger brother belonged to the neighboring church of the Holy Trinity. This house was inhabited partly by certain of the clergy, by two associations of fruit- and meat-sellers who hawked their wares from stands in town, but mostly by minor employees of the Moscow–Brest railway.
    The house was of stone with wooden galleries. They surrounded on four sides a dirty, unpaved courtyard. Dirty and slippery wooden stairways led up to the galleries. They smelled of cats and pickled cabbage. To the landings clung outhouses and closets with padlocks.
    Tiverzin’s brother had been called up as a private in the war and had been wounded at Wafangkou. 3 He was recovering in the Krasnoyarsk hospital, where his wife and two daughters had gone to visit him and receive him when he was dismissed. Hereditary railwaymen, the Tiverzins were light-footed and went all over Russia on free company passes. At the time,the apartment was quiet and empty. Only the mother and son were living in it.
    The apartment was on the second floor. On the gallery outside the front door stood a barrel, which was filled by a water carrier. When Kiprian Savelyevich got up to his level, he discovered that the lid of the barrel had been moved aside and a metal mug stood frozen to the crust of ice that had formed on the water.
    “Prov and nobody else,” thought Tiverzin with a smirk. “Can’t drink enough, got a hole in him, guts on fire.”
    Prov Afanasyevich Sokolov, a psalm-reader, a stately and not yet old man, was a distant relation of Marfa Gavrilovna.
    Kiprian Savelyevich tore the