A colossus appeared beside their table, a white napkin over his arm, gave the three drunken veterans a blasé look and sang out: "All right, old-timers, shall I fill 'em up or do you want to pay?"
"Go ahead, young man. We'll have one more for the road," Ivan's neighbor bellowed. "You see, we've just met here. We're almost all from the same regiment. We were on the same front in the war. But I was in the signal corps, Vanya was a gunner and Nikolai…" Amid hiccups he started relating his war experiences with sweeping gestures across the table. The waiter picked up the empty glasses and walked away, yawning, to get their beer.
What Ivan pictured now was not Red Square but a courtyard covered in mud petrified by the cold and the dry snow, surrounded by huts or barracks. They have penned in the soldiers there and kept them out in the icy wind for several hours. They have also brought in uncouth lads from the countryside on big farm carts. Clad in padded jackets, disheveled shapkas, and down-at-the-heel felt boots. No one knows what is going to happen next – if they will be sent straight to the front line or left there and fed, or stuck in the barracks to sleep on bunks. And the blue of the low winter sky slowly hardens. Dusk descends. It snows and still they are standing there, sunk in a drowsy, silent numbness. And suddenly, somewhere near the farm carts, the strident cry of a garmoshka, a little concertina, blares forth. One of the country boys is playing it, bareheaded, with a mane of golden curls, not yet shorn, and a worn, unbuttoned sheepskin jacket… He is playing "Yahlochko," little apple, a sailors' song; he plays with desperate passion, tugging furiously on his garmoshka. His unseeing gaze is lost in the distance, somewhere above the heads. In the midst of the soldiers who surround him a sailor dances with the same reckless passion, stamping his heels fiercely on the frozen earth. He is of middling height, stocky, with a craggy face. Sailor's jersey, black marine jacket. He dances violently, baring his teeth in a wild fixed grin, and ha, too, stares at the gray horizon in blind ecstasy. The accordionist plays faster and faster, biting his lips and shaking his head in frenzy. The sailor stamps harder and harder upon the ground. Spellbound, the soldiers watch his face distorted with blissful agony. They no longer know where they are, they are no longer thinking about food, or sleep, or the front. The officer, who has come over to put an end to this merriment with one ear-splitting yell, stops and watches in silence. The sailor's boots are as heavy as if they were made of cast iron. They are laced up with lengths of telephone wire.
The waiter brings the beer, sets the glasses down amid the moist streaks on the table. Suddenly, completely clearly, as it might occur to someone who has drunk nothing, a question rings out in Ivan's head: "But where on earth can he be now, that little sailor? And that curly-haired accordionist?" And suddenly he is seized with pity for both of them. And, without knowing why, with pity, too, for his drinking companions. His chin begins to tremble and, half lying across the table, he holds out his arms to embrace them and can no longer see anything through his tears.
Before leaving, they drink the third bottle of vodka and go staggering out into the street, holding one another up. The night is full of stars. The snow crunches underfoot. Ivan slips and falls. The signalman picks him up with difficulty.
"It's nothing! It's nothing, Ivan! Don't worry. We'll take you home. You'll get there, don't worry…"
After that something strange occurs. Nikolai turns off through a gateway. The signalman sits Ivan down on a bench, goes off in search of a taxi and never comes back. Ivan stands up with difficulty. "I'll get there on my own," he thinks. "There's a store next, then the District Committee, and after that I turn left…"
But on the corner, instead of seeing the four-story apartment building and its familiar entrance gate, he sees a broad avenue with cars driving along it. He stops, baffled, leans against the wall of the house. Then he retraces his steps unsteadily, in retreat from this broad avenue that does not exist in Borissov. Yet these snowdrifts certainly exist in Borissov. He needs to skirt around them. And this bench and this fence also exist. Yes, that's it, all he has to do now is to cross this courtyard… But at the end of the courtyard an improbable apparition rears up – a vast skyscraper, like a rocket, illuminated by thousands of windows. And once more he retraces his footsteps, slips, falls, picks himself up again, holding on to a tree covered in hoarfrost. Once more he heads for the familiar snowdrifts, and the bench, without realizing that he is not in Borissov but in Moscow wandering around Kazan Station, where he got off the train this morning.
Two vehicles pulled up almost simultaneously beside the snowdrift where Ivan lay. One of them, from the militia, was collecting drunks to take them to the sobering-up station; the other was an ambulance. The first of these was doing its midnight rounds, the second had been summoned by a kindhearted pensioner, who from his window had seen Ivan lying on the ground. His shapka had flown off five yards away when he fell. None of the passersby out late at night had taken a fancy to it. Who needs a truck driver's battered old headgear? As he fell, Ivan had grazed his cheek on the edge of the bench, but the cold blood had solidified without even staining the snow.
A drowsy militiaman got down from the cabin of the van; a young nurse sprang out of the ambulance, with a coat thrown on over her white blouse. She bent over the prostrate body and exclaimed: "Oh! This isn't our responsibility. What's the point of calling us? He's a drunk! Any fool can see that. But they call you up and say 'Come quick. There's someone on the ground, in the road. Maybe knocked down by a car. Or else a heart attack…' A likely story! You can smell him a mile off."
The militiaman bent over as well, picked up the body by the collar and turned him over on its back.
"Well, we're not going to take him, that's for sure. There's blood all over his face. A boozer? Sure he's a boozer. But there's a physical injury… It's down to you to treat him. It's not our job."
"You've got a lot of nerve," cried the nurse angrily. "Treat him! He's going to throw up all over the ward. And who's going to clear up after him? It's hard enough finding cleaners as it is…"
"Well, picking up people with physical injuries isn't our job, I'm telling you. He may croak in the van. Or under the shower. He could bleed to death in there."
"What do you mean 'bleed to death'? Don't make me laugh. From that little scratch? Here, take a look at it, this physical injury…"
The nurse crouched down, extracted a little vial of alcohol and a cotton pad out of her satchel and wiped the scratch on Ivan's cheek.
"There. There's your 'physical injury,'" she said, showing the militiaman the cotton wool lightly stained with brown. "It's not even bleeding."
"Fine, fine. Since you've started treating him, you'd better finish the job. Pick him up and let's call it a day."
"No chance! Picking up drunks is your job. Otherwise what's the point of having all your sobering-up stations?"
"What's the point? If we take him in now with his mug all bloody, tomorrow morning he's going to be howling: 'The cops worked me over.' Everyone's wised up these days. At the smallest bit of trouble, wham! you get a story in the paper: 'Violation of socialist legality.' Sure thing! We've got glasnost now… Thanks to Gorbachev, the whole place is swarming with rabble-rouseirs. Under Stalin they'd soon have put you where you belonged. If that's how it is, write me a certificate testifying that he's got a bloody head. Otherwise I'm not taking him."
"But I don't have the right to make out a medical certificate until he's been examined."