The speaker went on developing the plan for the conspiracy, but he began to move off with the others, and the doctor could not hear them anymore.
“They mean Liberius, the scoundrels!” Yuri Andreevich thought with horror and indignation, forgetting how many times he himself had cursed his tormentor and wished for his death. “The villains are going to hand him over to the Whites or kill him. How can I prevent it? Go up to the bonfire as if by chance and, without naming anybody, inform Kamennodvorsky. And somehow warn Liberius about the danger.”
Kamennodvorsky was no longer in his former place. The bonfire was going out. Kamennodvorsky’s assistant was there to see that the fire did not spread.
But the attempt did not take place. It was stopped. As it turned out, they knew about the conspiracy. That day it was fully uncovered and the conspirators were arrested. Sivobluy had played a double role in it, as sleuth and seducer. The doctor felt still more disgusted.
9
It became known that the fleeing women and children were now just two marches away. At Fox Point they were preparing to meet their families soon and after that to raise camp and move on. Yuri Andreevich went to see Pamphil Palykh.
The doctor found him at the entrance to his tent with an axe in his hand. In front of the tent was a tall pile of young birches cut down for poles. Pamphil had not yet trimmed them. Some had been cut right there and, falling heavily, had stuck the sharp ends of their broken branches into the damp soil. Others he had brought from not far away and piled on top. Trembling and swaying on the resilient branches crushed underneath, the birches lay neither on the ground nor on each other. It was as if they were warding off Pamphil, who had cut them down, with their hands and barring the entrance of the tent to him with a whole forest of live greenery.
“In expectation of our dear guests,” said Pamphil, explaining what he was doing. “The tent will be too low for my wife and children. And it gets flooded when it rains. I want to prop up the top with stakes. I’ve cut some planks.”
“There’s no use thinking they’ll let your family live in the tent with you, Pamphil. Where have you ever seen nonmilitary, women and children, staying in the middle of an army? They’ll be placed somewhere at the edge, with the train. Go to see them in your free time, if you like. But to have them in a soldier’s tent is unlikely. But that’s not the point. They say you’ve grown thin, stopped eating and drinking, don’t sleep? Yet you look pretty good. Only a bit shaggy.”
Pamphil Palykh was a stalwart man with black tousled hair and beard and a bumpy forehead that gave the impression of being double, owing to a thickening of the frontal bone that went around his temples like a ring or a brass hoop. This gave Pamphil the unkindly and sinister appearance of a man looking askance or glancing from under his brows.
At the beginning of the revolution, when, after the example of the year 1905, it was feared that this time, too, the revolution would be a brief event in the history of the educated upper classes, and would not touch the lowest classes or strike root in them, everything possible was done to propagandize the people, to revolutionize them, alarm them, arouse and infuriate them.
In those first days, people like the soldier Pamphil Palykh, who, without any agitation, had a fierce, brutal hatred of the intelligentsia, the gentry, and the officers, seemed a rare find to the rapturous left-wing intelligentsia, and were greatly valued. Their inhumanity seemed a miracle of class consciousness, their barbarity a model of proletarian firmness and revolutionary instinct. Such was the established reputation of Pamphil. He was on the best standing with partisan chiefs and party leaders.
To Yuri Andreevich this gloomy and unsociable strongman seemed a not quite normal degenerate, owing to his general heartlessness, and the monotony and squalor of whatever was close to him and could interest him.
“Let’s go into the tent,” Pamphil invited.
“No, why? Anyway, I can’t get in. It’s better in the open air.”
“All right. Have it your way. In fact, it’s a hole. We can chat sitting on these staves” (so he called the trees heaped lengthwise).
And they sat on the birch trunks, which moved springily under them.
“They say a tale’s quickly told, but doing’s not quickly done. But my tale’s not quickly told either. In three years I couldn’t lay it all out. I don’t know where to begin.
“Well, so then. I was living with my wife. We were young. She saw to the house. I had no complaints, I did peasant work. Children. They took me as a soldier. Drove me flank-march to war. So, the war. What can I tell you about it? You saw it, comrade medic. So, the revolution. I began to see. The soldier’s eyes were opened. The German’s not the foreigner, the one from Germany, but one of our own. Soldiers of the world revolution, stick your bayonets in the ground, go home from the front, get the bourgeoisie! And stuff like that. You know it all yourself, comrade army medic. And so on. The civil war. I merge into the partisans. Now I’ll skip a lot, otherwise I’ll never finish. Now, to make a long story short, what do I see in the current moment? He, the parasite, has moved the first and second Stavropol regiments from the front, and the first Orenburg Cossack regiment as well. Am I a little kid not to understand? Didn’t I serve in the army? We’re in a bad way, army doctor, we’re cooked. What does the scoundrel want? He wants to fall on us with the whole lot of them. He wants to encircle us.
“Now at the present time I’ve got a wife and kids. If he overpowers us now, how will they get away from him? Is he going to make out that they’re not guilty of anything, that they’re not part of it? He’s not going to look into that. He’ll twist my wife’s arms, torment her, torture my wife and children on my account, tear their little joints and bones apart. Go on, eat and sleep after that. Say you’re made of iron, but you’ll still crack up.”
“You’re an odd bird, Pamphil. I don’t understand you. For years you’ve been doing without them, didn’t know about them, didn’t grieve. And now, when you may see them any day, instead of being glad, you sing a dirge for them.”
“That was then, but this is now—a big difference. The white-epauletted vermin are overpowering us. But I’m not the point. It’s the grave for me. Serves me right, clearly. But I can’t take my dear ones with me to the next world. They’ll fall into the foul one’s paws. He’ll bleed them drop by drop.”
“And that’s why you have these fleetlings? They say some sort of fleetlings appear to you.”
“Well, all right, doctor. I haven’t told you everything. Not the main thing. Well, all right, listen to my prickly truth, don’t begrudge me, I’ll tell it all straight in your face.
“I’ve done in a lot of your kind, there’s a lot of blood on my hands from the masters, the officers, and it’s nothing to me. I don’t remember numbers or names, it’s all flowed by like water. But one little bugger won’t get out of my head, I bumped off one little bugger and can’t forget him. Why did I destroy the lad? He made me laugh, he was killingly funny. I shot him from laughter, stupidly. For no reason.
“It was during the February revolution. Under Kerensky. We were rioting. It happened at the railroad. They sent us a young agitator, to rouse us for the attack with his tongue. So we’d make war to a victorious conclusion. A little cadet comes to pacify us with his tongue. Such a puny fellow. He had this slogan: to a victorious conclusion. He jumped with his slogan onto a firefighting tub that was there at the station. So he jumped up on the tub to call us to battle from higher up, and suddenly the lid gave way under his feet and he fell into the water. A misstep. Oh, how funny! I just rolled with laughter. I thought I’d die. Oh, it was killing. And I had a gun in my hands. And I was laughing my head off, and that was it, no help for it. Same as if he was tickling me. Well, so I aimed and—bang—right on the spot. I don’t understand myself how it came out that way. As if somebody nudged my arm.