27
It was so hot and stuffy that it was impossible to sleep. The doctor’s head was bathed in sweat on the sweat-soaked pillow.
He carefully got down from the edge of the berth and quietly, so as not to waken anyone, slid the car door aside.
Dampness breathed in his face, sticky, as when your face runs into a spiderweb in a cellar. “Mist,” he guessed. “Mist. The day will probably be sultry, scorching. That’s why it’s so hard to breathe and there’s such an oppressive heaviness on the heart.”
Before getting down on the tracks, the doctor stood for a while in the doorway, listening all around.
The train was standing in some very big station of the junction category. Besides the silence and the mist, the cars were immersed in some sort of nonbeing and neglect, as if they had been forgotten—a sign that the train was standing in the very back of the yard, and that between it and the far-off station building there was a great distance, occupied by an endless network of tracks.
Two sorts of sounds rang out faintly in the distance.
Behind, where they had come from, could be heard a measured slapping, as if laundry were being rinsed or the wind were flapping the wet cloth of a flag against the wood of a flagpole.
From ahead came a low rumble, which made the doctor, who had been at war, shudder and strain his ears.
“Long-range cannon,” he decided, listening to the even, calmly rolling noise on a low, restrained note.
“That’s it. We’ve come right to the front,” the doctor thought, shook his head, and jumped down from the car to the ground.
He went several steps forward. After the next two cars, the train ended. It stood without an engine, which had gone somewhere with the detached front cars.
“That’s why they showed such bravado yesterday,” thought the doctor. “They clearly felt that, once they arrived, they’d be thrown right into the fire on the spot.”
He went around the end of the train, intending to cross the tracks and find the way to the station. At the corner of the car, a sentry with a rifle surged up as if out of the ground. He snapped softly:
“Where are you going? Your pass!”
“What station is this?”
“No station. Who are you?”
“I’m a doctor from Moscow. Traveling with my family on this train. Here are my papers.”
“Your papers are crap. Think I’m fool enough to go reading in the dark and ruin my eyes? There’s mist, see? I can tell what kind of doctor you are a mile away without any papers. That’s your doctors there, banging away from twelve-inchers. You really ought to be knocked off, but it’s too early. Back with you, while you’re still in one piece.”
“I’m being taken for someone else,” thought the doctor. To get into an argument with the sentry was meaningless. It truly was better to withdraw before it was too late. The doctor turned in the opposite direction.
The cannon fire behind his back died down. That direction was the east. There in the haze of the mist the sun rose and peeped dimly between the scraps of floating murk, the way naked people in a bathhouse flash through clouds of soapy steam.
The doctor walked along the cars of the train. He passed them all and went on walking further. With each step, his feet sank ever deeper into the loose sand.
The sounds of measured slapping came closer. The ground sloped down. After a few steps the doctor stopped in front of outlines that the mist endowed with incongruously large dimensions. Another step, and the sterns of boats pulled up onto the bank emerged from the murk. He was standing on the bank of a wide river, its lazy ripples slowly and wearily lapping against the sides of fishermen’s boats and the planks of the docks on shore.
“Who gave you permission to hang around here?” another sentry asked, detaching himself from the bank.
“What river is this?” the doctor shot back against his own will, though with all the forces of his soul he was determined not to ask anything after his recent experience.
Instead of an answer, the sentry put a whistle between his teeth, but he had no time to use it. The first sentry, whom he had intended to summon by his whistling, and who, as it turned out, had been inconspicuously following behind Yuri Andreevich, came up to his comrade himself. The two began to talk.
“Nothing to think about here. You can tell the bird by its flight. ‘What station is this? What river is this?’ Thought he’d distract our attention by it. What do you think—straight to the jetty, or to the car first?”
“To the car, I suppose. Whatever the chief says. Your identity papers,” barked the second sentry, and he grabbed the wad of papers the doctor handed him.
“Keep an eye on him,” he said to some unknown person, and together with the first sentry, he went down the tracks towards the station.
Then, to clarify the situation, a man lying on the sand, evidently a fisherman, grunted and stirred:
“Lucky for you they want to take you to the man himself. It may be your salvation. Only don’t blame them. It’s their duty. The time of the people. Maybe it’s for the best. But meanwhile, don’t say anything. You see, they mistook you for somebody. They’ve been hunting and hunting for some man. So they thought it was you. Here he is, they think, the enemy of the workers’ power—we’ve caught him. A mistake. In case of something, you should insist on seeing the chief. Don’t let these two have you. These class-conscious ones are a disaster, God help us. It wouldn’t cost them a cent to do you in. They’ll say, ‘Let’s go,’ but don’t go. You say, ‘I want to see the chief.’ ”
From the fisherman Yuri Andreevich learned that the river he was standing beside was the famous navigable river Rynva, that the station by the river was Razvilye, the riverside factory suburb of the city of Yuriatin. He learned that Yuriatin itself, which lay a mile or two further up, kept being fought over, and now seemed finally to have been won away from the Whites. The fisherman told him that there had been disorders in Razvilye as well, and they also seemed to have been put down, and there reigned such silence all around, because the area adjacent to the station had been cleared of civilian inhabitants and surrounded by a strict cordon. He learned, finally, that among the trains standing on the tracks with various military institutions housed in them, there was the special train of the regional army commissar Strelnikov, to whose car the doctor’s papers were taken.
From there a new sentry came after some time to fetch the doctor, one unlike his predecessors in that he dragged his rifle butt on the ground or set it down in front of him, as if carrying a drunken friend under the arm, who otherwise would have fallen down. He led the doctor to the army commissar’s car.
28
In one of the two saloon cars, connected by a leather passageway, which the sentry, having given the guard the password, climbed into with the doctor, laughter and movement could be heard, which instantly ceased on their appearance.
The sentry led the doctor down a narrow corridor to the wide middle section. Here there was silence and order. In the clean, comfortable room, neat, well-dressed people were working. The doctor had quite a different picture of the headquarters of the nonparty military specialist who in a short period of time had become the glory and terror of the whole region.