But the center of his activity was probably not here, but somewhere ahead, at frontline headquarters, closer to the scene of military activity, while here were his personal quarters, his small home office, and his mobile camp bed.
That was why it was quiet here, like the corridors of hot sea baths, laid with cork and rugs on which attendants in soft shoes step inaudibly.
The middle section of the car was a former dining room, carpeted over and turned into a dispatch room. There were several desks in it.
“One moment,” said a young officer who was sitting closest to the entrance. After that everyone at the desks thought it their right to forget about the doctor and stop paying attention to him. The same officer dismissed the sentry with an absentminded nod, and the man withdrew, the butt of his rifle clanking against the metal crossbars of the corridor.
The doctor saw his papers from the threshold. They lay on the edge of the last desk, in front of a more elderly officer of the old colonel type. He was some sort of military statistician. Humming something under his breath, he glanced at reference books, scrutinized army maps, compared, juxtaposed, cut out, and glued in something. He passed his gaze over all the windows in the room, one after the other, and said: “It’s going to be hot today,” as if he had drawn this conclusion from surveying all the windows, and it was not equally clear from each of them.
A military technician was crawling over the floor among the desks, fixing some broken wires. When he crawled under the young officer’s desk, the man got up so as not to hinder him. Next to him a girl, a copying clerk, in a man’s khaki jacket, was struggling over a broken typewriter. The carriage had gone too far to the side and gotten stuck in the frame. The young officer stood behind her stool and, together with her, studied the cause of the breakage from above. The military technician crawled over to the typist and examined the lever and gears from below. Getting up from his place, the commander of the colonel type went over to them. Everyone became occupied with the typewriter.
This reassured the doctor. It was impossible to suppose that people better initiated than he into his probable destiny would give themselves so lightheartedly to trifles in the presence of a doomed man.
“Though who knows about them?” he thought. “Where does their serenity come from? Beside them cannons boom, people are killed, and they make a forecast of a hot day, not in the sense of hot fighting, but of hot weather. Or have they seen so much that everything has gone dull in them?”
And, having nothing else to do, he began looking from his place across the entire room through the windows opposite.
29
In front of the train on this side stretched the rest of the tracks, and the Razvilye station could be seen on a hill in the suburb of the same name.
An unpainted wooden stairway with three landings led from the tracks up to the station.
The railway tracks on this side seemed to be a great engine graveyard. Old locomotives without tenders, with smokestacks shaped like cups or boot tops, stood turned stack to stack amidst piles of scrapped cars.
The engine graveyard below and the graveyard of the suburb, the crumpled iron on the tracks and the rusty roofs and signboards of the city’s outskirts, merged into one spectacle of abandonment and decrepitude under the white sky scalded by the early morning heat.
In Moscow, Yuri Andreevich forgot how many signboards there were in cities and what a great portion of the façades they occupied. The local signboards reminded him of it. Half of them were written in such big letters that they could be read from the train. They came down so low over the crooked little windows of the lopsided one-story buildings that the squatty houses disappeared under them, like peasant boys’ heads with their fathers’ caps pulled down over them.
By that time the mist had dispersed completely. Traces of it remained only on the left side of the sky, far to the east. But now they, too, stirred, moved, and parted like a theater curtain.
There, some two miles from Razvilye, on a hill higher than the suburbs, appeared a large city, a district or provincial capital. The sun lent its colors a yellowish tinge, the distance simplified its lines. It clung to the elevation in tiers, like Mount Athos or a hermits’ skete in a cheap print, house above house, street above street, with a big cathedral in the middle on its crown.
“Yuriatin!” the doctor realized with emotion. “The subject of the late Anna Ivanovna’s memories and of the nurse Antipova’s frequent remarks! How many times did I hear the name of the city from them, and it’s in such circumstances that I’m seeing it for the first time!”
At that moment the attention of the military bent over the typewriter was attracted by something outside the window. They turned their heads there. The doctor also followed their gaze.
Several captured or arrested men were being led up the stairs to the station, among them a high school boy who was wounded in the head. He had been bandaged somewhere, but blood seeped from under the bandage, and he smeared it with his hand over his sunburnt, sweaty face.
The student, between two Red Army men who wound up the procession, caught one’s attention not only by the resolution that his handsome face breathed, but by the pity evoked by such a young rebel. He and his two escorts attracted one’s gaze by the senselessness of their actions. They constantly did the opposite of what they should.
The cap kept falling off the student’s bandaged head. Instead of taking it off and carrying it in his hand, he would straighten it and pull it down further, to the detriment of his dressed wound, and the two Red Army men readily helped him.
In this absurdity, contrary to common sense, there was something symbolic. And, yielding to its significance, the doctor also wanted to run out to the landing and stop the student with a ready phrase that was bursting from him. He wanted to cry out both to the boy and to the people in the car that salvation lay not in faithfulness to forms, but in liberation from them.
The doctor shifted his gaze aside. In the middle of the room stood Strelnikov, who had just come in with straight, impetuous strides.
How could he, the doctor, amidst such a host of indefinite acquaintances, not have known up to now such definiteness as this man? How had life not thrown them together? How had their paths not crossed?
For some unknown reason it became clear at once that this man represented the consummate manifestation of will. He was to such a degree what he wanted to be that everything on him and in him inevitably seemed exemplary: his proportionately constructed and handsomely placed head, and the impetuousness of his stride, and his long legs in high boots, which may have been dirty but seemed polished, and his gray flannel tunic, which may have been wrinkled but gave the impression of ironed linen.
Thus acted the presence of giftedness, natural, knowing no strain, feeling itself in the saddle in any situation of earthly existence.
This man must have possessed some gift, not necessarily an original one. The gift that showed in all his movements might be the gift of imitation. They all imitated someone then. The glorious heroes of history. Figures seen at the front or in the days of disturbances in the cities and who struck the imagination. The most acknowledged authorities among the people. Comrades who came to the fore. Or simply each other.
Out of courtesy, he did not show that the presence of a stranger surprised or embarrassed him. On the contrary, he addressed everyone with such an air as if he included the doctor, too, in their company. He said:
“Congratulations. We’ve driven them off. This seems like a war game, and not the real thing, because they’re Russians as we are, only with a folly in them that they don’t want to part with and that we’ll have to knock out of them by force. Their commander used to be my friend. He’s of still more proletarian origin than I am. We grew up in the same courtyard. He did a lot for me in my life, I’m obliged to him. But I’m glad I’ve thrust him back across the river and maybe further. Repair the connection quickly, Guryan. We can’t go on with just messengers and the telegraph. Have you noticed how hot it is? I slept for an hour and a half even so. Ah, yes …” he recalled and turned to the doctor. He remembered the cause of his waking up. He had been awakened by some nonsense, by force of which this detainee was standing here.