The assumption that he would see Antipova once more made Yuri Andreevich mad with joy. His heart began to beat rapidly. He lived it all over in anticipation.
The log-built back streets of the outskirts, the wood-paved sidewalks. He is going to her. Now, in Novosvalochny, the vacant lots and wooden part of the city will end and the stone part will begin. The little houses of the suburb race by like the pages of a quickly leafed-through book, not when you turn them with your index finger, but when you flip through them all with the soft part of your thumb, making a crackling noise. It takes your breath away! She lives there, at that end. Under the white gap in the rainy sky that has cleared towards evening. How he loves these familiar little houses on the way to her! He could just pick them up from the ground and kiss them all over! These one-eyed mezzanines pulled down over the roofs! The little berries of lights and oil lamps reflected in the puddles! Under that white strip of rainy street sky. There again he will receive from the hands of the Creator the gift of this God-made white loveliness. The door will be opened by a figure wrapped in something dark. And the promise of her intimacy, restrained, cold as the pale night of the north, no one’s, belonging to nobody, will come rolling towards him like the first wave of the sea, which you run to in the darkness over the sand of the coast.
Yuri Andreevich dropped the reins, leaned forward in the saddle, embraced his horse’s neck, and buried his face in its mane. Taking this tenderness for an appeal to its full strength, the horse went into a gallop.
At a smooth, flying gallop, in the intervals between the rare, barely noticeable contacts of the horse with the earth, which kept tearing away from its hoofs and flying backward, Yuri Andreevich, besides the beating of his heart, which stormed with joy, also heard some shouts, which he thought he was imagining.
A shot close by deafened him. The doctor raised his head, seized the reins, and pulled at them. The racing horse made several clumsy leaps sideways, backed up, and began to lower his croup, preparing to rear.
Ahead the road divided in two. Beside it the billboard “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers” glowed in the rays of the setting sun. Across the road, barring it, stood three armed horsemen. A high school student in a uniform cap and a jacket crisscrossed with machine-gun cartridge belts, a cavalryman in an officer’s greatcoat and a Cossack hat, and a strange fat man, as if dressed for a masquerade, in quilted trousers, a padded jacket, and a broad-brimmed priest’s hat pulled down low.
“Don’t move, comrade doctor,” the oldest of the three, the cavalryman in the Cossack hat, said evenly and calmly. “If you obey, we guarantee you complete safety. Otherwise—no hard feelings—we’ll shoot you. The medic in our detachment got killed. We mobilize you forcibly as a medical worker. Get off your horse and hand the reins over to our younger comrade. I remind you. At the least thought of escape, we won’t stand on ceremony.”
“Are you the Mikulitsyns’ son Liberius, Comrade Forester?”
“No, I’m his chief liaison officer, Kamennodvorsky.”
Part Ten
ON THE HIGH ROAD
1
There stood towns, villages, settlements. The town of Krestovozdvizhensk, the Cossack settlement of Omelchino, Pazhinsk, Tysiatskoe, the hamlet of Yaglinskoe, the township of Zvonarskaya, the settlement of Volnoe, Gurtovshchiki, the Kezhemskaya farmstead, the settlement of Kazeevo, the township of Kuteiny Posad, the village of Maly Ermolai.
The highway passed through them—old, very old, the oldest in Siberia, the ancient post road. It cut through towns like bread with the knife of the main street, and flew through villages without looking back, scattering the lined-up cottages far behind it or bending them in the curve or hook of a sudden turn.
Long ago, before the railway came to Khodatskoe, stagecoaches raced down the road. Wagon trains of tea, bread, and wrought iron went one way, and in the other parties of convicts were driven on foot under convoy to the next halting place. They marched in step, their iron chains clanking in unison, lost, desperate men, scary as lightning from the sky. And the forests rustled around them, dark, impenetrable.
The highway lived as one family. Town knew and fraternized with town, village with village. In Khodatskoe, at the railway crossing, there were locomotive repair shops, machine shops servicing the railways; wretches lived miserably, crowded into barracks, fell sick, died. Political prisoners with some technical knowledge, having served their term at hard labor, became foremen here and settled down.
Along all this line, the initial Soviets had long since been overthrown. For some time the power of the Siberian Provisional Government had held out, but now it had been replaced throughout the region by the power of the Supreme Ruler, Kolchak.1
2
At one stretch the road went uphill for a long time. The field of vision opened out ever more widely into the distance. It seemed there would be no end to the ascent and the increasing view. And just when the horses and people got tired and stopped to catch their breath, the ascent ended. Ahead the swift river Kezhma threw itself under a roadway bridge.
Across the river, on a still steeper height, appeared the brick wall of the Vozdvizhensky Monastery. The road curved around the foot of the monastery hillside and, after several twists among outlying backyards, made its way into the town.
There it once more skirted the monastery grounds on the main square, onto which the green-painted iron gates of the monastery opened. The icon on the arch of the entrance was half wreathed by a gilt inscription: “Rejoice, lifegiving Cross, invincible victory of Orthodoxy.”
It was the departure of winter. Holy Week, the end of the Great Lent.2 The snow on the roads was turning black, indicating the start of the thaw, but on the roofs it was still white and hung there in dense, tall hats.
To the boys who climbed up to the ringers in the Vozdvizhensky bell tower, the houses below seemed like little boxes or chests clustered together. Little black men the size of dots went up to the houses. Some could be recognized from the bell tower by the way they moved. They were reading the decree of the Supreme Ruler, pasted on the walls, about the conscription of the next three age groups into the army.
3
Night brought much that was unforeseen. It became warm, unusually so for the time of year. A fine-beaded rain drizzled down, so airy that it seemed to diffuse through the air in a misty, watery dust without reaching the earth. But that was an illusion. Its warm, streaming water was enough to wash the earth clean of snow and leave it all black now, glistening as if with sweat.
Stunted apple trees, all covered with buds, miraculously sent their branches from the gardens over the fences into the streets. Drops, tapping discordantly, fell from them onto the wooden sidewalks. Their random drumming resounded all over town.
The puppy Tomik, chained up in the photographers’ yard since morning, barked and whined. Perhaps annoyed by his barking, a crow in the Galuzins’ garden cawed for the whole town to hear.
In the lower part of town, three cartloads of goods were delivered to the merchant Lyubeznov. He refused to accept them, saying it was a mistake and he had never ordered these goods. Pleading the lateness of the hour, the stalwart carters asked him to let them spend the night. The merchant shouted at them, told them to go away, and would not open the gates. Their altercation could also be heard all over town.
At the seventh hour by church time,3 and by common reckoning at one o’clock in the morning, a wave of soft, dark, and sweet droning separated from the heaviest, barely moving bell of the Vozdvizhenye and floated away, mixing with the dark moisture of the rain. It pushed itself from the bell as a mass of soil washed away by flooding water is torn from the bank and sinks, dissolving in the river.