‘We’re going tonight, Kyabine.’
After that, we each went back to our thoughts. Until Pavel spoke, we were separated from one another. But then thankfully Pavel said: ‘Let’s go to the pond now.’
We picked up our rifles and quickly left the camp, trying not to be seen. The last thing we wanted was for Sergeant Ermakov to spot us and order us to dismantle the company office or the kitchen, or to do any of the other things that needed doing before we broke camp.
Nobody spoke on the walk to the pond.
I was walking behind Pavel and my heart was racing. We crossed the field. We no longer cared about crushing the grass. It didn’t matter now if we left a path that others could follow. Who would discover the pond and occupy our place once we were gone? Nobody from our company, in any case.
We walked quickly and I could hear the Evdokim kid trotting behind me.
We reached the pond and stood there without moving, staring at the opposite bank. The horse we had stolen yesterday was lying on its side. Its head was halfway into the water. It must have run for a long time after it had escaped from us. It had come here and it had died because nobody had stopped it drinking straight away after running for so long.
We’d seen a lot of dead horses before this, believe me. If we’d laid them side by side, they’d have covered the whole field between the railway tracks and the road. And if we’d had all the dead mules we’d seen, too, there’d have been enough to cover all those horses.
And yet this one made a bigger impression on us than a whole field of dead horses.
We sensed that it had to be done quickly. We walked around the edge of the pond. We each grabbed one of the horse’s legs and dragged it with all our strength. We moved it barely a few feet and then paused to catch our breath. The kid had stayed on the far bank and was watching us. I didn’t think to ask him to help us. None of us did. Again we bent down and grabbed the horse’s legs. Yard by yard, we dragged the horse away from the pond. Until finally it seemed to us that it was far enough away and that the grass would hide it from us when we went back to sit on our bank.
All the same, we stayed there for a while. From where we were, we couldn’t see the pond or anything. We got our breath back. At that moment I looked up at the sky above us. But I kept seeing Pavel, Kyabine and Sifra, and the horse between us, and it briefly crossed my mind that nothing existed any more except a dead horse under the sky, and the four of us.
When we returned to our bank, Pavel suddenly started yelling at the Evdokim kid, asking him why he hadn’t come to help us. It was unfair but I didn’t say anything, and the kid stared despairingly at me. And Pavel asked him, shouting louder and louder, if he knew where all the dead horses were now. If he knew what had happened to them all because nobody had bothered to bury them? They had to be somewhere, all those dead horses we’d seen everywhere all the time.
Pavel was yelling all this despairingly now, frantically rubbing the back of his neck, and the kid continued to look distraught. He didn’t even dare to tell Pavel that he didn’t know anything about the dead horses.
While this was going on, Sifra stared straight ahead of him so sadly that I thought he might start sobbing at any moment. I don’t think I had ever seen Sifra look so sad. And Kyabine sat there with his mouth hanging open, looking even more idiotic than usual, and it was obvious that he was trying to understand what was happening, why Pavel was saying all of this and what his point was. And suddenly the expression on Kyabine’s face changed and I understood that he had started thinking about Pavel’s question, about the dead horses, that he was trying to come up with an answer so that he could save the kid by replying for him. And then in a trembling voice Kyabine said to Pavel that nobody could know where all the dead horses were, least of all the kid, and the kid looked at Kyabine as if he’d just saved him from drowning.
I thought Pavel was going to get angry with Kyabine, that he was going to yell at him to shut it, that he was going to tell him he was just a big Uzbeki idiot. But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t shout. In fact, it seemed to calm him down, it seemed to help him. He visibly relaxed. He crossed his hands behind his neck, pressing his forearms against his cheeks, and he stared at the water.
For a moment we all remained motionless like that on the bank.
38
THE SURFACE OF the pond was calm. It was also bright green, but most of all it was unbelievably calm and I thought that was lucky because this was surely how I would remember it for ever, given that this was the last time we would come here. To make sure I would always recall it like this, so calm and bright, I let my eyes wander over it, slowly and very attentively. When I came to the place where the horse’s head had been lying in the water earlier, I realised that I would remember that too and that there was nothing I could do about it.
My gaze finished its tour of the pond and then I lay on my back and closed my eyes. The air was still and mild.
All of a sudden I realised that I hadn’t yet had time to remember last night. To recall where I went with Pavel and whether this time I’d found things to say to him to console him. I started to think about it.
But as nothing came, I sat up and looked at Pavel. I thought that would help me remember. I stared at him, but still nothing came. So I thought that perhaps we simply hadn’t gone out last night.
Yes, that was it. It was coming back to me now. He’d touched my arm in the middle of the night, and, just as I’d started getting up so I could go outside with him, he’d tugged on my shoulder to tell me that he’d prefer to stay where we were. I lay back down in bed and I must have fallen asleep again very quickly because I don’t remember anything else.
At that moment Pavel asked where the Evdokim kid had gone. We looked around. Then Kyabine called out to him in his booming voice. He appeared almost instantly from behind the grass in the field and came over to sit with us on the bank. He still had a bit of that panic-stricken, despairing look he’d had when Pavel had yelled at him about the horse, and about all the dead horses. He’d unbuttoned his jacket and pulled his sailor’s shirt out of his trousers.
‘Listen,’ said Pavel, not looking at the kid but lying motionless and staring at the surface of the water, ‘if there’s one thing you ought to write, it’s that we’re all sad because we have to leave and we won’t be able to come back here.’
The kid opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
‘Did you hear me?’ Pavel asked him. The kid nodded and Pavel went on: ‘Yeah, say that we’re all sad because we had some good moments here, some really great moments, and we know that we won’t have any more, and where we’re going there won’t be any good moments, because all that is behind us now. You understand? That’s what you should write.’
Then he turned to the kid and smiled at him kindly, and in a tight voice he said: ‘Yeah, we’d like you to write that.’
Then he fell silent. He looked back at the pond and slowly took his cigarette case out of his pocket. But he didn’t open it, he kept it in his hand.
The kid didn’t look despairing any more. He stared at Pavel as if he was the brigade commander or even his own father, with an expression of gratitude in his eyes and at the corners of his lips, and it touched me to see that.
Kyabine, Sifra and I said nothing.
What was there to say, after all? Pavel had said it for us. What he’d said was exactly what we all wanted too. We wanted the kid to write about that, about the pond and all that, about all the good moments we’d had here.
There was a long silence then because Pavel wasn’t talking any more, he was just lying there motionless with his cigarette case in his hand, and we weren’t talking either, so it was completely silent because this morning there wasn’t the faintest breath of wind.