We waited until he’d put his notebook away in his jacket pocket.
Only then did we take off our coats.
Pavel spread his out on the grass behind us. He walked over to the water and said: ‘Let’s stay here.’
He turned around and looked at us. He calmly sized us up and said: ‘Let’s stay here, eh? What do you think?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah, let’s stay. Ermakov can go fuck himself. There are plenty of other idiots to help him dismantle the company office.’
Coldly smiling, Pavel added: ‘There are plenty of other poor idiots who can march tonight too. But not us. We’re going to stay here.’
I quickly went over what he had just said. I heard it as clearly as an echo, and I said: ‘What do you mean, Pavel? Why are you talking about tonight?’
He didn’t answer. The sun was in his eyes, so he pushed down the visor of his cap. It made a line of shadow over his eyes, though I could still see them sparkling from the darkness.
Next to me, Kyabine had started to fidget when Pavel pushed down his visor. Pavel’s words were slowly starting to percolate in his head.
Pavel addressed him: ‘We’re fine here, aren’t we, Kyabine?’
Kyabine lowered his head, then looked up and answered in an anxious voice: ‘Yes, we’re fine.’
Pavel spread out his arms and lifted his hands up to Kyabine, as if to point to both him and his answer. Then he turned back to the pond and lifted up the visor on his cap. Suddenly, his back to us, he said: ‘So why should we start marching again like dead men?’
Kyabine, Sifra and I were all alone with that now. All three of us were helpless and anxious because we had understood what it was Pavel was suggesting. And now he had turned his back on us and seemed to want to stay silent.
So in a weak voice I called out to him: ‘Pavel!’
‘What?’
In a whisper I said: ‘What are you talking about, Pavel? Why wouldn’t we go back to camp tonight?’
Instead of replying to me, Pavel — still with his back to us, facing the pond — said to Kyabine: ‘Hey, Kyabine, wouldn’t you like to catch some more fish?’
Kyabine looked at Sifra and me in a panic. His idiot’s eyes blinked and rolled.
Patiently, Pavel said: ‘Go ahead, Kyabine, answer me!’
Kyabine answered honestly: ‘Yes, I’d like to.’ Then he added: ‘But they’re too small, really, aren’t they?’
Pavel nodded, then said: ‘But what if there are some bigger ones, Kyabine?’
‘I haven’t seen any,’ Kyabine replied. ‘All I’ve seen are little ones.’
Still facing the pond, Pavel explained: ‘Yeah, but you can always throw the little ones back in the water until you catch a big one. I’m sure there are some big ones swimming at the bottom of the pond. I bet if all four of us tried, we could catch some. You can cook them, Kyabine — you’ve got the knack. And afterwards we’ll eat them. And tonight we’ll sleep here, and if it rains we’ll go to the station to sleep. We can clean the station up and take a load of grass there to sleep on. From time to time, we’ll requisition blankets and tobacco, and at night we’ll go back to the station. And we can bring back a chicken and some leeks when we’ve had enough of eating fish.’
‘Maybe we could try to catch the big ones tonight?’ Kyabine asked excitedly.
‘Yeah, why not,’ said Pavel kindly.
On a roll, Kyabine added: ‘We can cook them on my stones and afterwards we can go back to the company.’
Pavel did not move or speak.
‘Eh, Pavel, what do you think?’ Kyabine said. ‘Can we try to catch some now?’
In a sad voice, Pavel said: ‘Yeah, if you want to, Kyabine.’
Then Kyabine, his throat tight, asked desperately: ‘But afterwards we’ll go back to the company, right?’
A long silence followed, as empty as a day’s march.
Then Pavel nodded.
In a sudden panic, Kyabine said: ‘But we don’t have the big mess dish. We didn’t bring it with us!’
‘What?’
‘We need the big dish to catch the fish,’ Kyabine explained. ‘How else can we do it?’
At that, he set off abruptly, without a second thought, towards the camp. I told him to come back. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I said. ‘If Ermakov sees you, he’ll make you stay at the camp all day to help him dismantle the company office.’
But, leaping through the tall grass, he yelled back over his shoulder: ‘I’m clever. He won’t see me.’
He disappeared into the grass.
I tried again to make him come back. But in the distance we heard: ‘I’m clever!’
But the truth was, he wasn’t. Not Kyabine. He was stronger than Pavel, Sifra and me put together. He was incredibly strong and loyal, and he had a voice like thunder. But clever? No.
For an instant I thought about running after him, but I had no chance of catching him now.
Pavel crouched in front of the pond. He pushed the visor of his cap back up his forehead. He plunged his hands into the still water. He let them float on the surface for a moment. Then he took them out again and wet his face. Time had passed and the sun had risen higher in the sky.
43
SIFRA SAT DOWN and balanced his rifle on his knees.
He had listened to all of that in silence, sometimes shooting us frightened, helpless looks, as if we were his mother and father and we were deciding his future.
That was all he’d done.
But I don’t want you to think that Sifra just skulked near us like a shadow. No, that’s not how he was. I want you to know that, on the contrary, he was always with us, gentle and attentive, with that gentle, prophetic look in his eyes, and almost always silent. I would really like you to understand him.
44
KYABINE SUDDENLY APPEARED from the grass behind us, carrying the big mess dish over his head. ‘Told you I was clever, didn’t I?’ he shouted.
And it was true: he had been clever. He must also have been very lucky. He took off his boots and went into the water. We asked him what was happening in the camp, if the others had started taking their tents down yet. ‘I didn’t look,’ he answered as he waded into the water.
‘What do you mean, you didn’t look?’ asked Pavel, stunned.
‘No, I didn’t look.’
When he was in the pond up to his knees, Kyabine turned around and asked the Evdokim kid: ‘If I catch a big one, you’ll add that, won’t you?’
The kid said yes, of course he would add it. Kyabine bent down and plunged the big dish into the water, and after that he stopped moving. Soon afterwards he yelled that he’d got one. He came back to the bank and we all crowded round to see the fish. It wasn’t big. Kyabine sat down and put the dish between his legs. We asked him if he was going to eat it. He said no, he just wanted to watch it swim. We left him to watch his fish.
I was standing on the bank, trying not to think about anything, or at least not about tonight, when Kyabine called out to me: ‘Benia, come and see.’
His voice was mysterious.
He signalled for me to sit down next to him and in silence he showed me something that was floating in the air. It was a tiny bit of grass. It stayed there on its own, hovering in the air like that, just in front of our eyes, and it was really surprising. Then I spotted a sort of spider’s thread. It was almost invisible, and the bit of grass was suspended from the end of it. Kyabine didn’t see the thread.
While I was wondering if I should point it out to him, we heard gunshots from the camp. Three shots, with spaces in between. We understood. When the last one had faded to silence, Kyabine stood up, evading the bit of grass which was still floating there in the air, and he went to throw his fish back in the water. We picked up our coats and our rifles and we looked at Pavel, thinking that perhaps he was going to say something about the pond. But he didn’t say anything, and we left.