Suddenly Kyabine said to the kid: ‘We had a really nice hut in the forest.’
The kid looked at him.
‘With a stove,’ Kyabine added. ‘Eh, Pavel? Didn’t we?’
‘Yeah, we did,’ said Pavel.
‘But Pavel,’ Kyabine asked, ‘why did we burn them?’
Pavel shrugged. But this wasn’t enough for Kyabine, so he asked me: ‘Eh? Why did we burn the huts?’
‘Because we didn’t need them any more, Kyabine.’
‘You think?’
‘Of course.’
And then, as he often did when something was troubling him, Kyabine lost interest in us and started thinking.
The kid was still holding his ankles when the order came to start marching again. I stayed next to him because he was struggling to get his boots back on. He seemed terrified of being left behind and he started getting more and more anxious. ‘Don’t worry,’ I told him, ‘I’ll wait for you.’
That was when he realised that he’d been putting them on the wrong feet. All the others had left when he stood up and started rolling up his blanket.
‘I’d keep it on for a while longer if I were you,’ I advised him.
He put it back over his shoulders. He picked up the tent pole and we set off.
He was very grateful that I’d waited for him and he held the pole very straight. We were the last ones in the column. Pavel, Kyabine and Sifra were too far ahead for us to see them.
‘How do you feel?’ I asked him.
‘Fine.’
‘Good.’
‘Are we going to march all night?’ he asked me.
‘I guess so.’
We said all this in a whisper, because of the darkness.
‘Did you manage to write everything about the pond?’ I asked.
‘Nearly everything, yeah.’
‘Take your time.’
‘Yeah. But I’ve nearly finished.’
To take his mind off things, I said: ‘Don’t forget Kyabine’s fish.’
‘I won’t.’
‘You’ve seen how much it matters to him.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So, listen,’ I said, carefully choosing my words. ‘When you’ve finished with the pond, there’s something else I’d like you to write.’ I paused, to plan even more carefully what I had to say. ‘Listen, what I’d like you to write about… well, it’s Pavel. I’d like you to write that Pavel and me… that we were really lucky to find each other. It was lucky too for Kyabine and Sifra, of course, but with Pavel… well, shit, you understand, don’t you? It was even luckier, you know?’
‘Yeah, I understand.’
He listened very attentively.
‘Write it how you want, and take your time.’
He nodded.
I waited for a moment and then I said: ‘Has Pavel said anything to you that’s a bit like what I said about him?’
‘No.’
I started walking faster.
‘Come on, let’s catch up with the others.’
We marched and marched and we caught up with them and we continued marching and marching through the night, and sometimes we would pass through a village or a dark forest. And for a long time nobody in the company spoke — not us nor anybody around us.
I was walking with Sifra at one point, and then with Pavel, and then I lost sight of them and suddenly I realised that I was walking on my own, next to someone in the company whose name I didn’t know.
48
SOMETIMES WE WOULD march past Sergeant Ermakov as he stood by the side of the road, leaning on his rifle. And long before we reached him, we could hear him telling us to advance.
What did he think we were doing?
The company left the road and entered a field. Far in the distance on the left there was a dark line: it was the edge of a forest and now we could see stars shining above it, between black clouds.
We walked through the short grass. Around me and in front of me, I caught sight of bowed, staggering figures. And they stretched out as far ahead of me as I could see.
I was still walking on my own. I tried to spot Kyabine’s enormous silhouette, but he must have been out of sight in the darkness, or somewhere behind me. My fingers tightened suddenly and I thought I’d lost my rifle. In fact I’d fastened it across my bag, but I didn’t remember that at the time.
I thought I could see Pavel up ahead. I didn’t have enough strength to catch him up. I called out to him. But nobody replied or turned around.
I thought to myself: Either it’s not him or he didn’t hear me.
Soon after this, the order came through that we were stopping. Most of the men lay down where they were as soon as they heard it, but I kept walking, steering my way between them as I went in search of the others. I found Sifra first, then I heard Kyabine calling out to us. We headed towards him. Pavel came too, accompanied by the Evdokim kid.
We sat in the grass without even thinking about unstrapping our bags. We were all hollow-eyed, our mouths agape. The kid rolled onto his side with a groan. Pavel leaned down and said: ‘Don’t fall asleep now.’
The kid didn’t move and he didn’t reply.
‘Did you hear me? You mustn’t fall asleep. Have a rest but don’t fall asleep.’
He spoke to him gently. The kid nodded. I helped him to sit up. He was wild-eyed and there was white spittle at the corners of his mouth. I took off my bag and wedged it under his back. A moment later, he lowered his head and started to sob.
‘It’s all right, lad,’ I told him. ‘We’re all here.’
Kyabine kept staring at the kid. It made him sad and shy to see the kid sobbing like that.
Suddenly, realising that I couldn’t remember, I asked who had the watch tonight.
Pavel took it out of his pocket. I held out my hand and he passed it to me. I opened it and kissed the photograph. Kyabine kissed it passionately, and even Sifra gave it a shy peck because Kyabine asked him to, and it was touching to see him do it because he never had before. I was happy that he’d done it at last, and even though we knew that the watch didn’t really bring us luck, I thought to myself: Well, why shouldn’t it bring us luck? Pavel took it back and then handed it to the Evdokim kid.
‘Go on, you too.’
He almost stopped sobbing. He held the watch in his hand and looked at us.
‘Open it and kiss the picture,’ I said, to encourage him.
He did it and then he handed the watch back to Pavel. We spread our blankets over our backs and the sky started to turn blue far off to our left, above the forest. Pavel took out his cigarettes and gave one to each of us. They tasted really awful and bitter, but we smoked them down to the filter and afterwards we concentrated on fighting off sleep. It was hard for the kid.
When dawn broke, we were still there, sitting in the field, and we could see where we were now, and where all the others in the company were, all around us, and lots of them were asleep. The mules that Kossarenko had given us were standing next to each other, eating grass, with all the boxes from the company office and all the cook’s things still loaded on their backs.
Sergeant Ermakov’s voice echoed over the field: ‘No fires!’
Other voices passed on this message:
‘No fires!’
‘No fires!’
And then someone else called out in the same peremptory tones: ‘No women!’
For once, Ermakov didn’t lose his temper because someone had made a joke. In fact, he even replied with one of his own: ‘Women are allowed, but only if they’re pretty.’
‘And I bet you’ve got loads of pretty women in your pocket, haven’t you, sarge?’
‘Yeah, come over here and I’ll give you one.’
‘Coming!’
In the distance were some tiny narrow sheds painted in all different colours, and there was the big forest to the left that ended at the foot of a low hill, and behind the hill there was a town. We couldn’t see the town but we could see threads of grey smoke rising up and forming a flat cloud that drifted over the forest.