It was Kyabine’s turn to throw the dice. He rolled them around in his hand.
‘What’s he writing?’ Pavel asked.
‘Dunno.’
Suddenly Pavel turned towards the door and said in a loud voice: ‘Write to your mother that Kyabine is a big Uzbeki idiot!’
‘Don’t write that to her!’ Kyabine said, laughing.
Then he lifted his hand, ready to throw the dice. But he paused and yelled out: ‘Write to her that I’m going to score more points than Pavel!’
Only then did he throw. He quickly counted his points and picked up the dice. But it was my turn. I tried to grab them from his hand. But he kept his fist so tightly shut that it was impossible. ‘What are you doing, Kyabine?’ I asked.
Kyabine giggled and said: ‘Don’t bother me!’
He threw the dice again and used his big fist to threaten anyone who tried to pick them up.
‘I’m going to play until I’ve scored more points than Pavel. I want the kid to write that to his mother.’
I turned to the door and said: ‘You should write that Kyabine is a cheat!’
Kyabine picked up the dice in one hand and used his other hand to hold my mouth shut. Then he threw again, counted the points, and shouted: ‘All right, you can write it now!’
He let go of my mouth, put his hands behind his neck, leaned back against the station wall and roared triumphantly: ‘Oh, Pavel!’
24
THE SUNLIGHT CONTINUED to dim and brighten. The sky grew overcast, almost as dark as night, and then suddenly we heard a crack of thunder. The Evdokim kid came back into the station and sat with us. We closed the door and the window and we waited for the storm to end. Sifra lay down and fell asleep. When he was asleep like that, you’d have guessed he was the same age as the kid.
This was not a precious place like the pond but at least it sheltered us from the storm. With the door and the window closed, it felt like being inside a house.
The Evdokim kid played with the dice. Pavel and I tried joking around with him. Pavel asked him if he’d written that Kyabine was a big Uzbeki idiot and I asked him if he’d written that Kyabine was a cheat. He didn’t answer us. He just gave us a shy look and continued to play with the dice.
Kyabine, who had not been listening to what we were saying but had heard his name spoken, asked us: ‘What are you two talking about?’
‘Nothing, Kyabine,’ I said.
‘It wasn’t nothing,’ Kyabine insisted. ‘You said my name.’
Then he addressed the kid: ‘What did they say?’
The Evdokim kid was increasingly intimidated. Anyone would have been, in his place. He tried to concentrate on the dice because he didn’t know what to say to Kyabine.
The storm moved away. I got up and went out. The rain had flattened the grass and the air smelled good. It smelled of earth and wet grass. The sky above the station was blue, and towards the east it was grey. A bit further off, where the storm was, it was black.
I went back into the station. We woke Sifra and walked back to the camp. I almost fell when I was walking on the train tracks. They were slippery from all the rain. Kyabine saw me. He climbed up on a rail and tried to do better than me. As he was about to succeed, I pushed him and then ran off laughing.
25
JUST BEFORE WE reached the pile of sleepers, Pavel said we could go to the pond. He’d decided there wasn’t really much risk that Ermakov would put the kid in another tent.
The pond seemed different to us, after the rain. The water was darker. There was something strange about it, as if it had become deeper. And all around it was different because of the storm. Everything looked new and different. The bank was furrowed with lots of little grooves where the water had streamed through, and all around — and as far as the eye could see — the grass lay flat, soaked by the rain.
Above the pond the sky was blue, as it had been above the station, but its reflection in the water didn’t look very blue. The air was transparent.
The day was coming to an end.
We approached the water.
The Evdokim kid was already there. He was putting his hands in the water. For him, this was the first time he’d seen the pond. He couldn’t tell how new it looked after the storm.
We smelled the mud as we drew closer to the water. We didn’t say anything. I held my rifle by its barrel, the butt leaning on my shoulder, and I lifted my head to sniff the indefinable smell of evening.
A fish jumped from the middle of the pond and Kyabine pointed at where it had appeared. We watched that part of the water to see if it would jump out again.
26
WE’D FORGOTTEN THE dice in the station. We didn’t try to figure out who was to blame. We just knew that we’d have to go and find them as soon as we could, before anyone else found them.
The tent was big enough for five. The Evdokim kid wasn’t used to our oil lamp, though, and the smoke hurt his eyes.
Kyabine was kicking up a fuss about the watch. I think, in reality, he was just pretending not to understand that it was my turn to have it tonight. ‘I bought your turn from you last night,’ I reminded him.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but that means it’s my turn again now.’
‘Stop it, Kyabine,’ I replied. ‘Stop trying to mess me around. It doesn’t mean that at all.’
Finally I asked Paveclass="underline" ‘Does it, Pavel?’
And Pavel calmly backed me up: ‘Kyabine, you know perfectly well how it works.’
Kyabine gave up. He lay down under his blanket and didn’t say another word.
But the problem was that Pavel still had the watch with him from the previous night. And neither of us wanted Kyabine to ask why Pavel had it, when I was the one who’d bought his turn. Pavel pretended to reach down for his cigarette case and instead he took out the watch and slipped it under the blanket to me. Nobody saw.
I wondered what the Evdokim kid made of all this. Suddenly Kyabine sat up and said: ‘I shouldn’t have sold you my turn.’
Seriously, what could the Evdokim kid be thinking about all of this?
I turned off the lamp.
27
PAVEL WOKE ME up and we sneaked out of the tent without waking anyone else. We didn’t go to the pond that night either. It had rained so much during the storm that we risked getting wet up to our waists if we tried to cross the field. And how could we dry ourselves afterward?
We went and sat on the sleepers, next to the railway tracks. I waited for Pavel to sit and then I sat on the sleeper just below his. It was a good spot. I was very close to him — I could see his boots on my sleeper — but I wasn’t bothering him by looking at him. He had me right beside him and I could wait for his terror to go away without disturbing him. I wouldn’t have to wonder when it was the right moment to move closer to him.
It was a clear night. The storm had cleaned up the sky. The stars shone all the way to the horizon, as far as the eye could see.
I’d seen this kind of sky once before, one night in the forest.
Pavel’s stove worked perfectly and it was safe too: we were never afraid of our hut catching fire. I’ve already told you that. But what I didn’t say is that the fireplace was very narrow, so we had to feed it with fuel all the time. That wasn’t a problem during the day, but at night it was a big problem. How could we arrange things to keep the stove roaring so we wouldn’t all freeze to death at night? We used the military method. We divided the night into four parts and each of us took turns to watch the stove. In the evening we stocked up on wood inside the hut so nobody would have to put on their coat and their boots and go out into the cold. But one night we ran out. And it was my turn to watch the fire. So I put on my boots and my coat and I went to fetch some wood from our stockpile. And that’s the point of my story: it was that night in the forest that I saw this sky.