The sick man observed him in mute astonishment.
“Hang on, that’s impossible,” mumbled the captain. “That’s impossible. I am Boris Alexandrovich Solomin, son of Colonel Alexander Vasilyevich Solomin.”
The two strangers stared at each other for a long moment in bafflement.
“Brother… ,” breathed the sick man, straining to lean on the frame.
A long silence.
“I thought you died long ago,” the sick man said finally. “Mama told me you ran off with the Whites. For so many years we heard nothing from you. It never occurred to me that you might be in Paris… An officer in the farcical White Army…”
He fell silent, slumping over from exhaustion.
Captain Solomin absently wiped the sweat from his face with a stiff and fumbling hand, as if wiping away the residue of the steaming alcohol.
“I didn’t recognize you,” he said after a long moment. “How could I? When I left Moscow you were maybe thirteen years old. Well, and now it’s crazy to think… It didn’t occur to me that you were alive, an adult, that you had sold yourself to the Bolsheviks. And is Mama alive? They haven’t murdered her?”
“Mama died this year, not long ago.”
“And Yula, our sister? I heard rumors. That she married a Bolshevik. No doubt she’s a Bolshevik herself. Bad seeds, the both of you.”
“Yula is a model worker and her husband is a good worker, too, one of the first. She’s lived through a lot, learned a lot. But why bother telling you, a White Guardist? You wouldn’t understand anyway.”
“Sure, go work for the oppressors – smart move. Not everyone would understand. Like how they shot Papa – you don’t remember? You were too young. You’ve forgotten. I’m sure Yula’s forgotten. Your memory’s a short one, boy.”
“It’s not short. If they had shot more ‘papas’ back then, we wouldn’t have had to go through those three years of hardship.”
“You parrot their jargon like an agitator at a rally. You forgot to add: ‘They’ve drunk enough of our blood!’ You’ve denied your own father. Gone to serve the brutes. For a sack of barley, for an allowance payment – to lick the hand of the Jew. And this is a Solomin! I shudder to think this is my brother: a villain, a Bolshevik.”
“You sadden me, Boris,” said Sergei softly. “We don’t understand each other. We speak different languages. I never suspected that by coming to Paris I’d meet you in this émigré crowd. No doubt you’ve spent your time taxiing people around the amusement parks or waiting tables and scrounging for tips. Like everybody else. Bowing and scraping your life away. Without even a shred of dignity left to pop a bullet in your head, like a real officer. Eh, Boris?!”
Sergei’s face suddenly contorted into a grimace of inhuman pain and went completely ashen. The sick man groaned, and his body quivered with quick jerks like a bow cracking under strain. Foam appeared on his lips.
Captain Solomin felt as though his hair were standing on end, sharp as needles, and his heart were like a ripe orange crushed in a fist, squirting through the fingers with a stinging pain. He could not understand the source of this pain. He stared with bulging eyes at the man writhing in convulsions and he wanted to scream, but the scream was like an oversized cork jammed way in, refusing to come out the narrow neck of his mouth. He grabbed the dying man’s arms with his clammy hands and gave him a shake, choking:
“Sergei!”
He wanted to say something warm and tender, but searching feverishly through a pile of words he found nothing. His hands just convulsively clutched at the withered, powerless arms.
Then suddenly it came to him in a flash – he took his flask of cognac from his pocket, uncorked it with his teeth, and, carefully propping the dying man’s head with one hand, tipped the liquid into his mouth with the other. Sergei drank greedily, to the last drop. A surge of life tore through his body. A moment later, the sick man opened his eyes.
The captain felt a strange humming chaos in his head, and it was only from afar that he heard the incoherent mumbling of his own mouth:
“Wait… You can’t do this… I’ll take you home… We’ll call a doctor… You can’t…”
The sick man’s lips twisted into a wan smile:
“What’s that, Boris? You want to save a Bolshevik? A fine White officer you make. Anyway, it’s too late. It’s day three already. The end’s on its way.”
The captain bent over and stared into that face, suddenly so close. His pulse beat in his temples. From somewhere above his thoughts, a flash streaked: So much like his mother! The nose, the mouth, the curve of his chin… He wanted to howl. A warm surge of tenderness crept from somewhere in his entrails up to his throat.
“It’s blood I feel, blood…” he thought, trying to somehow justify the unfamiliar stream gurgling within him.
Taking a mind of its own, his hand crawled toward the pale head leaning on the frame. It rested on the forehead, then slid down the silky, sweat-drenched hair… This gesture held everything: his mother’s cheek covered in tears when he left her for the last time, the years of bitter, icy solitude, with never a warm word, never a loved one, and the soured tenderness of his sore, aging, unclaimed body, saved for no one.
The dying man shut his eyes, and a smile again lit upon his lips:
“You think, Boris, that I’m scared to die at twenty-five? You’re all torn up: so young, etc. Give it a rest! Go cry for yourself. People like us don’t die. We’ve grafted all our roots in the masses, in the species. Our every fiber has grown into them. Those who weren’t there to experience the first years of building with us will only envy us when their time is up…”
The sick man’s shaking hands clutched at the captain’s lapels, pulled him near, and began whispering into his face in a voice rasping and excited. His eyes glistened with fever.
“Do you understand, Boris, what it means to mold clay with your own two hands, to fire bricks for your own house, to clear a construction site, to pull floor after floor from the very earth? To build a new, solid, perfected life… To feel you’re the core of a marvelous human avalanche that has torn free and is flying into the future… it smothers you, like snow, in a churning, grainy mass. You are its heart… a cell in its bloodstream, slipping from vein to vein. You scoff at the laws of physics: at the same time you are permeable, and you yourself can permeate with no loss of material contours… Oh, Boris! You could have had it as well, you also were given the rare, the inconceivable fortune of being born and of living in these times, and you gave it up, you preferred, like some blind mole, in your thick, crude stubbornness, to try to knock down what was spreading before your eyes, hoisted up by the girder of a million hands, in spite of all the moles in the world, until you were driven from your hole…”
“Oh, Boris,” he added after a brief pause, in a tired, stifled whisper, “how lonely, unwanted, and homeless you must feel, like a stray, mangy dog… How are you going to die, Boris?”
Sergei leaned on the truck bed, exhausted, and a thin stream of foam trickled from his mouth. His narrow, blackened lips twisted into a horseshoe of pain. His face, white and wrenched in agony, became tiny, almost childlike.
The captain felt the iron hand of an irresistible paternal tenderness turn him toward that face. What to do? Just let him die alone? Get him out of here! Away! Stay by his side! Don’t leave him! His pale lips spoke, repeating incoherently:
“Sergei! It’s not true! This can’t be happening! Grab my neck. I’ll take you from here. I’ll carry you home. We’ll call a doctor. You’ll recover. We’ll get out of here. We’ll go together, to your people. I won’t leave you alone. I’ll go with you. You hear me, Sergei? We’ll go together. I’m going to work with you. Sergei!”