The hope that he might return home served only to sharpen his fear. He pictured himself marching down the street in Dolshanka, his chest covered with medals, and could imagine nothing more beautiful than that one moment. During hours of respite he found himself polishing his medals and the buckle on his belt while privately rehearsing a hundred times the same scene he dreamed of: the main street of his native village, the admiring looks of the villagers, himself making his way with blissful stateliness toward the house, whose silent, vibrant expectation he could imagine. During these preparations for his return, made between battles, he had the sensation of transporting a part of himself into the future, thus enabling it to escape from the war, to be living in the post-war era already.
That day the clay he had found on a riverbank was dissolving like soap. The tarnished silver of his two "For Gallantry" medals grew bright, the silhouette of the infantryman in the middle of the red star shone like a layer of mica. He put the decorations away, cleaned his fingers with a handful of sand. The water on that April evening seemed almost warm. And in the stillness of the dusk a bird hidden in the willow groves was repeating two notes with joyful insistence.
As he stood up he heard a brief guffaw. Soldiers from the company, he thought, taking advantage of the halt to bathe or wash their clothes. The guffaw rang out again but was too abrupt for it to be true laughter. Pavel made his way around the willow thicket, stepped over a thick, half-submerged tree trunk, pushed aside a cascade of branches, and saw them. A woman on her back on the beach by the river, her head toward the water, a man with his two hands clamped around her head to stop her crying out, another holding the woman's wrists, the third writhing on top of her.
He had taken rapists by surprise before and had fired shots in the air to make them run away. And been cursed as a stupid motherfucker by the woman who was doing it for two tins of food. This time he must act quickly. The guffaws were those of a half-suffocated mouth. The woman managed to free her head, to gasp a mouthful of air and at once her face was smothered by a broad palm. Pavel beat a path through the branches, overturned the man who was twisting the woman's hands, knocked down the one who was crushing her mouth. And just had time, in a fraction of a second, to catch sight of the woman's face and recognize it. That is to say not to recognize it but to tell himself that he had certainly seen it before, or dreamed it, or imagined it. The first soldier hurled himself at him. Pavel dodged him and grasped the tunic collar of the one who was still lying there, made him topple over to one side and, before he could make out his face in the gloom, recognized the voice cursing. It was one of the company's officers.
Afterward he came to understand that it was the close proximity of death that precipitated things. Had the rape been acknowledged the three men would have been court-martialed and shot. Had he not intervened the woman would have suffocated. The soldiers were drunk, they would have noticed nothing. Had they not been drunk they would in any case have killed her to silence her. Each one in his own way hurled back death, as in close combat you hurl back a hand grenade, a few seconds before it explodes, in a frenzied game of hot potato.
Later he thought about this game, this deadly counting-out rhyme in which the last word had fallen on him. It was weeks later, for at the time everything had happened too quickly. He was arrested, his stripes were torn off, his decorations (those medals burnished with clay) were confiscated. A truck picked him up with a load of men whose uniforms bore no distinctive insignia. He knew he had joined a penal company and this meant death in the very near future.
From the very first battle the distance that lay between him and death could be measured in the numbers killed. Two hundred soldiers from his company advanced directly toward the German positions, without any artillery support, without tanks, on a bare plain. One submachine gun to five men. He knew that behind them a barrage section was ready to shoot down anyone who tried to retreat. Caught between two fires, they could only advance toward death or retreat toward it.
He jumped into a trench behind a dead man, a soldier whose chest was cut to pieces by a burst of fire. For a second this body distracted the attention of two Germans as it fell, they moved aside to avoid the corpse. That second allowed time for a sideways knife thrust, the snatching of a submachine gun from one of the Germans, a shot that was just ahead of the other soldier's move. Pavel always ran, flung himself to the ground, fired a little ahead of the others. Now everything seemed slow to him: the knife plunging slowly in below the German's ear, the fall of the body, flailing and spattering him with blood, the look from the other soldier, hampered by the narrowness of the trench, struggling with his weapon jammed between his belly and the earth wall, who just had time to realize that he was too slow. An instant after the fighting had finished, the moments when Pavel had succeeded in staying ahead unfolded in his mind's eye with delayed action. He emerged from the trench and walked along beside it, moving toward the small group of survivors gathering around the commanding officer. They looked at one another as if seeing one another for the first time.
With the remnants of other penal companies a new one was formed: two hundred men with no name, no rank, and-the late comers-no 'weapons. They were thrown in wherever men could only die, as in that long valley, pitted with crevasses of marshland, which Pavel crossed during the third battle. The Germans hidden in the copse fired at them and gave away their own positions. Now a real offensive could be launched. The men of the penal company were simply bait.
As a new company was brought together the commissar repeated that they must "wash away" with their blood the wrongs done to their country. He had no fear of repeating himself to the company for the contingent was renewed at almost every battle. "A month, or at best two," thought Pavel, when calculating the life expectancy of these men, on the basis of the number of survivors.
This life expectancy found expression in a mathematical formula thanks to the prisoners from the gulag, who were numerous in these so-called kamikaze companies. One of them (like all the others, he had no name, simply a tattoo on the back of his hand: an anchor) was a man whose eyes were unaccustomed to the sun, his face burned by the cold of the far north. He showed Pavel his meticulous counting of the days, five notches on the handle of his knife: for a month of service in the penal companies, he explained, their sentence was reduced by five years, two months wiped out seven years in the camps, three months was worth ten. There was no better equation to express the times they were living through. Anchor was killed after eight years of war (i.e. two months and a few days). Pavel retrieved his knife, its handle notched with hope.
He found himself remembering the face of the violated woman. Not to pity her or to feel self-pity and regret his action. It was the similarity of her face and features to those of another, seen somewhere before, that haunted him. He thought of his sister, his mother, and also of Sasha. Of other women's faces. At times they had had in their eyes the same aura of pain and beauty. One day in a Polish town, passing in front of a church half-destroyed by shelling, he solved the riddle. The memory of the church at Dolshanka came to mind. Likewise demolished, in this case with stubborn vindictiveness: the cupola torn down, the roof burned, a section of wall blown up with dynamite, the work of Comrade Krassny. The interior, open to the sky, had been colonized by nettles and young maple saplings. Obscenities erupted across the wall, scrawled on it with a fragment of brick. Alone, in the corner, at a height beyond the reach of human hands, a face leaned down toward anyone who entered through the gaping door. The eyes of a woman, large and sorrowful, a gaze that came from a fresco blackened by fire.