Thrusting out his beard, Izya got up off the bed, grabbed hold of Andrei’s jacket, and forced him to sit down on the floor.
“Shut up!” he said with terrible wheezing hiss. “Want me to smack you in the face right now? I will. You whining old woman!”
Andrei grated his teeth and said nothing.
Puffing and panting, Izya went back to his bed and started scratching again. “He’s never seen dead bodies before…” he growled. “Never seen this world before. Stop griping, you wimp!”
Burying his face in his hands, Andrei fought to trample down and crush the senseless, hideous wailing inside him. But some small corner of his mind understood what was happening to him, and that helped. It was terrifying to be here, surrounded by dead men, supposedly still alive yourself but actually already dead too… Izya was saying something, but Andrei couldn’t hear it. Then it passed. “What were you saying?” he asked, taking his hands away from his face.
“I was saying that I’ll go and ferret around in the soldiers’ quarters, and you ferret around in the intelligentsia’s room. And don’t forget Quejada’s room—he must have kept some kind of geologists’ emergency supplies in there somewhere. And don’t panic, we’ll pull through this.”
At that moment the sun went out.
“Damnation! The worst possible moment!” said Izya. “Now we have to look for a lamp… Hang on, your lamp ought to be here somewhere, right?”
“Our watches,” Andrei said with an effort. “We have to set our watches…”
He raised his wrist to his eyes, focused on the phosphorescent hands, and set them to 1200 hours. Izya was scrabbling around in the darkness, swearing through his teeth, moving his bed around for some reason, and rustling papers. Then a match scraped and lit. Izya stood on his knees in the middle of the room, waving the match from side to side.
“Don’t just sit there, damn you,” he yelled. “Look for the lamp! Move it, I’ve only got three matches!”
Andrei got up reluctantly, but the Mute had already found the lamp, raised the glass, and handed it to Izya. The room got brighter. Izya wiggled his beard intently as he tried to adjust the burner. But he fumbled too clumsily and the burner refused to be adjusted. The Mute, gleaming all over with sweat, went back into the corner, squatted down on his haunches, and stared out at Andrei from there with plaintive devotion, his eyes wide open like a child’s. The troops. The rump of a routed army…
“Let me have the lamp,” said Andrei.
He took the lamp from Izya and adjusted the burner.
“Let’s go,” he ordered.
He pushed open the door of the colonel’s room. The windows here were firmly closed and the glass in them was unbroken, so he couldn’t smell the stench at all. The air smelled of tobacco and eau de cologne. Of the colonel.
Everything was neat and tidy: the high-quality leather of two packed suitcases glimmered in the lamplight; the folding camp bed was made up without a single wrinkle. At the head of the bed a shoulder belt with a holster and military cap with an immense visor hung on a nail. A gas lantern stood on a circle of felt on a bulky chest of drawers in the corner, with a box of matches, a pile of books, and a pair of binoculars in a case lying beside it.
Andrei put down his lamp on the table and looked around again. The tray with the flask and inverted shot glasses was standing on one shelf of an empty bookcase.
“Hand me that,” Andrei said to the Mute.
The Mute darted across, grabbed the tray, and set it on the table, beside the lamp. Andrei poured cognac into the shot glasses. There were only two of them, so he filled the cap of the flask for himself.
“Take it,” he said. “Here’s to life.”
Izya gave him an approving look, took a shot glass, and sniffed at it with the air of a connoisseur.
“That’s good stuff! Here’s to life, you say? Is this really life?” He giggled, clinked glasses with the Mute, and drained his glass. His eyes turned moist. “Goo-ood,” he said in a slightly hoarse voice.
The Mute drained his glass, too—as if it were water, without the slightest interest. But Andrei carried on standing there, holding the full flask-cap, in no hurry to down his drink. He wanted to say something, but he didn’t really know what it was. Yet another major stage was ending and a new one was beginning. And although he couldn’t possibly expect anything good from tomorrow, at least tomorrow was a reality—an exceptionally tangible reality, because it could well be one of a very, very small number of days still remaining. This was a feeling entirely new to Andrei, a very poignant feeling.
But he couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he just repeated the same words—“Here’s to life!”—and drank.
Then he lit the colonel’s gas lantern and handed it to Izya, with a promise: “You smash that one, you cack-handed hairy ape, and I’ll box your ears for you.”
Izya left, muttering resentfully, but Andrei lingered on, absentmindedly glancing around the room. Of course, he ought to ferret around in here—Duggan must have kept some kind of stash for the colonel—but the idea of ferreting around in this place somehow felt… shameful, was that it?
“Don’t be shy, Andrei, don’t be shy,” he suddenly heard a familiar voice say. “The dead don’t need anything.”
The Mute was sitting on the edge of the table, dangling his legs, and he wasn’t the Mute any longer—or, rather, not entirely the Mute. He was still wearing only his trousers, with the machete on the broad belt, but now his skin was dry, a matte ivory color, his face had rounded out, and his cheeks had acquired a healthy bloom, like two peaches. It was the Mentor, as large as life—and the sight of him brought Andrei neither joy nor hope; it didn’t lift his spirits. He felt annoyed and uneasy.
“You again…” he growled, turning his back to the Mentor. “Long time no see.”
He walked over to the window, pressed his forehead against the warm glass, and started looking out into the darkness that was faintly illuminated by little flames on the still-smoldering sled. “Well, as you can see, we’re all set to die here…”
“Why die?” the Mentor said cheerfully. “You have to live! You know, it’s never too late and always too early to die, isn’t that right?”
“And what if we don’t find water?”
“You’ll find it. You always have and you will now.”
“Good. We’ll find it. Do we live beside it for the rest of our lives? Then what’s the point of living?”
“What’s the point of living anyway?”
“That’s what I keep thinking too: what’s the point of living? I’ve lived a stupid life, Mentor. An idiotic kind of life. Bobbing about aimlessly like a turd that won’t flush. At first I fought for some kind of ideas, then for rugs that were in short supply, and then I totally flipped… and I destroyed those men.”
“Come on, come on, you’re not being serious,” said the Mentor. “People always end up dead. You’re not to blame for that, are you? You’re starting a new stage, Andrei, and, in my opinion, a decisive one. In a certain sense it’s actually good that things have turned out exactly this way. Sooner or later all this would inevitably have happened anyway. The expedition was doomed, wasn’t it? But you could have perished with it, without ever crossing this important borderline…”
“I wonder exactly what borderline that is,” Andrei said with a chuckle. He turned to face the Mentor. “I’ve already had ideas—all sorts of hooey about the good of society and other mumbo jumbo for kids still wet behind the ears… I’ve already made a career, thanks—I’ve had enough of being a big boss… So what else is there that can happen to me?”