PART V
Continuity Disrupted
1
Andrei suppressed the cramp in his stomach and swallowed the last spoonful of mush, then pushed his mess tin away with a feeling of revulsion and reached for his mug. The tea was still hot. Andrei wrapped his hand around the mug and started taking little sips, staring into the small, hissing flame of the gasoline lamp. The tea was unusually strong after standing for too long; it smelled like a birch-twig broom and it had a strange aftertaste, maybe from the cruddy water they’d collected after 820 kilometers, or maybe because Quejada had slipped his crappy remedy for diarrhea into all the command staff’s mugs again. Or maybe the mug simply hadn’t been properly washed—it felt especially greasy and sticky today.
In the street below his window he could hear the soldiers clattering their mess tins. The comic wit Tevosyan cracked some kind of gag about Skank and the soldiers started braying with laughter, but at that very moment Sergeant Vogel suddenly bellowed out in his Prussian voice, “Are you on your way to your post or to slip under the blanket with some woman, you low, creeping amphibian? Why are you barefoot? Where’s your footwear, you troglodyte?” A sullen voice responded that the troglodyte’s feet were chafed raw, and right through to the bone in some places. “Shut your mouth, you pregnant cow! Get those boots on immediately—and get to your post! Move it!”
Andrei wiggled the toes of his bare feet under the table, relishing the sensation. His feet had already recovered a bit on the cool parquet floor. If he just had a basin full of cold water… If he could stick his feet in it… He glanced into the mug. It was still half full of tea. To hell with it all, he thought, impulsively downing the remainder in three sensuous gulps. His stomach immediately started gurgling. For a while Andrei apprehensively listened to what was going on in there, then he put down the mug, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and looked at the metal documents box. He ought to get out yesterday’s reports… I’m not in the mood. Right now I could just stretch out, snuggle up under my jacket, and grab an hour’s shut-eye…
Outside the window a tractor engine suddenly started furiously clattering. The remnants of glass in the window jangled, and a lump of plaster fell off the ceiling, landing beside the lamp. Trembling rapidly, the empty mug crept toward the edge of the table. Screwing up his entire face, Andrei got up, padded across to the window in his bare feet, and looked out.
He felt a breath of heat on his face from the street, which hadn’t cooled off yet, along with the caustic odor of exhaust fumes and the nauseating stench of heated oil. In the dusty light of a swiveling headlamp, bearded men were sitting right there in the road, lazily scrabbling in mess tins with spoons. All of them were barefoot, and almost all of them were naked to the waist. Their sweaty bodies gleamed white but their faces looked black, and their hands were black, as if they were all wearing gloves. Andrei suddenly realized that he didn’t recognize any of them. A troop of strange, unfamiliar naked monkeys. Sergeant Vogel stepped into the circle of light holding a huge aluminum kettle, and the monkeys immediately started excitedly fidgeting, jostling and holding out their mugs to the kettle. Pushing the mugs aside with his free hand, the sergeant started yelling, but Andrei could barely hear him above the rattling of the engine.
Andrei went back to the table, jerked open the lid of the box, and took out the logbook and yesterday’s reports. Another lump of plaster fell on the table from the ceiling. Andrei looked up. The room was immensely high—about four meters, or maybe even five. The molding on the ceiling had come away in places, so that he could see the lathwork, and that immediately aroused sweet memories of homemade jam pies, served with huge amounts of perfectly brewed, transparent tea in transparent, thin-walled glasses. With lemon. Or you could simply take an empty glass and collect as much pure, cold water as you wanted in the kitchen…
Andrei jerked his head, got up again, and walked obliquely right across the room to a huge bookcase. There was no glass in the doors, and there were no books either—just empty, dusty shelves. Andrei already knew that, but nonetheless he examined them one more time and even felt in the dark corners with his hand.
There was no denying the room was pretty well preserved. There were two perfectly decent armchairs in it, and another one with a torn seat of tooled leather that had once been luxurious. Several plain chairs stood in a row along the wall opposite the window, there was a little table with short legs in the middle of the room, and standing on the table was a cut-glass vase, with some sort of black, dried-up gunk inside it. The wallpaper had come loose on the walls, and even fallen away completely in some places, and the parquet floor had dried out and warped, but even so the room was in perfectly good condition—someone had lived here recently, no more than ten years ago.
It was the first time Andrei had seen such a well-preserved building since they passed the five-hundred-kilometer mark. After all those kilometers of neighborhoods burned to cinders and transformed into black, charred desert; after all those kilometers of continuous ruins, overgrown by prickly, brownish briars, and doddering, empty multistory boxes with collapsed floors absurdly towering up out of them; and kilometer after kilometer of waste lots, planted with rotten log-built houses with no roofs, where you could see right across the entire terrace from the road—from the Yellow Wall in the east to the edge of the precipice in the west—after all this, neighborhoods that were almost intact had appeared again, and a road paved with cobblestones, and perhaps there were people somewhere here—in any case, the colonel had ordered the sentries to be doubled.
I wonder how the colonel’s doing? The old man’s health has gone downhill a bit recently. But then, recently everyone’s health has gone downhill. It’s perfect timing that we’ll be spending the night under a roof for the first time in twelve days and not under the open sky. If we could just find water here, we could make this a long halt. Only it looks like there won’t be any water here either. At least, Izya says we shouldn’t count on finding any. Out of the whole herd of them, Izya and the colonel are the only ones who ever talk any sense.
There was a knock at the door, barely audible above the clatter of the tractor engine. Andrei hurried back to his seat, pulled on his jacket, opened the logbook, and barked, “Yes!”
It was only Duggan—a lean old man and a good match for his coloneclass="underline" smoothly shaved, neat and tidy, every button fastened. “Permission to tidy up, sir?” he shouted.
Andrei nodded. Good God, he thought. What an effort it must take to keep yourself so smart in this shambles… And he isn’t even an officer, is he, not even a sergeant—he’s nothing but an orderly. A lackey. “How’s the colonel?” Andrei asked.
“Beg your pardon, sir?” Duggan froze, holding the dirty tableware in his hands, with one long, gristly ear turned toward Andrei.
“How is the colonel feeling?” Andrei roared, and that very second the engine outside fell silent.
“The colonel is drinking tea!” Duggan roared in the sudden silence, immediately adding in an embarrassed voice, “Beg your pardon, sir. The colonel is feeling passably well. He ate supper and now he is drinking tea.”
Andrei nodded absentmindedly and flipped over a few pages of the logbook.
“Will there be any instructions, sir?” Duggan inquired.
“No, thank you,” said Andrei.
When Duggan walked out, Andrei finally got started on yesterday’s reports. Yesterday he hadn’t recorded anything at all; he’d had the runs so bad, he barely managed to sit through to the end of the evening reporting session, and afterward he was in torment half the night—squatting out in the middle of the road with his bare ass pointed toward the camp, tensely peering into the gloom and straining his ears to catch any sounds, with a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other.