The statue on the corner was gone. The huge man of iron with the face like a toad and the theatrically outstretched arms had disappeared. There was nothing left at the intersection but the heaps of dried-out crap that the soldiers had dumped around the statue the day before.
3
“I’ll be going, then, Colonel,” Andrei said, getting up.
The colonel also got up, and immediately leaned heavily on his cane. Today he was even paler, his face was drawn, and he seemed like a genuinely old man. Nothing left, not even his bearing, you could say… “A safe journey to you, Mr. Counselor,” said the colonel. His faded eyes had an almost guilty look. “Damn it all, commander’s reconnaissance is basically my job…”
Andrei picked up his automatic off the table and hooked the strap over his shoulder. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “For instance, I have the feeling I’m running off and dumping everything on you. And you’re not well, Colonel.”
“Yes, just imagine, today I…” the colonel began and then stopped short. “I suppose you’ll be back before dark?”
“I’ll be back quite a bit earlier than that,” said Andrei. “I don’t even regard this sortie as reconnaissance. I simply want to show these cowardly bastards that there’s nothing terrible up ahead. Walking statues, my eye!” Then he realized what he’d said. “That wasn’t intended as a reproach to your men, Colonel…”
“Think nothing of it,” said the colonel, gesturing feebly with his gaunt hand. “You’re perfectly right. Soldiers are always cowardly. I’ve never seen any brave soldiers in my life. And why on Earth should they be brave?”
“Well,” Andrei said with a smile, “if there were merely enemy tanks waiting for us up ahead…”
“Tanks!” said the colonel. “Tanks are a different matter. But I remember very clearly one incident when a squadron of paratroopers refused to advance into a village that was home to a sorcerer famous for miles around.”
Andrei laughed and held out his hand to the colonel. “I’ll see you later,” he said.
“Just a moment,” said the colonel, stopping him. “Duggan!”
Duggan was instantly there in the room, holding a flask sheathed in silver grillwork. A little silver tray appeared on the table, with little silver shot glasses on it.
“Be my guest,” said the colonel.
They drank and shook hands. “I’ll see you later,” Andrei repeated.
He walked down the stinking stairway into the lobby, nodded coolly to Quejada, who was fiddling with some theodolite-like instrument right there on the floor, and went out into the red-hot street. When his short shadow fell across the cracked slabs of the sidewalk, a second shadow immediately sprang up beside it, and then Andrei remembered about the Mute. He looked around. The Mute was standing in his usual pose, with his open hands stuck into the belt on which his terrifying machete hung. His thick black hair was standing up on end, his bare feet were planted wide apart, and his brown skin gleamed as if it had been smeared with grease.
“Maybe you’ll take an automatic after all?” Andrei asked.
No.
“Well, please yourself.”
Andrei looked around. Izya and Pak were sitting in the shade of a trailer with a map spread out in front of them, studying the layout of the City. Two soldiers were craning their necks and glancing over their heads. One of the soldiers caught Andrei’s eye, hastily looked away, and nudged the other in the side. They both immediately walked off, disappearing behind the sled.
The drivers were jostling around the second tractor under Ellisauer’s supervision. They were dressed in various odds and ends, and Ellisauer was sporting a gigantic, wide-brimmed hat. Two soldiers were hanging about close beside them, giving advice and frequently spitting off to the side.
Andrei looked up along the line of the street. Nothing there. Scorching hot air shimmering above the cobblestones. Heat haze. A hundred meters away it was impossible to make out anything—like being underwater.
“Izya!” he called.
Izya and Pak looked around and got to their feet. The Korean picked up his small, handmade automatic rifle off the road and tucked it under his arm. “Already time, is it?” Izya asked briskly.
Andrei nodded and walked on.
Everyone looked at him: Permyak, screwing his eyes up against the sun; feeble-minded Ungern, with his permanently slack mouth rounded into a circle of alarm; the morose gorilla Jackson, slowly wiping his hands on a piece of fiber packing… Ellisauer, looking just like a ragged, dirty wooden-mushroom shelter from a children’s play area in Leningrad, set two fingers to the brim of his hat with a supremely solemn air of commiseration, and the spitting soldiers stopped spitting, exchanged inaudible remarks through their teeth, and drifted off together through the dust. Run scared, you yellow bastards, Andrei thought vindictively. If I called you now, just as a joke, you’d crap in your pants…
They walked past the sentry, who performed a hasty “present arms,” and then they strode off across the cobblestones—Andrei in front with his automatic over his shoulder, and the Mute hard on his heels with a rucksack containing four cans of food, a pack of hardtack, and two flasks of water, while Izya plodded along about ten steps behind in his battered shoes, carrying an empty rucksack over his shoulder; he was holding the map in one hand and feverishly patting at his pockets with the other, as if checking to see to if he had forgotten anything. At the back, striding along easily with the slightly waddling gait of a man used to long-distance marches, came Pak, his short-barreled automatic under his arm.
The street was scorching hot and the ferocious sun roasted their shoulder blades and the tops of their shoulders. They were deluged by surges of heat from the walls of the houses. There was no wind at all today.
In the camp behind them the wrecked motor was started up—Andrei didn’t even look back. He was suddenly engulfed by a sense of liberation. For a few glorious hours the soldiers, with their stink and their inscrutably simplistic minds, were disappearing from his life. And Quejada was disappearing too, that schemer who was so totally transparent, which made Andrei loathe him all the more; all those loathsome problems with other people’s sore feet were disappearing too, all the problems with someone else’s squabbles and fights, with someone else’s puking (could it be poisoning?) and someone else’s blood-saturated diarrhea (could it be dysentery?). To hell with all of you, Andrei euphorically repeated over and over. I never want to see you again. It feels so good without you!
Of course, he immediately recalled the dubious Korean Pak, and for a moment it felt as if the bright joy of liberation had been clouded with new anxieties and suspicions, but he instantly dismissed the idea without a second thought. Just a Korean. Calm and impassive, he never complains about anything. A Far East version of Izya Katzman, that’s all. He suddenly recalled something his brother once told him—that all the peoples of the Far East, especially the Japanese, felt exactly the same way about the Koreans as all the peoples of Europe, especially the Russians and Germans, felt about the Jews. Just at this moment he found that amusing, and for some reason he suddenly remembered Kensi… Yes, if only Kensi were here, and Uncle Yura, and Donald… Agh… If only he had managed to persuade Uncle Yura to join this expedition, everything would be very different now.