“Add prisoner under escort Mah-sim to the travel order. He is to be escorted without handcuffs and is permitted to travel in a public car… Private Gaal!”
Gai clicked his heels and drew himself erect. “At your command, Mr. Cornet!”
“Before presenting yourself at your new duty station in our capital city, deliver the detainee to the address indicated on this sheet of paper. After discharging these instructions, hand the note to the duty officer at your new station. Forget the address. This is your final assignment, Gaal, and you will of course carry it out as befits a fine young guardsman.”
“Your word is my command!” Gai shouted in a rush of indescribable rapture. A surge of joy, pride, and happiness, a hot wave of ravishing devotion, swept over him, lifting him up and bearing him onward toward the heavens. Oh, these sweet moments of ecstasy, these unforgettable moments, these moments that shook him to the core of his being, these moments when he sprouted wings, these moments of sweet contempt for everything coarse, material, and corporeal… These moments when he thirsted for the fire and the command, when he yearned for the command that would unite him with the fire, hurl him into the fire, against a thousand enemies, against gaping gun muzzles, against millions of bullets… and that was still not all, it would be even sweeter still, the ecstasy would blind and consume… Oh, the fire! Oh, the glory! The command, the command! And there it is, there it is!… He gets to his feet, this fine, strapping, handsome fellow, the pride of the brigade, our Corporal Varibobu, like a flaming torch, like a statue of glory and loyalty, and he starts singing, and we all take up the refrain, every one of us:
And they all sang. The brilliant Cornet To’ot sang, that very model of a Guards officer, for whom Gai wanted so badly, at this very instant, to lay down his life, his soul, and everything, to the strains of this very march. And the HQ medical officer Zogu sang, the very model of a brother of mercy, as coarse as a genuine soldier and as gentle as a mother’s hands. And our Corporal Varibobu, ours to the very marrow of his bones, an old war dog, a veteran turned gray haired in battle. Oh, how the battle medals glitter on his distinguished threadbare tunic; for him there is nothing else but service, nothing apart from devotion.
Do you know us, our Unknown Fathers? Raise your weary heads and look on us, for after all you see everything, and then surely you must see that we are here, on the distant, barbarous outskirts of our country. We will die in rapture and in torment for the happiness of our motherland!
But what is this? He isn’t singing, he’s just standing there, with his legs sprawling, leaning against the barrier, and turning his idiotic brown head to and fro, with his eyes darting around, and he keeps grinning, he keeps baring his teeth… Who is that blackguard grinning at? Oh, how I’d love to walk up to him, uttering a fearsome cry, and take a swing with my guardsman’s fist at that abominable white grin… But I mustn’t, I mustn’t, that’s not the Guards’ way. He is only a poor freak, a pitiful invalid, true happiness is unachievable to him, he is a blind nonentity, a pitiful fragment of humanity…
But this ginger-haired bastard, doubled over in the corner in agonizing pain… Ah no, that’s a different matter: You always get headaches when we labor for breath in our rapture, when we sing our battle march and are prepared to rupture our lungs in order to sing it through to the end! You lousy educatee, you hideous criminal, you ginger bandit, I’ll grab you by your chest and by your foul beard! Get up, you bastard! Stand to attention when guardsmen are singing their march! And I’ll smash you across your head, across your head, across your filthy mug, across your insolent, goggling eyes… Take that, and that…
Gai flung the educatee away, clicked his heels, and turned toward the cornet. As always after a fit of rapturous exhilaration, he felt a ringing in his ears, and the world was sweetly drifting and swaying in front of his eyes.
Corporal Varibobu, blue from the strain, was feebly clearing his throat. The HQ medical officer, sweaty and crimson, was voraciously drinking water straight from the carafe and tugging a handkerchief out of his pocket. The cornet was scowling with a vacant expression, as if he was trying to remember something. By the door, ginger-haired Zef was squirming about in a dirty heap of check rags. His face was smashed and bloody, and he was feebly groaning through his teeth. And Mah-sim wasn’t smiling any longer. His face had frozen, becoming entirely like an ordinary human face, and he was gazing round-eyed at Gai, with his mouth hanging open.
“Private Gaal,” the cornet said in a cracked voice. “Uhhh… I wanted to say something to you… or have I already said it?… Wait, Zogu, leave me at least a sip of water, will you…”
3
Maxim woke up feeling sluggish and heavy headed. The room was stifling; the window had been closed at night again. But then, opening the window didn’t make much difference. The city was too close; during the day he could see its motionless, reddish-brown cap of repulsive fumes, which the wind carried this way, and neither the distance nor the height of his room on the fifth floor nor the park down below were any help. What I could do with right now is an ion shower, thought Maxim, and then dart out naked into the garden—not this lousy, half-rotted garden, all gray from the fumes, but our garden, somewhere outside Leningrad, on the Karelian Isthmus—and then run about nine miles around the lake at full speed, and swim across the lake, and then walk along the bottom of it for about twenty minutes to exercise my lungs a bit, clambering over the slippery underwater boulders.
He jumped up, swung the window open, stuck his head out under the fine drizzle, took a deep breath of the damp air, and started coughing—the air was full of all sorts of stuff that shouldn’t be there, and the raindrops left a metallic aftertaste on his tongue. Cars hissed and whistled as they hurtled along the express highway. Down below the window, wet foliage glistened and broken glass glimmered on top of a high stone wall. A man in a wet cape was walking around in the park, scraping fallen leaves together into a heap. Through the pall of rain Maxim could vaguely make out the brick building of some kind of factory on the outskirts of the city. As always, thick streams of poisonous smoke were slowly creeping out of its two tall chimneys and drooping back down toward the ground.
A stifling world. A troubled, sickly world. It’s absolutely dreary and unappealing, like that official building where the men with the bright buttons and bad teeth suddenly, completely out of the blue, started howling, straining their voices until they went hoarse, Gai, that likable, handsome young fellow, started beating that red-bearded Zef’s face to a bloody pulp, and Zef didn’t even try to resist. A troubled world… A radioactive river, an absurd iron dragon, polluted air, and disheveled passengers in a lumbering, three-story metal box on wheels that pours out bluish-gray carbon monoxide fumes. And another savage scene—in that very same passenger car—when those coarse men, who smelled of poorly refined alcohol for some reason, reduced an elderly woman to tears with their crude laughter and gestures, and no one stuck up for her; the car was absolutely jam-packed, but everyone looked the other way. Only Gai jumped to his feet, pale-faced with fury, or perhaps fear, and shouted something at them, and they cleared off… An awful lot of fury, an awful lot of fear, an awful lot of resentment.