chaps myself not to see me off. They had better stick together and give that bureaucrat a hiding.
I arrived at the station half an hour before the train was due to leave and saw that no one was being allowed on the platform yet. With one hand in my pocket feeling the hard little ticket that we had clubbed together to buy, and the other gripping a brief case, I strolled about the station, glancing up at the clock.
Firmly pinned with two safety-pins in the inside pocket of my jacket were forty-three rubles sixty kopeks. At dinner-time we had been given our grants and most of the chaps at school had contributed a ruble each for my journey. That was how I had come to possess such a large sum, I had never had so much money before in my life. My papers for the journey were in the brief case that Nikita had forced on me. He had gone specially to the District Komsomol Committee and borrowed it from Dmitry Panchenko, the head of the instructors' department. Afraid of being laughed at, I tried to refuse it, but Nikita was adamant.
"Try to understand, old chap," he said persuasively, "when a brief case is necessary, it's nothing to be ashamed of. There's no reason why it should be a sign that you've turned into a bureaucrat. If you haven't got a brief case, what will you do with all your papers, the school estimate, the lists of pupils? Stuff them in your pockets? You'll get everything crumpled. And where will you put your towel, soap, tooth-brush? There's nowhere, is there? But it all goes fine into a brief case. Suppose you go in to see the chief of education himself. Do you want to fish a lot of crumpled papers out of your pocket?... You'll feel much better with a brief case."
I tried every excuse I could think of to get out of taking the brief case, for I knew that the Komsomol members who carried brief cases were called bureaucrats. And if one of these brief case owners went so far as to put a tie round his neck, he was sure to be dubbed a petty bourgeois or an upstart. Before I left the hostel, I wrapped the brief case in old newspapers and carried it under my arm, like a parcel. Not until I reached the station did I glance round and throw the newspaper into the ditch.
There was no one I knew at the station. In the buffet a samovar was steaming and an elderly waiter with a white overall over his fur jacket was pouring the hot water into thick glasses. In the luggage department customs men were checking the passengers' luggage for contraband.
I strolled along the corridors, crossed the entrance-hall several times and surveyed the passengers, trying to guess who would be with me in my compartment. Then I went out on the platform. Soon the platform grew empty as the passengers took their seats in the train. Only the stationmaster paced slowly over the ice-coated platform, glancing at his watch. At last, he straightened up, assumed a dignified air, put his watch away in his pocket and struck three ringing notes on a brass bell.
I showed the conductor my ticket and scrambled up the steep steps into the warm sooty-smelling carriage. It looked as if no one else would get in and I should have to travel alone. !l walked through the empty carriage to the last compartment and took a seat by the window.
Behind the wooden wall, in the toilet, I thought I heard someone cough, but paying no attention to it, I started examining the cosy compartment, which reeked of tobacco smoke.
What a thrill it had been a few years ago, when we were kids, to climb into the long, green carriages like these standing in the sidings! Why, only a few days ago, if someone had told me that I should soon enter such a carriage as a real passenger, I should never have believed him.
In the hush before the train started I could hear two greasers talking to each other by the station warehouse, then behind the wall someone coughed again, more clearly this time, and at last, from the head of the train came the cheerful whistle of the engine.
It had given a similar cheerful whistle several years ago, when Petka and I had seen Yuzik Starodomsky, "Weasel," off to Kiev from this same station. How we had envied Yuzik his long train journey! And now I, Vasily Mandzhura, was setting out on a long journey too!... A jerk.
Gazing out of the window, T watched the places I knew gliding past. How many times had I run barefoot over those paths and tracks! The willow pond near the candle factory flashed by. How dismal it looked in the snow! Nothing like as good as in summer. What big crayfish you could catch under its steep banks with a bit of old meat or a dead frog. Half the pond was overgrown with tall bul-rushes with brown cat's tails on their slender stems.. .
The door behind me gave a loud click.
I turned round.
Within two paces of me, holding a little suit-case, stood —Pecheritsa.
"Now it's all up," I thought. "Pecheritsa's found out everything, he knows I'm going to the centre, and he's decided to beat me to it. Now, of course, he'll try to scare me. He may even order me to go back at once."
In the first shock of meeting, I had not noticed that Pecheritsa had shaved off his moustache. Clean-shaven, he looked younger and not quite so bad-tempered as before. I was very: surprised to see that Pecheritsa was not dressed in his usual clothes. He was wearing an old Budyonny hat with the star taken off and a long cavalry . great-coat that reached to his ankles.
I hadn't the courage to look straight at Pecheritsa for long, so I turned away and pretended to be looking out of the window, now and then glancing at him from the tail of my eye. Huddling against the wall of the compartment, I waited for the questioning that I was sure would come. But glancing over his shoulder, Pecheritsa said kindly, and what was more, in Russian: "Going far, lad?"
"To 'Kiev," I lied, making up my mind not to confess on any account. "Here's a swindler," I thought to myself. "He sacks other people for speaking Russian, but as soon as he gets in the train, he goes over to Russian himself! Why should he be allowed to when others aren't?"
"So we're travelling together," Pecheritsa said calmly.
He raised the top bunk and tossed his little suit-case on to it. Wiping the bunk with his finger to see if it was dusty, Pecheritsa asked:
"Who sent you alone on such a long journey?"
Noticing that he was paying rather a lot of attention to my brief case, I lounged back and, without appearing to do so on purpose, covered it with my elbow.
"I'm going to see my aunt. I've got an aunt in Kiev who's ill."
"Everyone's getting ill now," Pecheritsa agreed readily. "It's a rotten time of the year—spring's coming. I'm not well myself, shivering and coughing all the time. I just don't want to do anything but sleep." And he coughed.
I realized that it was he who had been coughing and fiddling about there, behind the carriage wall, before the train started.
When his spell of coughing was over, Pecheritsa leaned towards me and asked in an even more friendly tone: "You're not going to sleep yet, are you, laddie?"
"No, I want to read for a bit."
"Then I'll ask you a favour, old chap. Here's my ticket and travel warrant. If they come round to check up, just show it to them, will you? I'll get up on my bunk now and have a snooze. Don't let them wake me. If they ask anything, just tell them I'm your uncle and I'm ill and you've got my ticket. Understand?"
"All right," I said, and taking Pecheritsa's ticket and the travel warrant wrapped round it, I put it away in my jacket pocket.
Pecheritsa climbed on to the bunk, turned his face to the wall and, placing the little case under his head, quickly fell asleep with one hand thrust into the pocket of his long great-coat.