any obligations."
I dreaded having to part with this dream, though my drenched leg felt
cold and my greatcoat had slipped far down from my shoulders and was
crumpled under me. I was holding Katya's hands, not letting go off my
dream, but already something frightful had happened and I had to force
myself awake.
I opened my eyes. A mist, lit up by the early rays of the sun, was
drifting lazily among the trees. My face was wet and so were my hands.
Romashov was sitting a little way off in the same pose of drowsy
unconcern. Everything looked the same as before, but in fact everything
was quite different.
He was not looking at me. Then he stole a glance at me out of the tail
of his eye, and I understood at once why I was lying so uncomfortably.
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He had pulled the knapsack with the rusks from under my head. What's
more, he had taken my flask containing vodka and my pistol.
The blood rushed to my face. He had taken my pistol!
"Give me back my gun this minute, you fathead!" I said calmly.
He did not answer.
"D'you hear!"
"You'll die all the same," he said hastily. "You don't need a gun."
"Whether I'm going to die or not is my own business. You give me
back my gun if you don't want to face a court martial. Get me?"
His breath was coming quick and short.
"Court martial!" he sneered. "We're alone and no one will know
anything. As a matter of fact you've long been dead. Nobody knows that
you're still alive."
He was staring me straight in the face now, and his eyes looked very
queer-sort of solemn and wide-open. I wondered whether he had gone
mad.
"I tell you what," I said calmly, "take a swig out of that flask and pull
yourself together. Then we'll decide whether I'm alive or dead."
But Romashov was not listening.
"I've stayed behind to tell you that you've always been in my way
everywhere. Every day, every hour of my life. I'm sick and tired of it! I've
had a thousand years of you!"
Definitely, he was not quite normal at that moment. That last phrase
of his spoke for itself.
"But that's all finished with now!" Romashov plunged on. "You would
have died anyway, you've got gangrene. You'll die now all the quicker."
"That may be." There was not more than three paces between us. If I
took good aim and threw my crutch at him I could stun him perhaps.
My voice was still calm, though. "But why have you taken my map-case?
My papers are in there."
"Why? To have them find you just as you are. Who? Unidentified. (He
was omitting words). Just another corpse lying about.
You'll be a corpse," he said arrogantly, "and no one will know that I
killed you."
Looking back, this scene is almost fantastic. But I have not altered or
added a single thing.
CHAPTER SIX
NOBODY WILL KNOW
As a boy I was very quick-tempered and I remember what a
dangerous sense of exhilaration came over me when I let myself go. It
was with just this feeling, which had gone slightly to my head, that I
found myself listening to Romashov. I had to keep perfectly calm, and I
forced myself to do this, while my hand slid slowly behind my back and
rested on my crutch.
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"You may be interested to know that I've sent a letter off to my unit,"
I said in a steady voice, "so it's no use your relying on that report."
"What about the hospital train?"
He looked at me exultantly. He meant that the attack on the hospital
train would easily explain my disappearance. At that moment I realised
how long he had been wishing my death, ever since our schooldays
perhaps.
"All right. But, strangely enough, you gain nothing by it," I said this,
or words to this effect, just to gain time.
The wood stack prevented me from swinging my arm back. I had to
move away from it unobserved and strike from the side to make sure of
hitting his head.
"Whether I gain by it or not doesn't matter. You have lost anyway. I’ll
going to shoot you. There!"
He pulled out my pistol.
Had I believed him really capable of shooting me he might have found
it in him to do so. I had never seen him so worked up. But I just spat in
his face and said: "Shoot, damn you!"
My God, how he howled and twisted about, gnashing his teeth and
even snapping! The sight would have been terrifying had I not known
that behind these antics was only cowardice and bluster. A struggle with
himself-whether to shoot or not-that was the meaning of his wild dance.
The pistol burned his hand. He kept flourishing the gun at me and
shivering, until I began to fear that he might press the trigger without
meaning to.
"Damn you!" he shouted. "You've always tormented me! If only you
knew to whom you owe your life, you rotter, you nobody! If only I could
do it, my God! Why should you live, why? All the same they'll saw your
leg off. You won't fly any more."
It may sound silly, but of all the idiotic curses he hurled at me one
that struck home was his saying that I would never fly again.
"Anyone would think I was mostly in your way up in the air," I said.
My voice had acquired a deadly quality, but I was trying to keep it calm.
"But down on the ground we were Orestes and Pylades."
He was now standing sideways to me, covering his eyes with Ms left
hand, as though despairing of persuading me to die of my own accord. It
was a good opportunity, and I hurled my crutch. It had to be thrown like
a spear, the body drawn hard back then flung forward with the arm
thrown out. I did the best I could, but unfortunately I missed his head
and struck his shoulder instead, not very hard.
Romashov was dumbfounded. He gave a great, clumsy jump, like a
kangaroo. Then he faced me.
"You would, eh!" he said and swore. "All right!"
Leisurely, he packed the knapsacks, tied them together the easier to
carry them and slipped one over each arm.
Just as unhurriedly, he walked round me, and bent down to pick up a
twig. Waving it about, he made for the marsh, and five minutes later his
stoop-shouldered figure could just barely be seen among the distant
aspen trees. I sat leaning my hands on the ground, my mouth dry,
fighting an impulse to cry out: "Romashov, come back!" as this, of
course, was impossible.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
ALONE
To leave me in the lurch, hungry, unarmed and badly wounded,
within a stone's throw of the German detachment—this, I felt sure, had
been carefully planned in advance. All the rest of Romashov's
performance was done on the spur of the moment, probably in the hope
of scaring and humiliating me. Having failed in this, he had gone away,
and this was tantamount to, if not worse than, the murder from which
he had flinched.
I could not say that this sobering thought made me feel any happier. I
had to keep moving if I did not want Romashov's prophecy about my
remaining in this little aspen wood for ever to prove true.
I stood up. The crutches were of different length. I took a step. It was
not the sort of pain that hits you in the back of the head and knocks you