moment, tipsy voices reached us from one of the gateways we had just
passed. Pyotr went into the yard. I sat on a curb stone, my teeth
chattering with cold and my freezing fingers thrust into my mouth.
Pyotr came back.
"Come on!" he said joyfully. "They'll let us in!"
44
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MY FIRST FLIGHT
It's good to sleep when you have a roof over your head! It's good, in a
bitter frost, to sit around an iron stove, chopping and feeding bits of
wood into it, until the tin smoke pipes begin to roar! But better still,
while weighing out salt and flour, is it to think that Turkestan itself had
been promised us in return for our work. We had stumbled upon a den
of black-marketeering war cripples. Their boss, a lame Pole with a
scalded face, promised to take us with him to Turkestan. We learned
that it was not a city, but a country, whose capital was Tashkent, that
same Tashkent to which our cripples used to go every two or three
weeks.
Those crooks employed us to pack food products. We got no wages,
only board and lodging. But we were glad to have that.
But for the boss's wife, life wouldn't have been at all bad. But the
woman got on our nerves.
Fat, with bulging eyes, her belly shaking, she would come running
into the shed where we were packaging the food to see whether
everything was safe.
"Pfef A pfef Jak smiesz tak rоbiс?” "How dare you work like this?"
I don't know about robic, but it was a sore temptation while weighing
out salted pork fat not to nip off at least a tiny bit for yourself. Lump
sugar just got itself stuck into your sleeve or pocket. But we put up with
her. Had we known that we should no more see Turkestan than our own
ears, that old hag might have really found herself short of quite a few
things.
One day, when we had been working for over two months with this
gang, she came rushing into the shed clad only in a dressing gown. In
her hand was the padlock with which she locked up the shed at night.
Eyes popping, she stopped in the doorway, looked over the shoulder and
went very pale.
"No knocking, no banging," she whispered, clutching her head. "No
shouting! Keep quiet!"
Before we knew where we were, she shot home to bolt, breathing
heavily, then hung up the padlock and went away.
It was so unexpected that for a minute or so we really kept quiet. Then
Pyotr swore and lay down on the floor. I followed suit, and we both put
an eye to the crack under the door to see what was going on.
At first all was quiet—the empty yard, the thawing snow with yellow
footprints filled with water. Then there appeared strange legs in a pair
of black high boots: after that another pair of legs, then a third. The legs
were making for the annex across the yard. Two pairs disappeared, the
third remaining on the doorstep. The butt of a rifle came to rest beside
them.
"A round-up," Pyotr whispered and sprang to his feet.
In the dark he bumped his head against mine and I bit my tongue. But
this was no time to think of bitten tongues.
"We must run for it!"
Who knows—my life might have taken quite a different turn if we had
taken some rope with us. There was plenty of rope in the shed. But we
45
didn't think of it until we were up in the loft. The shed was brick-built,
with a loft, a lean-to roof, and a round opening in the rear wall which
gave on to the yard next door.
Pyotr poked his head through this opening and took a look round. He
had scratched a cheek when we had removed a plank from the ceiling in
the darkness, and now he kept wiping the blood away with his fist every
minute.
"Let's jump, eh?"
But it was no easy thing, jumping through a small opening in a sheer
wall from a height of fifteen or eighteen feet, unless you took a dive,
head foremost. You had to crawl through this opening feet foremost,
sitting bent up almost double, then push free from the wall and drop to
the ground. That's what Pyotr did. I had half a mind to go back for some
rope, when he was already sitting in the hole. He couldn't turn round.
He just said, "Come on, Sanya. Don't be afraid." And he was gone. I
looked out, my heart in my mouth. He was all right. He had dropped on
to a heap of wet snow on the other side of the fence, which at this point
came close up to our shed.
"Come on!"
I crawled out and sat down, knees drawn up to my chin. I could now
see the whole of the next-door yard. A little girl there was playing with a
hand sled outside an old house with columns, and a crow was sitting on
a drainpipe. The girl stopped and looked at us with curiosity. The crow
glanced at us incuriously, then turned away and drew its head between
its wings.
"Come on!"
Besides the girl and the crow, there was a man in the yard, a man in a
leather overcoat. He was standing at the point where our annex
adjoined the next yard. I saw him finish his cigarette, throw away the fag
end and coolly walk towards us.
"Come on!" Pyotr cried desperately.
As I started feebly to push off from the wall with my hands everything
suddenly came into motion. The crow took wing, the girl backed away in
fright. Pyotr made a dash for the gateway, and the leathered man gave
chase. At that moment I understood everything. But it was too late—I
was hurtling down.
Such was my first flight—down in a straight line from a height of
fifteen feet, without a parachute; I shouldn't call it a successful flight. I
struck the fence with my chest, jumped up and fell again. The last thing
I saw was Pyotr dashing out into the street and slamming the gate in the
face of the man in the leather coat.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CLAY MODELLING
It was very silly, of course, to run away when you hadn't done
anything wrong. After all, we weren't blackmarketeers, we had been
only working for them. Our captors wouldn't do anything to us, they'd
simply question us and let us go. But it was too late now for regrets. The
46
man in the leather coat gripped my arm and marched me off—to jail
probably. I had been caught, while Pyotr had got away. I was alone now.
It was already evening, the sun was going down, and the daws were
circling slowly over the trees along the Strastnoi Boulevard. I wasn't
crying, but I must have looked pretty miserable, because the man in the
leather coat looked at me closely and let go of my arm. He realised that I
wouldn't run away.
He brought me into a large well-lighted room on the fifth floor of a
huge building at Nikitsky Gate. It was a children's reception centre of
the Education Department, where I was to spend three memorable days.
My heart sank when I saw all those ugly customers. Some were
playing cards, squatting around a clay-built stove, some were taking
down the wooden valance rods from the high windows and feeding them
straight into the stove, while others were sleeping or building a house
out of old frames and canvases stacked haphazardly in a corner. At
night, when it got colder inside the reception centre than outside, these