“Lunch break!”
People sink to the ground. Some look at the remaining piles, others watch the spines of logs rattling along the river in the distance, or gaze at the clear July sky. Spoons clink and the reeking smell of homemade tobacco wafts around. From this part of the riverbank, there’s a good view of the Semruk pier in the distance, where Kuznets is boarding his gleaming brown launch, barely staying on his feet thanks to a bad hangover. A half-dressed Ignatov clings to him, reeling, shouting, and waving his arms as if he’s making a demand or wants to ask for something, but Gorelov holds the commandant, allowing Kuznets to break loose and jump on the launch. “I can’t… ! Let me go!… I can’t be here any longer!” carries Ignatov’s desperate wail.
“Sons of bitches,” one of the log rollers quietly says, with hatred.
The uproar they created back on that autumn night in Semruk – firing on live people – has been nicknamed Walpurgis Night. Fortunately, there were only injuries and nobody was killed.
The launch finally breaks away from the dock, coughs, picks up steam, and heads toward the bend in the river, carefully skirting the accumulated logs. Gorelov releases the commandant, then throws his hands in the air as if in apology and presses them to his chest. Ignatov isn’t listening. He jumps into a small boat that’s bobbing at a berth and rows after Kuznets’s launch. The boat is just a small rowboat, so it flies quickly along the waves and the current carries it into the channel, pulling it into the tail end of a heavy flotilla of logs.
“He’ll get caught the hell up,” say dispassionate voices in the crowd. “Be crushed to pieces.”
People look up from their dishes. Some peer and half-stand to have a better look while others continue gulping indifferently. The loud, terrifying cracking of logs can be heard at a distance.
Ignatov notices the danger too late. He’s pulling the oars with all his might but can no longer row away and the boat smashes into a shiny jumble of moving logs in the middle of the river. He tries to push off one of them with an oar but the oar immediately snaps. A couple of seconds later, Ignatov appears to be crouching and shrinking in height, and then neither he nor the boat is visible. His brown hair flashes just once more among the frothy logs, and that’s all.
“Die, you bastard,” utters Zaseka, a frail little man wearing ragged overalls.
Someone suddenly darts away from the onlookers and rushes headlong toward the river, pushing a boat prepared for the log drivers into the water and jumping in. He goes after the caravan, desperately working a pole to drive the boat toward the churning porridge of logs and froth. It’s Lukka. People watch from the knoll as he’s flung from side to side, kneeling on half-bent legs, mashing at the Angara with the pole. He’s rapidly carried downstream but manages to steer the boat a bit to the side, edging and pushing his way stubbornly between the logs to where Ignatov’s wet head last flashed. He suddenly tosses the pole into the boat and bends toward the water.
“Has he found him?”
And now everyone has dropped their dishes, spoons, and unfinished hand-rolled cigarettes, and is dashing toward the river, crowding, making a racket, and running into the water. Several boats spring out into the Angara, tearing along the shore, downstream with the current, preparing to meet them, and help them out of the wooden jumble. People fling ropes, extend their pikes, yell…
“Come on, come on!” Gorelov shouts as hard as he can, his boots sloshing in water up to his ankles, and desperately waving at the tiny red-haired figure in the middle of the Angara.
Lukka catches his pike pole on one of the lines that’s been tossed and then they somehow haul Ignatov’s boat to shore and raise it to the Semruk pier. It’s crushed like a little paper boat and already half-filled with water that’s a rich red – Ignatov’s lying on the bottom, wheezing large, bloody bubbles and his legs are as awkwardly twisted as a puppet’s.
He comes to during the night, as if he’s been struck. He sits up in bed. Where am I?
A taut gauze cap is stretched over his forehead, his right arm is immobilized against his shoulder, and his left leg feels like a dead weight. The pillows around him are dim white in the dull moonlight; people are breathing loudly. Ah, yes, the infirmary. It seems like he’s already been here a long time, several days, maybe even weeks. He wakes up each night, regains consciousness – this is agonizing and takes a long time – and remembers; then he limply leans back and falls asleep again. Faces flash: Leibe, Gorelov, and other patients. Sometimes a spoon materializes in his mouth and he obediently swallows either cool water or a warm and liquidy stew that flows slowly down his throat. The same kind of thoughts – liquidy and viscous – splash listlessly in his head, too.
But everything’s different today because his head is clear; everything inside it is in good order, quick, and precise, and his body is unexpectedly strong. Ignatov’s healthy hand grasps at the strings digging into his chin and he pulls to unknot them, tearing the gauze over his head and throwing off the little cap. He peels off a couple of wads of cotton stuck to the top of his head and a light breeze from the vent window gently flutters at his shaved skull, caressing his skin. He’s free!
He leans into the edge of the bed, wanting to lower his feet to the floor. His right foot somehow obeys him and creeps out from under the blanket but the second has become unliftable and shoots with sharp pain. He throws off the blanket and sees his leg is tightly wound in gauze, like a swaddled infant, and half his foot is gone.
He breathes deeply and rapidly, gazing at his bandaged foot, then turns away. He notices a freshly planed crutch leaning against the bed. There weren’t crutches in Semruk until now. Meaning they’d crafted it themselves. For him? He grabs it and launches it into the darkness with all his might. There’s a crash and the clang of some vials; one of the patients raises himself up, grumbles, and drops his head to the pillow again. Quiet returns.
Ignatov sits and listens to his own breathing. Then he stands up with a start (his ribs burn his torso) and hops on one foot to where the crutch flew – there it is, lying by the wall. He bends and picks it up. The crutch smells strongly of pine pitch and it’s sturdy so it didn’t break into smithereens. The hand grips are wound with rags for softness, and there’s a heel from someone’s boot nailed to the bottom so it won’t thud too much. It was made sensibly, to last. (Thank you for that, at least.) Ignatov inserts the crutch under his arm and hobbles toward the door. There’s a sound of shuffling feet behind him. The sleepy doctor, rubbing his eyes, has come out of the living quarters because of the noise.
“Where are you going?” he clucks behind Ignatov. “You have a traumatic brain injury! And what about the stitches? The broken bones? Your foot!”
Ignatov thumps the crutch at the infirmary door, which swings open with a crash, and walks out into the night.
The commandant lives in his own home from that day on. Leibe comes up once a day to examine him and Zuleikha changes his bandages in the evenings.
She arrives and, gazing at the floor, goes to place the basin of hot water on the table, setting it alongside rolls of bandages she laundered and thoroughly boiled the day before. Ignatov is already sitting up in bed, watching. Has he been waiting?