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.
286
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
out, but it was as though a thousand fiends were tearing my leg to pieces
and lacerating the half-healed wounds on my back with iron scrapers. I
took another step, then a third.
'Well,' I said to the fiends.
I took a fourth step.
The sun stood fairly high in the sky by the time I reached the edge of
the wood, beyond which lay the marsh, intersected by a single strip of
wet, trampled grass. Green tussocks, like beautiful globes, were visible
here and there, and I remembered how they had turned over under the
girls' feet yesterday.
Some men were walking about on the embankment. I wondered who
they were-our own or Germans. Our train was still burning; the flames,
pale in the sunlight, licked the blackened walls of the trucks.
Should I go back to it? What for? The rolling thunder of gunfire
reached me, muffled by distance, coming seemingly from the East. The
nearest station along the line, some twenty kilometres distant, was
Shchelya Novaya. Fighting was going on there, and this meant our
troops were there. I directed my steps that way, if you could call that
agony steps.
The wood came to an end, giving place to bushes of blue-black berries,
the name of which I had forgotten. They looked like bilberries, only
much bigger. A welcome sight, seeing that I had not had anything to eat
since the day before. Something dark and motionless lay in the field
beyond the bushes, probably a dead body, and every time I reached for a
berry, leaning on my crutches, that dark object worried me. After a time
I forgot about it, only to remember it again with a cold shiver. Several
berries dropped into the grass. I lowered myself carefully to look for
them, and a stab went through my heart—it was a woman. I made my
way towards her as fast as I could.
She was lying on her back with outspread arms. It wasn't Katya, it was
the other girl. She had been shot in the face, and her beautiful black
eyebrows were drawn together in a look of suffering.
It was then, I believe, that I first noticed I was talking to myself, and
saying rather odd things at that. I recollected the name of those blue-
black berries that resembled bilberries-whortleberries they were called-
and was overjoyed at the discovery. I began speculating aloud about
287
how this girl had been killed. Probably she had been going back to fetch
