me, and the Germans on the embankment had fired a burst at her from
a submachine-gun. I said some kind words to her to buck her up, as
though she were not dead, hopelessly dead, with those eyebrows drawn
together in an expression of pain.
Then I forgot her. I hobbled along, babbling, and I didn't at all like the
way I was babbling. This was delirium, it had crept upon me unawares
and I did not even try to fight it because I needed every ounce of
strength to fight an irresistible desire to fling away my crutches, which
had blistered my armpits, and to lie down on the ground, where I would
find peace and happiness.
I must have stopped seeing anything around me long before I lost
consciousness, otherwise where could that fine pale-green head of
cabbage have come from alongside my own head? I was lying in a
vegetable garden gazing rapturously at the cabbage. Everything would
have been fine if not for that scarecrow in the tattered black hat which
wheeled slowly above me. The crow sitting on its shoulder circled with
it, and I thought that but for that bird with the flat blinking eye
everything in the world would be fine. I shouted at it, but my voice was
so hoarse and feeble, that it just looked at me and stirred its wings, as
though shrugging its shoulders.
Yes, everything would have been fine, if only I could stop the world
from making those slow circles round me. I would then perhaps have
been able to make out that unpainted log-built cottage at the top of the
garden, with the porch, and that tall well-sweep in the yard. One of the
windows kept darkening now and again. Somebody I couldn't see was
walking about the house, looking anxiously out of the window.
I got to my feet. The doorstep was about forty paces from me-a trifle
compared with the distance I had covered the previous day. But those
forty steps cost me dear. I dropped exhausted on the porch amid a
clatter of my crutches.
The door opened slightly. A boy of about twelve stood on his knee
behind a stool. Lying on the porch, it was some time before I could make
him out in the depths of the darkish room with its low ceiling and large
double-tiered bunks screened off from the rest of the room by cotton
curtains. He was aiming straight at me, one eye screwed up and the butt
pressed to his cheek.
'Look, I need help,' I said, trying to stop the room, which was also
spinning round me in that slow accursed manner. 'I'm a wounded
airman from the hospital train.'
'Kirill, stop!' said the boy with the gun. 'He's one of ours.'
He appeared to become duplicated at that moment. Another boy
exactly like him peeped out from behind the curtains. He had a hunting
knife in his hand. He was still puffing and blinking with excitement.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE BOYS
288
I hardly remember what happened afterwards. The days I spent with
the boys are wreathed, as it were, in clouds of vapour. It was real
vapour, too, coming from a big kettle that boiled from morning till night
on a trivet in the Russian stove. But there was also another, visionary
vapour, which made my breathing rapid and hoarse and left me in a
drenching sweat. Sometimes it would clear a little, and then I would see
myself in bed with a mound of coloured pillows under my leg. The boys
had done that to keep the flow of blood away from the wound. I knew
already that their names were Kirill and Vladimir, that they were the
sons of a pointsman named Ion Leskov and that their father had gone to
the station and told them to lock the door and let nobody in. They were
twins, and though I knew it, I got scared every time I saw them together.
They were so exactly alike that I thought I was being delirious again.
It was as though two selves were struggling within me—one a
cheerful, blithe soul who tried to conjure up vivid memories of all the
good things of life, the other a sombre and resentful person harbouring
a grievance and brooding over his humiliation.
At times I saw a tall bearded man, so still with cold that he could not
even shut the door behind him, coming into the cottage where my sister
and I were living. It wasn't Doctor Ivan Ivanovich though. It was myself.
I dropped exhausted on the porch steps, the door was flung open, boys
aimed a gun at me, then said: 'He's one of ours.'
And I kept thinking that the reason they were so kind to me was
because once, many years ago, my sister and I-lonely, neglected children
in a remote, snowbound village-had helped the doctor.
At other times I saw myself with teeth bared in hatred, gun in hand,
crouching under a railway carriage. People lay all round me in queer
attitudes, with arms flung out. What had I done, what sin of omission
was I guilty of? What important thing, the most important thing in life,
had I overlooked? How had it happened that these men had come to us
and dared to shoot down wounded men, as though there were no justice
in this world, no honour, none of the things I had been taught at school,
and learned to respect and love ever since a child?
I tried to answer this question, but I couldn't, because I was fighting
for breath, and the boys looked at me anxiously and kept saying that if
their father came he would know what to do to make me feel better.
The father did come. There could be no doubt it was he—the same
ungainly figure as the boys, the same sombre face and shining blue eyes.
They were shining at the moment when, with arms hanging down his
sides and back bent, he stopped beside my bed.
'The German detachment has been routed,' he said. 'We surrounded
them at Shchelya Novaya and mopped them all up to a man.'
Then he gazed at me silently with a frown, and I thought that I must
be in a bad way indeed if people looked at me with such kindly eyes,
asked me my full name and rank, and pinned the slip of paper with
these details to the wall so as not to lose it. There was no harm in that,
though; let him do it; I didn't have to look at that paper. I took the
man's hand and started earnestly to tell him what a reception his boys
had given me. I may have been spinning it out too long, repeating
myself and getting confused, because he put something cold on my
