THE FOREST ARMY
1
It was the second year since Yuri Andreevich fell captive to the partisans. The limits of this bondage were very vague. The place of Yuri Andreevich’s imprisonment was not fenced in. He was not guarded, not watched over. The partisan troops were on the move all the time. Yuri Andreevich made the marches with them. The troops did not separate themselves, did not shut themselves off from the rest of the people, through whose settlements and regions they moved. They mixed with them, dissolved in them.
It seemed that this dependence, this captivity, did not exist, that the doctor was free and simply did not know how to take advantage of it. The doctor’s dependence, his captivity, in no way differed from other forms of constraint in life, equally invisible and intangible, which also seem like something nonexistent, a chimera and a fiction. Despite the absence of fetters, chains, and guards, the doctor was forced to submit to his unfreedom, which looked imaginary.
His three attempts to escape from the partisans ended in capture. They let him off for nothing, but it was playing with fire. He did not repeat them any more.
The partisan chief Liberius Mikulitsyn was indulgent towards him, had him sleep in his tent, liked his company. Yuri Andreevich was burdened by this imposed closeness.
2
This was the period of the almost continuous withdrawal of the partisans towards the east. At times this displacement was part of the general offensive plan for driving Kolchak out of western Siberia. At times, when the Whites turned the partisans’ rear in an attempt to surround them, movement in the same direction was converted into a retreat. For a long time the doctor could not comprehend these subtleties.
The little towns and villages along the highway, most often parallel to which, but sometimes along which, the partisans made this withdrawal, varied between White and Red, depending on changing military fortunes. It was rarely possible to determine by their outward appearance who was in power in them.
In moments when the peasant militia passed through these small towns and villages, the main thing in them became precisely this army filing through them. The houses on both sides of the road seemed to be absorbed and drawn down into the ground, and the horsemen, horses, guns sloshing through the mud, and the tall, jostling riflemen with rolled-up greatcoats seemed to grow higher on the road than the houses.
Once, in one of these small towns, the doctor took over a supply of British medications abandoned during the retreat by officers of Kappel’s formation1 and seized as war booty.
It was a dark, rainy, two-colored day. All that was lit up seemed white, all that was not lit up—black. And in his soul there was the same gloom of simplification, without the softening of transitions and halftones.
The road, utterly destroyed by frequent troop movements, was a stream of black muck that could not be crossed everywhere on foot. The street could be crossed in a few places, very far from each other, to reach which one had to make big detours on both sides. It was in such conditions that the doctor met, in Pazhinsk, his onetime fellow traveler on the train, Pelageya Tyagunova.
She recognized him first. He could not at once determine who this woman with the familiar face was, who was casting ambiguous glances at him from across the road, as from one bank of a canal to the other, now fully resolved to greet him, if he recognized her, now showing a readiness to retreat.
After a moment he remembered everything. Together with images of the overcrowded freight car, the multitudes being driven to forced labor, their convoy, and the woman passenger with braids thrown over her breast, he saw his own people in the center of the picture. The details of the family trip of two years ago vividly crowded around him. The dear faces, for which he felt a mortal longing, stood before him as if alive.
With a nod of the head he gave a sign that Tyagunova should go a little further up the street, to a place where it could be crossed on stones sticking up from the mud, went to the place himself, crossed over to Tyagunova, and greeted her.
She told him many things. Reminding him of the handsome, unspoiled boy Vasya, illegally taken into the party of forced laborers, who had ridden in the same car with them, Tyagunova described for the doctor her life in the village of Veretenniki with Vasya’s mother. Things were very good for her with them. But the village flung it in her face that she was a stranger, an outsider in the Veretenniki community. She was reproached for her supposed intimacy with Vasya, which they invented. She had to leave, so as not to be pecked to death. She settled in the town of Krestovozdvizhensk with her sister, Olga Galuzina. Rumors that Pritulyev had been seen in Pazhinsk lured her there. The information proved false, but she got stuck living there, having found a job.
Meanwhile misfortunes befell people who were dear to her heart. From Veretenniki came news that the village had been subjected to a punitive expedition for disobeying the law on food requisitioning.2 Apparently the Brykins’ house had burned down and someone from Vasya’s family had perished. In Krestovozdvizhensk the Galuzins’ house and property had been confiscated. Her brother-in-law had been imprisoned or shot. Her nephew had disappeared without a trace. At first, after the devastation, her sister Olga went poor and hungry, but now she works for her grub with peasant relations in the village of Zvonarsk.
As it happened, Tyagunova worked as a dishwasher in the Pazhinsk pharmacy, the property of which the doctor was about to requisition. The requisition meant ruin for everyone who fed off the pharmacy, including Tyagunova. But it was not in the doctor’s power to cancel it. Tyagunova was present at the handing over of the goods.
Yuri Andreevich’s cart was brought into the backyard of the pharmacy, to the doors of the storeroom. Bundles, bottles sleeved in woven wicker, and boxes were removed from the premises.
Along with the people, the pharmacist’s skinny and mangy nag mournfully watched the loading from its stall. The rainy day was declining. The sky cleared a little. For a moment the sun appeared, squeezed between clouds. It was setting. The dark bronze of its rays sprayed into the yard, sinisterly gilding the pools of liquid dung. The wind did not stir them. The dungy wash was too heavy to move. But the rainwater flooding the roadway rippled under the wind and was tinged with cinnabar.
And the army walked and walked along the edges of the road, stepping or driving around the deepest lakes and potholes. In the seized batch of medicines a whole jar of cocaine turned up, the sniffing of which had lately been the weakness of the partisan chief.
3
The doctor was up to his neck in work among the partisans. In winter typhus, in summer dysentery, and, besides that, the growing influx of wounded on days of fighting in the renewed military activity.
In spite of failures and the predominance of retreats, the ranks of the partisans were constantly replenished by new insurgents from the places the peasant horde passed through and by deserters from the enemy camp. During the year and a half that the doctor had spent with the partisans, their army had grown tenfold. When Liberius
