bandaged can walk. But they’re an insignificant number. How am I to transport the badly wounded? And the medications, and the cots, the equipment?”
“Squeeze yourself in somehow. We’ve got to adjust to circumstances. Now about something else. There’s a general request to you from everybody. We have a seasoned, tried comrade here, devoted to the cause and an excellent fighter. Something’s gone wrong with him.”
“Palykh? Lajos told me.”
“Yes. Go and see him. Look into it.”
“Something mental?”
“I suppose so. Some sort of fleetlings, as he puts it. Apparently hallucinations. Insomnia. Headaches.”
“Very well. I’ll go at once. I have some free time now. When does the meeting begin?”
“I think they’re already gathering. But why you? You see, I’m not going. They’ll do without us.”
“Then I’ll go to Pamphil. Though I’m so sleepy I’m ready to drop. Liberius Averkievich likes to philosophize at night; he’s worn me out with talking. How do I get to Pamphil? Where is he quartered?”
“You know the young birch grove behind the filled-in pit? Birch saplings.”
“I’ll find it.”
“There are some commanders’ tents in a clearing. We assigned one to Pamphil. In expectation of his family. His wife and children are coming to him in the train. So he’s in one of the commanders’ tents. With the rights of a battalion commander. For his revolutionary merits.”
8
On the way to Pamphil the doctor felt that he could not go any further. He was overcome by fatigue. He could not fight off his sleepiness, the result of a lack of sleep accumulated over several nights. He could go back for a nap in the dugout. But Yuri Andreevich was afraid to go there. Liberius could come at any moment and disturb him.
He lay down in one of the not overgrown places in the forest, all strewn with golden leaves that had fallen onto the clearing from the surrounding trees. The leaves lay crosshatched like a checkerboard in the clearing. The sun’s rays fell in the same way onto their golden carpet. This double, crisscrossed motleyness rippled in one’s eyes. It lulled one to sleep, like reading small print or murmuring something monotonous.
The doctor lay on the silkily rustling leaves, putting his hand under his head on the moss that covered the gnarled roots of a tree like a pillow. He dozed off instantly. The motley sun spots that put him to sleep covered his body stretched out on the ground with a checkered pattern and made him undiscoverable, indistinguishable in the kaleidoscope of rays and leaves, as if he had put on the cap of invisibility.
Very soon the overintensity of his wish and need to sleep woke him up. Direct causes work only within commensurate limits. Deviations from the measure produce the opposite effect. Finding no rest, his wakeful consciousness worked feverishly in idle. Fragments of thoughts raced and whirled in circles, almost knocking like a broken machine. This inner turmoil tormented and angered the doctor. “That scoundrel Liberius,” he thought indignantly. “It’s not enough for him that there are hundreds of reasons now for a man to go off his head. By his captivity, by his friendship and idiotic babble, he needlessly turns a healthy man into a neurasthenic. Someday I’ll kill him.”
A colorful folding and opening little scrap, a brown speckled butterfly, flew by on the sunny side. The doctor followed its flight with sleepy eyes. It alighted on what most resembled its coloring, the brown speckled bark of a pine tree, with which it merged quite indistinguishably. The butterfly imperceptibly effaced itself on it, just as Yuri Andreevich was lost without trace to an outsider’s eye under the net of sunlight and shadow playing over him.
The usual round of thoughts came over Yuri Andreevich. It was indirectly touched upon in many medical works. About will and expediency as the result of improving adaptation. About imitative and protective coloring. About the survival of the fittest, and that the path laid down by natural selection is perhaps also the path of the formation and birth of consciousness. What is a subject? What is an object? How give a definition of their identity? In the doctor’s reflections, Darwin met with Schelling,6 and the passing butterfly with modern painting, with impressionist art. He thought of creation, the creature, creativity, and mimicry.
And he fell back to sleep, and after a minute woke up again. He was awakened by soft, muffled talk not far away. The few words that reached him were enough for Yuri Andreevich to understand that something secret and illegal was being arranged. The conspirators obviously did not notice him, did not suspect his proximity. If he were to stir now and betray his presence, it would cost him his life. Yuri Andreevich kept quiet, froze, and began to listen.
Some of the voices he knew. These were the scum, the riffraff of the partisans, the hangers-on, the boys Sanka Pafnutkin, Goshka Ryabykh, Koska Nekhvalenykh, and Terenty Galuzin, who sided with them—the ringleaders of all nastiness and outrage. With them was also Zakhar Gorazdykh, a still shadier type, involved with the moonshine case, but temporarily left out of it for having betrayed the chief culprits. Yuri Andreevich was surprised by the presence of a partisan from the “silver company,” Sivobluy, who was one of the commander’s personal guards. By a tradition stemming from Razin and Pugachev,7 this retainer, owing to the trust Liberius put in him, was known as “the ataman’s ear.” So he, too, was in the conspiracy.
The conspirators were making arrangements with men sent from the enemy’s advance patrols. The parleyers could not be heard at all, they discussed things so softly with the traitors, and only by the pauses in the whispering of the accomplices could Yuri Andreevich guess that the enemy representatives were speaking.
The drunkard Zakhar Gorazdykh talked most of all, in a hoarse, rasping voice, using foul language all the time. He was probably the main instigator.
“Now listen, you guys. Above all it’s got to be on the quiet, in secret. If anybody drops out and rats, see this knife? With this knife here I’ll spill his guts. Understand? Now for us it’s not here, not there, whichever way we turn it’s the high oak tree. We’ve got to earn our pardon. We’ve got to pull a stunt like the whole world never saw, out of the old rut. They want him alive, tied up. We hear their chief, Gulevoy, is coming to this forest.” (They told him the right way to say it; he did not quite hear and corrected it to “General Galeev.”) “There won’t be no more chances like this. Here are their delegates. They’ll tell you everything. They say he’s got to be delivered tied up and alive, without fail. Ask the comrades yourselves. Speak up, you guys. Tell ’em something, brothers.”
The strangers, the ones sent, began to speak. Yuri Andreevich could not catch a single word. By the length of the general silence, the thoroughness of what was being said could be imagined. Again Gorazdykh spoke:
“You hear, brothers? Now you can see for yourselves what a little treasure, what a sweet little potion we’ve run into. Do we have to pay for it with our lives? Is he a human being? He’s a freak, a holy fool, a sort of runt, or a hermit. I’ll teach you to guffaw, Tereshka! What are you baring your teeth for, you sin of Sodom? It’s not for your
