“Well, all right, doctor. I haven’t told you everything. Not the main thing. Well, all right, listen to my prickly truth, don’t begrudge me, I’ll tell it all straight in your face.
“I’ve done in a lot of your kind, there’s a lot of blood on my hands from the masters, the officers, and it’s nothing to me. I don’t remember numbers or names, it’s all flowed by like water. But one little bugger won’t get out of my head, I bumped off one little bugger and can’t forget him. Why did I destroy the lad? He made me laugh, he was killingly funny. I shot him from laughter, stupidly. For no reason.
“It was during the February revolution. Under Kerensky. We were rioting. It happened at the railroad. They sent us a young agitator, to rouse us for the attack with his tongue. So we’d make war to a victorious conclusion. A little cadet comes to pacify us with his tongue. Such a puny fellow. He had this slogan: to a victorious conclusion. He jumped with his slogan onto a firefighting tub that was there at the station. So he jumped up on the tub to call us to battle from higher up, and suddenly the lid gave way under his feet and he fell into the water. A misstep. Oh, how funny! I just rolled with laughter. I thought I’d die. Oh, it was killing. And I had a gun in my hands. And I was laughing my head off, and that was it, no help for it. Same as if he was tickling me. Well, so I aimed and—bang— right on the spot. I don’t understand myself how it came out that way. As if somebody nudged my arm.
“So there’s my fleetlings. By night I seem to see that station. It was funny then, but now I’m sorry.”
“Was it in the town of Meliuzeevo, the Biriuchi station?”
“I forget.”
“Was it a riot with the people of Zybushino?”
“I forget.”
“What front was it? At what front? The western?”
“Something like that. It’s all possible. I forget.”
THE FROSTED ROWAN
1
The families of the partisans had long been following the body of the army in carts, with their children and chattels. At the tail of the refugee train, far behind, countless herds of cattle were driven, mostly cows, some several thousand of them.
Along with the partisans’ wives a new person appeared in the camp, an army wife, Zlydarikha or Kubarikha, a cattle doctor, a veterinarian, and secretly also a sorceress.
She went about in a forage cap cocked to one side and the gray-green greatcoat of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, from the British uniforms supplied to the Supreme Ruler, and assured people that she had had these things made from a prisoner’s hat and smock, and that the Reds had supposedly freed her from the jail in Kezhem, where Kolchak had held her for some unknown reason.
At that time the partisans were halted in a new place. It was assumed that this would be a brief halt, until the area was reconnoitered and a place was found for a long and settled wintering over. But later on circumstances took a different turn and forced the partisans to stay there and spend the winter.
This new halting place was in no way like the recently abandoned Fox Point. It was dense, impassable forest, the taiga. To one side, away from the road and the camp, there was no end to it. During the first days, while the army was setting up a new bivouac and preparing to live in it, Yuri Andreevich had more leisure. He went deep into the forest in several directions with the aim of exploring it and convinced himself that it would be very easy to get lost in it. Two spots caught his attention, and he remembered them from that first round.
At the way out of the camp and the forest, which was now autumnally bare and could be seen through, as if gates had been thrown open into its emptiness, there grew a solitary, beautiful, rusty-red-leafed rowan tree, the only one of all the trees to keep its foliage. It grew on a mound above a low, hummocky bog, and reached right up to the sky, into the dark lead of the prewinter inclemency, the flatly widening corymbs of its hard, brightly glowing berries. Small winter birds, bullfinches and tomtits, with plumage bright as frosty dawns, settled on the rowan tree, slowly and selectively pecked the larger berries, and, thrusting up their little heads and stretching their necks, swallowed them with effort.
Some living intimacy was established between the birds and the tree. As if the rowan saw it all, resisted for a long time, then surrendered, taking pity on the little birds, yielded, unbuttoned herself, and gave them the breast, like a nurse to a baby. “Well, what can I do with you? Go on, eat, eat me. Feed yourselves.” And she smiled.
The other place in the forest was still more remarkable.
It was on a height. This height, like a drumlin, ended on one side in a sheer drop. It seemed that below, under the drop, there should have been something other than what was above—a river, or a ravine, or an abandoned, unmowed meadow overgrown with grass. However, below there was a repetition of the same thing as above, only at a dizzying depth, on another level, where the treetops were low down under one’s feet. This was probably the result of a landslide.
It was as if this severe, cloud-propping, mighty forest had stumbled once, just as it was, and plunged down, and should have fallen through the earth into Tartarus, but at the decisive moment had miraculously kept itself on earth and now, safe and sound, could be seen rustling below.
But this forest height was remarkable not for that, but for another particularity. It was shut in all around its edge by vertical blocks of granite standing on end. They were like the flat-trimmed slabs of prehistoric dolmens. When Yuri Andreevich came to this platform for the first time, he was ready to swear that the place and its stones were not of natural origin at all, but bore the traces of human hands. Here in ancient times there might have been some sort of pagan shrine of unknown idol worshippers, the place of their rituals and sacrifices.
In this place on a cold, gray morning the death sentence was carried out on the eleven men found guilty of the conspiracy and the two moonshining orderlies.
Some twenty men from among the partisans most loyal to the revolution, with a core of special guards from headquarters, brought them here. The convoy closed in on the condemned men in a semicircle and, pointing their rifles, at a quick, close-packed pace, pushed them, drove them into the rocky corner of the platform, from which they had no way out except to leap into the abyss.
The interrogations, the long imprisonment, and the humiliations they had been subjected to had deprived them
