underwear. The cage keeps opening and a paw comes in. The first one it falls on. Out he goes. Same as a chicken to be slaughtered. By God. One gets hanged, another gets a bayonet, another gets interrogated. They beat you to a pulp, sprinkle salt on your wounds, pour boiling water over you. If you puke or shit your pants, they make you eat it. And what they do with little kids, with women—oh, Lord!”
The wretched man was at his last gasp. He did not finish, cried out, and gave up the ghost. Somehow they all understood it at once and began taking their hats off and crossing themselves.
In the evening more news, much more horrible than this, spread through the camp.
Pamphil Palykh had been in the crowd that stood around the dying man. He had seen him, heard his story, read the inscription full of threats on the plank.
His constant fear for the fate of his family in case of his death came over him to an unprecedented degree. In imagination he already saw them handed over to slow torture, saw their faces disfigured by torment, heard their moans and calls for help. To deliver them from future sufferings and shorten his own, in a frenzy of anguish he finished them off himself. He cut down his wife and three children with that same razor-sharp axe with which he had carved wooden toys for the girls and his beloved son, Flenushka.7
It is astonishing that he did not lay hands on himself right after he did it. What was he thinking of? What could lie ahead for him? What prospects, what intentions? He was clearly deranged, an irrevocably finished being.
While Liberius, the doctor, and the members of the military council sat discussing what was to be done with him, he wandered freely about the camp, his head lolling on his chest, looking from under his brows with his dull yellow eyes and seeing nothing. A witless, vagrant smile of inhuman, invincible suffering never left his face.
No one pitied him. Everyone recoiled from him. Voices were raised calling for lynch law against him. They were not seconded.
There was nothing for him to do in the world. At dawn he disappeared from the camp, as an animal maddened by rabies flees from its own self.
9
Winter had long since come. It was freezing cold. Torn-up sounds and forms appeared with no evident connection from the frosty mist, stood, moved, vanished. Not the sun we are accustomed to on earth, but the crimson ball of some other substitute sun hung in the forest. From it, strainedly and slowly, as in a dream or a fairy tale, rays of amber yellow light, thick as honey, spread and on their way congealed in the air and froze to the trees.
Barely touching the ground with rounded soles, and at each step awakening a fierce creaking of the snow, invisible feet in felt boots moved in all directions, while the figures attached to them, in hoods and sheepskin jackets, floated through the air separately, like luminaries circling through the heavenly sphere.
Acquaintances stopped, got into conversation. They brought their faces close to each other, crimson as in a bathhouse, with frozen scrub brushes of beards and mustaches. Billows of dense, viscous steam escaped in clouds from their mouths and in their enormity were incommensurate with the frugal, as if frostbitten, words of their laconic speech.
On a footpath Liberius and the doctor ran into each other.
“Ah, it’s you? Long time no see! I invite you to my dugout this evening. Spend the night. We’ll talk, just like the old days. There’s new information.”
“The messenger’s back? Any news of Varykino?”
“The report doesn’t make a peep about my family or yours. But I draw comforting conclusions precisely from that. It means they saved themselves in time. Otherwise there would have been mention of them. Anyhow, we’ll talk about it when we meet. So I’ll be waiting for you.”
In the dugout the doctor repeated his question:
“Just tell me, what do you know about our families?”
“Again you don’t want to look beyond your nose. Ours are evidently alive, in safety. But they’re not the point. There’s splendid news. Want some meat? Cold veal.”
“No, thanks. Don’t get side-tracked. Stick to business.”
“Big mistake. I’ll have a go at it. There’s scurvy in the camp. People have forgotten what bread and vegetables are. We should have done better at organizing the gathering of nuts and berries in the fall, while the refugee women were here. I was saying, our affairs are in splendid shape. What I’ve always predicted has come true. The ice has broken. Kolchak is retreating on all fronts. It’s a total, spontaneously unfolding defeat. You see? What did I say? And you kept whining.”
“When did I whine?”
“All the time. Especially when we were pressed by Vitsyn.”
The doctor recalled that past fall, the execution of the rebels, Palykh’s murder of his wife and children, the bloody carnage and human slaughter of which no end was in sight. The atrocities of the Whites and the Reds rivaled each other in cruelty, increasing in turns as if multiplied by each other. The blood was nauseating, it rose to your throat and got into your head, your eyes were swollen with it. This was not whining at all, it was something else entirely. But how explain it to Liberius?
There was a smell of fragrant smoke in the dugout. It settled on the palate, tickled the nose and throat. The dugout was lighted by paper-thin splinters set in an iron trivet on a tripod. When one went out, the burnt end fell into a bowl of water underneath, and Liberius set up and lit a new one.
“See what I’m burning. We’re out of oil. The wood’s too dry. The splinter burns up quickly. Yes, there’s scurvy in the camp. You categorically refuse the veal? Scurvy. Where are you looking, doctor? Why don’t you gather the staff, shed light on the situation, give a lecture to the superiors about scurvy and the means of fighting it?”
“Don’t torment me, for God’s sake. Exactly what do you know about our families?”
“I’ve already told you that there’s no exact information about them. But I didn’t finish telling you what I know of the general military news. The civil war is over. Kolchak is utterly crushed. The Red Army is driving him down the railroad line, to the east, to throw him into the sea. Another part of the Red Army is hastening to join us, so that together we can start destroying his many scattered units in the rear. The south of Russia has been cleared. Why aren’t you glad? Isn’t that enough for you?”
