“What’s the story here?”
“He was buying pies and milk from this old woman, stuffed himself full, and pffft! She’s here, howling her head off.”
“It can’t be left like that. He’s got to be caught.”
“Go on, catch him. He’s all belts and cartridges. He’ll do the catching.”
10
In freight car 14 there were several men rounded up for the labor army. They were guarded by the convoy soldier Voroniuk. Three of them stood out for different reasons. They were: Prokhor Kharitonovich Pritulyev, known as “casheteer” in the car, a former cashier in a state wine shop in Petrograd; the sixteen-year-old Vasya Brykin, a boy from a hardware store; and the gray-haired revolutionary cooperator Kostoed-Amursky, who had been in all the forced labor camps of the old times and had opened a new series of them in the new time.
These recruits were all strangers to each other, picked up here and there, and gradually got to know each other during the trip. From their conver-sations it was learned that the cashier Pritulyev and the shopkeeper’s apprentice Vasya Brykin were fellow countrymen, both from Vyatka, and moreover were both born in places that the train was supposed to pass through sometime or other.
The tradesman Pritulyev from Malmyzh was a squat man with a brush cut, pockmarked and ugly. His gray jacket, black from sweat under the armpits, fitted him tightly, like the upper part of a sarafan on the fleshy bust of a woman. He was silent as a block of wood and, brooding about something for hours, picked the warts on his freckled hands until they bled and began to fester.
A year back he had been walking down Nevsky Prospect in the fall and at the corner of Liteiny had happened upon a street roundup. They had asked for his documents. He turned out to be the holder of a ration card of the fourth category, prescribed for nonlaboring elements, with which he had never obtained anything. He had been picked up by that token and, together with many others arrested in the street on the same grounds, had been sent to barracks under guard. The party assembled in that way, on the example of one previously put together, which was now digging trenches at the Arkhangelsk front, was first supposed to be moved to Vologda, but was turned back halfway and sent through Moscow to the eastern front.
Pritulyev had a wife in Luga, where he had been working in the pre-war years, before his job in Petersburg. Having learned of his misfortune by hearsay, his wife rushed to look for him in Vologda, to deliver him from the labor army. But the path of the detachment differed from that of her search. Her efforts came to naught. Everything was confused.
In Petersburg, Pritulyev had cohabited with Pelageya Nilovna Tyagunova. He was stopped at the corner of Nevsky just at the moment when he had taken leave of her and was going another way on business, and in the distance, among the passersby flashing along Liteiny, he could still see her back, which soon disappeared.
This Tyagunova, a full-bodied, stately tradeswoman with beautiful hands and a thick braid, which, with a deep sigh, she kept tossing now over one shoulder, now over the other, onto her breast, accompanied Pritulyev on the troop train of her own free will.
It was not clear what good the women who clung to Pritulyev found in such a block of wood as he. Besides Tyagunova, in another car of the train, several cars closer to the engine, rode another acquaintance of Pritulyev, the towheaded and skinny girl Ogryzkova, to whom Tyagunova gave the abusive titles of “the nostril” and “the syringe,” among other insulting nicknames.
The rivals were at daggers drawn and avoided each other’s eye. Ogryzkova never showed herself in their car. It was a mystery where she managed to see the object of her adoration. Perhaps she was content to contemplate him from afar, at the general loading of wood and coal by the forces of all the passengers.
11
Vasya’s story was something else again. His father had been killed in the war. His mother had sent Vasya from the village to apprentice with his uncle in Petrograd.
That winter the uncle, who owned a hardware store in the Apraksin Arcade, was summoned to the soviet for explanations. He went through the wrong door and, instead of the room indicated on the summons, landed in the one next to it. By chance it was the anteroom of the commission for labor conscription. There were a great many people there, appearing in that section on subpoena. When enough of them had accumulated, Red Army soldiers came, surrounded them, and took them for the night to the Semyonovsky barracks, and in the morning dispatched them to the station, to be put on the train to Vologda.
The news of the detention of so great a number of inhabitants spread through the city. The next day a host of relations came to bid farewell to their dear ones at the station. Among them were Vasya and his aunt, who came to see the uncle off.
At the station the uncle started begging the sentry to let him out for a minute to see his wife. This sentry was Voroniuk, who was now escorting the group in freight car 14. Voroniuk refused to let the uncle out without a sure guarantee that he would come back. The uncle and aunt offered to leave their nephew under guard as such a guarantee. Voroniuk agreed. Vasya was taken inside the fence, the uncle was taken outside. The uncle and aunt never came back.
When the hoax was discovered, Vasya, who had not suspected any fraud, burst into tears. He fell at Voroniuk’s feet and kissed his hands, begging him to let him go, but nothing helped. The convoy guard was implacable, not out of cruelty of character. This was a troubled time, the order was strict. The convoy guard was answerable with his life for the number entrusted to his charge, which was established by roll call. That was how Vasya ended up in the labor army.
The cooperator Kostoed-Amursky, who enjoyed the respect of all the jailers under both the tsar and the present government, and who was always on a personal footing with them, more than once drew the attention of the head of the convoy to Vasya’s intolerable situation. The man acknowledged that it was indeed a blatant error, but that formal difficulties did not allow for touching upon this tangle during the journey, and he hoped to disentangle it once they arrived.
Vasya was a pretty young boy with regular features, like portrayals of the tsar’s bodyguards and God’s angels on popular prints. He was unusually pure and unspoiled. His favorite amusement was to sit on the floor at the feet of the adults, clasping his knees with both arms and throwing his head back, and listen to their talk and stories. The content of it could be reconstructed from the play of the facial muscles with which he held back the tears that were about to flow or fought with the laughter that was choking him. The subject of the conversation was reflected in the impressionable boy’s face as in a mirror.
12
The cooperator Kostoed was sitting up above as a guest of the Zhivagos and sucking with a whistle on the shoulder of hare they had offered him. He feared drafts and chills. “How it blows! Where’s it coming from?” he
