arc of a big curve.
The engine gave several short, barking whistles and someone shouted something. The passengers knew even without the signals: the engineer had stopped the train to take on fuel.
The doors of the freight cars slid open. Out onto the tracks poured the goodly population of a small town, excluding the mobilized men from the front cars, who were always exempt from deckhands’ work and did not take part in it now.
The pile of stove wood in the clearing was not enough to load the tender. In addition they were required to cut up a certain number of the twenty-foot logs.
The engine team had saws in its outfit. They were handed out among volunteers, who broke up into pairs. The professor and his son-in-law also received a saw.
From the open doors of the military freight cars, merry mugs stuck out. Adolescents who had never been under fire, naval cadets from the senior classes, mistakenly intruded into the wagon, as it seemed, among stern workers, family men, who had also never smelled powder and had only just finished military training, deliberately made noise and played the fool with the older sailors, so as not to start thinking. Everyone felt that the hour of trial was at hand.
The jokers accompanied the sawyers, men and women, with loud banter:
“Hey, grandpa! Tell them—I’m a nursling, my mama hasn’t weaned me, I can’t do physical labor. Hey, Mavra, see you don’t saw your skirt off, it’ll be drafty! Hey, girl, don’t go to the forest, better marry me instead!”
26
In the forest there were several sawhorses made from stakes tied crosswise, their ends driven into the ground. One turned out to be free. Yuri Andreevich and Alexander Alexandrovich set themselves to sawing on it.
It was that time of spring when the earth comes out from under the snow looking almost the same as when it went under the snow six months earlier. The forest exuded dampness and was all littered with last year’s leaves, like an untidied room in which people had torn up receipts, letters, and notices for many years of their lives and had had no time to sweep them away.
“Not so fast, you’ll get tired,” the doctor said to Alexander Alexandrovich, making the saw go more slowly and measuredly, and suggested that they rest.
The forest was filled with the hoarse ringing of other saws going back and forth, now all in rhythm, now discordantly. Somewhere far, far away the first nightingale was testing its strength. A blackbird whistled at still longer intervals, as if blowing through a clogged flute. Even the steam from the engine’s piston rose into the sky with a singsong burble, as if it were milk coming to the boil over a spirit lamp in a nursery.
“You wanted to talk about something,” Alexander Alexandrovich reminded the doctor. “You haven’t forgotten? It was like this: we were passing a flooded field, ducks were flying, you fell to thinking and said: ‘I must talk with you.’ ”
“Ah, yes. I don’t know how to put it briefly. You see, we’re going ever deeper … The whole region here is in ferment. We’ll arrive soon. It’s not known what we’ll find at our destination. Just in case, we must come to an agreement. I’m not talking about convictions. It would be absurd to find them out or establish them in a five-minute talk in a spring forest. We know each other well. The three of us—you, I, and Tonya—along with many others in our time, make up a single world, differing from each other only in the degree of our comprehension. I’m not talking about that. That’s an ABC. I’m talking about something else. We must agree beforehand on how to behave under certain circumstances, so as not to blush for each other and not to put the stain of disgrace on each other.”
“Enough. I understand. I like the way you pose the question. You’ve found precisely the necessary words. Here’s what I’ll tell you. Do you remember the night when you brought the leaflet with the first decrees, in winter, during a blizzard? Do you remember how incredibly unconditional it was? That straightforwardness was winning. But these things live in their original purity only in the heads of their creators, and then only on the first day of their proclamation. The very next day the Jesuitism of politics turns them inside out. What can I say to you? This philosophy is alien to me. This power is against us. They didn’t ask me to consent to this breakup. But they trusted me, and my actions, even if I was forced into them, placed me under obligation.
“Tonya asks if we’ll come in time to start a vegetable garden, if we’ll miss the time for planting. What can I answer? I don’t know the local soil. What are the climatic conditions? The summer’s too short. Does anything at all ripen here?
“Yes, but can we be going such a distance to take up gardening? Even the old saying, ‘Why walk a mile for a pint of beer,’ is impossible here, because there are, unfortunately, two or three thousand of those miles. No, frankly speaking, we’re dragging ourselves so far with a totally different purpose. We’re going to try to vegetate in the contemporary way and somehow get in on squandering grandfather’s former forests, machinery, and inventory. Not on restoring his property, but on wasting it, on the socialized blowing of thousands in order to exist on a kopeck, and like everybody else, to be sure, in a contemporary, incomprehensibly chaotic form. Shower me with gold, I still wouldn’t take the factory on the old basis even as a gift. It would be as wild as starting to run around naked or forgetting how to read and write. No, the history of property in Russia is over. And personally, we Gromekos already lost the passion for money grubbing in the previous generation.”
27
It was so hot and stuffy that it was impossible to sleep. The doctor’s head was bathed in sweat on the sweat- soaked pillow.
He carefully got down from the edge of the berth and quietly, so as not to waken anyone, slid the car door aside.
Dampness breathed in his face, sticky, as when your face runs into a spiderweb in a cellar. “Mist,” he guessed. “Mist. The day will probably be sultry, scorching. That’s why it’s so hard to breathe and there’s such an oppressive heaviness on the heart.”
Before getting down on the tracks, the doctor stood for a while in the doorway, listening all around.
The train was standing in some very big station of the junction category. Besides the silence and the mist, the cars were immersed in some sort of nonbeing and neglect, as if they had been forgotten—a sign that the train was standing in the very back of the yard, and that between it and the far-off station building there was a great distance, occupied by an endless network of tracks.
Two sorts of sounds rang out faintly in the distance.
Behind, where they had come from, could be heard a measured slapping, as if laundry were being rinsed or the wind were flapping the wet cloth of a flag against the wood of a flagpole.
