How many times had we, Zarechye chaps, ignoring the hetman's curse, wandered along the river when it was in flood, our eyes fixed on the muddy bank, hoping to find among the-bits of wood, wet hay, and melting ice, just a small coin to buy elastic for our catapults!...
It was not Yasha's report that worried me. Certainly not! Having thought it over, I had firmly decided that the report did not matter at all. Tiktor could have written anything he liked against me—that I was a supporter of Petlura, that it was me who had planned to blow up Special Detachment Headquarters—and I shouldn't have minded. False accusations can always be exposed sooner or later.
I was not frightened. What depressed me was the sympathetic remarks of my friends, and above all, the strange silence of Nikita Kolomeyets.
'If someone sends in a report against a member of the committee and you are the secretary, you ought to come and tell the chap straight out what he has been accused of. Find out whether it's true or not, but don't pretend to be dumb, don't let a chap torture himself for nothing,' I reasoned as I walked up and down along the cliff. And I felt sure I was right.
Nikita's silence—that was what surprised, worried and offended me.
Yesterday we had been together in the hostel all the evening and he hadn't said a word! Although
Tiktor's report was already lying on his desk.
When he sent me to Kharkov, Nikita had said: 'You go, you're a lad of spirit!'
Didn't that mean he trusted me? Of course, it did!
Now Nikita was silent. Putting people off with vague phrases! 'Human nature at its worst...'
Evening was approaching. A cold wind with a touch of frost in it blew from the river. Again I went up to the little bench on which those familiar letters 'V' and 'G' were carved. The bench stood on a hummock and the wind whistled round me. I don't know why I slipped my hand in my pocket and took out my Zauer. Even when I went off to work at the factory-training school, I took the pistol with me. Nikita often pulled my leg about it.
'What do you want with a gun at work, Vasil?'
'But where can I put it?'
'Leave it in the hostel.'
'That's all right for you, you've got a locker that locks. But mine's always open.'
'Ask the locksmiths, they'll put a lock on it for you.'
'What's the use of a lock? Locks can be broken.'
'Vasil, you're incurable! You've got used to guns. You'd like to be living in the period of War Communism all the time! Vasily Mandzhura can't adapt himself to peace-time conditions!'
I knew that Nikita was joking, but his jokes nettled me a little. Fine peace-time conditions with what was going on all round us!
It was not a year since the Pilsudski men had attacked the Soviet frontier post near Yampol and killed the commander. Quite recently enemies of our republic had murdered the Soviet diplomatic courier Theodor Nette. And the murder of Kotovsky? ... I ought not to be the only one with a gun—all the young workers who lived on the border should be armed and ready for anything. And I went on bringing my pistol to work with me...
I took aim at one of the battlemented towers of the Old Fortress, but it was already rather dark and the sights were blurred.
But what was this mysterious report of Tiktor's? .. .
I shoved the pistol into my pocket and wandered back to the hostel, utterly fed up.
Our hostel was unusually quiet. But, of course—there was a film on at the club. All the chaps would be there. Pity I was late.
There were two lights on in the dormitory, one on the ceiling, the other by Nikita's bed.
Our secretary lived with us. There was a heap of books on his bedside locker. As usual, Nikita had stayed at home. 'I'll have my fun, when I'm old,' he used to say, 'now, while my eyes are all right, it's better to read books.' 'To read books a to exchange hours of boredom for hours of delight.' 'A book is a friend of man that will never betray him,' Nikita often repeated to us the dictums of certain philosophers known only to himself. And he read like a man bewitched—on the way to the hostel, walking blindly along the pavement with an open book before his eyes, at home in the hostel until late at night, and during the lunch-hour, sitting on a rusty boiler in the school yard.
Obviously Nikita had no intention of going out anywhere this evening. He was lying on his bed undressed; his clothes lay neatly folded on a chair beside him.
I walked silently over to my bed and took off my cap.
Nikita looked round and said: 'There's a questionnaire for you under your pillow, Mandzhura. Fill it up and hand it in to me in the morning.'
My heart sank. Now it was starting!
It must be a special, tricky sort of questionnaire.
'What's it about?' I asked in a whisper.
'For your pistol,' Nikita replied, not taking his eyes off the book. 'Special Detachment papers aren't valid any more, we've got to make personal applications for permission to carry fire-arms.'
A page rustled. Nikita felt for the pencil on his locker and marked something, as if to show that the conversation was over.
All right! I'm not going to beg you to talk...
It was very still. The sound of spring streets floated in through the open window. That special sound of spring! Have you noticed that in spring every noise comes to you as if you were hearing it for the first time? A cock crowed in the next yard and it seemed to me I had never heard such a fine, full-throated crow in my life...
In the stillness of the room, I examined the printed questionnaire that I had to fill in for the right to carry la pistol. I was expecting Nikita to say something about Tiktor's report.
'Oh, yes, Vasil, I nearly forgot,' Nikita murmured, looking round. 'There's a parcel for you in your locker. I signed for it.' And again he buried himself in his book.
The square heavy parcel, criss-crossed with packing thread, smelled of bast matting and apples. Across the bottom was written in indelible pencil: 'Sender: Miron Mandzhura, Cherkassy, District State Printing-House.'
Now that he had gone to work in Cherkassy, my father sometimes sent me parcels. Everything they contained was shared round the hostel—an apple for one, a lump of glistening salted pork for another. The other chaps' parcels were shared out in exactly the same way.
There were a lot of tasty things in that parcel. And I was hungry. But I could not open it. If I started treating Nikita now, without waiting for the other chaps to come in, he might think I had heard about the report and was trying to get round him—trying to bribe him with home-made poppy cakes.
And sad though 'it may seem, I had to leave Dad's parcel where it was, in the locker by my bed.
I undressed and lay down to sleep, listening to the rustle of pages as Nikita went on reading his book.
CLEARED!
The committee assembled the following evening in the locksmiths' shop at school. The long room seemed much too large for such a small meeting, specially in the evening, when the school was so quiet.
We seated ourselves on the benches. Tiktor, whistling quietly, sat, or rather lounged on the bench opposite me. There was a triumphant sneer on his face, his blonde locks hung luxuriantly over his big forehead. He felt good.
'Let's start, comrades!' Nikita nodded his head and walked forward between the benches. 'There's not much on the agenda today, so we'll have time to prepare for the tests as well. We have two questions to discuss. The first concerns the conduct of Komsomol member Yasha Tiktor, the second is to investigate Tiktor's report on the conduct of Komsomol member Vasily Mandzhura, who is also a
member of our committee. If anybody's got anything else they want to bring up, we'll 'discuss that as well of course. Are there any objections?'
'I want my report to be discussed first,' Tiktor grunted.
'Why?'
