“He sing! He sing!”
Another boat knocks against this boat, a steam-launch passes by. And here is a third boat: in it sits a fat Chinaman, eating rice with chopsticks. The water ripples lazily, white seagulls fly lazily over it.
“Be nice to give that fat one a punch …” thinks Gusev, gazing at the fat Chinaman and yawning.
He dozes off, and it seems to him that the whole of nature is dozing. Time runs fast. The day passes imperceptibly, darkness comes imperceptibly … The ship is no longer standing still, but going on somewhere.
IV
Two days pass. Pavel Ivanych is not sitting now, but lying down; his eyes are closed, his nose seems to have grown sharper.
“Pavel Ivanych!” Gusev calls to him. “Hey, Pavel Ivanych!”
Pavel Ivanych opens his eyes and moves his lips.
“Are you unwell?”
“Not at all …” Pavel Ivanych gasps. “Not at all, on the contrary … I’m better … You see, I can lie down now … It’s eased off…”
“Well, thank God, Pavel Ivanych.”
“When I compare myself with you, I feel sorry for you … wretches. My lungs are good, and this is a stomach cough … I can endure hell, not just the Red Sea! Besides, I take a critical attitude both towards my sickness and towards medications. But you … you’re in the dark … It’s hard for you—very, very hard!”
There is no tossing, it is calm, but on the other hand it is stifling and hot as a steambath; not only talking, but even listening is difficult. Gusev has put his arms around his knees, laid his head on them, and is thinking of his homeland. My God, in such stifling heat what a delight it is to think of snow and cold! You are riding in a sleigh; suddenly the horses get frightened by something and bolt … Heedless of roads, ditches, ravines, they race madly through the whole village, across the pond, past the factory, then over the fields … “Stop them!” factory workers and passersby shout at the top of their lungs. “Stop them!” But why stop them? Let the sharp, cold wind lash your face and nip at your hands, let the lumps of snow flung up by the horses’ hooves fall on your hat, on your neck behind the collar, on your chest, let the runners squeal and the harness and swingletree snap, devil take it all! And what a delight when the sleigh turns over and you go flying headlong into a snowdrift, your face right in the snow, and then you get up all white, icicles on your mustache; no hat, no mittens, your belt undone … People laugh, dogs bark …
Pavel Ivanych half opens one eye, looks at Gusev with it, and asks softly:
“Gusev, did your commander steal?”
“Who knows, Pavel Ivanych! We don’t know, it doesn’t get to us.”
And then a long time passes in silence. Gusev thinks, mutters, sips water every so often; it is hard for him to speak, hard for him to listen, and he is afraid someone may start talking to him. An hour passes, another, a third; evening comes, then night, but he does not notice it and goes on sitting and thinking about frost.
He seems to hear somebody come into the sick bay, there are voices, but another five minutes pass and everything quiets down.
“The Kingdom of Heaven and eternal rest to him,” says the soldier with his arm in a sling. “He was a restless man!”
“What?” asks Gusev. “Who’s that?”
“He died. They just took him topside.”
“Well, so there,” Gusev mutters, yawning. “God rest his soul.”
“What do you think, Gusev?” the soldier with the sling asks after some silence. “Will God rest his soul or not?”
“Who do you mean?”
“Pavel Ivanych.”
“He will … he suffered long. And another thing, he was from the clerical estate, and priests have big families. They’ll pray for him.”
The soldier with the sling sits down on Gusev’s cot and says in a low voice:
“And you, Gusev, you’re not long for this world. You won’t make it to Russia.”
“Was it the doctor or his assistant that told you?” asks Gusev.
“It’s not that anyone says it, but you can see … You can see at once when a man’s going to die soon. You don’t eat, you don’t drink, you’ve grown so thin it’s frightening to look at you. Consumption, in short. I say it not to alarm you, but in case you may want to take communion and be anointed.3 And if you have any money, you should place it with a senior officer.”
“I haven’t written home …” sighs Gusev. “I’ll die and they won’t know.”
“They’ll know,” the sick sailor says in a bass voice. “When you die, they’ll record it in the ship’s log, in Odessa they’ll give an extract to the military commander, and he’ll send it to the local office or wherever …”
Gusev feels eerie after such a conversation and begins to suffer from some sort of yearning. He drinks water— it’s not that; he leans to the round window and breathes the hot, humid air—it’s not that; he tries thinking about his homeland, about the frost—it’s not that … In the end it seems to him that if he spends another minute in the sick bay, he will surely suffocate.
“It’s bad, brothers …” he says. “I’m going topside. Take me topside, for Christ’s sake!”
“All right,” the soldier with the sling consents. “You won’t make it, I’ll carry you. Hold on to my neck.”
Gusev puts his arm around the soldier’s neck, the soldier grasps him with his good arm and carries him topside.
