by Oleg Pavlov
‘Arman, may your mother croak, may your father croak … May your children croak … ’ And then the Tajik resigned himself to what this man had done to him, to the pain he had caused him, and wiped the tears off his face.
That evening Pomogalov’s platoon went off to the zone, but the political officer kept the sergeant-major in the company headquarters and appointed himself officer of the guard in his place. Every time Arman went out on guard duty was special and this time there were two new soldiers on duty. Nobody was pleased. Matiushin was given an automatic in the weapons room and he lined up with everybody else on the parade ground, but the news that they were going on duty with Arman made him feel coerced and guilty. The guardhouse was like a beehive. Even inside it everything seemed as though it was waxed and had the sweetish smell of some kind of myrrh.
Before the squad left for the zone Arman ordered everyone to be searched, as if they weren’t marching off to guard convicts but were convicts themselves. It wasn’t clear to Matiushin why they were frisked, after all they left the guardhouse just as they had been, except that now they were armed. He was put on ‘number three’, the third tower on the circle of the camp – a quiet, swampy spot, where there was a little factory. However, apart from the factory’s swollen wall, Matiushin didn’t see anything. The zone was boxed in by walls and couldn’t be seen even from the tower. During the second shift when it was already night, the black swamp around the little factory greeted Matiushin with blank silence. He could see the fences by the lights, but all he could hear was the rustling whisper of the air. Because his hearing wasn’t very good, he fancied there was something alive behind every shadow. And then he started imagining sounds as well – rushing movements in the night, knocking and footsteps.
After a while, although he didn’t hear any steps, Matiushin saw two shadows on the squad path, already close to the tower, but after a moment he made out a peaked cap and realised that one of these men was Arman. Arman climbed up onto the tower in silence and made him explain why they hadn’t been hailed as they approached, peering at him angrily, not believing that Matiushin had seen them and simply forgotten to shout. Matiushin served out his watch more dead than alive and went back to the guardhouse, tormented now by his deafness and afraid to tell anyone about it. But after that night he found himself in the guard officer’s room, and Arman, continuing his night-time interrogation in the morning, wouldn’t let him out. Matiushin was so tired and short of sleep that he could barely stay on his feet, so he told the truth without even thinking about it: that his deafness was to blame. The young political officer listened but, for some reason, he grimaced fastidiously, interrupted Matiushin mid-word and ordered him to leave.
After suffering through the full twenty-four hours of the watch with agonised endurance, Matiushin had come to terms with the previous night and regretted now that he had complained about his disability. As for Arman, whether he had forgotten about that twenty-four hours or not, the only sign he gave afterwards was to cast an occasional sidelong glance at Matiushin – and it seemed as if what was said in the guard officer’s room was already a thing of the past.
The zone was painfully casting off its old skin and renewing itself. Major repairs were under way: stretches of the old wire-mesh fences were knocked down, together with their posts. Replacement wire was shipped in and lay about in tight steel rolls. Iron piles with hooks were being set up to replace the wooden pillars. After tearing the wooden beams off the old wire-mesh fences like bones out of a fish, the men started rolling them up, as if they were rolling large wire snowballs. They rolled up a path of wire three metres wide, and soon the prickly, rusty snowball was taller than a man. When they simply couldn’t push it any more, they cut the ends of the wire and started all over again.
The convicts had to finish the welding work on the fortifications, and Matiushin had just been taken off the tower, he was free, so Pomogalov took him along. Pomogalov urged the convicts on, making them work, and Matiushin sat at the side with his automatic, keeping an eye on things. The sergeant-major sweated harder than the workers did and in the end he was genuinely delighted that they managed to get things done in time. The convicts had a foreman who hardly did any work but they all obeyed him – he lay there in the shadow under a tower, wrapped in a monkey jacket as if he were sick, and talked to the team. He asked the sergeant-major’s permission to prepare chifir, narcotically strong tea, for the team before they went back into the zone. Pomogalov gave permission and sat down with them when they started lighting a little fire with the splinters of wood that were lying around everywhere. Matiushin sat about five steps from the fire, amazed at how familiarly the sergeant-major spoke and even laughed with the convicts, and they soon got high when they started passing the sooty tin can round the circle.
Serving in a camp had an enticing freedom to it. Life there was solitary and calm. After he started standing guard on a tower, Matiushin had unexpectedly grown unaccustomed to people, because the men were on guard duty for twenty-four hours and slept like wolves, each on his own, and came back to a barracks that was already empty, where even against their will they lived like wolves again – sleeping for the night, eating, sleeping again, and then going away again, leaving this lair to the others, whom they had seen for only ten minutes in the little guardhouse yard, during the changing of the guard, when they handed over the zone’s protection. Everyone kept secrets from everyone else, everyone skulked and hid. Those who had stood their watch kept their mouths tight shut and clammed up at the slightest thing. These secrets made the guardhouse seem dark and impenetrable, but the darkness in its blank, windowless rooms was permanent in any case.
Matiushin was now familiar with the entire area around the camp, but the camp itself was quite impossible to take in at a glance. From the tower all he saw was the wasteland of the perimeter security zone and the wall of the tiny factory, the work zone. A dump of scrap metal from the little factory had been set up on waste ground very close to the security zone. Some time ago he had spotted from his tower an abandoned iron barrel that always stood in exactly the same place; at night he imagined that someone was hiding inside it. During his shift two convicts were wandering about beside the barrel when suddenly a flame erupted from it and black smoke came billowing out. That was what brought Matiushin to his senses – the sight of the smoke and the fire, and the convicts standing by the barrel. They stood there watching while the barrel smoked. Matiushin picked up the incredibly heavy receiver of the guard-post phone and reported everything to the guardhouse. After a while a warden in uniform ran out of the open gates of the production area. He dashed over to the convicts and Matiushin saw him start talking to them. But suddenly his arm straightened out abruptly at the elbow and the convict he had hit tumbled to the ground. The warder started walking round him and battering him with his boots. The other convict kept out of things and watched all this indifferently. When the warder left, the beaten convict got up. He stood still for a while, and Matiushin fancied that as the convict stood there he was looking from the distance at Matiushin, the man who had seen all this from his tower. Then the convict started shuffling about, lazily scraping sand together at his feet, walking over to the barrel and throwing it in a handful at a time. Putting the flame out. When he had extinguished it, he trudged off into the production area and didn’t come back again.
In the early days of August the company’s pay came in. It was issued in the orderly room, and the platoon went on guard duty in the zone, carrying their pay with them as dead weight. They persuaded Pomogalov at least to let one man go to the village shop to buy sweets, and some cigarettes too, otherwise they would have to wait another twenty-four hours. Matiushin was dying for a smoke as soon as possible, so he volunteered to be the errand boy.
It was only two hundred metres from the zone to the shop, he only had to cross the road. Stepping inside the shop, he immediately caught the smell of sausage, but at the sight of it, languishing on the counter, he stopped dead in surprise. The
people in the queue were instantly filled with sudden sympathy for the soldier and started letting him push through so he could choose what he wanted. The serving woman waited hospitably. He held out the group’s money and told her he wanted a kilo of sweets and some cigarettes, but he kept looking at the sausage, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from it, with its glossy, greasy, natural beauty. In that moment he allowed himself to think that he could take at least a little piece. The serving woman gave him what he asked for and waited to see what else he would say; she saw him staring at the sausage. The people started egging him on.
‘It’s good, soldier boy, good sausage, from Tselinograd!’
And the serving woman advised him:
‘Go on, take some, love, enjoy it!’
Now he couldn’t leave without the sausage. For some reason he felt ashamed to seem petty in front of the people; he got completely carried away and asked for a kilogram. But while the serving woman was weighing it, he saw white bread and milk and, together with the sausage, they gave him such a deep, peaceful feeling that he shelled out for them without even a second thought.
Matiushin walked out of the shop in a hungry dream, loaded up with food, but despaired when he realised that he had to take the sausage back with him to the guardhouse, from where he had been sent on his run to the shop. He glanced around and started walking stealthily through the village, searching with his eyes for a spot where he could hide for a moment, but he walked right through to the end and found himself among the vegetable plots, already in the steppe. Then he saw a little trench or crater in the ground and hid on the dry earth at the bottom of it, already anxious, as if he was being chased. After the first few minutes, the most gluttonous, he gagged as he was gulping down bread. He didn’t finish the bread, abandoning it in the pit, but he poured the milk down his throat anyway, then climbed out and set off, staggering, afraid of what he’d done, to wander back through the dead village to the guardhouse, clutching the group’s bag of sweets and feeling sick. He couldn’t see his own bluish-grey, poisoned face, but in the guardhouse, where they were already wondering where he’d got to, Pomogalov started fussing over him, so Matiushin lied and said he had started feeling unwell at the shop. But then Pomogalov latched on to this and took it into his head to cure him with potassium permanganate, diluting some in a whole carafe of water and telling him:
‘There’s no better cure, and puking’s good for you anyway, it revitalises the organism. They say yogis live to be a hundred years old, and why? They eat a little speck of something and then politely squeeze it back out of themselves, like pussycats. This permanganate brings instant relief. Well, you blockhead, what are you gawping at? Drink it, I tell you.’
Matiushin poured a glass of it down his throat, but Pomogalov was only surprised and offended at that. He said Matiushin should drink more, half a carafe. The Chinese was hanging around in the watch officer’s room, waiting to take something to the company headquarters, and the sergeant-major roped him in to take the sick man to the privy.
‘Two fingers down your throat and start fighting for your life!’ Pomogalov shouted cheerfully. ‘Watch out he doesn’t drop his head in there!’
The Chinese helped Matiushin patiently, propping him up with his shoulder and not letting him fall. Although he didn’t want to get soiled, he overcame his reluctance and stayed to help to the end. However, he was startled and froze when the sick man threw up the white bread and sausage that he had gulped down. When he was done retching, Matiushin lifted up his soaking-wet face and sighed; the Chinese was standing silently one step away from him, just waiting to lead him out. But Matiushin was prepared to die rather than go back out again, realising from the severe way the titchy sergeant was looking at him that he had signed his own death sentence as far as all the soldiers were concerned. He twitched and burped up milky mush, like a little baby, but then grunted dully and reached into his pocket, pulling all the money out of it in his fist and opening his trembling hand with the dirty copper kopecks in it, so that the Chinese could see. The sergeant, realising what Matiushin was doing, silently took the money and counted it, but surprisingly enough, he seemed satisfied and tipped it into his pocket. He stood there, watching with fresh surprise and suddenly gave Matiushin a painful pinch before he felt able to leave.
Left alone in the latrine room, Matiushin dragged himself over to the sink, stuck his head under the icy water that snorted out of the nostril of the tap and gradually started coming back to life. He got a wash, slicked his hair back and set off, feeling slightly timid, to the guard room. Pomogalov was pleased with his fresh appearance and carried on doggedly singing the praises of potassium permanganate. Nothing in the guardhouse had changed in the meantime.
At night, when there was no one else awake in the guardhouse, Matiushin got hold of a pencil and a scrap of paper and scribbled a note to Yelsk. The scrap was big enough for him to report that he was alive and well and to beg to be sent ten roubles that he needed urgently in order to survive. The tears trembled in his eyes at the thought that his father and mother would hold this scrap of paper in their hands. It was as if his mother’s calloused hands were holding the paper, not his own, and he simply couldn’t make himself let go. The days were transformed into waiting. A letter arrived from home. The envelope was glued tightly shut, so he had to tear it patiently, but there wasn’t even a single rouble inside it. Only a sheet of paper covered with his mother’s lopsided, skimpy handwriting. And in everything that Alexandra Yakovlevna wrote to her son there wasn’t a single word about the money that he had asked to be sent so urgently. His mother told him what she had done since that morning, as if it was all she had in her head; she wrote that she and his father were glad that he was alive and well; that in the army at least he should stop damaging his heath by smoking; and at the end there was this: ‘Write to us, Vasenka. We wish you health, happiness and success in your work and studies.’
At night in the guardhouse, lying on his bunk surrounded by sleeping soldiers, Matiushin wept desolately, as if in the darkness he could see his father’s miserly face and hear the cajoling, greedy voice his father had acquired after Yakov’s death. You can’t spare me ten roubles, but you didn’t mind losing your children, damn you and curse you! After he had cursed his father, he felt calmer, his eyes closed of their own accord and he fell asleep, and then, in the middle of the night, he was shaken awake to go up on the tower.
It was a clear night. The lights of the zone, like fireflies, and the bright stars scattered across the sky were as clearly visible as two close banks of a river, and the night air flowed between them in a living, deep current, forming a bright pool in the boundless steppe. In his heart Matiushin wandered desolately along that river until dawn. No longer grief-stricken, he drifted into the great, hazy dollops of mist. This early morning mist had an intoxicating scent of tobacco or, more likely, of the steppe and its grasses. Matiushin had been pining without anything to smoke for several days now; in the company cadging smokes or scouring around for fag ends was only for the abject losers, who always had every last kopeck of their pay taken away from them and were forced to lackey for handouts – Rebrov was already lackeying like that in the barracks and the guardhouse. Matiushin breathed the mist greedily, but there was no way he could imagine getting hold of any cigarettes. When it grew light the first local train, the very earliest, howled to announce the start of the station’s day. A man set off, walking along the road from the village. After the night Matiushin was glad to see this man from his tower, but suddenly he noticed that the man was puffing out smoke; he was walking along and smoking. Just then the man drew level with the tower and in his solitude he looked up at the soldier who happened to be close by and waved his hand in greeting. If he hadn’t waved, Matiushin wouldn’t have done what then simply happened of its own accord, one word following another, when he called the man and the man stopped guiltily in the road.
‘Got any smokes? Let me have one, do me a favour!’
‘How can I?
’ said the little man, turning his face up, but he was willing to do the favour and hovered beside the fence.
The little man was standing so close that Matiushin didn’t have the strength to let him go, and the man wanted to help anyway; Matiushin called to him.
‘Come a bit closer at least, there’s a gap just down there.’
The nearest towers were about two hundred metres away. Figuring out warily how to avoid being spotted, Matiushin convinced himself that no one would see anything. The little man had a very simple appearance, like a worker – probably a railway linesman, and no officer or screw could be walking to the station at this time. It only needed a minute. Matiushin flew down onto the path. The little man, himself anxious, fearfully thrust a cigarette through the gap, and since Matiushin didn’t have any matches of his own, he hastily lit up from the man’s lighted stub. Then they flew apart, an identical sense of relief in their hearts.
Matiushin’s blissful, light feeling as he puffed on the cigarette clutched in his fist, fresh and hot, and watched the little man disappearing into the distance along the weightless morning road, didn’t last for long: he heard a vague noise from the direction of the guardhouse and soon a squad of soldiers, running at top speed, was cast up onto the path as if from the bottom of the sea. First he saw a radio and the crescent shape of an antenna behind one soldier’s back, then he saw Pomogalov’s peaked cap and turned cold, thinking that there was an attack or a breakout somewhere on the perimeter of the camp.