Two Captains (57 page)

He was not looking at me. Then he stole a glance at me out of the tail of his eye, and I understood at once why I was lying so uncomfortably. He had pulled the knapsack with the rusks from under my head. What's more, he had taken my flask containing vodka and my pistol.

The blood rushed to my face. He had taken my pistol!

"Give me back my gun this minute, you fathead!" I said calmly.

He did not answer.

"D'youhear!"

"You'll die all the same," he said hastily. "You don't need a gun."

"Whether I'm going to die or not is my own business. You give me back my gun if you don't want to face a court martial. Get me?"

His breath was coming quick and short.

"Court martial!" he sneered. "We're alone and no one will know anything. As a matter of fact you've long been dead. Nobody knows that you're still alive."

He was staring me straight in the face now, and his eyes looked very queer-sort of solemn and wide-open. I wondered whether he had gone mad.

"I tell you what," I said calmly, "take a swig out of that flask and pull yourself together. Then we'll decide whether I'm alive or dead."

But Romashov was not listening.

"I've stayed behind to tell you that you've always been in my way everywhere. Every day, every hour of my life. I'm sick and tired of it! I've had a thousand years of you!"

Definitely, he was not quite normal at that moment. That last phrase of his spoke for itself.

"But that's all finished with now!" Romashov plunged on. "You would have died anyway, you've got gangrene. You'll die now all the quicker."

"That may be." There was not more than three paces between us. If I took good aim and threw my crutch at him I could stun him perhaps. My voice was still calm, though. "But why have you taken my map-case? My papers are in there."

"Why? To have them find you just as you are. Who? Unidentified. (He was omitting words). Just another corpse lying about.

You'll be a corpse," he said arrogantly, "and no one will know that I killed you."

Looking back, this scene is almost fantastic. But I have not altered or added a single thing.

As a boy I was very quick-tempered and I remember what a dangerous sense of exhilaration came over me when I let myself go. It was with just this feeling, which had gone slightly to my head, that I found myself listening to Romashov. I had to keep perfectly calm, and I forced myself to do this, while my hand slid slowly behind my back and rested on my crutch.

"You may be interested to know that I've sent a letter off to my unit,"

I said in a steady voice, "so it's no use your relying on that report."

"What about the hospital train?"

He looked at me exultantly. He meant that the attack on the hospital train would easily explain my disappearance. At that moment I realised how long he had been wishing my death, ever since our schooldays perhaps.

"All right. But, strangely enough, you gain nothing by it," I said this, or words to this effect, just to gain time.

The wood stack prevented me from swinging my arm back. I had to move away from it unobserved and strike from the side to make sure of hitting his head.

"Whether I gain by it or not doesn't matter. You have lost anyway. Gt going to shoot you. There!"

He pulled out my pistol.

Had I believed him really capable of shooting me he might have found it in him to do so. I had never seen him so worked up. But I just spat in his face and said: "Shoot, damn you!"

My God, how he howled and twisted about, gnashing his teeth and even snapping! The sight would have been terrifying had I not known that behind these antics was only cowardice and bluster. A struggle with himself-whether to shoot or not-that was the meaning of his wild dance. The pistol burned his hand. He kept flourishing the gun at me and shivering, until I began to fear that he might press the trigger without meaning to.

"Damn you!" he shouted. "You've always tormented me! If only you knew to whom you owe your life, you rotter, you nobody! If only I could do it, my God! Why should you live, why? All the same they'll saw your leg off. You won't fly any more."

It may sound silly, but of all the idiotic curses he hurled at me one that struck home was his saying that I would never fly again.

"Anyone would think I was mostly in your way up in the air," I said. My voice had acquired a deadly quality, but I was trying to keep it calm. "But down on the ground we were Orestes and Pyla-des."

He was now standing sideways to me, covering his eyes with Ms left hand, as though despairing of persuading me to die of my own accord. It was a good opportunity, and I hurled my crutch. It had to be thrown like a spear, the body drawn hard back then flung forward with the arm thrown out.

I did the best I could, but unfortunately I missed his head and struck his shoulder instead, not very hard.

Romashov was dumbfounded. He gave a great, clumsy jump, like a kangaroo. Then he faced me.

"You would, eh!" he said and swore. "All right!"

Leisurely, he packed the knapsacks, tied them together the easier to carry them and slipped one over each arm.

Just as unhurriedly, he walked round me, and bent down to pick up a twig. Waving it about, he made for the marsh, and five minutes later his stoop-shouldered figure could just barely be seen among the distant aspen trees. I sat leaning my hands on the ground, my mouth dry, fighting an impulse to cry out: "Romashov, come back!" as this, of course, was impossible.

To leave me in the lurch, hungry, unarmed and badly wounded, within a stone's throw of the German detachment-this, I felt sure, had been carefully planned in advance. All the rest of Romashov's performance was done on the spur of the moment, probably in the hope of scaring and humiliating me.

Having failed in this, he had gone away, and this was tantamount to, if not worse than, the murder from which he had flinched.

I could not say that this sobering thought made me feel any happier. I had to keep moving if I did not want Romashov's prophecy about my remaining in this little aspen wood for ever to prove true.

I stood up. The crutches were of different length. I took a step. It was not the sort of pain that hits you in the back of the head and knocks you out, but it was as though a thousand fiends were tearing my leg to pieces and lacerating the half-healed wounds on my back with iron scrapers.

I took another step, then a third.

"Well," I said to the fiends.

I took a fourth step.

The sun stood fairly high in the sky by the time I reached the edge of the wood, beyond which lay the marsh, intersected by a single strip of wet, trampled grass. Green tussocks, like beautiful globes, were visible here and there, and I remembered how they had turned over under the girls' feet yesterday.

Some men were walking about on the embankment. I wondered who they were-our own or Germans. Our train was still burning; the flames, pale in the sunlight, licked the blackened walls of the trucks.

Should I go back to it? What for? The rolling thunder of gunfire reached me, muffled by distance, coming seemingly from the East. The nearest station along the line, some twenty kilometres distant, was Shchelya Novaya.

Fighting was going on there, and this meant our troops were there. I directed my steps that way, if you could call that agony steps.

The wood came to an end, giving place to bushes of blue-black berries, the name of which I had forgotten. They looked like bilberries, only much bigger. A welcome sight, seeing that I had not had anything to eat since the day before. Something dark and motionless lay in the field beyond the bushes, probably a dead body, and every time I reached for a berry, leaning on my crutches, that dark object worried me. After a time I forgot about it, only to remember it again with a cold shiver. Several berries dropped into the grass. I lowered myself carefully to look for them, and a stab went through my heart-it was a woman. I made my way towards her as fast as I could.

She was lying on her back with outspread arms. It wasn't Katya, it was the other girl. She had been shot in the face, and her beautiful black eyebrows were drawn together in a look of suffering.

It was then, I believe, that I first noticed I was talking to myself, and saying rather odd things at that. I recollected the name of those blue-black berries that resembled bilberries-whortleberries they were called-and was overjoyed at the discovery. I began speculating aloud about how this girl had been killed. Probably she had been going back to fetch me, and the Germans on the embankment had fired a burst at her from a submachine-gun. I said some kind words to her to buck her up, as though she were not dead, hopelessly dead, with those eyebrows drawn together in an expression of pain.

Then I forgot her. I hobbled along, babbling, and I didn't at all like the way I was babbling. This was delirium, it had crept upon me unawares and I did not even try to fight it because I needed every ounce of strength to fight an irresistible desire to fling away my crutches, which had blistered my armpits, and to lie down on the ground, where I would find peace and happiness.

I must have stopped seeing anything around me long before I lost consciousness, otherwise where could that fine pale-green head of cabbage have come from alongside my own head? I was lying in a vegetable garden gazing rapturously at the cabbage. Everything would have been fine if flot for that scarecrow in the tattered black hat which wheeled slowly above me.

The crow sitting on its shoulder circled with it, and I thought that but for that bird with the flat blinking eye everything in the world would be fine.

I shouted at it, but my voice was so hoarse and feeble, that it just looked at me and stirred its wings, as though shrugging its shoulders.

Yes, everything would have been fine, if only I could stop the world from making those slow circles round me. I would then perhaps have been able to make out that unpainted log-built cottage at the top of the garden, with the porch, and that tall well-sweep in the yard. One of the windows kept darkening now and again. Somebody I couldn't see was walking about the house, looking anxiously out of the window.

I got to my feet. The doorstep was about forty paces from me-a trifle compared with the distance I had covered the previous day. But those forty steps cost me dear. I dropped exhausted on the porch amid a clatter of my crutches.

The door opened slightly. A boy of about twelve stood on his knee behind a stool. Lying on the porch, it was some time before I could make him out in the depths of the darkish room with its low ceiling and large double-tiered bunks screened off from the rest of the room by cotton curtains. He was aiming straight at me, one eye screwed up and the butt pressed to his cheek.

"Look, I need help," I said, trying to stop the room, which was also spinning round me in that slow accursed manner. "I'm a wounded airman from the hospital train."

"Kirill, stop!" said the boy with the gun. "He's one of ours."

He appeared to become duplicated at that moment. Another boy exactly like him peeped out from behind the curtains. He had a hunting knife in his hand. He was still puffing and blinking with excitement.

I hardly remember what happened afterwards. The days I spent with the boys are wreathed, as it were, in clouds of vapour. It was real vapour, too, coming from a big kettle that boiled from morning till night on a trivet in the Russian stove. But there was also another, visionary vapour, which made my breathing rapid and hoarse and left me in a drenching sweat. Sometimes it would clear a little, and then I would see myself in bed with a mound of coloured pillows under my leg. The boys had done that to keep the flow of blood away from the wound. I knew already that their names were Kirill and Vladimir, that they were the sons of a pointsman named Ion Leskov and that their father had gone to the station and told them to lock the door and let nobody in. They were twins, and though I knew it, I got scared every time I saw them together. They were so exactly alike that I thought I was being delirious again.

It was as though two selves were struggling within me-one a cheerful, blithe soul who tried to conjure up vivid memories of all the good things of life, the other a sombre and resentful person harbouring a grievance and brooding over his humiliation.

At times I saw a tall bearded man, so still with cold that he could not even shut the door behind him, coming into the cottage where my sister and I were living. It wasn't Doctor Ivan Ivanovich though. It was myself. I dropped exhausted on the porch steps, the door was flung open, boys aimed a gun at me, then said: "He's one of ours."

And I kept thinking that the reason they were so kind to me was because once, many years ago, my sister and I-lonely, neglected children in a remote, snowbound village-had helped the doctor.

At other times I saw myself with teeth bared in hatred, gun in hand, crouching under a railway carriage. People lay all round me in queer attitudes, with arms flung out. What had I done, what sin of omission was I guilty of? What important thing, the most important thing in life, had I overlooked? How had it happened that these men had come to us and dared to shoot down wounded men, as though there were no justice in this world, no honour, none of the things I had been taught at school, and learned to respect and love ever since a child?

I tried to answer this question, but I couldn't, because I was fighting for breath, and the boys looked at me anxiously and kept saying that if their father came he would know what to do to make me feel better.

The father did come. There could be no doubt it was he-the same ungainly figure as the boys, the same sombre face and shining blue eyes.