Behind me, Pavel was silent. He moved occasionally and I heard his sleeper creak against the others.
Perhaps he wanted me to speak now?
I suggested we go to the station to pick up the dice. I thought it would give us something to do and help him forget his nightmare. But I had spoken too soon. If we brought the dice back, we’d have them on us tomorrow morning when we woke, and how would we explain that to the others? Anyway, Pavel didn’t say anything. I don’t think he’d been listening. I went back to gazing at the sky.
But I wasn’t thinking any more about the sky I’d seen in the forest.
Pavel was still silent.
And then suddenly I was seized again by that fear that one day I would take Sifra’s place in Pavel’s dreams.
And Pavel’s silence went on so long that I started thinking: it’s already happened, I’ve already replaced Sifra, I was the one who was holding the knife in his dream and he doesn’t dare tell me.
Without turning around, I quietly called out: ‘Pavel!’
‘What?’
A very brief pause and then: ‘Was it still Sifra in your dream?’
‘Why?’
‘Tell me it was still him.’
‘Yes, it was him.’
I relaxed. I felt confident again. And that confidence felt so good that I wanted more. Expecting that he would yell at me straight away for asking such a question, for having even thought it, I asked him: ‘Pavel, if it was me who did it… instead of Sifra, I mean… what would we do?’
I couldn’t see him, but I could tell that he was thinking. So instead of yelling at me straight away for even thinking it, which is what I’d hoped for, instead of that, he was thinking about the possibility of it happening one day. I felt awful.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t matter, Pavel,’ I lied. ‘Forget it.’
28
WE GOT UP very early to go and fetch the dice from the station.
We saw them as soon as we opened the door. They were stacked up on top of each other in the middle of the room. Kyabine grabbed them and started juggling them in his hand. I sat in a corner and tried to sleep because I was tired from my nocturnal outing with Pavel. I didn’t fall asleep, but it did me good to be able to close my eyes for a little while. When I opened them the station was empty. Everybody had left. I got up and went out onto the platform.
Sifra and the Evdokim kid were sitting against the station wall. Kyabine was crouched in front of them. His coat was spread out on the ground, and all the pieces of his rifle were lined up on it. He was teaching the Evdokim kid. Kyabine started reassembling the rifle until Sifra said: ‘Wait!’
‘Wait for what?’ Kyabine asked.
Sifra, in a gentle voice, said: ‘Show him that again.’
‘Why?’
‘You’re going too fast, Kyabine.’
Kyabine picked up the hammer spring again and slowly put it back in place.
‘That’s better,’ Sifra said. ‘Don’t go any faster than that.’
I spotted Pavel far off in the field. I walked down the platform and joined him. We walked together for a while. When we came back, the rifle was reassembled and Kyabine was asking Sifra to show the kid what he could do. ‘Come on, Sifra,’ he was saying, ‘please do it!’
Sifra smiled at Kyabine.
‘Show him, Sifra!’ Kyabine pleaded.
I understood what he was talking about and I helped Kyabine convince Sifra to do it.
‘Yeah, he’s right, Sifra. You should show him!’
Finally Sifra picked up his rifle and completely disassembled it, carefully placing each piece in front of him in a precise order. He always put the pieces in the same order. You’ll see why. When Sifra had all the pieces lined up, Kyabine said to the Evdokim kid: ‘Now watch this!’
He got to his feet, stood behind Sifra and put his huge hands over Sifra’s eyes. Sifra groped with his hands for the first piece to his right and, as soon as he touched it, the show began.
It happened very fast. He reassembled the rifle blind, more quickly than any of us could do it even when we could see what we were doing. Nobody in the company had as much skill or speed as Sifra when it came to reassembling a rifle. Maybe nobody in the whole Third Army did.
It was over. The rifle was in one piece again. Kyabine removed his hands from Sifra’s eyes and he looked at the astonished expression on the Evdokim kid’s face.
29
AFTER WITNESSING SIFRA’S demonstration, the Evdokim kid went back into the station. We stayed on the platform, doing nothing. We were silent, each of us lost in his thoughts. I was thinking that the Evdokim kid wasn’t really bothering us. Or not as much as we’d feared he would at the beginning, anyway. He followed us around, whatever we did, and barely spoke. I knew he found us intimidating.
Just then Pavel said that before going to the pond we could try crossing the field to see where it led. I poked my head around the station door. The Evdokim kid was writing in his notebook. He looked up at me and I told him that we were going.
We walked down the platform and went into the field. We didn’t have to find the pond today, so we walked together. We had taken off our coats and slung them over our shoulders. We were using our rifles as scythes to cut down the grass.
I stopped, turned to the side and took a piss. While I was doing that, I thought about Pavel’s caterpillar because there were lots of insects in the grass. I tried to look for a caterpillar being eaten by ants. There wasn’t one. I re-buttoned my trousers and looked up at the sky. Some birds were flying towards us. They were flying quite low and I had the feeling they were ducks. I ran back to the others, yelling that there was a flock of ducks that was going to pass over us. They stopped and turned to look at them. We all held our rifles and when the ducks flew over us, we fired. Then we started running as we reloaded our rifles. We fired again and ran again. We shouted furiously at the ducks, reloaded, and fired. Our coats, slung over our shoulders, got in the way of all our movements. Soon the ducks were a long way ahead of us, but we continued shouting and running after them like madmen, until we reached the road.
We tossed our coats and our rifles in the ditch and we lay down on the road to get our breath back.
When I sat up again, the Evdokim kid was coming out of the field. He sat down with us and asked: ‘Did you get any of them?’
For a moment nobody answered him. Then Sifra said: ‘No, we had no chance.’
So he must have been wondering why we fired so many shots. Pavel, still lying on the road, took out his cigarette case and offered one to each of us. The Evdokim kid didn’t want one. Pavel put the case away. He lit his cigarette and said to the kid: ‘So you’re writing to your mother?’
The kid looked surprised. ‘Oh, no!’ he said.
‘Who are you writing to, then?’ asked Pavel.
The kid hesitated, then said: ‘Nobody.’
Pavel rolled onto his side and put his elbow on the road, resting his temple on one hand. ‘What the hell!’ he said.
All of a sudden he sat up and stared down the road. In the distance a horse and carriage had appeared from around a bend. A man was walking beside the horse, holding its bridle. Pavel continued to stare at the carriage. He stood up, went over to the ditch and grabbed his rifle, and then calmly walked in front of the horse. When he was close to it, the man brought the horse to a halt and held out his hand to Pavel. Pavel put the rifle over his shoulder and shook the man’s hand.