The huts were cold at night. Darensky slept badly; his back froze, his ears and legs froze, his fingers froze, his cheeks froze. He went to bed without undressing, with two pairs of foot-cloths round his feet and a towel round his head.
At first he had been amazed at the way people he met seemed almost to have forgotten the war; they seemed to have no room in their minds for anything except food, tobacco and clean laundry. But soon he noticed himself thinking of all kinds of trivia, all kinds of petty hopes and disappointments as he talked to the commanders of divisions and batteries about axle-grease, ammunition supplies and how best to prepare the guns for the winter.
Front Headquarters now seemed impossibly distant; his dream was to spend a day at Army Headquarters, near Elista. But it wasn't Alla Sergeyevna and her blue eyes that he dreamed of: he dreamed of a bath, clean underwear and soup with white noodles.
Even the night he had spent at Bova's now seemed pleasant and agreeable. It hadn't been such a bad hut after all. And they hadn't talked only about soup and clean laundry.
The worst torment of all was the lice.
It had taken him some time to realize why he was always itching; he had failed to understand people's knowing smiles when he had furiously begun scratching his thigh or armpit in the middle of a serious discussion. Every day he had scratched with increasing zeal. He had felt a constant burning under his armpits.
He had thought he had eczema, that the dust and sand must be irritating his dry skin. Sometimes, on his way somewhere, he would stop and suddenly begin scratching his legs, his stomach, the small of his back. It was worst of all at night. He would wake up and scratch furiously at his chest. Once, when he was lying on his back, he had stuck his legs up in the air and moaned as he scratched at his thighs. His eczema seemed to be aggravated by heat. Under the blankets, it became unbearable; if he went out into the frost, it calmed down. He decided to go to the first-aid post and ask for some ointment.
One morning he had turned down his shirt collar and seen a row of sleepy, full-grown lice along the seam. There were dozens of them. He had looked round in embarrassment at the captain who slept in the next bed. He was sitting there with a ferocious expression on his face; he had spread out his pants and was squashing the lice that infested them. He was moving his lips silently, evidently keeping a tally.
Darensky took off his shirt and began doing the same. It was a quiet, misty morning. There was no shooting, and no planes going by overhead. You could hear distinct cracks as the lice perished, one after another, beneath the fingernails of the two officers. The captain glanced at Darensky and muttered:
'There's a fine one for you – a real bear of a louse! A breeding sow!'
His eyes still on his shirt collar, Darensky said:
'Don't they issue any powder?'
'They do,' said the captain. 'But it's a waste of time. What we need is a good wash, but there isn't even enough water to drink. They can't even wash the plates properly in the canteen. There's certainly no chance of a bath.'
'What about the ovens?'
'That's no use either. The uniforms come back scorched, and the lice just get a sun-tan… And when I think of the time we were quartered in Penza! I never even went to the canteen. The landlady fed me herself. She was a nice plump woman – and not too old. We had baths twice a week, beer every day…'
'I know,' said Darensky. 'But what's to be done? It's a long way to Penza.'
The captain looked at him seriously and said, as if revealing a secret:
'There is one good method, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel. Snuff! You grind up a brick, mix it with snuff and sprinkle it on your underwear. The lice begin sneezing. That makes them jump – and then they bash their heads in against the brick.'
The captain kept such a straight face that it took Darensky some time to realize this was a joke.
During the next few days, he heard at least a dozen stories in a similar vein. The folklore of lice was evidently a rich field of study.
Day and night, his mind was occupied with a host of questions: food, a change of underwear, clean uniform, louse-powder, extermination of lice by ironing them with a heated bottle, by freezing them to death, by burning them to death… He no longer thought of women at all. He remembered a saying the criminals had used in the camps:
'You may live, but you won't love.'
58
Darensky had spent all day inspecting the guns of the artillery division. He hadn't seen a single plane or heard a single shot.
The division's commander, a young Kazakh, said very clearly and without a trace of an accent:
'You know what? Next year I'm going to grow some melons. You must come back and try one.'
The divisional commander was at home in the desert. He cracked jokes, bared his white teeth in a smile, and moved with quick and effortless steps through the deep sand. He even glanced amiably at the camels standing in harness by the huts with their corrugated-iron roofs.
Darensky found his cheerfulness irritating. In search of solitude, he decided to return to the emplacements of the 1st battery – though he had already been there during the day.
An enormous moon had risen; it seemed more black than red. Growing crimson with effort, it climbed up into the transparent black of the sky; the mortars, anti-tank weapons and the barrels of the guns looked strangely threatening in this angry light. Along the road stretched a caravan of camels; they were harnessed to squeaking village carts loaded with hay and boxes of shells. It was an unlikely scene: tractors, the lorry with the printing press for the Army journal, a thin radio mast, the long necks of the camels – and their undulating walk that made it seem as though their whole body was made out of rubber, without a single hard bone.
The camels passed by, leaving a smell of hay in the frosty air. The same huge moon – more black than red – had shone over the deserted fields where Prince Igor was to give battle. The same moon had shone when the Persian hosts marched into Greece, when the Roman legions invaded the German forests, when the battalions of the first consul had watched night fall over the pyramids…
Darensky, his head sunk into his shoulders, was sitting on a box of shells and listening to two soldiers who lay stretched out under their greatcoats beside the guns. The battery commander and his political instructor had gone to Divisional HQ; the lieutenant-colonel from Front HQ – the soldiers had found out who he was from a signaller -seemed to be fast asleep. The soldiers puffed blissfully at the cigarettes they had rolled, letting out clouds of smoke.
They were obviously close friends; you could tell from their certainty that whatever happened to one was of equal interest to the other.
'So what happened?' said one of them, feigning mockery and indifference.
'You know the bastard as well as I do,' said the second soldier with pretended reluctance. 'How can he expect a man to walk in boots like these?'
'So what happened?'
'So here I am in the same old boots. I'm not going to walk barefoot, am I?'
'So he wouldn't give you new boots,' said the second gunner. His voice was now full of interest; every trace of mockery and indifference had disappeared.
Their talk turned to their homes.
'What do you expect a woman to write about? This is out of stock and that's out of stock. If the boy isn't ill, then it's the girl. You know what women are like.'
'Mine's quite straightforward about it. She says: "You lot at the front are all right – you've got your rations. As for us, we really are having a hard time." '
'That's woman's logic for you,' said the first gunner. 'There she is, sitting in the rear, and she hasn't got a clue what it's like at the front. All she knows about are your rations.'