One day happiness snapped him up. The woman looked like the raspberry picker and was even closer to what a man starved of flesh longs for: a weighty plenitude in her body that gave her breasts, her buttocks, her belly, a life of their own. Returning home after one or two days' absence (he was with a team installing electric cables along the roads), he would lose himself in this body, in the sickly sweet steam of boiled potatoes, and rejoice that one could live without anything other than the heavy flesh of these breasts and the pungent smell of this izba on the outskirts of a district capital.
Twice only he had doubts about this happiness. One evening he was watching his companion stirring the contents of a broad frying pan, from which arose the bluish aura of bacon rashers in burned fat. "She looks as if she were mixing it up for pigs," he thought unmaliciously, numbed both by his day's work in the rain and the happiness. "But one could very well turn into a pig if things go on like this," he said to himself, aware of the faint tremor of an awakening, a rush of memories. And he hastened to plunge back into the agreeable torpor of the evening.
The second time (their team had returned earlier than expected on account of frosts, he removed his muddy boots in the hall and went noiselessly upstairs) this happiness almost turned him into a killer. The bedroom door was ajar and already from the kitchen he could see his companion naked, and, glued to her, a very thin man, who seemed, as he huffed and puffed, to be trying to push her out of bed. He looked for the ax in the entrance hall and could not see where it had gone. The few seconds of searching for it calmed him. "What? End up in jail for the sake of that lump of pork and that worm with a wrinkled ass? I'm not crazy." He put on his boots and hurried to leave, knowing it would have been enough for him to see the woman's face, or hear her voice, to kill. He spent the night with a friend and did not sleep, at one minute almost indifferent, at the next planning revenge. In a moment of weariness he believed he had understood what kind of woman she was, whose life he had shared for a year. He had never thought about it before. The war was a time of women without men and men without women, but also one of women who, more from the chance of a town being near the front than from lewdness, had made love recklessly, accustomed to men who went back to the war and whom death made irremediably faithful to their mistress of one night. "Filthy whore!" he muttered in the darkness of the kitchen where his friend had made up a bed for him, but in reality this curse was a way of trying to silence a covert pardon. His concubine reminded him, through her very infidelity of the days of war. She was still living in those days. "Like me!" he thought.
In the morning the desire for vengeance got the better of him. He went back to the izba and found it already empty. The woman had gone to work, leaving him a saucepan of potatoes. He withdrew the cartridges from his automatic pistol, determined to put them in the stove, picturing with malicious glee the fireworks that evening. Then he changed his mind, went up to the bedroom, drew his knife. He stabbed at the down quilt halfheartedly, as if to satisfy his conscience, and stopped. A few feathers fluttered around the bed. The room already looked unrecognizable to him, as if he had never lived there. He stroked the notches on the handle of the knife, then gathered up several things that belonged to him and left. In the hall he noticed the ax, propped in a corner behind the door.
Once again he lived nowhere for several months, still playing at the soldier's return, cunningly avoiding the new life the others were embarking on, so he could stay in the company of those who were no more. Thinking about them one day, he remembered his mother's friend, the foreign woman, Sasha, who was so very Russian and who often came to see them at Dolshanka. He caught up with her in the little town where she lived, near Stalingrad, allowed himself to be persuaded to stay at her house, and began to work at a railroad depot. The third anniversary of the victory was approaching, the town was being covered in red and gold panels with triumphal slogans, and the radiant faces of heroic soldiers. Pavel had the strange impression that the people around him were talking about a different war and coming more and more to believe in the war that was being invented for them in the newspapers, on billboards, on the radio. He talked about his own war, the penal companies, about attacks made with their bare hands. The head of the workshop rebuked him, they grappled with each other. Pavel let go when he saw a long scar on the chief's arm, crudely sutured the way they used to do it at the front. When their quarrel had abated and they were alone the man took him outside behind a pile of old ties and warned him, "It's all true, what you say. But if they take you away tomorrow for your truth I want you to know I had nothing to do with it. There are spies in the workshop." Pavel told Sasha about it. She gave him bread and all the money she had in the house and advised him to spend the night with an old friend who lived in Stalingrad. She was right. They came looking for him at three in the morning.
He no longer needed to find a pretext for his wanderings. He simply needed to move farther and farther away from Stalingrad, make himself invisible, merge into the new life he had so far been running away from. He left the Volga region heading west, then through one chance or another began descending southward, thinking of the sea, the ports, the teeming, colorful south, in which his dubious air of a vagabond soldier would pass unnoticed. For a long time now stations and trains had become his true home. The weeks spent at the depot had given him the self-confidence of a professional. More than once he detected the presence of a military patrol. He would change, put on his blue overalls, and pass as a railroad worker. Then he became a soldier again: engineers rarely refused to help a "defender of the nation."
That day Pavel was in uniform. The train he had spotted that morning was already unloaded and was due to start at any minute. Its destination suited him. He still had to negotiate with the engineer or, if he were refused, leap into a freight car after the train had started. It was while he was keeping watch between two warehouse storage buildings that he heard their voices: two men's voices, backing one another up-with menacing jocularity-and that of a woman, whose strongly oriental accent he noticed straight away. Curious, he turned the corner and saw them. The men (one of them leaning on a broom, the other, switching his lamp on and off, teasingly, for it was still light) were preventing the woman from leaving, blocking her path, pushing her against the warehouse wall. They were doing it without violence but their movements had the authority of a cat playing with an already damaged bird.
"No, my beauty, first tell us where you're going and what train you're catching, then tell us your name," repeated the man with the broom, moving his shoulder forward to check the young woman.
"And then we'd like to have a look at your papers," chimed in the railroad worker, shining his lamp in the woman's face.
She took a more vigorous step to free herself, in her voice a weary cord snapped, "Let me alone!" The man with the lamp thrust his hand against her chest, as if to ward off an attack. "Now you be nice to us, honey, that's all we ask. Otherwise the militia are going to want to know about you."
The woman, dazed, her eyes half closed as if to avoid seeing what was happening to her, could no longer repulse the four hands that were pulling at her dress, squeezing her waist, pushing her toward the gaping warehouse door.
In an effort to forestall the warnings to be prudent sounding in his head Pavel moved up to them with one bound. It was not an urge to come to the rescue that decided him but an irrational vision: the violent contrast between the beauty of the woman, the chiseled delicacy of her face, and the quagmire of words, physiognomies, and actions that held her fast.