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.
His sudden appearance and his uniform made an impression on them, even frightened them. At the sound of his harsh voice the railroad worker turned, stepped away from the young woman, bent down to pick up the lamp he had put on the ground. He stammered, "No, look, it's like this, Sergeant… She's a thief. When we saw her she was lifting stuff from the warehouse."
He began justifying himself, invoking the sweeper as a witness. But gradually, as he got the better of his fear, he realized that the sergeant had a bizarre look about him: his cheeks covered with a four-day beard, a tunic coarsely patched here and there and with no collar, his top boots battered and swollen by wear. Appalled by his mistake, he changed his tone.
"And what about you? What are you doing here? Did you want to visit the stores, too? So she was with you, this thief? You're two of a kind."
Pavel, scenting danger, tried to silence him. "Right, shut your trap, you! Leave the woman and go tap some wheels! Get going! And not another sound from your whistle."
But the other man, on whom it was dawning more and more clearly that this soldier who had given him such a fright was on shaky ground himself, exploded, "What's that? Wheels? Just who do you think you are? You wait. We're going to find out what regiment you've deserted from! Hold him, Vassilich! I'm going to call the patrol! They're here, somewhere, near the station."
Pavel threw off the sweeper as he tried to seize him, turned and saw the man was not lying: an officer and two soldiers were making their way along the track. He struck out to stop the two men shouting. One fist impacted against a clammy, slippery mouth, the other hand hit a chin. But the yelling continued, only in shriller tones. And the fingers twisted, clutching at his tunic. He struck again. The lamp fell, rolled along the ground, lit up by itself, and its beam cut across the wheels of a train that was just moving off. In the distance the two soldiers of the patrol began to run, the officer quickened his pace.
It was the young woman who dragged him away from this fruitless brawl. Rooted to the spot close to the wall, she suddenly seemed to come to her senses and sped like an arrow toward the train that was moving forward with somnambulistic slowness. Pavel grabbed his pack and followed her, wiping his bloodstained hand on his trousers.
They climbed onto the platform of a freight car, jumped down onto the track on the other side, rolled under another train, and seeing that the soldiers had run around it right at the far end, dove under again, ran the length of the train and crawled between the wheels once more. The whistle blasts of the patrol guided them, now far off, now deafening, separated from them by a single line of freight cars. And their eyes had time to take in the calm of a workman, quietly smoking, sitting on a pile of ties, and the enamel plaque (with an improbable destination) on an old freight car on a siding, and even the inside of the compartments (children, tea, a woman making up the bed) in a passenger train that came hurtling past at high speed and saved them, separating them from their pursuers. They raced forward, drawn along by the draft of its passing, and found themselves once more between the express train and a freight train that was hardly moving at all, as if it could not make up its mind to leave. They saw the opening of a sliding door, for the first time exchanged a look of complicity, and climbed in. Pavel closed the door, found the young woman's arm in the darkness. They remained there without moving, listening behind the thin wooden partition to the coming and going of footsteps, shouts, whistle blasts. Footfalls came closer, walking beside the train, which was still sliding along with agonizing slowness, and a voice addressing someone on the other side of the track shouted, "Hey, they must be somewhere. I saw them! Tell him to bring his dog!" Their eyes were already accustomed to the darkness. They stared at one another fixedly, both sensing that each one's danger, so unique, so linked to each one's past, was now merged with the danger the other was escaping. That their lives were merging. In the distance an angry voice rang out, an order, then there was some barking. And it was at that moment that a shudder ran through the train and Pavel sensed in his own body, at the same moment as in the woman's, an involuntary straining of every muscle in the infantile desire to help the train move off. Its speed accelerated very little but after a dozen clanks of the wheels the noise changed, became more resonant, more vibrant. The train began crossing a bridge and moved faster and faster.