Nathan Kristianpoller opened his whole heart to the whole blessed peace of this declining earthly Friday which seemed to yearn towards the divine and holy Sabbath. Tomorrow evening, he thought, he would write a letter to his wife in Kyrbitki, and tell her he would like her to come home. “My darling wife,” he would say, “with the help of God we are now delivered from the war, and peace has been given back to us. Unfortunately we still have soldiers billeted on us, but the colonel is not as dangerous as he looks; in fact, when one thinks what a very high officer he is, he is not altogether savage. I think he is not a bad man at all, and is even a God-fearing one, I believe …”
Still inwardly composing his letter, Kristianpoller cut his nails with his pocket-knife in honour of the approaching Sabbath, and kept his eyes upon the street to see whether or no more customers were on the way. Suddenly his blood ran cold. He listened. Six pistol shots — ah, how well he could distinguish between those and the report of guns! — were fired in succession in his yard. All peaceful sounds died instantly — the quacking and cackling of the feathered folk, the cheerful voices of the peasants, the whinnying of their little horses, the laughter of their women. Through the window Kristianpoller saw their mouths gape open and their hands go up to cross themselves. In a moment they had all got down from the carts where they had already taken their places, ready to drive away. As though the sudden shots had hit the day as well, the light seemed to go now very fast. The glazier Nuchim’s little room facing the bar across the street was already in pitch darkness, although the windows stood wide open. Only the white table-cloth shone out silverly, spread for the Sabbath.
A presentiment of evil prompted Kristianpoller to leave his inn for the present, and by way of the window. He climbed out on to the street and slipped across the way to the tumbledown blue cottage of the glazier.
“They’re shooting in my yard!” he said hastily. “Don’t light your candles. Bolt your door!”
And so they were, shooting in Kristianpoller’s outhouse. Colonel Tarabas’s own men, harmlessly confident of their own superiority, and in momentary expectation of their Sergeant-Major Kontsev, had begun to go on drinking in company with the deserters from the barracks, whereupon sleep and fatigue and even indifference soon overcame them. Gradually the false camaraderie with which the old guard had baited the deserters gave place to a temporary and ungenuine, but nevertheless emotional friendliness. On both sides a great many false but burning tears were shed. In a word, they were all very drunk.
“Let’s try a bit of shooting just to see if we can still hit anything,” said the cleverest of the deserting band, one Ramzin.
“Splendid!” said the others.
“First let’s draw some decent targets,” said Ramzin. And he pulled a piece of chalk out of his trousers pocket, and set to work to draw all manner of large and smaller figures on the dark-blue distempered wall. This Ramzin was a skilful fellow. He had always been good at every kind of trick, including conjuring and sleight-of-hand. His tall, gaunt figure, the black eyes in his sallow face, his long and crooked nose with a list to one side, the raven-black mane of hair which, not without vanity, he allowed to fall in disorder over his forehead, and his long, bony hands with the slightly bent fingers, had long since given rise to the suspicion in his comrades’ minds that he could not be really one of them. Some had known him two years and more, and had seen service with him. He had never told any of them which government or province he belonged to. And all at once, most of them having taken him for a Ukrainian, he seemed to belong just here, in this brand-new country. Its language seemed to be his mother-tongue. He spoke it fluently and with raciness.
He was an adept with his chalk, they all agreed — his drawings were masterly in their eyes. They had ceased to feel tired. They crowded in a dense clump behind Ramzin, standing on tip-toe to follow the agile movements of his hand. Against the deep blue background of the wall Ramzin evoked snow-white kittens chasing mice, raging, greedy dogs which likewise filled the mice with terror, men having at the dogs with sticks. Below these in another row Ramzin began to draw three women, unmistakably in the act of taking off their clothes. To the onlookers Ramzin’s hand, somewhat lustful and certainly impatient as it was, seemed with extreme dexterity to divest the bodies of their garments in the very moment of clothing them; he stripped the women in the same second as he created them, and this proceeding excited and embarrassed the audience in equal measure. They were all at once completely sober. But another and far more potent intoxication now possessed them. Each one wished that Ramzin would stop, or change the subject of his pictures, but at the same time and just as ardently they wished him to continue. They were in a turmoil of fear and shame, intoxication and expectancy. Their eyes, before which all the pictures now and then hung blurred, looked again in the next instant and saw in sharp and torturing distinctness the shadows and lines of the bodies, the nipples on the breasts, the tender firmness of the thighs, and the delicate fragility of the slim and charming ankles. With scarlet faces, and in order to overcome the uneasiness whose helpless slaves they were, the men began to utter witless, meaningless, and shameless cries. Some whistled piercingly, others burst out into loud neighing laughter. Now upon the wall on which Ramzin was completing his infernal task, fell the farewell glory of the sunset. The wall was burnished gold and azure, and in the golden blue the chalk-white figures seemed to be carved, not sketched. Ramzin stepped back. He suddenly stopped short in the midst of filling his third row with German soldiers of different corps, soldiers of the Red Army, and every kind of symbol such as sickle and hammer, eagle, double-headed eagle, and the like. He hurled the chalk against the wall. It smashed and fell in many fragments to the floor. Ramzin turned round. Next to him stood the Ukrainian Kolohin, one of Tarabas’s own men. Ramzin pulled the pistol out of the other’s belt.
“Out of the way!” he said.
They made way for him. Ramzin retreated to the open doorway, took aim, and shot. He hit all the six pictures in succession, the whole of the top row. There was applause. They stamped their booted feet upon the ground. They shouted: “Bravo!” and “Well done, Ramzin!”
Now each was impatient to get a gun into his hand. Tarabas’s men shot first, then handed their pistols to the strangers. They all tried, and every one of them missed.
“They’re bewitched,” said someone. “Ramzin’s bewitched his pictures!”
The very devil was in it. Even the good shots whose hand and eye had never failed them fired too high or too low now. After a few more bullets had gone wide, they told themselves that an invisible presence touched the weapons in the instant when the ball left the barrel. Now Ramzin shot again. He did not miss. He had certainly drunk no less than all the rest. They had seen what he had had. How came it, then, that his hand was more sure than every other hand? Ramzin chose his target, took aim, shot, and hit it. Yes, as though goaded by some diabolical command, he began to ask the others to tell him the exact spot they wanted him to hit. The questions aroused in most of them the lust of sheer destruction, a hot and smouldering desire to see certain parts of the naked, ever more naked, bodies of the three women struck by the bullets and exterminated. Ramzin’s first question as to what his target should be remained unanswered. Shame and passion choked them. Ramzin helped them on.