After that Andrei blacked out and the curtain came down again; then there were savage voices and shrieks that didn’t sound human, and the tramping of a multitude of feet. The burning armored car gave off a stink of red-hot iron and gasoline. Fritz Heiger, surrounded by a crowd of men with white armbands on their sleeves and towering head and shoulders above them, was shouting out commands, gesturing abruptly in various directions with his long arms, with his face and mussed blond hair covered in soot. Other men with white armbands, who had clustered around the streetlamps in front of the entrance to City Hall, climbed up the streetlamps for some reason and lowered long ropes that dangled in the wind. Someone was dragged down the steps, struggling and jerking his legs about, someone squealed in a high womanish voice that left Andrei’s ears blocked, and suddenly the steps were completely covered with people. Andrei glimpsed black-bearded faces and heard the clatter of gun bolts. The squealing stopped and a dark body crept upward along the column of the streetlamp, squirming and shuddering convulsively. Shots were fired out of the crowd, the jerking legs went limp, stretching out full length, and the dark body started slowly twisting and turning in the air.
And afterward Andrei was shaken awake by a terrible jolting. His head was bobbing about on coarse, smelly knots of sackcloth; he was being driven away, being taken somewhere, and a familiar, frenzied voice was shouting, “Gee-up now! Gee-up there, you damned whore! Move on!” And right there in front of him, against the backdrop of the black sky, City Hall was burning. Hot tongues of flame burst out of windows, scattering sparks into the darkness, and he saw long, stretched bodies dangling from the streetlamps, swaying to and fro.
2
Washed and changed, with a bandage over his right eye, Andrei was reclining in an armchair, watching morosely as Uncle Yura and Stas Kowalski, with his head also swathed in bandages, greedily slurped down some kind of steaming slop, spooning it straight from the saucepan. Selma was sitting beside him, sighing tearfully, and she kept trying to take hold of his hand. Her hair was mussed, the mascara from her lashes was smeared across her cheeks, and her face was puffy and covered with hot, red blotches. And her frivolous, transparent little robe looked freakish on her, with its front soaked in soapy water.
“…He was going to finish you off,” Stas explained, carrying on slurping. “Working you over carefully, you know, dragging it out as long as possible. I know that trick; the state’s blue hussars worked me over the same way too. Only I got the full treatment, you see—they’d already started stamping on me and then, thanks be to God, it turned out that I was the wrong one; it was someone else they wanted.”
“They broke your nose—that’s nothing,” Uncle Yura confirmed. “The nose isn’t the most important thing… and a broken one will do. And the rib…” He waved the hand holding his spoon. “I’ve broken so many of them ribs. The important thing is, your innards are in good shape: liver, spleen, kidneys…”
Selma sighed fitfully and tried once again to take hold of Andrei’s hand. He looked at her and said, “Stop bawling. Go and get changed, and anyway…”
She obediently got up and went into the other room. Andrei felt around in his mouth with his tongue, came across something hard, and pushed it out onto his finger.
“They broke out a filling,” he said.
“Oh really?” said Uncle Yura, surprised.
Andrei showed him. Uncle Yura inspected it and shook his head. Stas shook his head too and said, “Unusual thing, that. Only when I was recuperating afterward, for instance—I spent three months in bed, you know—it was mostly teeth I spat out. My woman steamed my ribs every day. She died later, but here I am, still alive. And as right as rain.”
“Three months!” Uncle Yura said contemptuously. “After they blew my backside off at Yelnya, I was knocking around the hospitals for half a year. It’s a terrible thing, brother, to have your buttock ripped off. You see, all the major blood vessels are interwoven in the buttock. And that slab of iron sliced it right off me at a tangent! Boys, I asked, what is this, where’s my backside got to? And would you believe it, my trousers were ripped off too, right down to the tops of my boots, as if I never had any trousers… There was something left in my boots, but above that… well, nothing!” He licked his spoon. “Fedka Cheparev got his head ripped off that time,” he announced. “Ripped off by the very same slab.”
Stas licked his spoon too, and they sat there for a while in silence, looking into the saucepan. Then Stas delicately cleared his throat and lowered his spoon into the steam again. Uncle Yura followed his example.
Selma came back. Andrei glanced at her and turned his eyes away. The fool had dolled herself up. Stuck on her gigantic earrings and a dress with a plunging neckline, and painted herself like whore again… She was a whore… He couldn’t look at her—to hell with her anyway. First that shameful scene in the hallway, then the shameful scene in the bathroom when she wailed out loud as she pulled off his urine-soaked shorts, and he looked at the blue-black patches on his belly and his sides and wept again—out of pity for himself and sheer helplessness… And of course she was drunk, drunk again, every single day she was drunk, and now, while she was getting changed, she was sure to have taken a swig from the bottle…
“That doctor…” Uncle Yura said pensively. “The bald one who was just here—where have I seen him before?”
“You could easily have seen him here,” said Selma, smiling seductively. “He lives in the next entrance. What job is he doing now, Andrei?”
“He’s a roofer,” Andrei said dismally.
She cheerfully slept with this bald doctor, not giving a damn for the consequences. The whole building knew it. He didn’t make any particular effort to conceal it. In fact, no one tried to conceal it.
“How come he’s a roofer?” Stas asked in amazement, and the spoon stopped halfway to his mouth.
“He just is,” said Andrei. “Covers roofs, covers women.” He got up with a groan, reached into the chest of drawers, and took out some cigarettes. Two packs were missing again.
“Never mind the women,” Stas muttered, dumbfounded. “But why roofs? What if he falls off? He’s a doctor.”
“They’re always thinking up something new in the City,” Uncle Yura said venomously. He was about to tuck the spoon into the top of his boot, but remembered just in time and put it on the table. “It’s like the way it was in Timofeevka just after the war: they sent a Georgian to be the chairman of this collective farm, a former political commissar—”
The phone rang. Selma picked it up. “Yes,” she said. “Uh-huh, uh-huh… No, he’s not well, he can’t come—”