He laughed for about two minutes, and then suddenly, as was his wont, was serious again, and commanded the NCO: “I want all eight clapped in irons! Dismiss! Await further instructions.” Then, once the men had left the building, he started to shuffle the cards. “All right. Payback time.” We played another round. He lost again. At that point he picked up his revolver, got up and walked out, saying: “I’ll be back.” I remained seated; two petroleum lamps were lit. The Karvasian landlady wobbled in, with a new glass of tea. The fresh tea had the same slice of lemon in it. The landlady was as broad in the beam as a tugboat, but she smiled like a good sort, confiding and motherly. When I made to take the old used lemon slice out of the glass, she reached in two of her fat fingers and fished it out for me. I gave her a look of thanks.
I sipped my hot tea. Lieutenant Andrei Maximovitch didn’t return. It grew late, and I was due to go back to my men in the camp. I stepped outside, in front of the balcony door, and called Krassin’s name a couple of times. At last he answered. The night was so cold that I first thought a shout would shiver to pieces in the air and never reach its intended destination. I looked up at the sky. The silver stars didn’t look as though they belonged to it, more as though they were gleaming nails knocked into its canopy. A strong wind out of the East, the tyrant among the Siberian winds, took the breath out of my throat, stopped my heart, and briefly blinded me. The lieutenant’s reply to my call, carried to me on that bad wind, struck me as a comforting message from a human being, the first I’d heard for a long time, and that even though I’d only been waiting outside in the hostile night for a few minutes. But then this human message turned out to be anything but comforting.
I went back inside. A single lamp was still burning. It didn’t light the room so much as refine its darkness. It was the tiny luminous kernel of a heavy, orbic darkness. I sat down beside the lamp. Suddenly a couple of shots rang out. I ran outside. The shots hadn’t finished echoing away. They were still rolling around under the huge, icy sky. I listened. Nothing moved, nothing except the steady arctic wind. I could stand it no longer, and went back inside.
Shortly afterwards, the lieutenant came in, pale, cap in hand in spite of the wind, his pistol half out of its holster.
He sat down right away, breathing hard, unbuttoned his tunic, and looked at me with staring eyes, as though he didn’t know me, as though he had forgotten who I was and was straining to identify me. He swept the cards off the table with his sleeve. He took a long pull from his flask, lowered his head, and suddenly, rapidly said: “I only hit one of them.” “Poor aim,” I said. But he meant it differently.
“You’re right. I aimed badly. I had them form up in a line. I only wanted to give them a fright. I fired into the air. The last shot, it was as though something was pressing my arm down. I don’t know how it happened. The man is dead. My men can’t understand me any more.”
The soldier was buried that same night. The lieutenant accorded him full military honours. He never laughed again. He was reflecting about something that seemed to be preoccupying him.
We covered another ten versts or so under his command. Two days before the next commander was due to take over from him, he asked me to join him in his sleigh, and said: “This sleigh now belongs to you and your two friends. The Jew is a coachman, he’ll know his business. Here’s my map. I marked the point where you get off. You will be expected. The man is a friend of mine. Trustworthy. No one will come after you. I will report all three of you as fugitives. I will shoot you and have you buried.” He pressed my hand, and got out.
That night we set off. The trip was just a couple of hours. The man was there, waiting. We felt right away that we were safe with him. A new life began.
XXII
Our host belonged to the long-established community of Siberian Poles. He was a trapper by profession. He lived on his own, with a dog of no certifiable breed, a couple of hunting rifles, a number of homemade pipes, in two spacious rooms full of scruffy furs. His name was Baranovich, first name of Jan. He hardly spoke. A full black beard enjoined him to silence. We did all sorts of work for him, repairing his fence, splitting firewood, greasing the runners on his sleigh, sorting furs. These were all useful occupations for us to learn. But even after a week there, it was clear to us that he only allowed us to work for him out of a sense of tact, and so that in the isolation we didn’t quarrel with him or each other. He was right. He carved pipes and canes out of the limbs of a tough shrub he called nastorka, I don’t remember why. He broke in a new pipe every week. I never heard him tell a joke or anecdote. At the most he would take the pipe out of his mouth to smile at one or the other of us. Every two months someone would come from the nearest hamlet, bringing an old Russian newspaper. Baranovich didn’t even look at it. I learned a lot from it, but not about the war. Once, I read that the Cossacks were about to invade Silesia. My cousin Joseph Branco believed it, Manes Reisiger didn’t. They started to quarrel. For the first time they quarrelled. In the end, they too were in the grip of that madness that is the inevitable outcome of isolation. Joseph Branco, younger and more hot-tempered, grabbed at Reisiger’s beard. I was just washing up in the kitchen when it happened. When I heard the quarrel, I dashed into the room, plate in hand. My friends had neither eyes nor ears for me. For the first time, even though I was shocked by the violence of two people I loved, I was struck also by the sudden understanding which came to me: namely the revelation that I was no longer one of them. I stood before them, like a hapless umpire, no longer their friend, and even though I was perfectly sure that a kind of cabin fever had them in its grip, I believed I was somehow immune to it. A kind of hateful indifference filled me. I went back into the kitchen to finish the washing up. They went wild. But, as though I expressly wanted not to disturb them in their crazed fight, in the way that you try not to disturb people when they’re asleep, I put the plates down very quietly, one on top of the other, to avoid making the least noise. After I was done, I sat down on the kitchen stool, and waited patiently.
Eventually, they both came out, one after the other. They wouldn’t look at me. It seemed each of them separately — seeing as they were now enemies — wanted to make me feel his disapproval because I hadn’t intervened in their quarrel. Both turned to some needless task or other. One ground the knives, but it didn’t look at all menacing. The other collected snow in a pan, lit a fire, threw in little pieces of kindling, and stared concentratedly into the flames. It got warm. The warmth reached the opposite window, the ice-flowers turning reddish, blue, sometimes violet in the reflection of the blaze. Little ice-patches that had formed on the floor under the leaky window started to melt.
Evening was at hand, the water was bubbling away in the pan. Baranovich was due back from one of his wanderings that he would undertake on certain days, we never knew when or why. He walked in, with his stick in his hand, and his mittens stuck inside his belt. (He had the habit of taking them off outside, a kind of etiquette.) He shook hands with each of us with the familiar greeting: “God give you health.” Then he took off his fur cap and crossed himself. He walked into the sitting room.
Later, the four of us ate together, as usual. No one spoke. We listened to the hour striking on the cuckoo clock, which made me think of a bird that had lost its way from some other distant country: I was surprised it hadn’t frozen. Baranovich, who was used to our customary evening chitchat, looked covertly into each of our faces. At last he got up, not slowly as usual, but suddenly, and seemingly disappointed with us, called “Good night!” and went into the other room. I cleared the table, and blew out the oil lamp. Night glimmered through the icy panes. We lay down to sleep. “Good night!” I said, as always. No reply.