For weeks now he has spoken only when it was absolutely essential. He has heard the endless discussions as a confused and meaningless din. Proletariat, autocracy, finance, ruling class, militarism. Simple formulae, one had to make use of them in order to act. But they embraced only a minor part of what they aspired to contain. Life is stuck fast in these concepts like a fully-grown child in too-short clothes. A single hour of life comprises a thousand enigmatic stirrings of the nerves, the muscles, the brain and a single large empty word wants to express them all.
There was at this time only one word that had any meaning: Flight!
One could flee. He felt as if he had been abstracted from his own life for years and as if he were living somebody else’s. Somewhere his own waited like a good home, unjustly abandoned. To flee, to escape the leaden sky, the breadless table. As yet the idea hung only in the air, like a child’s red balloon. Life was short. Sixty years of freedom were less than ten years of Siberia.
‘What’s up with you?’ asked Berzejev.
The days were still long. But clouds came in the early evening, the moon destroyed them. They were there again in the morning cradling the red sun. It was an effort for it to rise. They prepared themselves for winter. The Cheldony said it would come earlier than usual, that winter was already upon them. The Chinaman would fail to appear, the newspapers become fewer, one must stock up with candles and oil.
‘I must escape,’ said Friedrich.
‘Out of the question now, we’re going to be free.’
‘Depend on me, I think of it every day.’
At that moment Lion burst through the door. He waved a newspaper.
The heir to the Austrian throne had been shot.
7
That night they slept peacefully, as if it were quite an ordinary night.
Meanwhile war was brewing in Europe. In the barracks trumpets sounded the alarm. Large posters were put up at all the street-corners of towns small and great. The trains rolled from the stations garlanded with green and the men had military uniforms and caps and rifles. All the women wept.
One day Colonel Lelewicz appeared in Kolymsk with a few friends. There was nothing striking about that. Small squads had already passed through. Efrejnov rejoiced. The newspapers arrived more quickly, as if impelled by the speed of the reports they contained. The whole region was almost invigorated.
Lelewicz bade farewell to his friend.
He left a blue packet lying on Berzejev’s table. Berzejev did not notice it. He was standing at the door. He accompanied the colonel. Lelewicz climbed into the saddle. He waved for the last time. Berzejev turned back into the room. He sighted the packet, quickly seized it and ran outside after the colonel. He shouted, Lelewicz seemed not to hear. He was only a small blue-black speck on the horizon.
Friedrich held Berzejev fast. ‘That’s for us!’ he said with eyes staring, pale, breathless and unable to speak.
When Efrejnov awoke next morning, Friedrich and Berzejev had disappeared.
8
They were afraid of attracting the attention of the secret police more readily if they stayed together. So they decided to separate for a few days, then to meet up again, and to make the journey to the first large town in stages. The first to arrive was to wait for the other, the latecomer to move on later. If one of them were captured, the other would realize that he must not show himself for the time being. They were ready at any moment to fall into the hands of the police. But each of the pair trembled more for the other than for himself. The constant apprehension sealed their friendship more than the need to face every danger together would have done, and bestowed on them in turn all the kinds and grades of love included in the terms of friendship: they were fathers, brothers and children to one another. Always, when they came together again after several days, they fell into each other’s arms, kissed and laughed. Even when neither had encountered any real danger on the way, each yet remained shaken by the dangers he had imagined as threatening the other. And although their splitting up had the object of saving at least one of them from arrest, both had nevertheless privately decided to give themselves up if anything should befall the other.
At last they reached European Russia. They saw the country’s warlike enthusiasm. These were the last happier moments of the Tsar, as it later appeared, almost — as it were — brought about by a conscious intent of world history to mislead a doomed system. The Radicals embraced the Conservatives and, as always when strangers come together in danger and opponents are reconciled, there was faith in a miraculous rebirth of the country because the miracle of fraternization is enough to make men believe in one even more improbable. Enmity is familiar to human nature, while reconciliation is foreign to it. Patriotic alliances were hurriedly formed. A hundred new names and insignia were invented. People marched through the streets and smashed German shop-signs.
‘How puzzling,’ said Friedrich to Berzejev, as they sat in their hotel room, ‘that the individuals of which the mass is composed surrender their characteristics, lose even their primary instincts. The individual loves his life and fears death. Together with others, he discards life and despises death. The individual does not want to join the army and pay taxes. With others, he voluntarily enlists and empties his pockets. And the one is as genuine as the other.’
‘I shall be interested to see,’ said Berzejev, ‘how long this enthusiasm will last, and whether one cannot turn it into its opposite. I shall also be interested to see whether things are exactly like this, or much the same, in other countries. Lion was right. The German Social Democrats are marching.’
According to documents that Lelewicz had procured for them, they were due to enlist for a year’s service in an artillery regiment in Volynia. They had the following expedients: either they enlisted and awaited an opportunity to be captured and then to escape from captivity again; or they hid in the country for the time being and waited for an opportunity to reach a foreign country with the aid of their friends, there to be interned as civilians. At that time they did not contemplate a third possibility. Chance helped them.
This was that, in Kharkov, they heard from a hotel porter due to enlist in the same regiment, that it was already in occupied territory, on Austrian soil. They could therefore depart, fail to report, but mingle with the inhabitants of one of the occupied towns and, with the aid of Friedrich’s old connections at the frontier, play the part of honest citizens under the occupation.
9
Thus he found himself once more at The Ball and Chain’. Yet again it stood in his path. He left Berzejev to wait in the large empty tap-room and climbed the stairs that led to old Parthagener’s room.
Friedrich looked through the keyhole; the door was locked. Old Parthagener was sleeping on the green sofa, as always in the afternoon from two to four. He slept as if to refute the war. The old furniture was still in the room. An unfolded newspaper lay on the table, watched by the blue spectacles. Friedrich wondered whether to wake the old man. It seemed dangerous to wait. At any moment a patrol might enter the tavern. He knocked. The old man jumped up. ‘Who’s there?’ Still the same cry. He opened the door. ‘Ah, it’s you! We’ve been expecting you for a long time. Kapturak heard a week ago that you’d escaped with your comrade Berzejev. You’ve been gone a long time, poor young man! You must have been through a lot! But now you’re here! Was it really necessary?’