The instructor spoke little in general. If he did speak, it was in Estonian and not, for the most part, with his countrymen, but with Harun. The dog always accompanied him.
Pakhapil was a closed person. Earlier that autumn, a telegram arrived addressed to him, signed by the division commander and the secretary of the Municipal Party Committee of Narva: “URGENT FLY REGISTER MARRIAGE CITIZEN HILDA COX BEING NINTH MONTH PREGNANCY.”
There’s an Estonian for you, I thought. Comes here from his Kurlandia, says nothing for half a year like Turgenev’s Gerasim,* teaches all the dogs to bark in a foreign tongue, and then flies off to marry some citizen with the fabulous name of Hilda Cox.
That very day, Gustav hitched a ride out with a log-carrier. For a whole month faithful Harun whimpered in the dog kennel. Finally Pakhapil returned.
He offered the orderly some good Tallinn cigarettes. Then he came over to the parallel bars, knocking down dandelions with his new suitcase, and held out his hand to each of us.
“Married?” Fidel asked him.
“Ya,” Gustav answered, blushing.
“Become a daddy?”
“Ya.”
“What did you name it?” I asked. I was interested to know what the child had been called in view of the mama’s name.
That’s an Estonian for you, I thought. A whole year he lives at the edge of the world. Ruins all the guard dogs. Then climbs into a log-carrier and leaves. He leaves so that he may kiss the unimaginable Hilda Braun, or rather Cox, to the cheering of wedding guests.
“So what did you name it?”
Gustav gave me a look and put out the cigarette on the heel of his boot. “The devil only knows.” And he went off to the pound to chat with his four-legged adjutant.
And once again, they appeared together. The dog seemed the more talkative of the two.
One time I saw Pakhapil with a book. He was reading in the well-heated drying room, sitting at a table yellow from gun oil, under the hooks for the sheepskin jackets. Harun was asleep at his feet.
I walked up on tiptoe, looked over his shoulder. It was a Russian book. I saw the title: Magic Tricks for the Club Stage.
Pakhapil walked in front with Harun. In his hand was the canvas leash, which he kept whipping against the top of his boot. An empty holster dangled on his belt. His TT was in his pocket.
Lance Corporal Petrov blocked the road from the forest. Small and clumsy, Fidel stumbled along the side of the road. He would often cock his weapon when there was no need. Fidel looked as though he had been forcibly tied to his sub-machine gun.
The zeks despised him, and in the event of some “incident”, they would have had no mercy on him.
A year before, near Sindor, Fidel had detained a group of prisoners for some offence. He got approval and then, swinging out his weapon, forced a column of men into an icy stream. The zeks stood there, silent, knowing full well the danger of a sixty-round sub-machine gun in the hands of a neurotic and a coward.
For about forty minutes, Fidel trained his gun on them, getting more and more worked up. Then someone far back in line cursed him, hesitantly. The column shuddered. The men in front started singing, and the sound carried above the river:
“And it all happened long ago,
Ech, near Rostov-on-Don,
With my girl, with my girl…
What a queer one I was then,
I put on a stolen jacket
And pants, and pants…”
Fidel began moving backwards. He was small and clumsy in his sturdy sheepskin jacket. His eyes white with terror, he yelled, “Step forward, bitch, and I’ll lay you to waste!”
And that was when the recidivist Kuptsov made his appearance (Kuptsov aka Koval, Alyamov, Gak, Shalikov, Rozhin). He stepped out of the first column and spoke out in the silence that immediately fell as he lightly pushed aside the barrel of the sub-machine gun. “You get burnt up? I’ll put you out.” His fingers stood out white against the dark muzzle.
Fidel jerked the gun to himself, fired a blind burst above their heads, and kept stepping back, stepping back…
That was the first time I saw Kuptsov. His hand looked elegant. His padded jacket, on that freezing day, was wide open. His words took the place of the song that had died out: “I’ll put you out.”
He made me think of a man walking against the wind, as if the wind had chosen him as a permanent adversary, wherever he walked, whatever he did.
After that, I saw Kuptsov often, in the dark, damp isolation cell, by a campfire in the logging sector, pale from loss of blood. And the sensation of the wind now never left me.
Pakhapil walked in front with Harun. Snapping the canvas leash on his boot, he was saying something to the dog in Estonian. To the left, Lance Corporal Petrov guarded the column, which no one worried about, since everyone was aware of the threat of the modernized AK in the hands of a warrior like Fidel.
We crossed the cold, narrow stream, watched to see that no prisoners tried to hide under the planks, led the brigade to the railway crossing, breathed in the station’s odour of cinders and crossed the embankment. Then we headed for the logging sector.
That was the name for the part of the forest surrounded by a flimsy, symbolic fence. Plywood watchtowers poked into view at treetop level. A whole group of guards stood watch. At their head was Sergeant Shumeyko, who languished for days on end waiting for “a situation”.
We led the brigade into the guarded sector. After this, our duties changed. Pakhapil became the radio operator. He took an R-109 out of the checkpoint cabin’s safe, pulled out an antenna as pliant as a fishing rod and then sent tender, mysterious words out into the airwaves: “Hello, come in Rose! Come in, Rose! This is Peony! This is Peony! Do you copy? Do you copy?”
Making a revolting sound, Fidel tried the rusty latch pins in the transit corridor. He counted prisoner identification cards, took keys from the weapons room, checked the “Amber” and “Flytrap” escape alarms, felt the stove to see if it was hot. He became a management-zone controller.
The zeks built bonfires. The log-truck drivers stood in line for motor oil. The sentries in the watchtowers called out to one another. Sergeant Shumeyko, whose personality was appreciated fully only after the fight in Koyna, fell asleep quietly on the trestle bed, though it was supposed to be reserved for soldiers off duty.
The twelve guard positions over the forest were fully established. The working day had begun.
All around: the smoke of campfires, the hum of motors, the smell of fresh sawdust, the calls of the sentries. This life slowly dissolved into the pale September sky.
The pines fell with a reverberating crash. Tractors dragged them away, uprooting bushes. The sun reflected off the truck headlights in blinding spots, and words soundlessly rushed through the spacious air above the logging sector: “Come in, Rose! Come in, Rose! This is Peony! This is Peony! The sentries are in the watchtowers! Alarms in order! Restricted zone in operation! Thieves at work! Over! Do you copy? Do you copy?”
The controller admitted me into the zone. I heard the unpleasant slide click of the bolts behind me. By the campfire, the cook, a trusty named Galimulin, was filling a chifir tub.* I walked past him, even though the use of chifir was strictly forbidden, since drinking it was equated with drug use in the regulations. But the whole camp population drank chifir, and we knew it.
Galimulin winked at me. Then I knew for certain that my liberalism had gone too far. All I could do was threaten him with solitary, at which point Galimulin made me a present of his Asiatic smile. His front teeth were missing.
I walked past a newly cut tree trunk, admiring its yellow cross section, and made way for a tractor, which was noisily breaking branches. Shielding my face from spiderwebs, I cut through the forest to the machine shop.