FOR HIS TWELVE YEARS of service in labour camps, Yegorov had earned six Rocket-brand wristwatches. He kept them in an old tea tin. The stack of certificates of merit he kept in a table drawer.
Without being noticed, one more year slipped by. That year was dark with melting snow, noisy with the barking of guard dogs, bitter with coffee and old phonograph records.
Yegorov got ready to go on leave. Packing his things, he said to his friend, Security Officer Bortashevich, “I’ll go to Sochi. Buy a shirt with parrots on it. Find a lady tourist without prejudices.”
“You buy some prophylactics,” the security officer said, being practical.
“You’re no romantic, Zhenya,” Yegorov answered, taking several tiny packages out of a chest drawer. “These have been here since 1960.”
“And you mean – not once since then?” Bortashevich exclaimed.
“Not once in a human way. And what there was doesn’t count.”
“If you need money, wire me.”
“Money is not the problem,” the captain said.
He landed in Adler, bought raspberry-coloured shorts at the airport. Then he went on to Sochi by bus.
There he made the acquaintance of a graduate student named Katya Lugina. She wore her hair short, read Tsvetaeva’s prose,* and was not overly fond of Georgians.
In the evening, the captain and the young lady sat on the cooling sand. The sea smelt of fish and old plumbing. The piercing wails of a loudspeaker carried from a dance pavilion behind some bushes.
Yegorov looked around and yanked the girl over to him. She pulled away, feeling with outrage how hard his arms could be.
“Come on,” Yegorov said. “It’ll end with this anyway. No reason to play Madam Butterfly.”
Without raising her hand, Katya gave him a swift smack in the face.
“Stop,” the captain declared. “A blow with an open glove. In the ring, a referee would give you a warning.”
Katya did not smile. “Make an effort to curb your animal instincts.”
“I make no promise,” the captain said.
The girl gave Yegorov a peaceable look. “Let’s talk,” she said.
“About what, for example?” the captain asked flatly.
“Do you like Heine?”
“More or less.”
“And Schiller?”*
“And how.”
Next day they went boating. The girl sat in the stern. Yegorov rowed with wide strokes, deftly working the oars.
“You have to understand,” Katya would say, “Yesenin’s cynicism was just a mask. Bravado is characteristic of people who are extremely vulnerable.”
Or: “Last summer, I was going out with Yuri Shtokolov, the opera singer. Once we were visiting friends, and Yuri started singing, and his pitch shattered two wineglasses.”
“That’s happened to me too,” the captain said, “breaking dishes at a friend’s house. It’s normal. For that to happen you don’t even need a strong voice.”
Or: “It seems to me that reason is the intelligible manifestation of feelings. Do you agree?”
“I agree,” the captain said. “I’ve simply got out of the habit.”
It happened once that they met another boat at sea. The letters of her name were traced under the wheel – Esmeralda.
“Hey, ahoy there!” Yegorov yelled, sensing, with all his experience and also his skin, trouble ahead. He felt an unpleasant cold twinge in his stomach.
A man in a green skintight sports shirt was steering the Esmeralda. In the stern lay a carefully folded blue jacket.
The captain recognized this man at once.
“Ugh, how awkward,” he thought to himself. “Devilishly awkward in front of the young lady. It’ll turn out like some phoney detective story…”
Yegorov turned the boat around, and without looking back he headed for shore.
They were sitting in a little place up in the mountains that served grilled meat. Faces shone, the lamps flickered, a greasy haze filled the room.
Yegorov tolerantly drank Riesling while Katya was saying, “You’ve got to tear yourself out of that hell… out of that accursed taiga. You are energetic, ambitious, you could still do great things.”
“Each person has his own work,” the captain explained patiently, “his own occupation. Some people get into my line of work. Someone has to do the job, don’t they?”
“But why does it have to be you?”
“I have the right abilities. My nerves are good, I have few relatives…”
“But you have a law degree, don’t you?”
“To some extent, that makes the job easier.”
“If you only knew, Pavel Romanych,” Katya said, “if you only knew… Ach, how much better you are than all my Odessa friends! All those Mariks, Shuriks, Toliks, the various Stases there with their orange socks…”
“I’ve got orange socks too,” the captain said. “What’s the big deal? I got them on the black market.”
A man with a red nose came up to their table.
“I’ve figured out the recipe of your new cocktail,” Yegorov said. “Powerful stuff! One part Riesling and one part water.”
They walked to the door. By the window sat the man in the tight green shirt, peeling an orange. Yegorov wanted to walk past, but the man addressed him, saying, “You recognize me, Citizen Chief?”
An action film, Yegorov thought, a Western… “No,” he said.
“And the penal isolator, you remember that?”
“No, I just said.”
“And the transit camp at Vityu?”
“No transit camp whatever. I’m on leave.”
“How about the logging sector outside Sindor?” the former zek asked without letting up.
“Too many mosquitoes there,” Yegorov remembered.
The man stood up. A narrow white blade stuck out of his hand. The captain instantly felt big and soft, lost all sense of smell and colour. All the lights went out. The sensations of life, death, the end, collapse, tapered to their limit. They stationed themselves on his chest beneath his flimsy shirt and merged into the blindingly white stripe of the knife.
The man sat down and went back to peeling the orange.
“What did he want?” the girl asked. “Who was that?”
“A vestige of capitalism,” Yegorov replied, “but, to put it more bluntly, considerable scum. Forgive me…”
While he said this, the captain was thinking of many things. He wanted to take his PM out of his pocket, then raise his hand abruptly, then lower it to those hate-filled eyes, then curse hard and press the trigger…
None of this happened. The man sat motionless. It was the motionlessness of an anti-tank mine.
“You better pray I don’t meet you again,” Yegorov said distinctly, “or I’ll shoot you like a dog.”
The captain and the girl strolled down a tree-lined alley. Cypresses cast their shadows across it.
“A marvellous evening,” Katya said cautiously.
“Eighteen degrees centigrade,” clarified the captain.
An aeroplane flew low over their heads. Its round windows were lit up. Katya said, “In a moment it will be out of sight. And what do we know about the people inside it? The aeroplane will disappear. It will carry away tiny, invisible worlds. And we’ll feel sad, I don’t know why…”
“Yekaterina Sergeyevna,” the captain said solemnly, and he halted. “Hear me out. I’m a lonely man… I love you… This is foolish… I have no time, my leave is ending… I’ll try… Brush up on the classics… Well, and so forth… I beg you…”
Katya laughed.
“All the best,” the captain said. “Don’t be angry with me. Farewell.”
“Are you interested to know what I think? Do you want to hear me out?”
“I’m interested,” the captain said. “I want to.”
“I’m very grateful to you, Pavel Romanych. I’ll talk it over with someone… and go away with you.”
He took a step to her. The girl’s lips were warm and rough as a small leaf warmed by the sun.