IN OCTOBER THEY DISQUALIFIED ME for bad conduct in the ring, and I was deprived of all the substantial privileges of an athlete. The result was that I found myself back in the guard battalion with the duties of a private. At night the smell of foot cloths wrapped around the tops of boots deprived me of sleep. As a finishing touch, Lance Corporal Blindyak screamed at me in front of the entire outfit: “I’ll ROT you, you carrion, I’ll ROT you!”
Given the situation, my appointment as company clerk was a piece of unheard-of luck. Apparently, the decisive factor had been my unfinished higher education. I had got through three years at Leningrad State University. I think I was the most educated man in the Komi Autonomous Republic.
Early in the morning, I used to sweep the porch at HQ. The snow-covered square would be criss-crossed with the mighty streamings of the guards. I would go out on the road and wait there for the captain.
Once I saw him, I would start walking faster, raise my palm sharply to my cap, and say in a feckless, mechanical voice, “Good health to you, sir!”
Then, letting my palm drop as if completely sapped by the effort, I would ask in a respectful-familiar tone, “How’d you sleep, Uncle Lyonya?” and then immediately stop speaking, as if embarrassed by the warm feeling that overcame me.
The life of Captain Tokar was made up of courage and drunkenness. Stumbling, he walked a narrow line between these two oceans.
Briefly, his life was unsuccessful. His wife lived in Moscow and danced on the stage under a different name. And his son was a jockey. Recently, he had sent a photograph: a horse, a bucket and some kinds of boards.
For the captain, the embodiment of courage had become tidiness, a sharp voice and the ability to keep drinking without having anything to eat.
Once he reached his office, Tokar took off his raincoat. On his neck, the thin line of his collar showed white, like a bad omen.
“Where’s Barkovets?” he asked. “Call him!”
Lance Corporal Barkovets appeared in the doorway. He did something funny with his leg, his shoulder, he rolled his eyes. To put it simply, he put on a show of feeling guilty that was crude and completely unconvincing.
Using his thumbs, Tokar tucked and smoothed his khaki officer’s tunic.
“Lance Corporal Barkovets, for shame!” he said. “Who addressed a four-letter word at Lieutenant Khuriyev yesterday?”
“Comrade Captain—”
“Silence!”
“If you had been there—”
“I order you to be quiet!”
“—you yourself would have agreed—”
“I’ll have you arrested, Barkovets!”
“—that I justly… called him to order.”
“Four days of arrest,” the captain said, “one for each letter.”
When the lance corporal had gone, Tokar said to me, “It seems that Muscovites are people with a sense of humour.”
“That’s true.”
“Were you ever in Moscow?”
“Twice, to box.”
“Did you ever go to the races?”
“Never.”
“It would be interesting to know – what kind of people are jockeys?”
“I really have no idea.”
“Athletic types?”
“Something like that.”
Tokar reached home. A black cocker spaniel threw itself at his feet, sitting in delight.
“Brooch, little Broochie,” Tokar whispered, dropping slices of “Doctor”-brand sausage onto the snow.
At home: warm vodka, the latest news. In the table drawer, a pistol.
“Brooch, Broochie, my only friend… Anikin’s getting his demobilization… All the rest of them are climbing up in the world. That idiot Pantaleyev is at General Headquarters… Reismann is a professor, he’s got his own apartment… Of course, Reismann would probably have got his own apartment in Maydanek… Well, Brooch, so what about us two? Valentina, the bitch, doesn’t write. Mitya sends a horse…”
Outside the window, cold and gloom. Snowdrifts had surrounded the cabin. Not a sound, not a rustle; take a drink and wait. And how long you have to wait you never know. If only the dogs would begin to bark, or the lamp go out, you could fill your glass again.
And that was how he always fell asleep, with his shoulder belt and khaki tunic and boots on. The lamp would burn till morning.
And in the morning I would again walk past the defiled square towards the gates, snap my palm smartly to my cap, then drop it limply and say in a voice that quavered with affection, “How was the night, Uncle Lenya?”
At one time I had been a promising army heavyweight and the sports instructor at section headquarters. Before working at headquarters, I’d done guard service in the production zone. And preceding all of the above, there had been an interview long ago with an official in the regional war office.
“You’re an educated fellow,” the commissar had said. “You could train to be a sergeant, or get into the rocket units… But the ones who go into the guard section are the kind who have nothing to lose.”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t have anything to lose.”
The commissar looked at me distrustfully. “In what sense?”
“I’ve been expelled from the university, divorced by my wife…”
I felt like being frank and natural. My arguments did not convince the commissar. He said, “Maybe you, you know… took something you shouldn’t have? And now you’re trying to get out of it?”
“Right,” I said. “A beggar’s tin cup with some copper coins.”
“I didn’t understand that,” the commissar said, starting.
“That was supposed to be a joke.”
“What was funny about it?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Listen, young man, I am telling you as I would a friend – guard duty is hell!”
Then I answered that hell is in us ourselves. Only we didn’t notice it.
“And in my opinion,” the commissar said, “you’re trying to be a little too clever.”
Disappointed at not figuring me out, the commissar began to fill out my documents.
In a month’s time, I was at the supervisor-training school near Ropcha. And after another month, the inspector of hand-to-hand combat, Toroptsev, said to us in parting: “Remember, it is possible to save yourself from the knife. You can block an axe. You can take away a pistol. You can do anything! But if you can run away – run! Run, son, and don’t look back.”
In my pocket I carried written instructions. The fourth item read: “If a guard finds himself in a hopeless situation, he gives this command to the sentry: ‘DIRECT YOUR FIRE AT ME.’”
The penal isolator, night. Behind the wall, rattling his handcuffs, Anagi wandered from corner to corner. Security Officer Bortashevich said to me, “Of course, anything can happen. People are nervous, egocentric to the limit. For example? Once in the logging sector they wanted to saw off my head with a “Friendship”-brand power saw.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Well, what do you think happened? I took away the power saw and smashed the guy’s face in.”
“That explains that.”
“Then there was the business with an axe in a transit station.”
“So? How did it end?”
“I took away the axe, gave this fellow one in the jaw…”
“I see.”
“Once a zek high on chifir came at me with a knife.”
“So you took away the knife and punched him in the face?” Bortashevich looked at me closely, then unbuttoned his fatigue shirt. I saw a small, white, soul-chilling scar.
At night I hurried from headquarters to the barracks. The shortest way was through the zone. I marched past the identical barracks, past yellow light bulbs in wire casings. I hurried, feeling the kinship of silence and frost.
From time to time, barracks doors were thrown open. A zek jumped out of one heated dwelling in a cloud of white steam. He urinated, lit a cigarette, yelled to the sentry in the watchtower, “Allo, Chief! Which one of us is in prison? You or me?”