I paid, and Tonechka held out two bottles of wine, which Fidel dropped in the big side pockets of his fatigues. Then we bought some halva and two jars of salt pork.
Fidel said, “Buy some herring.”
Tonechka said, “The herring smells.”
“What, bad?” Fidel asked.
“Yes,” Tonechka said, “not too good.”
We left the commissary and walked uphill until we came to a barracks with a dim light bulb above the entrance. Sinking in the snowdrifts, we went up to the window and knocked. A flat face immediately looked out, and a girl with her hair undone nodded several times, pointing to the door.
A bucket covered with a piece of plywood stood by the entrance. Quilted jackets hung in the corner, and there were ropes, scoops and hooks lying under them.
It was warm in the barracks. The pipe of a cast-iron stove, filled with rosy warmth, stretched diagonally from corner to corner. Overcoats and quilted jackets had been thrown onto the bunks. Fragments of a mirror and colour photographs from magazines were tacked to the rotten beams. Unwashed dishes were piled up on the night tables.
We took off our sheepskin jackets and sat down at the plank tables. A few feet away somebody was sleeping, covered with a coat. A woman in a fatigue shirt was sitting by the window, her back to us, reading a book. She didn’t even say hello.
“Make yourselves at home, since you’re here,” said the girl with her hair down. She was wearing loose raspberry-coloured trousers and badly made cheap leather boots. Her friend, who had a pale and spiteful face, was wearing a maroon ski jacket, a tight cloth skirt and slippers.
We took out the bottles and salt pork.
The girls brought out some enamelled mugs and bread. They kept nudging each other and laughing.
On the window sill was a transistor radio, looking out of place among all the rubbish.
The girl in the red trousers was called Zina, and her girlfriend in the skirt introduced herself in a bass voice as Nadezhda Amosova.
“Boys,” Zina asked, “are you from the camp guards?”
“No,” Fidel said, “we’re artists. Prize winners. And here’s my sax.” He waved the sub-machine gun above his head.
“Boys,” Nadya asked, “you a little cracked or something?”
“Yeah,” I said, “we’re mental cases. Cock-a-doodle-doo!”
Fidel poured out the wine, clinking the bottle against the enamelled mugs. “To our health!” he said.
“To our health!” I said.
“You’ll be healthy, don’t worry,” Zina said. “We get check-ups.”
Someone kept walking the length of the barracks behind us, somebody cursed, somebody slammed a book shut when we turned on the radio, somebody was drinking water by the door. After that some men from the sawmill showed up. They saw our sheepskin jackets on the bench and wouldn’t sit down, and instead they milled around the window for a long time, plotting something.
But I paid no attention to any of that because I had suddenly thought back to the time when I arrived in Vozhayel with the first snowfall for the orientation sessions of the supervisory staff. They quartered us in a forty-man tent with two tiers of bunks. The stove made the lower tier hot, but the wind whipped under the sides of the sagging tarpaulin. Each morning we went in a disorderly group to the training-ground mess hall. Then we did exercises in the gym, or leafed through our instructions so that we could disperse at six o’clock after eating – some of us going to visit people we knew, some to dances at the local club, where an orchestra rumbled, and excited girls searched for officers in the crowd, and privates in stuffy dress coats and boots shining like fake jewellery huddled against the wall, smelling of aftershave and the stables. Once the jazz stopped, they would leave the club and walk home in the dark or ride in the back of a battalion truck. Then for a long time under the vault of the forty-man tent gross and filthy swearing would be heard, directed without exception at all the women in the world.
One night I turned off the road, which was already rock hard from the first freeze, and walked down a path hugged by snowdrifts to the library. I climbed up the steep wooden steps to the third floor, opened the door, and stood at the threshold.
The reading room was quiet and empty. Bookcases shimmered against the wall. Several old-fashioned pictures gave the room a solemn air. I walked up to the wooden counter. A woman of about thirty, wearing glasses, with a thin face and pale lips, came towards me. She had delicate skin and a rather long nose. When she looked at me, taking off her glasses and touching the bridge of her nose, I felt her looking at me with an unexpectedly sure, impertinent, boyish stare. I asked for a book of Bunin’s stories which I had loved when I was still in school, and after signing it out on a square bluish form, I sat down by the window. I switched on a goose-necked lamp, put my elbows on the cold table, and got absorbed in reading.
The woman got up several times and walked out of the room, and sometimes she looked at me, and suddenly I realized that she wasn’t afraid of anything happening but just liked being silent. Then she started to move chairs, and I stood up to help, and I noticed that she had on an old-fashioned dress of very stiff, dark, cool material and fur-lined Chukchi slippers.* Then I accidentally touched her hand, and for an instant my heart stopped, and I thought with fear of how unaccustomed I had grown to the things which made life worth living, of how much I had lost, of what had been taken from me, of how much happiness had swept by me on those nights full of hatred and fear, when the floorboards crack from the frost and dogs bay in the kennel and you sit in the isolator and listen to Anagi-Zadye clinking his manacles behind the wall and the miserable, frozen, unchanging days drag on outside the window, delaying the mail.
I went back to the table and slammed the book shut, and without looking back I went down the stairs, struggled to light a cigarette, and walked the kilometre and a half back to the military settlement.
Now I remembered all this and I said to Fidel, “Let’s get out of here.”
“Now what!” Fidel said.
“Finish the wine and let’s go.”
The girls asked, “What’s wrong with you guys? Brides waiting for you or something?” And they burst out laughing as we left.
We walked under the stars, everything silent, and made our way along the fence to the hollow which ended in the dark and bulky silhouette of HQ. Suddenly shadows fell on the path and the men from the sawmill appeared in front of us, but Fidel immediately swung the sub-machine gun to his chest like an SS man and said simply, “In the forest I shoot without warning!”
They cursed and disappeared among the trees in the darkness.
I walked in front, orienting myself by the silhouette of the exercise frame with its hanging ropes, which was set up in front of headquarters. Dark against the background of the sky, it looked like gallows. Fidel walked behind me.
The path was narrow, no wider than a ski track, and I kept stumbling.
When we rounded the last house of the settlement, I saw a light in the window of the library. I stopped and thought of the woman who sat at the lighted table behind bastions of bookcases in a quiet and warm space with an invisible stove, and then it seemed as though I was walking up the wooden stairs and along the corridor, leaving wet footprints behind me: I throw open the door, the woman stands up, her old-fashioned earrings swing gently and the silence is so complete that I can hear their melodic sound. The woman takes off her glasses and touches the bridge of her nose with an expression of barely noticeable annoyance, and I feel her unwomanlike, bold gaze on me.