“I’m not answerable for anyone, in any shape or form, I wouldn’t even answer for you, if they asked me! But the school happens to be under your jurisdiction, Akim Akimich. If you could arrange to have a professional teacher sent here, I should be delighted to hear it…”
That deflated him, for he was both leery of responsibility and flattered to have some degree of it in the midst of all this hateful sand which makes you want to drink yourself into oblivion. Mentally, he considered the pleasure of ordering in the Polish woman for an interview laced with implicit threats, at the end of which might lie the belly of a white woman…
“I’ll think about it… It’s true that we should make the most of the human material we’ve got… How’s morale among the Kazaks?”
“They’re hungry, Akim Akimich.”
“And you think I’m not hungry too?”
“Much less than they are, Akim Akimich.”
He spat into the inkwell and scraped at it with a classroom quill.
“I’m even starved of ink. The newspapers I read are a month old. I haven’t seen a blade of grass for two years.”
“The Kazaks of Aul-Ata have never seen one,” Daria reflected, and they never will… But she was beginning to warm to this embittered lonely officer who probably doesn’t trust his trio of Uzbek soldiers. “Will you permit me to send you some books about the war?” “Not about the war. I know all there is to know about that. What it does to men! No book can do it justice… You can send me things on plants. With pictures of trees, if possible. A botanical treatise.”
“Or the tale of the Sleeping Forest?”
“And of the whispering reeds, Comrade!”
They regarded each other amicably. And yet how he had plagued her, this wrinkled, red-haired, crafty Akim, delaying the mail and spreading ridiculous rumors about her with the wiles of a village sorcerer — just to enliven the tedium of the desert days and give himself the illusion of existing as a human!
A blizzard of thickly falling snowflakes, more opaque than white, held nightfall back over the airfield and gave Daria her first deep thrill. Snow, I salute you, dear whirling snow, you that soften the cold and fill the darkest of nights with intimations of lightness, blotting the pathways, making space huge, and setting the wolves to howling! You deliver me from the sands, no more desert, yesterday is simply the past. You deliver me from the rot of inaction. We never feel ourselves dying in life except through such contrasts, when one present suddenly splits apart to let another in, and we come back to life as yesterday’s being dies. When the slaughter is over, perhaps man will find that by transcending erstwhile distances, by flying over continents and climates, he has grown and conquered the possibility of self-renewal. Who knows, one day neuroses may be treated with airplane travel.
“Military ID check. Are you dreaming, Citizen?”
“Yes, I am,” said Daria joyfully.
The small snow-covered shack was glacial; a single bulb struggled fearfully against the piercing night. Haggard NCOs, their boney faces framed in fur, were working noiselessly. One murmured numbers into the telephone. Another was changing the dressing on his right wrist. The one who had just spoken was going over some papers. He sniffed as he heard the crump of an explosion reverberating into the emptiness beyond, like the dying sigh of some colossal monster.
“They’ve got ammunition to spare, the bastards! It’s the same thing night after night.”
Her three documents were in order, unambiguously so, yet tainted by a whiff of mystery and prison. The man looked her coldly up and down, not without sympathy. People so rarely emerge from mysteries and prisons these days… Then again, it seems it’s possible to survive and that nearly everyone will have his turn…
“You won’t be able to report to military headquarters until tomorrow… Do you want to spend the night here in the barracks? You’re welcome to my bunk, Citizen. It’s all right as shelters go. I’m on duty till dawn.”
Klimentii stepped in and Daria realized that he was waiting for her. “The citizen can easily spend the night at my place…” The checkpoint corporal stared at them. He was around twenty years old, extremely skinny, with scarcely more than a glimmer, an indomitable spark, of vitality left in him.
“Been at the front long?”
“Oh, about a hundred years.”
“Is that all?”
“Not enough in your opinion? Try it.”
Embarrassed at seeming to rebuff a kindness, Daria said, “Thanks all the same, Comrade.” He threw a black look at before resuming his businesslike manner. “Four hundred yards to the truck. Compulsory wearing of shrouds. And no smoking!” One swoops down from the sky, having vanquished distance and danger, and then one puts on a shroud to go into the city at night… The conceit pleased Daria as she got into the loose, hooded overgarment of white canvas. The twenty-year-old NCO sang under his breath:
He walked ahead of the new arrivals through the swarm of gray flakes that softly buried everything around. Their shrouded forms, resembling dim cutouts of fog, were invisible at more than three paces. Klimentii was silent. Daria continued the poem in her mind, lines once written by a poet (who had recently died or been killed at the front) for another poet, who had killed himself.[27] So it goes with our poets, Old Russia, Young Russia!
Frustrated at being unable to recall more than that one quat-rain, she racked her brain for other important lines, those two lines that say it all — how do they go? She stumbled in the pathless snow, dark as cinders. Klim’s arm held her up firmly as she was about to fall, and Daria regained her balance like a dancer on her partner’s arm. “What did you say?” he asked softly. “Nothing, I was remembering two lines of poetry…” But he had already let go, and the two meaningful lines shone for her alone, unspoken:
She almost bumped into the ghostly truck. The journey was slow, guided by phosphorescent signals that moved along the ground. The invisible convoy traveled through a shifting, milky gloom of formless shadows. A desperate cold penetrated the flesh. The suffering was one of organic extinction and it effectively extinguished all thoughts apart from the craving for deliverance, the craving for warmth. Klim, Daria, and three shapeless, faceless soldiers squeezed together into a human heap at the back of the truck so as to conserve their meager supply of warmth. At times all that Daria could see were a pair of slanted eyes, green as a cat’s, seemingly full of quiet anger. It went on forever. Toward the end, a hand crawled between the compacted furs and bodies to find Daria’s gloved hand as though by instinct, squeezed it, and she returned the friendly pressure. Klim said, “We’re entering the city…” How did he know? They couldn’t see a thing. But through the gash in the mica window black walls slid by. The truck was weaving slowly, no doubt to avoid the potholes. Melodious night-watchmen’s whistles rang out. Klim extracted himself from the huddle. “Ahoy, comrade chauffeur! Stop your dreadnought. I’ve reached port.” The driver was clearly in no hurry to oblige, either because he was hanging on to the wheel half asleep or because he had no sympathy for someone who thought he’d reached port: you’re never home safe in this bloody life, or when you are, it blows up in your face. No such thing as a port! Not even a berth in the cemetery, unless you can produce half a loaf for the grave-digger! Barely raising his voice, Klim displayed his cursing abilities with contained fury in a barrage of the filthiest army swearwords combined with imperious supplication. The truck hiccupped to a halt, like a drunken mastodon. Klim helped Daria to get down. All that could be seen of the driver was his bearish bulk as he hopped up and down on the ground to get his circulation going and to shake off the cold. (The dancing bear, the fossil mastodon…) It was no longer snowing; there was not a spark of life in the night.