“I couldn’t stop before, idiot, it’s not a good place. Bombs fall on it. I don’t give a fart for your skin, but I’m responsible for the vehicle, you jackass.”
“My skin, your skin, and your rolling rat-trap, add ’em all up and the price is still cheap,” observed Klim sagely. “Here, take a swig.”
He passed his canteen to the dancing-bear man.
“That’s better,” the driver said, after drinking. “Thanks, brother. Six months I’ve been driving this piece of shit over this god-damn road, and still not a scratch! Can’t last, can it?”
“Sure it can, brother. The road can last.”
“Wiseass!” said the other, chuckling.
“There is no right to live and no right to die,” thought Daria, who had grown so stiff with cold and immobility that she found it hard to walk. “Klim, where are we?” “Near the Tauride Palace.” A handsome, wealthy district in its time, built around a little palace with a cupola and white peristyle; a poem of a park with pond, willows, silver birches; the history of the heady days of 1917. And now there was nothing left but the towering cliffs of a dead city. Yet there were watchful souls in this necropolis, since suddenly, inexplicably, one was beside them, and a ragged voice was saying, “Your papers, please, Citizens.” The watchful soul played its torch beam over the frame of a door where the wind gusted malignantly through two gaping holes. “These are not permits to circulate at night, Citizens.” Now it was a woman’s voice, cracked and hoarse. “Orders to complete mission. Valid twenty-four hours,” explained Klim. Swaddled in sheepskin to the eyes, to the mouth, the woman leveled her short carbine at them. “Drink,” said Klim, proffering the canteen. Before accepting she shone her light into their two faces and was reassured. “Show us your face too,” Daria said gently. The woman with the carbine turned a furtive beam onto herself. Her hard features seemed molded out of gray clay, nostrils like flared dark holes, tiny penetrating black eyes. “Look at me,” she cackled, comforted by a draft of alcohol, “a beauty, right?” Her laugh was bitter, cut off abruptly. “Now don’t take that street, you’d be stopped by the artillery gang, real pains in the ass… Go around by the demolition site, and watch out for the crater, it’s a nasty one…” One arm pointing the way through nothingness, she guided them on for a while. “I know my way around here, thanks,” Klim began to say; at that moment he tripped and nearly fell over something like a flabby stone. Stooping, he whispered, “It’s someone,” having bitten back the words “a corpse.” All three knelt down to touch the elongated human form. “Wasn’t there when I made my rounds,” grumbled the militiawoman. “Always the same thing…” The flashlight revealed the supine body of a woman in a cavalry greatcoat, whose open eyes inertly reflected the light playing over them. “Dropped dead,” said the militiawoman. “No mistaking those eyes… They go out without a permit and drop dead in a vacant lot.” “Dropping dead without a permit,” commented Klim. The pocket lamp threw the dead woman’s hands into momentary relief. The right was still clasped around an end of twine, leading to a small sled piled with broken boards and a saucepan full of ice. “She’s from the neighborhood, for sure…” the woman said ruminatively. “Was it hunger?” Daria asked. “What d’you think? Ah, well. I’ll take care of it tomorrow. Our daily bread, as you might say.”
And the right to die… “Klim,” asked Daria, pressing into the young soldier’s side as they walked, “is suicide punished, in the army?” “Obviously, if you bungle it… And it should be. Selfishness must be punished — so must incompetence.” They circled the massive crater: at the bottom, under fissured ice, they half glimpsed the murkiness of water with eyes that had grown accustomed to unrelieved night. A street welcomed them, petrified but intact. “Home!” Klim announced. “Be the welcome guest, Daria Nikiforovna, I offer thee bread and salt.” She looked up at the strangely smooth wall, four stories high, which seemed to be — no, was — swaying with a faraway deadened crackle, as of winds in sails. “Unusual architecture, hmm? You can admire it in the morning. Canvas, light wood frames, some paint, and you’d be fooled at a hundred yards. Well, no one is fooled anymore… The wall collapsed six months ago under a bomb. Four picturesque and habitable apartments survived…” He knocked on a rickety door, sending waves up the façade. “Who’s there?” Klim spoke his name, a small grill half opened, and someone could be heard dislodging the timbers that braced the entrance. It was a grizzled old man whom nothing could surprise, of that race of solitary hunters from the forests of the north who have preserved the same beard, the same eyes, the same attire, the same gait since Scythian times. “Still alive and kicking, then, Frol!” “Yes, God forgive me,” quavered Frol into his beard with unexpected meekness. “How about the tenants?” The reply came vaguely: “To each his fate…” “When’s this filthy war going to end, Uncle?” They had begun speaking by the light of a match, now they could not see one another. Idly the old Scythian cracked his joints. “Never, my boy, never. Good night.” He began to re-barricade the entrance.
The staircase mounted steeply toward the sky whose cloudy vastness was visible. To the right, on the very edge of the drop, Klim unlatched a door which he closed behind Daria. The air, though it felt less icy cold in this obscurity, was rank and stagnant, clammy with slumber: a glow between his fingers revealed two blond infants, packed side by side into a sort of basket. The skin lay so gray over their bones that they might have been dead. At last he undid the padlock to his room. He lit a church candle which yielded but a tiny flame, joyful after so much night. He rubbed his hands, dropping satchels, muster bag, and parcels to the floor. “Make yourself at home, Daria Nikiforovna, we’re going to make a fire…” They were in a storage closet measuring some six feet square. It contained only a mattress covered by a knot of grubby blankets, a small brick stove whose pipe vanished through a clumsily hacked hole in the wall, and a splendid armchair with green velvet upholstery. Designed for the soft white ass of some high-ranking functionary, preserved through wars, revolutions, industrializations, and bombardments, this old-fashioned armchair provoked a half-crazed squeal of laughter in Daria. In a corner lay some gas masks and a German helmet. The fire, already built up with splintered parquet for kindling, burst into life at once. Klim went to wake the neighbors and scrounge a little water; he put the kettle on. “Whenever I go away,” he explained, “I build a fire. It’s my love of comfort. And if one day I don’t return, the citizen who takes over the room will know I was someone who thought ahead. That’s all he’ll know of me…” He looked frail with his sheepskin off, “almost an adolescent,” Daria thought, but he was wearing the epaulettes of an NCO and two medals. “How old are you, Klim?” He clicked his heels, snapped to attention, and introduced himself. “Sublieutenant Gavrilovich Rybakov, twenty-three years of age, eighteen months at the front, three times wounded, three citations, ex-would-be teacher, bedrock optimist, some reservations about human nature.” “Me,” Daria said, “I’m an optimist about human nature, but over the very long term…” The young man was applying his army knife to a can of American corned beef. “Would a thousand years do for you, dear Comrade?”