The medic Angelyar brought two orderlies to the edge of the forest with a stretcher. The doctor ordered them to take care of the wounded, and went himself to the telephonist, who lay without moving. He vaguely hoped that the man might still be breathing and that he might be brought back to life. But the telephonist was dead. To make finally sure of it, Yuri Andreevich unbuttoned the shirt on his chest and began listening to his heart. It was not beating.
The dead man had an amulet on a string around his neck. Yuri Andreevich removed it. In it there turned out to be a piece of paper, decayed and worn at the edges, sewn into a scrap of cloth. The doctor unfolded its half-detached and disintegrating parts.
The paper contained excerpts from the ninety-first psalm, with those changes and errors that people introduce into prayers, gradually moving further from the original as they recopy it. The fragments of the Church Slavonic text on the paper were rewritten in Russian.3
In the psalm it is said: “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High.” In the paper this became the title of a spell: “Dwellers in Secret.” The verse of the psalm “Thou shalt not be afraid … of the arrow that flieth by day” was misinterpreted as words of encouragement: “Have no fear of the arrow flying by thee.” “Because he hath known my name,” says the psalm. And the paper: “Because he half knows my name.” “I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him” in the paper became: “It will be winter and trouble, I will shiver for him.”
The text of the psalm was considered miracle-working, a protection against bullets. Troops already wore it as a talisman in the last imperialist war. Decades went by, and much later arrested people started sewing it into their clothing, and convicts in prison repeated it to themselves when they were summoned to the investigators for night interrogations.
From the telephonist, Yuri Andreevich went to the clearing, to the body of the young White Guard he had killed. The features of innocence and an all-forgiving suffering were written on the young man’s handsome face. “Why did I kill him?” thought the doctor.
He unbuttoned the dead man’s greatcoat and opened its skirts wide. On the lining, in calligraphic lettering by a careful and loving hand, no doubt a mother’s, there was embroidered “Seryozha Rantsevich”—the first and last name of the dead man.
Through the opening of Seryozha’s shirt a little cross fell and hung outside on a chain, with a medallion, and also some flat little gold case or snuff box with a damaged lid, as if pushed in by a nail. The little case was half open. A folded piece of paper fell out of it. The doctor unfolded it and could not believe his eyes. It was the same ninety-first psalm, only typed and in all its Slavonic genuineness.
Just then Seryozha moaned and stretched. He was alive. As it turned out later, he had been stunned by a slight internal contusion. A spent bullet had hit the face of his mother’s amulet, and that had saved him. But what was he to do with the unconscious man?
The brutality of the fighting men had by that time reached the extreme. Prisoners were never brought alive to their destination, and enemy wounded were finished off on the spot.
Given the fluctuating makeup of the forest militia, which new volunteers kept joining, and old members kept deserting and going over to the enemy, it was possible, by preserving the strictest secrecy, to pass Rantsevich off as a new, recently joined-up ally.
Yuri Andreevich took the outer clothing off the dead telephonist and, with the help of Angelyar, whom the doctor initiated into his plan, put it on the young man, who had not regained consciousness.
Together with his assistant, he nursed the boy back to health. When Rantsevich was fully recovered, they let him go, though he did not conceal from his saviors that he would return to the ranks of Kolchak’s army and continue fighting the Reds.
5
In the fall the partisans camped at Fox Point, a small wood on a high knoll, under which a swift, foaming river raced, surrounding it on three sides and eroding the bank with its current.
Before the partisans, Kappel’s troops had wintered there. They had fortified the wood with their own hands and the labor of the local inhabitants, but in spring they had abandoned it. Now the partisans settled into their unblown-up dugouts, trenches, and passages.
Liberius Averkievich shared his dugout with the doctor. For the second night he engaged him in conversation, not letting him sleep.
“I wish I knew what my esteemed parent, my respected Vater, my Papachen, is doing now.”
“Lord, I simply can’t stand that clowning tone,” the doctor sighed to himself. “And he’s the very spit and image of his father!”
“As far as I have concluded from our previous talks, you came to know Averky Stepanovich sufficiently well. And, as it seems to me, are of a rather good opinion of him. Eh, my dear sir?”
“Liberius Averkievich, tomorrow we have a pre-election meeting at the stamping ground. Besides that, the trial of the moonshining orderlies is upon us. Lajos and I haven’t prepared the materials for that yet. We’re going to get together tomorrow in order to do so. And I haven’t slept for two nights. Let’s put off our discussion. Be a good heart.”
“No, still, let’s get back to Averky Stepanovich. What do you say about the old man?”
“Your father is still quite young, Liberius Averkievich. Why do you speak of him like that? But for now I’ll answer you. I’ve often told you that I have trouble making out the separate gradations of the socialistic infusion, and I don’t see any particular difference between Bolsheviks and other socialists. Your father is of the category of people to whom Russia owes the troubles and disorders of recent times. Averky Stepanovich is of the revolutionary type and character. Like you, he represents the Russian fermenting principle.”
“What is that, praise or blame?”
“I beg you once again to put off the dispute to a more convenient time. Besides that, I draw your attention to the cocaine that you have again been sniffing without restraint. You willfully appropriated it from the stock I’m in charge of. We need it for other purposes, not to mention that it’s a poison and I’m responsible for your health.”
“You weren’t at the study group again yesterday. Your social nerve has atrophied, as in illiterate peasant women or inveterately narrowminded philistines or bigots. And yet you’re a doctor, well-read, and it seems you even do some writing yourself. Explain to me, how does that tally?”
“I don’t know. It probably doesn’t tally, but there’s no help for it. I deserve to be pitied.”
“A humility worse than pride. Instead of smiling so sarcastically, you’d do better to familiarize yourself with the program of our courses and recognize your arrogance as inappropriate.”
“Good lord, Liberius Averkievich! What arrogance!? I bow down before your educative work. The survey of questions is repeated in the announcements. I’ve read it. Your thoughts about the spiritual development of the soldier are known to me. I admire them. Everything you say about the attitude of a soldier of the people’s army towards his comrades, towards the weak, towards the defenseless, towards woman, towards the idea of purity and honor—it’s all nearly the same as what formed the Dukhobor community, it’s a kind of Tolstoyism,4 it’s the dream of a dignified existence, which filled my adolescence. Who am I to laugh at such things?
“But, first, the ideas of general improvement, as they’ve been understood since October, don’t set me on fire. Second, it’s all still so far from realization, while the mere talk about it has been paid for with such seas of blood that I don’t think the end justifies the means. Third, and this is the main thing, when I hear about the remaking of life, I lose control of myself and fall into despair.
“The remaking of life! People who can reason like that may have been around, but they’ve never once known life, never felt its spirit, its soul. For them existence is a lump of coarse material, not yet ennobled by their touch, in need of being processed by them. But life has never been a material, a substance. It is, if you want to know, a continu
ally self-renewing, eternally self-recreating principle, it eternally alters and transforms itself, it is far above your and my dim-witted theories.”
“And yet attending meetings and socializing with our splendid, wonderful people would, I dare say, raise your spirits. You wouldn’t fall into melancholy. I know where it comes from. You’re depressed that they’re beating us and you don’t see any light ahead. But, my friend, one must never give way to panic. I know things that are much more terrible, concerning me personally—they’re not to be made public for now—and yet I don’t lose heart. Our failures are of a temporary nature. Kolchak’s downfall is inevitable. Remember my words. You’ll see. We’ll win. So take heart.”
“No, this is beyond anything!” the doctor thought. “What infantilism! What shortsightedness! I endlessly repeat to him about the opposition of our views, he took me by force and keeps me with him by force, and he imagines that his failures should upset me, and his calculations and hopes should fill me with high spirits. What self-blindness! The interests of the revolution and the existence of the solar system are the same for him.”
Yuri Andreevich cringed. He made no reply and only shrugged his shoulders, not even trying to conceal that Liberius’s naïveté had overflowed the measure of his patience and he could hardly control himself. That did not escape Liberius.
“You are angry, Jupiter, therefore you are wrong,” he said.
“Understand, understand, finally, that all this is not for me. ‘Jupiter,’ ‘Don’t give way to panic,’ ‘Whoever says A must say B,’ ‘The Moor has done his work, the Moor can go’5—all these banalities, all these phrases are not for me. I’ll say A, but I won’t say B, even if you burst. I grant that you’re all bright lights and liberators of Russia, that without you she would perish, drowned in poverty and ignorance, and nevertheless I can’t be bothered with you, and I spit on you, I don’t like you, and you can all go to the devil.
“The rulers of your minds indulge in proverbs, but they’ve forgotten the main one, that love cannot be forced, and they have a deeply rooted habit of liberating people and making them happy, especially those who haven’t asked for it. You probably fancy that there’s no better place in the world for me than your camp and your company. I probably should even bless you and thank you for my captivity, for your having liberated me from my family, my son, my home, my work, from everything that’s dear to me and that I live by.
“Rumors have reached us of the invasion of Varykino by an unknown, non-Russian unit. They say it’s been devastated and looted. Kamennodvorsky doesn’t deny it. My family and yours supposedly managed to escape. Some mythical slant-eyed people in quilted jackets and papakhas crossed the ice of the Rynva in a terrible frost, and, without an ill word spoken, shot everything alive in the village, and then vanished as mysteriously as they appeared. What do you know about it? Is it true?”
“Nonsense. Made up. Unverified gibberish spread by gossip mongers.”
“If you’re as kind and magnanimous as you are in your exhortations about the moral education of the soldiers, set me free. I’ll go in search of my family—I don’t even know if they’re alive or where they are. And if not, then please stop talking and leave me alone, because all the rest is uninteresting to me, and I can’t answer for myself. And, finally, devil take it, don’t I have the right simply to want to sleep?”
Yuri Andreevich lay prone on the bunk, his face in the pillow. He tried as hard as he could not to listen to Liberius justifying himself, continuing to reassure him that by spring the Whites would certainly be crushed. The civil war would be over, there would be freedom, prosperity, and peace. Then no one would dare to keep the doctor. But until then he had to bear with it. After all they had endured, after so many sacrifices and so much waiting, they would not have long to wait now. And where would the doctor go? For his own sake it was impossible right now to let him go anywhere.
“He keeps grinding away, the devil! Giving his tongue a workout! How can he not be ashamed to chew the same cud for so many years?” Yuri Andreevich sighed to himself in indignation. “He loves listening to himself, the golden-tongue, the wretched dope addict. Night isn’t night for him, there’s no sleep, no life where he is, curse him. Oh, how I hate him! As God is my witness, I’ll kill him some day.
“Oh, Tonya, my poor girl! Are you alive? Where are you? Lord, she must have given birth long ago! How did the delivery go? Who have we got, a boy or a girl? My dear ones, how are you all? Tonya, my eternal reproach and my guilt! Lara, I’m afraid to name you, so as not to breathe out my soul along with your name. Lord! Lord! And this one here keeps speechifying, he won’t shut up, the hateful, unfeeling brute! Oh, someday I’ll lose control and kill him, kill him.”
6
Indian summer was over. The clear days of golden autumn set in. The little wooden tower of the volunteers’ undestroyed blockhouse jutted up from the ground in the western corner of Fox Point. It was there that Yuri Andreevich had arranged to meet his assistant, Dr. Lajos, to discuss some general matters. Yuri Andreevich went there at the appointed time. While waiting for his colleague, he began pacing the dirt rim of the collapsed entrenchment, went up and into the watchtower, and looked through the empty loopholes of the machine-gun nest at the forest spreading beyond the river into the distance.
Autumn had already sharply marked the boundary between the coniferous and deciduous worlds in the forest. The first bristled in its depths like a gloomy, almost black wall; the second shone through the open spaces in fiery, wine-colored patches, like an ancient town with a fortress and gold-topped towers, built in the thick of the forest from its own timber.
The earth in the ditch, under the doctor’s feet, and in the ruts of the forest road, chilled and hardened by the morning frost, was thickly strewn and choked with fallen willow leaves, dry, small, as if clipped, rolled into little tubes. Autumn smelled of those bitter brown leaves and of a multitude of other seasonings. Yuri Andreevich greedily breathed in the complex spiciness of ice-cold preserved apples, bitter dryness, sweet dampness, and blue September fumes, reminiscent of the smoky steam of a campfire doused with water or a just-extinguished blaze.
Yuri Andreevich did not notice how Lajos came up to him from behind.
“Greetings, colleague,” he said in German. They got down to business.
“We have three points. The moonshiners, the reorganization of the infirmary and the pharmacy, and third, at my insistence, the treatment of mental illnesses out of hospital, in field conditions. Maybe you don’t see the need for it, but, from my observations, we’re going out of our minds, my dear Lajos, and the modern sorts of madness take on an infectious, contagious form.”
“A very interesting question. I’ll get to it later. Right now the thing is this. There’s ferment in the camp. The fate of the moonshiners arouses sympathy. Many are also worried about the fate of families who flee the villages from the Whites. Some of the partisans refuse to leave the camp in view of the approaching train of carts with their wives, children, and old people.”
“Yes, we’ll have to wait for them.”
“And all that before the election of a joint commander over our units and others not subordinate to us. I think the only real candidate is Comrade Liberius. A group of young men is putting up another, Vdovichenko. He’s supported by a wing alien to us, which has sided with the circle of the moonshiners—children of kulaks and shopkeepers, deserters from Kolchak. They’re especially noisy.”
“What do you think will happen with the orderlies who made and sold moonshine?”
“I think they’ll be sentenced to be shot and then pardoned, the sentence being made conditional.”
“Anyhow, we’re just chattering away. Let’s get down to business. The reorganizing of the infirmary. That’s what I’d like to consider first of all.”
“Very good. But I must say that I find nothing surprising in your suggestion about psychiatric prophylaxis. I’m of the same opinion myself. Mental illnesses of a most typical kind h
ave appeared and spread, bearing definite features of the time, and directly caused by the historical peculiarities of the epoch. We have a soldier here from the tsarist army, very politically conscious, with an inborn class instinct—Pamphil Palykh. He’s gone mad precisely from that, from fear for his family in case he’s killed and they fall into the hands of the Whites and have to answer for him. Very complex psychology. His family, it seems, is following in the refugee train and catching up with us. Insufficient knowledge of the language prevents me from questioning him properly. Find out from Angelyar or Kamennodvorsky. He ought to be examined.”
“I know Palykh very well. How could I not! At one time we kept running into each other at the army council. Dark-haired, cruel, with a low brow. I don’t understand what you find good in him. He’s always for extreme measures, strictness, executions. And I’ve always found him repulsive. All right. I’ll see to him.”
7
It was a clear, sunny day. The weather was still, dry, as it had been the whole previous week.
From within the camp the vague noise of a big human settlement came rolling, like the distant rumble of the sea. One could hear by turns the footsteps of men wandering in the forest, people’s voices, the blows of axes, the ding of anvils, the neighing of horses, the yelping of dogs, and the crowing of cocks. Crowds of tanned, white-toothed, smiling folk moved about the forest. Some knew the doctor and nodded to him; others, unacquainted with him, passed by without greeting.
Though the partisans would not agree to leave Fox Point until their families running after them in carts caught up with them, the latter were already within a few marches of the camp, and preparations were under way in the forest for quickly pulling up stakes and moving further to the east. Things were repaired, cleaned, boxes were nailed shut, wagons counted, their condition inspected.
In the middle of the forest there was a large, trodden-down glade, a sort of barrow or former settlement, locally known as the stamping ground. Military meetings were usually called there. Today, too, a general assembly was set up there for the announcement of something important.
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