by Oleg Pavlov
‘Is it really true a strapping hero like this can’t be any use? We’ll send him to the artillery: who needs keen hearing there?’ he said, trying to sound cheerful. ‘It’s a family of heroes, a guardsman’s dynasty, you might say, and we’re blocking the lad’s way. I’ll settle it, I’ll settle it … You stay at home and wait for the papers.’
Thinking that his father wouldn’t find out, Matiushin decided to keep quiet about everything at home. He lived those days lightheaded with impatience, even haste, waiting for the call-up papers, but hiding from his father. One day Grigorii Ilich came home, weary and taciturn, and without even taking his coat off, just removing his shoes, called for Matiushin.
‘I’ve heard that down at the commissariat you … You want to join the army? Get well away from here? Why, you fool.’
Matiushin’s heart sank.
‘Do you hear that, mother?’ the father asked in a gentle, sing-song voice filled with indifference. ‘It’s happened at last, they’re taking our boy into the army. They’ve declared him fit. His call-up papers have arrived!’ And he pulled the notification out of the pocket of his greatcoat and slapped it down on the table: ‘There, take it …’
Matiushin resigned from his odious job and in the week that remained to him, he did nothing. His mother didn’t know what to do with herself. Alexandra Yakovlevna understood whose word had decided everything, but Grigorii Ilich never changed his decisions. And he responded to her weeping and screaming with a deathly silence – and remained silent until the next day. It was only then that he summoned his son to his room and recalled his own youthful days with him, and how he himself joined the army, then grew emotional and gave him the watch off his own wrist as a keepsake – the one that he hadn’t parted with for ten years, the one he had bought for himself in Moscow, when he bought one for Yakov too, but that one had disappeared with his elder son. Only, left without the watch, Grigorii Ilich missed it, and in the morning Matiushin couldn’t find it, but he didn’t say anything: he felt sorry for his father.
In the morning Grigorii Ilich stayed at home to see his son off to the conscription centre. They didn’t drive, but walked. The father was dressed in civilian clothes: grey and flabby in his raincoat, he didn’t recognise himself and he felt timid. The recruits were being shipped out so early that they walked alone through the frozen, empty town into the gentle, twilit depths of the little streets. Alexandra Yakovlevna fussed over her own concerns, trying yet again to remember if she had put everything into the knapsack when she was packing for her son. She whispered:
‘Listen, Vasenka, your father’s going to give you twenty roubles from us. When you go to him, say goodbye nicely.’
Outside the military commissariat tipsy couples were jostling, music was roaring, everyone was saying goodbye. Grigorii Ilich strolled around off at one side, on his own, even striking up a conversation with one of the people seeing off a recruit, and waited. Alexandra Yakovlevna hugged her son, laid her head on his shoulder and wouldn’t let go. They stood there like that until a non-commissioned officer as genial as a hostess invited the recruits to start getting into the bus. At that everyone clumped together in groups, people banked up like small snowdrifts, and all the mothers started crying … At the last moment Matiushin’s father hugged him hastily, awkwardly allowed himself to be kissed, shamefaced, pushed the money into his son’s hand and said:
‘Serve well, son. Be worthy of your brother’s memory!’
Part Two
As night came on, the bus arrived somewhere. In the darkness not much could be seen except some tearful little lights: we’d stopped inside the fence of a distribution point. Inside, it was like a hostel, divided into little rooms: each of them contained beds with unstuffed mattresses and a table in the middle.
An officer walked in briskly with a red armband on his sleeve – there were lots of them striding about with those armbands, looking like volunteer public order militia. He ordered us to move from one room to another. Lots of young guys crowding the corridors; sitting along the walls, standing in queues at some of the doors, smoking non-stop, jabbering, and it’s hard to believe it’s night. They took us for the medical. And then, in the middle of the night, to be fed. We didn’t touch the boiled grain but we guzzled all the watery tea, as if we’d been brought here to drink, not eat. We tried not to get lost any more, bunching up tight together. The waiting was wearing us out; we wanted to be on our way already – anything but carry on waiting. We weren’t even let out for a breath of air. Men jabbering on all sides, wherever you stand, striking up little conversations. The call suddenly rang out: ‘Anyone from Kuznetsk! Over to the door!’ – and everyone fell silent and the crowd didn’t move while every man in it figured out thickheadedly whether he was from Kuznetsk or not, and then whoever was got up in silence, escorted by hundreds of already indifferent eyes.
An elderly officer with a jaded air appeared in the room, a captain by rank, looking like a frog in his uniform.
‘Is the Yelsk contingent here?’ he asked, glancing round as if he didn’t know what he ought to do and was trying to guess. ‘Krivonosov, Konstantin Vladimirovich, is he here?’
A disgruntled voice answered from somewhere:
‘That’s me … Here …’
The captain brightened up and glanced at his paper again, hunting out the elusive, unfamiliar names like little fleas.
‘Is Matiushin, Vasilii Grigorievich, present?’
‘Here …’
‘Rebrov, Ivan Petrovich?’
‘Here …’
The captain sighed in relief and said in a calm, almost indifferent tone:
‘Now, those men I named, follow me with your things.’
Matiushin straightened up and got to his feet, hearing the others get up too. They got up and walked out, not believing that this was really serious, as if they had no faith in the power of that dusty, froggy little uniform. Now they had to get up and follow it, walk after this little stranger wherever he told them to go. But they only marched about a dozen metres. Selected by some mysterious will, seemingly following some kind of schedule, they found themselves in another room, where there were about twenty other men with their things. The recruiting officer flickered erratically into and out of sight, disappearing and then surfacing out of the corridor with his catch – a new recruit – holding a roll call every now and then to settle his nerves. All the bureaucratic dithering made it hard to breathe, we were rapidly getting sick of all this waiting about. But the end of our time at the distribution centre was probably getting closer: to get us to trust him – no more and no less – the captain told us his name and patronymic and ordered us to prepare our things for inspection … He laughed when he found someone’s t-shirt and underpants. He chuckled as he sniffed someone’s eau de cologne. He was amazed by the food, all the different kinds of sausage, saying he’d never seen this kind or tried that kind …
They saw in the dawn at a railway station where they had been watched over in a half-empty waiting room for the rest of the night by the captain, now in a subdued mood. They were waiting for a train, but the recruiting officer stubbornly refused to say where he was escorting them, or even what branch of the forces they were going to serve in.
The little island of the blackly deserted station building was submerged in nocturnal darkness. Matiushin drank in the night, gazing out into the cold, anonymous expanse. Thrilled by the thought that no one in that expanse knew he existed, he even stopped breathing – it felt so sweet to be aware that there was only him.
Anxious, perhaps even afraid that they would run away from him, as morning arrived the captain ordered them all to line up. There was dozy jostling, another dreary roll call of names – by this time the word ‘here’ repeated in different voices was like a drill, boring through Matiushin’s head. When the roll call was over, the captain led the ranks out onto the deserted platform. He ordered them to sit in a row along the wall, and started striding along the row like a
sentry, waiting for the train.
It was already as bright as day on the platform, but they couldn’t even hear the sound of birds twittering yet. Some smoked a bit, listening to this dead morning silence. Some dozed, slumped back against the wall, with their legs sprawled out across the asphalt, as if they’d been torn off.
Matiushin didn’t remember their train arriving or how he ended up in the carriage. There was some kind of corporeal fire baked into his memory. He was woken by loud laughter in the hard-bunk carriage – for some reason everyone was calling it a ‘berth’. And immediately he could feel that he was completely soaked in hot sweat. Jam-packed with men, the berth was like a furnace.
Streaming with sweat, semi-naked, his unsolicited friends were laughing loudly. And it turned out they were laughing at him: for sleeping like a log. They’d all got chummy with each other by this time, they were pals already, and they treated him the same way. It turned out that there was a bottle of vodka in the berth and they’d already drunk their share, but Matiushin’s was still waiting for him. One young lad was bellowing loudly, acting more brashly than the others. Matiushin remembered him: he was from Yelsk, the recruiting officer had picked them out and led them off together at the distribution centre. Lanky and stooping, with a zero trim already, wild, ravenous eyes, dressed in absolute tatters.
Trying to fight the hazy weakness in his head as he heard about the vodka and realised he was on his way, in the train, Matiushin clambered down off the upper bunk. The berth fell silent. The Yelsk lad held out the bottle, thrusting it into Matiushin’s hand. Warm from the heat, the vodka went down like boiled water. Or else he just imagined it was like water. All he wanted was to get blasted; he wasn’t feeling anything any more. Instantly everything in his head blurred, the laughter thundered in his ears, and he started shouting something and laughing with the rest of them.
‘My old man serves under yours … ’ the Yelsk lad said out of the blue. ‘My old man respects yours … So now we’re going to serve together. You ask to be put in with me. Rebrov’s my name!’
‘You’ve got the wrong man. I don’t have any father!’ Matiushin chortled, and his new acquaintance went quiet; Matiushin couldn’t hear him any more.
The drunkenness and the heat and the men all seemed like a single evil. They were being dragged off somewhere helplessly – this evil was being dragged off somewhere. Tormented by the evil, or so it seemed to him, Matiushin climbed back up onto his empty bunk and sank into oblivion, his forehead thrust against a partition that felt as cold as ice. He cooled off and fell asleep.
Rebrov shook him awake with devoted zeal, as if Matiushin himself had ordered him to do it. There was a dull glimmer of light. The sky outside the window receded in a uniform twilight blur. The train hurtled straight on, soundlessly, as if flying through the air. Rebrov had woken him to eat.
They were eating everything they had with them. They gobbled and drank without pausing for breath. The little table was piled high with sticks of sausage, pieces of chicken, cans, feeble May vegetables. There was wine and beer and vodka as well – and they weren’t trying to hide, they weren’t even hiding the bottles. This insanity must have started back in the afternoon, with that specially saved bottle of vodka, and then all the food and all the money had been thrown in. Hungry and only half-awake, grabbing at everything indiscriminately, Matiushin threw himself on the other men’s food, swallowing lumps of something warm and fatty, and then flinging down his own 10-rouble notes on the common table when he remembered his father had given them to him for the journey … Rebrov topped up his glass and egged him on:
‘Drink up – to Yelsk, our home town! And let them drink too – do you hear me, everyone drink to Yelsk!’ he shouted to someone, and swung the bottle through the air, losing his drunken balance and collapsing onto several bodies.
The buzz of the inebriated carriage cheered Matiushin. After the food and the vodka he was feeling like a smoke, and Rebrov decided to lead him to the vestibule at the end of the carriage, clearing the way and acting pushy:
‘Move aside! I’ll clout you!’
Their squad occupied half the carriage, jumbled up together with civilians. There were lots of old men and women, all neatly dressed, strange, foreign, not Russian … They sat there, huddled in the corners, gazing with timid smiles at everything that was going on – at this gang of young, drunk Russian lads. Passing along the narrow corridor, Matiushin and Rebrov entered the dead end of the carriage, where the captain had taken up position, on duty at the door of the vestibule.
His hair neatly combed, almost slicked, he was sitting at an empty table without any food, reading a stale, well-thumbed newspaper on an empty stomach. His corner was full of the kind of secluded, strict order of which there wasn’t even a trace in the open space of the blind-drunk carriage teeming with men. The captain probably had nothing to eat, he’d blown all his money. Free now after escaping from the restraint of his tunic, he looked more homely and younger; in his officer’s summer shirt but locked into the captivity of the journey, he looked like someone on a business trip who definitely had nothing to do with the recruits.
‘Comrade Captain, Fyodor Mikhailovich, we’re off for a smoke! Permission to go out into the vestibule? Look, I’ve met a guy from my home town,’ the Yelsk lad declared in sham delight, almost pressing up against the captain and reeking grossly of drink.
‘Go and smoke … ’ the captain muttered dourly and stuck his nose angrily into his newspaper, trying not to see their drunken faces.
The vestibule was packed with no end of people. They were roaring themselves hoarse, palling up, rejoicing at being taken off to serve in the forces – now that they’d realised they weren’t going anywhere in the north or into the navy, but to somewhere warm – although the vestibule was as black and lonely as a deep pit. Matiushin listened, unable to see any faces through the tobacco smoke … Then suddenly he understood quite clearly that they were all afraid, afraid … That was why they were staggering about without any sleep, thrashing about in a sleepless, gluttonous fever, because they were afraid. Grabbing a bottle from someone, Matiushin took a gulp of vodka, but no matter how much he poured into himself after that, he couldn’t get drunk – it all just seemed to evaporate. Even the reason he was feeling jolly wasn’t the drink, it was because everyone around him wasn’t sleeping but yelling, gorging themselves – going insane in their fear. Like seeing a crowd of naked people, and it’s funny because they’re naked, but still prancing about.
In the vestibule a non-Russian guy, one of those civilians, attached himself to Matiushin. He asked for a cigarette and started reminiscing about his time in the army … He was featureless and smooth, as if his face had been planed off. The only bright spot Matiushin saw was his mouth, which flared up crimson when the guy took a drag on the cigarette. Short, the height of a child, but stocky and barrel-chested.
‘I’ve got two scars on my body from the army, and they knocked out my front teeth. But I don’t bear the army any grudge. I think they did right to beat me. First, I’m an Uzbek, and lots of Uzbeks can be stupid; it takes a fist to make them understand anything, so they post them to a construction battalion. And second, if they hadn’t beaten me, I wouldn’t have done anything. If someone’s beaten me, I respect them. I respect strong people.’
‘An Uzbek! An Uzbek!’ laughed Matiushin, delighted that now he knew who was talking to him, and slapped the man on the shoulder. ‘Come on then, tell me about it! I love Uzbeks!’
It didn’t bother the man at all that Matiushin was giving him orders. That was what he wanted – to be needed, to hook on to someone. His speech was clear, pouring out from somewhere inside him. But his face, with its stony jaw muscles, was silent with a cool tension, not even human, and it guttered like candlewax in the glimmers and glints of transparent twilight from the blind end of the vestibule.
Matiushin started getting the kind of warm feeling he hadn’t had with anyone for a long time. Drawing on this feeling of ben
evolence for the Uzbek, he felt a spiritual calm so strong that now even the stinking vestibule lulled him like a cradle. In this tenderhearted condition, he dragged the Uzbek after him back into the berth and tumbled out all his provisions for him. But the Uzbek kept talking on and on, telling only his own story and nodding dolefully, as if beating his head against an invisible wall.
For half the night they staggered from the vestibule into the carriage, from the carriage into the vestibule. And they weren’t alone: no one was sleeping. Those who had drunk up all their money pestered those who could stand them a drink – and they didn’t know what they were going to eat and drink tomorrow. Only the dirt-cheap cigarettes didn’t run out. The hungry tobacco smoke swirled all around, as if the carriage itself was quietly smouldering, going up in smoke. The night stretched out, vastly longer than the day; it was impenetrable somehow. Its immensity made everything seem immense to Matiushin – the jagged, opened food cans, gaping like jaws; a gigantic human eye, flitting past as if under a magnifying glass; the vast space of the vestibule; huge two-legged people – and all the words that were uttered came hurtling out, flew through the air and fell like massive stone blocks.
He had long ago wearied of peering at the Uzbek and trying to make him out; he just heard his voice, sometimes distant, sometimes close … Some night or other, but a different one, not his night. A filthy, dark barracks; winter. A tunic has to be washed – a man has to be cleanly dressed. The Uzbek lays out the damp tunic, secretly washed after midnight, under his sheet and sleeps on it, drying it with his body, ironing it – he says that in winter using your body is the only way to dry things. Reveille. All around sleeping men jump up, tumbling off their beds like dried peas and dressing on the hop. The tunic’s still damp, but it’s smooth. The important thing is that it’s clean and smooth – no one will see that it’s damp. They’re driven out into the frost to line up. The cold is terrible, ferocious. But for some reason the Uzbek is glad. Soon the tunic will freeze under his greatcoat, and then he’ll stop feeling it and won’t even notice that in the afternoon it’s completely dry. That means the frost can act like the sun, can have the same power – so does that mean that heat and cold are the same thing? But the tunic really is dry on him, and he got the idea of making a lining out of white oilcloth, and no one even noticed. At night he just wiped it with a rag, and the lining was as good as new – he managed to find a piece of this non-transparent oil-cloth somewhere. He says that in minus forty Celsius they were forbidden to use the earflaps on their caps: supposedly that wasn’t cold enough for them to tie their caps shut. And that, says the Uzbek, means you’ll freeze your ears, they’ll suppurate and stick to your head. Oh, so cold, oh, so cold! The most terrible thing, he says, is what the winter does. He cut a little pair of wings out of his greatcoat where no one would notice, and sewed them to his cap on the inside, so that he could pull them down when he needed to and warm at least the tips of his ears, and no one spotted them. He says that when he was on mess detail, he was so hungry he used to grab food straight out of the boiling cauldron with his hand. If the cook’s attention wandered, he dipped into the cauldron, grabbed something, stuffed it in his mouth quickly and swallowed it, hid it in his stomach. Waited. Grabbed. Stuffed. Swallowed. The important thing was not to be afraid of swallowing a boiling-hot piece, because if you burped it up or took too long, the cook would look round, and then all the cooks would fling themselves on you and beat you to death with their ladles.
