by Oleg Pavlov
‘Boy, oh boy! Hi, how’re you doing, brother, you took off on the quiet!’
Matiushin looked around, blind-eyed, but they laughed and surrounded him, patting him from all sides, healthy and genial; it was as if they’d suddenly sprung up out of the ground.
‘Well, why don’t you say something? We remembered you, we remembered you every day! We’d have had to put up with that bastard, if not for you! The Moldavian was sent off to a disciplinary battalion! You didn’t know that? That’s where he belongs, the scumbag!’
‘Yes, brother, you’ll never go back to Dorbaz again … And we’re moving on to be sergeants, but we’ll descend on all of you in the autumn, with our badges, to give you some backup. Just hang on in there until then.’
‘If you see any of our guys, say hello, we’ll be back to give them a hard time! Ok, live like a man!’
An officer showed up and summoned the soldiers, who had clumped together into a tight group, and they promptly obeyed.
Suddenly the infirmary felt empty. The dry, hot air meandered aimlessly inside its walls, and Matiushin didn’t feel like a man any more – or like anyone at all. He went back to the catering block, his heart calm and empty. When he’d done his work, he went off to get the lunch, pushing the trolley, not recognising anything in the base, forgetting this regiment more with every minute that passed and somehow surprised at his own decaying memory.
The mess seemed to him like some kind of barracks, an anthill of soldiers. When he reached the bread-slicing room, he looked at Vahid without saying a word, almost as if the powerful Uzbek was a pig, as if he wasn’t standing up level with him, screening off the bread room, but sprawled out amongst the bread, grunting. But Vahid greeted his little brother with simple-hearted joy, took his time issuing the bread ration for the infirmary and, without noticing a thing, embraced Matiushin until the next time.
Matiushin delivered the infirmary ration – but disappeared from the catering block that very moment. Some force shoved him out into the yard, which was empty and quiet without any soldiers, and he wandered into the garden, where the earth was breathing coolly under its thick covering of grass. After about ten steps he came up against a concrete wall. The free branches of the garden flew on over it, as if the garden was growing on the edge of a precipice, but it wasn’t the yard or the little garden that was broken off here by the wall – it was the Tashkent escort regiment. Since he couldn’t walk any further, he lay down by that wall in the coolness, on the grass, in the shady twilight, and fell asleep.
The little Uzbek missed him at the catering block and set out to look for him, but didn’t find him. Then, from midday onwards, the little Uzbek started concealing what had happened, keeping quiet, because he knew the Russian had gone missing. He did the ferrying work himself. He finished off the day, setting the catering block in perfect, gleaming order, like after a murder. He didn’t leave the catering block again for anything … And suddenly Matiushin showed up. The little Uzbek looked at him with a dark, smouldering fire in his glance, but eyes fastened expectantly on Matiushin. The little Uzbek was beginning to understand, to feel something, numbly and submissively; he was probably suffering the torment of withdrawal. Matiushin took the plain plastic bag from under the cook’s stove and shook it out into a small vat full of swill.
The cook huddled up quietly into a ball, as if the grass hadn’t drowned in the leftovers of food and drink, but in his petty little soul.
Looking at him, Matiushin felt a light tremor of disaster, as if he could hear the booming of heavy footsteps drawing closer and closer, boots tramping, tramping – but he wasn’t afraid. As if he had stopped believing in death, and in life. Let them kill him, so what … They’d come and they’d kill him. The little Uzbek trembled, lying on the floor, doubled up. Putting his arms round him without speaking, as if the cook was his brother, Matiushin fell asleep. The dirty yellow light burned until morning in the catering block, seeping down soundlessly from the ceiling, like gas. Matiushin kept waking up in a sweat, opening his eyes and seeing that pitiless, blinding light all around him, but then falling asleep again, feeling the firm bundle of human warmth close beside him.
Part Three
When he opened his eyes the foreman was standing over him, towering up in the hungry air of the bright morning, freshly washed, with his slicked-back hair still wet.
‘Now up you get quietly. You won’t be back here again …’
The foreman led him away as if he was under armed escort.
In the empty ward – at this time everyone was waiting in the little garden to be called for feeding – Matiushin stripped the leaden grey sheets off his bed and raked them together into an armload. They went to the stores; there he returned everything that was the infirmary’s and was given his own clothes, the ones in which he had been brought from Dorbaz. And they went out onto the hot, dusty porch, already baking in the sun.
‘Walk on, walk on!’ said the foreman, pushing him in the back, and he called another soldier who was standing not far away, as good as new, saying goodbye to someone. ‘Hey, soldier boy, whatever your name is, the jaundice case! The date’s over, follow me!’ And as he waddled down the steps from the porch, he called to the others who’d been left behind: ‘If anyone asks, tell them he’s gone to staff HQ!’
Matiushin marched along, dragging his useless boots like wooden stocks. He had sewn up the tops slit open by the military doctor at Dorbaz some time during the last few days – he didn’t remember when, it seemed like a dream. With their ugly seams of string, the boots looked like wounded living things, like toads hopping forward every time he took a step.
At staff HQ, a building that looked like a school, he heard his name shouted out and only then spotted the handful of soldiers sprawling back on a bench as if they were pinned down by his shadow.
‘Matiushin! Well, don’t just stand there! Don’t say you don’t recognise me!’
A skinny soldier got up off the bench and came over to him, grinning.
‘Well, God’s sent me a fine home-town buddy, blind and deaf! Well hi there, home-town buddy! Turned all stuck-up, have you?’
‘He’s famous for that … ’ the jaundice case chipped in; he had appeared on the bench, looking pleased with himself. ‘We were dying on the floor while he was in the mess, warming up the lunches.’
‘The fools always die first,’ the skinny one said with a smirk. ‘So die, if you’re a fool. Am I right, brothers? I was all right in the hospital. I wasn’t dying either.’ And from that smirk, not entirely open, a little canny, Matiushin suddenly spotted that this was Rebrov, somehow grown old. ‘So here we are … I knew we were going to serve together, and you’re no fool, that’s for sure! It was great the way you got away from the Moldavian … And the boots, those boots you’re wearing, talk about boots!’
The discovery that they had ended up in the same time and place again was equally painful to both of them, although Rebrov had pretended he was glad to see his home-town buddy. The others carried on sitting there in a row without talking, but now Matiushin recognised them for himself, realising that he knew them too – they had been at Dorbaz.
‘They took us from the hospital, so they must have taken you from the infirmary. Maybe you know where they’re sending us?’ Rebrov asked insistently. ‘We had six men die in one week at Dorbaz; they say it was some kind of poisoning. They wouldn’t stop hassling us, they were getting us up in the middle of the night – and off you go for a check-up, like it was some kind of interrogation! But what have you heard? The way I read things, they could have something important in store for us. If staff HQ’s involved, I reckon they won’t just ship us out to some company.’
‘You wanted to be a sergeant …’
‘I did, but I stopped wanting. I got sick of eating dirty fruit.’
At that moment the foreman emerged from the staff HQ and bawled:
‘Everybody from quarantine, follow me!’
It was clean and
cool in staff HQ. Suddenly awkward and timid, the foreman waited for permission to enter a ground-floor room, which turned out to be beautiful, filled with light paper rustlings and somehow blindingly naked because of the women sitting in it. Matiushin caught his breath at the warm, spicy scent of their perfume. They were sitting everywhere, behind desks, swallowed up to their necks by army shirts, as if sucked into the mire of a swamp, with only their small round heads, made light and airy by their hair-dos, bobbing up on the surface. A major was sitting among them forlornly. He wasn’t speaking, yet somehow he managed to produce so much noise with his silence – running his hands over the desk and turning round so that his chair cracked, puffing and blowing, wheezing – that he had actually broken into a heavy sweat.
‘Permission to enter?’ asked the foreman.
‘Granted,’ the major growled, and when the foreman had scurried off, he turned, blushing crimson in shame, to the oldest of the women and said: ‘Please begin.’
The woman sitting beside the safe started calling the men up to her by name and giving out money; she took a long time counting everything right down to the last kopeck and then made them sign for it, communicating with gestures, as if she was dumb.
While they were in that queue the realisation struck that they were being issued their first pay – and that meant they had served a month. The midday haze had a breath of freedom to it and, as they strolled on through the regimental base, they collected lots of tinned food, rusks and even sweets, and every one of them carried a cardboard box rattling with treats in his hands. Afterwards they were taken to the chaikhana and everyone was ordered to buy themselves water. In the chaikhana they cast ravening glances at the lemonade, thrusting all their money into the dumbfounded serving woman’s hands like men in a trance. She was so frightened, she called the officers. They told the men to pay a rouble each, and that way the lemonade was bought with everyone chipping in. But after walking past the staff HQ building, they were surprised to reach a dreary, dusty ambulance into which they were ordered to load the boxes and then themselves. No one moved from the spot. Rebrov was the only one to speak up, with a hungry, ruthless kind of look.
‘Lemonade, marmalade… Are they sending us back, then? Or somewhere even worse? That’s just great!’ he hissed though his teeth, sobering up and gazing round at everyone determinedly, as if figuring out who here was a survivor and who wasn’t, who’d be surplus to requirements.
While they stood there like strangers, the unusual boxes of dry rations started attracting attention and inviting disaster: some soldiers crept up to the ambulance. Seeing that there weren’t any officers, they peered into a box as if they owned it. Rebrov, worried about his lemonade, spoke up to frighten them off:
‘Those are our commander’s boxes. Don’t touch them, lads, he’ll be here any moment!’
The soldiers froze. They raised their goggle-eyed faces from the ground and gave him a long, gloomy look, but said nothing … When the regimental soldiers shambled off, Rebrov ordered the others to load the boxes into the ambulance and they jumped to obey him, then clambered into the back themselves – and hid. Then an officer appeared out of the staff HQ building and was delighted by the good order, but he read out two names and pulled two men out – they were Rebrov and the jaundice case – and led them back into the staff HQ. The back of the ambulance went quiet. Matiushin waited moment by moment for the rest of them to be set free, at least one at a time. For some reason he had the idea that when Rebrov and the jaundice case were let out, they had been rescued. But suddenly Rebrov stuck his head into the back of the ambulance and shouted:
‘Let’s go, brothers. Goodbye, Tashkent!’
As they raced through the warm, bright, white city with its clay-stove houses drowning in flowers and greenery as if they were mid-winter snow, they remembered the jaundice case who had been as delighted by his good luck as if it was sunshine, but he’d been left behind, he’d vanished inside staff HQ, and they had his lemonade now. On the platform at the railway station, which they reached riding like the wind, the group lined up one man at a time and Matiushin could see them all clearly. There was the same number as fingers on a hand, his brain made the calculation automatically: six deadbeats, including him. On the way to the station Rebrov had insisted again that they were being sent for training as cooks; supposedly he’d heard in staff HQ that their team would be taken to Kazakhstan and he’d figured out the bit about training as cooks for himself. If they were sending them off that far and weren’t worried about the cost, it meant this was serious business, they were being taken for training, and what could men like them be trained as, after being ill, except as cooks, there weren’t any specialists among them, were there – he questioned everyone briskly about that – and no electricians or signals men either. Rebrov strained, he tried really hard, giving neither himself nor the others a moment’s rest. He hardly even knew the men with whom he had been collected from the Tashkent Military Hospital that morning, and now he was hastily trying to win them over, ignoring only Matiushin, who kept to himself.
Soon the platform was completely flooded with local folk, but the soldiers didn’t drown in that sea, they stood there like an island. When the train arrived it was scarcely moving, and then the people, old and young alike, flowed into the gaping throats of the carriages in refreshing rivulets. The clamorous bustle of humanity – that was all that remained in Matiushin’s soul at the end of this unbelievable time he had lived through. Children’s shrieks, strident abuse and the barking of hoarse-voiced conductors engendered in Matiushin’s soul a solitary sense of an ending, but it wasn’t like a death to him; it flooded through his chest as warmth, it lulled him with the simple sadness of travelling.
It was a sitting carriage: hard wooden seats without even any mattresses, though the carriage was crammed full with people. The adroit conductor seated families on a single seat. Almost everyone there had no ticket, so he swore at them army-style at the top of his voice, aware of his power, and still somehow managed to feel compassion for these people and help them. Half-naked but wearing his strict peaked cap, thoroughly saturated with smoke, as guileful as a snake, with a throat hoarse from drink, he yelled and understood in various different languages, as if he had as many heads and souls. His job was to tamp down the contents of the ticketless carriage. And the conductor hurtled around the motionless carriage, as if they weren’t standing dozily at the platform but rolling down a steep embankment.
When the train started and they were off, almost immediately they stripped to their shorts in the unbearable swelter and drank hot lemonade. They travelled without speaking until the small stations started flickering by. The train would suddenly stop and stand quietly for long periods. In the twilight at the stations, the calm, distant steppe started to become visible; when they looked out of the window of the hurtling train during the day, it had burned itself into their eyes as a sheer wall of sand. The carriage started to smell of food. Every station smelled of its own kind of food. Women walked through the carriages selling pies and bread cakes, and shouted as they walked by outside the train, with their heads in flowery scarves floating along in the windows. Everything was sold for one rouble; the pies and the meat dumplings and griddle cakes, There were no men to be seen on the stations. Squat, sturdy women, like horses, wandered over the yellow, dusty earth beside the carriages, carrying buckets weighty with things that had to be sold. Their children ran after them and begged cigarettes or kopecks when people stuck their heads out of the windows and breathed the air.
It was getting cold rapidly. From somewhere in the darkness they seemed to hear the humming of a black hole from out of which the wild expanse of the desert burst into the carriage glimmering with people. Matiushin forgot about sleep, although everyone in the berth had already lain down and stopped speaking a long time ago. They were tired, they fell asleep, but he sat there blankly, like in the catering block in the middle of the night, marvelling at the cold and the wind – so strange that they seem
ed to belong to a different land. At one moment he imagined they were going home. The piece of land that he hooked up, like a fish, was cold and dumb, pleasantly rounded. Yelsk, Penza, Tashkent, this Tselinograd. Northwards, he thought exultantly, homewards – and the fish didn’t flap about, it gazed one-eyed, like a map. His human brain, half-stupefied with joy, held at least half the world at that moment. As if it was drunk, this half-of-the-world vaporised the time and Matiushin set off to wander round the carriage. He drifted out into the vestibule. Two marvellous, anonymous young sailors were standing there smoking, with identical attaché cases at their feet. Their faces were hidden in clouds of tobacco smoke. Matiushin was entranced by the way they were identically doubled, like in a mirror, so he staggered quietly into the corner and lit up a cigarette – only because these two were smoking. They conspired about something incomprehensible, discussed something, taking no notice at all of the stranger. Matiushin looked out from his corner at the young sailors, and soon the hammering of the wheels started sounding duller and duller and he imagined he was hearing the booming of the sea. Although he had never seen the sea in his life, he fancied that their carriage was swaying on the waves as it sailed along. But stretching out on all sides for many hundreds of kilometres there was nothing except an expanse of cold desert. The sailors seemed to have appeared in this dry land from somewhere high above it. And then there was another miracle: he recognised those stocky, sturdy young sailors with high cheekbones as two inhabitants of the steppe, as alike as twins, and he couldn’t tell if they were Kirghiz or Kazakhs … The train slowed down and a station approached. A bright beam from the floodlights lanced into the vestibule – and on the young sailors’ foreheads, on their round caps, the wrought-silver letters of some fleet glinted brightly. Instantly they themselves flared up in the blinding beam of light, taut and white in their sailors’ shirts, and then the vestibule was plunged into the dark of night, and they stood there charred black for a minute until the light lashed at them again. Through the window the full extent of the junction was visible, lit up by a floodlight: a grey field glinting with a fine dew of rails and herds of goods trains, standing like bulls, motionless and unattended. They were clustered together, waiting, like at a slaughterhouse. The train moved slower and slower, the carriages crept along as if on tiptoe towards the station, across this grey field. They stopped at a platform silver with dust, as if covered with snow in the night, and now there was time to for them to catch their breath. A man ran across the earth, scurried across it like a lizard. A woman’s mournful voice hooted like an owl over the station speakers, giving someone orders, and then the woman summoned unknown people out of the blank air and quarrelled with them and they yelled. The little station, entirely white, radiated an aura of mute peace. Matiushin saw the name of this place where they had arrived, spelled out on a building in letters the height of a man, embracing each other on the roof of the little station, looking like the anonymous sailors: CHU. The young sailors brightened up and all he could hear them say was this ‘chu, chu, chu’ … And that was the sound of their will and quiescence, which were incomprehensible and mysterious to Matiushin.
