Relieved from his post, Sasha lay down on the couch in the guard-room and pretended to be asleep. No one in the guard-room was sleeping after the excitement of the night. We kept telling each other over and over again what had happened and making all kinds of wild guesses. Furman, a little, thin fellow, insisted that the bandit had dressed himself up as a woman while he was in the garden, and slipped across the Market Square in disguise. Only Sasha took no part in the discussion.
The chaps said that when Nikita ran into the yard he had started to put Sasha through it. Sasha had tried to make excuses, but Nikita had cut him short:
"You're just a funk, that's what you are! Taken unawares, were you? Weren't expecting it, were you?... I suppose if they start dropping bombs on you from an aeroplane, you'll be taken unawares again and start shouting, 'I say, gentlemen, what do you want? Halt! Halt!...' Call yourself a member of the Komsomol."
Nikita's words must have had a very strong effect. Sasha could think of nothing better than to pretend he was ill. He lay on the couch muffled up in his "raglan" coat. Fie was very ashamed of himself for his part in the night's happenings. And who wouldn't have been in his place!... Sasha's "illness" started like this. When he came into the guard-room, he complained that his legs felt weak and he had a terrible headache. Then yellow circles started floating before his eyes...
And now, as he listened to our excited talk, Sasha tried to pretend he was in a fever. He made his teeth chatter, kicked his legs about and moaned pitifully. Actually his moans were more like the whining of a puppy that had been outside on a cold night. Anybody could see he was longing to get properly ill. Sasha would have given a lot at that moment for a dose of scarlet fever, say, or "flu." Instead of laughing at him, everybody would have been sorry and said it was because he had been ill. But Sasha was fit as a fiddle. We knew that, and we knew quite well what was the matter with him.
Nikita came in from the yard. He was carrying a smoky iron pot.
"Well, young people," he began solemnly, "in spite of the serious happenings of last night the demands of Nature must be satisfied. I am not mistaken, I trust, in saying that we are all hungry. To put things in a nutshell, there are spuds behind the stove. We'll peel as many as we can in this pot, then we'll imagine the aroma of sizzling fat, and soon we shall have a modest but satisfying meal. Who's against?"
No one was against Nikita's suggestion. "Who's for?" Nikita asked. Everyone except Sasha raised their hands. "Majority in favour! The debate is over!" Nikita exclaimed cheerfully, and going over to Sasha, he ripped off his overcoat: "Wake up, Sasha, old man, the dicky-birds are singing. Come on, spuds need peeling!" "I can't.. . I feel awful," Sasha moaned. "Sasha, our dearly beloved Comrade Bobir!" Nikita said very tenderly, winking at us. "We all know you are ill, very seriously ill, we all know very well what has caused your illness, nevertheless we all beg you not to act as if the end of the world had come, and wish you a rapid recovery. You mustn't let yourself be captured by that alien spirit Melancholy... Dearly beloved Sasha," Nikita went on, posing like an orator, "we beg you in all sincerity to overcome your sadness and peel the potatoes, for sooner or later you will get hungry yourself, and, as 'tis said, he who does not work, neither shall he eat... As for the real cause of your malady, Sasha, old man, you mustn't be too angry with me for those harsh words that were hurled at you on the threshold of this mansion. Even Homer sometimes nods, you know. We're all young still, we all make mistakes, and everyone except a hardened nitwit learns something from his mistakes, Why be sad and spoil your own valuable nerves with grieving?"
Rocking with suppressed laughter, we listened to Nikita's speech, trying to understand how much he meant jokingly, and how much was serious.
Sasha tried to keep it up; he clutched his head and rubbed his red freckled face, but at last he got up and with a shiver took his seat on the bench.
Nikita pulled a sack of potatoes out from behind the stove and, dumping it down in the middle of the guardroom, said: "The host requests his honoured quests to present themselves at dinner!"
We set to work on the muddy potatoes.
Penknives and cobblers' knives with corded handles gleamed in our hands. Furman produced a real Finnish dagger with an antler haft, which he had kept since the days when he had been a juvenile delinquent. At ordinary times Furman kept his treasure in a green box under his bed, only taking it out with him when he was on guard. It was his boast that when he had this knife with him there wasn't a bandit in the country he was afraid of!
Nikita spread out an old newspaper on the floor near the stove. Soon curly potato peelings were reeling off our knives and falling with a rustling sound on the sheet of newspaper.
"But who was it?" Petka muttered, still shaken by the events of the night.
"Now, that is a question!" Nikita exclaimed grinning. "Anybody would think you came from the convent we used to have in this ancient town. It's clear enough who it was... Don't you remember what the papers said last autumn about the frontier guards nabbing a spy? We're on the frontier too, and you've got to be on the look-out.. ."
"But what do these spies want here?" Petka asked again. "What have they left behind?"
"Oh, they've left a great deal behind, old chap," Nikita replied, seriously now. "In the time of the tsar, nearly the whole Donbas was in their hands. Think of Krivorozhye, and the iron ore! May be when you've finished training you'll find yourself in those parts. Notice the old names of the factories there—Providence, Dumot, Balfour... The foreign capitalists lost millions of rubles in those factories. Soviet power has trodden on their corns good and proper! Did you think they supplied Denikin and Wrangel and Petlura for nothing? They thought those bandits would get them back all they had lost. They didn't spare the cash either. And it all went down the drain..."
The door opened and Polevoi entered the guard-room.
"What's the news?" Nikita asked, glancing at him inquiringly.
"None so far. Seems to have vanished into thin air..." Polevoi glanced at the sack of potatoes: "Going to do some cooking? Do me a favour, chaps, will you?" he went on, pulling off his wadded jacket.
"When the spuds are ready, leave a few for me. In the meantime I'll have forty winks..'. You take over as guard commander, Kolomeyets."
"Yes, Comrade Polevoi!" Nikita answered smartly, jumping to his feet.
Our director nodded and lay down on the couch. But before he had time to stretch himself out, there was a whistle from the yard summoning the guard commander. Polevoi jumped up, but Nikita grabbed his rifle and said: "No, have a rest. The new guard commander is already on the job!" And so saying, he ran out into the yard.
We stopped peeling the potatoes and listened to the voices outside the door.
Polevoi listened too. His lean sunburnt face with its sparse young stubble was serious and strained.
Only a few minutes ago Polevoi had seen off Vukovich the OGPU representative from the frontier guard detachment. From the Komsomol members at the district OGPU we had heard that Vukovich was always entrusted with the most difficult cases. Polevoi had shown Vukovich where Sasha had first spotted the bandit and how the bandit had got into headquarters. From the attentive manner in which this tall fair-haired security man in the green-topped cap of a frontier guard listened to our director, we realized that Vukovich attached great importance to Polevoi's opinion. He questioned Polevoi in a quiet, calm voice. Any of us who watched him from afar would have given a lot to know what was in Vukovich's mind at that moment.
He and Polevoi sat together for a long time in the attic. They must have examined every inch of that dusty attic floor. Then, following the path of the fugitive, they squeezed through the gap and, using a ladder brought by Fur-man, climbed down from the roof of the hostel into the little garden, and thus worked their way, step by step, right as far as the Market Square. Vukovich questioned the grocery store watchman at great length, then returned to headquarters, where he left Polevoi.
"He'll have to use his noddle this time!" Nikita had said when Vukovich left. "This business will come before the District Party Committee. Kartamyshev himself will go into everything..."
Now, as we listened to the voices in the yard, we con- « eluded it was Vukovich, who had come
back. The thought was too much for Polevoi, who threw his jacket round his shoulders and strode to the door. But he was just reaching for the handle when the door opened and Nikita came in.
He was ruffled, and from the way he thrust his rifle into the rack, we realized that the conversation he had just had at the gate, had annoyed him.
"What was it?" Polevoi asked.
Sitting down and starting to peel a potato, Nikita answered unwillingly:
"Appearance of a mangy sheep not even concerned with guard duty!"
"What else? Make yourself clear!" Polevoi said more severely.
"Tiktor turned up. He wants to guard headquarters with the rest of the Komsomol members, you know. Says he only just found out that our group was on duty. Pretending to be innocent as a lamb, and reeks like a vodka still!" Nikita snapped angrily, carving a thick slice of peel off a large potato.
"What then?" Polevoi insisted.
"Then I told Tiktor we could do without him and his conduct would come up for discussion later."
"How did he have the cheek to look you in the lace!" Polevoi said, lying down again. "You'll be a weak-minded lot, lads, if you forgive Tiktor for the way he acted last night."
But even without Polevoi's saying it, we all realized that Nikita would not forget how Yasha Tiktor had not answered the call from headquarters because he was drunk.