Requiem for a Soldier E-Book

Oleg Pavlov

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 275

Beschreibung

In the vast Kazakh steppes of the crumbling Soviet Empire, Alyosha has finished his army service and is promised a gift from his deaf commander: an everlasting steel tooth. As he waits for it in the infirmary, he agrees to help out a medical officer, and they set out on a journey that takes them all the way to the kingdom of the dead. Oleg Pavlov's kaleidoscope of a tale is peopled with soldiers and prisoners, hoboes and refugees and mice that steal medicines. Their surreal inner world is vividly reflected in Pavlov's expressive prose, reminiscent of Platonov. Poetic, tragic and darkly comic, the novel is at once a grotesque portrayal of late Soviet reality and an apocalyptic allegory that has drawn comparisons with Faulkner and Kafka.

Leseprobe

First published in English translation in 2015 by And Other Stories Los Angeles – High Wycombewww.andotherstories.org

Copyright © Oleg Pavlov, 2002

Published by arrangement with ELKOST Intl. Literary Agency

English language translation copyright © Anna Gunin, 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

The right of Oleg Pavlov to be identified as author of Requiem for a Soldier (original title Karagandinskiye Deviatiny) has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or places is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 9781908276582 eBook ISBN: 9781908276599

Editors: Sophie Lewis & Louisa-Claire Dunnigan; proofreader: Louise Scothern; typesetter: Tetragon, London; typeface: Swift Neue & Verlag; cover design: Hannah Naughton; cover image: courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book was supported using public funding by Arts Council England and with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation (Russia).

Contents

GenesisThe Eternal ToothA New Day in the Old StyleWhere there’s Death, there’s LifeApples of ParadiseDwellers in the DustThe Long FarewellOn the RoadThe Living to the Living

Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth

Ecclesiastes

‌Genesis

They were still selling watermelons in the wind and the cold, while Karaganda sailed on the steppe winds deeper and deeper into the approaching winter. Every morning the clouds would timidly disperse, having come out of hiding during the night to hang among the crushed crumbs of scattered stars. November’s widescreen monochrome sky was laid bare. Out of the stone slab of day came forth the cold, which sulkily prowled the streets, the avenues, the squares – spaces where the surging winds swayed the raft-like columns of russet trees. The prison guard regiment switched over to winter time as it had always done: on the scheduled day when the order was given. Decked out in greatcoats, the camp’s guards and sentries were adapting to their warmer underclothes. The only ones stubbornly looking forward to the start of each new day were the men confined for treatment in the regimental infirmary.

There was seldom a peep louder than a mouse from the occupants of the infirmary. Those souls kept quiet, dosed up on their medicines. The mice, though, made quite a din: those voracious little grey wretches were everywhere. As the weather cooled, they had migrated from the garden, where the harvest had already been gathered, to the cellar and wall cavities in the shack-like infirmary – a building that proved fateful even for them. The mice entertained the prisoners in the infirmary, sometimes even comforting them, striking up hearty friendships when it took their fancy and with anyone they pleased if beckoned with a mere crust of bread. This was where they came into the world, beneath the floorboards and between the walls, but they were rarely seen as corpses, save by the one man who hunted them down with a passion, day in, day out: the head of the infirmary, who had a funny-sounding surname and hated with a vengeance all forms of life that gave out even the tiniest autonomous squeak.

The infirmary mice chomped their way through so many different drugs that you’d think they were suffering from every ailment at once and even laying in stores prophylactically. In the space of a year they had already devoured several sacks of Novalgin alone. The tablets had first emboldened the mice to the point of stupor, then made them as clever as geniuses, but they hadn’t been killed – well, all medicines are tested on mice, after all, before getting the green light for industrial production. And the man who went by the name of Institutov knew it all too well. Those mice were the only ones who could stand up to the military medic, and they roamed freely.

The head of the infirmary was no servile old trooper, neither in temperament nor in spirit. At some point he had been enlisted to work as a dental technician, having been to vocational college, which distinguished him considerably from everybody else, and at moments when he felt the need to remind people who they were dealing with, he would declare imposingly: ‘Well, being a man with a college education, I…’

As with all the civilian staff, in the interests of uniformity and equality they bestowed upon him the rank of junior officer. But Institutov did not have to go chasing ignominiously after promotion. When the previous head had drunk himself irrevocably into oblivion, they appointed the teetotal toothpuller in his place: a man of medium height with a neatly clipped moustache, a dull complexion and arms that were short and unremarkable but had amassed muscle with the help of an almost daily regimen of weight training. Institutov fastidiously and at times even fearfully abhorred anything plain and simple, so his workout with kettle bells, for example, he called his ‘kettle-bell sport’, and whenever he gave an ordinary jab, it became an ‘outpatient procedure’. Although the toothpuller cut rather a hefty figure, he tried to accentuate his elegance and beauty – yet the only feature to exude allure or power was his innately dark, teetotal eyes that glinted like anthracite. Sometimes they would narrow suddenly with malice and resentment like two little devils, while at other times a pair of sleek, rotund, magnificent demons would surface imperially from their depths, meaning the head of the infirmary was feeling content.

Institutov made a habit of judging people: whenever he felt irked, he would liken their personalities to characters from literary works, and not even necessarily to bad characters. No person held the slightest novelty for him. He would remark, with a note of exasperation, ‘You’re hardly the first of your ilk.’ That’s not to say he had read widely or seen much of life. But he had an inkling of things, having picked up a smattering of this and that, and at the sight of living people he would grimace like an erudite man faced with some phoniness.

The head of the infirmary abhorred alcohol; it seemed as though sober living was one of his most firmly held principles, perhaps even an ethical ideal. The reality was he suffered from a stomach ulcer, but he kept hush, ashamed that his body could host so common and primitive an ailment. Alcohol was always to hand in the infirmary, so it was odd to see spirits freely available and the head of the infirmary strutting about like some scrupulous insect, while across the street was a hostel for prison staff without a drop of drink in sight where everyone would always be horribly drunk and you’d hear a wail of singing, raucous hollering, children bawling, and a fanfare of dishes clattering and smashing.

For Institutov, service in the infirmary was all one long jittery race. He never found the time to treat people. Almost the entire day was taken up with important and shadowy matters that may have borne a semblance to disease, but only because they smacked of fatal outcomes. He was oblivious to the idea that in such cases people could be driven by diligence, or profit, or fear – his only desire was to be rid of the troubling business just as soon as he could. On each occasion it was merely due to his squeamishness that he carried out his work in the finest possible manner, contriving throughout to sparkle with squeaky cleanliness and thus validate one of the epithets applied to his profession: ‘men in white coats’. Institutov had the odious feeling that they were using him for their own ends as a clean-up person in cases where they were afraid of getting their own hands dirty, but all he could do was revolt inwardly in silence or suffer senselessly, despising those above him. Indeed, it seemed typical of him to carry something out despite the torment, and be in torment while he carried it out.

He had for a long time been too idle to treat people’s teeth, or perhaps he just couldn’t abide unclean and malodorous mouths, preferring instead to whip the teeth out – especially for the lower ranks. In his daily work as a dentist, one moment inflicting pain, the next eliminating it, he personally felt little – he just got on with the job. And he would tell his patients, ‘Well, what can we do? My friend, be brave – I’m the dentist, not the pain.’ His patients would approach him in dread of perhaps the most daunting pain known to man. They would tremble before him, throw themselves at his feet – though it was simply the toothache filling them with fear. The toothpuller from time to time would sense the delicious power he held over people, but unable to find anything else to lust after, he kept on passionately obliterating those mice.

It was not from existential boredom that Institutov succumbed to the temptation to strew poison and set up a blunt little mouse guillotine – and when he stamped some of the wretches out, he felt no heartache. In the whole wide world he loved only himself, and then not even with that blind familial love directed towards one’s own blood, but lustfully, lasciviously, the way one person’s flesh hungers incessantly for the flesh of someone still lovelier. But his entire paradise on earth was being wrecked on a daily basis by the mice, who could only be moved to act through fright. He was especially aghast and aggrieved whenever he found right there in his pockets fresh mouse droppings, which were not only white in colour but tablet-shaped. Those ever-present grey creatures were alone to blame for everything. Sometimes Institutov would mumble, ‘They’re trying to kill me,’ and he’d scowl with a haunted air, utterly miserable and pitiful. At other times he would denounce them out loud: ‘They don’t want to pull their weight in society!’ And the fact he was powerless to tackle those pilfering rascals, who were forever stealing brazenly from the infirmary, was well and truly driving him insane. Those grey little brutes were the cause of his anguish, much like the anguish experienced by people with toothache who fancy their entire life is convulsing piteously, racked by a great tapeworm of pain. Institutov could understand the mice when they squeaked. He knew almost all of them by sight and was quite sure that the mouse scurrying under the cabinet in his office was the very same one he’d seen last week in the treatment room or some such place. He remembered precisely which mouse had been stealing, all the outrages it had got up to and the overall harm it posed. He saw mice as a breeding ground for every contagious disease, from cholera to the plague, claiming for some reason that mice lived and fed only on refuse, despite the fact that they lived and ate alongside him, sometimes even right next to him in his office, feeding from his own forgotten biscuit left lying on the table. Yet the chief crime of these wretches apparently lay in the fact that, as Institutov would have it, they were plotting to kill him. From time to time he had feverish visions of them scaling his body, gnawing through his throat or veins and then crawling right into his mouth. Hence the head of the infirmary was, in some deeper sense, not so much possessed of a murderous passion to eradicate their entire genus as tirelessly battling to save his own life.

Yet the various chemical poisons that tasted of saltpetre seldom worked on them; it was as if the rodents had long ago discovered an antidote among the drugs they fed on in the infirmary. At his own expense, Institutov had purchased a large batch of mousetraps, and ever since he’d been filling them up with delicious-smelling bait bought with his own hard-earned cash. Every other mouse, benefitting from experience, patiently ate around the traps, dining as Institutov’s guest, and then made haste each month to bring fresh additions into the world. So it was impossible to wipe them out unless you could destroy them all at once – say, by setting fire to the infirmary. Towards nightfall, as the head of the infirmary left the scene of his battle for survival, the mice would emerge, parading in columns. The lights were not yet out, but everyone was already tucked up in bed ready for sleep. Then they would sweep forth in ranks across the vast flat expanse of linoleum, like little soldiers in overcoats in their grey pelts. Chances were only the most battle-hardened took part in these parades – their motions were resolute and harmonised. After gliding round in a circle, the mouse militia would vanish, to general laughter. Then the lights went out and everyone fell asleep in blissful silence, while the mice did battle somewhere else, valiantly surviving to see another morning.

The toms and she-cats that Institutov from time to time brought in to the infirmary for mouse-catching did not stay put for long; given a day or two, they would ingloriously scarper, shinning up the apple trees in the garden and then dropping out of them like wailing comets onto their tarmac home turf. The first of the felines to flee had acquired the name of Barsik, and ever since, this name somehow attached itself to all the other cats. People would stroke a Barsik; they would give it some milk. But the animals nonetheless wanted their freedom. The head of the infirmary, it should be mentioned, detested pretty much all animals, as if in his eyes they were somehow all descended from those abominable mice. He would quite gladly have strangled and hanged the cats, who also fed on the scraps and were forever brazenly pilfering things from people, if it weren’t for his need of them – and so he caught them in the refuse and smuggled them into the infirmary in the bottom of his briefcase, all wrapped up fastidiously in plastic bags. After their suffocating ordeal in the briefcase, no force on earth could keep the Barsiks within the walls of the infirmary, where all but one of the wards usually stood empty.

Come what may, the head of the infirmary had to cling on to his patients. Anyone who recovered would be fed until his cheeks grew as plump and flush as a bashful maiden’s, and they were condemned to interminable treatment. Someone needed to scrub the place to that squeaky cleanliness which Institutov so admired; someone had to listen to his sermons and to toil away for their own good – and it wouldn’t be the ward attendants, who’d become insolent from idleness and who filled him with fear. So it was the dexterous and docile lads who were on his books for months as contagious patients and whose illnesses had gradually mutated into chronic disease. In their own units they had been guarding convicts, some as guards, others as sentries, but from the moment they found themselves in the infirmary they were confined indoors for upwards of a month. They had been born in a variety of places and circumstances, but all in the same period. So they had more or less all turned eighteen when the call-up came. At first, in the mass of their own kind, all camouflaged in grassy, earthy colours, they would run, then crawl, then march imposingly in the same direction, but their sense of self faded as they all merged into one, and they were blithely unaware of what lay ahead. It wasn’t a unit or a herd or a throng – no, it was the people itself, with its own mission, yet also with a personality of its own. Childishly trusting – and already more or less cowed. Incredibly resilient – and yet moaning and groaning at the slightest complaint. Hale and hearty – and yet bone idle. It was as if they had all entered this world in their parents’ footsteps only to cross into manhood and manage before dying to leave in their wake some similarly trusting, resilient, moaning, hearty, idle child. Many of those whom fate had escorted to the infirmary would sneeringly tell the same dull old story about their close shave with death. The only ones to keep quiet were those hiding in the corner hoping to end it all. And among them all there’d be some true hero who’d been burnt in the arms depot and fought back the flames to prevent an explosion after he’d torched the place himself while trying to make an electric kettle element out of a high-voltage knife switch.

Life in an infirmary bed may have been a good deal more nourishing than in the army barracks, to say nothing of the prison camp, but the mere words ‘sick list’ and ‘infirmary contingent’ were enough to send the brains of yesterday’s guards and sentries into a crazy whir until they burned with a longing for freedom. All the quirks of life here suddenly turned into a reflection of the stinking prison and the lousy camp, with their regimes, inmates and miserable black void. The sensation of walking in front of yourself down the straight, narrow corridor as if being led under guard took some getting used to. The smug, imperious glances of those who’d breezed in from the outside bruisingly knocked the composure from your shoulders. The dressing gown issued in the infirmary somehow had a demeaning effect.

The officers’ ward, which had always been filled with nothing but mice and a desolate emptiness, one day became charged with a particularly oppressive silence. With the arrival of a young lieutenant at the infirmary, it had become gloomy for no clear rhyme or reason. On the day of his admission, the new patient was escorted by two officers who didn’t look like medical staff and, what’s more, with their faces clad in bronze tans they were clearly not locals. The entire party was still free of overcoats. They must have been serving on the edge of the steppes, where come spring or autumn the sun blazed like in the desert, and where boredom and the blues could drive men out of their minds. From that faraway place this lieutenant had been brought to Karaganda under the escort of officers – and all just to put him in an ordinary infirmary. His escorts stood like heathen idols waiting to receive the officer’s dusty, faded uniform, which had slipped off stocking-like as though it were a cast skin. With the uniform in their arms, they briskly vanished, carrying out the wishes of some unseen person. The lieutenant whose clothing had been taken – stripping him perhaps of his uniform, perhaps of his freedom – was issued a gown from the infirmary’s stores, one so roomy yet so tattered that the officer looked like a mendicant even in the lonely, fully enclosed garden, where they spotted him coming out for a smoke. They also saw him each morning in the utility room, where he washed and took his time carefully shaving.

Institutov ran the infirmary as though it were his home, and you couldn’t take a step without his house-proud chidings and proddings. There can’t have been a woman alive who could have stomached that rancorous old-maidish behaviour, which was why Institutov, no matter how he bent over backwards to please the ladies, was still knocking about as a barren old bachelor. With the punctiliousness of a eunuch, the head of the infirmary not only tried to knock everyone and everything into shape, but would also offer a running commentary of tedious speeches. Whatever living beings or even inanimate objects turned up in the infirmary, Institutov would immediately form his own opinion of them, and they were all expected to indulge his needs, not only by following his rules but also by listening to his lectures. When the lieutenant made his appearance, though, Institutov kept a wary silence and carefully avoided contact with this new person, as if the strange young man had been placed in the infirmary for purposes other than treatment. No doubt the real reason for keeping him in the infirmary was indeed known to him, and that was why he avoided the officers’ ward, merely muttering once or twice as he glanced in its direction, ‘Fancies himself a Raskolnikov, eh…’

When Institutov decided to put the new arrival into some kind of quarantine, his eyes happened to alight on one of his soldier charges, who was already hard at work painting, towering above him near the ceiling all alone on the trestle.

The head of the infirmary became engrossed for a moment in an icy tingle of conscience that was pricking him, but with a somewhat asinine pomposity he called out, ‘Kholmogorov! Come, my friend, get down from the heavens…’ The soldier dropped what he was doing and clumsily descended from the trestle’s height – half-naked and splodged from head to toe in whitewash, he looked like some gypsum figure adorning a park. Glancing at the foolish statue with his drooping arms, Institutov frowned and said, ‘Well, my friend, I have a new job for you: to serve breakfast, lunch and supper in the officers’ ward and, when our new patient has finished, you can take away the dirty dishes.’

‌The Eternal Tooth

It had been a month since another boss had thrust this demobilised dead soul upon Institutov’s infirmary: warrant officer Abdullayev, head of the firing range, who went by the nickname of Abdulka. The deaf and useless old soldier held sway out in the desolate steppe, a hundred kilometres from Karaganda. Abdullayev had previously served in one of the prison guard companies, but during some field exercises held on the anniversary of the October Revolution, he’d been maimed. Two fateful events had occurred on that day in the make-believe zone of hostile fire. First, he had stumbled and fallen, and second, right at the spot where he fell, as if on cue, a thunderbolt had exploded mimicking a blast as a hundred-odd men in khaki were acting out the shift from defence to offence.

From the watchtower somebody continued to gaze down on the soldierly swarm of little men in khaki, and the only annoyance – a brief one, no doubt – came when one ant-like man let out a scream, began bleeding profusely, and lay there unable to fathom why this had happened to him. Abdullayev was left facing the cruel fate of an invalid consigned to the scrap heap.

It was his sheep that saved him – his own humble yet lovingly tended livestock. On someone’s suggestion, Abdullayev had offered a lamb to each man on the medical commission and in the unit who had any sway over his fate. And each of them duly reasoned that a man who was deaf, in all senses of the word, could in fact be endowed with hearing. Mindful that the shell-shock victim no longer complained of hearing loss, one by one the recipients of the lambs declared Abdulla Ibrahimovich Abdullayev fit for service, that is to say, as right as rain. The last man to stick his neck out and allow the deaf man to stay in service offered him a livelihood in the farthest-flung place of all: the training ground, quiet as a graveyard, a sandy, rocky site in the steppe, all bashed up with bullets and blasts. Thus the wild and barren spot where he’d been robbed of his hearing – robbed of half his life, as it had seemed – had turned the deaf little man in khaki into an army boss.

To keep in their good books, once a year the shell-shocked man would visit his benefactors bearing something delicious to eat.

Abdulka always had one private reporting to him, in line with his entitlement. He must have been the only commander in the regiment with just one man in his charge. For the bulk of the year, during the weeks and sometimes months when the firing ceased, the deaf man lived with his missus in a small rural settlement, only visiting the distant training ground for the sake of propriety, while in summer and winter his single soldier would dwell in the wild, arid steppe, keeping watch over the wind. Fatherly old Abdulka doted on all his little soldiers and he’d reminisce about them as though they were sons, each becoming his one and only when the time came for them to part. These privates of his were odd creatures – as good as masters of all that Abdullayev personally presided over for barely a month in the year. They would arrive at his training ground all much the same – strangers, gazing about the steppes like doomed men. When they left a few years later, each unfailingly superseding the last in this post in the plains, they were still largely alike – beloved sons, eyes brimming with the enlightenment of sages, some already going grey at the tender age of twenty. That autumn Abdullayev had just lost the latest to be demobbed. The soldier should have left for home long ago. But fatherly old Abdulka couldn’t let him go just like that: he decided to bestow on him an eternal steel tooth.

The explosion, his own bloodcurdling scream, the sight of blood running from his ears – everything terrible that occurred at the firing ground that day had shaken and shocked Abdulka so deeply that, ever since, all manner of things would conjure in him a feeling of eternity. Abdullayev had already had some metal teeth fitted, even a gold one, but he’d never before reflected on the fact that they would remain after he was gone; that, say, in a thousand years’ time someone might find them in his grave. This touching and timid desire to contain something eternal had moved Abdulka to get his healthy teeth replaced with ones of steel, and from then on his life’s pride and joy were those stainless chinks of eternity, gleaming and glinting in the sun whenever the shell-shocked man lost his temper or grinned. To give a steel tooth to his latest son was like sharing this triumph of human life between the two of them. ‘What kind of man are you, without a tooth? Nothing to shout about, eh, just ashes and dust. You’re like the sand – one puff of wind and you’ll come to grief!’ Abdulka spoke loudly; like all deaf men, he couldn’t hear what he was saying, and his voice boomed as though from a loudspeaker.

The soldier didn’t protest, believing that the shell-shocked man meant him nothing but good. Abdulka paid Institutov a visit, bearing a lamb carcass wrapped up like a log in hessian – he was offering this generous gift of his own accord and only out of naïvety. Institutov would have softened at the sight of a mere leg of lamb, but Abdulka was already pining so badly for his cherished soldier that no powers of reason or forces of any description could make him diminish his sacrifice.

Just behind fatherly Abdulka, decked out in dress uniform and looking almost guilty, stood that soldier. He was like an overgrown child lost in a fog of bewilderment ever since emerging into the world. He had with him his soldier’s identity papers, a cash payment of forty-five roubles that he’d just been issued in the regiment’s accounting department, and a document entitling Private Aleksei Mikhailovich Kholmogorov to a second-class ticket to anywhere in the whole vast country.

Quick on the uptake, the pragmatic head of the infirmary did not heap praise upon the generous soul of Abdulla Ibrahimovich; rather he vowed to fix the soldier up with the finest steel tooth, placed prominently and bonded to him until death. Abdulka readily believed not so much this man’s words as the laws of human life, which he surrendered to like a worker ant, and which, as a human, he could infringe only on pain of instant punishment tantamount to death. And by those laws, no man on earth – no fellow worker ant – could cheat Abdulka once he’d accepted advance payment, because the man wouldn’t be able to live with himself afterwards. This was all the assurance Abdulka had wanted when preparing the lamb for Institutov. But upon hearing the word ‘death’, Abdulka was moved, and suddenly his eyes welled up with tears as if he were at a funeral. The shell-shocked commander followed conversations by reading people’s lips, yet people would be taken aback – unless they’d forgotten he was deaf – by the unexpected emotion in his responses to seemingly mundane utterances.

The moment fatherly old Abdulka started weeping, Kholmogorov almost burst into tears himself, feeling somehow orphaned. ‘Abdulla Ibrahimovich, I’ll get along fine without the tooth, come on, let’s be on our way!’ Alyosha said. Having already taken payment for his task, the head of the infirmary winced horribly. But the deaf man heard nothing and the soldier, who for some reason felt a pang of conscience, stayed put. Institutov said a long goodbye to the commander of the firing ground, then stole a few glances at the youngster, whose asinine appearance was already riling him. Worried that once Abdulka had gone he could well enough drop in unannounced, Institutov set straight to work and extracted the tooth destined for replacement with a steel one, but after biding his time for a couple of days, he forgot about his debt. At first he insisted that you couldn’t produce a tooth to last for centuries in the space of just a few days. Breathing a sigh of relief, Alyosha believed the head of the infirmary. Trust always came more naturally to him than mistrust. He would only stop believing a man once he’d been well and truly duped; before the realisation set in, though, the man would have time to bamboozle him several times over.

Kholmogorov reassured himself: ‘It’s all right, I’ll give it another week and then I’ll catch the train and go home.’ To make the time pass more quickly, he agreed to do the tasks they set him in the infirmary. But here too it turned out he was helping them not of his own free will; rather, he was paying off Institutov personally for the long-awaited eternal tooth. Kholmogorov could pack up and leave whenever he liked. He had all the documents required, and he’d long ago been taken off the roll. Institutov, though, was ready to tolerate his presence in the infirmary – indeed, to benefit from it. He dared not kick him out for fear Abdulka would catch wind of it. And lately he seemed to have dropped his ‘I’ll give him the tooth when I feel like it’; instead, he was setting him tasks as his debtor: ‘He’ll get the tooth when he’s earned it.’ Indeed, he spelled it right out: ‘You, my friend, as it happens, are free to leave.’ But as if to spite him, Kholmogorov hung on and waited patiently for what he had been promised.

Alyosha might not have known that great law of life so revered by Abdulka, but he trusted him. And so he had to believe the head of the infirmary, in whom Abdulla Ibrahimovich had placed his trust. Thus the slippery, meaningless promise of tomorrow – that desperate promise made by a restless, cornered little man – suddenly grew into a momentous human truth. Meanwhile, everyone he ran into would ask him how he’d lost his tooth and Alyosha would gladly launch into conversation: ‘They’ve pulled it out to make room for a new one. Was going to be the first to go home, couldn’t believe my luck. But I stayed on to mend my teeth and now it’s looking like I’ll be last to leave. Ah, but it’ll save me hassle in the long run. A steel tooth will last me a lifetime.’ They tried to shoot down this certainty of his: ‘But what if it rusts?’ And as they all laughed at him, he too smiled, but with a squirming, faraway smile so disfiguring his face that their sniggers of disgust began to die down and resemble coughs before fading out. Alyosha twitched like a frog wired to the mains; he was happy at the thought they were all listening to him. ‘I don’t think it’ll rust or wear down – life’s too short for that. Well it’s not like I’m going to live to two hundred! Nobody on Earth can do that yet!’