Владимир Беляев - The Town By The Sea

Taking advantage of Nikita's falling silent for a minute while he lit a cigarette, I asked him to tell me just why Pecheritsa had run away from our town. I had wanted to ask Vukovich, but I hadn't dared.

Nikita explained to me that any idle talk could only hinder the search for Pecheritsa. I promised faithfully not to tell anyone anything about it and said that if anyone should hear what he was about to tell me it would only be twenty years after this night.

"Not until twenty years have passed? Do you give me your word?" Nikita asked.

"I give you my word," I said in a trembling voice. "The word of a Komsomol member! You can be sure of that!"

"Well, be careful," said Nikita and began his story, every detail of which I strove to remember.

THE PRIEST'S SON FROM ROVNO

It turned out that when Pecheritsa's wife told Furman she had killed a chicken on her front door-step she had been deceiving him. But she did not deceive Vukovich.

When Polevoi said to Vukovich: "Why, think of that, we nearly mistook chicken's blood for human!" the security man had pretended to agree. And what was more, to cover his real opinion, he replied loudly, so that the tenants who had come out on to the porch should hear: "That bandit isn't fool enough to hang about here for long!"

When he got to the square, Vukovich gave the watchman a sound dressing-down for letting such a dangerous criminal slip through his fingers. The watchman swore by all that was holy that no bandit had been anywhere near him, but Vukovich refused to believe his protestations and returned to headquarters. There he learnt that a big Petlura gang trying to cross the border that night had been routed by frontiermen in the region of Vitovtov Brod. "So that Galician refugee, a labourer from Okopy village, was right when he warned the frontier guards that bandits were assembling near Zbruch!" Vukovich thought to himself.

While telephoning the frontier posts, Vukovich still did not forget about the woman who had chosen such an unsuitable place to kill her chicken. Who had ever heard of people killing chickens on their front door-step, and certainly not at the main entrance to a building where such cultured, educated people lived! Usually housewives killed their chickens, geese, turkies, and other livestock in woodsheds and out-of-the-way corners, where no one could see, but not in full view under their neighbours' windows.

By the evening of the same day Vukovich knew the woman who said she had killed a chicken on her front doorstep as well as if he had been acquainted with her since childhood. One thing he learnt about her was that she was the daughter of the owner of a sugar refinery who had been condemned to death in 1922 for working with the Angel gang.

Everyone knew that Doctor Pecheritsa and his wife lived in a three-room flat in the red-brick building in Trinity Street. It was a good flat, light and warm, but with one shortcoming—it had no kitchen. The reason was that before the Revolution the whole second floor of this large house had belonged to the lawyer Velikoshapko. Together with the Pilsudski men the lawyer had run away to Poland in 1920, and soon afterwards the town housing department had divided his seven-room apartment into two separate flats. The larger of them had the kitchen. The housing department had not had time to fit up a kitchen in the three-room flat that Pecheritsa had been given on his arrival.

But Pecheritsa had not insisted that they should. "We're birds of passage," he had told the engineers who came to measure up his flat. "Here today and gone tomorrow. If they send me to Mogilyov, I shall go to Mogilyov, if they send me to Korsun, I shall go there. The People's Commissariat of Education plays about with you. I don't intend to build a home. What's the point of making kitchens when you're on the march, it's just wasting people's time! We'll manage as we are, without a kitchen!"

Twice a day—afternoon and evening—Pecheritsa's wife Ksenia Antonovna, a tall, dark-haired woman, would carry her shining aluminium dinner-pans to the Venice Restaurant by the fortress gates. Martsynkevich himself, the head cook, served Pecheritsa's wife with dinners and suppers.

She carried the food home in her little dinner-pans and warmed it up on a small spirit stove; and that was how she and her husband lived. They kept themselves to themselves and never had any guests. Even

Pecheritsa's colleagues at the Education Department had never visited his flat.

They had neither kerosene stove, nor primus—just a little spirit stove burning with a blue flame on which Ksenia Antonovna boiled her husband's black coffee in the mornings. Pecheritsa was very fond of that stimulating drink.

On learning all this, Vukovich became even more surprised that Pecheritsa's wife had killed a chicken. Where had she roasted it? On the little spirit stove? But why should people who took their meals from a restaurant go to all that unnecessary bother?

Vukovich also learnt that the day after the night alarm at headquarters, on Sunday, Pecheritsa's wife started taking three dinners and three suppers from the Venice Restaurant. She hadn't enough dinner-pans, so she brought earthenware pots in a string bag for the third, extra meal.

"You must have some guests?" the extremely polite head cook asked sympathetically.

"Oh, it's only my sister from Zhitomir..." Ksenia Antonovna replied, rather hastily.

It was rather strange, however, that none of the neighbours ever saw this sister. Moreover, having investigated Ksenia Antonovna's past, Vukovich knew quite well that she was the only daughter of the sugar manufacturer.

Vukovich also knew that Pecheritsa had no servants, but that every Monday the education department's messenger, Auntie Pasha, came to scrub the floors.

When he arrived at work on Monday morning, Pecheritsa said to Auntie Pasha: "You needn't come to us today, Auntie. My wife's not very well. Come next Monday."

After this instruction from her strict department chief, Auntie Pasha was very surprised when going home from work to meet the "sick" Ksenia Antonovna on New Bridge. Pecheritsa's wife was walking quickly across the bridge, on the other side, carrying her dinner-pans.

'Ksenia Antonovna was in such a hurry to get home that she did not notice Auntie Pasha and did not answer her when the messenger bowed and said: "Good evening, Ma'am!"

At exactly six thirty in the evening on the day when I left for Kharkov, Doctor Gutentag- burst agitatedly into the duty officer's room at district security headquarters.

Gutentag said he must see the chief at once. The duty officer sent Gutentag up to Vukovich and the surgeon told him the following story.

That morning, when Doctor Gutentag was still in bed, Pecheritsa's wife had rushed in to see him and said that her husband was seriously ill. Ksenia Antonovna said that Pecheritsa must have appendicitis and begged him to go with her to their flat.

Gutentag knew Pecheritsa. A short time previously he had cut a tumour out of his neck. Besides, Gutentag was very fond of music and singing and enjoyed listening to the concerts that Pecheritsa conducted. And so, in spite of the early hour, Gutentag promptly got ready and set off for Trinity Street.

What was his surprise when the sick man himself opened the door to him! Inviting the doctor into the empty dining-room, Pecheritsa said:

"Listen to me, friend! I could, of course, play blind man's buff with you, I could invent some story about my poor relative who was accidentally shot during a hunting trip, but I have no desire or intention of doing anything of the kind. You and I are grown-up people and we're too old for fairy-tales. Besides,

I know you are a man of the old school. You studied at the medical faculty in Warsaw, and I don't think you have any particular liking for Soviet power. To put it in a nutshell, behind that door lies a wounded man. He has a bullet in his leg. His condition is getting worse; the leg is swollen and he may have blood-poisoning already. That man is being searched for. No one must know that you have helped him.