Taking long strides, in an effort to avoid seeing again the faces he already knew, he left the riverbank. He tried neither to make excuses for this retreat nor to seek comfort by telling himself that perhaps somewhere else… He was drained of himself, contaminated by death, driven out of his own body by ll the dead men he had been dressing in his clothes as he slipped into theirs. He spoke in rhythm with his footsteps, eager to replenish himself with what he had been before… But suddenly stopped. Far away from the others, his head washed by the current of the stream, lay a soldier. The one he had been looking for.
Alexe'i began to strip him with actions that belonged to someone else, rather brutal and businesslike… Once dressed, he noted that the boots were too tight. He went back toward the bridge and, in the same state of detachment, removed another soldier's boots. The right boot resisted. He sat down, stared helplessly at the great body his efforts had disturbed, saw himself from outside, a young man in the midst of a beautiful summer's evening on the riverbank fringed with sand – and these scores of corpses. From time to time a fish would stir idly among the reeds, beating the water with a resounding slap… He stood up, seized the boot stuck to the leg, began shaking it, tugging at it savagely. He was unaware that, for some time now, he had been weeping, and talking to someone, and even believing he could hear replies.
Continuing along the road, he grew calmer. In the middle of a night spent in an abandoned farm cart he woke up, struck a match, read the name of the soldier he now was. In the pocket of the tunic he found the photograph of a young woman and a postcard, folded in two, with a view of the Winter Palace.
He had a clear picture of his first encounter with the soldiers among whom he would have to lose himself, get himself accepted, not betray himself. Questions, inspections, he thought. And suspicion.
No such encounter really took place. At the edge of an unknown town, amid streets noisy with gunfire, he was quite simply drawn into a disorderly stampede of soldiers, fleeing an as yet invisible danger, falling and shooting, almost without taking aim, at a cloud of smoke down at the end of a long avenue.
He ran along with them, picked up a rifle, imitated their firing and even their panic, although he did not feel it himself at that moment, having had no time to take stock either of their exhaustion or the monstrousness of the force they were attempting to confront. When at nightfall an officer succeeded in mustering some remnants of the routed army, Alexe'i noticed that the soldiers came from the most diverse units, companies that had been wiped out, decimated regiments. So he was like them. The only difference was that sometimes he was more afraid of letting slip his real name than of finding himself under fire. As a result of this fear, and the extreme care with which he copied the actions of the others during these first few weeks, he did not feel as if he was engaged in combat. And when he was finally able to relax the constantly taut string within him, he found himself in the skin of a veteran soldier, taciturn and respected for his nerve, a man among thousands like him, indistinguishable in the column as it trudged along a muddy road, headed toward the heart of the war.
During the first two years at the front, Alexeï received four or five letters addressed to the man whose name he bore. He did not reply, and reflected that his lie was certainly giving several people the strength to hope, the energy to survive.
Moreover, he had long ago learned that in war truth and falsehood, magnanimity and callousness, intelligence and naivete, could not be so clearly told apart as in the life before. The memory of the corpses on the bank of a river often came back to him. But now the horror of those minutes revealed its obverse side: if the young man from Moscow he then was had not spent that time among the dead, he would doubtless have been shattered, from the very first battles, by the sight of eviscerated bodies. The boot he had wrenched off that corpse had been like a cruel but necessary vaccination for him. Sometimes, in a judgment he did not admit to himself, it even seemed to him that, compared with the removal of that dead man's boot, all the carnage he now witnessed was easy to endure.
One day, when he was first wounded, he discovered another paradox. Having come among these soldiers to escape death, he was exposing himself to a much more certain death here than in the reeducation colony where they would have sent him after his parents' arrest. He would have been safer behind the barbed wire of a camp than in possession of this lethal liberty.
Nor could he ever have believed that during one short week, at the time of his convalescence and with one arm still in a sling, in a hospital that echoed with the groans of the wounded, it was possible to love, to become attached to a woman, with the feeling of having always known these eyes, this rather gruff voice, this body. And above all, if in the days of his former life in Moscow a friend had spoken to him of such a love, Alexeï would have laughed in his face, perceiving nothing more in such a relationship than a few hasty couplings and dull silences between a nurse and a convalescent soldier, who had only their bodies to offer each other. He would have scoffed at all the ridiculous details, the trappings of a novel of rustic life: the untidy bouquet picked along a roadside with his one good hand, a pair of worn gilt earrings, the woman's fingers stained brown with tincture of iodine.
All these things happened during that week of convalescence. There was the hospital, which, while an offensive was being prepared, was living through several days of respite in the expectation of fresh train-loads of wounded. The heavy smell of blood and bruised flesh. This woman, fifteen years older than he, who seemed to be once more noticing that seasons existed: that the warm breath of the earth and the foam of lilac were called spring; and that a man, this rather awkward soldier, with whom she had started talking one day, could become very close to her, that they were becoming very close, in spite of herself, in spite of him, in spite of everything. And when he surprised her one evening, as she appeared on the path that led from the hospital to the izba where she lodged, he with his arm in a sling and holding that bunch of flowers, she felt her voice thawing out: "It's the first time anyone has ever…" He did not let her finish, hastened to crack a joke, to make her laugh. Then fell silent and, right up to his departure a week later, sensed that but for his arm, which was still painful, he could have sated himself utterly on this woman's body, draining the cup of everything she gave him.
In the trenches this unassuaged hunger would return, but already more all-embracing; he yearned both for the dust of that path leading to the izba (he would have given all he had simply to be able to touch those warm ruts lit by the setting sun) and for the glistening of the raindrops trickling down from the roof after a brief nocturnal shower, catching the moon's brilliance as they fell. He realized he even had a longing now for the sharp smell of iodine that emanated from those rather rough hands, whose caress he still felt on his face. This smell withstood time better than the physical memory of her, as that came to be erased by the sight of so many lifeless bodies, by brief encounters with women who left him neither the memory of a face nor a talisman like tincture of iodine.
The fear of being unmasked returned only on those occasions when he had the luck – ill luck, for him – to receive an award for bravery. The commission that decided these matters, especially if an order was under consideration, would check the soldier's past, so as to avoid decorating a former convict or someone expelled from the Party. Alexe'i had long ago learned to appear lackluster, and though he often led the way in assaults, he knew how to make himself scarce after the end of a battle, when the commanding officer was noting down the names of the bravest.