The Matiushin Case (22 page)

‘You're going to be interrogated!' he shouted. ‘Do you hear? I want you ready for interrogation, get out of here, go and sleep!'

‘I didn't want to … ' Matiushin started whinging, almost giving himself away. ‘It was him
…'

But Pomogalov yelled:

‘You're a hero, you fucker, understand? You have to be a hero for me, for the whole company. Go and get washed! Sleep! It's all over, your war's finished! As soon as we've logged the body, you're going home to rest. You've got nothing to be afraid of. No one's going to touch you. That's it, lad, consider that you've served your time. And if you start whining
–
I'll smash your face.'

He crept into the wash room, thinking he'd escaped from pursuit. But there was Rebrov scouring dishes with the abrasive local water. When he saw Matiushin he shuddered, thinking Matiushin was going to beat him for what had happened with the bread ration.

‘Vasenka … ' he babbled, ‘it was the trainer, he told me to give him your ration, and I didn't mean to do that with the mug, it won't happen again.'

Matiushin didn't hear what Vanka was saying. What ration, what trainer
–
no, that wasn't the way it was! Afraid of frightening off the groveller, Matiushin put his arms round him and pulled him close so that he wouldn't run
away.

‘Ah, you're all bastards … Reckon everything's turned out your way, do
you?'

‘What's turned out what way, Vasya? It was the trainer, the trainer told me
to.'

‘The trainer? Told you? What did he tell
you?'

‘Nothing, nothing
…'

‘You're lying. You know. Everyone knows. But I won't give in that easily. I'll do for the lot of you here. I've got nothing to lose.'

Without even realising it, he really was strangling Rebrov, squeezing tighter and tighter. As he wheezed, Rebrov suddenly understood that he was being strangled to death and jerked desperately, throwing Matiushin over, so that he was able to tear himself free and go running off. Matiushin darted after him, but he collided with a wall. He came to in a corner of the dark, blank watch corridor that was like a crack between two walls, and didn't know which way to
run.

As he fumbled about in the dark, his hand disappeared through a black, open doorway, and he immediately caught the smell of foot cloths stabbing out of it, and heard the resounding silence of human breathing.

This was the doorway Matiushin had kept dashing to round the circle of the camp. And last night he hadn't got enough sleep. Every time he collapsed lifeless onto the bunk, thinking that this was the night when he would catch up on his sleep and break free from his leaden, pitch-black drowsiness, as if he'd only ever agreed to live because he'd been promised that half his life would be sleep.

Matiushin had been dashing along the path to the vodka tower. He wanted to get there quickly. But now there was a roaring in his head and he was trapped in this crack, in this opening that breathed out drowsiness. And now there was nowhere to dash to, and no one would ever bother him again, they wouldn't call his name to get him up for duty
–
they'd go without
him.

The darkness and isolation in the sleeping area was the kind that can probably only exist underground. He started moving forward, forcing himself against the wall. He pressed up against a bunk-bed that he could smell and hear, and tumbled onto it, fancying that he was tumbling into a top bunk where a dozen soldiers, invisible in the dark, but just like him, were welded together in a drowsy crush.

His living and suffering were
over.

‘That's all now … It's the end … ' Matiushin just had time to think before someone prodded him in the stomach and shook him, straining to heave him off the
bunk.

‘Shove over! I'll kill you, you bastard!'

Matiushin tried to say his own name. He mumbled. He resisted. He felt as if his soul was being shaken out of him. They were torturing him. They'd started the interrogation.

And he summoned up all his willpower and groaned:

‘Kill me, kill me
…'

And he heard:

‘Get up! Come on! Shift off the bunk, you pushy bastard! It's not your time
yet!'

They shoved him out into the light, under a lamp, and he found himself in the watch officer's room, unable to tell if it was day or night, and how long they'd let him sleep. Pomogalov was standing there, skulking in the swampy darkness of his crumpled tunic. Arman was sitting at the desk, looking as if he'd been chopped off at the waist … He was leading the interrogation. Then he jumped to his feet. In his impatience he moved right up close, shouting something, flexing his arm and finally swinging it back
–
but Pomogalov suddenly shielded Matiushin from the officer with his own
body.

‘Why put the young lad through this? You've seen the body, you know what happened. Have you really no idea what you're after, what you're getting yourself into? Show him some pity; how's he going to live now? And if you don't want to, comrade Senior Lieutenant, pardon me, but it's time to put an end to this! This is the lad's fourth day on guard duty … You make me sick. You've got other things to think about! The zone's mutinied! You'll have blood, and there'll be plenty of
it!'

Arman froze
–
and then called loudly for the soldiers. The sergeant-major laughed and Matiushin, clutching at this jolly laugh of disbelief, shook his head, staring off somewhere into empty space. No one came in response to the political officer's call. Arman waited in the silence for about a minute and then gave another order, this time to Pomogalov.

‘Come with
me.'

Matiushin was left alone. He waited so long that everything inside him collapsed, and some time later the sergeant-major came into the little room on his own, seeming very strange, looking at Matiushin with a mournful and helpless expression.

‘Son, something's happened. Be strong now son, be strong … ' But tears that seemed grey, as if they had grey skins, were seeping out of his eyes. ‘We got a telegram by phone; your old man, your father, has died …
He
had the telegram yesterday already … So that's it, these things happen. You be strong now, but just have a little cry here, come on now … Only don't you do anything to yourself, you understand, do you hear me? I swear on my daughter that you'll leave this place today. It says you're to be demobilised; he's got no more right. Well, do you want me to go and shoot him? Do you want me to shoot myself, bastard that I am? Have you gone deaf, or what? Don't just say nothing!'

At the bus station a motley crowd of people was jostling and yelling beside a colourless concrete-and-glass box, and a large, white, human-looking dog was suffering torment in the biting cold, tethered by a rope to a birch tree that looked fragile in its coating of hoarfrost. The dog's owner had forgotten about it
–
he was probably jostling in that crowd. But the thought occurred to Matiushin that this was a simple, clear way to get rid of an animal that was no longer wanted; not throw it out, because then it would hang about outside the building and never leave you in peace, but walk a good distance away and tie it up in a well-populated spot, even beside a shop. Then either someone would take a fancy to it and steal it, or it would freeze, standing in the same spot overnight, and croak, and that same night it would be covered over by a snowdrift, so it wouldn't bother your conscience. And all day long it would strain on its rope, it wouldn't even whine, but bark in wild desperation that it was being killed, only none of the passers-by would understand that it had been left there to die, not just for a minute, and that this barking was its death howl. He'd just got off the bus that had brought him here and was glancing around, waiting for his eyes to stumble across the slip road leading off the highway, the road that his mother had explained to him about … And before that they'd walked to the ‘Soviet' cemetery to tell them that they were burying someone and arranged things there. Matiushin had felt good there, in that quiet nook, although his mother had made him dress up for the first time in the sheepskin coat and the deerskin cap and boots that had turned out to be just his size, the ones his father had kept for five years and hardly even worn, buying everything for himself in larger sizes out of thrift. Matiushin had walked round the cemetery, constrained by the unfamiliar sheepskin coat and still unaccustomed to civilian clothes, far away from his brother's snow-covered grave, and delighted in the glittering, untouched snow, feeling in his father's clothes as if he was wearing the living family armour. There was no sense of dread, as if this wasn't a cemetery but a winter garden. The snowdrifts on the graves brought peace to the earth and the dead in that earth. At his brother's grave, where his mother talked respectfully to a watchman the same age as herself, he stood a little distance away, listening to their complaints about their health, and suddenly thought: if he'd been killed or died before his brother, he'd have been lying here. But now his father would be buried with his brother
–
and they'd be together here for all eternity.

He walked round the crowd and the glass box, waddling heavily as he made his way out onto the empty white road ploughed up slightly by cars and buses, where he could already make out the tall chimney of the crematorium with its fragile plume of grey smoke. As he strode along, he was thinking obstinately about just one thing now
–
that he would untie the dog on his way back and let it find its own way home or find its master. The office smelled of pine needles and was tended by a young girl who looked out boldly through the small window with her little baby-face. When Matiushin saw the small, toy-like, brown plastic urn he fell silent in sudden, childish surprise. The unwieldy bag that he had brought, crusted with ice, seemed both ugly and too large, and he felt so awkward that he broke into a sweat, but he didn't have any other bag. And he strode back along the road to the bus station, hearing the urn rattling about and feeling as if he himself were crusting over with ice at every step. But the dog had disappeared. There were the fresh holes of tracks in the snow by the birch tree, and the pit that the dog had dug and packed down as a lair for itself was empty. Feeling as if his suffering was over, he walked past that same crowd, that glass-and-concrete box, that same line of living, reddish-brown buses, wreathed in clouds of steam, and felt something greater than peace. He fancied that he had left this life exactly as he arrived in this world when he was born: without feeling anything.

Dear readers,

We rely on subscriptions from people like you to tell these other stories
–
the types of stories most publishers consider too risky to take
on.

Our subscribers don't just make the books physically happen. They also help us approach booksellers, because we can demonstrate that our books already have readers and fans. And they give us the security to publish in line with our values, which are collaborative, imaginative and ‘shamelessly literary'.

All of our subscribers:

• receive a first-edition copy of each of the books they subscribe
  to
  
• are thanked by name at the end of these
  books
  
• are warmly invited to contribute to our plans and choice of future
  books
  

Visit
andotherstories.org/subscribe
to become part of an alternative approach to publishing.

Subscriptions
are:

£20 for two books per
year

£35 for four books per
year

£50 for six books per
year

If you'd like to know about upcoming events and reading groups (our foreign-language reading groups help us choose books to publish, for example) you
can:

• join the mailing list at:
  andotherstories.org/join-us
  
• follow us on Twitter:
  @andothertweets
  
• join us on Facebook:
  facebook.com/AndOtherStoriesBooks
  
• follow our blog:
  Ampersand
  

Current & Upcoming
Books

01

Juan Pablo Villalobos,
Down the Rabbit
Hole

translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey

02

Clemens Meyer,
All the Lights

translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire

03

Deborah Levy,
Swimming
Home

04

Iosi Havilio,
Open
Door

translated from the Spanish by Beth Fowler

05

Oleg Zaionchkovsky,
Happiness is Possible

translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield

06

Carlos Gamerro,
The Islands

translated from the Spanish by Ian Barnett

07

Christoph Simon,
Zbinden's Progress

translated from the German by Donal McLaughlin

08

Helen DeWitt,
Lightning
Rods

09

Deborah Levy,
Black Vodka: ten stories

10

Oleg Pavlov,
Captain of the Steppe

translated from the Russian by Ian Appleby

11

Rodrigo de Souza Leão,
All Dogs are
Blue

translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry & Stefan Tobler

12

Juan Pablo Villalobos,
Quesadillas

translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey

13

Iosi Havilio,
Paradises

translated from the Spanish by Beth Fowler

14

Ivan Vladislavić,
Double Negative

15

Benjamin Lytal,
A Map of Tulsa

16

Ivan Vladislavić,
The Restless Supermarket

17

Elvira Dones,
Sworn Virgin

translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford

18

Oleg Pavlov,
The Matiushin Case

translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield

19

Paulo Scott,
Nowhere People

translated from the Portuguese by Daniel
Hahn

20

Deborah Levy,
An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell

21

Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel,
By Night the Mountain Burns

translated from the Spanish by Jethro Soutar

22

SJ Naudé,
The Alphabet of Birds

translated from the Afrikaans by the author

23

Niyati Keni,
Esperanza Street

24

Yuri Herrera,
Signs Preceding the End of the World

translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman

25

Carlos Gamerro,
The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

translated from the Spanish by Ian Barnett

26

Angela Readman,
Don't Try This at Home

Oleg Pavlov
is one of the most highly-regarded Russian writers today. He has won the Russian Booker Prize (2002) and Solzhenitsyn Prize (2012) among many other awards. Born in Moscow in 1970, Pavlov spent his military service as a prison guard in Kazakhstan. Many of the incidents portrayed in his fiction were inspired by his experiences there: he recalls how he found himself reading about Karabas, the very camp he had worked at, in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's
The Gulag Archipelago
, became Solzhenitsyn's secretary and was inspired to continue the great writer's work. Pavlov's writing is firmly in the tradition of great Russian novelists such as Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn.

Translator
Andrew Bromfield
was a co-founder and original editor of the Russian literature journal
Glas
. His numerous translations include most books by Victor Pelevin and Boris Akunin, as well as books by Mikhail Bulgakov and Leo Tolstoy.

Title:
The Matiushin Case
Author: Oleg Pavlov
Translator: Andrew Bromfield
Editor: Sophie
Lewis
Series & Cover Design: Joseph Harries
Typesetting, proofreading & eBook version:
Tetragon, London