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That day never came. On the very first day of war the boys of Armyansky Lane signed up. Tolya Simakov and I were rejected: the war was discriminating in the early days. Pavlik was lucky. In September I received a hastily scribbled card from him saying: Those bastards don’t care how many bombs they throw, but we’re still alive and kicking.”

Pavlik’s days, however, were numbered. He was killed near Sukhinichi. The Germans surrounded a group of Soviet soldiers inside the headquarters of the local soviet and promised to spare the lives of all who threw down their weapons on the bullet-riddled floor and came out one by one with their hands up. The few soldiers remaining in the squad Pavlik commanded were incapable of such a thing. And so the Germans, enraged by the losses they had suffered, set fire to the building. Not a single man came out; instead, they kept shooting through the smoke and flames till the end. That at least, is what the local population told our forces when they took back the village, reduced by that time to charred ruins.

A quarter of a century has passed since the end of the war:I have lived the best and the most important part of my life yet every year, more or less frequently, I dream of Pavlik. Sleep is an artist to be envied. It draws its pictures without unity of composition. It has no need to worry about being true to life and convincing, about logically motivating behavior. It knows the secret of convincing you despite incongruities, even absurdities. Except for details that fade out of my mind as soon as I wake up, my dreams about Pavlik are always the same: he is alive and has come back. The only thing that remains unexplained is where he has been all these years and why he has not let us hear from him. I find in this nothing, however, to reproach him with. The cause is assumed to be loss of memory or a prolonged state of lethargy—sleep is not required to give explanations. It is enough that Pavlik is alive and has come back. Uneasiness and bewilderment which the unsolved mystery of his resurrection causes me are as nothing compared with the unspeakable joy of knowing he is alive!He is alive! Then begins a hazy and sorrowful passage. Pavlik does not approach me. He has no need of me. His silent mother, as phantomlike in the dream as in life, hovers about him, and she is more necessary to the returned Pavlik than I am, his only friend; they are united by some common concern that I do not share. But all these lost years—haven’t he and I got to make up for them in talk and tears? Doesn’t he realize this? Has he quite forgotten me? No, he hasn’t. He understands everything and has forgotten nothing He deliberately excludes me from his life. Why? I have done nothing wrong, he has nothing to reproach me with. In the dream I explain all this elaborately to somebody—to his mother, perhaps, in the hope that she will intercede for me—or to Pavlik himself—and not out loud but in the voiceless language of dreams. And he hears me but makes no response. Suddenly I discover him beside me; he nods coldly and goes away without a word.
When I wake up my face is wet and I lie for a long time thinking abo
ut the dream in a state of great misery. I go over in my mind all my thoughts, actions, relations with others, the sum of my entire living, and I find nothing meriting such punishment. Perhaps where Pavlik comes from they have a different sense of values; perhaps we too once had a different sense.