Looking up at a heavily laden branch from a cherry tree hanging over the wattle fence, Katya said:
"Alexei Ivanovich, tell me what I am to do.
One must live...." The moment she said it, she felt afraid—her words seemed to have floated into the void.
Alexei did not reply immediately.
"Do?
What a question—just like the gentry!
What— you, an educated woman, who can speak several languages, a beautiful woman like you—to ask a peasant what you're to do!"
An expression of supreme contempt passed over his face.
He gently rattled the hand grenades dangling from his belt.
Katya shrank into herself.
"You'll find plenty to do in the town," he said.
"You might go to a tavern, to sing or dance. You can become a cocotte, or go into an office and do typewriting.
You'll be all right."
Katya's head drooped. She felt he was looking at her, and she could not raise her head to meet his glance.
And suddenly she understood, as then with Mishka, why Alexei stared so fixedly over her head.
These were no times for forgiveness and sweetness.
She was not on their side, so she was an enemy.
She had asked how she was to live.
She had asked a fighter, still hot from the saddle, from the whistling of bullets, from the intoxication of victory... how to live!
The question now sounded absurd in her own ears.
If she had asked him whom she could attach herself to, whose cart she should follow in its flight over the steppe, in quest of what freedom, his eyes would no doubt have responded with a cordial sparkle....
Katya understood all this, and dodged like some wild creature.
For the first time in all these days she attempted to stick up for herself.
"You don't understand me, Alexei Ivanovich.
It's not my fault that I'm driven like a dead leaf over the earth.
What should I love?
What should I cherish?
I was never taught, so don't ask it of me.
First teach me." (He had stopped knocking the grenades together, a sign that he was on the alert, listening.) "Vadim Petrovich joined the White Army against my will.
I didn't want him to.
He reproached me for having no hate, too.... I see it all, I understand, Alexei Ivanovich. But I'm ... just an onlooker. It's terrible.
That's just my trouble. That's why I asked you what I was to do, how I was to live...."
She stopped speaking and looked frankly, clear-eyed, into the face of Alexei Ivanovich.
He blinked.
His expression became a little sheepish, embarrassed, completely baffled.
His hand went up to the back of his head, as if to scratch it.
"You're right, it's a real drama," he said, wrinkling up his nose.
"It's simple with us.
My brother killed a German in our yard, they burned his house... we went away.
Where to?
To the ataman. But you're from the gentry.... Yes, it's hard...."
Katya's ruse (had succeeded.
Alexei Ivanovich evidently intended to settle here and now the accursed question: whose rights was one like Katya—landless and horseless—to fight for?
A foolish way to spend the time at the wattle fence beneath the cherry tree.
Katya would have liked to pick a couple of linked black cherries, and hang them over her ear like an earring, but she only stood there in front of Krasilnikov, while gleams of humour lit up her great eyes, brilliant beneath the blue sky.
"If we peasants are to feed you townsfolk," said Alexei Ivanovich, enforcing his words with a resolute gesture, "you must support us.
We, the peasantry, are against the Germans, the Whites, the Communists, and for the free village Soviets.
Do you understand me?"
She nodded.
While he went on talking, she got on to the tips of her toes and with her left hand, because her right sleeve was torn under the armpit, picked two cherries: one she popped into her mouth, the other she twirled by its stem.