The man turned round and fell down in a state of terror.
'What did you say?' hissed Turbin, and immediately relaxed his grip.
'Sorry sir', replied the voice, shaking with fright. 'I didn't say anything.
I didn't open my mouth.
What's the matter?' The voice trembled.
The man's duck-like nose paled, and Turbin realised at once that he had made a mistake and had grabbed the wrong man.
A face of utter loyalty peered out from behind the duck-bill nose.
It was struck dumb and its little round eyes flicked from side to side with fright.
Turbin let go the sleeve and in cold fury he began looking around amongst the hats, backs of heads and collars that seethed about him.
He kept his left hand ready to grab anything within reach, whilst keeping his right hand on the butt of the revolver in his pocket.
The dismal chanting of the priests floated past, beside him sobbed a peasant woman in a headscarf.
There was no one to seize now, the voice seemed to have been swallowed up by the earth.
The last coffin marked
'Ensign Morskoy' moved past, followed by some people on a sledge.
' Voice of Liberty!' came a piercing contralto shriek right beside Alexei Turbin's ear.
Senseless with rage he pulled the crumpled newspaper out of his pocket and twice rammed it into the boy's face, grinding his teeth and saying as he did so:
'There's your damned Voice of Liberty!
You can damn well have it back!
Little swine!'
With this his attack of fury subsided.
The boy dropped his newspapers, slipped and fell down in a snowdrift.
For a moment he pretended to burst into tears, and his eyes filled with a look of the most savage hatred that was no pretence.
'What's the matter with you? Who d'you think you are, mister? What've I done?' he snivelled, trying to cry and stumbling to his feet in the snow.
A face stared at Turbin in astonishment, but was too afraid to say anything.
Feeling stupid, confused and ashamed Turbin hunched his head into his shoulders and, turning sharply, ran past a lamp-post, past the circular white walls of the gigantic museum building, past some holes in the ground full of snow-covered bricks and towards the huge asphalt square in front of the Alexander I High School.
'Voice of Liberty!
Paper! Paper!' came the cry from the street.
The huge four-storey building of Alexei Turbin's old school, with its hundred and eighty windows, was built around three sides of an asphalted square.
He had spent eight years there. For eight years, in springtime during breaks between classes he had run around that playground, and in the winter semester when the air in the classrooms was stuffy and dust-laden and the playground was covered by the inevitable cold, solid layer of snow, he had gazed at it out of the window.
For eight years that brick-and-mortar foster-mother had raised and educated Alexei Turbin and his two younger friends, Karas and Myshlaevsky.
And precisely eight years ago Turbin had said goodbye to the school playground for the last time.
A spasm of something like fear snatched at his heart.
He had a sudden feeling that a black cloud had blotted out the sky, that a kind of hurricane had blown up and carried away all of life as he knew it, just as a monster wave will sweep away a jetty.
Ah, these eight years of school!
There had been much in them that as a boy he had felt to be dreary, pointless and unpleasant - but there had also been a lot of sheer fun.
One monotonous classroom day had plodded after another - ut plus the subjunctive, Caius Julius Caesar, a zero for astronomy and an undying hatred of astronomy ever since; but then spring would come, eager spring and somehow the noise in the school grew louder and more excited, the high school girls would be out in their green pinafores on the avenue, May and chestnut blossom and above all the constant beacon ahead: the university, in other words - freedom. Do you realise what the university means?
Boat trips on the Dnieper, freedom, money, fame, power.
And now he had been through it all.
The teachers with their permanently enigmatic expressions; those terrible swimming baths in the math problems (which he still dreamed about) always draining themselves at so many gallons per minute but which never emptied; complicated arguments about the differences in character between Lensky and Onegin, about the disgraceful behaviour of Socrates; the date of the foundation of the Jesuit order; the dates of Pompey's campaigns and every other campaign for the past two thousand years.
But that was only a beginning.
After eight years in high school, after the last swimming bath had emptied itself, came the corpses in the anatomy school, white hospital wards, the glassy silence of operating theatres; then three years in the saddle, wounded soldiers, squalor and degradation - the war, yet another ever-Mowing, never-emptying pool.
And now he had landed up here again, back in the same school grounds.
He ran across the square feeling sick and depressed, clutching the revolver in his pocket, running God knew where or why: presumably to defend that life, that future on whose behalf he had racked his brains over emptying swimming-pools and over those damned men, one of whom was always walking from point
'A' and the other walking towards him from point
'B'.
The dark windows were grim and silent, a silence revealed at a glance as utterly lifeless.
Strange, that here in the center of the City, amidst all the disintegration, uproar and bustle this great four-storey ship, which had once launched tens of thousands of young lives on to the open sea, should now be so dead.
No one seemed to be in charge of it any longer; there was not a sound, not a movement to be found any longer in its windows or behind the yellow-washed walls dating from the reign of Nicholas I.
A virginal layer of snow lay on its roofs, covered the tops of the chestnut trees like white caps, lay evenly like a sheet over the playground, and only a few random tracks showed that someone had recently tramped across it.
And most depressing of all, not only did nobody know, but nobody cared what had become of the school.