The noise of rifle fire grew more audible, breaking out from several directions at once.
'Vaska, did you see how I fell off and hit my bottom on the kerb!' shouted the youngest.
'Look at them, playing so peacefully', Nikolka thought with amazement. He turned to the youth and asked the youth in an amiable voice:
'Tell me, please, what's all the shooting going on up there?'
The young man removed his finger from his nose, thought for a moment and said in a nasal whine:
'It's our people, beating the hell out of the White officers.'
Nikolka scowled at him and instinctively fingered the revolver in his pocket.
The older of the two boys chimed in angrily:
'They're getting even with the White officers.
Serve 'em right.
There's only eight hundred of them, the fools.
Petlyura's got a million men.'
He turned and started to pull the sled away. #
At the sound of Nikolka opening the front gate the cream-colored blind flew up in the dining-room window.
The old clock ticked away, tonk-tank, tonk-tank . . .
'Has Alexei come back?' Nikolka asked Elena.
'No', she replied, and burst into tears.
The whole apartment was in darkness, except for a lamp in the kitchen where Anyuta, leaning her elbows on the table, sat and wept for Alexei Turbin.
In Elena's bedroom logs flamed in the stove, light from the flames leaping behind the grate and dancing on the floor.
Her eyes red from crying about Alexei, Elena sat on a stool, resting her cheek on her bunched fist, with Nikolka sprawling at her feet across the fiery red pattern cast on the floor.
Who was this Colonel Bolbotun?
Earlier that day at the Shcheglovs some had been saying that he was none other than the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich.
In the half darkness and the glow from the fire the mood was one of despair.
What was the use of crying over Alexei?
Crying did no good.
He had obviously been killed - that was clear.
The enemy took no prisoners.
Since he had not come back it meant that he had been caught, along with his regiment, and he had been killed.
The horror of it was that Petlyura, so it was said, commanded a force of eight hundred thousand picked men.
We were fooled, sent to face certain death ...
Where had that terrible army sprung from?
Conjured up out of the freezing mist, the bitter air and the twilight ... it was so sinister, mysterious . . .
Elena stood up and stretched out her arm.
'Curse the Germans.
Curse them.
If God does not punish them, then he is not a God of justice.
They must surely be made to answer for this - they must.
They are going to suffer as we have suffered.
They will suffer, they will . . .'
She repeated the word 'will' like an imprecation.
Her face and neck were flushed, her unseeing eyes were suffused with black hatred.
Her shrieks reduced Nikolka to misery and despair.
'Mightn't he still be alive?' he asked gently. 'After all he is a doctor . . .
Even if he had been caught they may not have killed him but only taken him prisoner.'
'They will eat cats, they will kill each other just as we have done,' said Elena in a loud voice, wagging a threatening finger at the stove.
'Rumors, rumors . . .
They said Bolbotun's a grand duke-ridiculous.
So's the story of Petlyura having a million men. Even eight hundred thousand is an exaggeration.
Lies, confusion.
The hard times are really starting now.