Pepper escaped from the throng, and wandered off, swaying along the murky street. He felt sick, his chest was hurting and he kept on imagining those things in the cases, extending their metal necks and staring at the road in amazement at the crowd of blindfolded people in underpants, earnestly striving to understand what link existed between them and the activity of this crowd and, of course, failing to do so; whatever served them as sources of patience must now be near exhaustion...
It was dark in Kirn's cottage. A baby was crying.
The hostel door was boarded up and the windows were dark but someone was walking around inside with a shielded lamp and Pepper could make out some pale faces at the first-floor windows warily peeping out.
An inordinately lengthy gun barrel with a thick muzzle-brake was sticking out of the library door, while on the opposite side of the street a shed was burning up; around the conflagration, men in cardboard masks were prowling about with mine detectors, lit up in crimson flame.
Pepper headed for the park. In a dark alley, however, he was approached by a woman who took his arm and led him off without a word. Pepper made no resistance, he was past caring. She was all in black, her hand was soft and warm, her white face shone through the dark.
Alevtina, thought Pepper. She's bided her time all right, he thought with frank lack of shame. Well, what's wrong in that? So she waited. Don't know why, or why I'm giving in to her, but it's me she waited for...
They entered the house. Alevtina switched on the light and said: "I've waited for you here a long time."
"I know," he said.
"So why were you walking past?"
Yes indeed, why? thought Pepper. Probably because I didn't care. "I didn't care," he said.
"Okay, never mind," she said. "Sit down, I'll make you something."
He perched himself on the edge of a chair, put his hands on his knees and watched her fling off the black shawl from her neck and hang it up on a nail - white, plump, warm. Then she disappeared into the recesses of the house and soon a gas heater began humming and there came a sound of water splashing. He experienced severe pain in the soles of his feet, drew up his leg and looked at the bare sole. The balls of his toes were bloody, and the blood had mixed with dust and dried in black crusts. He pictured himself submerging his feet in hot water, at first very painful, then the pain passing and being soothed. Today I'll sleep in the bath, he thought. And she can come in and pour in hot water.
"This way," Alevtina summoned him.
He rose with difficulty, all his bones seemed to creak together. He limped across the ginger carpet to the door that led into the corridor, in the corridor, along a black and white carpet to a dead end, where the bathroom door was already open wide. The businesslike blue flame in the geyser hummed, the tiles sparkled, and Alevtina bent over the bath sprinkling powder into the water. While he was getting undressed, stripping off his underclothes stiff with dirt, she fluffed up the water; above the water rose a blanket of foam, over the rim of the bath it came, white as snow. He sank into that foam closing his eyes from pleasure and the pain in his feet, while Alevtina seated herself on the edge of the bath and gazed at him, sweetly smiling, so kind, so welcoming, and not a word about documents.
She washed his head as he spat water out and snorted and brooded over her strong, expert hands just like his mother's, just as good a cook too, likely, then she asked: "Want your back rubbed?"
He slapped his ear to get rid of the soap and water and said: "Well of course, surely! ..." She scrubbed his back with a rough loofah and turned on the shower.
"Hold on," he said. "I want to lie just like this a bit longer. I'll let this water out now, let in fresh and just lie here, and you sit there. Please."
She turned the shower off, went out for a moment, and came back with a stool.
"Lovely!" said he. "You know, I've never felt so good here as now."
"There you are," she smiled. "And you never wanted to."
"How did I know?"
"Why did you have to know in advance? You could have just tried. What had you to lose? You married?"
"I don't know," he said. "Not now, seemingly."
"I thought as much. Loved her a lot, didn't you? What was she like?"
"What was she like? ... She wasn't afraid of anything. And she was kind. We used to daydream about the forest."
"What forest?"
"What d'you mean? There's only one."
"Ours, you mean?"
"It's not yours. It's its own. Anyway maybe it really is ours. Only it's hard to picture it like that."
"I've never been in the forest," said Alevtina. "They say it's frightening."
"The unknown always is. Everything would be simple if people learned not to be afraid of the unknown."
"Well I think you shouldn't invent things," she said. "If there was a bit less making things up, there wouldn't be anything unknown in the world. Peppy, you're always making things up."
"What about the forest?" he reminded her.
