MARIANKA
111
he threw back his head, stuffed the neck of the bottle deep
in
his
mouth and drank with a real desert thirst. The alcohol gurgled in
his throat for a long time, and he drank with closed eyes, fearfully
pale, the triangle of his nose so prominent. The vodka poured so
quickly, it overflowed down both sides of his mouth and straggled
in
thin rivulets underneath his knitted collar. He withheld the
final mouthful, swilled his teeth with it and spat it out with a
crackling noise. Drops splashed my face and the other men
laughed and Kolenko writhed in his scarlet pool. The drunken
recruit once again contemplated his bottle, now empty, and ener–
getically, he tossed it towards us.
The heaviest fragment hit Rabbi Mellakh's wife
in
the temple.
One second the woman remained standing, upright, stiff, the hic–
cups had suddenly disappeared, as though you had picked
them off her with your fingers; then she bent forward gracefully
and before we could hold her, slid to the floor, dragging with her
the table cloth. Plates, glasses, bottles, candelabras, everything
toppled down with the clatter of a looted shop window and the
glass panes broke in splinters and blankets of clotted darkness cut
off all light.
Then it all grew hallucinating. The opaque night fencing us
in was like a hand squeezing your throat. The men stopped talk–
ing, suddenly troubled by the cold and
dark~ess
pouring in from
the remote, lonely countryside. Space and reality had been blotted
out as
if
a wall had crumbled on to the vast plains and in a dizzying
Bash I visualized the end of the world, a contorted, chaotic, mon–
strous vision. It was as though the earth cracked in every surface
and lay pulverised by a hundred earthquakes. And suddenly I was
mastered by a desire to run away, to flee across the desolate coun–
tryside, desperately, straight in front of me.
The candelabras had only tumbled to the floor one moment
ago and yet this black suspense seemed to have lasted for hours
merging into the ring of silence outside the darkness. Gusts of ice
cold air were needling right through me and my teeth began to
chatter and uncontrollably I was shuddering all over. I wanted to
move forward but my legs were stubborn, magnetised to the floor–
boards. The recruits had not yet recovered, perhaps they too
trembled and longed to escape, perhaps they too thought the end
of the world was at hand. I began a yell but smothered it. The
blood thumped through my temples, and the stillness was pushing
