Seven Hanged by Leonid Andreyev

Author:Leonid Andreyev
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780241252147
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-12-29T05:00:00+00:00

8. DEATH EXISTS. SO DOES LIFE

Sergey Golovin had given no thought to death, which had seemed so irrelevant, of no concern to him. He was a fit, strong and buoyant young man, endowed with a happy-go-lucky attitude and sheer joie de vivre that allowed him to cope with any unpleasant or life-threatening thoughts and feelings by absorbing them into his system quickly and without trace. In the same way that his cuts, wounds and grazes soon healed up, anything painful, wounding his spirit, worked its way out of him and gradually disappeared. And to everything, business or pleasure – photography, cycling or planning terrorism – he brought the same easy-going and life-affirming sense of application. Everything in life was good fun, everything in life was important, everything must be done well.

And everything he did was done well; he could manage a sail marvellously, he was very good with a pistol, devoted in friendship and in love, and he had a fanatical belief in one’s ‘word of honour’. His friends laughed at him; they said that if a police agent, a snout, a notorious spy, swore on his ‘word of honour’ that he wasn’t a spy, Sergey would believe him and shake him by the hand like a friend. If he had a fault, it was only that he fancied himself as a singer, when he had no ear for music: his singing was appalling. He couldn’t hold a tune, even in songs of revolution, and he wasn’t best pleased when they laughed at him.

‘You’re all stupid asses. Either that, or I’m one,’ he would say to them, looking serious and obviously offended. People would match his serious manner, but they were of one accord, and they came to the same considered opinion: ‘You’re the ass. You sound like one.’

Yet for this fault of character – as often happens with nice people – he was loved perhaps as much as he was for his virtues.

He was so unafraid of death, so uninterested in it, that before they left Tanya Kovalchuk’s flat on the fateful morning, he was the only one who had a good breakfast, putting away two glasses of tea, half full of milk, and a decent-sized roll. Then he looked ruefully at Werner’s untouched roll, and said, ‘Why don’t you eat something? You should. You need building up.’

‘Don’t feel like it.’

‘You’re a good trencherman, Seryozha.’

Instead of replying, Sergey burst into song, with his mouth still full. His singing was raucous and tuneless: ‘Dark whirling winds swirl overhead …’

After his arrest, he could have been depressed: it had not been done well, they had failed, but now he thought, ‘Here’s something else that must be done well. We have to die well,’ and this cheered him up. And, strange to relate, from the second morning in the fortress, he had started doing exercises prescribed in an extraordinary ‘rationalized’ programme created by some German by the name of Müller, which had caught his imagination. He would strip naked and, to the

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