“God, when have I sinned to earn such a death? Why should I die like a dog, without burial, without a priest, with no funeral? And who will take care of my mother? She will expire when she learns of my end.”
The Bolshevik soldiers burst out laughing. My pleading appealed to their sense of humour. They joked and made merry.
“Don’t cry, my child,” the General bent over me, patting me. “They are savages. Their hearts are of stone. They would not even let us receive the last sacrament. Let us die like heroes, nevertheless.”
His words gave me strength. I got up, stood erect and said:
“Yes, I will die as a hero.”
Then, for about ten minutes I gazed at the faces of our executioners, scrutinizing their features. It was hard to distinguish in them signs of humanity. They were Russian soldiers turned inhuman. The lines in their faces were those of brutal apes.
“My God! What hast Thou done to Thy children?” I prayed.
All the events of my life passed before me in a long procession. My childhood, those years of hard toil in the little grocer’s shop of Nastasia Leontievna; the affair with Lazov; my marriage to Botchkarev; Yasha; the three years of war; they all passed through my imagination, some incidents strangely gripping my interest for a moment or two, others flitting by hastily. Somehow that episode of my early life, when I quarrelled with the little boy placed in my charge and the undeserved whipping I got from his mother stood out very prominently in my mind. It was my first act of self-assertion. I had rebelled and escaped.... Then there was that jump into the Ob. It almost seemed that it was not I who sought relief in its cold, deep waters from the ugly Afanasi. But I wished that I had been drowned then, rather than die such a death....
CHAPTER XIX
SAVED BY A MIRACLE
The investigation committee finally appeared in the distance. Petrukhin was leading it. There were all the twelve members present, the two absentees apparently having joined the other ten.