“Playing a game and hunting—these are the ideal occupations! If I had had money, I would have gone to Siberia, into the taiga, bear-killing. Or to Africa, perhaps. A great thing, hunting. And the fun is not in the killing, it’s in the tracking, keeping the animal at the end of your gun and feeling in these moments your human power over it. One kills only out of need, nobody kills for pleasure, only maniacs, or people in a state of fury, but then fury is mania again. That’s why murder is mean, because it’s never quite disinterested.”

I did not believe him much as I listened to him, but I thought to myself:

“Well, if life is controlled by gamblers and hunters—what is there to prevent me from gambling with them and with myself?”

There was in Simonov’s mind a dark stain, a mental dislocation, a hardened spot, a callus.

“Games-and-hunting,” he said, bringing all his life down to these occupations, but I did not believe him any more, knowing how well people build up barricades to protect themselves from life, in order to explain their reluctance to work for it.

One night we were sitting in a secret lodging, drinking wine and Simonov said:

“I once came across an intellectual—you know, one of those who wander about like ghosts—and he preached to me that man is a beast, gone mad, who had risen on his hind legs and that this started things going as they do in the world, at present. Of course—the man was a madman himself, but it isn’t a bad idea. ‘History,’ he said, ‘is the medical treatment of the wild beast.’ You know, I have thought a lot about that—it’s an idea worthy of consideration. I can’t even help believing that if it were possible all honest and decent people would definitely refuse to participate in the history of mankind. But how to refuse? Where to escape? Even hermits and monks get unavoidably involved in all this general round- about.”

Simonov considered himself to be a “decent” man, although, in a shady job, he obviously played a shady part. But to remind him of it, to point it out, was wasting time.

“But why—that is childish of you, my dear fellow,” he would say. And then add:

“My God, what a mess the intelligentsia have made of you.”

There was something in his attitude to me which won me over. It was the interest in a man taken as a whole, in his entirety, a pure interest, so to say. It existed outside the official and calculating attitude, was quite separate and independent, as an interest in a man in general. Simonov did not treat me as a chief treats his subaltern, but as an elder man a younger one. He did not command, did not issue orders, but suggested and even advised:

“What do you think, should we make away with this one?”

And if I considered that this was premature, he agreed with me without further argument.

He felt for me something which I would define as a certain solicitude. Perhaps it was the same feeling of love and care which the hunter feels for a good dog. I say it without irony or bitterness, I know the clever proverb:

This proverb silences very effectively the cry of the soul.

It so happened that I had not a single friend among the crowd of comrades. Not a man with whom I would have been able to talk of the most essential subject—myself. I often tried to broach it, of course,