Volin sank down in his chair, staring at the wall to his left. His face showed no resentment or anger: it was just scolding itself for the fifth week in a row, which made it lose its expressionit was painfully tired.

"Let's deal with this in order…" – Gora felt that something harsh should happen after these words, but nothing of the sort happened: the man simply shook his head and sullenly agreed. – Masha had to get to Razdolnoye. Right?

– So

– There were poppies waiting for her. Until April 10th. Right?

– Well, well, well. But there's nothing.

– The group that was supposed to meet her was ambushed before reaching the rendezvous point 26 kilometers away. There were two survivors. They turned back. The next group was sent later and arrived on April 8.

Volin listened to the whole story and could barely hold himself together: the Maquis had failed to meet his daughter, and he already hated them: "Gavi, you understand me… I have no one but her. And now I don't have her either… You…"

– I didn't finish. She was never seen, that's true. And there was no trace of her anywhere in the vicinity. But. You realize that at any other time no one would have taken this seriously, but one of the Maquis saw a girl, tall, long blond hair. You know there aren't many of those out there....

– Where?! Where have you seen her? – Volin jumped up so that the chair flew back against the door like a deflated chair.

Gora smiled, albeit a little fake: "It's all right. It's okay… That rebel didn't remember the exact location. It was on the other side of the river. Not for long at all." – Where? What river? Don't drag it out!

– Kalmius. Where it was supposed to be… It was near the town of Novy Svet… Don't worry. Ask Tikhomirov, he'll tell you everything. Who better than him to know such things?

Volin's face twisted in an unknown direction. Creases popped up on his forehead, stretched by old wrinkles. These wrinkles had been going on for a month now, and here they cracked. The miner began to slump down and, unable to find a chair, sat straight down on the ground – he felt no better and didn't know what to do next. All these messages only added to the heaviness of his soul, and with time he stopped feeling both time and the surrounding reality.

Nikolai Lesin burst into the room without knocking: "Gavriil Vladimirovich, there's a mess going on in there!" His face was filled with something unnatural, something that had never occurred before.

"You should get some rest. – Said Hora, standing up from the table and picking up a chair lying by the door. – Just sit for a while. Don't do anything."

Coming out of his office, the prefect immediately realized what the matter was: two miners, right in his soma, were fighting with each other.

The prefect understood this situation, but Gavriil Vladimirovich didn't get it at once – his mind was going through some hitherto unknown thought processes: "Two miners got into a fight… They are both miners. They share the same fate. Shoulder to shoulder. And they fight. Fighting is a way of showing dislike, hatred, maybe attempted murder, loss of self-control…

Hate. Murder. Emotion."

One miner beats up another. When did that happen?

Nearly two hundred people, including Rich, were watching all of this, and no one had a thought to do anything about it.

No one could believe it.

The oldest man still living underground, miner Nikolai Pavlovich Krasnenko, thought he was suffering from marasmus. He thought that by the time he was eighty-two years old, it was time for his mind to move. And to this he was presented with strong evidence … That he himself has ever even thought of the fact that you can hit his comrade … Yes never. Never even a thought. Getting mad at someone, yes. An argument, yes. But not hitting. The plagues do that for us. But to hit a fellow man. Never. How can you do that? We're shoulder to shoulder. You can't survive here without each other. We're all family here! No, such things just don't make sense. "Young people? No. What youth? We didn't do that when we were their age," thought Galina Borisovna. It seemed to her that all this was some ridiculous coincidence that these two had misunderstood something about the relations between everyone at the mine, about the fact that here one individual person does not represent anything without the rest of the collective.

And in spite of all the excuses for their stupidity, she still felt sorry for them.

The thoughts of all the miners went around these two words: stupidity and pity.

Gora moved toward the fighting men. They were fifteen meters away, and when it became ten, they both spotted the approaching man. Immediately they separated and froze in their places.

Gora didn't even think about what was going on; he walked over and cracked one of them so hard that his head flew back a few meters and he fell to the ground. The other didn't move, for fear of doing something worse. A broad, sweeping blow knocked him aside. Both were now lying on the ground, barely moving or breathing.