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There it’s a rifle hanging on the wall. It's broken; the impact of its fall against the tracks breaking the stock and denting the barrel. More than once he had considered fixing it, he has the materials, he has the ability, he has done it in the past, to his own and his comrades’.
With this one there it’s just something stopping him.
He found it by the side of the train tracks.
Abandoned .
He knows who it belongs to.
He knows he will never give it back.
He knows he lost his chance .
Now all he has it’s a broken rifle and scars that will never heal. The physicals may, over time, if he ever feels like caring for them; try something more than dressing them when they start to smell or hurt too much. He can handle pain, he has for years, just hide it in a corner of his mind and ignore it, it's where it belongs,
…alongside his passions.
His cheeks finally stopped aching weeks ago.
His shoulder still feels like it is on fire .
Maybe it’s the bullet that is still there.
He should remove it.
He keeps staring the rifle and wonders what if he had got there faster, what if his bluff had worked the way he wanted, what if the other got the shoot on the arm that incapacitated him, what if…
…what if he found the body .
Once he got there was nothing but the broken rifle.
He is not sure the body and the rifle fell in the same area. He did look, for hours , and found nothing. The soldiers must have taken it. Probably for the best, what would he do with the body? Buried it? Burn it? Keep it?
Like the rifle?
There is no reason for him to stay here but he can’t bring himself to go back to Russia. It’s been months, all he does is sit in the hut, stare at the rifle and draw, draw, draw, draw, until his arms are sore and his eyes water.
He needs to keep drawing,
he needs to capture the image of the man who shot him,
he needs to capture those last moments.
But nothing he draws feels right , the way the body is sprawled, the way his arm and legs are positioned, is any limb missing? Are his eyes open or closed? Did his head get crushed by the train? Did his body end up miraculously intact?
He doesn’t know .
He wishes he knew.
So, he has to draw until he gets it right.
Sometimes when he is exhausted late at night he wonders, there was no body because was alive? That feels wrong, a sniper like that would not just abandon his rifle like that. He wouldn’t unless he knew there was another one, he could get, which he knew there was none.
What if he got a new rifle on the train? from another soldier, maybe Sugimoto, and just threw this one to the side… that doesn’t make sense, the damage to the rifle was inflicted by the fall, it was in perfect condition when it touched the ground, it was recently used, the casket of the bullet still on the chamber when he found it. A sniper always ejects it as soon as possible so they could get another shot, there is no reason to leave it there.
So, he must have died.
He is not sure why he took the rifle, sentimentalism? To honor the one person who won both of their duels? Because is the only thing left of him?
Because he is going mad with grief?
Grief over a man that he never saw face to face.
A man that all he did was to leave him scars that will never heal.
Why can’t he leave it behind?
He left his life behind. His nation. His comrades, he never went back to check for their bodies or asked anyone in the hospital about Ilya state, he didn’t even wonder if the man was alive or dead until a few weeks back. But he has been grieving this sniper for months now.
Would he go back home when he gets the drawing he is looking for?
Is there even a home to go back to?
Will his life end here in this miserable hut, surrounded by unfinished drawings and broken furniture?
With just a broken rifle as his witness.
Maybe he has gone mad.
He must have.
It’s the only reason why he has been sitting for hours looking at that broken rifle.
Alone with just his thoughts.
For the rest of his life.