I

Trofim Kopelko can't stand tears. Tears, he says, are ladies' buttons, a real man has no use for them. He would have hanged all tears if there were such a gallows.

Only once in a while, his own left leg, the wooden one, the one he himself carved out of a young, juicy fir tree, weeps a few tears of honey tar. It happens when the low sun warms the bones of his festive wooden leg.

Trofim Kopelko can't stand such tears either. He pours the embers of his pipe on them. But from the embers, the tar tears catch fire and Trofim Kopelko can't stand burning tears, even less than tears that died out.

Nevertheless, Trofim Kopelko found a way to deal with his tears. It happened like this: Kim, commander of the partisan brigade, remembered Trofim and appointed him executioner of the forest court. He, Trofim Kopelko, had the honor of dunking his victims in the swamp with his wooden left leg. And then, among the serpents frozen in the swamp, the tar-tears of Trofim's wooden leg froze too.

In the Narocz Forests, people say that, just yesterday, Trofim Kopelko's guys, wearing the uniform of the enemy, were ambushing partisans. Forest men who fell into their clutches were sawn to pieces by his band.

But Trofim Kopelko is shrewder than time. When the Germans lost their iron britches, Kopelko shed his skin: he stretched out his left leg to his

adjutant, the little Tartar, who pulled off his boot. Trofim Kopelko groped for a long time inside as if he were looking for his luck and plucked out from the lining the sweaty medal for heroism he won in the Finnish war.

With the scoured Soviet medal on his Berlin-made uniform, he jolted his blond advisers.

Ever since, armored by their weapons and experienced in action, Trofim Kopelko became famous throughout the region.

One autumn dawn, while cutting deeper into the Narocz Forests, a mine blew up under him, and his left leg, along with the boot, hung like a dead crow on the crown of a birch tree.

His loyal gang, who went on serving their beloved leader, would later swear that Trofim Kopelko almost bit through his pipe in pain, but his wolf's eyes remained dry as gunpowder; and when his adjutant, the little Tartar, begged him: "Sweetheart, saw off my left leg and put it on, it's yours …." he sank his teeth into his pipe and spat sideways to his Tartar: "No need …."

To this day, the little Tartar in his lamb's wool hat is still Trofim Kopelko's sublime subordinate. They ride together, they clink their glasses together, and he always leaps up with fire to light his boss's wrathful pipe.

The little Tartar built a bath in the forest for the two of them: a kind of underground bunker over a spring with bubbling water, colder than ice. Pour a bucket of spring water over glowing stones and you get steam as good as at home. The little Tartar sweeps all his limbs and parts, including the wooden leg that Trofim Kopelko won't give up for a moment.

From his hairy cloud-body, lightning flashes.

The big Kopelko is red as a lobster.

Then the little Tartar takes him naked on his shoulder, hurls him outside, and rolls him in the snow.

The points of his copper moustache hanging down under his chin are Trofim Kopelko's scales of justice. The sins of spies and traitors are weighed in their pans. True — the eye over the balance is the vigilant eye of the commander, but Kim is generous, very generous. And Trofim Kopelko's moustache swings back and forth, back and forth — —

The frozen sun warmed itself. In its own red ashes, it puffed up the sparks and sprayed them over the snow.

Through the needles of the evergreens, a green hand, growing out of the earth, threaded a green thread.

A single stork, a bow without a violin, arched over the forests.

Yonia Fain, illustration to "The Boot and the Crown."

And then he thawed, Trofim Kopelko, and shone in all his glory.

He galloped through panic-stricken forest and behind him — his faithful bloodhound with a drooping scarlet tongue, the little Tartar.

They rode back leisurely. Behind them, hands tied, the ropes pulled by the riders, limped teeteringly, barely recognizable, the most beautiful gals of the forests: Katya, Lyubochka, Halinka — the lovers of company commanders, commissars, and brave officers. Trofim Kopelko was a Caesar and the little Tartar — a little Tartar.