Friendship between Redrick Schuhart and Gutalin

Gutalin’s friendship with Redrick Schuhart is a bond of fierce admiration and moral disagreement, shaped by the Zone’s power to turn survival into guilt. Gutalin sees Redrick as one of the few people in the city who remains human, even while believing that his friend serves the devil; Redrick, in turn, accepts Gutalin’s affection, restrains his despair, and ultimately admits that Gutalin understood the Zone’s evil better than he did.

A friendship made of blunt judgments

Gutalin’s affection for Redrick is expressed in extravagant, uncompromising terms. When he sees him, Gutalin roars that there are only two real men in the whole city: himself and Redrick. Everyone else, he says, belongs among pigs or Satan’s children. The praise is not a claim that Redrick is innocent: Gutalin immediately adds that Redrick serves the devil too, but remains human. His loyalty depends on recognizing the danger in Redrick’s work without reducing Redrick to it.

That judgment gives their friendship its characteristic double edge. Gutalin admires Redrick, but he does not pretend that a successful return from the Zone is morally uncomplicated. When Redrick comes back alive, Gutalin dwells on the artifact brought into the world and on the sorrow and sin that may follow. His concern reaches beyond whether his friend survived: the spoils themselves represent a danger that does not end at the Zone’s boundary.

Contraband and conscience

Gutalin’s response to Zone artifacts is unusually consistent. Redrick says he likes Gutalin, calling him a weirdo, and explains that when Gutalin has money he buys up the swag without haggling, paying whatever price the stalkers ask. He then carries the goods back into the Zone at night. The gesture makes Gutalin’s opposition material rather than merely rhetorical: he spends his own money and undertakes the return of objects that other people have risked their lives to remove.

Redrick describes Gutalin as believing that people should take nothing from the Zone, return whatever has already been taken, and carry on living as though the Zone were not there. His formula is to leave the devil’s things to the devil. It sets Gutalin against the trade on which Redrick’s occupation depends, but the disagreement does not erase affection. Redrick finds Gutalin’s strangeness appealing, and Gutalin continues to regard Redrick as human even while condemning the work that brings him into contact with the Zone’s artifacts.

Survival, celebration, and rebuke

After Redrick returns, Gutalin’s alarm spills into a warning about the sorrow and sin carried into the world with the artifact. Redrick answers severely, telling him to stop, drink, and rejoice that Redrick came back alive. He raises a toast to success, and the toast goes over well; Gutalin, however, falls apart completely. The scene brings their different measures of a successful return into collision: Redrick insists on the immediate fact of survival, while Gutalin cannot set aside what the return may have unleashed.

Gutalin’s distress is not confined to that reunion. On another occasion, while Redrick is away, he is at Redrick’s home, stinking drunk. Guta says that she has sobered him up. Elsewhere, his fear and anger become public: he roars for the absent Redrick, demands to know what has been done with him, and denounces those around him as seeds of the devil as a police siren wails. The repeated image is of a man whose concern for Redrick comes out as drunkenness, shouting, and accusation rather than calm reassurance.

Recognition after the break

The friendship reaches its most painful point when Redrick decides that he has had enough of the Zone and of teaching other fools how to risk their lives. He thinks directly of Kirill, but his judgment also confirms Gutalin’s warning: Gutalin was right, and the Zone was no place for humans; it was evil. Redrick climbs over the fence and heads home, carrying the conclusion that his friend had reached through his refusal to treat the Zone’s spoils as harmless goods.

That recognition does not make Redrick’s earlier choices disappear, nor does it turn Gutalin’s convictions into an easy solution. Instead, it clarifies what the friendship has contained all along: Redrick can value Gutalin’s oddness and loyalty while pursuing a dangerous trade, and Gutalin can condemn that trade while continuing to see Redrick as human. Their bond holds together affection, reproach, and belated agreement, with the Zone itself as the force that makes those elements impossible to separate.