The jeep passed through hamlets and villages, past small houses with tiny windows that sheltered a jungle of geraniums; it looked as though you had only to break the glass for the life-giving air to drain away into the surrounding emptiness, for the thick green of the geraniums to wither and die. The jeep drove past circular yurts with clay-smeared walls, through tall, grey feather-grass, through prickly camel-grass, past white splashes of salt, past the little clouds of dust kicked up by flocks of sheep, past small fires that gave off no smoke and danced in the wind . . .
To someone travelling by jeep, on tyres filled with the smoky air of the city, everything here blurs into a uniform grey . . . This Kalmyk steppe, which stretches, gradually changing to desert, right to the mouth of the Volga and the shores of the Caspian, has one strange characteristic: the earth and the sky above have reflected one another for so long that they have finally become undistinguishable, like a husband and wife who have spent their whole lives together. It’s impossible to tell whether dusty, aluminium-grey feather-grass has begun to grow on the dull, lustreless blue of the sky, or whether the steppe itself has become impregnated with the sky’s blue; earth and sky have blurred together, dusty and ageless. In the same way, the thick opaque water of Lakes Dats and Barmantsak looks like a sheet of salt, while the salt flats look like lakes . . .
And in November and December – before the first snows – it’s impossible to tell whether the earth has been dried and hardened by the sun or by frost.
All this may account for the number of mirages here: the boundary between air and earth, between water and salt, has been erased. The mind of a thirsty traveller can transform this world with ease: the scorching air becomes elegant, blueish stone; the lifeless earth is filled with the gentle murmur of streams; palm trees stretch out to the horizon and the terrible sun blends with the clouds of dust to form the golden cupolas of temples and palaces . . . In a moment of exhaustion, a man can transform this sky and this earth into the world of his dreams.
But there is another, unexpected side to the steppe. It is also a noble, ancient world; a world where there are no screaming colours or harsh lines, but only a sober grey-blue melancholy that can rival the colours of a Russian forest in autumn; a world whose soft undulating hills capture the heart more surely than the peaks of the Caucasus; a world whose small, dark, ancient lakes seem to express the very essence of water more truly than seas or oceans.
Everything passes; but there is no forgetting this huge, cast-iron sun shining through the evening mist, this bitter wind laden with the scent of wormwood . . .
And the steppe has its own riches. In spring the young tulip-filled steppe is an ocean of colours. The camel-grass is still green; its harsh spines are still soft and tender . . .
The steppe has one other unchanging characteristic: day and night, summer and winter, in foul weather or fine weather, it speaks of freedom. If someone has lost his freedom, the steppe will remind him of it . . .
Darensky got out of his car and looked at a horseman on top of a small hill. Dressed in a long robe tied by a piece of string, he was sitting on his shaggy pony and surveying the steppe. He was very old; his face looked as hard as stone.
Darensky called out to the man and then walked up to him, holding out his cigarette-case. The old man turned in his saddle; his movement somehow combined the agility of youth with the thoughtful caution of age. He looked in turn at the hand holding out the cigarettes, at Darensky’s face, at the pistol hanging by his side, at the three bars indicating his rank, and at his smart boots. Then he took a cigarette and rolled it between his fine, brown, childlike fingers.
The old man’s hard, high-cheekboned face suddenly changed; two kind intelligent eyes looked out from between his wrinkles. There was something very splendid about these old brown eyes, about their look of trust blended with wary scrutiny; for no apparent reason Darensky suddenly felt happy and at ease. The pony, who had pricked up his ears suspiciously at Darensky’s approach, inquisitively pointed first one ear, then the other, and then smiled at him with his beautiful eyes and his two rows of large teeth.
‘Thank you,’ said the old man in a thin voice, putting his hand on Darensky’s shoulder. ‘I had two sons in a cavalry division. The first one’ – he raised his hand a little above the pony’s head – ‘was killed by the Germans. The second one’ – he lowered his hand a little below the pony’s head – ‘is a machine-gunner: he’s got three medals. How about you? Is your father still alive?’
‘My mother’s alive, but my father’s dead.’
‘Ay! that’s bad!’ said the old man, shaking his head. Darensky had the feeling that he wasn’t just being polite, that he felt genuinely sad to learn of the death of the father of the Russian lieutenant-colonel who had offered him a cigarette.
The old man gave a sudden cry, waved his hand in the air and galloped down the hill with extraordinary grace and speed. What was he thinking as he galloped through the steppe? Of his sons? Of the father of the Russian lieutenant-colonel whose jeep needed mending?
Darensky watched. One word pounded like blood at his temples:
‘Freedom . . . freedom . . . freedom . . .’
Yes, he was envious of the old Kalmyk.
66
Darensky had been sent from Front Headquarters on a lengthy mission to the army deployed on the extreme left of the flank. These missions were particularly unpopular among the staff officers, on account of the lack of water and housing, the poor supplies, the vast distances and the vile roads. The High Command had little precise information about these troops, lost as they were in the sands between the shores of the Caspian and the Kalmyk steppe; Darensky had a lot of tasks to carry out.
After travelling hundreds of miles through the steppe, he felt overwhelmed by melancholy and boredom. Here no one even dreamed of an offensive; there was something hopeless about the situation of these troops who had been driven back almost to the end of the world . . .
The continual tension of life at Front HQ, the rumours of an impending offensive, the movements of the reserves, the codes and telegrams, the never-ending work of the Signals-Section, the roar of the columns of tanks and vehicles coming in from the North – had all this really just been an illusion?
As Darensky listened to the gloomy conversations of the officers, as he collated and checked data about the state of the equipment, inspected artillery regiments and batteries, noticed the sullenness on the faces of the men and the laziness of their movements, he slowly gave in to the monotonous gloom around him. Russia seemed like a wounded animal that had been driven back into the sand-dunes, into steppes fit only for camels; there she was, lying on the harsh earth, impotent, unable ever to rise again.
Darensky arrived at Army Headquarters. A plump-faced, balding young man, wearing a tunic without any insignia of rank, was playing cards with two women in uniform, both of them lieutenants. Instead of breaking off as the lieutenant-colonel entered the room, they looked at him absent-mindedly and went on with their game.
‘Why not play a trump? Or a jack?’
Darensky waited for the end of the hand before asking, ‘Are these the commander’s quarters?’
‘He’s gone to the right flank. He won’t be back till evening,’ said one of the young women. She looked Darensky up and down. ‘Are you from Front HQ, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel?’
‘That’s right,’ said Darensky. With a barely perceptible wink, he asked: ‘Excuse me, but could I see the Member of the Military Soviet?’
‘He’s with the commander. He won’t be back till evening either,’ said the second woman. ‘Are you on the artillery staff?’
‘That’s right.’
Though she was clearly very much the older of the two, Darensky found the first woman extremely attractive. She was the kind of woman who can look very beautiful and yet – seen from the wrong angle – appear suddenly faded, middle-aged and dull. She had a fine straight nose and blue eyes that were lacking in warmth; you could tell she kn
ew both her own value and that of other people.
Her face looked very young, not a year over twenty-five. But as soon as she frowned or looked thoughtful, you could see the wrinkles at the corners of her lips and the loose skin at her throat; then she looked at least forty-five. But her legs – in elegant, tailored boots – were quite splendid.
All these details, which take some time to recount, were taken in at once by Darensky’s experienced eye.
The second woman was young, but already stout. Taken individually, none of her features was particularly beautiful: her hair lacked body, her face was very broad, and her eyes were an indeterminate colour. But she was young and feminine. Yes, sitting next to her, even a blind man would be conscious of her femininity.
These details, too, were noted by Darensky in less than a second. More than that – in this fraction of a second he was somehow able to weigh up the merits of the two women and make the choice, a choice quite without practical consequences, that nearly all men make in such a situation. Though he had a lot of questions on his mind – Where would he find the commanding officer? Would he be able to obtain the necessary information from him? Where could he eat and sleep? Would it be a long and difficult journey to the division on the extreme left? – Darensky still had time to say to himself: ‘Yes, that’s the one I’d choose!’ It was merely a passing thought; and yet, instead of going straight to the chief of staff, he stayed behind for a game of cards.
He ended up partnering the woman with the blue eyes. During the game he learnt several things: his partner was called Alla Sergeyevna; the other woman worked in the first-aid post; the young man, Volodya, was a cook in the Military Soviet canteen and appeared to be a relative of someone high up.
From the very start, Darensky sensed Alla Sergeyevna’s power; it was obvious from the way people addressed her when they came into the room. The commanding officer was clearly her husband – not just her lover, as he had first thought.
At first he couldn’t understand why Volodya was so familiar with her. Then it suddenly dawned on him that Volodya must be the brother of the commander’s first wife. What was still unclear was whether the commander’s first wife was still alive; and if so, whether they had got a divorce.
The younger woman, Claudia, was equally clearly not the wife of the Member of the Military Soviet. There was an occasional note of arrogance and condescension in the way Alla Sergeyevna talked to her: ‘Yes, we may be playing cards together, we may call each other ‘ty’, but that’s simply because of the war.’
Claudia in turn had a certain sense of her own superiority over Alla Sergeyevna. Darensky understood this as: ‘All right, I may not be lawfully married, but at least I’m faithful to my Member of the Military Soviet. So you watch it! You may be properly married, but there are one or two things I could say about you.’
Volodya made no attempt to hide how strongly he was attracted to Claudia. He seemed to be saying: ‘My love is hopeless. How can a mere cook hope to rival the Member of the Military Soviet? But even if I am only a cook, I love you with a pure love and you know it. All I ask is to be able to look into your pretty little eyes. As for what your Member of the Military Soviet loves you for, that doesn’t matter to me.’
Darensky played very badly and Alla Sergeyevna took him under her wing. She liked this lean, elegant colonel. He said, ‘I thank you,’ and mumbled, ‘Forgive me’ if their hands touched during the deal; he looked pained when Volodya wiped his nose on his fingers and his fingers on his handkerchief; he smiled politely at other people’s jokes and was extremely witty himself.
After one of his jokes she said: ‘You’re very witty, but it took me a moment to get the point. I’m losing my mind out here in the steppes.’
She said this very quietly, as if to let him know, or rather feel, how easily a conversation could develop between the two of them, a conversation that would send shivers up their spines, a conversation of the only kind that matters between a man and a woman.
Darensky continued to make mistakes and she continued to correct him; at the same time they began to play another game in which Darensky made no mistakes. Nothing had been said between them except, ‘No, don’t hang on to your low spades’ or ‘Go on, go on, there’s no need to save your trumps’; but she already knew and appreciated all his charms – his strength and his gentleness, his discretion and his audacity, his shyness . . . Alla Sergeyevna sensed these qualities both because of her own perceptiveness and because Darensky knew how to display them. She for her part was able to show him that she understood the way he watched her smile, the way he watched her gesture with her hands or shrug her shoulders, the way he looked at her breasts under her elegant gabardine tunic, at her legs, at her carefully manicured nails. And he could tell that her voice was just a little more melodic than usual, that her smile lingered a little longer than usual – so that he could appreciate the beauty of her voice, her white teeth and the dimples in her cheeks . . .
Darensky was quite shaken by his sudden feeling of excitement. It was something he never got used to; it was always as though he was experiencing it for the first time. His considerable experience of women had never degenerated into mere habit; his experience was one thing, his joy and excitement quite another. It was this that made him a true lover of women.
It somehow came about that he had to stay the night at Army Headquarters.
The following morning he called on the chief of staff, a taciturn colonel who didn’t ask a single question about Stalingrad itself or the position of the various fronts. By the end of their conversation Darensky had come to the conclusion that this colonel would be of no help at all; he asked him to stamp his documents and then went out to inspect the troops himself.
As he got into his jeep he felt a strange lightness and emptiness in his arms and legs, a total lack of thought or desire; he felt at once sated and drained. Everything round about seemed insipid and empty: the sky, the feather-grass and the hills that only yesterday had seemed so beautiful. He didn’t want to talk or joke with his driver. Even his thoughts about his friends and relatives, about his beloved mother, were somehow cold and lifeless. His thoughts about this war in the desert, at the furthest limits of Russian territory, were equally lacking in passion.
Every now and then he spat, shook his head and muttered with a kind of obtuse surprise: ‘What a woman . . .’
He thought remorsefully that this kind of affair always came to a bad end. He remembered something he had read, either in Kuprin or in some foreign novel, about love being like a lump of coal: hot, it burns you; cold, it makes you dirty. He wanted to cry, or rather to have a good moan, to find someone he could tell his troubles to. It wasn’t his own choice, it was the will of Fate. This was the only kind of love he knew . . . Then he fell asleep. When he woke up, he thought suddenly: ‘Well, if I don’t get myself killed, I’ll certainly drop in on Allochka on the way back.’
67
On his way back from work, Major Yershov stopped by Mostovskoy’s place on the bedboards.
‘One of the Americans heard the radio today: our resistance at Stalingrad has really upset the German strategy.’
Then he frowned and added: ‘And there was a report from Moscow – something about the liquidation of the Comintern.’
‘You must be crazy,’ said Mostovskoy, looking into Yershov’s intelligent eyes, eyes that were like the cool, turbid waters of spring.
‘Maybe the American got it mixed up,’ said Yershov, scratching his head. ‘Maybe the Comintern’s been expanded.’
During his life Mostovskoy had known several people who were like a diaphragm that resonated to the thoughts, ideals and passions of a whole society. Not one important event ever seemed to pass them by. Yershov was such a person; he was a mouthpiece for the thoughts and aspirations of the whole camp. But a rumour about the liquidation of the Comintern didn’t hold the least interest for this master of men’s minds.
Brigade Commissar Osipov, who had been responsible for the po
litical education of a large military unit, was equally indifferent.
‘General Gudz said that it was because of your internationalist propaganda that all this funk first set in. We should have brought people up in the spirit of patriotism, the spirit of Russia.’
‘You mean God, the Tsar and the Fatherland?’ said Mostovskoy mockingly.
‘Nonsense,’ said Osipov with a nervous yawn. ‘Anyway, who cares about orthodoxy? What matters, dear comrade, is that the Germans are skinning us alive.’
The Spanish soldier known to the Russians as Andryushka, who slept on the third tier of boards, wrote ‘Stalingrad’ on a scrap of wood and gazed at the word during the night. In the morning he turned it over in case the kapos caught sight of it as they came by on their rounds.
‘If I wasn’t sent out to work, I used to lie on the boards all day long,’ Major Kirillov told Mostovskoy. ‘But now I wash my shirt and I chew splinters of pine-wood against scurvy.’
The SS officers, known as ‘the happy lads’ because of the way they sang on their way to work, now picked on the Russians with even more cruelty than usual.
There were invisible links between the barrack-huts and the city on the Volga. But no one was interested in the Comintern.
It was around then that the émigré Chernetsov approached Mostovskoy for the first time. Covering up his empty eye-socket with the palm of his hand, he began talking about the broadcast the American had heard. Mostovskoy was pleased; he needed to talk about this very badly.
‘The sources aren’t very reliable,’ he said. ‘It’s probably just a rumour.’
Life and Fate Page 37