‘Everything’s been changed, Masha. I’m flying by Douglas at dawn tomorrow. Tell Anna Aristarkhovna. We won’t be able to bring any potatoes – they’re still at the State farm.’
His pale face took on a look of suffering and disgust. Then, evidently interrupting a flood of complaints, he snapped, ‘So you want me to inform the General Staff that I’m unable to leave until the tailor’s finished my wife’s coat?’ and hung up.
‘Comrade Colonel,’ he said to Novikov, ‘give me your opinion of the suspension of these tanks. Do they answer to the requirements we originally laid down?’
Novikov found this conversation wearisome. During his months in command he had learned to evaluate people very quickly. He had learned to weigh up the importance of all the inspectors, instructors, heads of commissions and other representatives who had come to see him. He understood very well the importance of such simple phrases as ‘Comrade Malenkov told me to inform you . . .’ And he knew that there were generals covered in medals, full of bustle and eloquence, who were powerless even to obtain a ton of fuel-oil, appoint a storekeeper or fire a clerk.
Ryutin’s position wasn’t on the top level of the pyramid of State; he was merely a statistician, a provider of information. During their conversation Novikov looked repeatedly at his watch.
The general closed his large notebook.
‘I’m sorry, comrade Colonel. I’m afraid I have to leave you. I’m flying at dawn tomorrow. I don’t know what to do. Perhaps you should come to Moscow yourself?’
‘Yes, comrade Lieutenant-General. Together with all the tanks under my command,’ said Novikov coldly.
They said goodbye. Ryutin asked him to give his regards to General Nyeudobnov; they had once served together. As Novikov walked down the strip of green carpet leading towards the door of the large office, he heard Ryutin back on the telephone:
‘Get me the director of kolkhoz number one.’
‘Poor man,’ thought Novikov. ‘He’s got to rescue his potatoes.’
He left the building and set out for Yevgenia Nikolaevna’s. In Stalingrad he had visited her on a stifling summer night; he had come straight from the steppe, covered in the smoke and dust of the retreat. There seemed to be an abyss between the man he had been then and the man he was now. And yet here he was, the same person, about to visit her once again.
‘You’ll be mine!’ he said to himself. ‘You’ll be mine!’
3
It was an old two-storey house, one of those obstinate buildings that never quite keep up with the seasons; it felt cool and damp in summer, but its thick walls retained a close, dusty heat during the autumn frosts.
He rang; the door opened and he felt the closeness inside. Then, in a corridor littered with trunks and broken baskets, he caught sight of Yevgenia Nikolaevna. He saw her, but he didn’t see her black dress or the white scarf round her head, he didn’t even see her eyes and face, her hands and her shoulders. It was as though he saw her not with his eyes but with his heart. She gave a cry of surprise, but she didn’t step back as people often do at some unexpected sight.
He greeted her and she answered. He walked towards her, his eyes closed. He felt happy; at the same time he felt ready to die then and there. He sensed the warmth of her body.
He realized that this previously unknown feeling of happiness had no need of eyes, thoughts or words.
She asked him about something or other and he answered. As he followed her down the dark corridor, he clung to her hand like a little boy afraid of being lost in a crowd.
‘What a wide corridor,’ he thought. ‘Big enough for a tank.’
They went into a room with a window looking out onto the blank wall of the house next door. There were two beds, one on each side – one with a grey blanket and a flat crumpled pillow, the other with fluffed-up pillows and a bedspread of white lace. Above this second bed hung Easter and New Year cards with pictures of men in dinner-jackets and chickens hatching out of eggs.
The table was cluttered with sheets of rolled-up drawing-paper; in one corner stood a bottle of oil, a chunk of bread and half of a tired-looking onion.
‘Zhenya,’ he said.
There was a strange look in her usually alert, mocking eyes.
‘You’ve come a long way,’ she said. ‘You must be hungry.’
She seemed to want to destroy something new that had arisen between them, something it was already too late to destroy. Novikov had become somehow different – a man with absolute power over hundreds of men and machines, a man with the pleading eyes of an unhappy schoolboy. This incongruity confused her: she wanted just to look down on him, to pity him, to forget his strength. Her happiness had seemed to lie in her freedom; and yet even though this freedom was now slipping away from her, she still felt happy.
‘Do you still not understand?’ said Novikov abruptly.
Once again he stopped listening to what either of them was saying. Once again he felt a sense of happiness well up inside him, together with the somehow connected feeling of being ready to die then and there. She put her arms round his neck. Her hair flowed across his forehead and cheeks like a stream of warm water; through it he could glimpse her eyes.
Her whispering voice blotted out the war, drowned the roar of tanks.
In the evening they ate some bread and drank some hot water. Yevgenia said: ‘Our commander’s forgotten the taste of black bread.’
She brought in a saucepan of buckwheat kasha she had left outside the window. The frost had turned the grains blue and violet. In the warmth of the room they began to sweat.
‘It’s like lilac,’ said Yevgenia.
Novikov tried some lilac and thought, ‘How awful!’
‘Our commanding officer’s even forgotten the taste of buckwheat,’ said Yevgenia.
‘Yes,’ thought Novikov. ‘It’s a good thing I didn’t take Getmanov’s advice and bring her a parcel of food.’
‘At the beginning of the war I was with a fighter squadron near Brest,’ he told her. ‘The pilots all rushed back to the airfield and I heard a Polish woman shout out: “Who’s that?” A little boy answered: “A Russian soldier.” At that moment I felt very acutely: “I’m Russian, yes I’m Russian!” Of course I’ve always known very well that I’m not a Turk, but at that moment it was as though my whole soul was singing: “I’m Russian, I’m Russian!” Of course we were brought up in a different spirit before the war . . . And today, the happiest day of my life, it’s just the same – Russian grief, Russian happiness . . . Well, I just wanted to say that . . . What is it?’ he asked suddenly.
In her mind’s eye Yevgenia had glimpsed Krymov and his dishevelled hair. God, had they really separated for ever? It was when she was happiest that she found this thought most unbearable.
For a moment she felt she was about to reconcile this present time, the words of the man now kissing her, with that time in the past; that she was about to understand the secret currents of her life, about to glimpse what always remains hidden – those depths of the heart where one’s fate is decided.
‘This room,’ she said, ‘belongs to a German. She took me in. This angelic little bed belongs to her. In all my life, I’ve never met anyone more innocent and more helpless . . . It sounds strange to say this while we’re at war, but I’m sure there’s no kinder person in the whole city. Isn’t that strange?’
‘Will she be back soon?’
‘No, the war’s already over for her. She’s been deported.’
‘Thank God for that.’
She wanted to tell him how sorry she felt for Krymov. He had no one to write to, no one to go home to, nothing but hopeless gloom and loneliness. She also wanted to tell him everything about Limonov and Shargorodsky. She wanted to tell him about the notebook where Jenny Genrikhovna had written down all the funny remarks she and the other children had come out with; if he wanted to, he could read it right now – it was there on the table. And she wanted to tell him the story of her residence permit and the head of the p
assport office. But she still felt shy; she didn’t trust him enough. Would he really want to know all this?
How strange . . . It was as though she were reliving her break with Krymov. Deep down she had always thought she could make things up, that she could bring back the past. This had consoled her. But now she was being carried away by a new force; she felt frightened and tormented. Was what had happened final, irrevocable? Poor, poor Nikolay Grigorevich! What had he done to deserve all this?
‘What’s going to become of us all?’ she asked.
‘You’re going to become Yevgenia Nikolaevna Novikova,’ he answered.
She looked him in the face and laughed.
‘But you’re a stranger. You’re a stranger to me. Who are you?’
‘That I can’t tell you. But you’re Novikova, Yevgenia Nikolaevna.’
Now she was no longer somewhere up above, looking down on her life. She poured some more hot water into his cup and asked: ‘More bread?’
‘If anything happens to Krymov,’ she began abruptly. ‘If he ends up crippled or in prison, then I’ll go back to him. That’s something you should know.’
‘Why should he end up in prison?’ asked Novikov, frowning.
‘Who knows?’ said Yevgenia. ‘He was a member of the Comintern. Trotsky knew him. He even said about one of his articles: “That’s pure marble!”’
‘All right then. Go back to him. He’ll send you packing.’
‘That’s my affair.’
He told her that after the war she would be the mistress of a large beautiful house with its own garden.
Was all this final, for ever?
For some reason she wanted Novikov to understand that Krymov was extremely talented and intelligent, that she was attached to him, that she loved him. It wasn’t that she consciously wanted to make him jealous, though her words did indeed have that effect. She had even told him, and him alone, what Krymov had once told her, and her alone: those words of Trotsky’s. Krymov could hardly have survived the year 1937 if anyone else had known about that. Her feelings for Novikov were such that she had to trust him; she had entrusted him with the fate of the man she had wronged.
Her head was full of thoughts – about the future, about the present, about the past. She felt numb, happy, shy, anxious, sad, appalled . . . Dozens of people – her mother, her sister, Vera, her nephews – would be affected by this change in her life. What would Novikov find to say to Limonov? What would he think of their conversations about poetry and art . . . ? But he wouldn’t feel out of place – even if he hadn’t heard of Chagall and Matisse . . . He was strong, strong, so strong. And she had given in to him. Soon the war would be over. Would she really never, never see Nikolay again? What had she done? It was best not to think of that now. Who knew what the future might bring?
‘I’ve only just realized: I don’t know you at all. You’re a stranger – I mean it. What’s all this about a house and garden? Are you being serious?’
‘All right then. I’ll leave the army and work on a construction site in Eastern Siberia. We can live in a hostel for married workers.’
Novikov wasn’t joking.
‘Perhaps not the hostel for married workers.’
‘Yes,’ he said emphatically. ‘That’s an essential part of it.’
‘You must be mad. Why are you saying all this to me?’ As she said this, she thought to herself: ‘Kolenka.’
‘What do you mean – why?’ Novikov asked anxiously.
But he wasn’t thinking about the past or the future. He was happy. He wasn’t even frightened by the thought that he’d have to leave her in a few minutes. He was sitting next to her, looking at her . . . Yevgenia Nikolaevna Novikova . . . He was happy. It wasn’t important that she was young, intelligent and beautiful. He loved her. At first he’d never even dared hope she might become his wife. Then year after year he had dreamed of nothing else. Even now, he still felt shy and timid as he waited for her smile or for some ironic comment. But he knew that something new had been born.
She watched him get ready to leave and said: ‘The time has come for you to rejoin your complaining companions and cast me into the approaching waves.’fn1
As Novikov said goodbye, he began to realize that she wasn’t really so very strong, that a woman was still a woman – for all the sharpness and clarity of her mind.
‘There’s so much I wanted to say and I haven’t said any of it,’ she said.
But that wasn’t quite so. What really matters, whatever it is that decides people’s fates, had become clearer. He loved her.
Footnotes
fn1 A quotation from a famous song about the Cossack chieftain, Stenka Razin.
4
Novikov walked back to the station.
. . . Zhenya, her confused whispering, her bare feet, her tender whispering, her tears as they’d said goodbye, her power over him, her poverty and her purity, the smell of her hair, her modesty, the warmth of her body . . . And his own shyness at being just a worker and a soldier . . . And his pride at being a worker and a soldier.
As Novikov crossed the tracks, a sharp needle of fear suddenly pierced the warm blur of his thoughts. Like every soldier on a journey, he was afraid he had been left behind.
In the distance he caught sight of the open wagons, the rectangular outlines of the tanks under their tarpaulins, the sentries in their black helmets, the white curtains in the windows of the staff carriage.
A sentry corrected his stance as Novikov climbed in.
Vershkov, his orderly, was upset at not having been taken into Kuibyshev. Without a word, he placed on the table a coded message from the Stavka: they were to proceed to Saratov and then take the branch-line to Astrakhan . . .
General Nyeudobnov entered the compartment. Looking not at Novikov’s face, but at the telegram in his hands, he said: ‘They’ve confirmed our destination.’
‘Yes, Mikhail Petrovich. More than that – they’ve confirmed our fate. Stalingrad . . . ! Oh yes, greetings from Lieutenant-General Ryutin.’
‘Mmm,’ said Nyeudobnov. It was unclear whether this expression of indifference referred to the general’s greetings or Stalingrad itself.
He was a strange man; Novikov sometimes found him quite frightening. Whenever anything had gone wrong on the journey – a delay because of a train coming in the opposite direction, a faulty axle on one of the carriages, a controller being slow to signal them on – Nyeudobnov had said with sudden excitement: ‘Take down his name. That’s deliberate sabotage. The swine should be arrested immediately.’
Deep down, Novikov felt indifferent towards the kulaks and saboteurs, the men who were called enemies of the people. He didn’t hate them. He had never felt the least desire to have anyone flung in prison, taken before a tribunal or unmasked at a public meeting. He himself had always attributed this good-humoured indifference to a lack of political consciousness.
Nyeudobnov, on the other hand, seemed to be constantly vigilant. It was as if, whenever he met someone, he wondered suspiciously: ‘And how am I to know, dear comrade, that you’re not an enemy of the people yourself?’ Yesterday he had told Novikov and Getmanov about the saboteur architects who had tried to convert the main Moscow boulevards into landing strips for enemy planes.
‘Sounds like nonsense to me,’ Novikov had said. ‘It doesn’t make sense technically.’
Now Nyeudobnov launched into his other favourite topic – domestic life. After testing the heating pipes in the carriage, he began to describe the central heating system he’d installed, not long before the war, on his dacha. All of a sudden Novikov found this surprisingly interesting; he asked Nyeudobnov to draw a sketch of the system, folded it up and placed it in the inside pocket of his tunic.
‘Who knows? One day it might come in useful,’ he said.
Soon afterwards Getmanov came in. He greeted Novikov loudly and heartily.
‘So our chief’s back, is he? We were beginning to think we’d have to choose a new ataman.fn1 We were afra
id Stenka Razin had abandoned his companions.’
He looked Novikov up and down good-humouredly. Novikov laughed, but as always, the presence of the commissar made him feel tense.
Getmanov seemed to know a great deal about Novikov, and it was always through his jokes that he allowed this to show. Just now he had even echoed Yevgenia’s parting words about rejoining his companions – though that, of course, was pure coincidence.
Getmanov looked at his watch and announced: ‘Well, gentlemen, if no one minds, I’ll take a look round the town myself.’
‘Go ahead,’ said Novikov. ‘We can manage to entertain ourselves without you.’
‘That’s for sure. You certainly know how to entertain yourself in Kuibyshev,’ said Getmanov, adding from the doorway of the compartment: ‘Well, Pyotr Pavlovich? How’s Yevgenia Nikolaevna?’
His face was now quite serious; his eyes were no longer laughing.
‘Very well, thank you,’ said Novikov. ‘But she’s got a lot of work to do.’
To change the subject, he asked Nyeudobnov: ‘Mikhail Petrovich, why don’t you go into Kuibyshev yourself for an hour?’
‘I’ve already seen all there is to see.’
They were sitting next to each other. As he listened to Nyeudobnov, Novikov went through his papers, putting them aside one by one and repeating every now and then: ‘Very good . . . Carry on . . .’
All his career Novikov had reported to superior officers who had gone on looking through their papers as they repeated absent-mindedly: ‘Very good . . . Carry on . . .’ He had always found it very offensive and had never expected to end up doing it himself.
‘Listen now,’ he said. ‘We need to make out a request for more maintenance mechanics. We’ve got plenty for the wheeled vehicles, but hardly any for the tanks.’
‘I’ve already made one out. I think it should be addressed to the colonel-general himself. It will go to him anyway to be signed.’
‘Very good,’ said Novikov, signing the request. ‘I want each brigade to check their anti-aircraft weapons. There’s a possibility of air-attacks after Saratov.’
Life and Fate Page 41