There was no need to call Getmanov. He opened the door, looked sadly at Novikov and said: ‘What’s all this, Pyotr Pavlovich? Rodin seems to have overtaken us. You watch it – he’ll beat us to the Ukraine yet!’
He turned to Darensky.
‘See what a pass things have come to, Lieutenant-Colonel? Now we’re more afraid of our neighbours than of the enemy. You’re not a neighbour, are you? No, I can see – you’re an old comrade.’
‘You seem to be obsessed with the Ukrainian question,’ said Novikov.
Getmanov reached out for a tin of food and said in a tone of mock threat:
‘Very well, Pyotr Pavlovich. But remember this! I won’t marry you and your Yevgenia Nikolaevna till we’re on Ukrainian soil. The Lieutenant-Colonel’s my witness.’
He held out his glass towards Novikov. ‘Anyway, let’s drink to his Russian heart!’
‘That’s a good toast,’ said Darensky in all sincerity.
Remembering Darensky’s dislike of commissars, Novikov said: ‘Yes, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, it’s a long time since we last met.’
Getmanov glanced at the table. ‘We’ve got nothing to offer our guest – only a few tins. The cook barely has time to light the stove before we move our command-post. We’re on the go day and night. You should have come round before the offensive began. Now we only stop for one hour in every twenty-four. We’ll soon be overtaking ourselves.’
‘You might at least give us a fork,’ said Novikov to his orderly.
‘You told us not to unload all that,’ he replied.
Getmanov began giving his impressions of the newly-liberated territory.
‘The Russians and the Kalmyks are like day and night,’ he began. ‘The Kalmyks danced to the Germans’ tune. They even got issued with green uniforms. They roamed over the steppes, rounding up our men. And just think of what they’ve been given by Soviet power! They were just a crowd of ragged, illiterate, syphilitic nomads. But it’s no good – you can’t change a leopard’s spots. Even during the Civil War the vast majority were on the side of the Whites. And just think how much money we spent on all those weeks dedicated to the friendship of nations. We’d have done better to spend it on building another tank factory in Siberia. I met one young woman, a Don Cossack, who told me what she went through during these months. No, there’s no doubt about it – the Kalmyks have betrayed the confidence of the Russians. That’s what I’m going to say in my report to the Military Soviet.’
He turned to Novikov.
‘Do you remember what I said about Basangov? My intuition as a Communist didn’t let me down. But don’t you be offended, Pyotr Pavlovich. That’s not meant as a reproach. Do you think I’ve never made mistakes in my life? But you can’t overestimate the importance of nationality. That’s what we’ve been taught by the experience of the war. And you know the name of a Bolshevik’s best teacher? Experience.’
‘As for what you say about the Kalmyks,’ said Darensky, ‘I couldn’t agree more. I’ve just been in the Kalmyk steppe myself. I can tell you – I’ve had enough of driving through all these Shebeners and Kicheners.’
What made him say that? He had spent a long time in the steppes and never once felt the least antipathy toward the Kalmyks. On the contrary, he had felt a genuine interest in their customs and way of life.
It was as if the commissar was endowed with some magnetic power. Darensky felt a need to agree with everything he said. Novikov looked at him with a mocking smile; he knew Getmanov’s power only too well.
‘I know you’ve suffered injustice in your time,’ said Getmanov to Darensky unexpectedly. ‘But don’t you go nursing a grudge against us Bolsheviks. What we want is the good of the people.’
Darensky, who had always thought that military commissars did nothing but spread confusion, said: ‘But of course. How could I fail to understand that?’
‘Certainly there have been times when we’ve gone too far,’ Getmanov continued. ‘But the people will pardon us. They will! We’re good fellows. And we mean well. Isn’t that so?’
Novikov gave the two men a friendly look and said: ‘Don’t you think we’ve got a fine commissar?’
‘You have indeed,’ said Darensky.
‘That’s right,’ said Getmanov. They all three began to laugh.
As though reading the thoughts of the two officers, Getmanov looked at his watch and said: ‘Well, I’m going to go and lie down. I should be able to get a decent night’s sleep for once. We’re like gypsies – always on the road. It’s ten days since I’ve taken off my boots. Where’s the chief of staff? Is he asleep?’
‘Asleep!’ said Novikov. ‘He’s already taking a look at our new quarters. We’ll be off again in the morning.’
Novikov and Darensky were left on their own.
‘You know,’ said Darensky, ‘there’s one thing I’ve never quite managed to understand . . . Not long ago I was in the sands near the Caspian. I felt very depressed. I felt it was the end of everything. And then what? I find we’ve achieved this. What power! What does anything else matter beside this?’
‘As for me,’ said Novikov, ‘I’m really beginning to understand what we Russians can do. We’re a fierce breed. We’re real wolves.’
‘What power!’ repeated Darensky. ‘And the important thing is this: under the leadership of the Bolsheviks we Russians are the vanguard of humanity. Everything else is just an insignificant detail.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Novikov. ‘Would you like me to ask again to have you transferred here? You could be the deputy chief of staff. We’d be fighting shoulder to shoulder again. How about it?’
‘Thank you,’ said Darensky. ‘Who would I be deputy to?’
‘General Nyeudobnov. That’s as it should be – a lieutenant-colonel as deputy to a general.’
‘Nyeudobnov? The one who was abroad just before the war? In Italy?’
‘That’s right. He’s no Suvorov, but it’s possible to work with him.’
Darensky didn’t say anything. Novikov looked at him. ‘Well?’
Darensky put his hand up to his mouth and pulled up his upper lip.
‘See these crowns?’ he said. ‘That’s Nyeudobnov’s work. He knocked out two teeth of mine when he was interrogating me in 1937.’
They looked at each other, didn’t say anything, and looked at each other again.
‘A very competent man,’ said Darensky. ‘Certainly.’
‘Of course,’ said Novikov with an ironic smile. ‘After all, he’s not one of those Kalmyks. He’s a Russian!’
‘And now let’s have a real drink,’ he bellowed. ‘Let’s drink like Russians!’
Darensky had never drunk so much in his life. Nevertheless, but for the two empty bottles on the table, no one would have guessed quite how much the two men had accounted for. They were now addressing each other as ‘ty’.
As he refilled the glasses for the hundredth time, Novikov said: ‘Come on! Don’t hold back now!’
For once, Darensky didn’t hold back.
They talked about the first days of the war and the retreat, about Blücher and Tukhachevsky, about Zhukov. Darensky spoke about his interrogation.
Novikov told Darensky how he’d delayed for a few minutes at the very beginning of the offensive. He didn’t tell him how very mistaken he’d been concerning his brigade commanders. Their talk turned to the Germans. Novikov said how he’d thought the summer of 1941 would have hardened him for ever. But, as soon as he’d seen the first columns of prisoners, he’d given orders to improve their rations and to have anyone wounded or frostbitten taken to the rear by truck.
‘Just now your commissar and I were abusing the Kalmyks,’ said Darensky. ‘And we were quite right. But it’s a pity your Nyeudobnov isn’t here. I’d like to have a few words with him. Yes, I certainly would.’
‘And were there no collaborators among the Russians in Kursk and Orel?’ asked Novikov. ‘What about General Vlasov? He’s hardly a Kalmyk. As for my Basangov �
� he’s a fine soldier. And Nyeudobnov’s a Chekist. He’s not a soldier at all. My commissar told me that. But we Russians are going to conquer. Yes, I’ll get to Berlin myself. The Germans will never be able to stop us now.’
‘I know about Nyeudobnov and Yezhov and all that,’ said Darensky. ‘But there’s only one Russia now – Soviet Russia. And even if they knock out every one of my teeth, that won’t change my love for Russia. I’ll love Russia till my dying day. But I won’t be deputy to a prostitute like that. No, comrade, you must be joking!’
Novikov poured out some more vodka. ‘Come on! Don’t hold back!’
Then he said: ‘But who knows what else will happen? One day I’ll be in disgrace myself.’
Changing the subject again, he said:
‘A horrible thing happened the other day. A driver had his head blown off but he still had his foot on the accelerator. The tank drove on. Forward! Forward!’
‘Your commissar and I were abusing the Kalmyks,’ said Darensky. ‘But there’s one old Kalmyk I just can’t get out of my head. How old’s that Nyeudobnov? How about driving to your new quarters and paying him a visit?’
‘I’ve been granted a great happiness.’ said Novikov in a thick, drawling voice. ‘The greatest of all happinesses.’
He took a photograph out of his pocket and passed it to Darensky. Darensky looked at it for a long time. ‘Yes, she’s a real beauty.’
‘Beauty?’ said Novikov. ‘Who cares about beauty? No one could love a woman like I do just for her beauty.’
Vershkov appeared in the doorway. He looked at Novikov questioningly.
‘Get the hell out of here!’ said Novikov very slowly.
‘Why treat him like that?’ said Darensky. ‘He just wanted to know if you needed him for anything.’
‘All right, all right . . . But I can be a swine too. And I don’t need you to tell me how to behave. And why are you calling me “ty” anyway? You’re just a lieutenant-colonel.’
‘So it’s like that, is it?’
‘Don’t you know how to take a joke?’ said Novikov, thinking to himself that it was a good thing Zhenya hadn’t yet seen him drunk.
‘I don’t know how to take stupid jokes,’ said Darensky.
They went on wrangling for a long time. They only made peace when Novikov suggested driving to their new quarters and giving Nyeudobnov a good whipping. Needless to say, they didn’t drive anywhere at all but just went on drinking.
30
Alexandra Vladimirovna received three letters all on the same day: one from each of her two daughters and one from her granddaughter Vera. She guessed by the handwriting who these letters were from, and sensed immediately that they contained bad news. Many years of experience had taught her that children don’t write to their mothers just to share their joys.
Each letter contained an invitation to come and stay: with Lyudmila in Moscow, with Zhenya in Kuibyshev, with Vera in Leninsk. This made Alexandra Vladimirovna still more certain that the three women were in trouble.
Vera wrote mostly about her father. His difficulties with the Party had brought him to the end of his tether. He had been summoned to Kuibyshev by the People’s Commissariat and had only returned a few days ago. This journey had exhausted him more than all the months in Stalingrad. His case still awaited a decision. He had been ordered to return to Stalingrad and make a start on rebuilding the power station; it was uncertain, however, whether he would be allowed to remain in the employ of the Commissariat.
Vera herself had decided to go back to Stalingrad with her father. The centre of the city hadn’t yet been liberated, but the Germans were no longer shooting. Apparently the house where Alexandra Vladimirovna had lived was just an empty shell with a caved-in roof. Stepan Fyodorovich’s flat was still there – undamaged save that the windows were broken and the plaster had come off the walls. He and Vera were intending to move back in, together with her son.
Alexandra Vladimirovna found it very strange that her little granddaughter Vera should now sound so adult, so like a woman. The letter was full of information about the baby’s rashes, about his stomach-upsets and disturbed nights. These were all things she should have been writing about to her husband or her mother, but she no longer had either.
She also wrote about old Andreyev and his daughter-in-law Natalya, and about Aunt Zhenya, whom Stepan Fyodorovich had seen in Kuibyshev. She said almost nothing about herself – as though her own life were of no interest to Alexandra Vladimirovna. In the margin of the last page, however, was a note saying: ‘Grandmama, we’ve got a large flat in Stalingrad and there’s plenty of room. Please, I beg you to come.’ This sudden appeal expressed everything Vera hadn’t written in the rest of the letter.
Lyudmila’s letter was very brief indeed. At one point she said: ‘My life seems quite meaningless. Tolya’s dead. And as for Viktor and Nadya – they don’t need me at all, they can get on fine without me.’
Lyudmila had never written her mother a letter like this before. Alexandra Vladimirovna realized she must be getting on very badly indeed with her husband. After inviting her to stay, Lyudmila went on: ‘Vitya’s in trouble – and he always talks more readily to you about his troubles than he does to me.’ A little further on she wrote: ‘Nadya’s become very secretive. She doesn’t tell me anything at all. That seems to be the norm in this family.’
The last letter, from Zhenya, was quite incomprehensible. It was full of vague hints at various difficulties and tragedies. She invited her mother to Kuibyshev – and then said she would have to go to Moscow almost immediately. She wrote about Limonov and how highly he always spoke of Alexandra Vladimirovna. He was an interesting and intelligent man and Alexandra Vladimirovna would enjoy meeting him. She then wrote that he had gone to Samarkand. Alexandra Vladimirovna found it hard to understand how she was to meet him in Kuibyshev.
There was one thing she could understand. As she came to the end of the letter, she said to herself: ‘My poor little girl!’
Alexandra Vladimirovna was very upset by these letters.
All three women had asked after her own health and whether her room wasn’t too cold. She was touched by their concern, but realized that none of them had wondered whether she herself might not be in need of them.
They needed her. But it could very well have been the other way round. Why wasn’t she asking for her daughters’ help? Why was it her daughters who were asking her for help? After all, she was alone. She had no real home. She was an old woman. She had lost her son and daughter. She didn’t know anything about Seryozha.
And she was finding her work increasingly difficult. She had a constant pain around her heart and she always felt dizzy. She had even asked the technical director to have her transferred from the shop-floor to the laboratory. She found it very difficult to spend the whole day taking control samples from one machine after another.
In the evening she stood in the food queues, went home, lit the stove and prepared something to eat.
Life was so bare, so harsh! It wasn’t standing in a queue that was difficult. It was worse when the shop was empty and there was no queue. It was worse when she went home and lay down in her cold, damp bed without lighting the stove, without preparing anything to eat.
Everyone around her was suffering. A woman doctor from Leningrad told her how she’d spent the winter with two children in a village a hundred kilometres from Ufa. They’d lived in a hut that had once belonged to a kulak; there were no windows and the roof had been partly dismantled. To get to work she had had to walk six kilometres through the forest; at dawn she had sometimes glimpsed the green eyes of wolves through the trees. It had been a very poor village. The kolkhoz had failed to fulfil the plan; the peasants said that however hard they worked, they’d still have their grain taken away from them. Her neighbour’s husband had gone to the war, leaving her alone with her hungry children; she had one pair of torn felt boots for all six of them.
The doctor told Alexandra Vladimirovna how she�
�d bought a goat. Late at night she used to walk through the deep snow to a distant field; there she would steal buckwheat and dig up the rotten hay that had never been gathered in. Listening to the villagers, her children had learnt to swear. The teacher in Kazan had said to her: ‘It’s the first time I’ve heard seven-year-olds swearing like drunks. And you say you’re from Leningrad!’
Alexandra Vladimirovna lived in the small room that had once been Viktor Pavlovich’s. The official tenants, who had moved to an annexe while the Shtrums had been there, now lived in the main room. They were tense, irritable people, always quarrelling over trivia.
What Alexandra Vladimirovna resented was not the noise or the quarrels, but the fact that they should demand two hundred roubles a month – more than a third of her salary – from a woman whose own home had been burnt down by the Germans. And the room was minute. Sometimes she thought their hearts must be made out of tin and plywood. All day long they talked about potatoes, salt beef, what you could buy and sell at the flea-market. During the night they talked in whispers. The landlady would tell her husband that honey had been very cheap that day in the market, or that their neighbour, a foreman in a factory, had been to a village and brought back a whole sack of sunflower seeds and half a sack of hulled maize.
The landlady, Nina Matveyevna, was very good-looking – tall and slim, with grey eyes. Before getting married, she had worked in a factory, sung in a choir and taken part in amateur theatricals. Her husband, Semyon Ivanovich, worked as a blacksmith’s striker in a military factory. In his youth he had served on a destroyer and been the middleweight boxing champion of the Pacific fleet. The distant past of this couple now seemed very improbable.
Before going to work in the morning, Semyon Ivanovich fed the ducks and prepared some swill for the piglet. When he came back in the evening, he pottered about the kitchen, cleaning millet, repairing shoes, sharpening knives, washing out bottles, and talking about drivers at work who had managed to get hold of flour, eggs and goat-meat from distant kolkhozes. Nina Matveyevna would interrupt him with stories of her countless illnesses and visits to famous doctors; then she would talk about lard and margarine, about how she had exchanged a towel for some beans, how a neighbour had bought a pony-skin jacket and five china saucers from an evacuee.
Life and Fate Page 86