They weren’t bad people, but they never said one word to Alexandra Vladimirovna about the war, about Stalingrad, or about the bulletins of the Soviet Information Bureau.
They both pitied and despised Alexandra Vladimirovna for living in such penury. Since the Shtrums had left, she had no sugar or butter, she drank hot water instead of tea, and ate the soup in the public canteen that even the piglet had refused. She had no money for firewood and no personal belongings to sell. Her poverty was a nuisance to them. Once she heard Nina Matveyevna say to her husband: ‘Yesterday I had to give the old woman a biscuit. I don’t like eating when she’s sitting there watching me with her hungry eyes.’
Alexandra Vladimirovna no longer slept well. Why was there still no news from Seryozha? She slept on the iron bed that had once been Lyudmila’s; it was as though her daughter’s anxieties had now been transferred to her.
How easily death annihilated people. How hard it was to go on living. She thought of Vera. Her child’s father had either forgotten her or been killed. Stepan Fyodorovich was constantly depressed and anxious. As for Lyudmila and Viktor, all their griefs and losses had done nothing to bring them together.
Alexandra Vladimirovna wrote to Zhenya that evening. ‘My dearest daughter . . .’ She kept thinking of her during the night. What sort of mess was she in? What lay in store for her?
Anya Shtrum, Sonya Levinton, Seryozha . . . What had become of them all?
Next door she could hear two hushed voices.
‘We should kill the duck for the October anniversary,’ said Semyon Ivanovich.
‘Do you think I’ve been feeding it on potatoes just to have it killed?’ snapped Nina Matveyevna. ‘Oh yes, once the old woman’s out of the way I’d like to paint the floors. Otherwise the boards will start rotting.’
All they ever spoke of was food and material things; the world they lived in had room only for objects. There were no human feelings in this world – nothing but boards, paint, millet, buckwheat, thirty-rouble notes. They were hard-working, honest people; the neighbours all said that neither of them would ever take a penny that didn’t belong to them. But somehow they were quite untouched by the wounded in hospital, by blind veterans, by homeless children on the streets, by the Volga famine of 1921.
In this they were quite the opposite of Alexandra Vladimirovna. She herself could get upset, overjoyed or angry over matters that had nothing to do with her or anyone close to her. The period of general collectivization, the events of 1937, the fate of women who had been sent to camps because of their husbands, the children who had been put in orphanages after their parents had been sent to camps, the summary execution of Russian prisoners-of-war, the many tragedies of the war – all these troubled her as deeply as the sufferings of her own family.
This wasn’t something she had learnt from books, from the populist and revolutionary traditions of her family, from her friends, from her husband, or even from life itself. It was something she couldn’t help; it was just the way she was. She always ran out of money six days before pay-day. She was always hungry. Everything she owned could be wrapped up in a handkerchief. But not once in Kazan had she thought of her belongings that had been burnt in Stalingrad – her furniture, her piano, her tea-service, her spoons and forks. She didn’t even think about her books.
It was very strange that she should now be so far from the people who needed her, living under one roof with people who were so alien to her.
Two days after she had received the letters, Karimov came round. Alexandra Vladimirovna was glad to see him and offered him some rose-hip tea.
‘How long since you last heard from Moscow?’ he asked.
‘Two days.’
‘Really?’ said Karimov with a smile. ‘Tell me, how long does a letter take?’
‘Have a look at the postmark,’ said Alexandra Vladimirovna.
Karimov examined the envelope for some time. ‘Nine days,’ he said in a preoccupied tone of voice. He sat there thoughtfully – as though the slowness of the postal service was a matter of great importance to him.
‘They say it’s the censors,’ said Alexandra Vladimirovna. ‘They’re quite snowed under.’
Karimov looked at her with his beautiful dark eyes.
‘So they’re all right, are they? They’re not having any problems?’
‘You don’t look at all well,’ said Alexandra Vladimirovna. ‘Are you ill?’
‘What do you mean? I’m fine!’ he replied hurriedly, as though denying some accusation.
They began to talk about the war.
‘We’ve come to a real turning-point now,’ said Karimov. ‘Even a child can see that.’
‘Yes, and last summer it was just as obvious that the Germans were going to win,’ said Alexandra Vladimirovna sarcastically.
‘Is it very difficult for you on your own?’ Karimov asked abruptly. ‘I see you have to light the stove yourself.’
Alexandra Vladimirovna frowned – as though this were a question she could only answer after deep thought. Finally she said: ‘Akhmet Usmanovich, have you really called on me just to ask if I find it difficult to light the stove?’
Karimov looked down at his hands. He waited for a long time before replying.
‘The other day I was summoned to you-know-where. I was questioned about the meetings and conversations we had.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that at the beginning?’ asked Alexandra Vladimirovna. ‘Why did you have to start asking about the stove?’
Trying to catch her eye, Karimov went on:
‘Naturally, I was unable to deny that we had talked about politics and the war. It would have been absurd to try and make out that four adults had spoken exclusively about the cinema. Naturally I said that we had always talked like true Soviet patriots. I said we were all of us certain that, under the leadership of comrade Stalin and the Party, the Soviet people would be victorious. In general, the questions weren’t particularly hostile. But after a few days I began to worry. I couldn’t sleep at all. I began thinking that something must have happened to Viktor Pavlovich. And then there’s this strange business with Madyarov. He went off for ten days to the Pedagogical Institute in Kazan. And he still hasn’t come back. His students are waiting for him. The dean’s sent him a telegram. And not a word. Well, you can imagine what goes through my head at night.’
Alexandra Vladimirovna said nothing.
‘Just think,’ he went on in a quiet voice, ‘you only have to get talking over a glass of tea and everyone’s full of suspicion, you get summoned you know where . . .’
Alexandra Vladimirovna said nothing. Karimov looked at her questioningly, as though inviting her to speak. He realized that she was waiting for him to tell her the rest.
‘So there we are,’ he said.
Alexandra Vladimirovna still didn’t say anything.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘There’s one thing I forgot. This comrade asked if we’d ever talked about the freedom of the press. We had indeed. Yes, and then they asked if I knew Lyudmila Nikolaevna’s younger sister and her ex-husband . . . Krymov or something? I’ve never set eyes on them in my life and Viktor Pavlovich has never so much as mentioned them to me. And that’s what I told them. Yes, and then they asked if Viktor Pavlovich had ever talked to me personally about the situation of the Jews. I asked why he should have talked about that to me. They answered: “You understand. You’re a Tartar and he’s a Jew . . .”’
Later, after Karimov had put on his hat and coat and was standing in the doorway, tapping the letter-box where Lyudmila had once found the letter telling her that Tolya had been wounded, Alexandra Vladimirovna said: ‘It’s strange. Why should they ask about Zhenya?’
But neither she nor Karimov had any idea why a Chekist in Kazan should suddenly take an interest in Zhenya, who lived in Kuibyshev, or in her ex-husband, who was now at the front.
People trusted Alexandra Vladimirovna and she had heard many similar stories and confessions. She had grown all too used to
feeling that something important had been left unsaid. She didn’t see any point in warning Viktor; it would merely cause him fruitless anxiety. Nor was there any point in trying to guess which of the group had talked carelessly or had informed. In situations like this it nearly always turned out to be the person you least suspected. And very often the matter had come to the attention of the NKVD in some quite unexpected manner: through a veiled hint in a letter, a joke, a few careless words in the communal kitchen . . . But why should the investigator have asked Karimov about Zhenya and Nikolay Grigorevich?
That night she was unable to sleep. She wanted something to eat. She could smell food in the kitchen. They must be frying potato-cakes – she could hear the clatter of tin plates and the calm voice of Semyon Ivanovich. God, how hungry she felt! What awful soup they’d served for lunch in the canteen! Now, though, she very much regretted not having finished it. She couldn’t even think clearly; her desire for food kept interrupting her train of thought.
On her way in to work next morning she met the director’s secretary, a middle-aged woman with an unpleasantly masculine face.
‘Comrade Shaposhnikova,’ she said, ‘come round to my office during the lunch-break.’
Alexandra Vladimirovna felt surprised. Surely the director couldn’t already have answered her request for a transfer? She walked through the yard. Suddenly she said out loud:
‘I’ve had enough of Kazan. It’s time to go home, to Stalingrad.’
31
Chalb, the head of the military police, had called company commander Lenard to the Headquarters of the 6th Army.
Lenard arrived late. A new order of Paulus’s had forbidden the use of petrol for personal transport. All their supplies of fuel were now at the disposition of General Schmidt, the chief of staff. And he’d rather see you die ten deaths than sign you an order for five litres of petrol. There wasn’t enough fuel for the officers’ cars, let alone for the soldiers’ cigarette-lighters.
Lenard had to wait till evening, when he could get a lift with the courier. The small car drove slowly over the frost-covered asphalt. The air was still and frosty; thin wisps of almost transparent smoke rose from the dug-outs and trenches of the front line. There were wounded soldiers walking along the road with towels and bandages round their heads. And then there were other soldiers, also with bandages round their heads and rags round their feet, who were being transferred to the area round the factories.
The driver stopped the car near the corpse of a dead horse and began digging about inside the engine. Lenard watched the anxious, unshaven men hewing off slabs of frozen horsemeat with hatchets. One soldier, standing between the horse’s exposed ribs, looked like a carpenter up in the rafters of an unfinished roof. A few yards away, in the middle of a ruined building, was a fire with a black cauldron hanging down from a tripod. Round it stood a group of soldiers wrapped up in shawls and blankets, helmets and forage caps on their heads, tommy-guns and hand-grenades hanging from their shoulders and belts. The cook prodded with his bayonet at the pieces of meat that came to the surface. A soldier sitting on the roof of a dug-out was gnawing at a large bone; it looked for all the world like an improbably vast harmonica.
Suddenly the road and the ruined house were caught in the rays of the setting sun. The empty eye-sockets of the burnt-out building seemed to fill with frozen blood. The ploughed-up, soot-covered snow turned golden. The dark red cave of the horse’s innards was lit up. The snow eddying across the road turned into a whirl of bronze.
The light of evening can reveal the essence of a moment. It can bring out its emotional and historical significance, transforming a mere impression into a powerful image. The evening sun can endow patches of soot and mud with thousands of voices; with aching hearts we sense past joys, the irrevocability of loss, the bitterness of mistakes and the eternal appeal of hope.
It was like a scene from the Stone Age. The grenadiers, the glory of the nation, the builders of the New Germany, were no longer travelling the road to victory. Lenard looked at these men bandaged up in rags. With a poetic intuition he understood that this twilight was the end of a dream.
Life must indeed conceal some strangely obtuse inertial force. How was it that the dazzling energy of Hitler and the terrible power of a people moved by the most progressive of philosophies had led to the quiet banks of a frozen Volga, to these ruins, to this dirty snow, to these windows filled with the blood of the setting sun, to the quiet humility of these creatures watching over a steaming cauldron of horsemeat?
32
Paulus’s headquarters were now in the cellar of a burnt-out department store. The established routine continued as usual: superior officers came and went; orderlies prepared reports of any change in the situation or any action undertaken by the enemy.
Telephones rang and typewriters clattered. Behind the partition you could hear the deep laughter of General Schenk, the head of the second section. The boots of the staff officers still squeaked on the stone floors. As he walked down the corridor to his office, the monocled commanding officer of the tank units still left behind him a smell of French perfume – a smell that blended with the more usual smells of tobacco, shoe-polish and damp, and yet somehow remained distinct from them. Voices and typewriters still suddenly fell silent as Paulus walked down the narrow corridor in his long, fur-collared greatcoat; dozens of eyes still stared at his thoughtful face and aquiline nose. Paulus himself still kept to the same habits, still allowed the same amount of time after meals for a cigar and a talk with his chief of staff. The junior radio-officer still burst into Paulus’s office with the same plebeian insolence, walking straight past Colonel Adam with a radio message from Hitler marked: ‘To be delivered personally.’
This continuity, of course, was illusory; a vast number of changes had imposed themselves since the beginning of the encirclement. You could see these changes in the colour of the coffee, in the lines of communication stretching out to new sectors of the front, in the new instructions regarding the expenditure of ammunition, in the cruel, now daily spectacle of burning cargo-planes that had been shot down as they tried to break the blockade. And a new name was now on everyone’s lips – the name of Manstein.
There is no need to list all these changes; they are obvious enough. Those who had previously had plenty to cat now went hungry. As for those who had previously gone hungry – their faces were now ashen. And there were changes in attitude: pride and arrogance softened, there was less boasting, even the most determined optimists had now started to curse the Führer and question his policies.
But there were also the beginnings of other, deeper changes, in the hearts and minds of the soldiers who until now had been spellbound by the inhuman power of the nation-state. These changes took place in the subsoil of human life and mostly went unnoticed.
This process was as difficult to pin down as the work of time itself. The torments of fear and hunger, the awareness of impending disaster slowly and gradually humanized men, liberating their core of freedom.
The December days grew still shorter, the icy seventeen-hour nights still longer. The encircling forces pressed still closer; the fire of their guns and machine-guns grew still fiercer. And then there was the pitiless cold – a cold that was unbearable even for those who were used to it, even for the Russians in their felt boots and sheepskins.
Over their heads hung a terrible frozen abyss. Frosted tin stars stood out against a frostbound sky.
Who among these doomed men could have understood that for millions of Germans these were the first hours, after ten years of complete inhumanity, of a slow return to human life?
33
Lenard approached Army Headquarters. He felt his heart beat faster as he saw the ashen face of the sentry standing beside the grey wall. And as he made his way down the underground corridor, everything he saw filled him with tenderness and sorrow.
He read the Gothic script on the door-plates: ‘2nd Section’, ‘ADCs’ Office’, ‘General Koch’, ‘Major Trau
rig’. He heard voices and the clatter of typewriters. All this brought home to him the strength of his filial, fraternal bond with his brothers-in-arms, his Party comrades, his colleagues in the SS. But it was twilight and their life was fading away.
He had no idea what Chalb wanted to talk about, whether or not he would wish to confide his personal anxieties. As was often the case with people who had been brought together by their work in the Party before the war, they paid little attention to their difference in rank and talked with comradely straightforwardness. Their meetings were usually a mixture of serious discussion and friendly chat.
Lenard had a gift for laying bare the essence of a complicated matter with the utmost concision. His words were sometimes relayed from one report to another right up to the most important offices in Berlin.
He entered Chalb’s office. It took him a moment to recognize him. And he had to look hard at his still plump face before he realized that all that had changed was the look in his dark, intelligent eyes.
A map of Stalingrad hung on the wall. The 6th Army was encircled by a merciless band of flaming crimson.
‘We’re on an island, Lenard,’ said Chalb, ‘surrounded not by water, but by the hatred of brutes.’
They talked about the Russian frost, about Russian felt boots, about Russian bacon fat and the treacherous nature of Russian vodka – how it first warmed you up only to freeze you later.
Chalb asked if there had been any changes in the relations between officers and soldiers in the front line.
‘When it comes down to it,’ said Lenard, ‘I can’t really see much difference between the thoughts of a colonel and the thoughts of the privates. There’s precious little optimism in either.’
Life and Fate Page 87