The chairman, for his part, disliked Vavilov and was afraid of him, telling him that he was contrary and that he had no manners. The chairman preferred to spend time with people who were useful to him, people who understood what was what. Some people in the kolkhoz were a little wary of Vavilov, finding him sullen and taciturn. Nevertheless, Vavilov was a trusted figure and, whenever the village was engaged in some communal enterprise, it was he who was asked to receive and take care of the money. Any voluntary work, anything for which the villagers had to club together—it was Vavilov who was chosen as treasurer. He had never been interrogated or involved in any legal proceedings and he had only once been inside a police station. A stupid little incident, a year before the war.
One evening an elderly man had knocked at the window of his hut and asked if he could stay the night. His face was covered by an unkempt black beard. Vavilov had looked at him in silence, taken him to the hay barn, spread out a sheepskin coat for him to lie on, and brought him some milk and a piece of bread.
During the night some young men in yellow leather jackets had appeared. They had arrived in a car and gone straight to Vavilov’s barn. They then set off again in their car, taking both Vavilov and the stranger. In the police station a senior officer asked Vavilov why he had let this bearded man sleep in his barn. Vavilov had thought for a moment, then said, “I felt sorry for him.”
“But didn’t you ask him who he was?” asked the officer.
“Why?” Vavilov replied. “I could see. He was a human being.”
Without uttering a word, the officer looked for a long time, for what seemed a very long time indeed, into Vavilov’s eyes. And then he said, “All right then, go back home.”
Everyone in the village had had a good laugh about all this, asking Vavilov if he had enjoyed his ride in a car. The chairman, though, had shaken his head and said, “You’re a fool.”
•
Vavilov went down the empty village street, walking more and more quickly. He couldn’t wait to see his home and children again; it was as if not only his mind but his entire body felt the anguish of the imminent separation.
He stood for a moment by the open door of his hut. His life there had not been easy. His children seemed badly dressed, and they did not always have enough to eat. His boots were worn out. There was no kerosene for the lamp, and it was dim even when it was lit. It had no glass and it smoked. Sometimes they did not even have bread. He seldom ate meat. There had been meat once, but it would have been better if there hadn’t. Their cow had fallen into a pit that wasn’t fenced off and had broken both her front legs. They had slaughtered her and eaten meat every day for the next week, their eyes swollen with tears. Vavilov seldom ate fatback. And he never ate white bread.
He went into his hut, where everything was familiar—and these long-familiar things seemed strangely new. His heart was touched by all of them: the chest of drawers covered by a knitted tablecloth; the felt boots he had resoled and repaired with black patches; the pendulum clock above the wide bed; the wooden spoons with edges nibbled away by impatient childish teeth; the picture frame with the family photographs; a small, heavy mug made from dark copper; a large, light mug made from fine white tin; and little Vanya’s tiny trousers, all colour now washed out of them except for a sad, hazy, pale blue. And the hut itself was endowed with an astonishing quality unique to Russian huts: the interior was at once cramped and spacious. It was well lived-in, warmed by the breath of its owners and the breath of its owners’ parents, as deeply imbued with human presence as any dwelling can possibly be—and at the same time it was as if no one had meant to stay for long, as if a few people had come in, put their things down for a minute and would be off again straightaway, leaving the door wide open behind them . . .
How beautiful children were in this hut! Early in the morning, when little fair-headed Vanya came running across the floor on his bare feet, he was like a warm, moving flower.
•
Vavilov helped Vanya up onto a high chair and sensed, through his rough calloused hand, the precious warmth of Vanya’s little body. The child’s clear bright eyes looked at him with a trust that was pure and absolute—and the voice of a very small human being who had never uttered a single coarse word, never smoked a single cigarette or drunk even one drop of vodka, asked, “Papa, are you really going to the war tomorrow?”
Vavilov smiled, and his eyes moistened.
5
THAT NIGHT Vavilov stood in the moonlight, chopping up the tree stumps stacked under an awning behind the shed. He had collected these stumps over many years and they had long been trimmed and stripped of their bark. Really, they were little more than bundles of twisted roots; he couldn’t split them or chop them cleanly—all he could do was hack at them and then tear them apart.
Marya—tall, broad-shouldered and dark-skinned like her husband—was standing nearby. Now and again she bent down to pick up stray pieces of wood and occasionally she gave her husband a sideways look. And he too caught glimpses of her as he worked away with his axe. As he bent down, he saw her legs or the hem of her dress; straightening up, he would see her large, thin-lipped mouth, her intent dark eyes, or her high, clear, convex forehead, without a single wrinkle. Standing beside each other, they could have been brother and sister. Life had forged them in the same fashion, beaten them into the same shape; hard labour had not bowed them but straightened them. Neither was speaking, which was their way of saying farewell. Vavilov struck with his axe at the springy wood. It was soft, yet un-yielding, and the blows resonated both in the earth and in Vavilov’s own chest. The axe blade shone blue in the moonlight, flaring as he lifted it into the air, fading as it moved nearer the ground.
All around was silence. Like soft linseed oil, the moonlight covered the ground, the grass, the broad fields of young rye and the roofs of the huts, dissolving in the puddles and little windows.
Vavilov wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand and looked at the sky. It was as if he were out in the hot summer sun, though the light shining down on him was from the bloodless luminary of the night.
“That’ll do,” said his wife. “You’re not going to lay in enough firewood for the whole of the war.”
Vavilov glanced at the mountain of wood he had chopped.
“All right—but the moment we get back, Alyosha and I will chop you some more.” And he drew the back of his hand across the axe blade, just as he had wiped it across his sweaty forehead a moment before.
Vavilov took out his tobacco pouch, rolled a cigarette and lit up; the smoke from the coarse tobacco drifted slowly away in the still air.
They went back inside. He felt the hut’s warmth on his face, and he could hear the breathing of his sleeping children. This quiet, this warmth, these two fair heads in the half-dark—here beside him was his life, his love, his good fortune. He remembered how he had lived here as a young bachelor—how he had gone about in blue riding breeches and a pointed Red Army helmet from the time of the Civil War, how he had smoked a pipe with a little lid that his elder brother had brought back from the imperialist war, that earlier war against the Germans. He had been proud of this pipe. It had made him look dashing, and people had held it in their hands and said, “It’s beautiful, it’s so interesting.” Shortly before getting married, he had lost it.
Nastya was asleep. He saw her face and the dark shape of her beret. He looked round at his wife—and felt that there could be no greater happiness in the world than to stay here in this hut, never to leave it. Never had he known a moment more bitter; in the sleepy silence before dawn he could sense the power of a harsh whirlwind that was entirely indifferent to Vavilov and all that he loved and desired—and he could sense this power in every cell of his body, on his skin and in the marrow of his bones. He felt the horror that a splinter of wood might feel if it suddenly realized that it was not moving of its own accord past the river’s green banks but was being carried by the insuperable power of the water. The whirlwind had snatched h
im up and he no longer belonged either to himself or to his family. For a moment he forgot that his own fate and that of the children asleep on the bed were bound to the fate of the country and all its inhabitants, that the fate of his kolkhoz and the fate of the huge stone cities with their millions of citizens were one and the same. In this bitter hour his heart was gripped by a pain that neither knows nor wants consolation or understanding. He wanted only one thing: to go on living here—in the wood that his wife would put into the stove in winter, in the salt with which she would season the potatoes and bread, in the grain she would receive in return for his many workdays on the kolkhoz. And he knew that this was impossible, that it would be need and shortage, not plenty, that would make him live in their thoughts. They would think of him as they looked at the empty salt cellar, when they asked a neighbour for a measure of flour, as they tried to persuade the chairman to allow them a horse to drag a sledge-load of firewood from the forest.
“We’ll run out of potatoes before spring. Same with bread. Same with firewood. The only thing we won’t be short of is grief.” Quickly, quietly but bitterly, Marya listed what they would run out of before winter, what before Christmas, what before the beginning of Lent and what before Easter.12 Pointing to the sleeping children, she went on, “It’s all very well for you, you won’t need to worry about bread. But what about me? Where am I going to find bread for them?” And she picked up a towel that had been dropped on the floor.
This upset Vavilov. It wasn’t as if he were going away for his own pleasure. But he understood that his wife was in pain and that she was trying to stop this pain from bursting out into the open.
When she had had her say, he said, “And my knapsack? Have you put everything in?”
She put his knapsack on the table and said, “Yes, but it’s not much. The knapsack itself weighs more than everything I’ve put in it.”
“All the easier for me to carry,” he said gently. The knapsack was indeed very light: bread, some rye rusks, some onions, a tin mug, a needle and thread, two pairs of clean foot cloths, a penknife with a wooden handle.
“Mittens?” she asked angrily.
“No. You need them more.”
“That’s for me to say,” Marya replied sharply. She knew she was being unkind and this made her angrier still.
“Papa!” came Nastya’s sleepy voice. “Your jacket. I don’t need your jacket. Take it with you!”
“Jacket, your jacket,” said her mother, imitating Nastya’s sleepy voice. “You go back to sleep. What if they send you out in midwinter to dig trenches? What’ll you wear then?”
“My darling, my silly darling,” Vavilov said to his daughter. “I love you, my silly girl. I love you. Don’t think I’m strict with you because I don’t care.”
And the girl began to cry. Pressing her cheek against his hand, she sobbed, “Dearest Pápenka! Do at least write to us!”
“Maybe you should take your padded jacket with you,” said Marya.
There was so much more that Vavilov could have said. He wanted to say that it was no use his taking the mittens because he’d be dead before winter anyway, and they’d simply be wasted. He wanted to say dozens of things, both important and unimportant, that would have served to express not only his concern over practical matters but also his love for his family. The potatoes needed sorting—they were beginning to rot. The young plum tree needed protecting from the frosts. His wife should have a word with the kolkhoz chairman about getting the stove repaired. And he wanted to talk about the war, this war that had mobilized the entire nation. Their son was already fighting, and now he himself would be fighting too.
But there was so much to say that he said nothing at all. Otherwise he’d be talking all night.
“Well, Marya,” he said. “Before I go, let me fetch you some water.”
He took the buckets and walked to the well. He lowered the first bucket and it clattered against the slimy walls of the well frame. Vavilov leaned over and looked down. There was a smell of something cold and damp, and the absolute dark was as blinding as bright sunlight. “There it is,” he thought. “My death.”
The bucket quickly filled to the brim. As it came up again, Vavilov heard the sound of water falling on water. The closer the bucket came to the surface, the louder the sound. Then the bucket emerged from the darkness. Swift streams of water were flowing down its sides, eager to return to the dark below.
Going back into the entrance room, he found his wife sitting on the bench. In the half-dark he couldn’t make out her face, but this didn’t matter; her feelings were not hard to guess.
She looked up and said, “Sit down for a few minutes. Have a rest and a bite to eat.”
“All right,” he said. “There’s no hurry.”
It was already getting light. He sat down at the table. On it stood a bowl of potatoes, a saucer with a little white, crystallized honey, some slices of bread and a mug of milk. He ate slowly. His cheeks were burning, as if he’d been out in the winter wind, and his head felt as if full of smoke. He thought, talked, chewed and shifted about on his chair. Any moment now the smoke would blow away and he’d be able to see things clearly again.
His wife pushed a bowl towards him and said, “Eat these eggs. I’ll put another dozen in your bag. I’ve boiled them already.”
In answer he smiled such a clear and shy smile that she felt almost burned. He had smiled in exactly the same way when she entered this hut aged eighteen. And what she felt now was the same as what thousands upon thousands of other women were feeling. Her heart clenched, and all she really wanted was to let out a scream—to silence her grief by giving voice to it.
But she merely said, “I should have baked lots of pies. I should have bought a few bottles of vodka. But . . . with it being wartime . . .”
And he just got to his feet, wiped his mouth and said, “Yes.” And got ready to leave.
They embraced.
“Petya,” she said slowly, as if trying to persuade him to come back to his senses and change his mind.
“I have to,” he said.
His movements were slow. And he was trying not to look in her direction.
“We must wake the children,” said Marya. “Nastya’s gone back to sleep.” She wasn’t sure what to do. It was for her own sake that she wanted to wake the children, so she would have someone to share her pain with.
“There’s no need. We’ve already said our goodbyes,” he replied. And he listened for a moment to his sleeping daughter’s slow breathing.
He adjusted his knapsack, took his hat, stepped towards the door and glanced quickly back at his wife.
Both looked around the room—but how very differently they each saw it, at this last moment, as they stood together on the threshold . . . She knew that these four walls would witness all her loneliness, and to her they seemed bleak and empty. He, on the other hand, wanted to carry away in his memory what he saw as the kindest home on this earth.
He set off down the road. Standing by the gate, she watched him walk away. She felt that she would survive, that she would be able to endure everything—if only he would come back again and stay for another hour, if only she could look at him one more time.
“Petya, Petya,” she whispered.
But he didn’t look round. He didn’t stop. He just carried on walking towards the dawn. It was reddening over land that he had ploughed himself. A cold wind was blowing straight into his face, blowing the last vestige of warmth, the last breath of hearth and home, out of his clothes.
6
IT WAS the birthday of Alexandra Vladimirovna Shaposhnikova, the widow of an eminent specialist in bridge construction, but this was not the only reason why her family was giving a party.
There is something moving about a family sitting together around a table in order to be with a loved one about to go on a long journey. This custom answers a deep need; it is not for nothing that—unlike many other old customs—it is still so widely observed.
The count
ry was at war. Friends, family—everyone understood that this might be their last gathering. There was no knowing how many of them would meet again.
It had been decided to invite Mikhail Mostovskoy and Pavel Andreyev, family friends of long standing. As a nineteen-year-old polytechnic student, Alexandra Vladimirovna’s late husband had gone to Stalingrad for a few months to work as an engineer on a tugboat on the River Volga. Andreyev had been a stoker on the same boat, and he and the young Shaposhnikov had often chatted together on deck. Andreyev had later become a friend to the whole family. When Alexandra moved to Stalingrad with her children, he became a regular visitor.
Zhenya, the youngest of Alexandra’s three daughters, had joked, “Clearly one of Mama’s admirers.”
The Shaposhnikovs had also invited Tamara Berozkina, whom they had got to know only recently. Tamara and her children had seen so many burning buildings, air raids and hurried evacuations that the Shaposhnikovs had got into the habit of referring to her as “poor Tamara”: “What’s happened to poor Tamara?”; “How come poor Tamara hasn’t been round?”
For many years, this three-room apartment in Stalingrad had felt spacious—home only to Alexandra Vladimirovna and her grandson Seryozha. Now, though, it was crowded. First, Zhenya had moved in. And then, after the German summer offensive, Alexandra’s middle daughter, Marusya, had moved in, along with her husband, Stepan Spiridonov, and her daughter, Vera. Until then the three of them had lived a few miles away, near Stalgres, the central power station. Anticipating night air raids on Stalgres, most of the engineers with relatives in the city had sent their wives and children to join them. Spiridonov had installed not only his family but also a piano and several items of furniture.
Stalingrad Page 6