Seryozha listened. The man sitting beside him seemed to have changed; he was no longer a stranger, no longer alien and incomprehensible. And Seryozha said to himself, “I’ve done the right thing!”
“Yes, the streets. Our Soviet cities,” sighed Spiridonov. “But it’s time you lay down. You’ve been on the road a long time.”
20
NOVIKOV was from the Donbass. The only other member of his family still alive at the beginning of the war was his elder brother, Ivan, who worked at the Smolyanka mine, not far from Stalino.42 Their father had died in a fire, deep underground; not long after that, their mother had died of pneumonia.
Since the beginning of the war, Novikov had received only two letters from his brother. The second, in February, had been sent from some mine far off in the Urals to which Ivan and his wife and daughter had been evacuated; it was clear from this letter that life as an evacuee was not easy. Novikov, then in Voronezh with the Southwestern Front, had sent his brother money and food—but there had been no reply and he did not know whether Ivan had received the parcel or whether he’d had to move yet again.
Their last meeting had been in 1940. Novikov had gone to stay with his brother for a week. Wandering around places he’d known as a child had felt strange. But love for one’s birthplace, one’s memory of childhood and a mother’s love, is evidently so powerful that this austere and gloomy mining settlement had seemed sweet, cosy and beautiful and Novikov had not noticed the biting wind, the acrid, nauseating smoke from the coke and benzene, and the grim slag heaps that looked like burial mounds. And his brother’s face, eyelashes blackened by coal dust, and the faces of the childhood friends who came to drink vodka with him, had seemed so close, so intimate a part of his life, that he had wondered how he could have lived so far away for so long.
Novikov was one of those people who never know easy successes and victories. He put this down to his inability to make quick friendships, and to a directness that sometimes made him awkward and clumsy. He thought of himself as responsive, good-natured and well-meaning, but this was not at all how others saw him. Many people’s view of themselves is mistaken, but Novikov was at least partly right. He appeared colder and more unfriendly than was really the case.
When he gave up chasing the village pigeons and first went to technical school in a nearby town, the other boys had thought him unfriendly; and when he began work in a fitter’s shop, the other workers had thought him unfriendly; so it had been during his first days in the Red Army; and so—unfortunately—it had been throughout his life.
His father and grandfather had been workers, but his fellow commanders had thought him stuck-up and aristocratic. He hardly ever drank and he strongly disliked the smell of vodka. He never raised his voice—let alone cursed or swore—when speaking to his subordinates. People said he was as scrupulously fair as a pair of pharmaceutical scales. Nevertheless, there were occasions when the men under him had felt nostalgic for their former commanders—however loud-mouthed, capricious and dictatorial they may have been.
Novikov loved the idea of fishing and shooting, he would have liked to plant fruit trees and he enjoyed beautifully furnished rooms; but there had been no time in his nomadic life for anything but work. He had never fished, gone shooting or gardened, nor had he ever lived in comfortable, well-furnished rooms with paintings and carpets. People had seen him as indifferent to such things, as having no interest in anything but his work—and he had indeed worked unusually hard.
He had married young, when he was only twenty-three—and he was still young when his wife died.
Like most commanders, he had known difficult moments during the war. Though he had always been a staff officer, far from the front line, he had survived air raids and encirclements. In August 1941, not far from Mozyr, he had led into the attack an ad hoc detachment made up entirely of commanders from an Army HQ.
Novikov had been promoted several times, but his progress had been steady rather than dazzling. By the end of the first year of the war he had received his fourth red bar; he was a full colonel, and he had been awarded the Order of the Red Star.
He was considered an excellent staff officer: well educated, open-minded, calm, methodical and intelligent, with a gift for quick analysis of complex and confusing situations. But Novikov did not see staff work as his real calling. He saw himself as a front-line commander, a born tank man who would truly prove himself only in combat. Not only could he think logically and analytically but he would also be able to carry out swift, decisive attacks. His capacity for careful thought went hand in hand with courage and passion, with the ability to take risks.
Others saw Novikov as excessively cerebral—and he was well aware what gave them that impression. He was calm and restrained in argument and meticulous about everyday matters. He got irritated if others infringed on his routines and he never infringed on these routines himself. He was capable, during an air raid, of reprimanding a cartographer for not sharpening his pencil properly, or of saying to a typist, “I asked you to stop using the typewriter that does such faint t’s.”
His feelings for Zhenya Shaposhnikova did not fit with anything else in his life. His first meeting with her at the Military Academy gala had made an overwhelming impression on him. The news of her marriage to Krymov had made him jealous; the news of their separation had filled him with joy. On glimpsing Zhenya through the window of a railway carriage, he had got onto her train and travelled south for three hours when he should have been travelling north. And he did not tell her this.
Altogether, he had seen Zhenya only a very few times in his life. Nevertheless, during the first hour of the war, his thoughts had kept returning to her.
Only now, about to lie down on a bed newly made up for him on the floor, did Novikov feel any surprise. With absolutely no right to behave like this, he had called on Zhenya in the middle of the night and woken her family. He might have put her in an awkward position. No, worse than that—he had almost certainly put her in a false and very unpleasant position. How would she explain all this to her mother, and to the rest of her family? Or maybe she’d find it only too easy—she’d give an exasperated shrug and everyone would have a good laugh at his expense: “How very strange! Bursting in on us at two in the morning . . . What was he after? Was the man drunk? He charges in, has a shave, drinks some tea, then sleeps the sleep of the dead!” He could hear them making fun of him already. “No,” he said to himself. “I must leave an apologetic note on the table, go out as quietly as I can, wake my driver and tell him to get going.”
Barely had he decided to leave when he began to see everything in a different light. She had smiled at him. With her own sweet hands she had made up a bed for him. Come morning he’d be seeing her again. And had he come a day or two later, she might well have said, “Oh, what a shame you didn’t come round straightaway. We’ve got someone else sleeping here now.” But what did he have to offer her? And what right did he have to be dreaming of personal happiness at a time like this? None at all. He knew this only too well, yet somewhere deep inside him lived a different knowledge—and this other, wiser knowledge was telling him that all the movements of his heart were legitimate and had their meaning.
He took from his briefcase an exercise book with an oilskin cover and, sitting on his bedding, began to leaf through it. He was deeply agitated and his exhaustion, rather than bringing sleep nearer, was only driving it still further away.
Novikov looked at a faded pencil note: “22 June 1941. Night. The main Brest–Kobrin highway.”
He looked at his watch: four o’clock. The pain and anxiety he had got used to during the last year, and which did not prevent him from eating, sleeping, shaving or breathing, were now strangely fused with a joyful excitement that made his heart beat faster. When he entered this room, the idea of sleep had seemed as absurd as it had in the dawn of 22 June 1941.
He thought back over his conversation with Spiridonov and Seryozha; he had disliked both of them, especially Spir
idonov. Then he relived the moment when, waiting out on the landing, he had heard quick, light, adorable steps.
And in spite of all this, he fell asleep.
21
NOVIKOV was always able to recall the first night of the war with absolute clarity.43 He had been sent by the Military District HQ to the River Bug, to carry out some inspections. On his way there he had taken the opportunity to gather information from commanders who had taken part in the war against Finland; he wanted to write a memo about the breaching of the Mannerheim Line.44
He had looked calmly at the west bank of the Bug, at the bald patches of sand, at the meadows, at the little houses and gardens, and at the dark pines and groves of deciduous trees in the distance. He heard German planes whining like sleepy flies in the cloudless sky over the General Government.45
At the sight of puffs of smoke on the western horizon, he thought, “The Germans are cooking their porridge,” as if it were out of the question for the Germans to be cooking up anything else. He had been reading the newspapers; he had discussed the war in Europe; and he had toyed with the thought that the hurricane raging in Norway, Belgium, Holland and France was now moving farther and farther away, from Belgrade to Athens, from Athens to Crete—and that from Crete it would cross over into Africa and blow itself out in the desert sands. Yet deep in his heart he had already understood that this silence was not that of a peaceful midsummer day but the stifling, agonizing silence before a storm.
Even now Novikov could still sense sharp, ineradicable memories that had become his constant companions for no other reason except that they were memories of 22 June 1941, the day that had put an end to the era of peace. It was like when someone has just died and those close to this person keep remembering every last detail. A momentary smile, a chance movement, a sigh, a word—everything, in retrospect, takes on significance, turns into a clear signal of the tragedy to come.
A week before the beginning of the war, in Brest, Novikov had been crossing a wide street paved with cobblestones; coming the other way was a German officer, probably a member of the commission for the repatriation of ethnic Germans.46 Novikov could still remember his smart peaked cap with its metal band, his thin, haughty face, his steel-coloured SS uniform, his armband with a black swastika in a white circle, his cream-coloured leather briefcase and his gleaming boots—black mirrors the dust of the street did not dare to settle on. His stiff, strange gait seemed all the stranger against the backdrop of the little old one-storey houses.
Novikov crossed the street and went up to a kiosk selling seltzer water with syrup. While an elderly Jewish woman filled his glass, he said to himself three words he would remember again and again: “Clown!” Then, correcting himself: “Madman!” And, correcting himself once more: “Thug!”47
And he had at once felt a sticky, crooked feeling, a sense of frustration and embarrassment. He had felt ashamed of his baggy tunic and his rawhide belt—and still more ashamed of drinking seltzer water with cherry syrup.
Novikov also remembered that a peasant passing by on a cart and the woman at the kiosk had both watched the Nazi officer in the same tense way. Probably they had understood the true meaning of the message brought by this lone harbinger of evil walking down the wide dusty streets of a city on the Soviet frontier.
And then, just three days before the beginning of the war, Novikov had had dinner with a commander in charge of a frontier post. It was unusually hot and the net curtains across the open windows were not stirring at all. Amid the silence beyond the river, they had heard the low boom of an artillery piece, and the commander had said crossly, “There’s that damned neighbour of ours, doing his voice exercises again!”
Later, in spring 1942, Novikov happened to learn that five days after this meal this same commander, armed only with a few machine guns, had resisted the German advance for sixteen hours. His wife and his twelve-year-old son had died beside him.
After occupying Greece, the Germans had launched an airborne invasion of Crete. Novikov could remember hearing a report about this at HQ. There had been a marked note of anxiety in many of the questions that followed: “Please tell us in more detail about the losses suffered by the German army”; “Has any weakening of the German forces been detected?” One of the little notes handed to the man on the rostrum asked baldly: “Comrade speaker, if the trade agreement is violated in the near future, will there be time for the equipment on order from Germany to reach us?”48
He remembered a moment in the middle of that night, a few hours after he had heard this report. His heart had missed a beat and he had said to himself, “It’ll be a miracle if Russia escapes this storm—but there are no miracles in the world.”
•
The last night of peace, the first night of war.
That night Novikov was due to meet the commander of a heavy tank brigade. Novikov was in one of the regimental HQs, but the orderly was unable to connect him with Brigade HQ.
They both cursed the stupidity of telephonists. It was puzzling—usually the telephones worked perfectly.
Novikov drove to the airstrip; the airmen liaised with higher HQs, and he thought he would be able to use their wire. But he was equally unable to get through from the airstrip. There was no connection at all—neither direct, nor indirect; the wire, on this quiet summer evening, seemed to have been damaged in several different places.
The commander of the fighter regiment invited Novikov to the town theatre, to see a production of Platon Krechet.49 Some of the airmen were going with their wives, others with parents who’d come to visit. There was still room in the bus. But Novikov refused; he had decided to drive to Brigade HQ.
It was a warm moonlit night. Between the two rows of dark, squat lime trees, the road seemed almost white. A moment after Novikov had got into the car, he heard the orderly call out from the brightly lit, wide-open window, “Comrade Colonel, the line’s working again!”
It was a poor line, but Novikov was able to talk. It turned out that the brigade commander had gone to the maintenance depot, where his tanks had been taken to be serviced and have their engines replaced. He would not be back until tomorrow evening.
Novikov decided to stay the night at the airstrip. In response to his request for accommodation, the orderly smiled and said, “All right. We’re certainly not short of room here.” Regimental headquarters was a large manor house.
The orderly took him to a huge room, lit by a bright three-hundred-candlepower bulb. Against a panelled wall stood an iron bed, a stool and a small bedside table.
The narrow army bed and plywood table were out of keeping with the splendour of the oak panelling and the plaster mouldings on the ceiling. Novikov noticed that there were no bulbs in the crystal chandelier: the wire with the 300-candlepower bulb simply hung down beside it.
Then Novikov went to the grand, spacious dining room. It was almost empty; there were just two political commissars at the far table, eating sour cream. Novikov usually enjoyed his food, but he ate barely half of the plentiful meal put in front of him: meat patties and fried potatoes in an enamel bowl, followed by thin pancakes with sour cream on a gilt-rimmed porcelain plate with a picture of a shepherdess in a pink dress, surrounded by white sheep. The kvas came in a pale blue glass, and the tea in a new aluminium mug that burnt his lips.
“How come there’s hardly anyone here?” Novikov asked the waitress.
“A lot of our men are married,” she replied, in the accent of someone from the lower Volga. “Sometimes their wives cook for them. Sometimes the men come down and take food back to their rooms.” And then she raised a finger and added, with a sweet, innocent smile, “Some of the girls don’t like it here. They complain about the young men all having wives and children. But I love it—it’s like being at home, with your mother and father.”
She spoke with feeling, as if hoping for Novikov’s agreement and understanding; Novikov wondered if she and a girlfriend had been arguing about this in the kitchen.
Some
time later she came back and said in a tone of alarm, “You’ve hardly eaten a thing! What’s the matter? Don’t you like our cooking?” Bending down towards him, she added confidentially, “Will you be staying with us long, comrade Lieutenant Colonel? Whatever you do, you mustn’t leave tomorrow—our Sunday lunch will be really special! We’ll be serving ice cream—and the first course will be cabbage soup. We’ve just received a whole barrel of pickled cabbage from Slutsk. We haven’t had cabbage soup for a long time, and the pilots have been complaining.”
He could feel the girl’s breath on his cheek. Had her shining eyes not looked so trustful, Novikov would have thought she was flirting. As it was, he felt moved by her childlike whispering.
Not feeling in the least sleepy, he went out into the garden.
In the moonlight the wide stone steps were like white marble. The silence was absolute, somehow unusual. So still was the bright air that the trees seemed almost to be underwater, as if deep in a clear pond.
There was a strange light in the sky—moonlight, together with a faint remnant of pink in the west and a stain of colour to the east that was the dawn of the year’s longest day. The sky above him was whitish, opalescent, with a touch of blue.
Each leaf on the maples and lindens was sharply outlined, as if chiselled from black stone. Taken as a whole, however, the great mass of trees seemed like a flat black pattern against the bright sky. The world’s beauty had surpassed itself. It was one of those moments when everyone stops to gaze in wonder—not only the idler with time on his hands but also the shift worker on his way home and the traveller half-dead on his feet.
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