Things that had changed, things that had not changed—all were equally sad.
Viktor opened the sideboard and felt around inside it. There in a dark corner was a bottle of wine. He took a glass from the table and found the corkscrew. He wiped the dust from the bottle and glass with his handkerchief, then drank some wine and lit a cigarette.
He drank only rarely, and wine had a strong effect on him. Instead of seeming close and stuffy, the room at once felt bright and elegant.
He sat down at the piano and tried out the keys, listening intently.
His head was spinning. To be back in his own home felt both sad and joyful. It was all very strange. He had returned, yet he felt abandoned. He was alone, yet in the presence of his family. He was conscious of his ties and obligations, yet unusually free.
Everything was as it always had been—yet also, somehow, unfamiliar and strange. And he felt different in himself; he was not the man he understood and was accustomed to.
Viktor wondered about his neighbour. Could she hear him? Who was this bright-eyed young woman next door? The Menshovs had left Moscow long ago, before Viktor and his family, only a few weeks after the German invasion.
When Viktor stopped playing, he felt anxious—the silence was oppressive. He felt the need to move about. He walked around the apartment, had a look in the kitchen and decided to go back outside.
On the street he met the house manager. They talked about how cold the winter had been, about burst central-heating pipes, about rent payments and empty apartments—and Viktor asked, “By the way, who’s the young woman in the Menshovs’ apartment? They’re all still in Omsk, aren’t they?”
“Don’t worry,” the man replied. “She’s a friend of theirs from Omsk. She’s here on business. I registered her for two weeks—she’ll be leaving in a few days.” And then, looking Viktor in the eye, he winked slyly and said, “But she’s quite a beauty, isn’t she, Viktor Pavlovich?” He laughed and added, “A pity Ludmila Nikolaevna hasn’t come back with you. We put out a lot of fires together. The yardmen and I often remember her and all the incendiaries she helped us to deal with.”
On his way to the institute Viktor suddenly thought, “I’d rather stay in my own home—I’ll have to go back and fetch my case.”
39
BUT WHEN Viktor went into the institute, when he saw the familiar lawn and bench, the poplars and lindens in the yard and the windows of his own office and laboratory—he immediately forgot everything else.
The institute had not been damaged by bombs; this he already knew. He also knew that all the equipment on the main floor—the first floor, where his laboratory was located—had been entrusted to the care of senior laboratory assistant Anna Stepanovna.
Anna Stepanovna was the only senior laboratory assistant without a degree. Shortly before the war, there had been a proposal to replace this elderly woman with someone with higher formal qualifications. But both Viktor and Pyotr Sokolov had opposed this—and she had been allowed to stay.
The watchman told Viktor that Anna Stepanovna kept all the keys to the first-floor rooms in her own apartment. The laboratory door, however, turned out not to be locked.
The main room seemed very bright. The huge, wide windows were clean and shining and the entire laboratory, full of glass, copper and nickel, glittered in the summer sun. The absence of the most valuable apparatus, moved the previous autumn first to Kazan and then to Sverdlovsk, was not immediately noticeable.
Viktor was breathing fast and he had lit a cigarette. His head was spinning—perhaps from excitement, perhaps from the wine he had drunk earlier. Still close to the door, he leant against the wall and looked slowly around him. This was the one place where he was never absent-minded. He was absent-minded in every other part of his life—at home, with his friends, during boat trips, in the theatre, and in the letters he wrote—because all his energy was taken up with what went on in these rooms. Here he noticed everything. As he crossed the threshold of his laboratory, his vision, his hearing and every aspect of his attention became precise and tenacious; there was nothing so small that it escaped his notice.
Now, too, he saw everything: the polished parquet, the spotless glass, and the noble, tender metal of the remaining equipment, which gave off a sense of health and cleanliness. He looked at the temperature chart on the wall; during the winter it had not once fallen below 10°C.
His vacuum pump had been placed beneath a bell jar. A special measuring apparatus—one particularly sensitive to damp—was in a glass cupboard sprinkled with fresh granules of calcium chloride. An electric motor on a vast frame had been installed exactly where he had meant to install it before the war.
Hearing quick, light footsteps, he turned round.
“Viktor Pavlovich!” a woman shouted as she ran towards him.
Viktor looked at Anna Stepanovna and was astonished at how much she had changed. Yet nothing in the laboratory had changed at all; everything entrusted to her was exactly as he had left it.
Viktor struck a match and began lighting a cigarette he had already lit. Anna Stepanovna’s hair had turned white. Her once full, pink face was thin and haggard. Her skin looked grey, and two deep furrows had appeared on her forehead, in the form of a cross.
He took her hand. It was densely callused and the skin was dark brown and rough as sandpaper.
What Anna Stepanovna had achieved, and what she had endured during the winter, were only too clear—even before she spoke. What could he say to her? Should he thank her on behalf of the institute, on behalf of the professors as a whole? Or even in the name of the president of the Academy of Sciences?
Without saying a word, he bowed low and kissed her hand.
She hugged him and kissed him on the lips.
They walked round the room arm in arm, talking and laughing, while the old watchman stood in the doorway and smiled.
Then the three of them went into Viktor’s office.
“How did you get that vast frame up from the ground floor?” Viktor asked. “It must have taken at least seven or eight strong men.”
“That was the easy part,” Anna Stepanovna replied. “During the winter we had an anti-aircraft battery stationed in the square. The gunners helped out. But getting six tons of coal through the yard on a sledge—that was hard work.”
Then old Alexander Matveyevich, the watchman, brought a kettle of boiling water and Anna Stepanovna took from her bag a little packet of red caramels stuck together into a ball. She spread out a sheet of newspaper, so she could cut some bread into tiny rectangular slices—and the three of them sat together, chatting and drinking tea out of measuring beakers.
As she offered Viktor the caramels, Anna Stepanovna said, “Feel free, Viktor Pavlovich! I collected them this morning on my academy sugar ration.”
And old Alexander Matveyevich picked up little crumbs of bread between his fingers—which looked pale and bloodless despite being stained with nicotine—ate them slowly and thoughtfully and said, “Yes, Viktor Pavlovich, it wasn’t an easy winter for the old. It’s a good thing the gunners were there to give us a hand now and then.”
Realizing that Viktor might interpret this as a hint not to eat any more of their bread and sweets, he added, “But everything’s a lot easier now. This month I’ll be getting better rations—there’ll be sugar on my card too.”
The care with which Anna Stepanovna and Alexander Matveyevich held their tiny pieces of bread, their quiet, measured movements, their seriousness and concentration as they chewed—all this told Viktor a great deal. More clearly than ever, he understood how difficult this last winter in Moscow had been.
When they’d finished their tea, Viktor and Anna Stepanovna went round the offices and laboratories once again.
Anna Stepanovna brought up the question of the laboratory’s work plan. She had seen a draft during the winter, when Sukhov was still the director.
“Yes,” Viktor replied. “Sokolov and I were talking about Sukhov just before I set off
for Moscow. He came to Kazan a few months ago, to discuss the plan with us.”
Anna Stepanovna then told him about her own meetings with Sukhov during the winter. “I went to the committee to ask for more coal. He couldn’t have been kinder or more cordial. I was very pleased, of course, but there was still something depressing and bureaucratic about him. Things were looking bad for us, I thought. And then I happened to meet him in the spring, by the entrance to the main building, and he seemed a different person. I sensed it at once. His attention wandered and he treated me coldly. But, would you believe it, I felt glad. I thought things must be looking up for us.”
“Yes,” said Viktor. “Though they’re certainly not looking up for him any longer. But tell me, is our telephone working?”
“Of course it is.”
With the words “So help me God!” Viktor picked up the receiver and began to dial. He had kept putting off this conversation with the new director, though he had taken out his notebook and checked the number several times while still on the train. Now, hearing the phone ring, he felt agitated. He was hoping to hear the secretary reply, “Pimenov’s away. He’ll be back in a few days.”
Instead, he heard Pimenov himself.
Anna Stepanovna understood this at once, from the look on Viktor’s face.
Pimenov said how glad he was to hear from Viktor. He asked how the journey had gone and if he was comfortable in his hotel room. He said he’d have come to see Viktor himself but hadn’t wanted to interrupt his first reunion with his laboratory. Finally, he came out with the words Viktor had been waiting for so anxiously and had feared he would never hear: “The academy fully guarantees to fund all the work. That applies to all our institutes, and to your laboratory in particular, Viktor Pavlovich. Your research themes have been officially approved. Your work plan has also been approved by Academician Chepyzhin. Any day now, by the way, we’re expecting him here from Sverdlovsk. There is really only one remaining concern: Will it be possible for us to obtain the grade of steel your apparatus requires?”
As soon as he’d put the phone down, Viktor went up to Anna Stepanovna, took both her hands and said, “Moscow, magnificent Moscow . . .”
And she laughed and said, “See how we’re greeting you!”
40
THE SUMMER of 1942 was an extraordinary time for Moscow.
Only during the most terrible of foreign invasions had the state’s frontiers been pushed back so far. There had been a time when a courier could gallop in one night from the Kremlin to the boundary of the Russian state, pass on a message from the Grand Prince of Moscow to his military commander and then look down from a hilltop at Tatar horsemen, in ragged fur hats and sweat-drenched tunics, riding without a care over devastated Russian fields.
And in the dark, troubled days of August 1812, a courier sent by Rostopchin, governor of Moscow, could ride by night to Kutuzov’s HQ, have time for a few hours’ rest and a meal, and be back in Moscow by evening with the latest despatches. He could tell a friend in the governor’s house how, only that morning, from one of the forward positions, he’d been able to see the French uniforms “as clearly as I can see you this minute!”
And in the summer of 1942 a signals officer in an armoured car could set out in the morning from the General Staff, deliver a message to the commander of the Western Front, ask a colleague to give him a lunch coupon, eat in the canteen and return straightaway to the general-staff signals section. “Only an hour and a half ago,” he could say to his comrades, “I was listening to the rumble of German field artillery.”
And a fighter pilot could take off from Moscow’s central aerodrome, reach the front line in thirteen or fourteen minutes, fire a few rounds at the German uniforms dotting the aspen and birch copses around Mozhaisk and Vyazemsk, shake his fist as he banked over a German regimental HQ, be back in Moscow within quarter of an hour and go by tram, past the Belorussian station, to the Pushkin monument, where he and a woman he knew had arranged to meet.
Mtsensk to the south of Moscow, Vyazma to the west and Rzhev to the north-west were all in German hands. The provinces of Kursk, Oryol and Smolensk were occupied by the rear support services of Field Marshal Kluge’s Army Group Centre. Four German infantry and two German tank armies, along with their ordnance and supplies, were within two days’ march of Red Square, the Kremlin, the Lenin Institute, the Moscow Art Theatre and the Bolshoy—and of the Razguliay, Cheryomushki and Sadovniki districts,84 of Moscow schools and maternity homes, and of the monuments to Pushkin and Timiryazev.85
The Western Front’s support services’ HQs—the supplies, quartermasters and army newspaper editorial offices—were located within the city itself. Muscovites among the staff were simultaneously at home and at war. They spent the night alone in their apartments, transferred food from their mess tins to their usual plates and bowls and slept in their boots not in dugouts and bunkers but on their usual beds. Their apartments bore witness to a strange blend of war and domestic life. Hand-grenade fuses and cartridge magazines lay on the floor beside children’s toys and women’s berets and dressing gowns. Sub-machine guns stood against sofas, and windows were blacked out with tarpaulin groundsheets. It was strange to hear only the squeak of heavy boots in the evenings—not the quick tread of children or the shuffle of a grandmother’s slippers.
The front line lay close by, only a little further away than in the terrible days of October 1941. Nevertheless, as the German armies advanced deeper into the south-eastern steppe, the Moscow front grew ever quieter, ever more static. The war, it seemed, was moving away from Moscow.
There were days, even weeks when German bombers did not appear over Moscow at all. Muscovites ceased to pay attention to the Soviet fighters buzzing about the sky. They had grown so used to them that a few minutes of silence would make them look up in surprise, wondering what was going on.
There was space in the trams and the metro. Even during the busiest times of day there was none of the usual pushing and jostling around Theatre Square and the Ilinsky Gates. In the evenings, with practised efficiency, young women Air Defence volunteers sent silvery barrage balloons up into the sky from Chistye Prudy and from the Tverskoy, Nikitsky and Gogol boulevards.
But, even though hundreds of factories, schools, higher-education institutes and other establishments had been evacuated, Moscow was not empty.
Muscovites gradually got used to the proximity of the front line. They returned to their routine tasks. They prepared for the winter, laying in stores of potatoes and firewood.
There were several reasons why people felt calmer. One was a somewhat inaccurate sense that the danger had now moved elsewhere. Another was that it is impossible to remain very long in a state of extreme nervous tension; nature simply doesn’t allow this.
One can get used to particular conditions and start to feel calmer not because there has been any real improvement but simply because one’s sense of tension has been dissipated by everyday tasks and concerns. A sick person can start to feel calmer not because he is recovering but simply because he has got used to his illness.
Last, and most important of all—people truly began to believe, consciously or not, that Moscow would never be allowed to fall to the Germans. This faith was reaffirmed when the German forces, after appearing poised to encircle the city, were driven out of Klin and Kalinin and back to Mozhaisk; this faith was reaffirmed by the way that Leningrad refused to yield, even after 300 days of fire, ice and hunger. This faith constantly strengthened and deepened, supplanting the anguish Muscovites had felt in September and October 1941.
By summer 1942 Muscovites had come to feel that the tone of official bulletins and newspapers was excessively grim, even alarmist. Changing circumstances had brought about remarkable changes in the way people thought; they had even come to an entirely new understanding of their own past behaviour.
In October 1941 some Muscovites, concerned only about their worldly belongings, had refused to get on trains that could have taken them east.
When asked why, they had looked away in embarrassment.
At the time it had been thought that those who abandoned their belongings to fate, who left their apartments and moved with their factory or institute to Bashkiriya or the Urals, were acting patriotically. Anyone who refused to leave the city because their mother-in-law was ill, or because they couldn’t take a beloved piano or dressing-table mirror with them, was considered petty-minded or worse.
But by the summer of 1942 some such people had managed to forget the real reasons behind their decision to stay. They now saw the evacuees as deserters and themselves as Moscow’s defenders. They had no conception of how little they had in common with the city’s true defenders—the fighter pilots, the volunteers manning the anti-aircraft defences, the soldiers, workers and militia defending the city with their own blood.
These people now felt that the city belonged to them. They talked about how good it would be if the government forbade evacuees to return to the capital.
Conditions had changed, and so had people’s attitudes. An extreme flexibility of thought, to keep up with the demands of the moment, is the defining characteristic of the philistine and the petty-minded.
Those who had left in October 1941, taking only a pair or two of felt boots, a few changes of underclothes and a few loaves of bread, those who had been reluctant even to lock their apartments, in case their belongings might be of some use to the city’s defenders—these same people were now writing to neighbours, yardmen and house managers, asking them to keep a close eye on their belongings. Some of the evacuees were even writing to public prosecutors and the heads of district police stations, complaining that yardmen and house managers were failing to protect their property. And those who had stayed in Moscow now professed surprise at the evacuees’ petty-mindedness.
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