Vera believed that Zina lived in a different world from other people. For Zina, the laws of feeling were the laws of existence. After talking to Zina, Vera always felt more clearly than ever that love was the mightiest power in the world. Love took no account of tanks, guns, aeroplanes or blazing buildings. Love crossed trenches, did not recognize frontiers and feared no suffering or sacrifice.
She felt certain that Viktorov’s life would end tragically. In his eyes she had seen a look of sadness, a recognition of an inescapable fate. The thought of their fleeing together to the peace of a northern forest was no more than a foolish dream. In his MIG, Viktorov was like a twig being swept away by a storm, through a sky full of dark flames.
At home she found Zhenya, Novikov and Sofya Osipovna. She wanted very much to tell Zhenya the story of the German officer. She wanted Zhenya to understand the triviality of the calm, comfortable love known by those who prosper in life. She wanted her to recognize that there is another kind of love, a love that knows neither good fortune nor boundaries.
She recounted the story. She spoke quickly and with feeling, looking Zhenya straight in the eye. She was like a preacher, castigating human vices.
Everyone was deeply shocked.
Sofya was first to respond. “It’s true that Homer tells of a girl who was going to live with Achilles, even though he had killed her father and three brothers and burned down her city. But in those days people lived by a different code. And pirates and brigands like Achilles were respected figures, admired by everyone. It’s not like that today.”
“What on earth’s the Iliad got to do with it?” said Zhenya. She said this quietly, but in a way that made everyone look at her. And then she struck the rim of her glass with her spoon. Her face had turned white and her lips were tight and trembling, but it was the high-pitched ring of the glass that most truly expressed her fury. “Idiot girl!” she added, more shrilly.
“Maybe I am—but I understand what I need to understand.”
“How dare you use the word love about such vulgar, obscene filth! Look around you! Look at all the grey hairs and haggard faces! The graves! The burning buildings! The ashes! Look at all the broken families, all the orphans, all the people going hungry! Love has meaning when it inspires people to sacrifice—otherwise it’s just base passion. When two people love, their love elevates them. They become willing to sacrifice their strength, their beauty, even their lives. Love knows everything—joy, torment, and sacrifice. Love knows great deeds. Love is ready to meet death. But this . . . This thing you’ve just told us . . . It’s petty, foul, dirty. What you’ve just told us is contemptible. You call it love, but I call it a sickness. It’s vile. It’s like an addiction to cocaine or morphine. I want to spit in its eyes.”
Vera was looking at her with sullen obstinacy. Her jaw dropped open; she could have been a schoolgirl dumbfounded by an unexpectedly fierce telling-off from a teacher. She looked helpless—and Zhenya seemed to feel it wrong to expend any more of her fury on her. She turned to Sofya and went on, in the same shrill voice, “And you should be ashamed of yourself too, Sofya! What’s Homer got to do with any of this? What Vera’s told us is filth—and that’s clear enough to anyone with a Russian heart. There’s no need to drag Homer and Achilles into it. I know it’s not for me to give you lectures, but really, you ought to know better . . .”
Sofya agreed with every word Zhenya had said to Vera. But being quick-tempered, she took offence at Zhenya’s mention of a Russian heart. She gasped. Her broad chest swelled. Her cheeks, her ears and even her forehead turned a bright red. The locks of grey hair across her forehead seemed about to catch fire.
“Yes. Of course. A Russian heart. Mine, of course, is a mere Jewish heart. Yes, I understand.” She pushed her chair back, scraping the legs on the floor, and left the room.
“What’s got into you, Sofya Osipovna?” said Zhenya. “Has the war damaged your mind too?” Then she turned back to Vera. “Yes, you should be ashamed of yourself. You’ve been brought up as a revolutionary, as a member of the intelligentsia. How dare you talk like that! Thank God Granny’s not here. She wouldn’t have forgiven you till the end of her days.”
Zhenya was speaking more quietly, but it was these last words that upset Vera most of all. Zhenya’s first outburst had made her shrink into herself. Now, though, Zhenya sounded less out of control—and so Vera began to feel more angry. She was like a blade of grass, returning to the upright after being flattened by a blast of wind.
“Don’t bring Granny into it. It’s not as if you’ve got much in common with either her or Grandad. Granny was first imprisoned at the age of eighteen. You’re twenty-six now—and what have you got to show for yourself? Only a failed marriage—though it seems there may be a second one on the way!”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” Zhenya said coldly. “Just try to get it into your head that love and morphine are different things. A drug addict ready to suffer or die for their fix is not a hero. They’re more like a prostitute. If you can’t understand that, then there’s nothing more to be said.”
She made a gesture of dismissal, like a haughty queen exiling a disgraced courtier.
Vera left the room.
Zhenya and Novikov remained silent for a while. Then Zhenya said, “Vera thinks it’s just her I’m cross with, but really I’m more cross with myself. Remember our conversation down by the river?”
Novikov replied quietly, “Zhenya, there’s something I have to tell you: I’m going to Moscow very soon. I’ve been called to the Central Cadres Administration. I’m to be given a new posting.”
Zhenya looked at him in astonishment, not understanding.
“When are you going?”
“Any day now, by plane.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I was afraid you’d be angry. But after hearing the way you spoke to Vera just now, I felt bolder.”
“The only person I have any right to be angry with is myself. Embarking on any serious relationship at a time like this is sheer madness. I can’t believe I was such an idiot as not to see that!”
“Madness isn’t such a bad thing,” said Novikov, thinking how beautiful Zhenya looked when her feelings were roused. “As long as it’s madness about something that matters.”
“We seem to be exchanging roles,” Zhenya replied. “You’ve started preaching the things I said down by the river, and I’m coming out with the boring good sense I was complaining about.”
“To be honest,” said Novikov, “I already have committed a tiny, infinitesimal act of madness. Remember when I sat in the train with you, from Voronezh to Liski? Really, I should have been on my way north, to Kashira, but I saw your face in the window and got in a train going south, or rather south-east. When I got out at Liski I had to wait twenty-four hours for a train back.”
Zhenya gave him an intent look and started to laugh.
57
MIKHAIL Sidorovich Mostovskoy woke up, raised the blackout blind, opened the window and breathed in the freshness of a cool clear morning. Then he went to the bathroom and shaved, noting with annoyance that his beard was now entirely grey. He could no longer distinguish his beard trimmings from the soapsuds.
“Did you hear today’s bulletin?” he asked Agrippina Petrovna when she came in with his tea. “My radio’s broken.”146
“Good news!” said Agrippina Petrovna. “We’ve destroyed eighty-two tanks and two infantry battalions, and we’ve set fire to seven of their petrol tankers.”
“Nothing about Rostov?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Mostovskoy drank his tea and sat down at his desk to work. But then Agrippina Petrovna knocked at his door again.
“Mikhail Sidorovich, it’s Gagarov. But if you’re busy, he says he can come back in the evening.”
Mostovskoy was delighted to see someone, even if it was irritating to be disturbed during working hours.
Gagarov was a tall old man with a long, narrow face. He had lo
ng, thin arms, long hands with slender and unusually pale fingers, and long legs which—judging by the way his trousers flapped about—must have been equally thin. As he came through the door, he said, “Did you hear the bulletin? Rostov and Novocherkassk have both fallen.”
“Is that so?” said Mostovskoy, and brushed one hand over his eyes. “And there was Agrippina Petrovna saying she’d heard good news: that we’d destroyed eighty-two tanks and two battalions of infantry, and taken prisoners.”
“Oh God, what a stupid old woman,” said Gagarov, with a nervous twitch of his shoulders. “I’ve come to you for comfort and reassurance, as a sick man turns to a doctor. And I do also have some business to discuss.”
The air filled with the howl of an engine. Drowning out every other sound, a fighter up above them was looping the loop. When it grew quiet again, Mostovskoy said, “I’ve not much comfort to offer. I can only say one thing: that there are, in fact, grounds for optimism in what we hear from silly old Agrippina Petrovna. What really matters is what seems least important. Rostov is a great blow, it’s a tragedy—but it won’t decide the outcome of the war. The final outcome depends on the small print in those bulletins—and the small print’s on our side, day after day, hour after hour. For more than a year now, the fascists have been fighting on a 3,000-kilometre front. What seldom gets mentioned is that, as they advance, the fascists are losing not only lives and blood. They get through thousands of tons of fuel, they wear out a certain proportion of their engines, a certain amount of their tyre rubber. And any number of smaller things. The final outcome of the war depends more on these seemingly unimportant matters than on the big events we all hear about.”
Gagarov shook his head sceptically. “But look at the way they keep advancing. They clearly have a definite strategy.”
“Nonsense! They did have a plan once, as you know, and that was to destroy Soviet Russia in eight weeks. But this war has already been going on for fifty-six weeks. This miscalculation matters. The war was supposed to paralyze our industry. It was supposed to trample our wheat to the ground, to destroy any possibility of a harvest. But Siberia, the Urals, everywhere to the east is working day and night. There’s enough kolkhoz bread both for our front line and for the rest of the country—and there always will be. What, I ask you, has become of Hitler’s elegant plan? What’s so well planned about this wild rush across the southern steppe? Do you think their evil acts are making the fascists stronger? Far from it. Their evil acts guarantee their collapse. Agrippina Petrovna with her simple good sense is right. You’re the one I’d call silly.”
Mostovskoy had made several brief visits to Nizhny Novgorod before the Revolution. He had gone there to do archival research on the region’s history, and now and again he had written for the liberal newspapers; it was then that he had first got to know Gagarov. Here in Stalingrad, the war had brought the two men together again. Gagarov was no longer young; it was several years since he had last worked. But in his day he had been renowned for his sharpness of mind; even now there were still a fair number of old people around who treasured his letters and remembered his thoughts.
Gagarov had an uncommonly powerful memory. His knowledge of Russian history was extraordinary. He knew more small details, important and unimportant, than one would think there was room for in a single head. He could effortlessly list several dozen people present at the funeral of Peter the Great, or tell you on what day and at what time Chaadaev had arrived at his aunt’s home in the country and how many horses had pulled his carriage and the colour of each of them.147
If people talked to him about material hardships, he soon allowed his boredom to show. But the moment a conversation touched on questions he thought more significant, he would come to life, licking his lips and swallowing his saliva as if he were a gourmet in a famous restaurant, watching a waiter carefully and unhurriedly laying his table.
“Mikhail Sidorovich,” he said, “I’ve not once heard you say ‘the Germans.’ It’s always ‘the fascists.’ It seems you still draw a distinction. But aren’t they one and the same by now?”
“Most certainly not,” Mostovskoy replied. “As you well know. Take the last war. We Bolsheviks drew a very clear distinction between the Prussian imperialists around the kaiser and the German revolutionary proletariat.”
“I do indeed remember,” said Gagarov, laughing. “How could I not? But you can hardly say it’s a distinction that bothers many people today.” Seeing Mostovskoy frown, he quickly added, “Look, this isn’t something to quarrel over.”
“Why not?” said Mostovskoy. “Perhaps it should be.”
“No, no,” said Gagarov. “Remember what Hegel said about the cunning of universal reason? While the passions it has unleashed are raging, it departs from the stage. Only when those passions have done their work, only when they leave the stage, does universal reason—the true master of history—choose to reappear. Old men should attend to the reason of history, not to its passions.”
This enraged Mostovskoy. His fleshy nostrils twitched. Still frowning, but no longer looking at Gagarov, he said pugnaciously, “I may be five years older than you, my good objectivist, but I shan’t abandon the struggle until my last breath. I can still march thirty-five miles, and I can still manage a bayonet or a rifle butt.”
“Well, there’s certainly no compromising with you,” said Gagarov. “Anyone would think you’re going to join the partisans tomorrow. Now, remember I once told you about someone I know called Ivannikov?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Ivannikov asks you to give this envelope to Alexandra Vladimirovna. It’s for her son-in-law, Professor Shtrum. It’s from behind German lines. Ivannikov brought it across the front himself.”
He handed Mostovskoy a small package wrapped in torn, dirty, brown-stained paper.
“Wouldn’t it be better if Ivannikov gave it to her himself? There’ll be things the Shaposhnikovs want to ask him about.”
“Yes, of course there will. But Ivannikov says he knows nothing about this envelope. It’s pure chance that it ended up in his hands. He was given it by some woman in Ukraine. He has no idea how it reached her, and he doesn’t know her name or address. And he’d rather not have to go to the Shaposhnikovs.”
“All right,” said Mostovskoy with a shrug. “I’ll pass it on.”
“Thank you,” said Gagarov, watching Mostovskoy slip the package into his pocket. “This Ivannikov, by the way, is a rather unusual man. First he studied at the Forestry Institute, and then he studied humanities. He used to spend whole months wandering about the Volga provinces. That’s when we first met, he used to come and see me in Nizhny Novgorod. In 1940 he was in western Ukraine for a long time, inspecting the mountain forests. And he was there again when the war started. Living with a forester, with no radio and no newspapers. And when he finally emerged from the forest, he found the Germans already in Lvov. At this point his story becomes quite remarkable. He took refuge in the cellars of a monastery; the prior gave him a job, sorting through their store of medieval manuscripts. And without telling the monks, Ivannikov helped other people to hide there: a wounded colonel, two Red Army soldiers, and an old Jewish woman along with her grandson. Someone denounced him to the Germans, but he got everyone out in time and then slipped away into the forest. The colonel decided to try to escape through enemy lines, and Ivannikov chose to go with him. So they walked a thousand versts.148 The colonel was wounded as they crossed the front. Ivannikov had to carry him in his arms.”
Then Gagarov got to his feet and said in a very serious voice, “Before I go, I want to pass on some news—very important news, at least to me. Believe it or not, I’ll soon be leaving Stalingrad—and in an official capacity.”
“You’ve been appointed as an ambassador?”
“Don’t make fun of me. It’s astonishing. I’ve been called to Kuibyshev all of a sudden. Would you believe it? I’m to be official consultant for a major historical work on famous Russian generals. People have remembered
that I exist. There have been whole years when I haven’t received a single letter from anyone. And now, well, I’ve heard women in the building say, ‘The telegram? Who do you think it’s addressed to? Gagarov—who else?’ Mikhail Sidorovich, I haven’t felt so happy since I was a little boy. It makes me want to weep. My life was so lonely—and suddenly, at a time like this, people have remembered me. Unimportant as I am, I seem to be needed.”
As he saw Gagarov out, Mostovskoy asked, “How old is this Ivannikov?”
“You want to know whether an old man can become a partisan?”
“There are many things I want to know,” said Mostovskoy.
That evening, after finishing his work, Mostovskoy took Gagarov’s package and went out for a walk. He walked fast, swinging his arms, breathing freely and easily.
After completing his usual circuit, he went to the city gardens and sat down on a bench, glancing now and again at two soldiers sitting nearby.
The sun, wind and rain had coloured their faces the dark, rich brown of well-baked bread, while the same sun, wind and rain had bleached all colour from their tunics, now white with just the merest hint of green. The soldiers seemed to be enjoying their view of the city and its calm, everyday life. One of them took off a boot, unwound his foot cloth and anxiously examined his foot.
His mate sat down on the grass, opened a green knapsack and took out some bread, some fatback and a small flask. A park attendant with a broom walked over and said sadly, “Comrade, what are you doing?”
The soldier seemed surprised. “Can’t you see?” he said. “We’re hungry.”
Shaking his head, the attendant walked off down the path.
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