Deep in his heart he knew that his indictment was unfair and partial, false and mendacious. Not only had falsehood, which he had detested all his life, penetrated his relations with his family and friends, but it had also clouded the cool, clear spring of his reason.
As he got out of the train, he asked himself, “But then, what’s so wrong about falsehood? Why, when it comes down to it, are lies worse than truth?”
•
Viktor opened the little gate and entered the garden. The setting sun was reflected in the windows of the verandah.
The garden was full of phlox and campanula—splashes of bright colour among the tall wild grass now growing densely and greedily in flower beds and strawberry beds, beneath the dacha’s windows, everywhere Ludmila had never allowed it to grow. There were blades of grass on the paths, piercing through the sand and the packed earth; there were blades peeping out from beneath the first and second steps of the porch.
The fence was no longer upright. Some of the planks had been ripped out and the raspberry canes from next door were stealing in through the gaps. There were traces on the verandah floor of a small bonfire someone had made on a sheet of corrugated iron. And people must have been living in the house during the winter—Viktor could see bits of straw, a worn-out padded jacket, some tattered foot cloths, the crumpled bag from a gas mask, yellow scraps of newspaper and a few wrinkled potatoes. The cupboard doors were all open.
Viktor went up to the first floor. Their guests had evidently been there too—the doors were all wide open. The sight of the empty rooms and cleaned-out cupboards did not in the least upset Viktor. On the contrary, he felt only too glad to be freed from Ludmila’s excruciatingly complicated demands. No longer would he have to find the items she wanted, pack them, struggle to get hold of a car, and take all this extra luggage to the station.
“Wonderful!” he said to himself,
Only his own room was still locked. Before leaving, Ludmila had blocked the narrow little corridor with broken chairs and old buckets, and she had disguised the door with sheets of plywood.
There were thumps and crashes as he dismantled the barricade. This took him some time. Finally, he was able to unlock the door. The orderly appearance of his untouched room was somehow more startling than the chaos elsewhere; it was as if only a week had passed since that last Sunday before the war.
He had argued with Ludmila about where his mother should sleep. And Maximov had come round—his unread manuscript still lay on the floor, close to the bed.
There were chess pieces on the desk. Around a vase lay the remains of some flowers—a circle of blue-grey dust. Their rough stalks were like a small dusty broom, sticking up into the air.
On that last peacetime Sunday, Viktor had sat there at his desk, working on some troublesome problem. And then he had solved the problem, written an article, typed it out and given copies to his colleagues in Kazan. The problem itself no longer concerned him, but the memory of that Sunday was now unbearably painful.
He took off his jacket, put his briefcase on the desk and went downstairs. The wooden staircase creaked beneath his feet. Usually Ludmila heard this from her room and asked, “Where are you going, Vitya?”
But no one could hear his footsteps now. The house was empty.
Then came the sound of rain. In the windless air the large drops fell generously and abundantly. The setting sun was still shining; as they passed through its slant rays, the drops flared, then faded. It was a very small rain cloud, and it was passing right over the dacha; its smoky leading edge was already floating away towards the forest. The sound of the drops had not yet tired the ear. Rather than a dull monotone, it was a polyphony in which every drop was a conscientious and impassioned musician, fated to play only a single note in its whole life. The drops pattered to the ground, bouncing off the strong, taut burdock leaves, breaking up against the silky pine needles, dully tapping the wooden steps of the porch, drumming on thousands of birch and linden leaves and sounding the iron tambourines of the roofs.
The rain passed, yielding to a wonderful silence. Viktor went out into the garden. The moist air was warm and clean; every strawberry leaf, every leaf on every tree, was adorned with a drop of water—and each of these drops was a little egg, ready to release a tiny fish, a glint of sunlight, and Viktor felt that somewhere in the depth of his own breast shone an equally perfect raindrop, an equally brilliant little fish, and he walked about the garden, marvelling at the great good that had come his way: life on this earth as a human being.
The sun was setting, twilight was coming down over the trees, but the drop of light in his breast did not want to be extinguished with the light of day. It was gleaming more and more brightly.
He went back inside and up to his room, opened his briefcase and began to look inside it for a candle. He found a small package and thought it was a bar of chocolate he had bought for Nina. Then he remembered that it had been given to him by Novikov. He had forgotten about it, and the package had lain there all day unopened.
Viktor found a candle and hung a blanket over the window. The candlelight brought a sense of peace to the room.
He undressed, got into bed and began to open the little package from Stalingrad. Written in a firm, clear hand were the words “Viktor Shtrum,” followed by his Moscow address.
Recognizing his mother’s handwriting, he threw off the blanket and put his clothes back on again. It was as if a calm, clearly audible voice had called to him out of the dark.
Viktor sat down and glanced through the long letter. It was his mother’s record of her last days—from the beginning of the war until the eve of her inevitable death behind the barbed wire of the Jewish ghetto. It was her farewell to her son.
All sense of time disappeared. Viktor did not even ask himself how this child’s exercise book had found its way to Stalingrad, how it had crossed the front line.
• • •
He got to his feet, removed the blackout curtain and opened the window. There was a white morning sun over the fir tree by the fence. Leaves, flowers and grass were all covered in dew; it was as if a dense shower of finely ground glass had fallen on the entire garden. There were explosions of birdsong from the trees in the orchard—sometimes from a single tree, sometimes a sudden volley from every tree at once.
Viktor went up to the mirror hanging on the wall. He was expecting to see a haggard face with trembling lips and crazed eyes, but his face looked just as it had the day before. His eyes were dry and there was no red on their lids.
“So that’s it,” he said aloud.
Feeling hungry, he broke off a piece of bread and slowly, with effort, began to chew it, looking intently all the time at a twisted pink thread quivering on the edge of the blanket.
“It’s as if it’s being rocked by the sunlight,” he said to himself.
61
ON MONDAY evening Viktor was sitting in the dark on the sofa in his Moscow apartment. He had not put up the blackout curtain and he was looking out through an open window. Suddenly, the air-raid sirens sounded and searchlights lit up the sky.
A few minutes later the sirens stopped and he could hear a few of the other tenants shuffling slowly down the stairs in the dark. Then he heard an angry voice outside, “Why hang about in the yard, citizens? Everything in the shelter’s as it should be. There are cots and benches and water that’s just been boiled.”
But the citizens evidently had ideas of their own. They did not want to go down into a hot airless cellar until they were certain they needed to.
Children called out to one another. Someone said, “Yet another false alarm—they’d do better to let us have some sleep!”
Then came the chatter of distant anti-aircraft guns.
And then—the malevolent drone of a bomber. The roar of Soviet fighters. A brief hubbub out in the yard, a distant thump and more anti-aircraft fire. But there were no longer any voices in the intervals between shots.
Human life had now flowed down into the
bomb shelter. There was no one left in the buildings and yards. The pale blue brooms of searchlights went on silently and diligently sweeping the cloudy night sky.
“Good,” said Viktor. “Now I’m alone.”
An hour passed. Viktor still sat in the same position, as if in a dream, staring out of the window, his brows furrowed, listening to the ack-ack fire and the explosions of bombs.
Then came a silence. The raid seemed to be over. There was the sound of people emerging from the shelter. The searchlights went out and the dark returned.
All of a sudden the phone rang, abrupt and unrelenting. Without turning on the light, Viktor picked up the receiver. The operator said there was a call for him from Chelyabinsk. Viktor thought it was some muddle, and he almost hung up. But it turned out to be Nikolay Krymov’s brother, the engineer he had spoken to at the end of Postoev’s meeting. The line from Chelyabinsk was very good. Semyon began by apologizing to Viktor for disturbing him during the night.
“I wasn’t asleep,” Viktor replied.
It turned out that an entirely new electronic control apparatus had been installed in Semyon’s factory. They had encountered serious problems while trying to put it into operation and this was greatly slowing the entire production process. Semyon wanted Viktor to send him one of his research assistants—it was, after all, Viktor’s laboratory that had worked out the principles behind this equipment. Viktor’s assistant could leave Moscow at dawn on a factory plane. He should, however, be warned that it would be a difficult journey—it would be a heavily loaded transport plane, not a passenger aircraft. The factory’s representative in Moscow had been put in the picture. If Viktor agreed, then he could send a car to collect the assistant—Viktor needed only to make one phone call to this representative.
Viktor replied that his colleagues were all in Kazan—there was no one except him in Moscow. Semyon begged Viktor to send a telegram to Kazan. The problem was both complex and urgent; only a scientist with a sound theoretical understanding would be able to help them.
Viktor thought.
“Hello, hello!” said Semyon. “Are you still there, Viktor Pavlovich?”
“Give me your representative’s phone number,” said Viktor. “I’ll come myself. I’ll see you this evening.”
He called the representative, gave him his address and warned him that he would be taking two suitcases with him—from Chelyabinsk he would return not to Moscow but straight to Kazan. The representative said he would arrange for a car to collect Viktor at five o’clock.
Viktor went to the window and looked at the clock—it was a quarter to four.
The beam of a searchlight moved past in the dark. Viktor watched it, wondering whether it would disappear into the blackness as suddenly as it had appeared. The beam trembled, darted to the right, then to the left, and then froze—a vertical pale blue pillar between the dark of the earth and the dark of the sky.
62
THE FIGHTING to the west of the Don lasted for about three weeks. The first stage was the German attempt to break through to the river and surround the divisions defending the line Kletskaya–Surovikino–Suvorovskaya.
Had they succeeded, the Germans would have crossed the Don and headed straight for Stalingrad, but despite their numerical superiority, and although they managed to penetrate the Soviet defences in several places, the offensive failed. The battle begun on 23 July turned into a stalemate, tying down large numbers of German troops. Soviet counter-attacks paralyzed the advance of the German tanks and motor infantry.
The Germans then attacked from the south-west. This too proved unsuccessful.
Then the German command decided to launch simultaneous attacks from north and south.
This time they outnumbered the Soviet forces two to one, and they enjoyed a still greater superiority in tanks, artillery and mortars.
Paulus’s troops began their advance on 7 August and reached the Don two days later, taking control of a broad area on the west bank and encircling a number of Soviet units. Now in a precarious position, the Red Army troops still on the west bank began crossing the river.
In the first days of August 1942 the Supreme Command ordered Krymov’s anti-tank brigade, which had suffered heavy losses, to withdraw to Stalingrad to regroup and refit.
On 5 August the brigade’s main units, along with its HQ, crossed the Don near Kachalin and set off towards their regrouping point—the Tractor Factory on the city’s northern outskirts.
Krymov accompanied the brigade as far as the ferry, said goodbye to the commander, and then drove to the HQ of the army on the right flank; there he was to meet Sarkisyan, the commander of the mortar unit to which he was now being posted.
The mortar unit had been delayed because their petrol tanker had been bombed during the night and their vehicles had been left without fuel. Sarkisyan had to go to Army HQ to obtain a warrant for petrol.
Wanting to shorten the journey, Krymov set off along a back road. Knowing from experience how easy it is to lose one’s bearings in the steppe, he kept stopping the car and looking intently all around him. The Germans might be very close and he had no wish to get lost in the spider’s web of steppe roads and tracks.
He could see he must be near to HQ: there were telephone cables alongside the road and he was overtaken by an armoured car from a signals unit. Then a camouflaged ZIS-101 with crumpled sides sped past, followed by a green Emka staff car with shattered windows.
Krymov told Semyonov to follow the Emka and they continued on their way, sometimes lagging a little behind it, sometimes driving within the cloud of dust raised by the vehicles ahead. They came to a barrier. After it had been raised to allow the first two vehicles through, Krymov held out his pass. As the sentry leafed through it, Krymov asked, “Is this the 21st Army HQ?”
“It is indeed,” the sentry replied. He handed back Krymov’s pass and smiled, knowing how relieved someone feels when, amid the confusion of war, he finds the place he’s been searching for.
Krymov left his car by the aspen pole that served as a barrier and made his way into a small village, plodding through deep sand the warmth of which he could feel even through his boots.
The HQ was clearly preparing to move. Instead of being hidden beneath camouflage awnings, trucks were parked beside huts. Soldiers were loading tables, stools, typewriters and crates of documents. They were working quickly, quietly and with casual efficiency. It was easy to see that, during the last year, they had loaded and unloaded the HQ’s furniture and equipment dozens of times.
Krymov went straight to the canteen—a canteen during the lunch hour was usually the easiest place to find the people you needed. A specific HQ way of life had developed in the course of the last year, and this way of life was much the same in all the different Army HQs Krymov had seen.
He used to joke that life in a Front HQ was like life in the capital of one of the Soviet republics, that life in an Army HQ was like being in a provincial capital, that a divisional HQ was like a district town and a regimental HQ like a large village, while battalion and company command posts were like field camps caught up in the sleepless frenzy of harvest time.
The canteen staff were also preparing to move on. Waitresses were packing cups and plates in trunks lined with straw. The admin clerk was stacking meal coupons and ration-card stubs in a metal box.
The canteen was located in the village school. Commanders and political workers were standing by the main door, waiting to be issued with their field rations. Desks removed from the classrooms took up almost half the yard; a pockmarked captain was sitting at one of these desks and rolling a cigarette. Opposite him stood a blackboard. It was a long time since it had last rained in the Don steppe and the children’s arithmetic was still clearly visible. The waiting commanders went on talking, paying no attention to the new arrival. It was in any case obvious from Krymov’s gait, from the way he headed straight to the canteen, and from the layers of dust covering his face and his clothes, that this man was simply a
nother comrade, a brother fighter.
“So you never got a new tunic sewn for you, Stepchenko?” said one man.
“Which truck are you going in? With the scouts, or the operations section?”
“Once again,” said a third man, “the canteen boss has given us concentrate instead of sausage. And I bet he’ll be having fried chicken himself—the bastard eats as well as the army commander.”
“Look, there’s Zina. She’s not even going to glance at us. And she’s wearing smart little new boots, made to measure.”
“What does Zina want with a lowly captain? She’ll be doing the journey by car—while you’ll be bouncing about at the back of a one-and-a-half-tonner, like a mere mortal.”
“You can stay with me at our next stop—the commandant’s promised me a billet near the canteen!”
“I’d rather stay away from the canteen, my friend. What if Fritz sees the crowds outside and drops a bomb on it? Remember the pounding we got on the Donets, when we were quartered in . . . What was the name of that village?”
“The Donets was nothing. Do you remember Chernigov last autumn? Major Bodridze was killed, along with six others.”
“Was that when your greatcoat got burnt?”
“That greatcoat! I had it made for me in Lvov. The cloth was good enough for a general.”
Several men were listening to a young black-haired political instructor. There was a restrained happiness about his entire being—it was clear that he had just returned to safety after being under fire. His animated tone of voice was at odds with the painful story he was telling.
“We were still deploying. The Messers were flying low, almost scratching our heads with their wheels. Some of our units showed true heroism. There was one anti-tank battery where not a single gunner survived. Not one man abandoned his gun. But what’s the use when the enemy’s broken through all around you?”
“Do you have eyewitness accounts of acts of heroism?” a battalion commissar—evidently the head of the information section—asked severely.
Stalingrad Page 42