The atmosphere in the shelter was grim. It was one of those awful times when a crowd sees its vast size only as a danger, not as a strength, when everyone in the crowd senses how everyone around them feels as helpless as they themselves and this makes their own sense of helplessness seem all the more terrible. People know the same fear during a shipwreck, when non-swimmers may endanger the lives of swimmers, and soldiers feel the same when they are encircled, when they have been driven into a forest and have thrown down their arms. The words “Every man for himself!” then sound like the height of wisdom.
Those who lived in the building above were whispering agitatedly to one another, looking angrily at the outsiders.
A dark-eyed woman in a grey astrakhan coat wiped a handkerchief over her temples and said, “There were such crowds at the entrance my husband couldn’t get through. I kept shouting, ‘Let him in—his life is important to our country!’ And there were bombs falling all the time. Another moment—and it could have been the end of him.”
The woman’s husband, rubbing his hands as if he’d just come in out of the cold, said, “And if there’s a fire, this will be a real Khodynka.51 None of us will get out alive. We really must keep the entrance clear!”
Then Meshcheryakov, the Shaposhnikovs’ neighbour, said in a booming voice, “We need to instil order. This isn’t a shelter for the whole street—it’s for the commanders and scientific workers who live up above. Where’s the house manager? Vasily Ivanovich!”
The outsiders, some of whom had only just rushed in, looked timidly at the rightful masters of the shelter and began to pick up their belongings, trying to make themselves less obtrusive.
An elderly man in a military tunic said, “It’s true—we need to consolidate.”
There was a brief silence. The air seemed more stifling than ever, the smoking candle and lamp wicks still more dismal.
“Listen,” Sofya began in her deep voice. “This is a catastrophe—it’s no time for ours and yours. Bomb shelters are for everyone. Entry isn’t by ration cards.”
Alexandra Vladimirovna was looking furiously at Meshcheryakov. This was the man who only a month ago had accused her of being spineless, of showing excessive concern over matters of workplace safety.
“Comrade,” she said, “my daughters will also have taken refuge in the first shelter they could find. Do you want them to be thrown out too?”
“Citizen Shaposhnikova,” Meshcheryakov retorted, “this is no time for demagogy.”
This was not the way Meshcheryakov usually spoke to her. If he passed her on the stairs, he liked to take off his hat to her with extravagant politeness and say in broken Polish, “I kiss your dear hand, Alexandra Vladimirovna!”
“If I were her,” said the house manager’s wife, “I’d keep my mouth shut. She’s sent her daughters across the Volga, and she’s got an illegal tenant. And now there’s no room for the men and women who first built this shelter. Yes, she should keep her mouth shut! But we’ve all of us come across her sort. They wear the right uniform, but you don’t see much of them at the front.”
“Whose are these things here? Who does this bundle belong to?” asked Meshcheryakov. “Throw all this stuff outside!”
Alexandra leapt to her feet and said, in a voice that was quiet but full of rage, “Cut it out! Or you’ll be thrown out yourself. I’ll call soldiers.”
A young woman with a little boy in her arms, her eyes shining in the half-dark, shouted, “I’ll tear your eyes out, you rat—then you’ll know who this bundle belongs to! We have Soviet laws now. And they don’t allow you to injure children!”
“You’re waiting for Hitler, you swine,” shouted another woman. “But you’re waiting in vain!”
“Mama, Mama!” cried a weeping girl. “Don’t go away—we’ll be buried alive like Grandad!”
Then the whole cellar seemed to brighten. As if with light, it filled with voices, and for a while these voices even drowned out the noise of the bombs.
“The fat brute—anyone would think he’s a German. He thinks Hitler’s here already. But we’re Soviet citizens. We’re all equal. He’s the one who should be thrown out to die—not our children!”
Alexandra Vladimirovna reached out to the young woman with the little boy and gently tugged at her sleeve. “It’s all right. Please don’t worry. And here’s somewhere you can sit down.”
Meshcheryakov stepped back a little. “Comrades, you didn’t quite understand me. I wasn’t meaning to throw anyone out. I just wanted to clear a passageway. For the common good.”
Afraid he was about to be lynched and trying to make himself inconspicuous, he sat down on a suitcase. The house plumber, who was standing nearby, said crossly, “What the hell d’you think you’re doing? That there suitcase is plywood. With that fat arse of yours you’ll go straight through it.”
Meshcheryakov looked in astonishment at the man who only two days before had been working in his apartment, grateful to be given a tip after mending a bathroom tap.
“Maximov, you should address me a little more—”
“Get off that case, I said!”
Meshcheryakov got to his feet. He realized that the world had changed. People no longer saw one another as they had the day before.
“What are you doing?” Alexandra said to the young woman sitting beside her. “You’re squeezing the child to death. He can hardly breathe. Put him down for a while!”
The woman shook her head. “I’m hugging him tight so we get killed together. His legs are withered, he can’t walk. If I die, it’ll be the end of him. His father’s dead already—we’ve had a letter from the front.” She bent her head towards her son and kissed him repeatedly. She was still far from calm, but her eyes were now full of tenderness.
When the bombing grew louder, everyone fell silent and the old women began making the sign of the cross and calling in a whisper on God.
But when the bombing quietened, people started talking again and there were even eruptions of true Russian laughter, the sound of people able to burst into joyful, spontaneous laughter even at the bitterest times.
“Look at old Makeyeva,” a woman with a broad face was saying. “Before the war, all she ever talked about was how she wanted to die. Again and again, ‘I’m eighty years old now—why should I keep on living? The sooner I go, the better.’ But at the sound of the first bombs, there she is, in the shelter. Yes, she left me standing!”
“It was dreadful,” said her neighbour. “My legs turned to jelly. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t. And then I was suddenly running as fast as I could, holding a plywood board over my head. A minute before, I’d been chopping spring onions on it. Next thing, I was hoping it would protect me from bombs.”
“I’ve lost everything,” said the woman with the broad face. “All my belongings. And I’d just re-upholstered the sofa. I’d covered it with cretonne. And then . . . all in a few seconds . . . I was lucky to get out alive.”
“All right. That’s enough of you and your sofa—people are burning to death.”
No one left the cellar and it was a while since anyone new had appeared. Nevertheless, they all seemed to find out in no time at all about everything that was going on in the world, both on the earth and up in the sky: which buildings were on fire, where there’d been a direct hit on a bomb shelter, where Soviet flak had brought down a German plane, which point of the compass the last wave of bombers had appeared from.
A soldier standing at the top of the stairs was shouting, “Machine-gun fire. From around the Tractor Factory!”
“Sure it’s not ack-ack fire?” asked a second soldier.
“No, it’s ground combat all right.” The first soldier listened for a moment, then added, “Yes, mortars—and artillery too. No doubt about it.”
Then came more bombers—followed by another wave of explosions.
“Dear God,” said the woman in the astrakhan coat, “please just bring all this to an end.”
“Let’s go,” the first sol
dier said to his comrade. “Or we’ll be trapped here like mice.”
Then Sofya Osipovna leaned over towards Alexandra Vladimirovna, kissed her on the cheek, got to her feet, threw her greatcoat over her shoulders and said, “I’ll be on my way too. Maybe I can get to my hospital. I’ll just roll myself a cigarette.”
“Yes, my dearest,” said Alexandra, “you go to your hospital.” Reaching beneath her coat, she quickly unfastened her enamel brooch and pinned it to Sofya’s tunic. “You take care of these violets now,” she said gently. “Do you remember? Viktor’s mother gave this to me the spring I got married. When we were both staying with her in Paris. You were still just a girl. Two enamel violets—I took them to Siberia with me.”
In the dark cellar, this memory of a distant spring, of the two women’s youth, seemed painfully sad.
They embraced in silence and kissed. From the way they looked each other in the eye, it was clear to everyone that they were close friends and that they were parting for a long time, maybe forever.
Sofya Osipovna began to walk towards the exit. The house manager’s wife said, “She’s running away. The Jews are all running away. They know they won’t last long under the Germans. Only I don’t understand what makes a Russian woman give her her cross.”
“It wasn’t a cross,” said a woman standing beside her. “It’s a brooch.”
“All right, all right,” said the house manager’s wife. “But whatever you choose to call it, it won’t be any help to her now—not with a nose like that.”
Craning her neck, Alexandra Vladimirovna watched Sofya Osipovna’s broad shoulders disappear into the gloom. She knew, with startling clarity, that she would never see her again.
36
ZHENYA was down by the river when the first bombs fell. The ground shook, and she thought for a moment that Kholzunov, the pilot, gazing up into the sky with his bronze eyes, had trembled and stepped down from his granite pedestal.52 There was a second thunderbolt, this time unleashed by the earth; the whole world reeled, and the large corner building, which housed a haberdashery she often visited, collapsed slowly onto the pavement, exhaling clouds of chalky dust. Something struck her in the chest—warm, dense, compacted air. People on the quayside were running about and shouting. Two soldiers flung themselves down on a flower bed. One yelled, “Lie down, you idiot woman—or you’ll get yourself killed!”
Mothers were snatching up babies from prams and running, some towards the river, others away from the river. Zhenya, though, felt strangely calm. She could see everything around her very clearly: the collapsing buildings, the black and yellow smoke, the short, geometrically straight flames from the explosions. She could hear the triumphant howl of bombs tearing towards the earth; she could see people rushing along the quays, crowding onto the boats and ferries.
But it was as if her eyes and her heart lay underwater, as if she were watching the furious, raging world from the bed of a deep, quiet pond.
A young lad with a knapsack on his shoulder ran across the street in front of her, then fell. His green peaked cap flew towards the gate he’d been trying to reach. Zhenya glimpsed him—and immediately forgot him.
A madwoman, wearing only an unfastened bathrobe, was standing in the middle of a smoke-filled street, powdering her nose and cheeks with a coquettish smile.
A bald, stout man, with no jacket and with his braces hanging loose, was holding up a bunch of thirty-rouble notes and waving them in the air. He was offering the money to God and cursing him in the foulest of language; he too was out of his mind.
She saw a ragged young man running up the street from the port with a yellow suitcase: his movements were supple and catlike, as if he had paws rather than feet. She knew at once that he had stolen the suitcase. Through the smashed windows of a ground-floor room she heard the sounds of a gramophone playing a foxtrot and she saw people with glasses in their hands, singing, shouting and stamping. She saw injured men and women being lifted out of a window and she saw someone quickly pulling a pair of boots off a man who had been killed.
Later, as she tried to recall all this, she realized that she had lost all sense of time; it was during the third day of the bombing that she had seen the young man with the knapsack, not during the first hours.
She was looking intently around her, trying to take everything in. It was as if someone had spoken a word that had transported her to some past century, to a time of sombre and majestic upheavals. She saw herself as a figure on the canvas of Briullov’s Last Day of Pompeii, amid collapsed walls and columns, beneath a black sky slashed by forks of lightning. She thought of Pushkin’s A Feast in Time of Plague, of the circles of Dante’s hell and of the Last Judgement. She was certain that none of this was really happening. When she got home, she would recount her strange visions.
Everyone who saw Zhenya during these hours thought that she had lost her mind: How could this tall young woman be walking along so slowly and deliberately, with such a calm look in her eyes?
It is not uncommon for people in a state of deep shock, who have just heard terrible news, to go on polishing their boots with an air of great concentration, to quietly finish their bowl of cabbage soup, to calmly complete the line they are writing or the patch they are darning.
What brought Zhenya back, what allowed her to sense the horror of what was happening around her, was not the flames of burning houses or the dust and smoke swirling above them. Nor was it the blows struck by the crazed hammer now taking swing after swing at stone, iron and human beings. What brought Zhenya back was the sight of an old, poorly dressed woman lying in the middle of the boulevard, her hair matted with blood. Kneeling beside her was a chubby-faced man in a smart grey raincoat. Slipping his arms beneath the old woman and trying to lift her up, he was repeating, “Mama, Mama, what’s happened? Mama, what’s the matter with you? Mama, Mama, say something to me!”
The old woman reached out and gently stroked the man on the cheek. As if her wrinkled hand were the only thing in the world, Zhenya at once saw everything it expressed: the mother’s gentleness; her tears; her gratitude for her son’s love; the plea of a being now helpless as a baby; her forgiveness of her son’s failings; her desire to comfort her son, who was young and strong yet unable to help her; her need to say goodbye to life, along with the desire to keep on breathing and seeing the light of day.
Zhenya stretched out her hands to the cruel, snarling sky and yelled, “What are you doing, you bastards? What are you doing?”
Human suffering. Will it be remembered in centuries to come? The stones of huge buildings endure and the glory of generals endures, but human suffering does not. Tears and whispers, a cry of pain and despair, the last sighs and groans of the dying—all this disappears along with the smoke and dust blown across the steppe by the wind.
Only after this moment did Zhenya feel afraid that she might die. She began to run back towards her home, doubling over at every explosion, dreaming that Novikov would suddenly appear and lead her out of the fire and smoke. Knowing he would be calm and strong, she was looking for him among the people running down the street, even though she knew he was in Moscow. But the fact that she was thinking of him—of him, and at a time like this, meant a great deal. It was, perhaps, the declaration Novikov so wanted to hear from her.
Later, Zhenya felt surprised that she had not once thought about Krymov, even though she knew he was in Stalingrad. And she had, until that day, been thinking about him constantly; it had seemed that she would feel guilty and anxious about him for the rest of her life. Their recent non-meeting, however, had left her with a feeling of calm indifference.
She was now close to her apartment block. On all five floors the windows had been knocked out, and curtains—some white, some coloured—were blowing about in the wind; even from a distance she could make out the ones she herself had sewn—white, edged with blue silk. In one apartment she could see flowerpots—palms and fuchsias. Everywhere she had been, Zhenya felt an awful emptiness. But here, close to
her home, there was something still more awful about the drone of the planes and the din of the bombs.
And Zhenya, with her artist’s eye—her ability to see inner, unexpected similarities—suddenly saw the building as a huge five-storey ship emerging from a misty, smoke-filled harbour into a raging sea.
She stopped and looked around, wondering how best to make her way through the debris. Someone called out and pointed her in the right direction, and she went down into the bomb shelter. At first the darkness seemed impenetrable, and the air stifling. Then Zhenya began to make out dim oil lamps, pale faces and white pillows. She saw a water pipe sparkling with moisture. A woman down on the ground said, “Watch where you’re going—you’re about to step on a child!”
When a nearby explosion shook the five heavy storeys of stone and iron above them, the cellar seemed to stir and rustle. Then it went quiet again. It was as if the hundreds of bowed, silent heads had given birth to a stifling darkness.
The explosions were quieter down in the cellar, but the slight trembling of the reinforced-concrete ceiling made them more frightening still. Ears learned to distinguish the piercing buzz of the bombers’ engines, the thunder of explosions, the sharp cracks of the anti-aircraft guns. Each time they heard the howl of a bomb—ominously quiet at first but growing continually louder—they all held their breath, bowing their heads in anticipation of a blow. And during these howling seconds, each composed of hundreds of infinitely long and entirely distinct fractions of seconds, there was neither breath, nor desires, nor memories; there was no room in people’s bodies for anything except the echo of this blind iron howl.
Quietly groping her way through the darkness, Zhenya found a free spot and sat down on the floor. The stone suspended over her head, the water pipes, the depth of this dungeon—everything seemed threatening, and there were moments when the cellar seemed more like a grave than a shelter, when she wanted to run back up to the surface, to escape the deaths waiting for her in the dark, to escape to a death in daylight. And she wanted to find her mother; she wanted to push people out of her way, to beat a path through the darkness; she wanted to tell everyone her name, to put an end to the loneliness she felt among people who couldn’t see her, people whose faces she couldn’t see and whose names she didn’t know.
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