He returned the papers to his briefcase and drifted off in thought. For some reason he began to remember his childhood: a miners’ settlement, clothes drying on lines in the yards, women shouting at one another. He recalled the mixture of envy and delight he had felt when his elder brother, Ivan, had come back from his first day down the mine. Their mother had come out into the yard with a stool, a tin tub and a bucket of hot water, and he had soaped Ivan’s black neck. He remembered the sad look on their mother’s face as she slowly poured out the water, one mugful after another.
Why were his mother and father no longer alive? They would have felt proud of their son, now about to take command of a tank corps. Still, he might well be able to spend a day with his brother; his mine was not far from where the tank corps was being formed. He would find his brother washing in the yard. He would see a tin tub on a stool. His brother’s wife would drop the mug she was holding and shout, “Vanya! Vanya! Your brother!”
He also recalled Marusya’s thin, swarthy face. Why had her death made so little impression on him? Learning that Zhenya was alive, he had forgotten about Marusya. Now he felt an aching sense of pity. But then this pity dissipated and the image of Marusya faded away. Novikov’s thoughts ran on ahead. They overtook the plane on its journey east, then returned to different times in the past.
46
VIKTOR returned to Kazan from Chelyabinsk at the end of August. Instead of spending three days there, as he expected, he had stayed for three weeks.
He had worked very hard indeed. At any other time it would have taken him two months to give so many consultations, check so many complex schemes and discuss so many different questions with engineers and laboratory heads.
He had felt a constant sense of surprise that his theoretical understandings should turn out to be of obvious importance not only to physicists and chemists in the factory laboratories but also to the work of engineers, technicians and electricians. The original problem—the problem Semyon Krymov had first telephoned him about—had been resolved within forty-eight hours, but Semyon had persuaded Viktor to stay until his recommendations had been put into effect and fully tested.
Throughout these two months Viktor felt acutely conscious of the closeness of his relationship to this vast factory. Everyone who has worked in the Donbass, in Prokopievsk or the Urals will know such a feeling.
The shop floors, the factory yard from which the newborn metal first sets out into the world—and even the theatre, the barbershop, the chief engineer’s carpeted dining room, the grove by the quiet pond with autumn leaves on its surface, the shops and streets, the few separate cottages, the long barrack huts—everything round about lives and breathes the life of the factory.
The factory determines whether there is a smile or a frown on the engineers’ faces. It determines the nature of people’s work and their standard of living. It determines their mealtimes and their hours of rest. It determines the ebb and flow of crowds in the streets, the timetable of local trains and the decisions of the city soviet. Streets, shops, squares, tram rails and railway lines—all feel the pull of the factory. People think about it and talk about it. Either they have just come from the factory or they are on their way to it.
The factory is everywhere, present all the time—in every mind and heart, and in the memories of the old. It is the future of the young—a source of joy, hope and anxiety. It breathes and it makes a lot of noise. There is no getting away from its warmth, from its smell, from its din. It’s there in your nostrils, on your skin, and in your eyes and your ears.
In answer to Semyon’s request, Viktor had outlined a simpler routine for installing the new equipment.
During the final assembly of the instruments and apparatus, Viktor spent two whole days and nights at the factory, snatching the occasional few minutes of rest on a small sofa in the shop-floor office. Like every one of the electricians and metalworkers involved, he felt under intense pressure.
The evening before the first trial, Viktor, Semyon and the factory director went round the workshops to carry out a final check.
“You seem remarkably calm,” said Semyon.
“You must be joking,” said Viktor. “The calculations still look faultless, but that doesn’t make me any less anxious.”
Instead of going back with Semyon, he chose to stay in the factory all night.
Along with Korenkov, the shop-floor Party organizer, and a long-faced young electrician in a blue overall, he climbed the iron staircase to the upper gallery, to the location of one of the main switching units.
Viktor’s impression was that Korenkov never went home. If Viktor went past the Red Corner and looked through the half-open door, he saw Korenkov reading a newspaper aloud to the workers. If he entered the workshop, he saw Korenkov’s small stooped figure, lit by the flames of the furnaces. He saw him in the laboratory, and outside the factory store, waving his arms about as he encouraged a growing crowd of women to form an orderly queue. Tonight was no different; Korenkov was still working away.
From the upper gallery, the ribs of the huge fire-breathing furnaces appeared almost sculpted and the casting ladle full of molten metal looked like the surface of the sun, bubbling with atomic explosions, surrounded by a bright mane of sparks and shifting protuberances. It was a sun that human eyes—for the first time—were looking at not from below, but from above.
After they had checked the switching unit, Korenkov suggested that Viktor go back down to the ground floor.
“What about you?” asked Viktor. “What are you going to do?”
“I want to have a look at the wiring on the roof. I’m going up there with the electrician,” said Korenkov—and he pointed to a second iron staircase, spiralling up into the roof like a corkscrew.
“I’ll join you,” said Viktor.
From up on the high roof they could see not only the factory itself, but also the entire settlement and its surroundings.
In the dark, the factory gave off a reddish glow. Hundreds of electric street lights flickered around it, and it was as if the wind were alternately blowing them out and making them flare up.
This inconstant light touched the water in the pond, the pine forest and the clouds. All nature seemed to be in the grip of the tension and anxiety introduced to this calm realm by mankind.
Many things were invading nature’s night-time silence—not only this flickering light, but also the piercing hoots of locomotives, the whistle of steam, and the roar of metal.
It was the opposite of what Viktor had felt during his first evening in Moscow, when a quiet twilight from a world of village streams, empty plains and sleeping forests appeared to have invaded the blacked-out streets and squares of a world city.
“You wait here,” Korenkov said to Viktor. “I’ll help the electrician fix the end of the wire. The contact’s a bit shaky.”
Viktor held the wire in the air. Korenkov, some distance away, gesticulated at him and called out, “Towards me! Towards me!”
Viktor misunderstood and began to pull the wire towards himself. Korenkov shouted out crossly, “What are you doing? I said, ‘Towards me!’”
When they were finished, Korenkov crawled back, smiled at Victor and said, “There was a lot of noise. You couldn’t hear what I was shouting. Come on, let’s go back down again.”
Viktor asked Korenkov whether he might be able to conduct a trial smelt. Korenkov said this would be difficult and asked Viktor why he needed this special grade of steel. Viktor told him a little about his work and specified the technical requirements the steel for his apparatus must meet.
Then Viktor went to the factory laboratory, and from there to the shop office. It was the relatively quiet hour before the change of shift.
A young steelworker, whom Viktor had seen several times on the shop floor and whose work he had observed, was sitting at a desk, writing something in a thick office book and glancing now and then at a stained sheet of paper.
Seeing Viktor, he pushed his tarpaulin
mittens aside to make some space on the desk and went on writing.
Viktor sat down on a little wooden sofa.
The young man finished what he was writing and rolled a cigarette. “How have things gone today?” Viktor asked.
“All right, I think.”
Korenkov came in. “Ah, glad to see you, Gromov!” he said. “Here for a smoke?”
He glanced at what the young man had just noted and said, “That’s quite something, Gromov!”
“Thanks!” said Gromov. “I guess I deserve a cigarette. Soon there’ll be two or three extra tanks on their way to the front.”
“Extra—but certainly not superfluous,” Korenkov said with a laugh.
The three men began to talk. Gromov told Viktor how he first came to the Urals. “I’m not from these parts, I was born in the Donbass. I came here a year before the war. Everything here seemed wrong. I wished I hadn’t come. It was a nightmare. I wanted to go back home. I wrote letter after letter, begging for work. I wrote to Makeyevka, to Yenakiyevo, to all the main works. And do you know, comrade Professor, when it was I came to love the Urals? It was when we first saw real hardship. Conditions before the war hadn’t been bad at all. We had a room, and there was food. But I hated it—all I wanted was to return to the Donbass. But after the autumn and winter of 1941, after me and my family got to know cold and hunger—after all that, somehow I came to feel at home here.”
Korenkov looked at Viktor and said, “It was a grim winter for me too. My brother was killed at the front and my mother and father ended up in occupied territory. And this whole city was packed with evacuees. My wife fell ill. It was cold, and there wasn’t a lot to eat. The construction sites were at work day and night—we built whole new workshops. But equipment evacuated from Ukraine was still just lying around outside. And people were living in dugouts. And I couldn’t stop thinking about my parents in Oryol. What were they going through, I kept asking myself, under the Germans? I’d tell myself they were alive, that I’d be seeing them again. But then I’d remember their age. My father’s seventy, my mother’s only two years younger. And my mother had heart trouble—and swollen legs—even before the war. The thought that I’d never see them again felt like a knife in my heart. And so it goes on. Grieve all you like, but you have to keep going.”
Viktor listened without saying a word. His anguish was so apparent that Korenkov stopped and said, “But why am I telling you all this? I’m sure you’ve seen your share of suffering too.”
“I have, comrade Korenkov,” Viktor replied. “And it’s not over yet.”
“So far, at least, I’ve been lucky,” said Gromov. “My family are all here, safe and sound.”
“You must give me your address, comrade Shtrum,” said Korenkov. “I’ll write to you about this trial smelt. Give me the technical specifications in as much detail as possible. We’ll do our best. I’m confident that Krymov and the director will have no objections. Far from it! But I’ll make it my personal responsibility. You can even include my name in your list of acknowledgements: Korenkov.”
“You’re a remarkable man,” said Viktor, visibly moved. “I thought you’d just forget all about it.”
“Comrade Korenkov never forgets,” said Gromov with a smile. And he shook his head—perhaps in approval, perhaps in disapproval.
At the start of the morning shift, the new control apparatus underwent its first complete test—with satisfactory results. At eleven the test was repeated—this time with perfect results; the minor faults noted during the first test had all been put right. A day later, the factory was able to return to its normal routine.
Throughout his stay Viktor had been lodging with Semyon Krymov, but they had little chance to get to know each other. Semyon came back home only late at night, and when they did meet they talked mainly about work. Semyon had had no letters from his brother and he was very worried about him.
Olga Sergeyevna, Semyon’s wife, was a rather thin, pretty woman with big eyes and a pale face. Unwittingly, Viktor caused her a lot of grief. She did her best to cook tasty meals for him, but he hardly ate anything at all. He seemed absent-minded and taciturn, and she decided that the professor was a cold, dry fellow, with no interest in anything but his work.
But once, walking past Viktor’s room during the night, she heard a quiet sob. She stopped. Feeling confused, she started back to her room, meaning to wake her husband. Then she hesitated, thinking she must have imagined it: the thought of this dry professor sobbing in the middle of the night was simply too absurd. She stood outside the door again—and could hear nothing at all. She went back to her room, thinking it had been some strange auditory illusion. But it had not been an illusion—Viktor’s work was not all that mattered to him.
Viktor returned to Kazan in late August. The plane took off in the morning; the navigator announced with a smile, “Goodbye, Chelyabinsk!”—and disappeared into the cockpit. And at two in the afternoon he reappeared, smiled and said, “And here is Kazan!” All very quick and simple—as if he were an accomplished conjuror, slipping Chelyabinsk up one sleeve and taking Kazan out of the other. Through the little square window beside him Viktor was able to see the whole of the city: the tall red and yellow buildings crowded together in the centre; the motley roofs; the little wooden houses on the outskirts; people, cars and yellowing vegetable gardens; frightened goats, trying to escape the low-flying plane and the roar of its engines; the railway station and the silvery veins of its many spur tracks; the tangle of dirt roads leading out into flat plains and misty forests. It was the first time that Viktor had been able to take in every aspect of Kazan at once, but this had the effect of making the city seem dull, as if stripped of its mystery. “How strange,” he thought, “that the beings dearest to me in the world should live in this heap of stone and iron.”
He and Ludmila met just inside the front door. In the half-dark her face seemed pale but youthful. For a few moments they looked at each other in silence. There was no other way to express the mixture of sadness and joy they both felt.
It was not for the sake of happiness that they needed to see each other, nor to console or be consoled. During these brief moments Viktor felt many, many things—everything that can be felt by a man capable both of loving and of doing wrong, a man who can be overwhelmed by powerful emotion yet still manage to carry on with his daily life.
Everything in Viktor’s life was in some way connected to Ludmila. Grief and success, a handkerchief he had forgotten at home, misunderstandings with friends, a misjudged remark during a scientific discussion, an occasion when he didn’t feel like eating—Ludmila was present everywhere.
And if his life was important, if it differed from other lives, it was because even its smallest, seemingly mutest events took on meaning, and acquired a resonance of their own, from Ludmila’s presence in them.
They went through into the main room, and Ludmila began talking about their Stalingrad family and relatives. Alexandra Vladimirovna and Zhenya were now in Kuibyshev. There had been a letter from Zhenya only the day before; she herself was going to stay on in Kuibyshev, but Alexandra Vladimirovna would soon be on her way to Kazan. She’d be coming by boat, and she might be with them in two or three days. Vera had decided to remain in Stalingrad with her father. That was all Ludmila knew; there was no longer any post to or from Stalingrad. Then Ludmila said, “Tolya writes fairly often. Yesterday I received a letter he sent on 21 August. He’s still in the same place. He’s eating lots of watermelons, he’s in good health, and he feels bored. And Nadya should be back from the kolkhoz either today or tomorrow. It seems I was right. She’s worked hard and it’s done her good. She’s in fine spirits.”
“When did you last see Sokolov?” Viktor asked.
“He came by the day before yesterday. He was very surprised when I told him you were in Chelyabinsk.”
“Has there been some difficulty?”
“No, he says everything’s fine. He just wanted to see you. And Postoev dropped by a few d
ays before. He laughed at your being such a homebody. He said you hadn’t wanted to stay even twenty-four hours in the hotel. But what did you do for food? Did you eat anything that wasn’t out of a tin?”
Viktor shrugged. “Seems I’m still on my feet.”
“Tell me about Chelyabinsk. Was it interesting there?”
Viktor began to tell Ludmila what he’d done at the factory. Neither he nor her said a word about Marusya or Anna Semyonovna—but they were both thinking about them all the time, no matter what was being said, and they both knew this.
And only late that night, when Viktor came back from the institute, did Ludmila say, “Vitya, dearest Vitenka,57 Marusya’s dead . . . and I got your letter about Anna Semyonovna.”
“Yes,” he replied. “I’ve lost all hope. And I heard about Marusya only a few weeks afterwards.”
“You know me. I don’t like to let myself go, but yesterday I was going through a few of our belongings. In one suitcase I found a wooden box Marusya gave me when she was nine and I was twelve. Engraved on it, in pokerwork—there was a craze for it that year—were some maple leaves and the words ‘To Luda, from Marusya.’ And it was as if I’d been stabbed in the heart. I howled all night.”
•
Since his return to Kazan, Viktor’s anguish had only deepened. No matter what he was thinking or doing, his thoughts constantly, relentlessly returned to his mother.
Getting on the plane for Chelyabinsk, he had thought, “She’s gone. And now I’m flying east, I’ll be further away from where she lies.” And during the flight back, as they approached Kazan, he thought, “And she’ll never know that we’re here in Kazan.” In the midst of his joy and excitement at seeing Ludmila again, he said to himself, “When I last spoke to Luda, I was thinking I’d see Mama again once the war was over.”
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