Shimansky went on to say that many hundreds of casualties passed through the hospital, but seldom had the staff taken anyone so much to their hearts as Lieutenant Shaposhnikov – an intelligent, well-educated and unassuming patient who had always scrupulously avoided making any unnecessary demands on them. Lastly he said that a mother should be proud to have brought up a son who had selflessly and honourably laid down his life for the Motherland. He then asked if Lyudmila had any requests.
Lyudmila apologized for taking up his time, took a sheet of paper from her handbag and began to read out her requests.
She asked to be shown her son’s grave. Shimansky gave a silent nod of the head and made a note on his pad.
She asked if she could have a word with Dr Mayzel. Shimansky informed her that, on hearing of her arrival, Dr Mayzel had himself expressed a wish to speak with her.
She asked if she could meet Sister Terentyevna. Shimansky nodded and made a note.
She asked to be given her son’s belongings. Shimansky made another note on his pad.
Finally she put two tins of sprats and a packet of sweets on the table and asked him to give the other patients the presents she had brought for her son.
Her large, light blue eyes suddenly met his own. He blinked involuntarily at their brilliance. Then he said that all her requests would be granted and asked her to return to the hospital at half-past nine the next morning.
Shimansky watched the door close behind her, looked at the presents she had left for the wounded, tried to find his pulse, gave up, and began to drink the water he had offered Lyudmila at the beginning of the interview.
31
Lyudmila seemed not to have a spare moment. That night she walked up and down the streets, sat on a park-bench, went to the station to get warm, and then walked up and down the deserted streets again with a quick, businesslike stride.
Shimansky carried out Lyudmila’s requests to the letter.
At half-past-nine in the morning she saw Sister Terentyevna; she asked her to tell her everything she knew about Tolya. She then put on a white smock. Together with Terentyevna she went up to the first floor, walked down the corridor that led to the operating-theatre, stood by the door of the intensive care unit and looked at the solitary, now empty, bed. Sister Terentyevna stood beside her, dabbing her nose with her handkerchief. They went back down and Terentyevna said goodbye. Soon after that a stout man with grey hair came into the waiting-room. There were huge dark circles beneath his dark eyes. His starched, blindingly white smock seemed whiter still by comparison with his swarthy face and dark, staring eyes.
Dr Mayzel explained why Dr Rodionov had been against the operation. He seemed already to know everything Lyudmila wanted to ask him. He told her about his conversations with Lieutenant Tolya before the operation. Understanding Lyudmila’s state of mind, he described the operation itself with brutal frankness.
Then he said that he had felt a fatherly tenderness towards Lieutenant Tolya. As he spoke, a high, plaintive note slipped into his bass voice. Lyudmila looked for the first time at his hands. They were peculiar; they seemed to live a quite separate life from the man with mournful eyes. His hands were severe and ponderous, the dark-skinned fingers large and strong.
Mayzel took his hands off the table. As though he had read Lyudmila’s thoughts, he said: ‘I did all I could. But, instead of saving him from death, my hands only brought his death closer.’ He rested his huge hands on the table again.
Lyudmila could tell that every word he had said was true.
Everything he said, passionately though she had desired to hear it, had tortured and burnt her. But there was something else that had made the conversation difficult and painful: she sensed that the doctor had wanted this meeting not for her sake, but for his own. This made her feel a certain antagonism towards him.
As she said goodbye, she said she was certain he had done everything possible to save her son. He gave a deep sigh. She could see that her words had comforted him – and realized that it was because he felt he had a right to hear these words that he had wanted the meeting.
‘And on top of everything else, they even expect me to comfort them!’ she thought.
After the surgeon had left, Lyudmila spoke to the commandant, a man in a Caucasian fur-cap. He saluted and announced in a hoarse voice that the commissar had given orders that she was to be taken by car to the cemetery, but that the car would be ten minutes late since they were delivering a list of civilian employees to the central office. The lieutenant’s personal belongings had already been packed; it would be easiest if she picked them up on her return from the cemetery.
All Lyudmila’s requests were met with military precision and correctness. But she could feel that the commissar, the nurse and the commandant also wanted something from her, that they too wanted some word of consolation or forgiveness.
The commissar felt guilty because men were dying in his hospital. Until Lyudmila’s visit this had never disturbed him: it was what was to be expected in a military hospital. The quality of the medical treatment had never been criticized by the authorities. What he had been reprimanded for was failing to organize enough political work or to provide adequate information about the morale of the wounded.
He hadn’t fought hard enough against defeatism and against the hostility of those socially backward patients opposed to collectivization. There had even been cases of military secrets being divulged. All this had led to a summons from the political division of the military district medical administration; he had been told that he would be sent to the front if the Special Section ever again informed them of ideological errors in the hospital.
Now, however, in front of the mother of the dead lieutenant, the commissar felt himself to blame for the fact that three patients had died the day before – while he himself had taken a shower, ordered his favourite dish of stewed sauerkraut from the cook and drunk a bottle of beer from the store in Saratov. And Sister Terentyevna felt guilty because her husband, a military engineer, served on the army staff and had never been to the front; while her son, who was a year older than Shaposhnikov, worked in the design office of an aviation factory. As for the commandant, a regular soldier, he was serving in a hospital back in the rear, sending home felt boots and good-quality gabardine – while the uniform that had been passed on to the dead lieutenant’s mother was made of the very cheapest material.
Even the thick-lipped sergeant-major with the fleshy ears, the man responsible for the burial of dead patients, felt guilty before the woman he was driving to the cemetery: the coffins were knocked together out of thin, poor-quality boards; the dead were laid out in their underclothes and buried in communal graves – extremely close together unless they were officers; the inscriptions over the graves were in an ugly script, on unpolished board and in paint that would not last. Of course, men who died in a field first-aid post were just heaped together in pits without individual coffins, and the inscriptions there were written in indelible pencil that would only last until it next rained. And men who died in combat, in forests, bogs, gullies and fields, often found no one at all to bury them – only wind, sand and snowstorms . . .
Nevertheless, the sergeant-major felt guilty about his poor-quality timber as the lieutenant’s mother questioned him about the conduct of burials, asking how they dressed the corpses, whether they buried them together and whether a last word was spoken over the grave.
Another reason he felt awkward was that before the journey he had been to see a friend in the store; he had drunk a glass of diluted medical spirit and eaten some bread and onion. He was ashamed that his breath made the car stink of onions and alcohol – but he could hardly stop breathing.
He looked gloomily into the rectangular mirror in front of the driver: in it he could see the reflection of the man’s bright, mocking eyes. ‘Well, the sergeant-major’s certainly had a good time,’ they said mercilessly.
Everyone feels guilty before a mother who has lost her son in a war; through
out human history men have tried in vain to justify themselves.
32
The soldiers of a labour battalion, conscripts who were too old for active service, were unloading coffins from a truck. You could tell from their silence and lack of haste that they were used to this work. One man stood in the back of the truck and pushed a coffin to the rear; another man put his shoulder beneath it and took a few paces forward; a third walked silently up and took the other end of the coffin on his shoulder. Their boots squeaked on the frozen earth as they carried the coffins to the wide communal grave, laid them down beside it and returned to the truck. When the empty truck set off for the city, the soldiers sat down on the coffins and rolled cigarettes, using lots of paper and a very small amount of tobacco.
‘There’s not such a rush today,’ said one of them, striking a light from a very good-quality steel: a thin cord of tinder running through a copper-casing where a flint had been set. The soldier pulled at the tinder and a puff of smoke rose into the air.
‘The sergeant-major said there’d only be one lorry today,’ said another soldier as he lit his cigarette, letting out clouds of smoke.
‘In that case we can finish the grave.’
‘That’s right. It’s best to do it straight away. Then he can come and check it against the list,’ said a third soldier. He wasn’t smoking; instead he took a piece of bread from his pocket, shook it, blew over it and began eating.
‘Tell the sergeant-major to bring us a pickaxe. The earth’s frozen solid almost quarter of the way down. Tomorrow we’ve got to do a new grave. We’ll never be able to dig it just with spades.’
The soldier who had been striking a light clapped his hands, knocked the end of his cigarette out of a wooden holder and gently tapped the holder against the lid of the coffin.
All three fell silent, as though listening for something.
‘Is it true we’re being put on dry rations?’ said the soldier eating the piece of bread. He spoke in a hushed voice so as not to disturb the men in the coffins with a conversation that didn’t concern them.
The second of the two smokers blew his cigarette-end out of a long, smoke-blackened reed holder, held it up to the light and shook his head. Everything was quiet again . . .
‘It’s quite a good day, just a bit windy.’
‘Listen. There’s the truck. We’ll be finished by lunchtime.’
‘No. That’s not our truck. It’s a car.’
The sergeant-major got out of the car, followed by a woman in a shawl. They walked together towards the iron railings, to what had been the burial ground until they had run out of space the previous week.
‘Thousands of people are being buried and no one attends the funerals,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘In peacetime it’s the other way round: one coffin and a hundred people carrying flowers.’
‘People mourn for them all the same,’ said the soldier, tapping gently on the board with a thick oval fingernail, ‘even if we don’t see the tears . . . Look, the sergeant-major’s coming back on his own.’
This time all three of them lit up. The sergeant-major walked up and said good-naturedly: ‘So you’re having another smoke, are you? How do you think we’re going to get the work finished?’
They quietly let out three clouds of smoke. Then one of them, the owner of the steel, said: ‘You only have to stop for a smoke and the truck arrives. Listen, I can tell by the sound of the engine.’
33
Lyudmila walked up to the small mound of earth. On a plywood board she read her son’s name and rank.
She felt her hair stirring beneath her shawl. Someone was running their cold fingers through it.
On either side, stretching right up to the railings, were rows and rows of the same small grey mounds. There were no flowers on them, not even grass, just a single wooden stem shooting straight up from the grave. At the top of each stem was a plywood board with a man’s name on it. There were hundreds of these boards. Their density and uniformity made them seem like a field of grain . . .
Now she had found Tolya at last. She had tried so many times to imagine where he was, what he was thinking about and what he was doing: leaning against the side of a trench and dozing; walking down a path; sipping tea, holding his mug in one hand and a piece of sugar in the other; or perhaps running across a field under fire . . . She had wanted to be there beside him. After all, he needed her: she would top up his mug of tea; she would say, ‘Have another slice of bread’; she would take off his shoes and wash his chafed feet; she would wrap a scarf round his neck . . . But he had always eluded her. And now she had found him, he no longer needed her.
Further away she could see graves from before the Revolution with crosses made out of granite. The gravestones stood there like a crowd of unloved, unwanted old men. Some of them were lying on their sides, others leant helplessly against tree-trunks.
The sky seemed somehow airless – as though all the air had been pumped out and there was nothing but dry dust over her head. And the pump was continuing its work: together with the air, faith and hope had now disappeared; nothing was left but a small mound of grey, frozen earth.
Everything living – her mother, Nadya, Viktor’s eyes, the bulletins about the course of the war – had ceased to exist.
Everything living had become inanimate. In the whole wide world only Tolya was still alive. But what silence there was all around him. Did he realize that she had come . . . ?
Lyudmila knelt down and, very gently, so as not to disturb her son, straightened the board with his name on it. He had always got angry with her when she straightened the collar of his jacket on their way to school.
‘There. I’m here now. You must have thought Mama was never going to come.’ She spoke in a half-whisper, afraid of being overheard.
Some trucks went past. The dust whirled about in the wind. Milkwomen with churns and people carrying sacks tramped by wearing soldiers’ boots. Schoolchildren ran past in soldiers’ winter caps.
But the day and all its movement seemed to Lyudmila just a misty vision.
What silence there was everywhere.
She was talking to her son, remembering every detail of his life; and these memories, which survived only in her consciousness, filled the world with the voice of a child, with his tears, with the rustle of the pages of a picture-book, the clinking of a teaspoon against the edge of a white plate, the humming of home-made radio sets, the squeak of skis, the creaking of rowlocks on the ponds near the dacha, the rustling of sweet-papers, with fleeting glimpses of a boy’s face, shoulders and chest.
Animated by her despair, his tears, his moments of distress, his every act – good or bad – took on a distinct and palpable existence.
She seemed to be caught up, not by memories of the past, but by the anxieties of everyday life.
What did he think he was doing – reading all night long in such awful light? Did he want to have to wear spectacles at his age?
And now he was lying there in a coarse calico shirt, bare-footed. Why hadn’t they given him any blankets? The earth was frozen solid and there was a sharp frost at night.
Blood began to pour from Lyudmila’s nose. Her handkerchief was soon sodden and heavy. Her eyes blurred and she felt giddy; for a moment she thought she might faint. She screwed up her eyes. When she opened them again, the world brought to life by her suffering had vanished. There was nothing but grey dust whirling over the graves; one after another, they began to smoke.
The water of life, the water that had gushed over the ice and brought Tolya back from the darkness, had disappeared; the world created by the mother’s despair, the world that for a moment had broken its fetters and become reality, was no more.
Her despair had raised the lieutenant from the grave, filling the void with new stars. For a few minutes he had been the only living person in the world; it was to him that everything else had owed its existence. But even the mother’s tremendous strength was not enough to prevent the multitudes of people, the
roads and cities, the seas, the earth itself, from swamping her dead Tolya.
Lyudmila dabbed at her eyes. They were quite dry, but the handkerchief was sodden. She realized that her face was smeared with sticky blood and sat there, hunched up, resigned, taking her first involuntary steps towards the realization that Tolya no longer existed.
The people in the hospital had been struck by her calm and the number of questions she had asked. They hadn’t appreciated her inability to understand something quite obvious – that Tolya was no longer among the living. Her love was so strong that Tolya’s death was unable to affect it: to her, he was still alive.
She was mad, but no one had noticed. Now, at last, she had found Tolya. Her joy was like that of a mother-cat when she finds her dead kitten and licks it all over.
A soul can live in torment for years and years, even decades, as it slowly, stone by stone, builds a mound over a grave; as it moves towards the apprehension of eternal loss and bows down before reality.
The soldiers finished their work and left; the sun had nearly gone down; the shadows of the plywood boards over the graves lengthened. Lyudmila was alone.
She ought to tell Tolya’s relatives about his death. Above all, she must tell his father in the camp. His father. And what had Tolya been thinking about before the operation? Had they fed him with a spoon? Had he been able to sleep a little on his side? Or on his back? He liked water with lemon and sugar. How was he lying right now? Was he shaven or unshaven?