A burst of machine-gun fire whistled over their heads, then another.
‘This spring we were stationed near Sviatogorsk,’ Lyakhov told her. ‘Once there was a terrible whistling right over our heads, but we couldn’t hear any shots. We didn’t know what on earth was happening. It turned out to be the starlings imitating bullets . . . The lieutenant had even put us on alert – they did it perfectly.’
‘When I was at home,’ said Katya, smiling, ‘I imagined that war would be a matter of lost cats, children screaming and blazing buildings. That seems to be just how it is.’
The next man to approach her was the bearded Zubarev.
‘Well,’ he asked sympathetically, ‘and how’s our little man with the tail?’
He lifted up the scrap of cloth that had been laid over the kitten.
‘Poor little thing. You do look weak!’ As he said this, his eyes gleamed insolently.
That evening, after a brief skirmish, the Germans managed to advance a short distance along the flank of the building; now their machine-guns covered the path leading back to the Soviet lines. The telephone link with Battalion Headquarters was severed again. Grekov ordered a passage to be blasted to link up with a nearby tunnel.
‘We’ll use the dynamite,’ said Antsiferov, the sergeant-major – a stout man with a mug of tea in one hand and a sugar-lump in the other.
The other inmates were sitting in a pit at the foot of the main wall and talking. As before, no one mentioned the two gypsies; nor did they seem worried at being encircled.
This calm seemed strange to Katya; nevertheless, she submitted to it herself. Even the dreaded word ‘encirclement’ no longer held any terrors for her. Nor was she frightened when a machine-gun opened up right next to them and Grekov shouted: ‘Fire! Fire! Look – they’ve got right in!’ Nor when Grekov ordered: ‘Use whatever’s to hand – knives, spades, grenades. You know your job. Kill the bastards – it doesn’t matter how.’
During the few quiet moments, the men engaged in a long and detailed discussion of Katya’s physical appearance. The short-sighted Batrakov, who had always seemed to live in another world, turned out to be surprisingly interested.
‘All I care about are a woman’s tits,’ he said.
Kolomeitsev disagreed. He – in Zubarev’s words – preferred to call a spade a spade.
‘So have you talked to her about the cat, then?’ asked Zubarev.
‘Of course,’ said Batrakov. ‘Even old grey-beard here’s had a chat with her about that.’
The old man in command of the mortars spat and drew his hand across his chest.
‘Really! I ask you! Does she have what makes a woman a woman?’
He got particularly angry if anyone hinted that Grekov might have his eye on her.
‘Well, of course! To us, even a Katya seems passable. In the country of the blind . . . She’s got legs like a stork, no arse worth speaking of, and great cow-like eyes. Call that a woman?’
‘You just like big tits,’ Chentsov retorted. ‘That’s an outmoded, pre-revolutionary point of view.’
Kolomeitsev, a coarse, foul-mouthed man, whose large bald head concealed many surprising contradictions, said: ‘She’s not a bad girl, but I’m very particular. I like them small, preferably Armenian or Jewish, with large quick eyes and short hair.’
Zubarev looked thoughtfully at the dark sky criss-crossed by the beams of searchlights. ‘Well, I wonder how it will work out in the end.’
‘You mean who she’ll end up with?’ said Kolomeitsev. ‘Grekov – that’s obvious.’
‘Far from it,’ said Zubarev. ‘It’s not in the least obvious.’ He picked up a piece of brick and hurled it against the wall.
The others laughed.
‘I see! You’re going to charm her with the down on your chin, are you?’ said Batrakov.
‘No,’ said Kolomeitsev, ‘he’s going to sing. They’re going to make a programme together: “Infantry at the microphone”. He’ll sing and she’ll broadcast it into the ether. They’ll make a fine pair!’
Zubarev looked round at the boy who’d been reading poetry the evening before. ‘And how about you?’
‘If he doesn’t say anything, it’s because he doesn’t want to,’ said the old grey-beard warningly. Then he turned to the boy and said in a fatherly way, as though he were rebuking his son for listening to the grown-ups: ‘You’d do better to go down to the cellar and get some sleep while you can.’
‘Antsiferov’s down there right now with his dynamite,’ said Batrakov.
Meanwhile Grekov was dictating to Katya. He informed Army Headquarters that the Germans were almost certainly preparing an offensive and that it would almost certainly be directed at the Tractor Factory. What he didn’t say was that house 6/1 appeared to lie on the very axis of this offensive. But as he looked at Katya’s thin little neck, at her lips, at her half-lowered eyelashes, he saw an all-too-vivid picture of a broken neck with pearly vertebrae poking out through lacerated skin, of two glassed-over, fish-like eyes, and of lips like grey, dusty rubber.
He was longing to seize hold of her, to feel her life and warmth while they were both alive, while this young being was still full of grace and charm. He thought it was just pity that made him want to embrace the girl – but does pity make your temples throb and your ears buzz?
Headquarters were slow to answer. Grekov stretched till every joint in his body began to crack, gave a loud sigh, thought, ‘It’s all right, we’ve got the night ahead of us,’ and asked tenderly: ‘How’s Klimov’s kitten getting on? Is he getting his strength back?’
‘Far from it,’ answered Katya.
She thought about the gypsies on the bonfire. Her hands were shaking. She glanced at Grekov to see if he’d noticed.
Yesterday she’d thought that no one in this building was ever going to talk to her; today the bearded second lieutenant, tommy-gun in hand, had rushed by as she was eating her kasha and called out as though they were old friends: ‘Don’t just pick at it, Katya!’ He had gestured at her to show how she ought to plunge her spoon into the pot.
She had seen the boy who’d read the poem yesterday carrying some mortar-bombs on a tarpaulin. Later she had looked round and seen him standing by the water-boiler. Realizing he was watching her, she had looked away, but by then he had already turned away himself.
She already knew who would start showing her letters and photographs tomorrow, who would look at her in silence and sigh, who would bring her a present of half a flask of water and some rusks of white bread, who would say he didn’t believe in women’s love and would never fall in love again . . . As for the bearded second lieutenant, he would probably start pawing her.
Finally an answer came through from Headquarters. Katya started to repeat the message to Grekov.
‘Your orders are to make a detailed report every day at twelve hundred hours precisely . . .’
Grekov suddenly knocked Katya’s hand off the switch. She let out a cry.
He grinned and said: ‘A fragment from a mortar-bomb has put the wireless-set out of action. Contact will be re-established when it suits Grekov.’
Katya gaped at him in astonishment.
‘I’m sorry, Katyusha,’ said Grekov and took her by the hand.
Footnotes
fn1 From a short lyric of Pushkin’s.
fn2 An anonymous twelfth-century epic poem.
59
In the early morning Divisional Headquarters were informed by Byerozkin’s regiment that the men in house 6/1 had excavated a passage into one of the concrete tunnels belonging to the Tractor Factory; some of them were now in the factory itself. A duty-officer at Divisional HQ informed Army HQ, where it was then reported to General Krylov himself. Krylov ordered one of the men to be brought to him for questioning. A signals officer was detailed to take a young boy, chosen by the duty-officer, to Army HQ. They walked down a ravine leading to the bank; on the way the boy kept turning round and anxiously asking questions.
??
?I must go back home. My instructions were to reconnoitre the tunnel – so we could evacuate the wounded.’
‘Never mind,’ said the officer. ‘You’re about to see someone a little senior to your own boss. You have to do as he says.’
On the way the boy told the officer how they had been in house 6/1 for over two weeks, how they’d lived for some time on a cache of potatoes they’d found in the cellar, how they’d drunk the water from the central heating system, and had given the Germans such a hard time that they’d sent an envoy with an offer of free passage to the factory. Naturally their commander – the boy referred to him as the ‘house-manager’ – had replied by ordering them all to open fire. When they reached the Volga, the boy lay down and began to drink; he then shook the drops from his jacket onto the palm of his hand and licked them off. It was as though he were starving and they were crumbs of bread. He explained that the water in the central heating system had been foul. To begin with, they had all had stomach-upsets, but then the house-manager had ordered them to boil the water and they had recovered.
They walked on in silence. The boy listened to the sound of the bombers and looked up at the night sky, now decorated by red and green flares and the curved trajectories of tracer-bullets and shells. He saw the glow of the guttering fires in the town, the white flame of the guns and the blue columns of water sent up by shells falling in the Volga. His pace gradually slackened, till finally the officer shouted: ‘Come on now! Look lively!’
They made their way between the rocks on the bank; mortar-bombs whistled over their heads and they were constantly challenged by sentries. Then they climbed a little path that wound up the slope between the bunkers and trenches. Sometimes there were duck-boards underfoot, sometimes steps cut into the clay. Finally they reached the Headquarters of the 62nd Army. The officer straightened his belt and made his way down a communication trench towards some bunkers constructed from particularly solid logs.
The sentry went to call an aide; through a half-open door they glimpsed the soft light of an electric lamp under its shade. The aide shone his torch at them, asked the boy’s name and told them to wait.
‘But how am I going to get back home?’ asked the boy.
‘All roads lead to Kiev,’ answered the aide. He then added sternly: ‘Go on now – get inside! Otherwise you’ll get yourself killed by a mortar-bomb and I’ll have to answer for you to the general.’
The boy sat down in the warm, dark entranceway, leant against the wall and fell asleep.
In his dreams the terrible cries and screams of the last few days blurred together with the quiet, peaceful murmur of his own home – a home that no longer existed. Then someone shook him and he heard an angry voice:
‘Shaposhnikov! You’re wanted by the general! Look lively!’
60
Seryozha Shaposhnikov spent two days at Army HQ. He found it oppressive. People seemed to hang around all day doing nothing.
Somehow it reminded him of the time he had spent eight hours in Rostov with his grandmother, waiting for the train to Sochi – he laughed at the absurd idea of comparing house 6/1 to a holiday resort. He kept begging the chief of staff to let him go, but the latter had had no definite instructions from the general. The general had already spoken to Shaposhnikov, but after two questions their conversation had been interrupted by a telephone call from his commanding officer. The chief of staff preferred not to let the boy go for the time being – the general might still remember him.
Every time the chief of staff came into the bunker, he felt Shaposhnikov looking at him. Sometimes he said: ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten,’ but at other times the boy’s constant look of entreaty really got under his skin. ‘Anyway,’ he demanded, ‘what are you complaining about? It’s nice and warm here and you get lots of food. There’ll be time enough to get yourself killed back at the front.’
When a man is plunged up to his neck into the cauldron of war, he is quite unable to look at his life and understand anything; he needs to take a step back. Then, like someone who has just reached the bank of a river, he can look round: was he really, only a moment ago, in the midst of those swirling waters?
Seryozha’s old life in the militia regiment now seemed almost unbelievably peaceful: sentry-duty at night in the steppe, a distant glow in the sky, the soldiers’ conversations . . .
Life in house 6/1 had blotted out everything that had gone before. Improbable though this life was, it now seemed the only reality; it was as if everything before was imaginary. Only now and then, at night, did he feel a sudden twinge, a sudden surge of love as he imagined Alexandra Vladimirovna’s grey head or Aunt Zhenya’s quick, mocking eyes.
During his first days in house 6/1 he had thought how strange and impossible it would be if people like Grekov, Kolomeitsev and Antsiferov were suddenly to appear at home . . . Now he sometimes thought how absurd his aunts, his cousin and Uncle Viktor would seem if they were suddenly to become part of his present life.
Heavens! If his grandmother could hear the way he swore now . . .
Grekov!
He wasn’t sure whether these men had always been exceptional, or whether they had only become exceptional on arriving in house 6/1.
Grekov! What an extraordinary combination of strength, daring, authority and common sense. He remembered the price of children’s shoes before the war; he knew the wages of a machinist or a cleaning lady, how much grain and money the peasants received for each unit of work on the collective farm where his uncle lived.
Sometimes he talked about how things had been in the army before the war: the purges, the constant examinations, the bribes you had to pay for an apartment. He talked about men who’d became generals in 1937 by writing dozens of statements and denunciations unmasking supposed enemies of the people.
Sometimes his strength seemed to lie in his mad bravery, in the gay desperation with which he would leap up from a breach in the wall, throw hand-grenades at the advancing Germans and shout: ‘No you don’t, you swine!’ At other times it seemed to lie in his easygoing simplicity, in the way he could be friends with everyone in the house.
There was nothing exceptional about his life before the war: he had been a foreman, first in a mine, then on a building site, before becoming an infantry captain in a unit stationed on the outskirts of Minsk; he had studied both in the barracks and in the field and had gone to Minsk for further training; in the evening he had read a little, drunk vodka, gone to the cinema, played cards with his friends and quarrelled with his wife, who was jealous, not without reason, of a large number of the women and girls in the district. Grekov had revealed all this quite freely. And now – in Seryozha’s eyes and in the eyes of many others – he had suddenly become a legendary warrior, a crusader for truth.
New people had entered Seryozha’s life, taking the place even of his nearest and dearest.
Kolomeitsev had been in the Navy. He had served on various ships and had been sunk three times in the Baltic. For all his contempt for many highly-esteemed figures, Kolomeitsev always showed the greatest respect for scientists and writers. Seryozha found this very appealing. No military commander, whatever his rank, was of the least importance beside a bald Lobachevsky or an ailing Romain Rolland.
Kolomeitsev’s views on literature were very different indeed from what Chentsov had said about instructive, patriotic literature. There was one writer, either an American or an Englishman, whom he particularly liked. Seryozha had never read this writer and Kolomeitsev couldn’t even remember his name; nevertheless, Kolomeitsev praised him so enthusiastically, in such coarse, colourful language, that Seryozha was convinced he was a great writer.
‘What I like about him,’ said Kolomeitsev, ‘is that he’s not trying to teach me anything. A bloke gets his leg over a woman, a soldier gets pissed, an old man loses his wife – and that’s that. It’s life. It’s exciting, you laugh, you feel sorry, and in the end you still don’t know what it’s all about.’
Kolomeitsev was a frie
nd of Vasya Klimov, the scout.
One day, Klimov and Shaposhnikov had to go right up to the German lines. They climbed over the railway embankment and crept up to a bomb-crater that sheltered a heavy-machine-gun crew and an artillery officer. Pressed flat against the ground, they watched the Germans go about their tasks. One young man unbuttoned his jacket, tucked a red checked handkerchief under his collar and began shaving; Seryozha could hear the scrape of the razor against his wiry, dust-covered stubble. Another German was eating something out of a small flat tin; for a brief moment Seryozha saw his face take on a look of concentrated, lasting pleasure. The officer was winding up his watch. Seryozha felt like asking very quietly, so as not to frighten him: ‘Hey! What time is it?’
Klimov took the pin out of a grenade and dropped it into the crater. Before the dust had settled, he threw another grenade after it and then jumped in himself. The Germans were all dead; it was hard to believe they could have been alive only a moment before. Sneezing at the dust and gas, Klimov took what he needed – the breech-block from the machine-gun, a pair of binoculars and the watch from the officer’s still warm wrist. Very carefully, so as not to get stained with blood, he removed the soldiers’ papers from the remains of their uniforms.
When they got back, Klimov handed over his prizes, described what had happened, asked Seryozha to splash a little water over his hands, then sat down next to Kolomeitsev, saying: ‘Now we can have a fag.’
Just then Perfilev rushed up. He had once described himself as ‘a peaceful inhabitant of Ryazan who likes fishing’.