‘Hey, Klimov! Don’t make yourself too comfortable!’ he shouted. ‘The house-manager’s looking for you. You’ve got to go behind the German lines again.’
‘All right,’ said Klimov guiltily. ‘I’m coming.’
He began collecting together his belongings – a tommy-gun and a canvas bag full of hand-grenades. He handled objects very carefully, as though he were somehow afraid of hurting them. He never swore and he addressed nearly everyone in the polite form of the second person.
‘You’re not a Baptist, are you?’ old Polyakov once asked this man who had killed a hundred and ten people.
Klimov was by no means taciturn, however, and he particularly liked talking about his childhood. His father had worked at the Putilov factory. He himself had been a skilled lathe-operator; before the war he had taught apprentices. He made Seryozha laugh with a story of how one of his apprentices had nearly choked to death on a screw; he had gone quite blue before Klimov managed to remove the screw with a pair of pliers.
Once Seryozha saw Klimov after he had drunk a captured bottle of schnapps; then he had been quite terrifying – even Grekov had seemed wary of him.
The untidiest man in the building was Lieutenant Batrakov. He never cleaned his boots and one of the soles flapped on the ground – people didn’t have to look up to know when he was coming. On the other hand he cleaned his glasses hundreds of times a day with a small piece of chamois; apparently the lenses were the wrong strength – it was as if they were blurred by dust and smoke. Klimov had brought him several pairs of German spectacles but, though the frames were good, the lenses were no better than his own.
Before the war Batrakov had taught mathematics at a technical school; he was very arrogant and he talked about his ignorant students with disdain. He had put Seryozha through a full-scale maths exam; everyone had laughed at his failure and told him he would have to retake the course.
Once, during an air-raid, when earth, stone and iron were being smashed apart by sledge-hammer blows, Grekov saw Batrakov sitting on top of what was left of a staircase, reading a book.
‘No,’ said Grekov, ‘the Germans haven’t got a hope. What can they do against madmen like that?’
Far from terrifying the inmates of the building, the German attacks only succeeded in arousing a certain condescending irony: ‘Hm, the Fritzes really are having a go at it today!’ ‘Look what those maniacs are doing now!’ ‘The fool – where does he think he’s dropping his bombs?’
Batrakov was a friend of Antsiferov, the commander of the sapper detachment, a man in his forties who loved talking about his various chronic illnesses. This was unusual at the front: when people were under fire, ulcers and sciaticas usually cleared up of their own accord.
Even in Stalingrad, however, Antsiferov continued to suffer from the numerous diseases that had attacked his enormous body; captured German medicines were of no help. He had a large, bald head, a full face, and his eyes were round. At times there was something quite bizarre about him – especially when he was sitting in the sinister light cast by the distant fires and drinking tea with his soldiers. He suffered from corns and he always felt hot; usually he took off both his shoes and his tunic. There he would sit – sipping hot tea from a cup decorated with tiny blue flowers, wiping his bald head with a huge handkerchief, smiling, sighing and blowing into his cup. The sullen Lyakhov, a bandage round his head, would constantly refill this cup with boiling water from a soot-encrusted kettle. Sometimes Antsiferov would climb up on a small mound of bricks, wheezing and groaning, to see what was happening in the world. Bare-foot, with no shirt, he might have been a peasant coming to the door of his hut during a downpour to keep an eye on his garden.
Before the war he had been a foreman on a building site. His experience of construction now proved useful for the opposite purpose: he was constantly mulling over the best way to destroy cellars, walls, even entire buildings.
Most of his discussions with Batrakov were about philosophical matters. He evidently needed to think over this shift from construction to destruction, to find meaning in it. Sometimes, however, they left the heights of philosophy (Does life have a meaning? Does Soviet power exist in other galaxies? In what way is Man intellectually superior to Woman?) to touch on more mundane matters.
Stalingrad had changed everything; now the muddle-headed Batrakov seemed a man of wisdom.
‘You know, Vanya,’ said Antsiferov. ‘It’s only through you that I’ve begun to understand anything. I used to think there was nothing more I needed to know about life: all I had to do was to get new tyres for one person’s car, give another some vodka and something to eat, and slip a hundred roubles to a third . . .’
Batrakov seriously believed that it really was his muddle-headed philosophizing – rather than Stalingrad itself – that had led Antsiferov to see people in a different light.
‘Yes, my friend’, he said condescendingly. ‘It’s a real pity we didn’t meet before the war.’
The infantry were quartered in the cellar. It was they who had to beat off the German attacks and, at Grekov’s piercing call, launch counter-attacks themselves.
Their commander, Lieutenant Zubarev, had studied singing at the Conservatory before the war. Sometimes he crept up to the German lines at night and began singing ‘Don’t Wake Me, Breath of Spring’, or one of Lensky’s arias from Eugene Onegin.
If anyone asked why he risked his life to sing among heaps of rubble, he wouldn’t answer. It may have been from a desire to prove – to himself, to his comrades and even to the enemy – that life’s grace and charm can never be erased by the powers of destruction, even in a place that stank day and night of decaying corpses.
Seryozha could hardly believe he had lived all his life without knowing Grekov, Kolomeitsev, Polyakov, Klimov, Batrakov and the bearded Zubarev. He himself had been brought up among intellectuals; he could now see the truth of the faith his grandmother had repeatedly affirmed in simple working people. He was also able to see where his grandmother had gone wrong: in spite of everything, she had thought of the workers as simple.
The men in house 6/1 were far from simple. One statement of Grekov’s had particularly impressed Seryozha:
‘No one has the right to lead other people like sheep. That’s something even Lenin failed to understand. The purpose of a revolution is to free people. But Lenin just said: “In the past you were led badly, I’m going to lead you well.”’
Seryozha had never heard such forthright condemnations of the NKVD bosses who had destroyed tens of thousands of innocent people in 1937. Nor had he heard people talk with such pain of the sufferings undergone by the peasantry during collectivization. It was Grekov who raised these matters most frequently, but Kolomeitsev and Batrakov talked of them too.
Every moment Seryozha spent at Army HQ – away from house 6/1 – seemed interminably wearisome. There was something quite absurd in conversations about the duty-roster, about who had been called to see which commanding officer. Instead, he tried to imagine what Polyakov, Kolomeitsev and Grekov were up to now.
It was evening; things would be quietening down. Probably they were talking yet again about Katya.
Once Grekov had decided on something, neither the Buddha nor Chuykov would be able to stop him. Yes, that building housed a bunch of strong, remarkable, desperate men. Zubarev would probably be singing his arias again . . . And she would be sitting there helplessly, awaiting her fate.
‘I’ll kill them!’ he thought, not knowing who he had in mind.
What chance did he have? He’d never kissed a girl in his life. And those devils were experienced; they’d find it easy enough to make a fool of her.
He looked at the door of the bunker. Why had he never thought before of simply getting up, just like that, and leaving?
Seryozha got up, opened the door, and left.
Just then the duty-officer at Army HQ was instructed over the phone to send the soldier from the encircled building to Vasiliev, the head of the Polit
ical Section, as quickly as possible.
If the story of Daphnis and Chloe still touches people’s hearts, it is not simply because their love was born in the shade of vines and under a blue sky. That story is repeated everywhere – in a stuffy basement smelling of fried cod, in a concentration-camp bunker, to the click of an accountant’s abacus, in the dust-laden air of a cotton mill.
And now the story was being played out again to the accompaniment of the howl of dive-bombers – in a building where people nourished their filthy sweat-encrusted bodies on rotten potatoes and water from an ancient boiler, where instead of honey and dream-filled silence there was only noise, stench and rubble.
61
Pavel Andreyevich Andreyev, an old man who worked as a guard in the Central Power Station, received a letter from his daughter-in-law in Leninsk; his wife, Varvara Alexandrovna, had died of pneumonia.
After receiving this news Andreyev became very depressed. He called very rarely on his friends the Spiridonovs and usually spent the evening sitting by the door of the workers’ hostel, watching the flashes of gunfire and the play of searchlights against the clouds. If anyone tried to start a conversation with him, he just remained silent. Thinking that the old man was hard of hearing, the speaker would repeat the question more loudly. Andreyev would then say: ‘I can hear you. I’m not deaf, you know.’
His whole life had been reflected in that of his wife; everything good or bad that had happened to him, all his feelings of joy and sadness, had importance only in so far as he was able to see them reflected in her soul.
During a particularly heavy raid, when bombs of several tons were exploding around him, Andreyev had looked at the waves of earth, dust and smoke filling the power station and thought: ‘Well, I wonder what my old woman would say now! Take a look at that, Varvara!’
But she was no longer alive.
It was as though the buildings destroyed by bombs and shells, the central courtyard ploughed up by the war – full of mounds of earth, heaps of twisted metal, damp acrid smoke and the yellow reptilian flames of slowly-burning insulators – represented what was left to him of his own life.
Had he really once sat here in a room filled with light? Had he really eaten his breakfast here before going to work – with his wife standing next to him wondering whether to give him a second helping?
Yes, all that remained for him now was a solitary death . . .
He suddenly remembered her as she had been in her youth, with bright eyes and sunburnt arms.
Well, it wouldn’t be long now . . .
One evening he went slowly down the creaking steps to the Spiridonovs’ bunker. Stepan Fyodorovich looked at his face and said: ‘You having a hard time, Pavel Andreyevich?’
‘You’re still young, Stepan Fyodorovich. You’re not as strong as I am. You can still find a way of consoling yourself. But I’m strong; I can go all the way.’
Vera looked up from the saucepan she was washing, unable for a moment to understand what the old man meant. Andreyev, who had no wish for anyone’s sympathy, tried to change the subject.
‘It’s time you left, Vera. There are no hospitals here – nothing but tanks and planes.’
Vera smiled and shrugged her shoulders.
‘Even people who’ve never set eyes on her before say she should cross over to the left bank,’ Stepan Fyodorovich said angrily. ‘Yesterday the Member of the Military Soviet came to our bunker. He just looked at Vera without saying a word. But once we were outside and he was about to get into his car, he started cursing me. “And you call yourself her father! What do you think you’re doing? If you like, we can have her taken across the Volga in an armoured launch.” But what can I do? She just refuses to go.’
He spoke with the fluency of someone who has been arguing day in day out about the same thing. Andreyev didn’t say anything; he was looking at an all-too-familiar darn on his sleeve that was now coming undone.
‘As if she’s going to get any letters from her Viktorov here!’ Stepan Fyodorovich went on. ‘There’s no postal service. Think how long we’ve been here – we haven’t heard from Zhenya or Lyudmila or even from Grandmother . . . We haven’t the least idea what’s happened to Tolya and Seryozha.’
‘Pavel Andreyevich got a letter,’ said Vera.
‘Hardly a letter. Just a notification of death,’ replied Stepan Fyodorovich. Shocked at his own words, he gestured impatiently at the walls of the bunker and the curtain that screened off Vera’s bunk. ‘And this is no place for a young woman – what with workers and military guards around day and night, all of them smoking like chimneys and shouting their heads off.’
‘You might at least take pity on the child,’ said Andreyev. ‘It’s not going to last long here.’
‘And what if the Germans break through?’ said Stepan Fyodorovich. ‘What then?’
Vera didn’t answer. She had convinced herself that one day she would glimpse Viktorov coming through the ruined gates of the power station. She would catch sight of him in the distance – in his flying suit and boots, his map-case at his side.
Sometimes she went out onto the road to see if he was coming. Soldiers going past in lorries would shout out: ‘Come on, my beautiful. Who are you waiting for? Come and join us!’
For a moment she would recover her gaiety and shout back: ‘Your lorry can’t get through where I’m going.’
She would stare at Soviet fighters flying low overhead, feeling certain that any moment she would recognize Viktorov. Once a fighter dipped its wings in greeting. Vera cried out like a desperate bird, ran a few steps, stumbled, and fell to the ground; after that she had back-ache for several days.
At the end of October she saw a dogfight over the power station itself. It ended indecisively; the Russian planes flew up into the clouds and the Germans turned back to the West. Vera just stood there, gazing up into the empty sky. Her dilated eyes looked so full of tension that a technician going through the yard asked: ‘Are you all right, comrade Spiridonova? You’re not hurt?’
She was certain that it was here, in the power station, that she would meet Viktorov; she couldn’t tell her father, however, or the angry Fates would prevent this meeting. Sometimes she felt so certain that she would jump up, bake some rye-and-potato pasties, sweep the floor, clean her dirty boots and tidy everything up . . . Sometimes, sitting with her father at table, she would listen for a moment and say: ‘Just a second,’ then throw her coat over her shoulders, climb up, and look round to see if there was a pilot in the yard, asking how to get to the Spiridonovs’.
Never, not even for one moment, did she think he might have forgotten her. She was sure that Viktorov thought about her day and night, just as she thought about him.
The power station was bombarded by heavy artillery almost every day. The Germans had found the range and their shells fell right inside the building; the ground was constantly shaken by the roar of explosions. Sometimes solitary bombers would fly over and drop their bombs. Low-flying Messerschmidts would strafe the station with their machine-guns. Occasionally German tanks appeared on the distant hills and you could hear the quick chatter of small-arms.
Stepan Fyodorovich, like the other workers, appeared quite accustomed to the bombs and shells, but they were all of them living on their last reserves of energy. Sometimes he felt overwhelmed by a sense of exhaustion; he just wanted to lie down, pull his jacket over his face and be still. Sometimes he got drunk. Sometimes he wanted to run to the Volga, cross over and make his way through the steppe without once looking back. He even felt ready to accept the shame of desertion – anything to escape the terrible whine of bombs and shells. Once he spoke to Moscow over the radio. The Deputy People’s Commissar said: ‘Comrade Spiridonov, greetings from Moscow to the heroic collective of which you are the leader!’ This merely made Spiridonov feel embarrassed – it was hardly a matter of heroism. And then there were constant rumours that the Germans were preparing a massive raid on the power station, that they were determined to raz
e it to the ground with gigantic bombs. Rumours like that made his hands and feet go quite cold. All day long he would keep squinting up at the grey sky. At night he would suddenly jump out of bed, thinking he had heard the taut hum of the approaching German squadrons; his chest and his back would be covered in sweat.
He evidently wasn’t the only person with frayed nerves. Chief Engineer Kamyshov once told him: ‘I can’t take any more. I keep imagining something terrible. Then I look at the road and think: “God, why don’t I just scarper?”’ And Nikolayev, the Party organizer, came round one night and said: ‘Give me a drop of vodka, Stepan Fyodorovich. I’ve run out myself and I can’t get to sleep without my anti-bomb medicine.’ As he filled the glass, Stepan Fyodorovich said: ‘You live and learn. I should have chosen a job with equipment that’s easy to evacuate. But these turbines are nailed to the ground – and so are we. All the other factories were moved to Sverdlovsk months ago.’
‘I just don’t understand it,’ Stepan Fyodorovich said to Vera one day. ‘Everyone else keeps on at me to let them go. I’ve heard every excuse under the sun. And you still refuse, no matter what I say. If I had any choice in the matter, I’d be off right now!’
‘I’m staying here because of you,’ she answered bluntly. ‘If it weren’t for me, you’d be drinking like a fish.’
For all of this, Stepan Fyodorovich did more than sit there and tremble. There was also hard work, courage, laughter and the intoxicating sense of living out a merciless fate.
Vera was constantly tormented by anxiety about her child. She was afraid that it would be born sickly, that it would have been harmed by the life she led in this suffocating, smoke-filled cellar whose floor and walls were constantly shaken by explosions. She often felt sick and dizzy herself. What a sad, frightened baby it would be if its mother had had nothing to feed her eyes on but ruins, fire, tortured earth and a grey sky full of aeroplanes with black swastikas. Maybe it could hear the roar of explosions even now; maybe it cringed at the howl of the bombs, pulling its tiny head back into its contorted body.