Nikolai had found some flowers, some violets. He had seized them and carried them under his coat through the mud and the broken brick buildings, scrambling over rubble and rubbish, nursing his burden, until he had reached the sewer. He pulled them out from his pocket and presented them shyly. Valeria smiled, had been about to say thank you, when a shell crashed into the crater outside. Everyone dived for cover. Valeria dived on the violets, and crushed them. When the dust settled, she stood up again holding the dead, fraying flowers.
Nourishment was gained from chewing coffee grounds, or bread, flat, dry bread made from the oil cake once fed to the cattle. It contained no flour. Nikolai's mother, Valeria's mother, hundreds of mothers fed their children on thin yeast soup. Nikolai watched his brother Pavel grow old at ten, a tiny, dwarf-like figure shrouded within a huge, thick charcoal coat. He stood by the stove, pale as a ghost, deep ash-coloured circles under his eyes, his stomach bulging like a ripe water melon over his matchstick legs. He'd found half a potato and a piece of mouldy black bread, and crammed it into his mouth. Nikolai watched his brother chewing silently, snot dribbling from his nose over the spots around his lips. When he'd forced down the last of the bread, he sat down by the stove and died.
Nikolai and Lera had gone scavenging together, combing the ruins for food. And then the winter arrived.
The temperature plunged to -44. The two teenagers bundled themselves into layers and layers of clothing, blankets and newspapers, shrouded their shoes in old rags, buried their faces in scarves and balaclavas, and stepped out into the glaring brightness of the ice and the snow. They saw dogs, whole packs of them, frozen stiff and solid. They saw a mangy horse wandering in Ploschad Titova, its urine freezing as it left its body. They broke into a house off Stimienko and found ice on the walls, the windows shattered. On a chair near the door sat a dead twelve year old boy. His face was blue, his lips were white. He sat upright, expectant, as though waiting for someone. On the bed lay his dead mother. Next to her, lay a frozen baby.
Lera and Nikolai argued fiercely about stripping the wallpaper. Lera had heard that the paste was made from potatoes, but Nikolai declared it was poisonous. They left the house together, still arguing, and entered the yard. There the talking stopped.
Twenty, maybe thirty corpses lay in the snow. They were all naked. Women, young girls, babies, boys, heaped together or strung out in rows around pools of frozen blood. Children's underwear, tiny shoes, tin cups, scattered buttons and torn photographs were strewn around the yard, spattered with blood and the thick grey porridge Nikolai would come to recognise as human brains.
Lera vomited violently into the blood-stained snow, but Nikolai walked towards the heap of death to imprint on his memory the frozen, straining breasts of the women, the frozen, jutting penises of the boys, the marble whiteness of this sculpted monument to the Fascist Invader, and the bullet-entry points in the backs of the necks, the twenty-one open mouths, glazed red holes, on the chest of an old man. He wanted to see. he wanted to feel. He wanted to remember what the Fascists had done to his people. They had stormed the houses, dragged out the people, shot them all and stolen their clothes. Nikolai imagined the lingering echoes of "Raus, Raus" and "Ruki Vyerk" and the cries and the volleys of machine gun fire and he vowed he would never forget and never forgive, and he didn't, not till it was over.
Lera and her mother joined Nikolai and his in their bomb shelter with three other families, their lice and their dysentery. One dark night, during a fierce bombardment from the Red Army's T34 tanks coming over the Mamaev Kurgan, Nikolai and Lera had slept together, making love with a silent, ferocious determination. Lera had cried and Nikolai had sworn he would marry her after the war.
Then the Red Army had broken through, smashing the Rumanians and driving on to the very outskirts of the city. The German boats were locked into the ice of the avenging Volga, sitting targets for the Russian artillery at Krasnoslobodsk and the MiG fighters sweeping out of the skies. On January 31st 1943 the German Sixth Army surrendered. Nikolai was two months away from his fifteenth birthday, Valeria six.
The children had run to the centre to watch whilst Red Army Commissars marched Field Marshal Paulus and his officers corps out of their bunker, and they burned with hatred. Every time Nikolai went to the Central Department Store known as Tsum, the vast, cavernous shop which sold electrical goods, clothes, food, plants, books and furniture, he saw that line, those pathetic, frail, exhausted scarecrows, feet wrapped in blankets, faces rimed with stubble and frost, spirits broken, and remembered his hatred, remembered that courtyard off Stimienko.
Nikolai Ribakov had nursed his hatred for the next thirteen years, until, in another hospital, in another great city, Budapest, he had finally forgiven, finally let the fires of his hatred die, but not till he had taken his vengeance, expressed his anger, rampaged through their cities as they had done his.
Then he had had his son. Oh, they had wanted more, had tried for more, but the little girl had died in the hospital a few hours' old and the other little boy, Kolya's brother, had died in Lera's womb. It was a miracle that Kolya had made it. Something about the diet, the starvation, the privation of those war years had left their marks on Lera's body, somehow corrupted her womanhood.
They had been happy, they and their son. They had both worked at the tractor factory, steady jobs producing the mechanics by which the Soviet Union was to conquer the earth, but things were changing. Stalin was dead (they had both wept on that dreadful day in '53), Kruschchev had failed, Brezhnev was in, and there was no money, except for parades, but still, they had lived in the communal flat and shared their meals with other families, complained together about their lot, then drunk vodka and sung songs in the firelight. Happy days.
Nikolai was concerned about his son. He was always concerned about his son. Forty years old and manning a kiosk was not the future he was supposed to have. He had pursued a military career, reached the rank of Major in the Red Army, but given it up to get married. Oh, Nina was a nice girl, although her brother was a bit of a clown, and her father….Nikolai did not like his son's father-in-law. He was a cold, stern, unbending man, ramrod-straight, gruff, close, regretting the dismantling of the Union, loathing Yeltsin and Gorbachev in equal measure for bringing ruin on his nation. He also seemed to look down on Kolya, the kiosk-keeper. No matter that Kolya had served his country in Afghanistan, or that he had lost his job when the factory closed. No, no-one, save some high-ranking apparatchik would have done for Princess Nina.
What Ivan thought, Nikolai did not know. He felt it would be inappropriate to ask. He seemed to get on well with his forbidding grandfather. He was good at sport. That was probably the key to their relationship.
Nikolai worried that his son had seemingly wrapped up all his thwarted ambitions in Ivan. It wasn't healthy. He knew himself that an only son was the world, but Kolya had taken it to an extreme. Should Vanya fail, Kolya too would fail, and that would destroy him just as surely as the deaths of the babies had destroyed Lera. Never a day went by without her remembering, and muttering some ancient prayer or other for their souls. Nikolai was made of sterner stuff.
''They weren't meant to be,'' he had told her repeatedly. ''Don't dwell on the distant past. Celebrate the present. Enjoy Kolya and Nina and Vanushka. Make your life in the here and now, and in Vanya's future.''
But she could not be comforted. Sometimes she would take the tiny knitted bootees from their bureau, the pink ones she had made for the girl, and stroke them softly, murmuring incantations.
This was not healthy. Nikolai knew that.
''You mustn't brood, love,'' he said, but he had been saying that for forty years and nothing really changed. She was too soft, too sentimental, despite everything she had been through in her seventy-something years. Maybe it was losing the children.
Things might be different, he reflected, easing the old Volga off the main road and onto a dirt track. The letter from Hungary was burning a hole in his pocket. He wanted to share its contents with his
wife, really he did, but the timing was critical. The letter could change everything. Once Lera knew, Kolya would have to know. How he would react was anybody's guess. Tonight, with Vanya in hospital, was not the night. Nikolai would have to wait.
"What are you thinking about?" asked Lera, folding her knitting needles into the thick brown wool that would become Kolya's New Year socks.
"How much I love you," said Nikolai Aleksandrovich, stopping the car.
"I think you're going soft," said Lera affectionately, unfastening her seat belt.
"It's a beautiful night," said Nikolai.
The fog had cleared and the stars shone brilliantly, a thousand bright eyes watching from the dark. He stood with his wife at the garden gate, the gentle breeze ruffling his thinning silver hair, and looked back down the rutted dirt track that was Ardatskaya and which led to the small wooden house they had shared for the last thirty years. He reached for her hand. He knew what he had to do. He would read her the letter, but not tonight.
"Ivanushka will be all right," he said. "I can feel it. I can see it. All those eyes watching from Heaven. Whilst the stars are watching him, he'll be all right. Twenty one million Russians, our fathers