short, the housekeeper lost her shoes, and the result was that
Nikolai Antonich invited Grandma in for a serious talk.
"I'm this, I'm that!" said Grandma, puffing herself up ths way Nikolai
Antonich did when talking about himself. "Why don't you keep quiet if you're
better than the next man. Let other people say it. Showed me the flat. 'Take
your choice, Nina Kapitonovna!' "
Nikolai Antonich had been given a flat in a new house in Gorky Street
and had offered poor old Grandma the choice of any room she liked in this
splendid flat. He had been running around Moscow a whole month, selecting
furniture. The old flat, Nikolai Antonich said, was to be turned into a
"Captain Tatarinov Museum". The fact that Captain Tatarinov had never set
foot in this flat did not seem to bother him.
"And I bowed to him and said: 'Much obliged, I'm sure. But I've never
yet lived in other people's homes.' "
It was after this conversation that Grandma got the idea of leaving
Nikolai Antonich and coming to live with us. But her fear of him was so
great that instead of simply packing up and going away, she first made her
peace with him and even with the housekeeper. She devised a cunning
psychological plan based on Nikolai Antonich's departure for Bolshevo to
spend his holiday at the Scientists' Rest Home. For the first time in twenty
years she left home and sneaked out of Moscow, umbrella in one hand and
travelling-bag in the other.
Sanya always got up after six and we'd go for a swim before breakfast.
We did the same that morning, which looked no different from any other
Sunday morning.
No different. Then why do I remember it so well? Why do I see, as
though it were yesterday, Sanya and myself tripping down the hill hand in
hand, and he balancing as he glides along the aspen tree thrown across the
brook, while I take off my shoes and wade across, feeling the thick folds of
the sandy bed with my feet? Why is it that I can repeat every word of our
conversation? Why do I still feel the dreamy, misty delight of the river in
the slanting beams of the sun? Why, with a tenderness that wrings my heart,
do I remember every trivial detail of that moming-the drops of water on
Sanya's tanned face, shoulders and chest and the wet tuft of hair on the
back of his head when he comes out of the water and sits down beside me
clasping his knees? And that boy, with his trousers rolled up, and carrying
a home-made net, whom Sanya had taught how to catch crabs with the aid of a
campfire or a bait of rotten meat?
Because before some three or four hours had passed all this-our
wonderful swim together, the dreamy pool of the river with its motionless
banks reflected in it, the boy with the net and a thousand other thoughts,
feelings and impressions-all this was suddenly gone, swept miles and miles
away, looking small, insignificant and infinitely remote as if seen through
the wrong end of binoculars.
September 3, 1941. If time could be made to stand still, I would have
done it the moment when, running back to town and no longer finding Sanya
there, I had got off the tram in Nevsky Prospekt and stopped in front of a
huge shop window displaying the first communique issued by the High Command.
Standing close to the window I read the communique, then turned to see the
grave anxious faces behind me, and a curious feeling took hold of me, as if
this reading of mine was taking place in some new strange life. That
evening, the first warm evening that summer, the pale shadows walking the
pavements, the moon riding the sky above the Admiralty spire with the sun
still up-all these belonged to that mysterious new life. The first words in
that life were written in heavy letters across the whole width of the
window. People kept coming up to read them, and there was nothing you could
do about it, however desperately you wanted to.
Rosalia had given me Sanya's note and I kept taking it out of my bag
and reading it.
"Darling Pi-Mate," ran the hastily scribbled note on the bluish sheet
from his pocket-diary, "I embrace you. Remember, you believe."
When we lived in the Crimea we had a dog named Pirate, who used to
follow me about whenever I went. Sanya used to laugh and invented the name
"Pi-Mate" for the two of us. "Remember, you believe"-those were my words. I
had once said that I believed in his life. He was in excellent spirits.
Though we didn't say goodbye to each other, he did not even mention it in
his note, it didn't mean anything.
I returned to the dacha and spent the night there, but I don't think I
slept a wink. I must have done, though, because I suddenly woke up dismayed,
with a wildly beating heart. "It's war. And there's nothing you can do about
it."
I got up and woke Nanny.
"We must pack up. Nanny. We're leaving tomorrow."
"You do keep changing your mind," Nanny said crossly, yawning.
She was sitting on the bed in a long white nightgown, grumbling
sleepily, while I paced up and down the room, not listening to her, then
flung the windows open. Out there, in the young, smiling wood, such a
stillness reigned, such a joyous peace!
Grandma heard us talking and called me.
"What's the matter, Katya?" she demanded.
"We didn't say goodbye. Grandma! I don't know how it happened, but we
didn't!"
She looked at me and gave me a kiss, then furtively made a sign of the
cross.
"It's a good thing that you didn't. It's a good sign. It means that
hell come back soon," she said, and I cried and felt that I couldn't bear
it, just couldn't bear it.
Pyotr arrived by the evening train, looking tired and worried, but
determined, which was quite unlike him.
It was from him that I first heard that children were to be evacuated
from Leningrad, and it seemed so fantastic that we had to leave this cottage
in the country, where we had been so happy, where Nanny and I had planted
flowers-stocks and marigolds-and the first tender shoots were coming up,
that we had to take little Pyotr in a crowded, dirty railway carriage, in
this heat-all through June the weather had been cold, and now it had started
getting hot and stuffy-take him not only to Leningrad, but farther to some
other strange town!
Pyotr said that the Artists' Union was sending members' children to
Yaroslavl Region. He had already signed on little Pyotr and Nina
Kapitonovna. With Nanny, it was more difficult, but he would have to try
again.
The train with the children was due to leave at four o'clock and it did
so punctually on time. Pyotr came running up at the last moment. His son was
handed to him through the window, and he took him in his arms and pressed
his dark little head to his face. Grandma began to get nervous, so he kissed
him hastily and handed him back.
To this day I cannot recall without distress that scene of the children
going away, a distress that was all the more poignant because I feel so
powerless to describe it adequately. Although I had lived through so much
during those two months of war, and such strange, powerful impressions had
stamped themselves for ever in my heart and mind, that day stands before me
quite apart, all on its own.
September 7, 1941. Rosalia set up a first-aid station in the office of
the former Elite Cinema and the local Defence Committee invited me to work
there as a nurse, Rosalia having told them that I had some experience in
nursing sick people.
"Bear in mind, my dear," the genial old doctor, a member of the Defence
Committee, said to me in confidence, "if you refuse we shall immediately
assign you to fortification work."
Work on fortifications, or "trenching", as people in Leningrad called
it, was of course harder than nursing. Nevertheless, I said thank you and
declined.
We went out late in the afternoon and dug anti-tank ditches all night.
The ground was hard and clayey and had to be broken up first with a pick
before a spade could be used. I found myself working with a team from one of
Leningrad's publishing houses, which had already shown a high standard of
performance in the "digging of Hitler's grave", as it was jokingly called.
The team was made up almost entirely of women-typists, proof-readers,
editors, many of them surprisingly well-dressed. I asked one pretty
brunette, an editor, why she had turned up to dig trenches in such a smart
dress, and she laughed and said that she simply hadn't any other.
The grey, spectral light that hung motionless between earth and sky was
suddenly shot through with something fresh and morning-like, and even the
faint breeze which stole through the field and stirred the bushes that
masked the anti-aircraft guns seemed to generate a different, dawning light.
Far out over the city the barrage balloons, silvered by the still invisible
shafts of the sun, resembled huge amiable fishes.
Everyone looked rather wan by morning, and one girl felt faint, 4 but
still, our team finished their stint ahead of the others. We were very
thirsty, and the brunette with whom I had made friends overnight dragged me
off to where people were queuing up for kvass. Tents had been pitched near
an old, tumbledown church, and we queued up there. My editor friend on a
sudden impulse suggested that we climb up the belfry. It was silly, because
my back ached and I was dead tired, but to my own surprise I found myself
consenting.
I recognised our section from above by the hand-barrow stuck into the
ground with a wall newspaper fixed to it. New people were coming up to it.
Had we done so little, I wondered? But our section merged into another, and
that into another, on and on. As far as the eye could see, women were
breaking the clay in ten-foot deep ditches, throwing it out with shovels and
carrying it away in wheel-barrows. There was not one amongst them who would
not have laughed heartily had anyone told her two months before that she
would drop her home and her work and go outside town at night into an empty
field to dig up the earth and build ditches, earthworks and trenches. But
they had gone out and now had nearly completed these gigantic belts which
girdled the city and broke off only at the roadblocks.
I got home the next day at noon. Dog-tired, I lay down and closed my
eyes. The moment I did so my head began to swim with whirling visions of
girls lifting barrows loaded with hard, heavy clay, wheelbarrows slowly
sliding along planks, and the sun gleaming on the dark-red walls of the
trenches.
Then daylight broke through, faint and lingering after the bright
night, and the paling world slipped away from me as I began to drop off. I
felt so good, so wonderfully good, but for that dreary long-drawn moan-or
was it a song?-which came from behind the partition. How I wished it would
stop...
"Katya, the alert!"
Rosalia was shaking me by the shoulder.
"Get up, it's the alert!"
September 16, 1941. A few days ago I met Varya Trofimova in Nevsky. She
was the wife of an aviator. Hero of the Soviet Union, with whom Sanya had
served in the S.P.A. Varya and I had travelled together to Saratov once to
visit our husbands, and I remember having been surprised to learn that she
was a dentist.
She was a tall, ruddy-cheeked, robust woman, who walked with a
purposeful stride. She reminded me somehow of Kiren, especially when she
laughed loudly, showing her long beautiful teeth.
"And my Grisha," she said with a sigh, "would you believe it, he's
bombing Berlin. Did you read about it?"
We fell into conversation and she suggested that I come and work at the
Stomatological Clinic of the Military Medical Academy.
While I was turning this over in my mind Varya added quickly that I had
better come and see what it was like first, because one young lady she had
recommended had given up the job after two days, saying that she couldn't
stand the smell.
Varya hated "young ladies"-that, too, I remembered from the time we
went to Saratov together.
As a matter of fact the smell really was impossible-it hit me the
moment I entered the corridor, which had wards on both sides. It was a smell
that made me feel sick right away and kept me feeling sick all the time
Varya Trofimova was introducing me to the other nurses, the radiologist, the
head physician's wife and a lot of other people.
Here lay men who had been wounded in the face. Just as I arrived they
brought in a young man who had had his face blown away by a mine.
In nursing these men-I realised this the second or third day of my work
there-one had to keep reassuring them, as it were, that it didn't matter,
there was nothing to worry about if a scar remained, that they must grin and
bear it and hardly anything would be noticeable. But how was one to deal
with that hidden, unspoken fear lurking behind every word, that horror with
which a man gets his first glimpse at his own disfigured face, that endless
standing in front of the mirror on the eve of discharge, those pathetic
attempts to look smart, spruce themselves up?
September 23, 1941. Yesterday I spent the night at home instead of at
the hospital, and early in the morning I went in search of Rosalia, since
there was no one in the flat. I found her in the courtyard. Three boys were
standing in front of her and she was teaching them how to mix paint.
"Too thick is as bad as too thin," she was saying, "Where's the board?
Vorobyov, don't scratch yourself. Try it on the board. Not all at once."
Automatically, she started to speak to me in the same lecturing tone.
"Fire-prevention measures. Painting of attics and other wooden upper
structures. Fire-resistant mixture. I'm teaching the children to use
paint... Oh, Katya, look at me!" she exclaimed. "There's a letter for you! I
have paint on my hands, pull it out."
I put my hand in her pocket and drew out a letter from Sanya...
I ran through it first to leam whether anything had happened to him,
then I reread it more slowly, word by word.
"Do you remember Grisha Trofimov?" he wrote towards the end of the
letter. "We used to spray Paris green together over the lakes. Yesterday we
buried him."
I did not remember Trofimov very well. He had flown off somewhere
almost as soon as I arrived in Saratov. I had no idea that he had been
serving in the same regiment as Sanya. Then I pictured Varya, poor Varya,
and the letter dropped from my hand, the sheets scattering on the ground.
It was time to go to the hospital, but I found myself trudging back to
the house, forgetting that I had given Rosalia the key to the flat. On the
stairs I ran into the "learned nurse", who at once began complaining that
she couldn't fix up anywhere-nobody would employ her because there wasn't
enough to eat-and that one domestic help had got a job with the
Tree-Planting Trust, but she no longer had the strength for such work, etc.,
etc. I listened to her, thinking:
"Varya, poor Varya."
Arriving at the hospital, where I avoided going into the Stomatological
Clinic for fear of running into Varya, I reread the letter, and it struck me
that Sanya had never written me such letters. I recollected that one day in
the Crimea he had come home pale and tired, saying that the stuffy heat gave
him a pain at the back of his head. But next morning his navigator's wife
told me that their plane had caught fire in the air and they had made a
crash landing with a load of bombs. I ran to Sanya, but he said with a
laugh: "You dreamt it."
Sanya, who had always sheltered me, who deliberately spared me any
knowledge of the dangers of his professional life-Sanya had suddenly
written-and in such detail-about the death of a comrade. He had even
described Trofimov's grave.
"In the middle we laid out some dud shells and large stabilisers with
smaller ones for a border, making a sort of flowerbed with iron flowers."
The locker containing my white overall was in the Stomatological Clinic
and I hastily put it on and went out onto the landing leading to the
hospital. Just before I reached my ward I heard Varya's voice, saying: "You
must do it yourself if the patient can't do it yet." She was telling off one
of the nurses for not having washed out a patient's mouth with hydrogen
peroxide, and her voice was the same firm, ordinary voice as that of
yesterday and the day before, and she walked out of the ward with the same
brisk mannish stride, issuing instructions as she went. I glanced at her-the
same old Varya. She knew nothing. For her nothing had happened yet.
Ought I to tell her that her husband had been killed? Or should I say
nothing, and leave it for that sad day to bring her the black message:
"Killed in action in defence of his country", a message that was coming to
hundreds and thousands of our women. At first she would not grasp it, her
heart would refuse to accept it, then it would start fluttering like a
captive bird. There was no escape from it, nowhere you could hide away from
it. This grief was yours-receive it! All that day I hurried past the room
where Varya was working without raising my eyes.
The day dragged on endlessly, with the wounded coming in all the time
until the wards were full up and the senior sister sent me to the head
physician to ask whether she might put some beds in the corridor.
I knocked on the door, first softly, then louder. There was no answer.
I opened the door a little and saw Varya.
The head physician was not there and she must have been waiting for
him, standing there by the window, her shoulders slightly bent, drumming
monotonously on the window-pane with her fingers.
She did not turn round, did not hear me come in, did not see me
standing in the doorway. Slowly, she moved away from the window and struck
her head hard against the wall several times.
"It was the first time in my life that I saw anyone actually beating
his head against a wall. She was striking the wall not with her forehead,
but sort of sideways, probably so that it should hurt more. And she did not
cry. Her face was expressionless, as though she were engaged in some routine
procedure. Then suddenly she pressed her face to the wall and flung her arms
wide.
She knew. All that hard, wearisome day, when non-urgent operations had
had to be put off because there were not enough hands to deal with new
arrivals, when there was nowhere to put the patients and everyone was
fretting and upset, she alone had worked as though nothing had happened. In
Ward No. 1 she had been teaching one poor lad with a lolling tongue to
speak-and she had known. She had told the cook off in a dull voice because
the potatoes had not been properly mashed and got stuck in the patients'
tubes-and she had known. Her brusque, firm voice could be heard now in one
ward, now in another, and nobody in the world would have guessed that she
knew.
December 8, 1941. As clearly as I used to remember the days when Sanya
and I met, I now remember the days when I got letters from him. The letter I
received from him on September 23rd, in which he wrote of Grisha Trofimov's
death, was the third and the last. I have received nothing since.
I am writing this in the light of an oil "blinker", wrapped up in a
winter coat. There is a terrible draught from the window, which has been
smashed in by an air blast and covered up with pillows, and every other
minute I have to take a tin with hot water in my hands to warm them. But I
must write this, even though my fingers are freezing and my head is reeling
from hunger.
There have been no letters. I don't think I had ever worked so hard in
my life as I did that autumn. I attended the Red Cross courses, went to the
front and was even mentioned in despatches for bringing back wounded men
under heavy fire. But still no letters. In vain I searched for Sanya's name
among the airmen who had been decorated for raids on Berlin, Konigsberg and
Ploesti.
But I worked like mad, gathering up speed like a runaway train that
tears ahead, ignoring signals, sounding its whistle as it plunges into the
autumn night.
Then came a day when the train rushed past me, leaving me lying under
the embankment, lonely, broken, steeped in misery.
Varya was with me that evening. The sirens started off, as usual, at
seven thirty. We sat through the first alert, though Rosalia phoned and in
the name of the Self-Defence Group ordered us to go down. We sat through the
second alert too. The bomb-shelters always depressed me, and I had long
decided that if I was to be one of the "unlucky" ones I'd rather it was out
in the open, under Leningrad's skies. Besides, we were roasting coffee-an
important job, seeing that this was not only coffee, but flatcakes too, if
you added a little flour to the grounds. Leningrad was beginning to starve.
But a third alert came on, bombs fell nearby and the house rocked, as
though it had taken a step forward then back. The saucepans came tumbling
down in the kitchen. Varya took my arm and marched me downstairs, ignoring
my protests. Women were standing in the dark entrance hall, talking in quick
anxious tones. I recognised the voice of the yardkeeper, a Tatar woman named
Gul Ijberdeyeva, whom everybody in the building called Masha.
"Number Nine's hit," she was saying. "Hit hard. House manager-he give
order-take spades, go, dig him up."
"Number Nine" was the building which housed Delicatessen Shop No. 9.'
"Take spade, come along. All come! Who has no spade will get spade
there. Come on, missus! When you get hit, they'll dig you out."
"Number Nine" had been cleft into two. The bomb had gone through all
five floors. Through the black jagged gap you could see a narrow Leningrad
courtyard with fantastic broken shadows. The facade of the building had
collapsed, blocking the roadway with its debris. Sticking out of the tangled
mass of rubble, furniture and steel girders was the black wing of a grand
piano. A sideboard hung suspended from the fourth floor, and a coat and a
lady's hat could distinctly be seen on the wall.
It was quiet all round. People approached the building at a leisurely
pace, oddly calm, and their voices, too, were slow and guarded. A woman
started to scream, then threw herself on the ground. She was raised and
carried aside and all grew quiet again. A dead old man in a coat white with
plaster and rubble lay on the pavement. People stopped short, peered into
his face and slowly walked round him. ' The basement was flooded. Something
had to be done first about the water. A slim, agile sergeant, who was in
charge of the rescue work, set me to man the pump.
Flushed and beautiful, Varya wrenched mattresses, blankets and pillows
out of the heap of wrecked furniture, laid out the injured on them, applied
artificial respiration, shouted at the stretcher-bearers, and kept the two
ambulance doctors on the run, obedient to her every word.
Hitching up her skirt, she went down into the basement and came out
carrying a wet man across her shoulder. The sergeant ran up to help,
followed by the stretcher-bearers.
"Sit him up!" she commanded.
It was a soldier or an officer. He had no cap and his army coat was
sodden and black from the water. They sat him up. His head dropped on his
chest. Varya took him by the chin, and his head lolled back like a doll's.
There was something familiar about that pale face with the dark-yellow
matted hair clinging to his forehead, and I worked for several minutes,
trying to recollect where I had seen him.
"There, he'll be all right in a minute," Varya said gruffly.
She forced his teeth open and put two fingers into his mouth. He shook
his head violently and his body twitched as he started to draw his breath,
wheezing and gasping.
"Aha, bite, would you?" Varya said.
The pump handle kept going up and down and I could see what Varya was
doing to him only in snatches. Now he was sitting and breathing heavily with
his eyes shut, his face with the flattened nose and square jaw startlingly
white in the moonlight, as though etched in chalk-a face which I had seen a
thousand times and which I now scarcely recognised.
To this day I can't make out why I had not let Romashov-for it was
he-be taken to the hospital. Incredible as it may seem, I was glad, when,
sitting on the ground in Ms unbuttoned army coat, he raised his eyes with a
glazed stricken look, saw me as if through a mist, and said in a barely
audible whisper, "Katya." He wasn't surprised to find me standing there in
front of him with a little bottle of something which Varya said he was to
smell. But when I took his hand to feel his pulse, he clenched his teeth,
shuddering, and repeated still louder: "Katya, Katya."
In the morning we started off home. We staggered along, Varya and I
just as bad as Romashov, although no bomb had cleaved five floors over us,
and we had not floundered in a flooded basement.
Varya and I trudged along, while Masha and some other woman all but
dragged Romashov along behind us. He kept worrying about his kitbag, afraid
it would get lost, until Masha angrily thrust it under his nose, saying:
"Don't think about bag. Think about God. Your life saved, you fool! You
should pray, read Koran!"
He was still sleeping when we left-Rosalia had made up a bed for him in
the dining-room. The blanket had slipped and he was sleeping in clean
underwear. Varya, in passing, straightened the blanket with an habitual
gesture and tucked it under him. He was breathing through clenched teeth and
a slit of eyeball was visible through the eyelids-a Romashov true to life,
not to be confused with any other Romashov in the world.
Somehow it seemed to me that he would disappear by the evening, like a
vision that belonged to that vanished night. But he didn't. When I rang up,
it was he, and not Rosalia, who answered the telephone.
"Katya, I must talk to you," he said in a firm, yet, deferential tone.
"When will you be back? Or may I come and see you?"
"You may come."
"Won't it be rather awkward, though, at the hospital?"
"I daresay it will. But I won't be home for several days."
He was silent for a while.
"I realise that you haven't the slightest desire to see me. But that
was such a long time ago... The reason why you did not want to meet me-"
"Oh, no, not so very long ago."
Silence.
"This is no accident, our meeting. I was on my way to see you. I rushed
down into the basement when I heard someone shout that there were children
there. We must meet, because it's a matter that concerns you."
"What matter?"
"A very important matter. I'll tell you all about it."
My heart missed a beat, as though I didn't know who it was speaking to
me.
"Well?"
Now he was silent, and for so long that I very nearly hung up.
"All right, you needn't see me. I'm going away and you will never see
me again. But I swear..."
He said something in a whisper. I could see him standing there, teeth
clenched and eyes shut, breathing heavily into the mouthpiece, and that
silence and despair suddenly decided me. I said I would come, and rang off.
Cheese and butter on the table-that's what I saw when, letting myself
in with the latchkey, I stopped in the doorway of the dining-room. It was
unbelievable-real cheese, red Dutch cheese, and the butter, too, was real,
in a big enamelled mug. Bread of a kind we had not seen in Leningrad for a
long time was cut up in generous slices. Romashov was engaged in opening
some tins of food with a kitchen knife when I came in. From the kitbag lying
on the table the tip of a bottle could be seen projecting.
Rosalia came out of the bedroom, excited and happy. "Katya," she
whispered to me, "what about Bertha? May I invite her?"
"I don't know."
"My God, you're angry? But I only wanted to know-" "Misha," I broke in,
"Rosalia here wants to find out whether she can invite her sister Bertha to
the table."
"What a question! Where is she? I'll invite her myself." "You'll scare
her, I'm afraid."
He laughed awkwardly. "Supper is served, ladies!"
It was a gay supper. Poor Rosalia prepared the sandwiches with
trembling hands and ate them with a religious expression. Bertha, frail,
grey, with a peaked little nose and wandering glance, whispered something
over every morsel. Romashov chattered without a stop-chattered and drank.
That was when I got a good look at him!
We hadn't seen each other for some years. He had been rather stout
then. His face and body, with its slight backward tilt, had shown those
signs of solidity peculiar to a man who was beginning, to put on weight.
Like all ugly people, he took pains to dress immaculately, even foppishly.
Now he was gaunt and skinny, tightly strapped in new leather harness,
clad in an army tunic with an officer's insignia-not a major, surely? His
skull bones were now prominent. His eyes, unblinking, wide-open, seemed to
have something new in them-weariness perhaps?
"I've changed, haven't I?" he said, seeing that I was studying him.
"The war has turned me inside out. Everything is changed-body and soul."
If it was changed he would not be telling me about it.
"Where did you get all this food, Misha? Stole it?"
Apparently he did not hear the last two words.
"Tuck in, tuck in! I'll get some more. You can get anything here. You
people just don't know how to go about it."
"Really?"
"Yes, of course. You have to know the right people."
I don't know what he meant by that, but instinctively I put my sandwich
back onto the plate.
"Have you been in Leningrad long?"
"Two days. I was transferred from Moscow at the disposal of the chief
of Voentorg (-a retail organisation of army and navy stores.- Tr.) I was at
the Southern Front. Caught in encirclement. Broke through by nothing short
of a miracle."
It was the truth, for me a shocking truth, but I listened to him
carelessly, with a long-forgotten sense of my power over him.
"We retreated towards Kiev. We didn't know that Kiev was cut off. We
thought the Germans were God knows where, but they met us near Khristinovka,
within two hundred kilometres of the front. It was hell," he added with a
laugh. "But that's another story. Now I wanted to tell you that I saw
Nikolai Antonich in Moscow. Strange to say, he stayed in Moscow, didn't
evacuate."
"Is that so?" I said indifferently.
We were silent for a while.
"Didn't you want to talk to me about something, Misha?" I said at
length. "If so, come into my room."
He stood up and straightened his back. Drew his breath and adjusted his
belt.
"Yes. Do you mind if I take some wine with us?"
"No."
"Which one?"
"Anyone you like, I won't drink."
He took a bottle and some glasses from the table, thanked Rosalia and
followed me out. We settled down-I on the sofa, he at the table, which had
once been Sasha's. Her paint brushes in a tall glass still stood on it
untouched.
"It's a long story."
He was agitated. I was calm.
"A very long and... Do you smoke?"
"No."
"Lots of women have started smoking during the war."
"I know. They're waiting for me at the hospital. You have exactly
twenty minutes."
"Very good," Romashov enunciated slowly. "I won't tell the story of how
I came to be in the South. We fought near Kiev and were defeated."
He said "we".
"At Khristinovka I joined a hospital train which was making for Uman,
bypassing Kiev. They were ordinary goods trucks with the wounded lying in
them on bunks. A lot of them badly wounded. We travelled three, four, five
days, in stuffy heat and dust..."
Bertha was praying in the next room.
He got up and shut the door.
"I was shell-shocked a couple of days before I joined the hospital
train. True, just lightly-stabs once in a while in my left side. It still
gets sort of brownish, you know," he added with a strained smile.
*Voentorg-a retail organisation of army and navy stores.- Tr.
Varya, who had changed his clothes that night, had said that his left
side was burnt-I suppose that is what he called "gets brownish".
"I found myself taking things in hand on our train-managing the
household, you know. The first thing to be done was to organise meals, and
I'm proud to say that throughout the journey-we were a good fortnight
travelling-no one died of starvation. But I'm not talking about myself."
"About whom then?"
"Two girls, students from a Teachers' College at Stanislav, were
travelling with us. They carried meals to the wounded, changed dressings,
did everything they could. Then one day one of them called me to an airman,
a wounded airman lying in one of the trucks."
Romashov poured out some wine.
"I asked the girls what it was about. 'Talk to him.' 'What about?' 'He
doesn't want to live, says he'll shoot himself, cries.' We went to see
him-it so happened that I had never been in that particular truck before. He
was lying on his face, his legs bandaged, but very carelessly, clumsily. The
girls sat down next to him, called him..."
Romashov fell silent.
"Why don't you have a drink, Katya?" he said in a voice that had gone
husky. "I'm drinking all by myself. I'll get drunk-what will you do then?"
"Turn you out. Finish your story."
He tossed off the glass, took a walk round the room, and sat down
again. I took a sip. After all, the world was full of airmen!
Here is the story as Romashov told it.
Sanya had been wounded in the face and legs. The lacerated wound in the
face was healing. He had said nothing about the circumstances in which he
was wounded-Romashov got that quite by accident from the army newspaper Red
Falcons, which carried a paragraph about Sanya. He was bringing me that
newspaper, and would have brought it but for that stupid accident, when he
almost got drowned in the basement trying to save the children. But that
didn't matter, he remembered the paragraph by heart:
"While returning from a mission the aircraft piloted by Captain
Grigoriev was overtaken by four enemy fighter planes. In the unequal combat
Grigoriev shot down one Fighter, and put the others to flight. Though his
machine was damaged, Grigoriev flew on. Not far from the front-line he was
attacked again, this time by two Junkers. Grigoriev, his machine in flames,
rammed one of the Junkers. The men of the X air unit will forever cherish
the memory of their brave comrades, Captain Grigoriev, Navigator Luri, Radio
Operator-Gunner Karpenko and Aerial Gunner Yershov, who fought for their
country to their last breath."
This might not be the exact text, the words might be in a different
order, but the substance of it was correct-Romashov was prepared to vouch
for it with his life. He had kept the copy of the paper in his dispatch-case
together with other papers, very important ones, but the dispatch-case had
fallen into the water, the newspaper had become wet pulp, and when he had
dried it he found that the column containing the paragraph was missing. But
that did not matter.
Sanya, then, was considered killed, but he was only wounded- wounded in
the face and legs. In the face only lightly, but in the legs evidently
seriously. At any rate, he couldn't go about unaided.
"How did he come to be in the train?" "I don't know," said Romashov,
"we didn't speak about it." "Why not?" "Because an hour after our talk,
twenty kilometres short of Khristinovka our train was shot up by German
tanks." That's what he said, "shot up."
It was unexpected, running into German tanks behind our own lines. The
train stopped-the locomotive was put out of action by the first shell. The
wounded started to jump out onto the embankment, scattering, and the Germans
used shrapnel on them, firing through the train.
First thing, Romashov ran to Sanya. It was no easy job-dragging him out
of the truck under fire, but Romashov did it and they hid behind the wheels.
The badly wounded screamed in the trucks:
"Brothers, help!" and the Germans kept on firing. It was getting close
to where they lay and Sanya said: "Run, I have a pistol, they won't get me."
But Romashov did not leave him. He dragged him aside into a ditch, knee-deep
in the mud, though Sanya struggled with him and swore. Then a lieutenant
with a burnt face helped Romashov to drag him across the swampy ground, and
there left them, the two of them, in a wet little aspen wood.
It was terrifying, because a big German tank-mounted force had seized
the nearest railway station; fighting was going on all round, and at any
moment the Germans might make their appearance in the wood, which was the
only defensible spot in a stretch of open country. They had to move on,
there wasn't a minute to be lost. But the wound on Sanya's face had opened,
and he kept telling Romashov: "Leave me, you'll never make it with me!" And
once he said: "I thought that in my position I'd have to fear you." When he
put his legs down the pain was unbearable. Romashov made a crutch for him
out of a tree branch. But Sanya could not walk all the same, so Romashov
went alone-not forward, but back to the train in the hope of finding those
Stanislav girls. But he did not get to the train, the Germans opened fire on
him on the edge of the marsh. He went back.
"I got back in an hour, maybe a little more," Romashov said, "and I
didn't find him. It was a small wood and I searched the length and breadth
of it. I was afraid to shout but nevertheless I did, several times. There
was no answer. I searched all night until finally I dropped down and fell
asleep. In the morning I found the spot where we had parted. The moss was
torn up and trampled down, and the crutch lay under a tree..."
Afterwards Romashov had got caught in an encirclement, but broke
through to our troops with a detachment of sailors off the Dnieper Flotilla.
He never heard about Sanya again.
I had pictured to myself a thousand times how I would get to know about
this. A letter would come, an ordinary letter without a stamp, and I would
open it-and the world would be blotted out. Or Varya would come-Varya, whom
I had tried so many times to comfort-and she would try to break the news to
me gently, starting from afar with: "If he were killed, what would you do? "
And I would answer:
"I wouldn't survive it." Or I would be standing in a queue with other
women at the Military Registration Office, and we would be looking at one
another, all thinking the same thing: "Who would it be today? " I had
thought of everything, but never had it entered my mind that I would hear
about this from Romashov.
It was all nonsense, of course. He had made it up or read something
like it in a magazine. Most likely he had made it up. The calculated cunning
so characteristic of him was evident in his every word. But how unfair, how
painful it was to have this stupid, this harrowing game played out at my
expense! To have this man turn up in Leningrad, where life was hard enough
without him, in order to deceive me so meanly!
"Misha," I began very calmly, "all this is a lie and you know it. If
you don't admit it and ask my forgiveness, I'll drive you out like the cad
you are. When did this happen-all you've been telling me? "
"In September."
"There, you see-in September. And I received a letter dated the
twentieth of October in which Sanya writes that he is alive and well and may
fly in to Leningrad for a day o