But it wasn’t as simple as that, not for the old teacher who had known the boys since they were children, and whose brother had died on a battlefield in the Crimea. That letter, on the special official paper, screamed at him about his part in all of this. No matter how he tried to ignore it, one dreadful thought was determined to be inspected, Am I to quietly lead them to their deaths?
Sensing he was no longer the centre of his teacher’s attention, Anton said almost accusingly, ‘It was you who taught us about the Spartan women!’
Vlad couldn’t help smiling at this sudden change in conversation; he even looked around to catch someone’s eye. Leo obliged and winked at him.
Anton wasn’t known for his interest in lessons. He was the sporty type, excelling in running, football and boxing his own shadow. Although maybe his favourite past-times were intimidating small children, lone small dogs and trying to kiss girls, but only the timid ones that didn’t want to be kissed.
Leo’s mother had a name for Anton, his big brother and their father, ‘Bullies, the lot of them! That poor woman, I don’t know how she puts up with them.’
Mrs Valisov was a short, messy-looking woman who never looked happy. The women in the town had an explanation for her anxious expression and quivering voice, ‘It’s her nerves, of course. She’s a wreck from living with such mean-tempered men.’ Few dared to suggest that it might also be guilt about her hard-working brother and his bewildered family.
Mr Belov seemed as surprised as anyone else to hear Anton talk about Spartan women.
Anton grew impatient. ‘The Spartan mothers who told their sons that if they didn’t win the battle they weren’t to bother coming home?’
Leo, a hardy soul, who wasn’t afraid of Anton and his little gang of desperados, coughed politely, a little ‘ahem’, before saying, ‘I think you mean that they told their sons to come back on their shields. They could come back if they were dead, that is, they could come home beaten as long as they were lying dead on their shield. So they could be victorious and alive, or beaten and dead, but they were allowed home.’
‘Yeah?’ scowled Anton, his face darkening. ‘That’s what I said!’ He swung around to find the source of barely heard titters. If he caught anyone laughing at him, he would have to punish them. His father had taught him that there was nothing worse than being laughed at. As a result, Anton had, not surprisingly, a rather poor sense of humour.
Before there could be an eruption, particularly of the Anton-kind, Mr Belov weighed in, ‘Very good, Anton, but you will have to enlighten me on your reference to the Spartan mothers.’
‘Huh?’ Anton was distracted by some giggling that only he could hear.
‘What is your point, boy?’ Mr Belov was starting to tire of everything.
‘Well’, pouted the teenager, ‘in a way, you are… no, you should be like a Spartan mother.’
Leo snorted, prompting the others to forget themselves and laugh aloud. They expected their teacher to laugh with them, or even smile broadly, and gave him his cue. Instead, he stood up straight and tense, his lips hardly moving to spit out the word, ‘Pardon?’
Misinterpreting Mr Belov’s sudden sternness as disgust for his classmates’ treatment of him, Anton launched himself superbly, ‘What I mean, sir, is that you are our leader. We will take our leave of you at the registrar office, see? You will wave us off to battle, like those mothers, sending us off to become men. You have to tell us to be victorious or…’
The laughter died a sudden death when their teacher’s expression of rage was duly noted by all the students.
‘You imbecile, Vasiliev! You stupid, stupid boy. You want me to tell you all to go and die?’
Utterly confused, poor Anton opened his mouth to say something but had no idea what.
TANYA
It was Tanya who’d told Yuri that Peter was an orphan. Nobody claimed to know where his father was, including Peter, but his mother had died somewhere down by the Volga. She’d been shot dead as she filled buckets with water. The buckets were still there, one was yellow and one was blue. Her body was elsewhere, perhaps carried along by the current to some far-flung resting place.
Tanya had lived in the flat next door to them, in a tall, white apartment block on Gogolya Street. It was long gone now, both the building and the street. For several days, Peter had tried to show Yuri where it used to stand but he hadn’t been able to make sense of the mountains of rubble.
It was difficult to remember what the city used to be like before the Germans bombed it into concrete mush. A lot of places were just gone, Yuri’s house was gone, his entire street, the whole area was gone, including Mr Olga’s barber shop, where Yuri had sat impatiently through too many haircuts that always involved a lot more time and work than they should have. Yuri imagined that Mr Olga fancied himself as an artist who was forced to make do with cutting or shaping men’s hair, one strand at a time.
Yuri had wondered where Mr Olga was now – just as he had wondered about his best friends, Grigori and Anatoly. But then he had decided to make himself stop thinking about them. He had closed off that part of his mind; he had tried to close off the pain.
The boys had been out on one of their walks when Peter had spotted his neighbour. Gasping in utter delight, he’d run into her open arms, leaving Yuri staring at them both in amazement. No introductions had been forthcoming; Yuri had simply had to wait until the pretty girl and little boy had stopped hugging one another before she’d taken any notice of him. When she’d smiled at him, at long last, Yuri’d felt both out of his depth and out of breath, as if he’d just been sprinting hard and wasn’t sure about where the finish line was.
Peter hadn’t known any better so he hadn’t bothered saying something like, this is Yuri, or this is Tanya.
Sticking out her hand, Tanya had taken charge. ‘Hi, I’m Tanya!’
Yuri’d never shaken a girl’s hand before and he’d stared away from her as he’d allowed her to shake his, barely remembering to follow this up with a stammering introduction of his own.
Maybe to spare him further embarrassment – a girl like her was used to having admirers – she’d turned her full attention on Peter again, who’d been too ignorant to be bashful just because someone was pretty. ‘Where have you been, pet?’
Peter had stared at her for a moment, as if he’d been asked the most unusual question ever, and then he’d given a shockingly perfunctory answer, ‘With Yuri!’
Shrugging her shoulders, she’d laughed. ‘Well, that’s as good an answer as any, I suppose.’
Yuri remembered grinning; at least that’s what he hoped his face had been doing.
Tanya had persisted with Peter. ‘And where have you been with Yuri?’
Delighted to have made her laugh before, the small boy had tried again, smiling brightly, sticking his tongue between his teeth and saying in a babyish voice, ‘Em… em… I forget!’
Tanya had turned back to Yuri, glancing around them as she’d said, ‘I’m glad he found you.’