In his heart he reproached Lyudmila for her coldness towards his mother. Once he had even said: 'If you hadn't got on so badly with my mother, she'd have been living with us when we were in Moscow.'
She, for her part, kept going over Viktor's many acts of injustice towards her son Tolya. She resented the way he had always been conscious only of Tolya's faults. He had never let him get away with anything – though he had always been only too willing to pardon Nadya her rudeness, her laziness, her slovenliness and unwillingness to help in the house.
Viktor's mother, Anna Semyonovna, had indeed suffered a terrible fate. But how could he have expected her to get on with Anna Semyonovna when Anna Semyonovna didn't like Tolya? That had been enough to make her letters and her visits to Moscow quite unbearable. It had always been Nadya, Nadya, Nadya… Nadya's got Viktor's eyes… Nadya's absent-minded, Nadya's quick-witted, Nadya's very thoughtful. Anna Semyonovna's tenderness and love for her son had extended into a tenderness and love for her granddaughter. But as for Tolya – he didn't even hold his fork in the same way Viktor had done.
She had also begun to think more and more often of Tolya's father, her first husband. She wanted to look up his relatives and his elder sister. Yes, they would immediately recognize Tolya's eyes, Tolya's wide nose, Tolya's slightly deformed thumb as the very eyes, nose and thumb of Abarchuk.
She now no longer remembered any of Viktor's kindness towards Tolya. In the same way she no longer remembered any of Abarchuk's cruelty towards herself – even the fact that he had left her when Tolya was a new-born baby, forbidding her to give him his surname.
In the morning Lyudmila would be left alone in the house. She looked forward to that; her family only got in her way. Everything in the world, the war, the fate of her sisters, Viktor's work, Nadya's unhappiness, her mother's health, her own compassion for the wounded, her grief over the men who had died in German camps -everything sprang from the pain and anxiety she felt for her son.
The feelings of her mother, the feelings of Viktor and Nadya, seemed to her to have been smelted from a quite different ore. Their devotion to Tolya, their love for him, seemed shallow. For her, the whole world was contained in Tolya; for them, Tolya was just a part of the world.
The weeks passed and still there was no letter from Tolya.
Every day Soviet Information Bureau bulletins were broadcast over the radio; every day the newspapers were full of the war. The Soviet forces were in retreat. The artillery was often mentioned in these bulletins and reports. Tolya served in the artillery. There was still no letter from Tolya.
She felt there was only one person in the world who could understand her anguish: Marya Ivanovna Sokolova.
Usually Lyudmila didn't get on with the wives of the other academics; their endless talk about clothes, domestic servants and their husbands' successes made her feel bored and irritated. But she had grown very attached to Marya Ivanovna – partly because her shy, gentle character was so unlike her own, partly because she was moved by her concern over Tolya.
Lyudmila felt she could speak more freely about Tolya to her than to her own husband and mother; and she always felt calmer for these conversations. Even though Marya Ivanovna came round almost every day, Lyudmila would still wait for her impatiently, watching through the window for her slim figure and kind face.
There was still no letter from Tolya.
16
Lyudmila, Nadya and Alexandra Vladimirovna were sitting in the kitchen. Now and then Nadya crumpled up pages of her exercise-book and threw them into the stove; for a moment the stove would be filled with flames. Alexandra Vladimirovna glanced at Lyudmila out of the corner of her eye and said: 'One of the laboratory assistants invited me home yesterday. They certainly do live in cramped conditions. And the hunger! The poverty! We live like Tsars in comparison…! Some neighbours came round and we started to talk about what we'd loved most before the war. Someone said "veal". Someone else said "pickled cucumber soup". And then my friend's little girl said: "What I liked most of all was 'lights out' in the pioneer camp." '
Lyudmila looked at her in silence.
'Grandmama, you've already got millions of friends here!' said Nadya.
'And you haven't got any.'
'And what's wrong with that?' asked Lyudmila. 'It's better than Viktor. These days he spends all his time at Sokolov's. You should just see the rabble that gather there. I really don't understand how Viktor and Sokolov can sit there for hours on end. Don't they get tired of chewing the fat all night? And why don't they give a thought to Marya Ivanovna? She needs a bit of peace. With all of them around the poor woman can't even sit down for a minute. And they smoke like chimneys!'
'I like that Tartar, Karimov,' said Alexandra Vladimirovna.
'A nasty piece of work.'
'Mama's just like me,' said Nadya. 'She doesn't like anyone apart from Marya Ivanovna.'
'You are a strange lot,' said Alexandra Vladimirovna. 'You've got your own little circle of fellow evacuees from Moscow. And everyone else, everyone you happen to meet in a train or in the theatre, is just a nobody. Your friends are the people who've built themselves dachas in the same place as you have… Your sister Zhenya's just the same. The signs by which you recognize one another are almost invisible: "She's a real nonentity. Do you know, she doesn't even like Blok! He doesn't like Picasso! She gave him a present of a vase made from cut glass. What taste!" But Viktor's a democrat. He doesn't care tuppence for such airs and graces.'
'You're talking nonsense,' said Lyudmila. 'Dachas have nothing to do with it. There are bourgeois philistines with or without dachas, and I prefer to avoid them.'
Lyudmila seemed to be getting annoyed with her mother more and more frequently these days.
She would give Viktor advice, tick Nadya off for something she had done wrong or let it pass, spoil her or refuse to spoil her – and be conscious throughout that her mother had her own opinions about everything that she did. She never expressed these opinions, but they made themselves felt. Sometimes Viktor would catch his mother-in-law's eye and they would exchange mocking looks – as though they'd already discussed all Lyudmila's strange quirks. And it didn't matter whether or not they really had; what mattered was that a new force had appeared in the family, a force whose mere presence was enough to change all the existing relationships.
Viktor had once said that if he were in Lyudmila's shoes, he'd let Alexandra Vladimirovna take charge of the house; then she wouldn't be conscious all the time that she was a guest. Lyudmila had thought this hypocritical. It even crossed her mind that by emphasizing the warmth of his feelings for her mother, he was trying to remind her of her own coldness towards Anna Semyonovna.
She would never have admitted it, but there had been times when she had even been jealous of his love for Nadya. Now, though, it was no longer just jealousy. How could she admit, even to herself, that her own homeless mother had become a burden and an irritation to her? And yet, at the same time, she was ready to give her last dress away to Alexandra Vladimirovna, to share her last crust of bread with her.
For her part, Alexandra Vladimirovna sometimes felt like bursting into tears for no reason. Or she wanted to die; or to spend the night on a colleague's floor; or to pack her bags and set out to find Vera, Seryozha and Stepan Fyodorovich in Stalingrad.
Alexandra Vladimirovna usually agreed with what Viktor did or said, while Lyudmila usually disagreed. Nadya had noticed this and would say to her father: 'Go and tell Grandmama that Mama's been nasty to you!'
! Now Alexandra Vladimirovna said: 'You two are as gloomy as owls. But Viktor's normal.'
'Words, words…,' said Lyudmila wrily. 'You and Viktor will be as glad as any of us when the time comes to go back to Moscow.'