'A horrible thing happened the other day. A driver had his head blown off but he still had his foot on the accelerator. The tank drove on. Forward! Forward!'
'Your commissar and I were abusing the Kalmyks,' said Darensky. 'But there's one old Kalmyk I just can't get out of my head. How old's that Nyeudobnov? How about driving to your new quarters and paying him a visit?'
'I've been granted a great happiness.' said Novikov in a thick, drawling voice. 'The greatest of all happinesses.'
He took a photograph out of his pocket and passed it to Darensky. Darensky looked at it for a long time. 'Yes, she's a real beauty.'
'Beauty?' said Novikov. 'Who cares about beauty? No one could love a woman like I do just for her beauty.'
Vershkov appeared in the doorway. He looked at Novikov questioningly.
'Get the hell out of here!' said Novikov very slowly.
'Why treat him like that?' said Darensky. 'He just wanted to know if you needed him for anything.'
'All right, all right… But I can be a swine too. And I don't need you to tell me how to behave. And why are you calling me "ty" anyway? You're just a lieutenant-colonel.'
'So it's like that, is it?'
'Don't you know how to take a joke?' said Novikov, thinking to himself that it was a good thing Zhenya hadn't yet seen him drunk.
'I don't know how to take stupid jokes,' said Darensky.
They went on wrangling for a long time. They only made peace when Novikov suggested driving to their new quarters and giving Nyeudobnov a good whipping. Needless to say, they didn't drive anywhere at all but just went on drinking.
30
Alexandra Vladimirovna received three letters all on the same day: one from each of her two daughters and one from her granddaughter Vera. She guessed by the handwriting who these letters were from, and sensed immediately that they contained bad news. Many years of experience had taught her that children don't write to their mothers just to share their joys.
Each letter contained an invitation to come and stay: with Lyudmila in Moscow, with Zhenya in Kuibyshev, with Vera in Leninsk. This made Alexandra Vladimirovna still more certain that the three women were in trouble.
Vera wrote mostly about her father. His difficulties with the Party had brought him to the end of his tether. He had been summoned to Kuibyshev by the People's Commissariat and had only returned a few days ago. This journey had exhausted him more than all the months in Stalingrad. His case still awaited a decision. He had been ordered to return to Stalingrad and make a start on rebuilding the power station; it was uncertain, however, whether he would be allowed to remain in the employ of the Commissariat.
Vera herself had decided to go back to Stalingrad with her father. The centre of the city hadn't yet been liberated, but the Germans were no longer shooting. Apparently the house where Alexandra Vladimirovna had lived was just an empty shell with a caved-in roof. Stepan Fyodorovich's flat was still there – undamaged save that the windows were broken and the plaster had come off the walls. He and Vera were intending to move back in, together with her son.
Alexandra Vladimirovna found it very strange that her little granddaughter Vera should now sound so adult, so like a woman. The letter was full of information about the baby's rashes, about his stomach-upsets and disturbed nights. These were all things she should have been writing about to her husband or her mother, but she no longer had either.
She also wrote about old Andreyev and his daughter-in-law Natalya, and about Aunt Zhenya, whom Stepan Fyodorovich had seen in Kuibyshev. She said almost nothing about herself – as though her own life were of no interest to Alexandra Vladimirovna. In the margin of the last page, however, was a note saying: 'Grandmama, we've got a large flat in Stalingrad and there's plenty of room. Please, I beg you to come.' This sudden appeal expressed everything Vera hadn't written in the rest of the letter.
Lyudmila's letter was very brief indeed. At one point she said: 'My life seems quite meaningless. Tolya's dead. And as for Viktor and Nadya – they don't need me at all, they can get on fine without me.'
Lyudmila had never written her mother a letter like this before. Alexandra Vladimirovna realized she must be getting on very badly indeed with her husband. After inviting her to stay, Lyudmila went on: 'Vitya's in trouble – and he always talks more readily to you about his troubles than he does to me.' A little further on she wrote: 'Nadya's become very secretive. She doesn't tell me anything at all. That seems to be the norm in this family.'
The last letter, from Zhenya, was quite incomprehensible. It was full of vague hints at various difficulties and tragedies. She invited her mother to Kuibyshev – and then said she would have to go to Moscow almost immediately. She wrote about Limonov and how highly he always spoke of Alexandra Vladimirovna. He was an interesting and intelligent man and Alexandra Vladimirovna would enjoy meeting him. She then wrote that he had gone to Samarkand. Alexandra Vladimirovna found it hard to understand how she was to meet him in Kuibyshev.
There was one thing she could understand. As she came to the end of the letter, she said to herself: 'My poor little girl!'
Alexandra Vladimirovna was very upset by these letters.
All three women had asked after her own health and whether her room wasn't too cold. She was touched by their concern, but realized that none of them had wondered whether she herself might not be in need of them.
They needed her. But it could very well have been the other way round. Why wasn't she asking for her daughters' help? Why was it her daughters who were asking her for help? After all, she was alone. She had no real home. She was an old woman. She had lost her son and daughter. She didn't know anything about Seryozha.
And she was finding her work increasingly difficult. She had a constant pain around her heart and she always felt dizzy. She had even asked the technical director to have her transferred from the shop-floor to the laboratory. She found it very difficult to spend the whole day taking control samples from one machine after another.
In the evening she stood in the food queues, went home, lit the stove and prepared something to eat.
Life was so bare, so harsh! It wasn't standing in a queue that was difficult. It was worse when the shop was empty and there was no queue. It was worse when she went home and lay down in her cold, damp bed without lighting the stove, without preparing anything to eat.
Everyone around her was suffering. A woman doctor from Leningrad told her how she'd spent the winter with two children in a village a hundred kilometres from Ufa. They'd lived in a hut that had once belonged to a kulak; there were no windows and the roof had been partly dismantled. To get to work she had had to walk six kilometres through the forest; at dawn she had sometimes glimpsed the green eyes of wolves through the trees. It had been a very poor village. The kolkhoz had failed to fulfil the plan; the peasants said that however hard they worked, they'd still have their grain taken away from them. Her neighbour's husband had gone to the war, leaving her alone with her hungry children; she had one pair of torn felt boots for all six of them.
The doctor told Alexandra Vladimirovna how she'd bought a goat. Late at night she used to walk through the deep snow to a distant field; there she would steal buckwheat and dig up the rotten hay that had never been gathered in. Listening to the villagers, her children had learnt to swear. The teacher in Kazan had said to her: 'It's the first time I've heard seven-year-olds swearing like drunks. And you say you're from Leningrad!'
Alexandra Vladimirovna lived in the small room that had once been Viktor Pavlovich's. The official tenants, who had moved to an annexe while the Shtrums had been there, now lived in the main room. They were tense, irritable people, always quarrelling over trivia.