What Alexandra Vladimirovna resented was not the noise or the quarrels, but the fact that they should demand two hundred roubles a month – more than a third of her salary – from a woman whose own home had been burnt down by the Germans. And the room was minute. Sometimes she thought their hearts must be made out of tin and plywood. All day long they talked about potatoes, salt beef, what you could buy and sell at the flea-market. During the night they talked in whispers. The landlady would tell her husband that honey had been very cheap that day in the market, or that their neighbour, a foreman in a factory, had been to a village and brought back a whole sack of sunflower seeds and half a sack of hulled maize.
The landlady, Nina Matveyevna, was very good-looking – tall and slim, with grey eyes. Before getting married, she had worked in a factory, sung in a choir and taken part in amateur theatricals. Her husband, Semyon Ivanovich, worked as a blacksmith's striker in a military factory. In his youth he had served on a destroyer and been the middleweight boxing champion of the Pacific fleet. The distant past of this couple now seemed very improbable.
Before going to work in the morning, Semyon Ivanovich fed the ducks and prepared some swill for the piglet. When he came back in the evening, he pottered about the kitchen, cleaning millet, repairing shoes, sharpening knives, washing out bottles, and talking about drivers at work who had managed to get hold of flour, eggs and goat-meat from distant kolkhozes. Nina Matveyevna would interrupt him with stories of her countless illnesses and visits to famous doctors; then she would talk about lard and margarine, about how she had exchanged a towel for some beans, how a neighbour had bought a pony-skin jacket and five china saucers from an evacuee.
They weren't bad people, but they never said one word to Alexandra Vladimirovna about the war, about Stalingrad, or about the bulletins of the Soviet Information Bureau.
They both pitied and despised Alexandra Vladimirovna for living in such penury. Since the Shtrums had left, she had no sugar or butter, she drank hot water instead of tea, and ate the soup in the public canteen that even the piglet had refused. She had no money for firewood and no personal belongings to sell. Her poverty was a nuisance to them. Once she heard Nina Matveyevna say to her husband: 'Yesterday I had to give the old woman a biscuit. I don't like eating when she's sitting there watching me with her hungry eyes.'
Alexandra Vladimirovna no longer slept well. Why was there still no news from Seryozha? She slept on the iron bed that had once been Lyudmila's; it was as though her daughter's anxieties had now been transferred to her.
How easily death annihilated people. How hard it was to go on living. She thought of Vera. Her child's father had either forgotten her or been killed. Stepan Fyodorovich was constantly depressed and anxious. As for Lyudmila and Viktor, all their griefs and losses had done nothing to bring them together.
Alexandra Vladimirovna wrote to Zhenya that evening. 'My dearest daughter…' She kept thinking of her during the night. What sort of mess was she in? What lay in store for her?
Anya Shtrum, Sonya Levinton, Seryozha… What had become of them all?
Next door she could hear two hushed voices.
'We should kill the duck for the October anniversary,' said Semyon Ivanovich.
'Do you think I've been feeding it on potatoes just to have it killed?' snapped Nina Matveyevna. 'Oh yes, once the old woman's out of the way I'd like to paint the floors. Otherwise the boards will start rotting.'
All they ever spoke of was food and material things; the world they lived in had room only for objects. There were no human feelings in this world – nothing but boards, paint, millet, buckwheat, thirty-rouble notes. They were hard-working, honest people; the neighbours all said that neither of them would ever take a penny that didn't belong to them. But somehow they were quite untouched by the wounded in hospital, by blind veterans, by homeless children on the streets, by the Volga famine of 1921.
In this they were quite the opposite of Alexandra Vladimirovna. She herself could get upset, overjoyed or angry over matters that had nothing to do with her or anyone close to her. The period of general collectivization, the events of 1937, the fate of women who had been sent to camps because of their husbands, the children who had been put in orphanages after their parents had been sent to camps, the summary execution of Russian prisoners-of-war, the many tragedies of the war – all these troubled her as deeply as the sufferings of her own family.
This wasn't something she had learnt from books, from the populist and revolutionary traditions of her family, from her friends, from her husband, or even from life itself. It was something she couldn't help; it was just the way she was. She always ran out of money six days before pay-day. She was always hungry. Everything she owned could be wrapped up in a handkerchief. But not once in Kazan had she thought of her belongings that had been burnt in Stalingrad -her furniture, her piano, her tea-service, her spoons and forks. She didn't even think about her books.
It was very strange that she should now be so far from the people who needed her, living under one roof with people who were so alien to her.
Two days after she had received the letters, Karimov came round. Alexandra Vladimirovna was glad to see him and offered him some rose-hip tea.
'How long since you last heard from Moscow?' he asked.
'Two days.'
'Really?' said Karimov with a smile. 'Tell me, how long does a letter take?'
'Have a look at the postmark,' said Alexandra Vladimirovna.
Karimov examined the envelope for some time. 'Nine days,' he said in a preoccupied tone of voice. He sat there thoughtfully – as though the slowness of the postal service was a matter of great importance to him.
'They say it's the censors,' said Alexandra Vladimirovna. 'They're quite snowed under.'
Karimov looked at her with his beautiful dark eyes.
'So they're all right, are they? They're not having any problems?'
'You don't look at all well,' said Alexandra Vladimirovna. 'Are you ill?'
'What do you mean? I'm fine!' he replied hurriedly, as though denying some accusation.
They began to talk about the war.
'We've come to a real turning-point now,' said Karimov. 'Even a child can see that.'
'Yes, and last summer it was just as obvious that the Germans were going to win,' said Alexandra Vladimirovna sarcastically.
'Is it very difficult for you on your own?' Karimov asked abruptly. 'I see you have to light the stove yourself.'
Alexandra Vladimirovna frowned – as though this were a question she could only answer after deep thought. Finally she said: 'Akhmet Usmanovich, have you really called on me just to ask if I find it difficult to light the stove?'
Karimov looked down at his hands. He waited for a long time before replying.
'The other day I was summoned to you-know-where. I was questioned about the meetings and conversations we had.'
'Why didn't you tell me that at the beginning?' asked Alexandra Vladimirovna. 'Why did you have to start asking about the stove?'
Trying to catch her eye, Karimov went on:
'Naturally, I was unable to deny that we had talked about politics and the war. It would have been absurd to try and make out that four adults had spoken exclusively about the cinema. Naturally I said that we had always talked like true Soviet patriots. I said we were all of us certain that, under the leadership of comrade Stalin and the Party, the Soviet people would be victorious. In general, the questions weren't particularly hostile. But after a few days I began to worry. I couldn't sleep at all. I began thinking that something must have happened to Viktor Pavlovich. And then there's this strange business with Madyarov. He went off for ten days to the Pedagogical Institute in Kazan. And he still hasn't come back. His students are waiting for him. The dean's sent him a telegram. And not a word. Well, you can imagine what goes through my head at night.'