He let out a scream. He was struggling, kicking at the floor. He wanted to talk to that crowd of people in padded jackets and felt boots… The sound of their voices was drowning the quiet conversation that was going on beside him. He was in Stalingrad… Grekov was making his way towards him over piles of rubble…
The doctor was holding him by the hand and saying: 'You must break off for a while… repeated injections of camphor…'
Krymov swallowed down a ball of salty saliva. 'No, I'm quite all right, thanks to the medicine. You can carry on. But you won't get me to sign anything.'
'You will sign, in the end,' said the investigator, with the good-natured assurance of a factory foreman. 'We've had people more difficult than you.'
This second interrogation session lasted three days. At the end of it Krymov returned to his cell.
The soldier on duty placed a parcel wrapped in white cloth beside him.
'You must sign for this parcel, citizen prisoner.'
Krymov read through the list of contents: onion, garlic, sugar, white rusks. The handwriting was familiar. At the end of the list was written: 'Your Zhenya'.
'Oh God, oh God.' He began to cry.
58
On 1 April, 1943 Stepan Fyodorovich Spiridonov received an extract from the resolution passed by the college of the People's Commissariat of Power Stations. He was to leave Stalingrad and become the director of a small, peat-burning power station in the Urals. It wasn't such a very terrible punishment; he could well have been put on trial. Spiridonov didn't say anything about this at home, preferring to wait till the bureau of the obkom had come to their decision. On 4 April, 1943 he received a severe reprimand from the bureau of the obkom for abandoning his post without leave at a critical time. This too was a lenient decision; he could well have been expelled from the Party. But to Stepan Fyodorovich it seemed cruelly unjust; his colleagues in the obkom knew very well that he had remained at his post until the last day of the defence of Stalingrad; that the Soviet offensive had already begun when he crossed to the left bank to see his daughter who had just given birth in a barge. He had tried to protest during the meeting, but Pryakhin had replied sternly:
'You have the right to appeal against this decision to the Central Control Commission. For my part, I think that comrade Shkiryatov will consider this decision over-lenient.'
'I am certain that the Commission will annul this decision,' Stepan Fyodorovich had insisted, but he had heard stories about Shkiryatov. In the event, he preferred not to appeal.
In any case, he was afraid that there were other reasons for Pryakhin's severity. Pryakhin knew of the family ties between Spiridonov, Yevgenia Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova and Krymov; he was hardly likely to be well-disposed towards a man who knew that he himself was an old friend of Krymov's.
Even if he had wanted to, it would have been quite impossible for Pryakhin to support Spiridonov. If he had done, his enemies – and there are always more than enough of them around a man in a position of power – would have immediately informed the appropriate authorities that, out of sympathy for Krymov, an enemy of the people, Pryakhin was supporting the cowardly deserter, Spiridonov.
It seemed, however, that Pryakhin hadn't even wanted to support Spiridonov. He evidently knew that Krymov's mother-in-law was now living in Spiridonov's flat. He probably also knew that Yevgenia Nikolaevna was in correspondence with her, that she had recently sent her a copy of her letter to Stalin.
After the meeting was over, Spiridonov had gone down to the buffet to buy some sausage and some soft cheese. There he had bumped into Voronin, the head of the oblast MGB. Voronin had looked him up and down and said mockingly: 'Doing your shopping just after you've incurred a severe reprimand! You are a good little housekeeper, Spiridonov.'
Spiridonov had given him a pathetic, guilty smile. 'It's for the family. I'm a grandfather now.'
Voronin had smiled back and said: 'And there was I, thinking you were preparing a food-parcel.'
'Well, thank God I'm being sent to the Urals,' Spiridonov had thought. 'I wouldn't last long if I stayed here. But what's going to become of Vera and her little boy?'
He had been driven back to the power station in the cab of a truck. He had sat there in silence, looking through the misted-over glass at the ruined city he would soon be leaving. He remembered how his wife had once gone to work along this pavement now covered in bricks. He thought how the new cables from Sverdlovsk would soon arrive at the station and he himself would no longer be there. He thought about the pimples his grandson was getting on his hands and chest from malnutrition. He thought that a reprimand really wasn't as bad as all that. And then he thought that he wouldn't be awarded the medal 'For the defenders of Stalingrad '. For some reason this last thought upset him more than everything else; more than the imminent parting from the city he was tied to by his work, by his memories of Marusya, by his whole life. He started to swear out loud.
'Who've you got it in for now, Stepan Fyodorovich?' asked the driver. 'Or did you forget something at the obkom?'
'Yes, yes,' said Stepan Fyodorovich. 'But it hasn't forgotten me.'
Spiridonov's flat was cold and damp. The empty windows had been boarded over and there were large areas where the plaster had fallen from the walls. The rooms were heated only by paraffin stoves made from tin. Water had to be carried in buckets, right up to the third floor. One of the rooms had been closed off and the kitchen was used as a storeroom for wood and potatoes.
Stepan Fyodorovich, Vera and her baby, and Alexandra Vladimirovna all lived in the large room that had previously been the dining-room. The small room next to the kitchen, formerly Vera's, was now occupied by Andreyev.
Spiridonov could easily have installed some brick stoves and had the ceilings and walls replastered; he had the necessary materials and there were workmen at hand. He had always been a practical and energetic man; now, though, he seemed uninterested in such matters. As for Vera and Alexandra Vladimirovna, they seemed almost to prefer living amid this destruction. Their lives had fallen apart; if they restored the flat, it would only remind them of all they had lost.
Andreyev's daughter-in-law, Natalya, arrived from Leninsk only a few days after Alexandra Vladimirovna had arrived from Kazan. Having quarrelled with the sister of her late mother-in-law in Leninsk, she had left her son with her and come to stay for a while with her father-in-law.
Andreyev lost his temper with her and said:
'You didn't get on with my wife. And now you're not getting on with her sister. How could you leave little Volodya behind?'
Her life in Leninsk must have been very difficult indeed. As she went into Andreyev's room for the first time, she looked at the walls and ceiling and said: 'Isn't this nice?'
It was hard to see what was nice about the twisted stovepipe, the mound of plaster in the corner and the debris hanging from the ceiling.
The only light came through a small piece of glass set into the boards nailed over the window. This little porthole looked out onto a view that was far from cheerfuclass="underline" a buckled iron roof and some ruined inner walls that were painted blue and pink in alternate storeys.
Soon after her arrival, Alexandra Vladimirovna fell ill. Because of this she had to postpone her visit to the city centre; she had intended to go and look at the ruins of her own house. To begin with, in spite of her illness, she tried to help Vera. She lit the stove, washed nappies, hung them up to dry, and carried some of the rubble out onto the landing; she even tried to bring up the water. But her illness kept getting worse; she shivered even when it was very hot and would suddenly begin to sweat in the freezing kitchen.