It was the first time since the baby's birth that anyone had said anything about Vera herself.
Spiridonov decided to stay on the barge till Vera was stronger. Then they could go to Leninsk together. It was on the way to Kuibyshev; he'd have to go there for a new appointment. The food on the barge was obviously quite appalling. Once he'd warmed up a bit.
he set off into the forest to find the command post of the obkom; he knew it was somewhere nearby. He hoped he'd be able to get hold of some fat and some sugar through his friends there.
62
It had been a difficult day on the barge. The clouds lay heavily on the Volga. There were no children playing outside, no women washing clothes in the holes in the ice; the icy Astrakhan wind tore at the frozen rags and bits of rubbish, forcing its way through crevices in the walls of the barge, whistling and howling through the hold.
Everyone sat there without moving, numb, wrapped up in shawls and blankets. Even the most talkative of the women had fallen silent, listening to the howl of the wind and the creaking boards. When night came, it was as though the darkness had sprung from the unbearable sadness, from the terrible cold and hunger, from the filth, from the endless torments of the war.
Vera lay with a blanket up to her chin. On her cheeks she could feel the draught that whistled into the hold with each gust of wind. Everything seemed hopeless: her father would never be able to get her out of here; the war would never come to an end; next spring the Germans would spread right over the Urals and into Siberia; there would always be the whine of planes in the sky and the thunder of bombs on the earth.
She began to doubt, for the first time, whether Viktorov really was nearby. After all, there were airfields in every sector of the front. And he might no longer even be at the front – or even in the rear.
She moved the sheet aside and looked at her baby's face. Why was he crying? She must be passing her sadness to him, just as she passed on her milk and her warmth.
That day everyone felt crushed by the mercilessness of the cold and wind, by the vastness of the war that had stretched out over the Russian steppes.
How long can one bear a life of continual cold and hunger?
Old Sergeyevna, the midwife, came over to Vera.
'I don't like the look of you today. You looked better on the first day.'
'It doesn't matter,' said Vera. 'Papa will be back tomorrow. He'll bring some food with him.'
Even though Sergeyevna wanted the nursing mother to have some fats and sugar, she replied sourly:
'Yes, it's all right for you lot, you leaders and directors. You always get enough to eat. All we ever get is half-frozen potatoes.'
'Quiet there!' someone shouted. 'Quiet!'
All they could hear was an indistinct voice at the other end of the hold. Then the voice rang out loud and clear, drowning every other sound. Someone was reading a news bulletin by the light of the oil-lamp.
'…A successful offensive in the Stalingrad area… Several days ago our forces on the outskirts of Stalingrad launched an offensive against the German Fascists… Our forces are advancing along two axes – to the north-west and to the south of Stalingrad…'
Everyone stood there and cried. A miraculous link joined them both to the men marching through the snow, shielding their faces from the wind, and to the men who now lay on the snow, spattered with blood, their eyes growing dim as their lives ran out.
Everyone was crying: workers, old men, women, even the children – whose faces had become suddenly adult and attentive.
'Our forces have taken the town of Kalach on the east bank of the Don, Krivomuzginskaya railway station, the town and station of Abgasarovo…'
Vera was crying with everyone else. She too could feel the link between the exhausted listeners in the barge and the men marching through the darkness of the winter night, falling and standing up again, falling and never standing up again.
It was for her and her son, for these women with chapped hands, for these old men, for these children wrapped in their mothers' torn shawls, that the men were going to their death.
She thought with ecstasy how her husband might suddenly come in. Everyone would gather round him and call him 'My son!'
The man came to the end of the bulletin. 'The offensive launched by our troops is still continuing.'
63
The duty-officer had just given a report to the general in command of the 8th Air Army on the sorties made by their fighter squadrons during the day.
The general looked through the papers spread out in front of him.
'Zakabluka's having a hard time. Yesterday he lost his commissar and today he's lost two pilots.'
'I've just phoned his HQ, comrade General,' said the duty-officer. 'Comrade Berman's going to be buried tomorrow. The Member of the Military Soviet has promised to fly in and give a speech.'
'He does like giving speeches,' said the general with a smile.
'As for the pilots, comrade General, Lieutenant Korol was shot down over the area held by the 38th division. And Senior Lieutenant Viktorov was set on fire over a German airfield. He couldn't get back to our lines – he came down on a hill in no man's land. The infantry tried to get him out, but the Germans stopped them.'
'Yes, yes…,' said the general, scratching his nose with a pencil. 'I know what: you phone Front Headquarters and remind them that Zakharov promised us a new jeep. Soon we won't be able to get about at all.'
The dead pilot lay there all night on a hill covered with snow; it was a cold night and the stars were quite brilliant. At dawn the hill turned pink – the pilot now lay on a pink hill. Then the wind got up and the snow covered his body.
PART THREE
1
A few days before the beginning of the Stalingrad offensive Krymov arrived at the underground command-post of the 64th Army. Abramov's aide was eating a pie and some chicken soup.
He put down his spoon; you could tell from his sigh that it was good soup. Krymov's eyes went moist; he desperately wanted a bite of cabbage-pie.
Behind the partition, the aide announced his arrival. After a moment's silence Krymov heard a familiar voice; it was too quiet for him to make out the words.
The aide came out and announced:
'The member of the Military Soviet is unable to receive you.'
Krymov was taken aback.
'But I never asked to see him. Comrade Abramov summoned me himself.'
The aide just looked at his soup.
'So it's been cancelled, has it? I can't make head or tail of all this,' said Krymov.
He went back up to the surface and plodded along the gully towards the bank of the Volga. He had to call at the editorial office of the Army newspaper.
He felt annoyed by the senseless summons and by his sudden greed for someone else's pie. At the same time he listened attentively to the intermittent gunfire coming from the Kuporosnaya ravine.
A girl walked past on her way to the Operations Section. She was wearing a forage cap and a greatcoat. Krymov looked her up and down and said to himself: 'She's not bad at all.'
The memory of Yevgenia came back to him, and as always his heart sank. As always he immediately reproved himself: 'Forget her! Forget her!' He tried to call to mind a young Cossack girl he had spent the night with in a village they had passed through. Then he thought of Spiridonov: 'He's a fine fellow-even if he isn't a Spinoza!'
For a long time afterwards Krymov was to remember these thoughts with piercing clarity – together with the gunfire, the autumn sky and his irritation with Abramov.