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.
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.'