He held his hand to his chest, afraid that his booming heart-beats would disturb the children. He felt a piercing ache of tenderness, anxiety and pity for them. He desperately wanted to embrace his son and daughters and kiss their sleeping faces. He was overwhelmed by a helpless tenderness, an unreasoning love; he felt lost, weak and confused.
He wasn't in the least worried or frightened at the thought of the new job he was about to begin. He had taken on many new jobs, and had never had difficulty in finding the correct line to follow. He knew it would be the same in the tank corps.
But how could he reconcile his unshakeable, iron severity with this limitless tenderness and love?
He looked round at his wife. She was standing beside him, resting her cheek on her hand like a peasant. In the half-light her face seemed younger and thinner – just as it had been when they had gone to the sea on their honeymoon and stayed in a hostel right on the cliffs.
There was a discreet hoot beneath the window – the car from the obkom. Getmanov turned once more towards his children and spread out his hands – expressing through this gesture his impotence before a feeling he was unable to control.
In the corridor he said goodbye, kissed his wife for the last time and put on his fur coat and cap. Then he stood and waited while the driver carried out his cases.
'Well then,' he said – and suddenly stepped up to his wife, removed his cap and embraced her once more. And this second farewell – with the cold damp air off the streets slipping in through the half-open door and blending with the warmth of the house, with the rough, tanned hide of his coat touching the sweet-scented silk of her dressing-gown – this final farewell made them feel that their life, which had seemed one, had suddenly split apart. They felt desolate.
23
Yevgenia Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova, Lyudmila's younger sister, had moved to Kuibyshev. She was living with an old German woman, Jenny Genrikhovna, who years before had worked for the Shaposh-nikov family as a governess.
Yevgenia found it strange, after Stalingrad, to be sharing a small, quiet room with an old woman who never ceased marvelling at how a little girl with plaits could have turned into a grown woman.
Jenny Genrikhovna's gloomy little cubby-hole had once been part of the servants' quarters of a spacious merchant's flat. Now each room was inhabited by a whole family and was divided up by screens, curtains, rugs and the backs of sofas into little nooks and corners – one for eating, one for sleeping, one for receiving guests, another for the nurse to give injections to a paralysed old man…
In the evening the kitchen fairly hummed with the voices of all the inmates.
Yevgenia Nikolaevna liked this kitchen with its sooty ceiling and the dark red flames of the oil-stoves. People in dressing-gowns, padded jackets and soldiers' tunics bustled about below clothes that had been hung up to dry. Knives gleamed. Clouds of steam rose from tubs and bowls full of washing. The ample stove was no longer in use; the Dutch tiles lining its sides seemed cold and white – like the snow-covered slopes of some long-extinct volcano.
The tenants of the flat included the family of a docker who was now at the front, a gynaecologist, an engineer from an armaments factory, a single mother who worked as a cashier in a store, the widow of a hairdresser who had been killed at the front, the manager of a post-office, and – in what had once been the large dining-room – the director of a surgery.
The flat was as extensive as a town; it even had room in it for its own madman, a quiet little old man with the eyes of a sweet, good-natured puppy.
They were all crowded together and at the same time very isolated. They were always taking offence at one another and then making peace, one moment concealing every detail of their lives, and the next generously and excitedly sharing everything that happened to them.
Yevgenia would have liked to draw this flat – not so much the objects and people themselves as the feelings they aroused in her.
There were many facets to these feelings. It seemed unlikely that even a great artist could give expression to them. They arose from the strange incongruity between the tremendous military strength of the Soviet State and this dark kitchen with its poverty, gossip and general pettiness; the incongruity between cold, hard steel and kitchen pots and pans full of potato peelings.
The expression of these feelings would break up every line, distort figures and take the form of some apparently meaningless coupling of fragmented images and patches of light.
Old Jenny Genrikhovna was a meek, timid, obliging creature. She wore a black dress with a white collar and, in spite of her constant hunger, her cheeks were always rosy.
Her head was full of memories of Lyudmila's pranks when she was still in the first form, of amusing phrases little Marusya had once come out with, of how two-year-old Dmitry had once come into the dining-room in his pinafore and shouted out: 'Munch-time, munch-time!'
Now Jenny Genrikhovna worked as a daily help in the home of a dentist, looking after her sick mother. Sometimes the dentist would travel round the region for five or six days. Then Jenny would spend the night in her house to look after the old woman; she had recently had a stroke and was barely able to walk.
Jenny lacked any sense of property – she was constantly apologizing to Yevgenia and asking her permission to open the small upper window in order to let in her elderly tabby cat. Her main interests and worries were centred around this cat and how to protect it from her neighbours.
One of these neighbours, an engineer called Dragin, who was in charge of a workshop at his factory, looked with cruel mockery at her wrinkled face, her girlishly slim, emaciated waist and her pince-nez. His plebeian soul was indignant that the old woman should remain devoted to her memories of the past; indignant that she should continue, an idiotically blissful smile on her face, to tell stories about taking her pre-revolutionary charges out in the pram, or accompanying 'Madame' to Venice, Paris or Vienna. Many of the 'little ones' she had cared for had fought with Denikin or Wrangel during the Civil War and had been killed by the Red Army. The old woman, however, remained interested only in how they had once languished in bed with scarlet fever, diphtheria or colitis.
'I've never met anyone so gentle and so forgiving,' Yevgenia told Dragin. 'Believe me, she's a better person than any of the rest of us here in the flat.'
'Sweet little dicky bird!' said Dragin with a laugh. He looked her brazenly in the eye. 'You've sold yourself to the Germans, comrade Shaposhnikova – just for somewhere to live.'
Jenny Genrikhovna was evidently less fond of healthy children. She talked most often of all about the very sickliest of her charges, the son of a Jewish factory-owner. She still kept his exercise-books and drawings and would burst into tears each time she reached the point of describing the death of this quiet little boy.
It was many years since she had lived with the Shaposhnikovs, but she still remembered the names and nicknames of all the children. When she heard of Marusya's death she cried. She was always scrawling a letter to Alexandra Vladimirovna, but could never finish it.
She referred to caviare by its French rather than its Russian name and she told Yevgenia how her pre-revolutionary charges had breakfasted on a cup of strong broth and a slice of venison.
She fed her own rations to the cat, whom she called 'my dear, silver child.' The cat adored her; he was a rough and sullen beast, but would become suddenly animated and affectionate when he saw her.
Dragin kept asking her what she thought of Hitler. 'You must be happy now,' he would say. But the old woman shrewdly declared herself an anti-Fascist and called the Fuhrer a cannibal.