She felt her hair stirring beneath her shawl. Someone was running their cold fingers through it.
On either side, stretching right up to the railings, were rows and rows of the same small grey mounds. There were no flowers on them, not even grass, just a single wooden stem shooting straight up from the grave. At the top of each stem was a plywood board with a man's name on it. There were hundreds of these boards. Their density and uniformity made them seem like a field of grain…
Now she had found Tolya at last. She had tried so many times to imagine where he was, what he was thinking about and what he was doing: leaning against the side of a trench and dozing; walking down a path; sipping tea, holding his mug in one hand and a piece of sugar in the other; or perhaps running across a field under fire… She had wanted to be there beside him. After all, he needed her: she would top up his mug of tea; she would say, 'Have another slice of bread'; she would take off his shoes and wash his chafed feet; she would wrap a scarf round his neck… But he had always eluded her. And now she had found him, he no longer needed her.
Further away she could see graves from before the Revolution with crosses made out of granite. The gravestones stood there like a crowd of unloved, unwanted old men. Some of them were lying on their sides, others leant helplessly against tree-trunks.
The sky seemed somehow airless – as though all the air had been pumped out and there was nothing but dry dust over her head. And the pump was continuing its work: together with the air, faith and hope had now disappeared; nothing was left but a small mound of grey, frozen earth.
Everything living – her mother, Nadya, Viktor's eyes, the bulletins about the course of the war – had ceased to exist.
Everything living had become inanimate. In the whole wide world only Tolya was still alive. But what silence there was all around him. Did he realize that she had come…?
Lyudmila knelt down and, very gently, so as not to disturb her son, straightened the board with his name on it. He had always got angry with her when she straightened the collar of his jacket on their way to school.
'There. I'm here now. You must have thought Mama was never going to come.' She spoke in a half-whisper, afraid of being overheard.
Some trucks went past. The dust whirled about in the wind. Milkwomen with churns and people carrying sacks tramped by wearing soldiers' boots. Schoolchildren ran past in soldiers' winter caps.
But the day and all its movement seemed to Lyudmila just a misty vision.
What silence there was everywhere.
She was talking to her son, remembering every detail of his life; and these memories, which survived only in her consciousness, filled the world with the voice of a child, with his tears, with the rustle of the pages of a picture-book, the clinking of a teaspoon against the edge of a white plate, the humming of home-made radio sets, the squeak of skis, the creaking of rowlocks on the ponds near the dacha, the rustling of sweet-papers, with fleeting glimpses of a boy's face, shoulders and chest.
Animated by her despair, his tears, his moments of distress, his every act – good or bad – took on a distinct and palpable existence.
She seemed to be caught up, not by memories of the past, but by the anxieties of everyday life.
What did he think he was doing – reading all night long in such awful light? Did he want to have to wear spectacles at his age?
And now he was lying there in a coarse calico shirt, bare-footed. Why hadn't they given him any blankets? The earth was frozen solid and there was a sharp frost at night.
Blood began to pour from Lyudmila's nose. Her handkerchief was soon sodden and heavy. Her eyes blurred and she felt giddy; for a moment she thought she might faint. She screwed up her eyes. When she opened them again, the world brought to life by her suffering had vanished. There was nothing but grey dust whirling over the graves; one after another, they began to smoke.
The water of life, the water that had gushed over the ice and brought Tolya back from the darkness, had disappeared; the world created by the mother's despair, the world that for a moment had broken its fetters and become reality, was no more.
Her despair had raised the lieutenant from the grave, filling the void with new stars. For a few minutes he had been the only living person in the world; it was to him that everything else had owed its existence. But even the mother's tremendous strength was not enough to prevent the multitudes of people, the roads and cities, the seas, the earth itself, from swamping her dead Tolya.
Lyudmila dabbed at her eyes. They were quite dry, but the handkerchief was sodden. She realized that her face was smeared with sticky blood and sat there, hunched up, resigned, taking her first involuntary steps towards the realization that Tolya no longer existed.
The people in the hospital had been struck by her calm and the number of questions she had asked. They hadn't appreciated her inability to understand something quite obvious – that Tolya was no longer among the living. Her love was so strong that Tolya's death was unable to affect it: to her, he was still alive.
She was mad, but no one had noticed. Now, at last, she had found Tolya. Her joy was like that of a mother-cat when she finds her dead kitten and licks it all over.
A soul can live in torment for years and years, even decades, as it slowly, stone by stone, builds a mound over a grave; as it moves towards the apprehension of eternal loss and bows down before reality.
The soldiers finished their work and left; the sun had nearly gone down; the shadows of the plywood boards over the graves lengthened. Lyudmila was alone.
She ought to tell Tolya's relatives about his death. Above all, she must tell his father in the camp. His father. And what had Tolya been thinking about before the operation? Had they fed him with a spoon? Had he been able to sleep a little on his side? Or on his back? He liked water with lemon and sugar. How was he lying right now? Was he shaven or unshaven?
It must be the unbearable pain in her soul that was making everything darker and darker.
She suddenly felt that her grief would last for ever; Viktor would die, her daughter's grandchildren would die – and she would still be grieving.
When her anguish grew unbearable, the boundary between her inner world and the real world again dissolved; eternity retreated before her love.
Why should she give the news of Tolya's death to his father, to Viktor, to her other relatives? After all, she didn't yet know for sure. Perhaps it would be better to wait; things might turn out differently.
'Don't tell anyone,' she whispered. 'No one knows yet. It will be all right.'
Lyudmila covered Tolya's feet with the hem of her coat. She took off her shawl and laid it over her son's shoulders.
'Heavens! What are you doing? Why haven't they given you any blankets? You really must have something over your feet.'
She fell into delirium, talking to her son, scolding him for writing such short letters. Sometimes she woke up and adjusted the shawl; it had been blown aside by the wind.
How good that they were alone together, that there was no one to disturb them. No one had ever loved him. People had always said he was ugly: that he had swollen lips; that he was very strange; that he was ridiculously touchy and quick-tempered. No one had ever loved her either; the people close to her saw only her failings… My poor boy, my poor, timid, clumsy little son… He was the only person who loved her – and now he was alone with her in the cemetery at night; he would never leave her; he would still love her when she was a useless old woman who got in everyone's way… How ill adapted he was to life. He never asked for anything; he was always absurdly shy. The schoolmistress said he was the laughing-stock of the school; the boys all teased him till he was quite beside himself and began to cry like a little child. Tolya, Tolya, don't leave me alone.