Day dawned. An icy red glow flared up over the steppes east of the Volga. A truck rumbled down the road.
Her madness had passed. She was sitting beside her son's grave. His body was covered with earth. He was dead.
She could see her dirty fingers and a shawl of hers lying on the ground; her legs had grown numb: she could feel that her face was smeared with dirt. Her throat tickled.
But none of this mattered. And if someone had told her that the war was over or that her daughter had just died, if a glass of hot milk or a piece of warm bread had suddenly appeared beside her, she wouldn't have stirred; she wouldn't have stretched out her hands or made any movement. She was sitting there without thought, without anxiety. Nothing mattered to her; there was nothing she needed. All that existed was some agonizing force that was crushing her heart and pressing against her temples. A doctor in a white smock and some other people from the hospital were talking about Tolya; she could see their mouths open, but she couldn't hear what they said. A letter was lying on the ground. It had fallen out of her coat-pocket. It was the letter she had received from the hospital, but she didn't want to pick it up or shake the dust off it. She was no longer thinking about how, when he was two, Tolya had waddled clumsily after a grasshopper as it jumped from spot to spot; it didn't matter that she'd forgotten to ask whether he had lain on his side or on his back on the last day of his life. She could see the light of day; she was unable not to see it.
Suddenly she remembered Tolya's third birthday: in the evening they had had tea and pastries and Tolya had asked: 'Mummy, why's it dark when today's my birthday?'
She could see some trees, the polished gravestones shining in the sun and the board with her son's name. 'shaposhn' was written in big letters, while 'ikov' was written very small, each letter clinging to the one before. She had no thoughts and no will. She had nothing.
She got up, picked up the letter, flicked a lump of earth off her coat with numb fingers, wiped her shoes and shook her coat until it was white again. She put on her shawl, using the hem to wipe the dust off her eyebrows and clean the blood from her lips and chin. With even steps and without looking round, she began to walk towards the gates.
34
After her return to Kazan, Lyudmila began to lose weight; soon she began to look like photographs of herself as a student. She went to the store to collect the family's rations; she prepared meals; she stoked the stove; she cleaned the floors and did the washing. The autumn days seemed very long; she could find nothing to fill their emptiness.
On the day she got back she told her family all about her journey and her feelings of guilt towards everyone close to her. She described her visit to the hospital and unwrapped the parcel containing the bloodstained shreds of her son's uniform. Nadya cried; Alexandra Vladimirovna breathed heavily; Viktor's hands trembled so much he couldn't even pick up a glass of tea. Marya Ivanovna had rushed in to visit Lyudmila; she turned pale, her mouth fell open and a martyred expression appeared in her eyes. Lyudmila was the only person able to speak calmly, looking around her with her bright, wide-open, light blue eyes.
She had always been very argumentative, but now she no longer argued with anyone; in the past one had only had to direct someone to the station for Lyudmila to fly into a temper and excitedly start to prove that they should take a different street and quite another trolley-bus.
One day Viktor asked her: 'Lyudmila, who is it you talk to at night?'
'I don't know,' she answered. 'Perhaps I'm just dreaming.'
He didn't question her further, but he told Alexandra Vladimirovna that almost every night Lyudmila opened some suitcases, spread a blanket over the sofa in the corner and began talking in a quiet, anxious voice.
'I get the feeling that during the daytime she's with you and me and Nadya in a dream, while at night her voice comes alive again like it was before the war,' he said. 'I think she's ill. She's become someone else.'
'I don't know,' said Alexandra Vladimirovna. 'We're all of us suffering, each in our own way.'
Their conversation was cut short by a knock at the front door. Viktor got up to answer it, but Lyudmila called, 'I'll go,' from the kitchen.
No one could understand why, but they had all noticed that since her return from Saratov, Lyudmila had been checking the letter-box several times a day. And whenever there was a knock at the door, she rushed to answer it.
Viktor and Alexandra Vladimirovna looked at each other as they listened to Lyudmila's hurried steps – she was almost running.
Then they heard her say in an exasperated tone of voice: 'No, we haven't got anything today. And don't come so often. I gave you half a kilo of bread only the day before yesterday.'
35
Lieutenant Viktorov had been summoned to HQ to see Major Zakabluka, the commander of a fighter squadron that was being held in reserve. The duty-officer, Lieutenant Velikanov, said the major had flown off in a U-2 to the Air Army HQ near Kalinin and would return that evening. When Viktorov asked why he had been sent for, Velikanov winked and said that it might well have to do with the booze-up in the mess.
Viktorov glanced behind a curtain made out of a blanket and a tarpaulin sheet. He could hear the clatter of a typewriter. As soon as he caught sight of him, the chief clerk said: 'No, comrade Lieutenant, there aren't any letters for you.'
Lenochka, the civilian typist, glanced round at Viktorov. She then turned towards a mirror from a shot-down German plane – a present from the late Lieutenant Demidov – straightened her forage cap, moved the ruler lying on the documents she was copying, and started typing again.
This long-faced lieutenant bored Lenochka; he always asked the chief clerk the same gloomy question.
On his way back to the airfield, Viktorov turned off towards the edge of the forest.
The squadron had been in reserve for a month, replacing men and material.
The Northern countryside seemed very strange to Viktorov. The life of the forest and the young river that wound between the steep hills, the smell of mushrooms and mould, the rustling of the trees were all somehow disturbing.
When he was flying, the various smells seemed to reach right up to his cabin. From the forest and lakes came the breath of an old Russia Viktorov had previously only read about. Ancient tracks ran among these lakes and forests; houses and churches had been built from the tall, upright trees; the masts of sailing-boats had been hewn from them. The Grey Wolf had run through these forests. Alyonushka had stood and wept on the very bank along which Viktorov was now walking towards the mess. This vanished past seemed somehow simple-minded, youthful, naive; not only the maidens in towers, but even the grey-bearded merchants, deacons and patriarchs seemed a thousand years younger than the worldly-wise young pilots who had come to this forest from a world of fast cars, machine-guns, diesel engines, radios and cinemas. The Volga itself- quick and slim, flowing between steep, many-coloured banks, through the green of the forest, through patterns of light blue and red – was a symbol of this vanished past.
How many of them there were – privates, sergeants and lieutenants – all travelling the same war-path. They all smoked countless cigarettes, tapped on tin bowls with tin spoons, played card-games in railway-carriages, treated themselves to ice-lollies in town, coughed as they downed their hundred-gram tots of vodka, wrote the same number of letters, shouted down field-telephones, fired light or heavy guns, yelled as they stepped on the accelerator of a T-34 tank…