The earth beneath Viktorov's boots was as squeaky and springy as an old mattress. The leaves on the surface were light, brittle and still separate from one another; under them lay leaves that had withered many years before and fused into a brown, crackling mass – the ashes of the life that had once burst into bud, rustled in the winds of a storm and gleamed in the sun after a shower. Rotten, almost weightless brushwood crumbled beneath his feet. A soft, gentle light fell on the forest-floor, diffused by a screen of foliage. The air itself was thick and congealed; a fighter-pilot, accustomed to a rushing wind, felt this very acutely. The living trees felt fresh and damp like cut timber. The smell of the dead trees and brushwood, however, was still stronger… From the pines rose a sharp note of turpentine, an octave higher. The aspen smelt sweet and sickly and the breath of the elder was bitter. The forest had its own life; it was as though he were entering an unfamiliar house where everything was different from outside. The smells were different, the light was filtered through drawn curtains, the sounds had a different resonance. All this made him feel strange and uncomfortable. It was as though he were at the bottom of a reservoir, looking up through a thick layer of water, as though the leaves were splashing about, as though the strands of gossamer clinging to the green star on his forage cap were algae suspended from the surface. It was as though the inert swarms of midges, the darting flies with their large heads, the blackcock squeezing through the branches, might flick their fins yet never be able to rise above the forest – just as a fish can never rise above the surface of the water; and if a magpie did happen to soar over the top of an aspen, then it immediately plunged down again into the branches – like a fish whose white belly gleamed for a moment in the sun before it flopped back into the water. And how very strange the moss seemed, covered in blue and green drops of dew that slowly faded away in the gloom of the forest-floor.
It was good to emerge from this silent semi-darkness into a bright glade. Suddenly everything was different: the earth was warm; the air was in movement; you could smell the junipers in the sun; there were large, wilting bluebells which looked as though they had been cast from mauve-coloured metal, and wild carnations on sticky, resinous stems. You felt suddenly carefree; the glade was like one happy day in a life of poverty. The lemon-coloured butterflies, the polished, blue-black beetles, the ants, the grass-snake rustling through the grass, seemed to be joining together in a common task. Birch-twigs, sprinkled with fine leaves, brushed against his face; a grasshopper jumped up and landed on him as though he were a tree-trunk; it clung to his belt, calmly tensing its green haunches as it sat there with its round, leathery eyes and sheep-like face. The last flowers of the wild strawberries. The heat of the sun on his metal buttons and belt-clasp… No U-88 or night-flying Heinkel could ever have flown over this glade.
36
At night Viktorov often remembered the months he had spent in the hospital at Stalingrad. But he no longer remembered how his nightshirt had been damp with sweat, how the brackish water had made him feel sick, how the thick, heavy smell had tormented him. Those days in hospital now seemed a time of happiness. Here in the forest, listening to the rustling of the trees, he thought: 'Did I really once hear her footsteps?'
Had it all really happened…? She had taken him in her arms; she had stroked his hair; she had cried; and he had kissed her wet, salty eyes. In a Yak he could fly to Stalingrad in only a few hours; he could refuel in Ryazan – he had a friend there who was a controller. What did it matter if he then got shot for it?
He kept thinking of a story he had read in an old book: the Sheremetyev brothers, the rich sons of the field-marshal, gave their sixteen-year-old sister in marriage to Prince Dolgoruky. As far as Viktorov could remember, she only met him once before the wedding. The brothers gave the bride an enormous dowry – the silver alone took up three whole rooms. And then two days after the wedding Peter II was killed. Dolgoruky, who had been in attendance on him, was seized, taken to the far North and imprisoned in a wooden tower. The young wife could have had her marriage annulled – she had only lived with her husband for two days – but she refused to listen to anyone's advice. She set off after her husband and settled in a peasant hut in a remote forest. Every day for ten years she walked to the tower where Dolgoruky was imprisoned. One morning she found the window of the tower wide open and the door unlocked. The young princess ran down the street, falling on her knees before everyone she met – whether peasant or musketeer – begging them to tell her what had happened to her husband. She was told that Dolgoruky had been taken to Nizhny Novgorod. She made the long journey after him on foot, suffering great hardships. In Nizhny Novgorod she discovered that Dolgoruky had been executed and then quartered. The princess decided to enter a convent and travelled to the Pecherskaya Lavra in Kiev. On the day she was to take the veil she walked for a long time along the bank of the Dnieper. What she regretted was not her freedom but the obligation to take off her wedding-ring. She couldn't bring herself to part with it… Hour after hour she paced up and down the bank; as the sun was about to set, she took off the ring, threw it into the Dnieper and set off towards the convent gates.
The pilot, who had been brought up in an orphanage and who had once been a mechanic at the Stalingrad Power Station, couldn't stop thinking of Princess Dolgorukaya. He walked through the forest, imagining that he had died and been buried; that his plane had caught fire, nose-dived into the ground, grown rusty, disintegrated and been covered over by grass; and that now Vera Shaposhnikova was here, stopping, climbing down towards the Volga, looking into the water… And two hundred years ago it had been the young Dolgorukaya: she had come out into a clearing, made her way through the tall flax, and parted with her own hands these bushes laden with red berries. Viktorov felt a sensation of hopeless pain, of bitterness and sweetness.
A young, narrow-shouldered lieutenant was walking through the forest in a worn tunic. How many people there were like him -forgotten during unforgettable years.
37
Before he even got to the airfield, Viktorov knew that something had happened. Fuel-tankers were driving about the runway; technicians and mechanics were bustling around the fighter-planes covered in camouflage netting. The radio transmitter, normally silent, was chattering away.
'No doubt about it,' thought Viktorov, quickening his pace.
Everything was immediately confirmed when he met Solomatin, one of his fellow lieutenants, a man with pink scars on his cheeks.
'The order's come through. We're being taken out of reserve.'
'To the front?'
'Where do you think? Tashkent?' said Solomatin, striding off towards the village.
He looked very upset. He was seriously involved with his landlady and was obviously on his way to her now.
'Solomatin's decided to go halves. He's keeping the cow for himself and leaving the hut to the woman,' said a familiar voice at Viktorov's side. Lieutenant Yeromin, Viktorov's partner, fell in beside him.
'Where do you think they're sending us, Yeroma?'
'The North-Western Front may be about to advance. The divisional commander's just arrived in an R-5. I can ask a friend who's a Douglas pilot on the Air Force staff. He always knows everything.'
'Why bother? We'll be told soon enough.'
The flurry of excitement affected not only the pilots and ground staff, but the whole village. Junior Lieutenant Korol, the youngest pilot in the squadron, was walking down the street with some freshly washed and ironed linen; on top of it lay a honey-cake and a packet of dried berries. The other pilots often teased Korol, saying that his landladies, two elderly widows, were spoiling him with their honey-cakes. Whenever he'd been out on a mission, the two women – one tall and straight, the other hunch-backed – would come to meet him on his way back from the airfield. He would walk between them, looking like a spoiled and sullen little child; his comrades said he was flying in formation with a question mark and an exclamation mark.