Wing-Commander Vanya Martynov came out of his house, dressed in a greatcoat. He was carrying a suitcase in one hand and a dress forage cap in the other – he had left it out so it wouldn't get crumpled. The landlady's daughter, the red hair she had waved herself blowing in the wind, looked after him in a way that made their relationship only too plain.
A lame little boy told Viktorov that Political Instructor Golub and Lieutenant Vovka Skotnoy, with whom he shared his billet, had left with all their belongings. Viktorov had only moved in a few days before: until then he and Golub had been billeted with a dreadful landlady, a woman with a high forehead and protuberant yellow eyes. Looking into her eyes was enough to make you feel ill.
In order to get rid of her tenants, she used to fill the hut with smoke. Once she even sprinkled ash in their tea. Golub had tried to persuade Viktorov to report her to the commissar, but he couldn't bring himself to do so.
'Well, I hope the cholera gets her!' said Golub.
Their new billet had seemed like paradise. But they had not been allowed to stay there for long.
Soon Viktorov was carrying a kitbag and a battered suitcase past the tall grey huts that seemed almost two storeys high. The crippled boy hopped along at his side, taking aim at chickens and at planes circling over the forest with a German holster Viktorov had given him. He walked past the hut Yevdokiya Mikheevna had smoked him out of; he could see her expressionless face behind the dirty window-panes. No one ever talked to her when she stopped for a rest as she carried her two wooden buckets back from the well. She had no cows and no sheep; she didn't even have any house-martins in the eaves. Golub had asked questions about her, hoping to bring to light her kulak background, but she turned out to be from a very poor family. The women in the village said she had gone crazy after her husband's death: she had walked into a lake in cold autumn weather and sat there for days. But she had been taciturn even before that, even before her marriage.
There he was, walking through a village in the forest – and in a few hours he would have flown away for ever. The village, the forest, the elks who came into the vegetable gardens, the ferns, the yellow pools of resin, the cuckoos – all these would cease to exist for him. The old men and the little girls would disappear, as would the stories about collectivization, the stories of bears who had stolen punnets full of raspberries from the women, the stories of little boys who had stepped with bare heels on the heads of vipers… This unfamiliar village would vanish – this village whose life revolved around the forest just as the workers' settlement where he had been born and raised revolved around the factory.
Then his fighter would land and a new airfield would come into being. Nearby they would find a new peasant village or workers' settlement – with its own old women and small girls, its own tears and jokes, its own cats with bald, scarred noses, its own good and bad landladies, its own stories about the past and about general collectivization. Here too the handsome Solomatin would put on his peaked service cap, walk down the street, sing to his guitar and drive some young girl out of her mind.
Major Zakabluka, with his bronzed face and a white, clean-shaven skull, read out their orders. His five Orders of the Red Star jingled as he swayed on his crooked legs. He told them that their route would be announced before take-off and that they were to sleep in their bunkers; anyone who absented himself from the airfield would be punished with the utmost severity.
'I don't want anyone nodding off when we're in the air,' he explained. 'Get some sleep before we set off.'
Then Berman, the commissar, stepped forward. He was generally considered too arrogant, though he could talk sensibly and eloquently about the finer points of flying. His unpopularity had increased after the Mukhin affair. Mukhin had been involved with Lida Voynovaya, a radio-operator. This love-affair had charmed everyone – whenever they had a spare moment, the two of them would be walking hand in hand along the banks of the river. Everything about the affair was so transparent that the men didn't even make jokes about it.
Then a rumour sprang up – apparently Lida had told a girl-friend and the girl-friend had passed it on to the squadron – that during one of their walks Mukhin had threatened Lida with a gun and raped her.
Berman was furious; he pursued the case with such furious energy that within ten days Mukhin had appeared before a tribunal and been sentenced to be shot.
Before the sentence was carried out, however, Major-General Alexeev, the Member of the Air Army Soviet, had flown in to ascertain the exact circumstances of Mukhin's crime. To his profound embarrassment, Lida knelt down before him and implored him to believe that the whole case against Mukhin was an absurd fabrication.
She then told him the full story. She and Mukhin had been kissing in a glade in the forest. She had dozed off and – as a jest – Mukhin had quietly placed his pistol between her knees and fired into the ground. She had woken up and screamed, and Mukhin had started kissing her again. She had told all this to her girl-friend – who had then circulated another, more sinister version. But only one thing in all this was true – and that was something exceptionally simple: her and Mukhin's love for one another.
Everything was finally resolved: Mukhin's sentence was rescinded and he was transferred to another squadron. But the whole affair made Berman very unpopular.
One day, in the mess, Solomatin remarked that a Russian would never have acted like that. Someone else, probably Molchanov, had answered that every nation had its villains.
'Take Korol,' said Vanya Skotnoy. 'He's a Jew – and he's a splendid person to have as a mate. It's good to know there's someone you can rely on at your tail.'
'Korol's not a Jew,' said Solomatin. 'He's one of us. In the air I trust him more than I trust myself. Once, over Rzhev, he shot down a Messerschmidt that was right on my tail. And I've twice let a damaged Fritz off the hook to get him out of trouble. And I forget everyone when I'm in combat – even my own mother'.
'I see,' said Viktorov. 'If you like a man, he can't be a Jew!'
Everyone laughed.
'It's all very well to laugh,' Solomatin replied, 'but Mukhin didn't think it was funny when Berman sentenced him to be shot.'
At this moment Korol came in. One of the pilots asked in a sympathetic tone of voice: 'Listen, Borya, are you a Jew?'
'Yes, I am,' answered Korol in some embarrassment.
'Are you sure?'
'Absolutely.'
'Are you circumcised, though?'
'To hell with you!' retorted Korol. Once again everyone laughed.
When they were on their way back to the village, Solomatin had come up to Viktorov and said: 'You're a fool to talk like that, you know. I used to work in a soap-works and the whole place was full of Jews. All the administrative staff were Jewish. I can tell you I had enough of those Samuel Abramoviches. They knew how to look after one another all right.'
'Why go on about it?' said Viktorov with a surprised shrug of the shoulders. 'Do you think I'm in league with them?'
Now it was Berman's turn to address the assembled pilots. He announced that this was the beginning of a new era for the fighter squadron: their time in the rear was over. Everyone knew this already, but they listened attentively in case he dropped any hint as to whether they would be kept on the North-Western Front and stationed near Rzhev, or whether they would be transferred to the South or the West.