The kitten trembled constantly, evidently in a state of shock.
'You should do away with it right now,' the old man in charge of the mortars said with a grimace – and then added: 'You must pick off the fleas.'
Another member of the mortar-crew, the handsome, swarthy Chentsov, also a former member of the militia, urged: 'Get rid of that vermin, my girl. Now, if it were a Siberian cat…'
The sullen Lyakhov, a sapper with thin lips and an unpleasant-looking face, was the only man to be genuinely concerned about the kitten and indifferent to the charms of the radio-operator.
'Once, when we were in the steppe,' he told her, 'something suddenly hit me. I thought it must be a shell at the end of its trajectory. But guess what? It was a hare. He stayed with me till evening. Then things quietened down a bit and he left.
'Now, you may be a girl,' he went on, 'but at least you can understand: that's a 108 millimetre, that's the tune of a Vanyusha, that's a reconnaissance plane flying over the Volga… But the poor stupid hare can't make out anything at all. He can't even tell the difference between a mortar and a howitzer. The Germans send up a flare and he just sits there and shakes – you can't explain anything to him. That's what makes me sorry for these dumb animals.'
Recognizing that he was in earnest, Katya responded in the same tone. 'I don't know… Take dogs, for example – they can tell different planes apart. When we were stationed in the village, there was a mongrel called Kerzon. When our ILs flew over, he just lay there without even raising his head. But as soon as he heard the whine of a Junkers, he went straight to his hiding-place. He never once made a mistake.'
The air was rent by a piercing scream – a German Vanyusha. There was a metallic crash, a cloud of black smoke mixed with red dust, and a shower of rubble. A minute later, when the dust began to settle, Katya and Lyakhov resumed their conversation – for all the world as though it was two different people who had just fallen flat on their faces. The self-assurance of these soldiers seemed to have rubbed off on Katya. It was as though they were convinced that everything here, even the iron and stone, might be weak and fragile – but not they themselves.
A burst of machine-gun fire whistled over their heads, then another.
'This spring we were stationed near Sviatogorsk,' Lyakhov told her. 'Once there was a terrible whistling right over our heads, but we couldn't hear any shots. We didn't know what on earth was happening. It turned out to be the starlings imitating bullets… The lieutenant had even put us on alert – they did it perfectly.'
'When I was at home,' said Katya, smiling, 'I imagined that war would be a matter of lost cats, children screaming and blazing buildings. That seems to be just how it is.'
The next man to approach her was the bearded Zubarev.
'Well,' he asked sympathetically, 'and how's our little man with the tail?'
He lifted up the scrap of cloth that had been laid over the kitten.
'Poor little thing. You do look weak!' As he said this, his eyes gleamed insolently.
That evening, after a brief skirmish, the Germans managed to advance a short distance along the flank of the building; now their machine-guns covered the path leading back to the Soviet lines. The telephone link with Battalion Headquarters was severed again. Grekov ordered a passage to be blasted to link up with a nearby tunnel.
'We'll use the dynamite,' said Antsiferov, the sergeant-major – a stout man with a mug of tea in one hand and a sugar-lump in the other.
The other inmates were sitting in a pit at the foot of the main wall and talking. As before, no one mentioned the two gypsies; nor did they seem worried at being encircled.
This calm seemed strange to Katya; nevertheless, she submitted to it herself. Even the dreaded word 'encirclement' no longer held any terrors for her. Nor was she frightened when a machine-gun opened up right next to them and Grekov shouted: 'Fire! Fire! Look – they've got right in!' Nor when Grekov ordered: 'Use whatever's to hand – knives, spades, grenades. You know your job. Kill the bastards – it doesn't matter how.'
During the few quiet moments, the men engaged in a long and detailed discussion of Katya's physical appearance. The short-sighted Batrakov, who had always seemed to live in another world, turned out to be surprisingly interested.
'All I care about are a woman's tits,' he said.
Kolomeitsev disagreed. He – in Zubarev's words – preferred to call a spade a spade.
'So have you talked to her about the cat, then?' asked Zubarev.
'Of course,' said Batrakov. 'Even old grey-beard here's had a chat with her about that.'
The old man in command of the mortars spat and drew his hand across his chest.
'Really! I ask you! Does she have what makes a woman a woman?'
He got particularly angry if anyone hinted that Grekov might have his eye on her.
'Well, of course! To us, even a Katya seems passable. In the country of the blind… She's got legs like a stork, no arse worth speaking of, and great cow-like eyes. Call that a woman?'
'You just like big tits,' Chentsov retorted. 'That's an outmoded, pre-revolutionary point of view.'
Kolomeitsev, a coarse, foul-mouthed man, whose large bald head concealed many surprising contradictions, said: 'She's not a bad girl, but I'm very particular. I like them small, preferably Armenian or Jewish, with large quick eyes and short hair.'
Zubarev looked thoughtfully at the dark sky criss-crossed by the beams of searchlights. 'Well, I wonder how it will work out in the end.'
'You mean who she'll end up with?' said Kolomeitsev. 'Grekov -that's obvious.'
'Far from it,' said Zubarev. 'It's not in the least obvious.' He picked up a piece of brick and hurled it against the wall.
The others laughed.
'I see! You're going to charm her with the down on your chin, are you?' said Batrakov.
'No,' said Kolomeitsev, 'he's going to sing. They're going to make a programme together: "Infantry at the microphone". He'll sing and she'll broadcast it into the ether. They'll make a fine pair!'
Zubarev looked round at the boy who'd been reading poetry the evening before. 'And how about you?'
'If he doesn't say anything, it's because he doesn't want to,' said the old grey-beard warningly. Then he turned to the boy and said in a fatherly way, as though he were rebuking his son for listening to the grown-ups: 'You'd do better to go down to the cellar and get some sleep while you can.'
'Antsiferov's down there right now with his dynamite,' said Batrakov.
Meanwhile Grekov was dictating to Katya. He informed Army Headquarters that the Germans were almost certainly preparing an offensive and that it would almost certainly be directed at the Tractor Factory. What he didn't say was that house 6/1 appeared to lie on the very axis of this offensive. But as he looked at Katya's thin little neck, at her lips, at her half-lowered eyelashes, he saw an all-too-vivid picture of a broken neck with pearly vertebrae poking out through lacerated skin, of two glassed-over, fish-like eyes, and of lips like grey, dusty rubber.
He was longing to seize hold of her, to feel her life and warmth while they were both alive, while this young being was still full of grace and charm. He thought it was just pity that made him want to embrace the girl – but does pity make your temples throb and your ears buzz?
Headquarters were slow to answer. Grekov stretched till every joint in his body began to crack, gave a loud sigh, thought, 'It's all right, we've got the night ahead of us,' and asked tenderly: 'How's Klimov's kitten getting on? Is he getting his strength back?'
'Far from it,' answered Katya.