Could he really be about to see her? Today? 'Zhenya! Hello!'
His interview with General Ryutin was extremely brief. They had barely started when the general received a telephone call from the General Staff – he was to fly to Moscow immediately.
Ryutin apologized to Novikov and then made a call on the local exchange.
'Everything's been changed, Masha. I'm flying by Douglas at dawn tomorrow. Tell Anna Aristarkhovna. We won't be able to bring any potatoes – they're still at the State farm.'
His pale face took on a look of suffering and disgust. Then, evidently interrupting a flood of complaints, he snapped, 'So you want me to inform the General Staff that I'm unable to leave until the tailor's finished my wife's coat?' and hung up.
'Comrade Colonel,' he said to Novikov, 'give me your opinion of the suspension of these tanks. Do they answer to the requirements we originally laid down?'
Novikov found this conversation wearisome. During his months in command he had learned to evaluate people very quickly. He had learned to weigh up the importance of all the inspectors, instructors, heads of commissions and other representatives who had come to see him. He understood very well the importance of such simple phrases as 'Comrade Malenkov told me to inform you…' And he knew that there were generals covered in medals, full of bustle and eloquence, who were powerless even to obtain a ton of fuel-oil, appoint a storekeeper or fire a clerk.
Ryutin's position wasn't on the top level of the pyramid of State; he was merely a statistician, a provider of information. During their conversation Novikov looked repeatedly at his watch.
The general closed his large notebook.
'I'm sorry, comrade Colonel. I'm afraid I have to leave you. I'm flying at dawn tomorrow. I don't know what to do. Perhaps you should come to Moscow yourself?'
'Yes, comrade Lieutenant-General. Together with all the tanks under my command,' said Novikov coldly.
They said goodbye. Ryutin asked him to give his regards to General Nyeudobnov; they had once served together. As Novikov walked down the strip of green carpet leading towards the door of the large office, he heard Ryutin back on the telephone:
'Get me the director of kolkhoz number one.'
'Poor man,' thought Novikov. 'He's got to rescue his potatoes.'
He left the building and set out for Yevgenia Nikolaevna's. In Stalingrad he had visited her on a stifling summer night; he had come straight from the steppe, covered in the smoke and dust of the retreat. There seemed to be an abyss between the man he had been then and the man he was now. And yet here he was, the same person, about to visit her once again.
'You'll be mine!' he said to himself. 'You'll be mine!'
3
It was an old two-storey house, one of those obstinate buildings that never quite keep up with the seasons; it felt cool and damp in summer, but its thick walls retained a close, dusty heat during the autumn frosts.
He rang; the door opened and he felt the closeness inside. Then, in a corridor littered with trunks and broken baskets, he caught sight of Yevgenia Nikolaevna. He saw her, but he didn't see her black dress or the white scarf round her head, he didn't even see her eyes and face, her hands and her shoulders. It was as though he saw her not with his eyes but with his heart. She gave a cry of surprise, but she didn't step back as people often do at some unexpected sight.
He greeted her and she answered. He walked towards her, his eyes closed. He felt happy; at the same time he felt ready to die then and there. He sensed the warmth of her body.
He realized that this previously unknown feeling of happiness had no need of eyes, thoughts or words.
She asked him about something or other and he answered. As he followed her down the dark corridor, he clung to her hand like a little boy afraid of being lost in a crowd.
'What a wide corridor,' he thought. 'Big enough for a tank.'
They went into a room with a window looking out onto the blank wall of the house next door. There were two beds, one on each side – one with a grey blanket and a flat crumpled pillow, the other with fluffed-up pillows and a bedspread of white lace. Above this second bed hung Easter and New Year cards with pictures of men in dinner-jackets and chickens hatching out of eggs.
The table was cluttered with sheets of rolled-up drawing-paper; in one corner stood a bottle of oil, a chunk of bread and half of a tired-looking onion.
'Zhenya,' he said.
There was a strange look in her usually alert, mocking eyes.
'You've come a long way,' she said. 'You must be hungry.'
She seemed to want to destroy something new that had arisen between them, something it was already too late to destroy. Novikov had become somehow different – a man with absolute power over hundreds of men and machines, a man with the pleading eyes of an unhappy schoolboy. This incongruity confused her: she wanted just to look down on him, to pity him, to forget his strength. Her happiness had seemed to lie in her freedom; and yet even though this freedom was now slipping away from her, she still felt happy.
'Do you still not understand?' said Novikov abruptly.
Once again he stopped listening to what either of them was saying. Once again he felt a sense of happiness well up inside him, together with the somehow connected feeling of being ready to die then and there. She put her arms round his neck. Her hair flowed across his forehead and cheeks like a stream of warm water; through it he could glimpse her eyes.
Her whispering voice blotted out the war, drowned the roar of tanks.
In the evening they ate some bread and drank some hot water. Yevgenia said: 'Our commander's forgotten the taste of black bread.'
She brought in a saucepan of buckwheat kasha she had left outside the window. The frost had turned the grains blue and violet. In the warmth of the room they began to sweat.
'It's like lilac,' said Yevgenia.
Novikov tried some lilac and thought, 'How awful!'
'Our commanding officer's even forgotten the taste of buckwheat,' said Yevgenia.
'Yes,' thought Novikov. 'It's a good thing I didn't take Getmanov's advice and bring her a parcel of food.'
'At the beginning of the war I was with a fighter squadron near Brest,' he told her. 'The pilots all rushed back to the airfield and I heard a Polish woman shout out: "Who's that?" A little boy answered: "A Russian soldier." At that moment I felt very acutely: "I'm Russian, yes I'm Russian!" Of course I've always known very well that I'm not a Turk, but at that moment it was as though my whole soul was singing: "I'm Russian, I'm Russian!" Of course we were brought up in a different spirit before the war… And today, the happiest day of my life, it's just the same – Russian grief, Russian happiness… Well, I just wanted to say that… What is it?' he asked suddenly.
In her mind's eye Yevgenia had glimpsed Krymov and his dishevelled hair. God, had they really separated for ever? It was when she was happiest that she found this thought most unbearable.
For a moment she felt she was about to reconcile this present time, the words of the man now kissing her, with that time in the past; that she was about to understand the secret currents of her life, about to glimpse what always remains hidden – those depths of the heart where one's fate is decided.
'This room,' she said, 'belongs to a German. She took me in. This angelic little bed belongs to her. In all my life, I've never met anyone more innocent and more helpless… It sounds strange to say this while we're at war, but I'm sure there's no kinder person in the whole city. Isn't that strange?'