Everybody still remembered everything. Nothing had yet been trampled underfoot by tourists or those groups of young admirers of our military glory, and everything was mixed up together: the mossy headstone of Count Seslavin, a hero of the First World War, and the legend of Dunka, the local Robin Hood, a woman who robbed rich citizens of Tver on the highways, and the River Dunka, which had invariably featured in our daily situation reports during the war. It was the front line between us and the Germans, where, it seems the valiant female ataman had finally been caught by the prince’s guards. Here the dead are still waiting for the living to bury them. Sasha related what his mother had told him: she and some other women had been going to scythe remote meadows. Suddenly, in an overgrown trench, they saw a soldier sitting wearing his greatcoat and helmet. The women were stunned. They wept and rushed to him, but the moment they touched him he crumbled to dust.
There were still landmines buried everywhere. Where a village had been burned down there was now a forest, creeping towards the boundary fence of other villages in decline. We finally drove into Zaimishche. The village street was noticeably shorter. I later discovered there had been seventy houses, but now only twenty-five remained. I remembered the village as it was in winter, and now, in autumn, it seemed unrecognizable. But it was still alive. The log huts stood in a row: one in good order, with a new roof of black roofing felt; another leaning to one side; another again newly refurbished and full of life. I remembered the well sweep in front of the house but the well had changed. It had had to be altered three years previously because the sweep was in the way when the village finally got electricity (something else I only found out later).
I got out of the car and asked two schoolgirls going by with their school bags if they could tell me where Matryona Nilovna lived. They thought hard, and then it dawned on one: Auntie Matryosha? She pointed out her house to me.
I pushed the gate, as people here call the outer door of a hut, and went in on tenterhooks. In the passage, lit by a tiny window, a few steps higher up on the platform where Kostya, the eldest son, used to grind grain between the millstones, stood an iron bed. Leaning over it, taking something off the bed, was a woman. She straightened up and turned round at the sound of the door opening.
I asked if Matryona Nilovna live here. She replied, ‘Yes.’
I took a step up on the mat covering the stairs.
‘Is that you…?’
‘Me,’ she said, peering down at me.
‘We were billeted here with you during the war.’
‘Are you Lena?’ she asked. I felt my heart leap. I gasped with emotion.
‘Why did you not come back?’ she asked in such a slow, calm way. ‘You promised.’ I could not say a word. I just silently hugged her.
‘Come on in. I’ll put the samovar on.’
I followed her in, half blinded by tears, and stubbed my toe in the kitchen on the ring on the hatch down to the cellar. When the bombs were falling I had passed the younger children down there to her (the boys, Kostya and Genka, had rushed out into the street), and climbed down myself to join them. Soldiers running past shouted to us that this was a deadly place to stay, but there was nowhere else to take cover. And, as if the veil of time had been drawn back, I again saw a calf in the enclosure, exactly like the one that had so annoyed Captain Borisov.
Looking at me, Matryona Nilovna shook her head. In all those years her face had not lost that trustful expression. She was not at all taken aback that I had reappeared: I had promised, and had just taken rather a long time to keep my promise. She said sadly, ‘Out working there in the field you do wonder, is she still alive? She did promise…’ Lord, what did we not promise all sorts of people if we came through the war alive.
A short fellow came in, and looked at me in amazement. ‘You never got to meet her,’ Matryona Nilovna said regretfully. And how could he have, missing at the front and in captivity? ‘Nothing you can count on,’ Matryona Nilovna used to say when asked what she knew of her husband’s whereabouts. Thinking how he should react to my appearance, he began shaving, looking me over, this stranger. I felt awkward. After all, I meant nothing to him.
Sasha, waiting outside by the car, hearing what was embarrassing me and that I did not know what to do, said firmly, ‘In your place, I would stay.’ And that being so, he did not deny me one last favour, turned the car round, and we bumped off over the potholes to the next village. There a show trial was being held at the clubhouse, and during the proceedings the sale of vodka was prohibited. One or two men were hanging around on the porch of the village store, visibly wilting as they waited for the resumption of business. The assistant, learning why we needed vodka, sympathized with my predicament and, laden with purchases, we made our way back out past the parched would-be drinkers.
Vasiliy Mikhailovich, as Matryona’s husband was called, brightened up considerably at the sight of our party preparations. ‘One for the road!’ he urged Sasha, who was in a hurry to be on his way. Vasiliy had a drink with him and went off to check whether the flax was to be raised. Sasha took his farewells.
In the kitchen nothing had changed, only now a bare electric light bulb was hanging from the ceiling on its flex, and on the slanting shelf over the table, next to St Nicholas the Wonderworker, there was a small box and the football was being broadcast on the radio.
Little Shurka had not lived long after we left. In the autumn the fighting was again moving towards Zaimishche and everyone was hastily evacuated. ‘We kicked up a fuss and did not want any of their evacuation. Then an officer said, “We just have to wait and see what comes next. We don’t know for sure whether we’ll lick them or maybe they’ll lick us.” Well, then we stopped yelling. That wasn’t going to help, we had to get out, from what he said. We packed our things. Left. Stopped where they told us to. No gate on the house. The officers safe in their bunker. Everything was wide open and it was such a cold day. She fell sick. The children had run off somewhere. I swore at them for leaving Shurka. But what could we do for her? Where could we take her? There was no hospital.’
I remembered her in that cradle, her hungry crying, her toothless, old woman’s smile that went straight to your heart, her quick little legs, pounding the damp straw. And Kostya’s ‘There now, Shurushochki, shush Shurushochki!’
Matryona Nilovna asked about my family. ‘You said after the war you’d come back here for a holiday.’ Did I really say that, about coming for a holiday? But if that was what she remembered, then, fool that I was, I must have said it. ‘And do you remember Jesus saving your life?’ I did not understand what she was talking about.
By now the village women had come to see what was going on. ‘Look, I’ve got a visitor!’ Matryona could scarcely conceal her sense of triumph. Vasiliy Mikhailovich returned. Two young men came in, ‘Look at them now!’ Matryona said. They were her sons, Genka, now Genya, and Shura. A girl of around thirteen came rushing home from school after hearing that someone had come to visit. This was Valya. ‘After Valya I had a little boy, stillborn, and that was that. I was an old woman.’
Everyone began sitting round the table, the women shuffling about hesitantly at the door. Matryona, after a suitable pause, called to them, ‘Come on in, uninvited guests. We’ll spare you a glass, one, and if we get drunk, maybe two.’ Unhurriedly, primly, they came in and sat down. They drank, and became lost in their own thoughts: ‘If it had been shorter, the war, at least one of my sons might have come back, even wounded… But I have no one.’