‘You just grabbed your kiddies under your arm and headed for Mikitka’s vegetable plot and into the little ditch he’d dug. We had such a fright! We sat there all night. And he kept flying around. And then, away over on Yegorka’s, he dropped the bomb. What a fright…’ says Matryona. ‘They’re coming, do you hear? They’re coming, hear that creaking. Oh, are they really Russians? It’s Russians coming. Stop whining, Nyurka, I say. Oh, what’s going on over there. The Germans are on the run. Oh, daughter. Light the pegaska the German anti-aircraft gunners left.’ ‘Germans? It’s how it is. They took them off to fight a war, so fight they did. It’s not for us to judge.’
Vasiliy Mikhailovich filled the glasses and added his voice to the conversation, all about today’s farming worries. The women couldn’t wait to tell their stories about how it had been in the past. ‘It was time for the sowing, we had no horses, nothing. Just the women on their own. We hitched five of us to the harrow.’ ‘Well, now we’re getting a life again. Especially anyone whose got some men.’ ‘Just as long as we don’t have another war. Now, God have mercy on us if we have to.’ And then Matryona’s voice, tenderly: ‘And I was wondering, who can that be? The schoolmistress? Now I’ll recognize her anywhere.’ That was about me.
I kept quiet. I could not contain my emotion. The war really had passed through the door of this house. Just about everybody had been billeted here: Finns, Germans (more than once), the German anti-aircraft gunners with their ‘pegaskas’, as Matryona called their lamps, and we Russians, repeatedly being driven from the village, then retaking it. In a large picture frame on the wall, among the family photos, are some girls in hats with earflaps and forage caps who stayed here after us. There is no photo of me: I did not have one with me. But now I find that all along I have been hovering here, those long years during which she was seeing children laid in their graves, giving birth to others, then seeing the children she already had grown up, bidding them farewell as they moved far away.
‘She sent me dried bread with a soldier once,’ she kept repeating, and to me, ‘Do you remember?’ To my shame, I had not the wits to say I did. Of course I would have, at the first opportunity, as soon as I found someone coming this way, only I did not remember doing it. ‘And I wanted to pour him some milk to take back to you,’ she said, suddenly deflated. ‘But he said, no way! “She has plenty to eat! She’s well fed!”’ That memory about the bread was so important to her, so treasured; to this day I cannot forgive myself for not immediately confirming it.
Vasiliy Mikhailovich went out and returned with a lantern, having done the rounds of the houses. He was the night watchman. Everybody went home. Vasiliy and the boys settled down to sleep; they would all be up in the morning and off to harvest the potatoes. Matryona and I talked as we cleared the table and washed the dishes. ‘Do you remember,’ she asked, ‘that last night before you were travelling on, and we had the bombing?’ I remembered it only too well. The Germans were rarely flying nights at that time: they had pretty much a free hand even during the day. Matryona had been generous with heating the hut, so that we should be well warmed up before going on our way. The house was positively hot and the bedbugs crawled out in droves. To get away from them, I moved out of my corner to the bench by the wall opposite, with my head to the icon corner. I was wakened by a loud explosion and the whistling of shards of glass from the windows flying through the air.
‘They riddled the house,’ someone said. Matryona, protecting the flickering light of the pegaska with her hand, looked around and said, ‘He hit our holy Saviour.’ If I had woken up a moment sooner and sat up, I would have had my brains blown out. Matryona decided it was the Saviour who had saved me, and been wounded himself.
‘And now, if you please, I have my daughter Valya coming home from the school and saying, “Mummy, you have to get rid of the boards.”’ Their teacher had been asking them to get the icons taken down. I said, ‘While we have breath in our bodies they’re doing no harm.’ ‘Well then, Mum, at least give me the cloths from them.’
The schoolmistress is very respected in the village. Before she came nobody grew flowers in Zaimishche. She was very persistent, showed how to grow them, and now people have lilac planted, flowers growing under their windows, and they sow them in their vegetable plots. Everybody is very pleased, but there is Valya saying, ‘Mum, we need to throw the icons out.’
In the morning I found myself alone in the house. Matryona and her entire family had got on a cart and gone off to dig up the potatoes. I went out to the passage and opened the door to the yard. Just as then, there were the birch-twig brushes ready for use in the bathhouse. Sawn logs were piled up by the wall. The salted cabbage was being pressed by a weight in the keg. Chickens dozed on their perch. That smell was just the same. Nothing, I suppose, stirs our emotions and reawakens our memories like smells.
I went back to the kitchen and there too, in my solitude, I was pursued by smells. There was a smell of calf, tobacco, sheepskin, and leather. The smell of our nomadic army life seemed to have suffused this peasant lodging ineradicably.
I remembered the icon. In the ‘clean’, living half of the hut, where it used to hang, there was nothing. What had become of it?
From the low ceiling there hung paper crackers for the New Year tree, each containing some little treat. They alternated with embroidered towels folded in half and pinned to the ceiling. That continued right through the room, and the closer you came to the corner, the more dense were the colourful crackers, and the towels from the trunk for Valya’s dowry were lowered full length, blocking any view of the corner.
I parted the towels, disrupting Valya’s little masquerade. The icon she had ‘masked’ was in its place. I looked at it again and gasped. The Saviour was holding an open book on which was inscribed:
A jagged wound had pierced the old dark wood and damaged the words ‘That ye love’. To anyone who did not see it with their own eyes this will seem far fetched, and that is why I never mentioned it. ‘That ye love one another’. It continued in Church Slavonic, ‘as I…’ That was alclass="underline" there was no room for more on the open page of the book.
Matryona and Vasiliy Mikhailovich wrote to me, sharing their worries and urging me to visit them. Two years later I was again in Rzhev, and again went to Zaimishche to see them. We were sitting at the table when I suddenly noticed that the icon, that very icon, was now, for some reason, leaning on the kitchen windowsill. I asked why it was in such an unbecoming place. Vasiliy Mikhailovich answered animatedly, ‘Well, the next time you come it will have been chopped up for firewood.’
I was horrified. What was he saying? This was a historic icon. They needed to take such good care of it. ‘Would you?’ he asked. ‘Of course I would.’ ‘Then you take it.’ ‘But it’s not my icon. You should put it back in the icon corner. Why did you move it? That was its place. After all, that is where it was hit.’
Matryona, who had said nothing up till now, said, ‘Take it.’ ‘Only I’m telling you,’ Vasiliy Mikhailovich said, ‘you’ll get woodworm in all your furniture.’ He turned the icon round and showed where the wood had been eaten away on the back.
On my last visit Matryona had said of the icons, ‘While we have breath in our bodies they’re doing no harm.’ Evidently, however, her husband had sided with the children against her. On my last morning, when I came into the kitchen I saw Matryona washing the icon, preparing it for its journey and talking to it. ‘Now, don’t be upset, Lord Jesus. You’ll be better off there.’ She wrapped the icon in an old apron and put it into a bag along with a pair of woollen socks she had knitted for me.