pillows out of the heap of wrecked furniture, laid out the injured on
them, applied artificial respiration, shouted at the stretcher-bearers,
and kept the two ambulance doctors on the run, obedient to her every
word.
Hitching up her skirt, she went down into the basement and came out
carrying a wet man across her shoulder. The sergeant ran up to help,
followed by the stretcher-bearers.
"Sit him up!" she commanded.
It was a soldier or an officer. He had no cap and his army coat was
sodden and black from the water. They sat him up. His head dropped on
his chest. Varya took him by the chin, and his head lolled back like a
doll's. There was something familiar about that pale face with the dark-
yellow matted hair clinging to his forehead, and I worked for several
minutes, trying to recollect where I had seen him.
"There, he'll be all right in a minute," Varya said gruffly.
She forced his teeth open and put two fingers into his mouth. He
shook his head violently and his body twitched as he started to draw his
breath, wheezing and gasping.
"Aha, bite, would you?" Varya said.
The pump handle kept going up and down and I could see what Varya
was doing to him only in snatches. Now he was sitting and breathing
heavily with his eyes shut, his face with the flattened nose and square
jaw startlingly white in the moonlight, as though etched in chalk-a face
which I had seen a thousand times and which I now scarcely recognised.
To this day I can't make out why I had not let Romashov-for it was he-
be taken to the hospital. Incredible as it may seem, I was glad, when,
sitting on the ground in Ms unbuttoned army coat, he raised his eyes
with a glazed stricken look, saw me as if through a mist, and said in a
barely audible whisper, "Katya." He wasn't surprised to find me
standing there in front of him with a little bottle of something which
Varya said he was to smell. But when I took his hand to feel his pulse, he
clenched his teeth, shuddering, and repeated still louder: "Katya,
Katya."
In the morning we started off home. We staggered along, Varya and I
just as bad as Romashov, although no bomb had cleaved five floors over
us, and we had not floundered in a flooded basement.
Varya and I trudged along, while Masha and some other woman all but
dragged Romashov along behind us. He kept worrying about his kitbag,
afraid it would get lost, until Masha angrily thrust it under his nose,
saying:
"Don't think about bag. Think about God. Your life saved, you fool!
You should pray, read Koran!"
He was still sleeping when we left—Rosalia had made up a bed for him
in the dining-room. The blanket had slipped and he was sleeping in
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clean underwear. Varya, in passing, straightened the blanket with an
habitual gesture and tucked it under him. He was breathing through
clenched teeth and a slit of eyeball was visible through the eyelids-a
Romashov true to life, not to be confused with any other Romashov in
the world.
Somehow it seemed to me that he would disappear by the evening,
like a vision that belonged to that vanished night. But he didn't. When I
rang up, it was he, and not Rosalia, who answered the telephone.
"Katya, I must talk to you," he said in a firm, yet, deferential tone.
"When will you be back? Or may I come and see you?"
"You may come."
"Won't it be rather awkward, though, at the hospital?"
"I daresay it will. But I won't be home for several days."
He was silent for a while.
"I realise that you haven't the slightest desire to see me. But that was
such a long time ago... The reason why you did not want to meet me-"
"Oh, no, not so very long ago."
Silence.
"This is no accident, our meeting. I was on my way to see you. I
rushed down into the basement when I heard someone shout that there
were children there. We must meet, because it's a matter that concerns
you."
"What matter?"
"A very important matter. I'll tell you all about it."
My heart missed a beat, as though I didn't know who it was speaking
to me.
"Well?"
Now he was silent, and for so long that I very nearly hung up.
"All right, you needn't see me. I'm going away and you will never see
me again. But I swear..."
He said something in a whisper. I could see him standing there, teeth
clenched and eyes shut, breathing heavily into the mouthpiece, and that
silence and despair suddenly decided me. I said I would come, and rang
off.
Cheese and butter on the table—that's what I saw when, letting myself
in with the latchkey, I stopped in the doorway of the dining-room. It was
unbelievable—real cheese, red Dutch cheese, and the butter, too, was
real, in a big enamelled mug. Bread of a kind we had not seen in
Leningrad for a long time was cut up in generous slices. Romashov was
engaged in opening some tins of food with a kitchen knife when I came
in. From the kitbag lying on the table the tip of a bottle could be seen
projecting.
Rosalia came out of the bedroom, excited and happy. "Katya," she
whispered to me, "what about Bertha? May I invite her?"
"I don't know."
"My God, you're angry? But I only wanted to know—" "Misha," I broke
in, "Rosalia here wants to find out whether she can invite her sister
Bertha to the table."
"What a question! Where is she? I'll invite her myself." "You'll scare her,
I'm afraid."
He laughed awkwardly. "Supper is served, ladies!"
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It was a gay supper. Poor Rosalia prepared the sandwiches with
trembling hands and ate them with a religious expression. Bertha, frail,
grey, with a peaked little nose and wandering glance, whispered
something over every morsel. Romashov chattered without a stop-
chattered and drank.
That was when I got a good look at him!
We hadn't seen each other for some years. He had been rather stout
then. His face and body, with its slight backward tilt, had shown those
signs of solidity peculiar to a man who was beginning, to put on weight.
Like all ugly people, he took pains to dress immaculately, even
foppishly.
Now he was gaunt and skinny, tightly strapped in new leather harness,
clad in an army tunic with an officer's insignia-not a major, surely? His
skull bones were now prominent. His eyes, unblinking, wide-open,
seemed to have something new in them-weariness perhaps?
"I've changed, haven't I?" he said, seeing that I was studying him. "The
war has turned me inside out. Everything is changed-body and soul."
If it was changed he would not be telling me about it.
"Where did you get all this food, Misha? Stole it?"
Apparently he did not hear the last two words.
"Tuck in, tuck in! I'll get some more. You can get anything here. You
people just don't know how to go about it."
"Really?"
"Yes, of course. You have to know the right people."
I don't know what he meant by that, but instinctively I put my
sandwich back onto the plate.
"Have you been in Leningrad long?"
"Two days. I was transferred from Moscow at the disposal of the chief
of Voentorg (-a retail organisation of army and navy stores.— Tr.) I was at the
Southern Front. Caught in encirclement. Broke through by nothing