had I overlooked? How had it happened that these men had come to us
and dared to shoot down wounded men, as though there were no justice
in this world, no honour, none of the things I had been taught at school,
and learned to respect and love ever since a child?
I tried to answer this question, but I couldn't, because I was fighting
for breath, and the boys looked at me anxiously and kept saying that if
their father came he would know what to do to make me feel better.
The father did come. There could be no doubt it was he—the same
ungainly figure as the boys, the same sombre face and shining blue eyes.
They were shining at the moment when, with arms hanging down his
sides and back bent, he stopped beside my bed.
"The German detachment has been routed," he said. "We surrounded
them at Shchelya Novaya and mopped them all up to a man."
Then he gazed at me silently with a frown, and I thought that I must
be in a bad way indeed if people looked at me with such kindly eyes,
asked me my full name and rank, and pinned the slip of paper with
these details to the wall so as not to lose it. There was no harm in that,
though; let him do it; I didn't have to look at that paper. I took the
man's hand and started earnestly to tell him what a reception his boys
had given me. I may have been spinning it out too long, repeating
myself and getting confused, because he put something cold on my
forehead and said I was to go to sleep.
I knew that he would be pleased if I did, so I closed my eyes and
pretended to be asleep. But the picture I had been describing to him
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remained-somewhere in an interminable perspective, between wide-
spaced walls.
Thousands of little houses loomed before me. Thousands of boys
knelt behind stools on which lay thousands of guns. Thousands of other
boys hid behind curtains, knife in hand. From horizon to horizon, in
every house, in the depth of dark rooms, boys were lying in wait for the
enemy, waiting to kill him as he entered.
CHAPTER NINE
DEALING WITH LOVE
If, like the poets, one compares life to a road, it can be said that at the
sharpest turns in this road I have always encountered traffic-regulators,
who showed me the right direction. This particular turn in the road
differed from the others merely in fact that I was helped out by a
pointsman, that is, by a professional traffic-regulator.
I lay in his house for two days and nights, now coming to myself, now
losing consciousness, always opening my eyes to the sight of that
sombre man standing by my bed, never moving away, as though to keep
me from taking the turn where the road drops away into the abyss.
Sometimes he turned into a boy with the same amazingly bright eyes,
and the boy, too, stood steadfast at his post and kept me there in that
room with the little windows and the low ceiling, away from the place
where (if the report in Red Falcons was to be believed) I had already
gone to.
The remarkable thing was that never, either awake or in delirium, did
I think of Romashov. Could that have been an instinct of self-
preservation? Probably it was-the memory of it would not have done me
any good.
But when traffic was restored, when the family took me to Zaozorye
by railcar-no doubt the very one which the nurses had failed to reach-
and three pairs of shining blue eyes shyly took leave of me, when I found
myself in another hospital train, this time a real one with a bathroom, a
radio and a library; when, bathed, rebandaged and fed, with my leg
hitched to the ceiling according to all the rules of medical science, I had
slept my way through the whole of Central Russia, to find myself
somewhere beyond Kirov in a strange world of unblacked-out windows-
it was then that I remembered and went in my mind over everything
that had occurred between me and Romashov.
I recollected our talk on the evening before the German tanks had
gunned our train.
"Admit that you have committed some base actions in your life," I had
said. "Base from your own point of view, I mean."
"Maybe," he had said coolly. "But what do you call a base action? I
regard life as a game. Even now, for instance. Hasn't fate itself put the
cards in our hands?"
It was the war, not fate, that had dealt the cards. Not the war either,
but the retreat. If not for the retreat he would never have dared to steal
my gun and papers from me and leave me in the wood alone.
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I went over the whole history of our relationship, a very complicated
one, bearing in mind (a thing now almost fantastic) that he had once
seriously contemplated marrying Katya.
Was he reconciled to the fact that he had lost her for ever? I don't
know. He had married somebody by the name of Alevtina Sergeyevna,
and Nina Kapitonovna said that he had got terribly drunk at the
wedding and had wept. Katya had listened to the story with a blush. Did
she guess, then, that Romashov still loved her? I don't know, I don't
know...
I had written to Katya while still in the train, and I wrote to her from
the hospital almost every day. I wrote to the Berensteins' address, and to
Pyotr through the field post, and to the Military Medical Academy
where Katya was working with Varya Trofimova, as she had written to
me in September. There was no railway communication with Leningrad,
but the mail was delivered by plane, and I could not understand why my
letters did not reach them. I comforted myself with the thought that if
anything had happened to Katya somebody was sure to answer me.
That unhappy day, February 21, 1942, will always stick in my memory.
One of the volunteer nurses told me that she had met a train from
Leningrad at the station with trade-school pupils who were being
evacuated from the starving city. She was a stern-faced woman who had
mentioned one day, with a calmness that astonished me, that her
husband and son had been killed at the front. Yet when she told me
about the boys, so weak from dystrophy that they had to be carried out
of the carriages, she wept.
I had to force myself to eat my dinner that day. My leg, which had
been in a plaster cast for over a month now, had suddenly begun to give
me an excruciating pain. The doctor ordered an X-ray, and that was
when I "let it get me", as Aunt Dasha was fond of saying.
For one thing, the X-ray showed that the leg had knitted wrong and
would have to be removed from the plaster and have some bones or
other broken. That meant starting the treatment all over again.
Secondly, it was devilishly cold in the X-ray room and I was kept there
for an hour and a half. I must have caught a cold, because towards the
evening I noticed that I was talking nonsense—a first sign with me that I
was running a temperature.
In short, I contracted pneumonia. This meant putting off the second
operation, and the doctors feared that I would be left lame.
I am afraid I am making too much of my ailments—dull stuff,
especially considering that I had been wounded in the third month of
the war without having done anything worth mentioning. And that at a