The Road (6 page)

“I’ll go on top,” said Goryacheva. “I’m young.”

“But it’s not difficult with these little steps,” said Gagareva. “If you’d rather, I can easily go on top myself.”

“Don’t even think of it,” said Goryacheva, looking at Gagareva and laughing.

“I may be big,” said Gagareva, also laughing, “but that’s neither here nor there. I’ve been doing my gymnastics right up to the last minute.”

The attendant brought them some tea, and they decided to have their supper there in the compartment rather than go to the restaurant car. They quickly struck up a rapport. They were smiling, offering each other tastes of their food.

“This will be the first time I’ve ever seen the sea,” said Goryacheva. She went on: “The resort network’s growing so fast now.”

“Yes,” said Gagareva, “a great deal of thought is going into maintaining the health of the country’s citizens. Our commissariat alone has planned eight centers on the shores of the Black Sea.”

“Foreigners are very attracted to our wealth, too,” said Goryacheva. “The Japanese have quite lost their heads over it. And one can understand them. Our seas, our rivers, our forests—there’s such beauty everywhere!”

“The Red Army will soon knock that out of them. This will be the last time they
try to get their hands on our Motherland!” said Gagareva.

“Yes, on May Day I couldn’t take my eyes off our tanks. Iron mountains—but they move fast!”

“I didn’t have the good fortune to be there on Red Square myself, but I know anyway that the strength of our army lies not only in its equipment but also in its Socialist ideology.”

“You’ve hit the nail on the head, comrade Gagareva,” Goryacheva agreed. “Our whole country will want to fight.”

They carried on chatting for a while, then went to bed. Goryacheva woke up during the night. It was comfortable on the upper bunk, like being in a cradle. The train was going at a good speed, but the heavy first-class carriage was barely swaying. Goryacheva looked down. Gagareva was wearing a flannel nightgown and her gray hair was hanging loose on her shoulders; propped up on one elbow, she was looking out of the dark window and crying. Rather than weeping silently, as old women often do, she was sobbing loudly and hoarsely, her fleshy shoulders quivering with each sob. Goryacheva wanted to ask her what was the matter; she wanted to comfort her. Instead, however, she said nothing and very quietly, without Gagareva hearing, lay down again and closed her eyes. She had realized why Gagareva was crying. Eight or nine months before, she had been called to the deputy of the People’s Commissar to discuss Gagareva. Gagareva held an important position, and she was a good worker who knew her job well. But one day she had handed in a statement saying that she considered it her duty to report that in the autumn of 1937 her son-in-law, an important official at the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, had been arrested; soon after this, her daughter had been arrested too.

“What do you make of it all?” the deputy had asked Goryacheva. “Kozhuro, you know, has handed me a carefully argued summary of the reasons why she should be removed from her post.”

Goryacheva and the deputy had both laughed; Kozhuro, the head of the planning department, was known as the most cautious and fearful of all the heads of department. He had dismissed a huge number of people and had even been reprimanded for this by the Moscow Party Committee: he was too ready, apparently, to dismiss his staff at the merest hint of suspicion. Once he had dismissed a young woman, the wife of a cost accountant, merely because the cost accountant’s sister was married to a professor who had been excluded from the Party “for links to enemies of the people.” All this had only come to light when the professor was reinstated in the Party and Kozhuro could not decide whether or not to bring back the cost accountant’s wife.

In reply to the deputy’s question, Goryacheva had said, “Kozhuro’s the one who should be dismissed—he over-insures his every move. If Gagareva’s fired, I’m going straight to the Central Committee. She’s an old woman I really admire!”

The deputy had replied, “It’s not for you and me to make decisions about Kozhuro—that’s not our concern. And there will be no need for you to appeal to the Central Committee, since Gagareva is not being dismissed.”

Goryacheva had thought to herself, “This fellow’s pretty careful too,” but she had said nothing.

And just now, in the train, she had understood: Gagareva was crying because she was on her way to a holiday resort, in a comfortable train compartment—while her daughter was in a camp barrack, sleeping on bed boards.

In the morning Gagareva asked, “How was your night, comrade Goryacheva? These last few years I’ve been sleeping badly on trains. I wake up feeling battered, like after a serious illness.” Her face looked puffy, and her eyelids were red.

“Do you receive letters from your daughter?” Goryacheva asked suddenly.

Gagareva was taken aback. “How can I put it?” she began. “Really I have no official contact with her. She and I have nothing in common. But I happen to know that she’s working in Kazakhstan, and that she’s petitioning for a review of her case.”

It was stuffy in the compartment, but they had to close the window because of the dust. All around them were fields of ripe grain. In the evening, after Kharkov, they came to places where the harvest had already started, where there were trucks and combine harvesters waiting in the fields. “I used to work on those,” said Goryacheva, her heart beating faster.

The house of recreation for senior cadres was small but very comfortable. Each of the visitors had their own room. There was a choice of dishes for lunch, and there was always wine—proper wine made from grapes. There would even be a choice of desserts—ice cream, custard, blintzes with jam. Goryacheva did not see a lot of Gagareva; not only were they on different floors but there were also days when Gagareva felt unwell and had her meals brought to her room. In the evenings, when it was cooler, Gagareva would wrap a shawl around her shoulders and go for a walk, book in hand, along the avenue of cypress trees above the sea; she took short steps, often pausing to get her breath back, and sometimes she would sit on one of the low stone benches. She had no regular companions. The only person who visited her in her room was Kotova, an old doctor who worked there; she and Gagareva would talk together for a long time. And sometimes, after supper, Gagareva would call on Kotova.

“I feel I’m in a kindergarten here,” Gagareva would complain. “I’ve got no one to talk to.”

“Yes,” said Kotova. “It really is like a kindergarten. Nobody here in August is older than thirty—apart from me, of course.”

Gagareva talked about what a good time they had all had in this same house of recreation in 1931. There had always been things going on: evenings of reminiscences, amateur singers and musicians, readings from books, literary debates.

“Yes, there were some interesting people then,” said Kotova, “but I sometimes had a hard time of it myself. There was one man I remember—a handsome man with a blond beard. He had heart problems—an accumulation of fat around the heart, some degree of metabolic disturbance, and symptoms of gout in the joints of his left arm. I’ve forgotten his name and where he worked. None of his illnesses was serious, but he didn’t half give me a lot of trouble. He was so capricious, so very used to getting whatever he wanted. I even ended up writing to the Health Department, asking to be relieved from my post.”

“Oh, I know the man you mean,” said Gagareva. “He isn’t around anymore. During collectivization he was head of the regional land department. We used to talk about him a lot in our activist group.”

“Well,” said Kotova, “all I can say is that he was unbearable when he was here. Once I was woken up in the middle of the night. He’d called me. He was sitting on his bed, and all he could say was, ‘Doctor, I feel sick.’ At that point I lost all patience. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ I snapped, ‘waking an old woman in the middle of the night just because you ate too much supper.’ ”

“Yes,” said Gagareva, “people are strange...”

Kotova lived on her own, and Gagareva liked her white clean room and her little “private” garden outside the window. She preferred this small plot to the large and splendid park, and she liked to sit on the little step with a book, beside the pot with the pink oleander.

The visitors spent most of their time on the beach. But not even the keenest swimmers and sunbathers could match Goryacheva in their enthusiasm. She was mesmerized by the sea; it was as if she had fallen in love. In the morning she would quickly eat her breakfast, wrap some pears and some grapes in a shaggy towel, and walk down the narrow path to the beach.

“Wait a moment, Goryacheva!” jokers would call out. “Give us a moment to have a smoke—then we can go down together. Or are you afraid of being
twenty-one minutes late? Don’t worry! There are enough rocks for everyone—there’s no shortage of tickets!”

She hurriedly undressed, then threw herself into the sea and began to swim—the way village girls swim, thrashing her legs, sticking her head right out of the water and screwing up her eyes, and choking on the spray she churned up with her powerful but clumsy arms. There was a childish pleasure on her face that verged on bewilderment; it was as if she were unable to believe it was possible to feel so good. She would swim for hours on end; often she would not even return for lunch. She particularly enjoyed her lunch hours by the sea. The beach would empty; the waves would gradually take hold of the grape skins and cigarette butts, and the remains of apples and pears, and carry them away. Goryacheva would help the water to clean the beach. When the rubbish had all gone and the waves were left with only the sand and shingle to play with, she would lie on her stomach and prop herself up on her elbows, her cheekbones cupped in her palms. Obstinately, as if waiting for something, she would gaze at the gleaming, pliant water and the deserted, rocky shore. She wanted it to remain deserted for longer, and she was upset when she heard the bell that marked the end of the quiet hour after lunch and the voices of people on their way down to the beach. But just why she should feel upset she could not understand; many of the other visitors, after all, were people she knew, pleasant, straightforward people with a sense of fun. There was Ivan Mikheyevich, a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, who had once been a brigade leader on the collective farm where Goryacheva had operated a combine harvester. There were two Ukrainian women whom she had once met at a conference in Moscow, in the days when they too were still working on a collective farm. Now one of them was about to graduate from the Industrial Academy, and the other—Stanyuk—was working in the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian Republic. And there was the director of the Donetsk Coal Trust, a man who, only a few years ago, had been working at the pit face, hewing coal. Goryacheva recognized him. The two of them had been in the Kremlin on the same day; they had both gone there to receive awards. These were all people she liked; she felt close to them and enjoyed their company. Nevertheless, it was a relief to be alone on the beach. She would listen to the noise of the water and remember how, as a little girl, she had used to run to the river, not far from the mill, and swim across, her shirt ballooning out of the water. Then she would gaze at the sea and go into the water again and again.

***

The other visitors all began teasing her straightaway; they did not waste a moment.

Ivan Mikheyevich said, “Well, madam combine harvester, shouldn’t you be telegraphing home to say you’re about to combine with a husband?”

Stanyuk grinned and said, “Careful, Goryacheva. You might find you suddenly lose all your holiday weight!”

By the evening, even Gagareva, who never went down to the beach, had heard the news. Meeting Goryacheva in the glass-walled corridor, she said, “Doctor Kotova worries that too many hours in the sun might bring about a cardiac neurosis, but I think you need to be careful not to spend too long in the moonlight.”

“What do you mean?” asked Goryacheva, who was not used to Black Sea wit.

Goryacheva had got to know a certain Colonel Karmaleyev who was staying next door, in the house of recreation for senior Red Army commanders. They had chatted a little and then gone into the water together. He had told Goryacheva that he had been wounded in August 1938—only now were the doctors allowing him to go swimming again. Goryacheva had been terrified as she watched him strike out; she thought that his swift, powerful arm movements were going to reopen the wound on his chest, which was now covered by pink, fresh skin. And there had been moments when his face had looked not tanned but pale. When they went for walks together, she sometimes asked, “You’re not getting tired, are you?”

“What do you mean?” he would reply, a little affronted.

He was four years older than her, but their life stories had much in common. Until 1926, he too had lived in a village and been a member of the Komsomol. Then he had gone to the Far East to serve in the frontier forces. After his military service, he had joined a military-command training course and remained in the Far East. He seemed to be someone very calm; he spoke slowly, articulating each word clearly. Even though his movements were quick and effortless, their measure and precision somehow added to this general impression of slowness. Goryacheva thought he spoke to her like a teacher; this amused her, and on one occasion she commented on it. He was embarrassed and said it was a habit he had slipped into; it was because he had to spend a lot of time dinning things into the soldiers and junior commanders.

“So I’m like a junior commander, am I?” said Goryacheva. It was now her turn to feel affronted. “I’ll have you know that a departmental head in an All-Union People’s Commissariat is superior to a colonel!”

“Yes, you’d be a corps commander at the very least!” Karmaleyev replied with a smile. His teeth were so straight and even that they seemed like a single white strip. He had fair hair that looked soft, and his eyes were pale, serious, and sad.

The two houses of recreation watched the growth of their relationship with interest, laughing and joking, but from the very first day everything between Goryacheva and Karmaleyev was so utterly clear and straightforward that neither of them ever felt the least embarrassment. In the evenings they carried on going out for walks, hand in hand, around the park or down to the sea. Karmaleyev would bring some special kind of grapes to the dining room for Goryacheva, and in the morning he would go to the post office for the newspaper and then give it to her before he had so much as glanced at it.