Two Captains (52 page)

"Killed in action in defence of his country", a message that was coming to hundreds and thousands of our women. At first she would not grasp it, her heart would refuse to accept it, then it would start fluttering like a captive bird. There was no escape from it, nowhere you could hide away from it. This grief was yours-receive it! All that day I hurried past the room where Varya was working without raising my eyes.

The day dragged on endlessly, with the wounded coming in all the time until the wards were full up and the senior sister sent me to the head physician to ask whether she might put some beds in the corridor.

I knocked on the door, first softly, then louder. There was no answer.

I opened the door a little and saw Varya.

The head physician was not there and she must have been waiting for him, standing there by the window, her shoulders slightly bent, drumming monotonously on the window-pane with her fingers.

She did not turn round, did not hear me come in, did not see me standing in the doorway. Slowly, she moved away from the window and struck her head hard against the wall several times.

"It was the first time in my life that I saw anyone actually beating his head against a wall. She was striking the wall not with her forehead, but sort of sideways, probably so that it should hurt more. And she did not cry. Her face was expressionless, as though she were engaged in some routine procedure. Then suddenly she pressed her face to the wall and flung her arms wide.

She knew. All that hard, wearisome day, when non-urgent operations had had to be put off because there were not enough hands to deal with new arrivals, when there was nowhere to put the patients and everyone was fretting and upset, she alone had worked as though nothing had happened. In Ward No. 1 she had been teaching one poor lad with a lolling tongue to speak-and she had known. She had told the cook off in a dull voice because the potatoes had not been properly mashed and got stuck in the patients'

tubes-and she had known. Her brusque, firm voice could be heard now in one ward, now in another, and nobody in the world would have guessed that she knew.

December 8, 1941. As clearly as I used to remember the days when Sanya and I met, I now remember the days when I got letters from him. The letter I received from him on September 23rd, in which he wrote of Grisha Trofimov's death, was the third and the last. I have received nothing since.

I am writing this in the light of an oil "blinker", wrapped up in a winter coat. There is a terrible draught from the window, which has been smashed in by an air blast and covered up with pillows, and every other minute I have to take a tin with hot water in my hands to warm them. But I must write this, even though my fingers are freezing and my head is reeling from hunger.

There have been no letters. I don't think I had ever worked so hard in my life as I did that autumn. I attended the Red Cross courses, went to the front and was even mentioned in despatches for bringing back wounded men under heavy fire. But still no letters. In vain I searched for Sanya's name among the airmen who had been decorated for raids on Berlin, Konigsberg and Ploesti.

But I worked like mad, gathering up speed like a runaway train that tears ahead, ignoring signals, sounding its whistle as it plunges into the autumn night.

Then came a day when the train rushed past me, leaving me lying under the embankment, lonely, broken, steeped in misery.

Varya was with me that evening. The sirens started off, as usual, at seven thirty. We sat through the first alert, though Rosalia phoned and in the name of the Self-Defence Group ordered us to go down. We sat through the second alert too. The bomb-shelters always depressed me, and I had long decided that if I was to be one of the "unlucky" ones I'd rather it was out in the open, under Leningrad's skies. Besides, we were roasting coffee-an important job, seeing that this was not only coffee, but flatcakes too, if you added a little flour to the grounds. Leningrad was beginning to starve.

But a third alert came on, bombs fell nearby and the house rocked, as though it had taken a step forward then back. The saucepans came tumbling down in the kitchen. Varya took my arm and marched me downstairs, ignoring my protests. Women were standing in the dark entrance hall, talking in quick anxious tones. I recognised the voice of the yardkeeper, a Tatar woman named Gul Ijberdeyeva, whom everybody in the building called Masha.

"Number Nine's hit," she was saying. "Hit hard. House manager-he give order-take spades, go, dig him up."

"Number Nine" was the building which housed Delicatessen Shop No. 9.'

"Take spade, come along. All come! Who has no spade will get spade there. Come on, missus! When you get hit, they'll dig you out."

"Number Nine" had been cleft into two. The bomb had gone through all five floors. Through the black jagged gap you could see a narrow Leningrad courtyard with fantastic broken shadows. The facade of the building had collapsed, blocking the roadway with its debris. Sticking out of the tangled mass of rubble, furniture and steel girders was the black wing of a grand piano. A sideboard hung suspended from the fourth floor, and a coat and a lady's hat could distinctly be seen on the wall.

It was quiet all round. People approached the building at a leisurely pace, oddly calm, and their voices, too, were slow and guarded. A woman started to scream, then threw herself on the ground. She was raised and carried aside and all grew quiet again. A dead old man in a coat white with plaster and rubble lay on the pavement. People stopped short, peered into his face and slowly walked round him. ' The basement was flooded. Something had to be done first about the water. A slim, agile sergeant, who was in charge of the rescue work, set me to man the pump.

Flushed and beautiful, Varya wrenched mattresses, blankets and 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 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!"

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 short of a miracle."

It was the truth, for me a shocking truth, but I listened to him carelessly, with a long-forgotten sense of my power over him.

"We retreated towards Kiev. We didn't know that Kiev was cut off. We thought the Germans were God knows where, but they met us near Khristinovka, within two hundred kilometres of the front. It was hell," he added with a laugh. "But that's another story. Now I wanted to tell you that I saw Nikolai Antonich in Moscow. Strange to say, he stayed in Moscow, didn't evacuate."

"Is that so?" I said indifferently.

We were silent for a while.

"Didn't you want to talk to me about something, Misha?" I said at length. "If so, come into my room."

He stood up and straightened his back. Drew his breath and adjusted his belt.

"Yes. Do you mind if I take some wine with us?"