Her mother was sitting on a stool, leaning back against the table as she tugged off a tarpaulin boot with hands red from the frosty air. Every time her mother got back from work and started tugging off her boots, Sashenka stood rooted to the spot, with her mouth watering and her heart pounding in anticipation of tasty morsels. This was the last day of December 1945, it had already started getting dark, and Olga brought in the oil lamp from the kitchen.
Sashenka was annoyed that their lodger Olga was home; she knew Olga wouldn’t go back to her place in the kitchen, but would hang about by the table until Sashenka’s mother gave her something too.
With her left hand, Sashenka’s mother grasped her bent knee, sheathed in a quilted trouser leg, suspending her leg in the air, then thrust the fingers of her right hand against the boot above the heel and heaved with all her might. The boot fell, and solid-frozen lumps of millet porridge tumbled out of the mother’s foot cloth onto the floor. She picked them up and put them together on a plate prepared in advance. Then she unwrapped the foot cloth and took out some meat patties in a rag. There were four patties, two completely intact, with a crispy coating, but two had been slightly crushed by her foot, and she neatly matched together the pieces on a plate. Then she pulled up one quilted trouser leg and started unpinning a little oiled-paper bag that was fastened to her stocking. A sweet, thrilling smell tickled Sashenka’s nostrils, she felt a twinge below her ribs, and she gulped. Olga gulped too, so loudly that something cracked in her throat, and Sashenka gave her a spiteful look.
Sashenka was sixteen years old, and she was rather good-looking, but when she started getting angry, and Sashenka often got angry, her pale face flushed crimson, her eyes glittered, and her little lips sometimes pouted and sometimes parted slightly, revealing her neat little teeth. Sashenka was tormented, but somewhere in the depths of her soul she also took pleasure in working herself into this state.
Sashenka hated Olga so much that sometimes the fury made the back of her neck ache. Olga was thirty-eight, but she looked older. She was a quiet, docile woman, although her docility sometimes shaded into insolence since, while she was never resentful and held no grudges, she also knew no shame. She worked by the day, washing people’s floors and doing their laundry, on Sundays and church holidays she went to a church porch to beg, and then sorted out the copper coins, stale pieces of pie, and frozen rye-flour dumplings behind her screen in the kitchen. Olga’s docile insolence was also what had led to her moving in with Sashenka and her mother. One day she came there to work: she washed the floor and brought two sacks of peat from the shed, then lay down behind the stove and fell asleep. It was a freezing-cold November evening and Olga was wearing torn stockings and galoshes tied on with string. Sashenka’s mother felt sorry for her and didn’t wake her up. By morning Olga had become seriously ill; she was coughing and gasping for breath. After two days the cough passed, but Olga stayed on anyway, living behind the stove in the kitchen. Her bedding consisted entirely of the things that she wore during the day. As a base, she laid out two skirts, an army uniform blouse, and a soldier’s flannelette undershirt. A quilted jacket served as a pillow and her blanket was a shawl. In general, she was quite well off for clothes, but she was hard up for shoes, and wearing nothing but galoshes made her toes ache in the frost, although she muffled her feet in rags and paper.
But even more than Olga, Sashenka hated Olga’s boyfriend Vasya, whom Olga had picked up on a church porch somewhere, where he was freezing, and also brought into the household. Vasya was a big, tall peasant with hands as broad as spades, hairy ears, and a heavy, thickset neck. But the eyes in his face were small and a washed-out blue color, constantly frightened and imploring.
“How can you do that?” Sashenka’s mother asked. “How can you move another person into someone else’s home? Maybe he’s a thief or he’s infectious…”
“It’s only until spring, ma’am,” Olga replied as she revived Vasya with hot water, “for the love of Christ, ma’am…”
Vasya was so frozen that he couldn’t speak, he only squinted fearfully at Sashenka’s mother and looked imploringly at Olga, as if he were asking her to protect him. Vasya stayed.
Sashenka later found out that he had run away from a village where, according to Olga, the woman whose house he lived in had written a report about him out of spite, claiming that he had worked as a polizei during the occupation. Vasya was absolutely unassuming, even more unassuming than Olga, and if he didn’t go out to earn money, he sat in the kitchen, behind the screen that Sashenka’s mother had given them. Olga had furnished her corner with a little round table, so badly eaten by woodworm that it was like honeycomb. Vasya had cobbled together a bench out of planks, and on the wall they had hung some paper flowers, a little icon, and a portrait of Marshal Zhukov, cut out of a newspaper.
While her mother was detaching the oiled-paper bag, Sashenka wondered anxiously whether Vasya was out earning money or sitting behind the screen. The bag turned out to contain doughnuts.
“That’s to celebrate New Year’s,” Sashenka’s mother said. “They baked them for the top brass…”
Sashenka’s mother worked as a dishwasher in a militia canteen, and that was why her hands were red, they were stewed by the hot water in the kitchen vats, and in the freezing cold they turned even redder, and the joints swelled up.
Sashenka watched her mother take out the doughnuts and set them out on a plate, leaving her red, swollen fingers glistening with grease. There were seven doughnuts. Mother laid them in a circle around the edge of the plate and licked the smears of jam off her palms. Sashenka touched a doughnut—it was still warm, and so soft that her finger sank right into it, and a little squiggle of jam crept out from inside.
“Wait,” said her mother, “first we have to warm up the millet and the patties…Olga, this is for you and Vasya.” She put a whole patty and a few pieces from a crushed one on a different plate. The patty was a bit overcooked on one side, but Sashenka liked gnawing on a crunchy, meaty crust like that. Mother added three lumps of millet porridge to the patties, then thought for a moment and added another one.
“Vasya,” Olga said joyfully. “Come on out, Vasya, the missus is treating us. We’ll feed ourselves up a bit…”
Vasya emerged from behind the screen, but didn’t come out into the room, he stopped short on the threshold. Sashenka could sense his heart starting to pound more rapidly.
Mother took two doughnuts and put them on Olga’s plate.
“A special treat,” she said. “It’s our first New Year’s Eve without war…”
Mother smiled and Vasya smiled too. He gave off a sour smell, the kind you find in a poor, grubby home. Sashenka’s heart started racing so fast, it took her breath away, as if she were running down a steep slope and couldn’t stop.
“I want him to go away,” Sashenka shouted. “He stinks…When I’m at the table…I want him always to go behind the screen…And her, too…”
Vasya wilted on the threshold, ducking his head down, Olga stepped toward him, to protect him if necessary, and this hulking, frightened peasant infuriated Sashenka even more.
“My father died for the motherland,” she shouted at her mother in a high voice, as if she were at a Komsomol meeting, “and you’re hiding a German toady here.”
Sashenka caught a glimpse of her mother’s face, with its puffy eyes, and the sparse tangle of hair at the back of her head, and suddenly realized for the first time that her forty-year-old mother had become really old. For a moment Sashenka felt sorry for her mother and relaxed her chest, which was tensed up in malice. But that also gave Sashenka a moment’s respite to catch her breath, fill her lungs as full of air as she could, and shout loudly, this time something unintelligible, the way that Sashenka had wanted to shout over and over again when she felt the sweet languor that had been tormenting her for more than a year now, just as soon as the oil lamp was turned out in the evening. And sometimes, waking up in the night, she clenched her teeth and wanted someone big with a vague, indefinite face to take her body in his coarse hands and knead it and tear it to pieces. Just recently Sashenka had started thinking about the “young hawk” Markeev.
“Young hawks” was what they called the young trainees from the mop-up battalion, which carried out patrol duty in the city.
Sashenka hated Markeev, but last night she had dreamed that Markeev was pressing her up against some kind of wall, and it felt so sweet that after she woke up her entire body had carried on trembling and shivering for several minutes.
She was seized by trembling now too, and she raked the porridge, patties, and doughnuts off all the plates, tipped them out onto the table and started grinding them together in her hands, watching the mingled mass, sticky with jam, oozing out between her greasy, gleaming fingers. Olga led Vasya behind the screen and they sat there quietly, not even whispering; the oil lamp crackled, Sashenka’s mother stood there with her arms wearily lowered, barefooted, with her quilted trousers rolled up to the knees, and Sashenka started calming down too, she felt better now and was breathing more freely…
“Don’t trample on it,” her mother said. “We’ll never scrape the jam and the millet off the floor afterward…”
Sashenka’s mother used to beat her, but recently Sashenka had noticed that her mother had started to be afraid of her, especially when Sashenka flew into a rage.
Sashenka shook the remains of the sticky mush off her fingers and went into the kitchen to wash her hands. Behind the screen Olga hastily whispered something and then abruptly fell silent in mid-word, as if she had put her hand over her mouth.
“They’ve gone into hiding, those helpless bastards,” Sashenka shouted, “my father laid down his life, and they’re hiding here…”
The water in the bucket had grown a crust of ice. Sashenka took a mug, broke the ice, and scooped up some water; then she leaned down over a basin, filled her mouth with icy water, and squirted it out onto her hands. She pulled off her cotton sweater, rolled up the long sleeves of her undershirt, and washed her face thoroughly with a little slip of household soap, then pulled off her undershirt and washed her breasts. Sashenka went back to the main room, feeling fresher and even more cheerful. Her mother was gathering up the slimy, mingled lumps off the table, trying to separate the remains of the doughnuts from the millet and the meat patties. After the cold, fresh water, Sashenka felt such an intense pang of hunger that her forehead and temples cramped up and she got a painful twinge in her stomach. She wanted to go over and eat the patty and two doughnuts that had been left untouched, but she controlled herself and walked stone-faced past her mother and into the little second room, where there was a wardrobe with a mirror. Sasha closed the door with the hook, lit a candle, dropped a little melted paraffin wax on a stool, stuck the candle on it in front of the mirror, and started getting undressed. She took off her undershirt, crumpled skirt, and long pants, and looked at herself in the mirror for a minute or two. Sashenka had a good figure and she knew it. She had long legs, broad hips, and small breasts, although it was true that her appearance was somewhat spoiled by the protruding ribs on both sides.
Sashenka put her hands on her thighs and squeezed them with her fingers, feeling a sweet, ticklish sensation. Then she ran her palms under her armpits, touched her erect, springy nipples and quietly laughed at the sudden surge of happiness. She put on a pink silk bra and lacy panties, took a cool, sleek slip that smelled of perfume and held it against her face, then dived into the slip, shuddering at the tender touches of the silk against her skin, glanced at her little shoulder with a little sky-blue ribbon stretched over it, and rubbed her cheek against the ribbon. All these clothes had once belonged to her mother, but now they fitted Sashenka perfectly. Then Sashenka stuck her head into the wardrobe, into the darkness that smelled of mothballs, and pulled out a cardboard box full of shoes. She put on a pair of white lisle-thread stockings, a new skirt, and white pumps. The shoes were out of season, and so was the pink silk blouse, but everything suited Sashenka very well, and in any case, it was her only outfit. Full of joy, with her eyes sparkling, Sashenka sauntered past the mirror. Then she strolled past it with an independent air, casting disdainful glances, and then she ran through a few dance moves, holding the edge of the skirt in her fingers. She took the hook off the door and walked into the large room, clenching her teeth in angry irritation again, because she realized that if she once smiled and stopped being angry and suffering, she would forfeit her power in the home. Her mother was sitting at the table, and when she saw Sashenka she ran her hand across her eyes and wrinkled up her face. Just recently Sashenka’s mother often cried at the slightest excuse, and Sashenka found that irksome.
“Why have you turned on the waterworks again?” Sashenka asked, trying to speak in a low voice.
“You’re my beautiful girl,” her mother said, sobbing, “it’s such a shame your father can’t see what a grown-up Komsomol girl you are now…”
“Father laid down his life for the motherland,” said Sashenka, “and you pilfer things here on the home front.”
“I’m not qualified for anything,” her mother said. “If I had an education, I could have got a job with good pay…”
Sashenka went out into the kitchen and saw that Vasya’s dirty, dusty greatcoat with no half-belt at the back, smeared all over with some kind of heating or diesel oil, was hanging on top of her short fur coat. She yanked hard on the coat, but its loop was sewn on solidly—Olga must have run a double seam across it—and Sashenka broke a nail.
“You bastards,” Sashenka shouted, turning toward the corner with the screen in it. “If you hang that filthy rag here again…Just one more time…I’ll throw it in the garbage pit…” Sashenka hung on the greatcoat with all her weight and tore off the loop. The greatcoat fell on the floor, but Sashenka’s fur coat fell with it and Sasha struck her knee painfully. Her frightened mother came running into the kitchen. “Olga,” she said, “I asked you to keep your things separately…There’s a very convenient place over there in the corner.”
Sashenka’s mother leaned down to pick up the greatcoat, but Sashenka stepped on it and gleefully wiped it round the floor, trying to drag it across the dirtiest and wettest spots.
“Let him pick it up himself,” Sashenka shouted. “Lackeys were done away with almost thirty years ago…He’s not betraying patriots to Hitler’s gauleiters now…”
There was a heavy sigh behind the screen, but nothing was said.
Sashenka felt hot after the commotion and the shouting, and she hastily put on her fur jacket and the fluffy beret that pulled down over her ears and tied under her chin with little ribbons, put on her low boots, wrapped her shoes in newspaper, grabbed her purse, and ran out into the street.
It was dark in the side street and Sashenka took a shortcut by turning onto a narrow path and walking past an icebound water pump. Behind the pump were sheds and the ruins of a single-story, gray brick building. This spot had always had a sweetish, sinister odor, like the smell of corpses. But later Sashenka had found out that the smell near the sheds wasn’t from corpses, but from German louse powder. Under the Germans the little gray building had been some kind of sanitary and epidemiological station. Even now there were lots of little packets lying all around with a picture of a large green louse on them.
The yard custodian Franya was standing beside the ruins, holding on to the hoarfrosted remains of the cast-iron porch. The porch had been made of patterned iron with various kinds of bows and flourishes. Even the withered stems of the Virginia creeper that used to wind around the metal supports of the porch had survived.
“Anyone who rats on his buddy is a creep, right?” Franya shouted and burst out laughing. He took an onion out of his pocket and started crisply munching on it. Suddenly Franya grabbed hold of Sashenka’s arm and pressed his wet mouth, with its smell of cheap vodka, to her ear…“The dentist’s family is buried here. Leopold Lvovich’s family. By the cesspit…Alongside the privy…” Franya whispered.
Franya’s eyes bulged in a drunken or insane stare. Sashenka tore herself free, ran out into the middle of the street, and set off at a hasty walk, trying to reach the well-lit, crowded avenue as quickly as possible.
On the main street the lamps were lit, and outside the cinema was a large fir tree, with its paper decorations and little flags rustling. In the two-story building of the divisional headquarters and the buildings beside it, where the families of military officers lived, the lights were on and the windows were exceptionally bright and festive. The Young Pioneer Palace, where the young people’s New Year’s Ball had already begun, was also glittering with bright lights. It was an old building with tall windows and paneled ceilings. Before the revolution and during the occupation the municipal council had been located here.
A crowd was standing in front of the entrance and the marble staircases were completely covered with frozen gobbets of spit and snowballs. Sashenka squeezed into the crowd and she was borne away, dragged up the slippery stone slabs, flung against the door, and swept into the lobby, which was very cold, with the wind blowing straight through it, where a cordon of “young hawks” was holding the onslaught in check. A female receptionist deftly grabbed Sashenka’s invitation in her mittens and made a tear in it. The lobby was decorated with banners, fir-tree branches, and colored lightbulbs that were blinking randomly. Sashenka hurriedly took off her jacket and boots, put the cloakroom tag in her purse, and walked up to the top floor, where she saw Markeev beside the snack bar counter with the Assyrian girl Zara.
A large Middle Eastern family living in the town ran shoeshine stands, where they also sold boot and shoelaces. Some people called them Georgians and others called them Assyrians. But in fact, they were either Kurds or Serbs. Zara was wearing a heavy, dusty velvet skirt and she had gold pendant earrings in her ears, while Markeev was in a fashionable, lightish-blue service jacket, brightly polished boots, and riding breeches. In keeping with the latest fashion, the pull chain of a German rifle ran from his belt to his pocket. The aluminum links were fastened together by little rings and at the end of the chain the handle of an excellent clasp knife could be seen, flirtatiously peeping out of his pocket. Sashenka’s throat immediately went dry, but she managed to put on an independent air and walked to the snack bar counter, swaying her hips. She simply watched herself in the mirror out of the very corner of her eye, and the farther she walked, the better she felt. She sensed that she had made an impression with her lisle stockings and pink blouse with the wide, low neckline that offered just the slightest glimpse of the lacy edge of her slip, that even though these clothes were the only dressy ones she had, they emphasized all of her good points to advantage and, at the same time, concealed her defects, which Sashenka knew with absolute precision. For instance, she had a chin that was a little bit longer than it ought to be and sometimes, when she was left alone in front of the mirror, in her annoyance Sashenka rubbed her chin with her fingers until it turned red, as if that would make it shorter. She also had a scar on the nape of her neck from an operation that she’d had in her childhood, but Sashenka powdered over it and covered it with her hair, which she combed in a seemingly casual fashion, so that it cascaded down to the right of the scar. But now she liked the way she looked in the mirror.
It was Sashenka’s first ball. She had been preparing for it a long time, a whole week, since her mother got her an invitation through the local special trade committee. Sashenka had washed every day with a special war-trophy lotion bought at a street market, wound curlers into her hair, rubbed eau de cologne into her skin and, for the first time in her life, painted her lips in a little Cupid’s bow and powdered her cheeks. And now there was General Batiunya’s son whispering something to his friend and glancing furtively at Sashenka’s calves in their covering of cream lisle cotton. Sashenka stood in line, showed her invitation, and received a present at a competitive market price. When the counter girl handed out the little package, she marked the edge of the invitation with a little stamp that said “Canceled.”
Sashenka walked into the large hall, where the New Year’s tree was standing and a military band was playing. Lots of couples were swirling around, some slowly, others quickly, jostling shoulders with each other. But Sashenka didn’t stop in the middle; every step she took was calculated now, as if some experienced force were directing her movements. Sashenka walked through them and sat down a little farther on in the shadow of the balcony. The hall had a balcony and a stage, but everything was happening in the center, by the tree, illuminated with several hundred-watt light bulbs. General Batiunya’s son walked up, sat down beside Sashenka, and started tugging her purse out of her hands.
“You nasty boy,” Sashenka exclaimed in a singsong voice, bursting into laughter and hitting him on the hand.
God only knows where Sashenka had mastered this flirtatious, caressing blow, in which the girl’s completely relaxed hand first touches the man’s hand with its wrist and then trails its palm across it, with the fingertips gently touching and the little nails scratching.
Taking the prickling of the nails as a summons to action, General Batiunya’s son snatched his hand away and immediately thrust it back again, this time not at the purse, but at Sashenka’s lisle-thread knees. And Sashenka felt a sweet fear, like in a dream. She sat there for a few moments as if entranced, surrendering completely to those long-awaited fingers as they fumbled at her knees, growing bolder and creeping higher. But then she came to her senses and pushed the young man so hard in the chest that he almost went flying off the bench.
“Let’s go up on the balcony,” Batiunya whispered.
“No, I want to dance,” Sashenka said firmly.
General Batiunya’s son meekly followed her to the center of the hall. He was wearing a service jacket that the “young hawk” Markeev could never even have dreamed of, cut from English cloth and trimmed with piping. He had a little gold-plated chain running from his belt to his pocket, and peeping out of the pocket was the tip of a knife-handle made from the leg of a wild boar, with the little hoof as the pommel.
Sashenka danced a tango, then a waltz, then a butterfly polka. During the breaks, she nibbled on walnuts and filled chocolate candies from an American aid parcel, with which Batiunya regaled her in the darkness under the balcony, and Sashenka’s present, still unopened, lay in her purse for the next day. Sashenka ate so much chocolate that she completely stopped feeling hungry and the taste of chocolate even started to seem familiar and ordinary. She piled the chocolate wrappers and walnut shells in the hand that Batiunya meekly held out in the air. Batiunya hid the waste in the cracks in the parquet floor.
Sometime after midnight a fight broke out on the balcony, someone was detained and someone was led away, but Sashenka cheerfully accepted all this too. The chocolate had actually made her slightly drunk, her lips were sticky and the roof of her mouth and her throat itched. She glimpsed Markeev and Zara flitting past a few times. Zara was shaking her gold pendants like a nanny goat, and Markeev only appeared well-fed and handsome from a distance. His boots were down-at-heel, and in a break between dances Sashenka spotted him standing behind the door, stealthily gnawing on a hard, dry biscuit. He was gathering up the crumbs off his sleeves and putting them in his mouth. Sashenka almost split her sides laughing when she saw how embarrassed Markeev was to realize that he’d been discovered with his biscuit, and at the way he dropped a crumb he had picked off his sleeve on the floor before it reached his mouth, and then started picking some specks of dust and little threads or other off his sleeve in an attempt to deceive her. Sashenka raised her head, laughing as she cast a sideways glance in Markeev’s direction and started whispering something in Batiunya’s ear. She whispered to him that she wanted some kvass from the buffet with competitive market prices: she could have said it out loud, but she deliberately whispered in his ear, so that Markeev would think she was talking about him. She was taking her revenge on Markeev for the dreams in which he had pawed and fumbled at her, and for the hateful little virginal sofa bed that she had pummeled with her sides as she squirmed on it afterward, when she woke up in the middle of the night.
Markeev gave Sashenka a spiteful look, pushed the door, and darted out into the lobby, and Sashenka burst into loud laughter. The laughter and dancing had turned Sashenka’s cheeks pink, and she was so beautiful that Batiunya forgot about everything else and dashed off, not to the commercial buffet, but to the cloakroom to get his greatcoat, and from there across the road to the freshly plastered apartment building of the top military brass, where he seized his chance and snatched a bottle with French writing on it and several tangerines out of his father’s personal cupboard. Without pausing to catch his breath, he dashed back, and as he ran up to Sashenka he couldn’t remember taking off his greatcoat at the cloakroom, he simply couldn’t remember, it was as if he had been instantly transported back to Sashenka, and he stood there in front of her, panting, disheveled, smeared with plaster, his eyes glowing.
In the hall, they were playing forfeits. A “master of ceremonies” with a limp, wearing a service jacket with tank-crew collar tabs, but no shoulder straps, was hobbling around everyone, handing out little cardboard tabs. Batiunya ended up with a tab that said “mignonette,” and Sashenka’s was “nasturtium.”
“Oh,” Zara shouted out.
“What’s wrong?’ asked the tank-crew master of ceremonies.
“I’m in love,” said Zara, adjusting her pendants.
“Who with?”
“With ‘forget-me-not.’”
“Oho,” Markeev shouted out brazenly, as if he had never nibbled on a dry biscuit behind a door, but fed from morning to night on American condensed milk and American dried-fruit pudding packed in little golden boxes.
“Let’s go up on the balcony,” Batiunya whispered to Sashenka, then looked at Markeev and snickered rather loudly.
Sashenka and Batiunya walked up the spiral staircase, where it was drafty and smelled of cat droppings. The balcony was dusty and dark. A little lantern lit up rows of seats nailed to planks, stacked together with their legs upward, a broken billiard table, and ragged drapes, from which strips had been torn to be used as velvet shoeshine rags. Small items of club property crunched underfoot: chessboards and chess pieces, a bent bugle, several Spanish hats with tassels and papier-mâché animal masks.
Batiunya took out his pocketknife and picked at the cork of the French bottle. The cork popped and aromatic foam oozed out, fizzing up and flowing onto the chaotically heaped up, dirty junk.
“Have some,” said Batiunya, “it’s French champagne.”
He set the champagne bottle to Sashenka’s lips, and she took a timid swallow, squeezed her eyes shut and took several more. The champagne didn’t taste quite as good as the lemonade that Sashenka had drunk on Victory Day, it wasn’t as sweet and it didn’t have the fruit-essence fragrance that Sashenka adored, but it still prickled at her throat in the same pleasant way, and after the third swallow Sashenka felt some effect. Batiunya handed her a mandarin; Sashenka sniffed at the tender yellow skin and laughed.
“Eat it,” said Batiunya.
“Later,” said Sashenka, and she put the mandarin in her purse.
“Take some more,” Batiunya said, and held out three more mandarins.
Sashenka felt sorry to tear the satin-smooth skin, and she put another two mandarins in her purse and tore open the third one, the worst one, which wasn’t yellow, but greenish, and put a segment in her mouth. Closing her eyes, Sashenka sucked the juice out of the mandarin, swallowing her aromatic saliva. Her stomach had been gurgling and she’d been feeling occasional twinges for a long time already: Sashenka had obviously gorged herself on American chocolate and once or twice a light nausea crept up to her throat, leaving behind in her mouth a sweet and sour aftertaste of glutinous, ration-card bread, cocoa with vanilla, and millet soup.
When Batiunya reached forward to kiss her, Sashenka had jerked her head back in fright, although she very much wanted to try a man’s lips with her own for the first time in her life. But she was afraid that Batiunya would sense that sweet and sour aftertaste that was setting her teeth on edge. However, after drinking some champagne and sucking on the mandarin, Sashenka felt much better, her stomach settled down and the twinges stopped, and her mouth now felt fresh, cool, and aromatic. She waited for Batiunya to try to kiss her again, but he must have been frightened off by her refusal and didn’t dare to try. That made Sashenka angry and she said, “Let’s go downstairs.”
Batiunya nodded without saying anything. His nose was submissive and sad, absolutely timid, and a tuft of hair stuck up sadly on the crown of his head. That made Sashenka want to laugh and her heart was touched by a kind impulse; she felt grateful to Batiunya for the mandarins and the chocolate and for falling in love with her. She wanted to do something nice for Batiunya, but she didn’t know what, and apart from that, there was a faint, confused buzzing in her head.
“I’ll kiss you,” Sashenka said, “only you close your eyes.”
Batiunya hastily closed his eyes. Sashenka couldn’t bring herself to kiss his lips after all, and she spent a long time choosing between the forehead and the cheek.
“Come on,” Batiunya called out impatiently, opening his eyes slightly.
“Close your eyes, you nasty boy,” Sasha exclaimed and stepped forward to kiss him on the neck. But the moment she got close, Batiunya suddenly grabbed her by the shoulders and poked something wet against her nose and the edge of her mouth several times. Breaking away, Sasha realized that these wet, disgusting dabs were the first kiss of her life, the one that she had dreamed about so much. She felt bitter and sad, because her first kiss was already over and it had been so uninteresting. She walked away to the broken billiard table that was standing up on end and propped her hands against it.
“What’s wrong?” Batiunya asked guiltily.
“Nothing,” said Sashenka, and she burst into tears.
“Perhaps I’ve offended you,” said Batiunya, perplexed, “don’t you go thinking…I want to marry you…”
Sashenka looked at his submissive nose, stopped crying, and started laughing.
“Let’s go downstairs,” she said.
She suddenly wanted to dance, sing, flirt, and be the center of attention. Downstairs the military band was thundering away again. They were dancing something quick and passionate.
“Now let’s get moving,” shouted the tank-crew master of ceremonies. “Let’s have lots of sweat and no blood.”
The band members got out of their seats, turning up the heat. Markeev juggled with his boots and Zara tortured her skirt so fiercely with her knees that a crack was clearly heard as the seams yielded.
Sashenka started trembling, anticipating a difficult battle. Zara was two years older than she was and had muscular, well-fed legs, the kind you could only get from good-quality food. But Sashenka had no intention of outdancing Zara, or of joining in the frantic pace of the foxtrot. On the contrary, she and Batiunya set off, gliding slowly and smoothly, skillfully omitting several beats of the music by marking time on the spot and so slipping into the rhythm. It was a precisely calculated move that had come to Sashenka in a flash, when she was still on the final step of the spiral staircase. Sashenka transformed a problem into an advantage. Moving slowly, she immediately stood out from the general mass of dancers, who were trying to outdance each other. All their faces, even the girls’, were red and contorted, as if they were performing heavy work, their mouths fitfully gulped in air and the clothes under their arms were baggy with sweat. But Sashenka floated smoothly and lightly; in that way she could show off her lisle stockings, and her pink blouse with the low neckline, and even the lacy, sky-blue slip, which glowed through the transparent voile. Before even a minute had passed, Sashenka began reaping the fruits of her intelligent behavior, as well as her clothes and her appearance. Several lieutenants, who had appeared in the hall only recently, broke off dancing and moved back to the wall, watching no one but Sashenka. Other, more impressive young men also moved back to the wall: young hawks in service jackets, students from the mechanical engineering college, soccer players from the Red Front team, and in general everyone who was strong and handsome moved aside, to the wall. A few second-rate couples tried to dance on, it’s true, but no one took any notice of them, and Zara and Markeev completely disappeared. Eventually the tank-crew master of ceremonies gave a wave of his hand, and the band fell silent, defeated by Sashenka; the musicians sat down, mopped off their faces with their handkerchiefs, and started playing a smooth tango, adjusting to Sashenka’s rhythm. Sashenka waited out the pause with dignity, calmly standing at the center of the circle, resting the palm of one hand on Batiunya’s shoulder and presenting her other hand to Batiunya’s right hand in a casual, relaxed gesture, like an award. To demonstrate her indifference to the general attention, she quietly asked her partner about trivial nonsense that she wasn’t interested in at all. She asked if his boots pinched and if his mother went to bed early. As for her own mother, she sometimes slept like a log, and sometimes tossed and turned all night, like Olga.
Sashenka immediately checked herself at that, because she might blurt out in passing that her mother worked as a dishwasher, and that they had two paupers, who begged on a church porch, living with them. But nonetheless, from the outside their conversation appeared elegant, and Sashenka was carried away by this quiet talking, which all these lieutenants and young hawks could only guess at. When the music started playing, Sashenka inclined her head, smiling sadly, and glided off in the same dignified manner, slipping gracefully across the parquet in her pumps, indifferent to the fame that she had craved only yesterday; she was created only to adorn, but not to love, like Marlene Dietrich or Erika Fiedler in the captured German color movies. Sashenka floated on across the parquet and nothing interested her any longer, apart from the tall windows, which were gilded by patches of moonlight at the spots where they were not boarded up with plywood. Sashenka slipped into a joyful melancholy, diffusing into something sweet and amorphous, and only returned to the hall when she and Batiunya glided past the inner dividing wall. Here there were no moonlit windows, the staircase leading to the vestibule was visible through the open doors, and she caught the smell from the snack bar, where the food was not sold at ration-card rates, but for competitive market prices. Sashenka began recognizing faces, as if she were sinking downward, and suddenly, for some reason that wasn’t yet clear, she intuitively sensed a disagreeable change of mood toward her. She listened.
“A louse,” someone said joyfully.
“Two,” someone else put in.
“I’ve been watching them for ages,” Zara chipped in happily and immediately added spitefully: “She’s spreading typhus.”
“I’ve already studied the route they follow,” Markeev explained to Zara, but so loudly that he was heard in every corner of the hall, “one creeps across her shoulder blade, from where you can see the strap of the slip, as far as the collar of the blouse and back again…And the other one creeps over to intercept it…They meet between the shoulder blades…”
The orchestra carried on playing and Sashenka made a few more movements to the rhythm of the tango, obviously in the same way that the body of someone who has been killed outright sometimes feels pain and carries on living its former life for a few minutes, because even among people who are killed outright there are some unfortunates whom the bullet doesn’t strike directly in the heart, but a little bit lower.
“They’ve met again,” Markeev shouted, “and kissed each other…Batiunya, they’ll launch an assault on you now…”
There was the sound of laughter and one lieutenant pulled his forage cap down over his eyes. Batiunya stopped. He was still holding his hand on Sashenka, but he had a bewildered, frightened expression. Then he suddenly smiled, jerked his hand away and started clownishly scratching himself and slapping his hand against his sides, as if he were trying to catch parasites. The laughter became so loud that the band stopped playing and the musicians leaned down from the stage, asking what was wrong. Then the lame tank-crew master of ceremonies walked over to Markeev and, without actually hitting him, ran his palm across Markeev’s face from ear to ear, as if wiping it clean, but in a way that left five crimson stripes welling up on Markeev’s cheeks. Then the master of ceremonies turned toward Sashenka and his heavy, cast-iron face became gentle and calm.
“Right, enough of that,” he said, “these things happen…When we were encircled, I scratched myself so hard, I was bleeding all over…”
But Sashenka looked at the master of ceremonies with hatred in her eyes, she hated him now more than anyone else in the hall, she thought that this postcard face from the battle of Kursk somehow reminded her of Vasya, and immediately remembered that Vasya’s dirty greatcoat had been hanging on her fur coat.
“Enough of that,” the master of ceremonies repeated, moving closer to Sashenka. “What’s to be done, when there’s hardship and hunger…I know your mother. She’s strained her back hunching over those army kitchen vats…A louse loves hardship and hunger…”
This “Kursk hero” was finally trampling Sashenka into the dirt, he was humiliating her lisle stockings and her marquisette blouse, and now it was clear to her that he had ended up doing his “cultural work” as a “master of ceremonies” because he was an invalid, and not because he loved dancing and beauty.
“Brush them off with a newspaper,” whispered a poorly dressed girl, who was so thin that the skin of her face had a bluish tinge. The girl was wearing her grandmother’s plush cape-coat. “Parasites ought to crawl across a coat like that, not across a marquisette blouse,” Sashenka thought bitterly. “My God, why did it have to happen…I hate them all…How I hate them…”
“Come on, let’s go out, I’ll help you,” the girl whispered.
“If not for this disaster, I wouldn’t even speak to a plain creature like this,” Sashenka thought, “and now she’s trying to give me advice…To be my friend…Why did this happen…Why haven’t I died…It’s all because of that greatcoat…It’s filthy…From the church porch…I’ll throw them all out…Out into the street…They’ve ruined my life…”
Sashenka’s chest was filled with sobbing and moaning, but she tried to clench her teeth firmly as she ran out of the hall, and only a slight, trembling whine seeped out through them, because she simply couldn’t clench them completely tight, and it was pointless anyway, because the whine escaped along with the air as she breathed it out. Sashenka knew she couldn’t hold back the groans in her chest and throat for long—her mouth was filled with them—and Sashenka puffed out her cheeks, hoping to gain a split-second that way. She ran out into the vestibule and slammed her back and shoulder blades hard against a column in loathing.
“It’s already done,” said the girl with the skin that was blue from malnourishment, popping up again beside Sashenka. “I brushed them off with a newspaper and throttled them in my fist…You try using Romanina powder on them…Not German, but Romanina…And it doesn’t spoil your clothes…”
Sashenka looked at the girl’s unattractive, kind eyes and thought: “What is she living for…Nobody will ever love her…Nobody will ever feed her chocolate…The life of beautiful women is out of reach for both of us now…I ought to poison myself…Poison myself with matches…Scrape the sulfur off of matches…”
The tank-crew master of ceremonies took hold of Sashenka’s elbow, crumpling the marquisette of her sleeve with his yellow, tobacco-stained fingers, and the very moment Sashenka saw those gnarled fingers creeping across her body, looking like beetles or insects, or something else repulsive, she realized that she was done for.
“Don’t touch my arm,” Sashenka cried out in revulsion. But then she immediately snapped her teeth shut so smartly that even she was surprised, cutting short the groaning and sobbing that were trying to burst out together with her shout and finally disgrace her completely. Sashenka gave the tank-crew master of ceremonies a hard push and he lost his balance. His shorter leg, which didn’t bend at the knee, slipped, leaving his feet straddled wide in an awkward, comical posture, and he slipped down the steps, trying to catch hold of the banister. And at that very moment the loudspeaker hanging in the vestibule broadcast the first stroke of the clock announcing the arrival of the New Year, 1946. Sashenka dashed to the cloakroom, she was afraid she wouldn’t find her tag, but she found it quickly and the startled old woman tossed out Sashenka’s fur coat and boots.
