When the master of ceremonies came up to Sashenka from behind and took hold of her shoulder, she tried to jerk free and run away, but he was holding her so tight that the iron grip of his fingers made Sashenka’s collarbone ache. And as he held her, the master of ceremonies said in a gentle voice:
“Don’t you avoid me, Sashenka…I haven’t done you any harm, but if you don’t like me, then spurn me later on…Meanwhile we have to help your mother…I know this orderly a little bit…He was at the front line too…We have to wait a little while…One frontline veteran has to respect another…The major’s got no heart, and the commander’s away. The orderly’s the only decent one there…”
“Where are you taking me?” Sashenka asked angrily.
They walked along narrow passages, along fences, between vegetable plots dusted with snow, with the remains of last year’s dry corn rustling on them here and there.
“He lives over there,” said the master of ceremonies, nodding toward a low, entirely rural wattle-and-daub house with white walls and a thatched roof. Wattle-and-daub houses like this could be found all over the place, not only in the streets on the outskirts, but even in the center, in courtyards behind the brick buildings. And here, about ten such houses with two or three windows were scattered among the vegetable plots and cherry trees. Shaggy mongrel dogs strained at their chains to get at the strangers and rushed along the low, woven lattice fences. On one side these little houses ran up to the yard of the recently restored two-story municipal hospital, and on the other side to red buildings erected in the 1930s, where the workers of the Chemapparat chemical equipment factory lived.
“Let’s sit down a while,” the master of ceremonies said, lowering himself onto a crudely made bench beside a gate, not in front of the orderly’s house but slightly to one side of it, so that they had a good view of the approach to the house.
“He has to come for lunch…I had a talk with him here once before…”
“Let go of my shoulder,” Sashenka said spitefully.
The master of ceremonies relaxed his fingers with an embarrassed air and Sashenka twisted her arm about, stretching her cracking joints. She had a premonition of trouble ahead, and the illness, her unexpected apprehension about facing up to Vasya and Olga, and the sudden pity, grief, and even tenderness she had felt for her mother, had completely drained Sashenka’s strength, and she realized that she needed to harden her heart to become stronger.
“Look,” the master of ceremonies said suddenly, “what a sly bitch, she’s sniffed him out too…”
In the distance, the woman in astrakhan fur was making her way between the fences, shying away from the straining dogs.
“She’s a black marketeer,” said Sashenka, “and her husband’s a black marketeer. Their kind should be clamped down on hard…”
“No,” the master of ceremonies replied, “she’s not a criminal case…Her husband comes under Article 58…An enemy of the people…He was a teacher of literature at the teachers’ training college…I don’t feel sorry for them…We laid down our bones for the motherland at the front, and they trade the motherland for foreign currency. You know the kind of rumors that are going around…A friend of mine told me, a frontline veteran…A bright young guy…Nine classes of school…Our allies are up to no good…I don’t care much for the English myself…The Americans are decent guys; I received some of the equipment they gave us…But the English really dislike Soviet power…This good friend of mine, he knows the score, if he says something, you can believe it…”
In the meantime, the woman in astrakhan fur had crossed a little bridge laid over a ditch, snuggled up against a latticework fence and started peering along the path winding between the snow-dusted vegetable plots; her feet were clearly freezing in their fashionable felt boots and she kept knocking the back of one boot against the other foot.
“She’ll intercept the orderly,” the master of ceremonies said in alarm. “That’s our people for you…Sly, foxy rascals…You could sit here for a while and maybe I could go around and outflank her…”
But just at that moment they heard the sound of last year’s cornstalks rustling; it was the orderly coming home for lunch, only not along the path, but across the vegetable plots behind them, which put paid to the prospects of the astrakhan-clad wife of the enemy the people. The orderly wasn’t alone, though. He had already been intercepted somewhere, obviously quite near, by the old woman Stepanets. The orderly had an expression of weary dismay, and his eyes were shifting about fretfully.
“Stop bothering me, granny,” the orderly said in a hoarse, strained voice. “What can I do…They’ll put him on trial…I’m not the judge…”
“But he’s so thin, my little son is,” the old woman wailed, “you can see every bone in him…He’s sick, through and through, he is…And he coughs blood…even before the war he coughed blood…They took him off to the district center…The purfessor said as he had to be kept in the warm…And drink warm milk in the mornings and before bed…With honey…”
“What are you filling my head with all this nonsense for?” the orderly asked, turning angry. “Go and see the commander…Go and see the major…Your son’s a murderer, do you understand? He killed innocent civilians…There’s signed testimony against him…Do you understand?…When they shot the children from the orphanage…The gypsies and the Jews…And he was involved in executions near your village…There’s testimony on that too…”
“If they’d just let me in to him,” the old woman Stepanets wailed, standing her ground as if she couldn’t hear what the orderly was telling her. “I don’t need a place…I’d sleep on the floor beside him…He’s not well. Maybe just to tidy things up or hand him something…“
“Come tomorrow,” said the orderly, overwhelmed and obviously eager to get rid of her. “Come to the chancellery at one o’clock tomorrow afternoon…”
“And should I bring the doctor’s note?” the old woman asked, encouraged, and even brightening up a bit.
“What note?” the orderly asked in surprise.
“The one about his sickness,” the old woman replied.
“All right,” said the duty officer, giving in. “Bring the note as well…”
“Thank you,” said the old woman, bowing and crossing herself, “you’re a kind man…Everyone says that about you…God grant you good fortune…” She set off back along the path.
It had gotten noticeably colder, and a wind had come up, blowing the snow off the cherry trees and the dry stalks of last year’s corn. It as if a stormy, frosty night was approaching, as if there hadn’t been any afternoon and the late morning was merging directly into the early evening twilight.
“What are you doing, Stepanets?” the orderly shouted after the old woman. “Are you going to trudge four miles now?”
“Yes, four,” the old woman replied, looking back.
“I won’t find a cart,” said the old woman. “It’s too late…Maybe someone would have given me a lift a bit earlier…”
“Through the fields all the way?” the orderly asked.
“It’s open fields as far as Raiki,” said the old woman, “after that it’s forestry land and downhill…Then fields again after that…It’s easy walking out of town, but into town is harder…It’s uphill, not downhill. Before you reach the top, you’re in a real lather…”
“I tell you what,” said the orderly, “better not come tomorrow…Come in three days’ time…I’m afraid the commander won’t be here, and what can you settle without him…”
“No,” said the old woman. “I’ll come…Just in case he’s here…Maybe he’ll let me send a food parcel…I baked lots of spice cakes for my son, with honey…And if the commander’s not here, I’ll go back home again…”
She crossed herself and set off along the passage between the fences, hunched over and hobbling along with rapid, old-woman’s steps in her huge felt boots, neatly tied onto her feet with rags that were stuffed with straw for extra warmth. Hobbling in those boots, she would reach the outskirts of the city, set off across the fields through the night blizzard, through the sleeping village of Raiki, rousing the dogs, downhill through the frozen forestry land, slipping on the snow packed hard by sleds and on like that for four miles, all the way to Khazhin…And in the morning, back into town, to her son…
The old woman had long ago disappeared from sight, but the orderly still didn’t go for his lunch, although his wattle-and-daub house was close by. He just stood there, thinking about something.
“We could approach him now, maybe?” the master of ceremonies whispered to Sashenka.
But the woman in the astrakhan fur coat beat them to it. Dashing along, stumbling, and once even falling very comically, so that the astrakhan hood slipped over onto her ear, the woman rushed through the vegetable plots to the orderly. She caught one of her magnificent puffed sleeves on a rusty roll of barbed wire hanging from a post, and tore it, leaving the astrakhan dangling in tatters. For a brief instant Sashenka’s heart leapt with joy, because she hated the woman for being beautiful too, perhaps even more beautiful than Sashenka, and she had a kind of fur coat that Sashenka didn’t have, and also for something else vague and indefinite, but Sashenka sensed that this vague thing was the main reason she disliked this woman so much. This time, however, Sashenka’s joy was short-lived, because her heart was oppressed by ominous premonitions. Perhaps one part of Sashenka’s vague feeling was that somewhere in her subconscious, she had begun to sense that this woman had known and lived a life that was not merely beyond Sashenka’s reach, but one that Sashenka was not even capable of dreaming about, although perhaps there were dreams of a light, formless kind, which Sashenka had had very rarely, dreams in which there was just as much breathtaking happiness as in her physical yearning at night, when it concluded in her dreams in a wild, sweet ecstasy that led to calm. In those rare, formless dreams, so very rare that in all her life Sashenka only remembered perhaps two or three of those happy states, and apart from the state she didn’t remember anything, not a single detail, although there was one time when she had remembered the landscape of some region where she had never been, flooded with moonlight; in those rare dreams, too, there was ecstasy and there was sweetness, but there was no ferocity and yearning, and the whole thing didn’t end in a calm that soon turned to boredom, or even into aversion for the recent sweetness, because in those dreams the calm was constantly present, and the ecstasy and sweetness in those dreams were filled with calm all the time; and it wasn’t possible to touch anything there, neither the objects around her nor herself, and that was the only thing Sashenka definitely remembered.
Meanwhile, the woman in astrakhan fur had run up to the orderly where he was standing pensively.
“Comrade commander,” the woman said in a respectfully trembling voice.
The orderly raised his head and gave the woman a dumbfounded look. The orderly was young, and the woman, deciding that he was examining her beautiful face, lowered her eyelashes flirtatiously and hid her left arm, on which the sleeve was torn, behind her back, tightly clutching her shopping bag in that hand.
“I’d like to talk to you alone,” the woman said in a whisper that had perhaps set more than one man’s heart pounding. “The important thing is, let me finish what I’m saying…I’ve been trying to get to meet you for a long time…You in particular…”—she thrust her right hand inside her astrakhan fur coat and drew out several notebooks bound in calico.
“What has happened to my husband is a misunderstanding,” the woman began hastily, afraid of being interrupted. “Perhaps he is brusque, perhaps sometimes he does express himself vaguely, but he’s a very talented man…Believe me…He’s been misunderstood…I don’t mean to say that he was deliberately slandered…He’s been misunderstood…We have a lot of acquaintances in Moscow…highly respected people, Stalin prizewinners…I wrote to them as soon as it happened…I’m sure they’ve sent references…Or they will send them…Pay attention to them…My husband is a difficult man, I know…Sometimes even I can hardly bear him…But he’s a talent…He’s erudite…He knows four languages…He has translations from English…He’s translated Byron…And Lorca…That’s from Spanish…Here, look, listen…This is talent…”
She awkwardly opened the top notebook with her chin, because her left hand was occupied, and started reading in a low voice, obviously at random, the words that happened to be in front of her eyes: “ ‘You’ll have a child more beautiful than the stems of the breeze.’…‘Ah, Saint Gabriel, joy of my eyes! Little Gabriel my darling! I dream of a chair of carnations for you to sit on.’…‘God save you, Annunciation, sweetly moonlit and poorly clothed. Your child will have on his breast a mole and three scars.’…‘Ah, Saint Gabriel, how you shine! Little Gabriel my darling! In the depths of my breasts warm milk already wells. In amazed Annunciation’s womb the child sings. Three bunches of green almond quiver in his little voice. Now Saint Gabriel climbed a ladder through the air. The stars in the night turned to immortelles!’”
The orderly gazed at the woman in mounting amazement, then his face darkened, and then it flushed an intense red, and he fell into the appalling fury that comes over kind and placid people only extremely rarely, but which is especially terrible at those moments in such people, and the true causes of which are not entirely clear either to them or those around them. Moreover, when she finished reading, in order to intensify the impression, the woman had in fact permitted herself several ambiguous glances and movements, which might, if one so wished, have been taken for an attempt at seduction…
“Bitch!” the orderly shouted, smashing the notebooks out of the woman’s grasp and stepping on them. “You’re trying to take advantage of me…Trying to impress me with this worthless gibberish…Trying to buy me…In forty-two I wouldn’t have thought twice…In the partisans…I’d have just riddled you with bullets…”
As if she had also lost her fear and gone crazy, the woman went down on her knees and started tugging the notebooks out from under the orderly’s foot. For a while they presented a strange sight, the orderly pinning the notebooks to the ground with all his strength, and the woman pulling so hard that her eyes bulged out of her head and the eyebrows painted on top of her plucked ones were washed away by sweat, and the color ran down her face. Eventually either the woman managed to tug the notebooks free, or the orderly came to his senses and stepped back. The woman hurriedly put the notebooks away in her coat and, obviously having completely lost her grasp of the situation, held out the basket to the orderly.
“This is for you,” she babbled, “there’s roasted meat with garlic…And home-baked cookies…With powdered egg…”
“Trying to give me a bribe!” shouted the orderly, who had just begun to calm down a bit. “Why, I’ll stick you away…With your husband…You’ll be slopping out toilet buckets…”
The woman didn’t shout, so much as squeak, like a bird caught in a snare, and ran off through the vegetable lots, then crashed into a fence and disappeared from sight. The orderly was breathing as hard as if he had been carrying heavy weights; he unfastened his sheepskin jacket, unbuttoned his tunic, and turned his sweat-soaked singlet toward the freezing-cold wind. The master of ceremonies walked up to him from behind and cautiously slapped him between the shoulder blades. The orderly gave a start and looked around, then when he saw the master of ceremonies, he said calmly:
“Ah, it’s you, my frontline comrade-in-arms…Come on, let’s go to my place…I live just here. My wife’s made borscht…We’ll have lunch…”
“I’m not alone,” said the master of ceremonies, nodding at Sashenka.
The duty officer glanced at Sashenka and seemed to recognize her, but he didn’t say anything.
They walked into a small yard, and from there into a low wattle-and-daub house with a dirt floor, where there really was a delicious smell of freshly made borscht.
“Ganusya,” the orderly said affectionately to his wife, “pour us a little glass before lunch…A really little one, because I’ve got to go back to work…”
The duty officer’s wife, Ganusya, was so like her husband, she could have been his sister, with the same bright-blond hair. She laid the table easily and quietly, gently set out the aluminum bowls, and skillfully cut the bread into identical slices, and the orderly watched her with an affectionate smile, his eyes glowing with the boundless love that endures as long as life itself, which was confirmed by the lettering in thick, indelible war-trophy ink on his wrist; the name “Ganna” was written in capital letters, so that the top of the “G” touched the blue veins where they bulged up from under the skin, as if the name of his beloved was impregnated and tinctured with the living blood.
“I’m going to leave this job,” the orderly said after clinking glasses with the master of ceremonies and drinking. “I haven’t slept for the last three days…And yesterday I went into the Raiki Forest, after a gang…My buddy got sliced in half beside me with a submachine gun…His guts tumbled out…”
He rolled up the soft center of a slice of bread, used it to pick up the bread crumbs off the table, and swallowed it.
“But that’s not the problem…You understand me…In three years we’ve seen plenty of deaths, and guts…That’s not the problem…I’m too kindhearted for this kind of work…I don’t know who started the rumors about me…But people just keep on coming to me…They bring all their petitions to me…Not to the major, not to the commander…That old woman Stepanets comes every day…But her son’s looking at twenty-five years at least…Although I don’t think he’ll even last a year…Consumption…He had consumption, but he still went and joined the Nazi death squad…We have testimony to that…Some joined out of cowardice, but he volunteered, they even wanted to reject him because of his illness…But he kept on trying…He wrote a complaint about the local police to the gestapo commander…We have that document attached to the case file…And today was a really terrible day…Then this woman showed up, and she tries to seduce me…With her painted eyebrows, reading something that might just be Russian, or might not…We’ve got a prisoner, held under Article 58…Betrayal of the Motherland…Although people write a lot of nonsense too, to tell the truth. Some out of malice, trying to settle accounts, some just haven’t figured things out properly…And then this mess today. We didn’t get the prisoners to the station…Now we’ll have to send them off at night…I earned a reprimand, and that’s my third already.”
Ganusya took a cast-iron cooking pot out of the oven. The steam it gave off smelled absolutely wonderful, delicious enough to make you drunk. This was Ukrainian borscht, which was cooked only in a cast-iron pot and in a village stove; it was the color of venous blood, dark and viscous, and a spoon stood upright in it didn’t fall over, but got stuck between the vegetables confiscated from black market traders, the greatest part of which had doubtless gone to the orphanage, and a lesser part to the security agencies’ canteen or, if so desired, as rations for those who had families. The potatoes in this borscht weren’t slippery after being frozen, but soft and oily; the cabbage didn’t have the taste of bitter leaves from autumn trees, but was imbued with the juices of well-manured private vegetable plots; the beets weren’t pale pink and tart, but dark cherry-red and sweet; the meat wasn’t rubbery, with bones in it, but succulent, it easily tore into slices and was saturated with fat. It had been concealed from German requisitions and obviously raised on the finest lumps of stolen collective-farm silage. After eating a bowl of this borscht, you could easily go all day long feeling satisfied, only every now and then drinking water to dilute the fat and ease the process of digestion. Sashenka had eaten really well at Sofya Leonidovna’s apartment, but never before had she felt so agreeably full as this. This state of satiety left her totally relaxed, and she realized that she was done for, because she vaguely anticipated some kind of trick, and she even had a premonition about which direction it would come from.
“Ganusya,” said the orderly, burping soundlessly into his hand, “call them and say I’ll be there by early evening…I was on a raid yesterday, and a bullet tore the sleeve of my jacket…It needs to be patched, and now that I come to think of it…There’s no work to be done right now. I’ll be there in time to ship out the prisoners at 12:30 tonight.” He turned to the master of ceremonies: “Let’s have another one.” He poured two full shot glasses and filled one halfway up for Sashenka. “Ganna,” he called, “you have one too…I’ve met a friend, a frontline veteran, a regimental comrade…You’re from the Third Ukrainian Front, right?”
“No,” said the master of ceremonies. “I was on the First Belarusian.”
“Never mind,” said the orderly, “the main thing is, we have a common enemy, external and internal…”
Ganna came over, red and flushed, with her breasts high and firm under her embroidered blouse. She picked up her shot glass with her finger and thumb, jutting out her little finger. The orderly clinked glasses with everyone, drank, and instead of following his drink with a snack, gave his wife a resounding kiss on the lips.
“That short-ass almost did me in yesterday,” the orderly told the master of ceremonies resentfully, “in the Raiki Forest…He obviously got a clear bead on me, with his sight trained on my left side…Only when he squeezed the trigger, he jerked it, rushed things…But I got so infuriated, I gave him a gentle pat on the head with my gun butt…The major cursed, we couldn’t even interrogate him…And he never came around. But I was infuriated, you understand…It’s not my life that I mind losing, what I mind is leaving behind a woman like this…I just can’t get enough of her…I’ve been drooling for over a year now.”
“Petrik,” said Ganna, blushing to the roots of her hair, “don’t you go talking such nonsense.”
Ganna raised her little white hand, loose and relaxed, and first touched the orderly’s dry hand with her wrist, then ran her palm across it, with the tips of the fingers trailing gently and the little nails scratching.
“It’s out of the question for me to be killed,” said the orderly, bursting into laughter. “I’m still a newlywed, only one year…Listen, my frontline comrade in arms, get married. What are you dragging it out for…You can’t find a woman? I don’t believe it…Men have become more valuable now…The dead have driven up our price.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” the master of ceremonies said, “about my woman…You haven’t forgotten, have you?”
“Hang on, hang on,” said the orderly, straightening up as if he were sitting at an office desk at work, and not in his own home. “Right then, Ganna, you go, I’ve got a serious conversation here.”
Ganna got up with a sigh and went out.
“Right,” said the duty officer, “you’ve come about that woman…And I had you mixed up with someone else…But not to worry…You’re a frontline veteran, the genuine kind…And I remember about you now…I recall that business of yours…I haven’t slept properly for three days, my head’s a total mess.” He moved his shot glass away and suddenly glanced intently at Sashenka, and her heart faltered as her premonitions started coming true.
“I understand,” said the orderly, “I remember it all clearly now…Well, what did you expect?” he said, turning to the master of ceremonies. “We’ve had instances when complainants retracted their statements and we closed the case…Now, though, the accusation isn’t based on her daughter’s statement, but on material evidence…Your woman was caught with the foodstuffs right there at the checkpoint. She hid them in her boots and in a few woman’s places too, sorry to have to say that…There’s a report, and witness’s signatures…The statement can even be retracted now, it doesn’t make any difference…”
“What statement?” the master of ceremonies asked in surprise.
“Come on now,” said the orderly. “Don’t play the halfwit with me, I hate that…Didn’t you two get your story straightened out? I took a shine to you, as a frontline veteran, you just bear that in mind. My simple advice to you is, don’t go petitioning for her at all just yet…Then it will come out that she’s the widow of a decorated airman…A hero of the battles for Warsaw…His heroism was specially singled out in the central press…We’ve got all of that…And for the legal documentation it’s best not to emphasize that she’s sleeping with you…”
“Aren’t you ashamed, you great big men?” Ganna suddenly shouted from the doorway, “Saying things like that in front of her daughter…You’re plastered on the moonshine…”
“Ganna,” the orderly said as sternly as he could manage, turning his body toward his wife and holding his palm out toward her with the fingers splayed, as if fencing her off from the conversation taking place in the room. “Ganna, don’t you interfere in my official business…”
“How can you say that sort of thing about a mother in front of her daughter, no matter what kind of thief or speculator she might be?” said Ganna. “The girl’s gone all green.”
“I don’t give a damn,” Sashenka shouted, jumping to her feet.
The robust meat borscht, mingling with sips of sugary moonshine, no longer lulled and weakened her, but had precisely the opposite effect, somehow instantly cuing up a new series of pictures in her mind, and these pictures buried the hesitations and doubts about her mother, who had never given a thought to Sashenka’s future. Sashenka’s mother was a coarse, lecherous woman, who had already forfeited any right to the memory of Sashenka’s heroic father, and any connection with her could deprive Sashenka of the right to that memory too. Sashenka didn’t have a mother any longer, but she did have Sofya Leonidovna, and Sashenka could give her the pension from her father, so she could live there in peace and have her meals there.
“I don’t give a damn,” Sashenka shouted, “I won’t retract the statement…So there…That woman had me, but she didn’t raise me…And a mother isn’t the one who has you, just the opposite, in fact…Your mother is the one who raises you…I don’t want to know her…My father died for the motherland…He fought…He gave his life…”
Suddenly the tears started flowing of their own accord, and so abundantly that it wasn’t just Sashenka’s face that got soaked, but her chest, her arms, and the tangled tresses of hair cascading onto Sashenka’s cheeks. Ganna took Sashenka by the shoulders, her warm hands smelled of dried cherries, but Sashenka only found the whiff of this aroma pleasant for the first brief moment; an instant later Sashenka started feeling sorry for herself, and Ganna’s warm, appetizing hands only inflamed this self-pity and resentment against life even more. Sashenka pulled herself free and cast a sideways glance at the orderly, who was frozen in amazement, but she didn’t look at the master of ceremonies, she turned her back to him, and then stepped into the porch, grabbed her fur coat and fluffy beret, ran out into the freezing-cold air and set off into the total darkness that had descended in the meantime. Sashenka couldn’t remember such a black night for a long time, although in fact it was still evening, and not very late, only seven or eight o’clock. But everything was already sleeping, with only a few feeble little lights glimmering here and there, emphasizing even further the remoteness and desolation of a place that was now completely unrecognizable.
