ALEXANDRA Vladimirovna finished her letter to Seryozha, the last she would be writing before her departure. She blotted the page, read through it again, took off her glasses and carefully wiped them with a handkerchief. Then she heard screams out on the street.
She went out onto the balcony and saw a black, droning cloud of planes approaching the city.
She hurried back inside and went straight to the bathroom. She could hear splashing and the contented grunts of Sofya Osipovna, who had returned only half an hour earlier from a long stint in the hospital. She knocked on the door and, articulating each syllable, said, “Sofya, get dressed at once! An air raid—a huge air raid!”
“Are you sure?” replied Sofya.
“Quick! I’m not a panic-monger.”
With more noisy splashing, Sofya got out of the bath, muttering, “More like a hippopotamus getting out of its pool.” After a loud sigh, she went on, “And there I was, hoping to sleep till tomorrow. I’ve been up for the last forty-eight hours!”
Sofya was unable to make out what Alexandra said in reply. The first bombs were already exploding. She flung open the door and shouted, “You run downstairs. I’ll follow. But mind you leave me the keys!”
It was no longer a matter of individual explosions; all space was now filled by a single dense, protracted sound. When Sofya entered the living room a few minutes later, she found shards of glass and chunks of fallen plaster all over the floor. The lamp had been knocked off the table and was swinging from its flex like a pendulum.
Alexandra Vladimirovna was standing by the open door in her winter coat and a beret, looking long and intently at the tables and bookshelves, at Zhenya’s paintings on the walls and at the empty beds of her daughters and grandson. As Sofya threw on her greatcoat, she glimpsed her friend’s sad, pale face. It had not been easy for Alexandra, on her own, to create a home for her children—and she was leaving it forever. There she stood, now an old woman, but still endowed with the same calm strength as on previous occasions when she had parted with everything she loved and to which she was accustomed: as a young student, leaving her wealthy father’s fine home; setting off on long journeys to Siberia and to the River Kara; and on the November night when she crossed the Bessarabian frontier.
“Quick!” Sofya shouted. “You shouldn’t have waited!”
Alexandra turned towards Sofya and said, with a sudden smile, “Have you got some tobacco?” And then, with a kind of despairing bravado, “Oh, all right, let’s go!”
A sharp, powerful blow shook the ground below, and the house gasped and trembled, as if in its death throes. More plaster scattered onto the floor.
They left the apartment. Closing the door behind her, Alexandra said, “I thought these were just rooms, just an apartment—but I was wrong. Farewell, my home!”
Sofya stopped on the landing. “Give me the key. I must get Marusya’s suitcase and Zhenya’s shoes and dresses.”
“No!” said Alexandra. “They’re only things.”
They set off down the empty staircase. Their steps were slow and shuffling. Sofya had to support Alexandra with one arm, while holding onto the rail with her other hand.
They left the building, then stopped in shock. The two-storey house opposite had been destroyed: part of the front wall had collapsed into the middle of the street, while the roof now lay in the front garden, across the fence and the trees. The ceiling beams had fallen into the rooms below, and the doors and windows had been blown clean out of their frames. All over the street were piles of stone and broken brick. The air was cloudy, from a mixture of white dust and yellow, acrid smoke.
“Lie down on the ground!” yelled a desperate male voice. “It’s not over yet!” Then came several more explosions. But the two women continued quietly on their way, stepping slowly and cautiously between the stones, dry flakes of mortar creaking beneath their feet.
•
The bomb shelter was crowded and there were heaps of bundles and suitcases all over the floor. There were only a few benches, and most people were either sitting on the floor or still on their feet, packed close together. The electricity had gone out, and the flames of the candles and oil lamps seemed wan and tired. Every least pause in the bombing brought more breathless tenants, rushing down into the cellar in the hope of salvation.
The atmosphere in the shelter was grim. It was one of those awful times when a crowd sees its vast size only as a danger, not as a strength, when everyone in the crowd senses how everyone around them feels as helpless as they themselves and this makes their own sense of helplessness seem all the more terrible. People know the same fear during a shipwreck, when non-swimmers may endanger the lives of swimmers, and soldiers feel the same when they are encircled, when they have been driven into a forest and have thrown down their arms. The words “Every man for himself!” then sound like the height of wisdom.
Those who lived in the building above were whispering agitatedly to one another, looking angrily at the outsiders.
A dark-eyed woman in a grey astrakhan coat wiped a handkerchief over her temples and said, “There were such crowds at the entrance my husband couldn’t get through. I kept shouting, ‘Let him in—his life is important to our country!’ And there were bombs falling all the time. Another moment—and it could have been the end of him.”
The woman’s husband, rubbing his hands as if he’d just come in out of the cold, said, “And if there’s a fire, this will be a real Khodynka.51 None of us will get out alive. We really must keep the entrance clear!”
Then Meshcheryakov, the Shaposhnikovs’ neighbour, said in a booming voice, “We need to instil order. This isn’t a shelter for the whole street—it’s for the commanders and scientific workers who live up above. Where’s the house manager? Vasily Ivanovich!”
The outsiders, some of whom had only just rushed in, looked timidly at the rightful masters of the shelter and began to pick up their belongings, trying to make themselves less obtrusive.
An elderly man in a military tunic said, “It’s true—we need to consolidate.”
There was a brief silence. The air seemed more stifling than ever, the smoking candle and lamp wicks still more dismal.
“Listen,” Sofya began in her deep voice. “This is a catastrophe—it’s no time for ours and yours. Bomb shelters are for everyone. Entry isn’t by ration cards.”
Alexandra Vladimirovna was looking furiously at Meshcheryakov. This was the man who only a month ago had accused her of being spineless, of showing excessive concern over matters of workplace safety.
“Comrade,” she said, “my daughters will also have taken refuge in the first shelter they could find. Do you want them to be thrown out too?”
“Citizen Shaposhnikova,” Meshcheryakov retorted, “this is no time for demagogy.”
This was not the way Meshcheryakov usually spoke to her. If he passed her on the stairs, he liked to take off his hat to her with extravagant politeness and say in broken Polish, “I kiss your dear hand, Alexandra Vladimirovna!”
“If I were her,” said the house manager’s wife, “I’d keep my mouth shut. She’s sent her daughters across the Volga, and she’s got an illegal tenant. And now there’s no room for the men and women who first built this shelter. Yes, she should keep her mouth shut! But we’ve all of us come across her sort. They wear the right uniform, but you don’t see much of them at the front.”
“Whose are these things here? Who does this bundle belong to?” asked Meshcheryakov. “Throw all this stuff outside!”
Alexandra leapt to her feet and said, in a voice that was quiet but full of rage, “Cut it out! Or you’ll be thrown out yourself. I’ll call soldiers.”
A young woman with a little boy in her arms, her eyes shining in the half-dark, shouted, “I’ll tear your eyes out, you rat—then you’ll know who this bundle belongs to! We have Soviet laws now. And they don’t allow you to injure children!”
“You’re waiting for Hitler, you swine,” shouted another woman. “But you’re waiting in vain!”
“Mama, Mama!” cried a weeping girl. “Don’t go away—we’ll be buried alive like Grandad!”
Then the whole cellar seemed to brighten. As if with light, it filled with voices, and for a while these voices even drowned out the noise of the bombs.
“The fat brute—anyone would think he’s a German. He thinks Hitler’s here already. But we’re Soviet citizens. We’re all equal. He’s the one who should be thrown out to die—not our children!”
Alexandra Vladimirovna reached out to the young woman with the little boy and gently tugged at her sleeve. “It’s all right. Please don’t worry. And here’s somewhere you can sit down.”
Meshcheryakov stepped back a little. “Comrades, you didn’t quite understand me. I wasn’t meaning to throw anyone out. I just wanted to clear a passageway. For the common good.”
Afraid he was about to be lynched and trying to make himself inconspicuous, he sat down on a suitcase. The house plumber, who was standing nearby, said crossly, “What the hell d’you think you’re doing? That there suitcase is plywood. With that fat arse of yours you’ll go straight through it.”
Meshcheryakov looked in astonishment at the man who only two days before had been working in his apartment, grateful to be given a tip after mending a bathroom tap.
“Maximov, you should address me a little more—”
“Get off that case, I said!”
Meshcheryakov got to his feet. He realized that the world had changed. People no longer saw one another as they had the day before.
“What are you doing?” Alexandra said to the young woman sitting beside her. “You’re squeezing the child to death. He can hardly breathe. Put him down for a while!”
The woman shook her head. “I’m hugging him tight so we get killed together. His legs are withered, he can’t walk. If I die, it’ll be the end of him. His father’s dead already—we’ve had a letter from the front.” She bent her head towards her son and kissed him repeatedly. She was still far from calm, but her eyes were now full of tenderness.
When the bombing grew louder, everyone fell silent and the old women began making the sign of the cross and calling in a whisper on God.
But when the bombing quietened, people started talking again and there were even eruptions of true Russian laughter, the sound of people able to burst into joyful, spontaneous laughter even at the bitterest times.
“Look at old Makeyeva,” a woman with a broad face was saying. “Before the war, all she ever talked about was how she wanted to die. Again and again, ‘I’m eighty years old now—why should I keep on living? The sooner I go, the better.’ But at the sound of the first bombs, there she is, in the shelter. Yes, she left me standing!”
“It was dreadful,” said her neighbour. “My legs turned to jelly. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t. And then I was suddenly running as fast as I could, holding a plywood board over my head. A minute before, I’d been chopping spring onions on it. Next thing, I was hoping it would protect me from bombs.”
“I’ve lost everything,” said the woman with the broad face. “All my belongings. And I’d just re-upholstered the sofa. I’d covered it with cretonne. And then . . . all in a few seconds . . . I was lucky to get out alive.”
“All right. That’s enough of you and your sofa—people are burning to death.”
No one left the cellar and it was a while since anyone new had appeared. Nevertheless, they all seemed to find out in no time at all about everything that was going on in the world, both on the earth and up in the sky: which buildings were on fire, where there’d been a direct hit on a bomb shelter, where Soviet flak had brought down a German plane, which point of the compass the last wave of bombers had appeared from.
A soldier standing at the top of the stairs was shouting, “Machine-gun fire. From around the Tractor Factory!”
“Sure it’s not ack-ack fire?” asked a second soldier.
“No, it’s ground combat all right.” The first soldier listened for a moment, then added, “Yes, mortars—and artillery too. No doubt about it.”
Then came more bombers—followed by another wave of explosions.
“Dear God,” said the woman in the astrakhan coat, “please just bring all this to an end.”
“Let’s go,” the first soldier said to his comrade. “Or we’ll be trapped here like mice.”
Then Sofya Osipovna leaned over towards Alexandra Vladimirovna, kissed her on the cheek, got to her feet, threw her greatcoat over her shoulders and said, “I’ll be on my way too. Maybe I can get to my hospital. I’ll just roll myself a cigarette.”
“Yes, my dearest,” said Alexandra, “you go to your hospital.” Reaching beneath her coat, she quickly unfastened her enamel brooch and pinned it to Sofya’s tunic. “You take care of these violets now,” she said gently. “Do you remember? Viktor’s mother gave this to me the spring I got married. When we were both staying with her in Paris. You were still just a girl. Two enamel violets—I took them to Siberia with me.”
In the dark cellar, this memory of a distant spring, of the two women’s youth, seemed painfully sad.
They embraced in silence and kissed. From the way they looked each other in the eye, it was clear to everyone that they were close friends and that they were parting for a long time, maybe forever.
Sofya Osipovna began to walk towards the exit. The house manager’s wife said, “She’s running away. The Jews are all running away. They know they won’t last long under the Germans. Only I don’t understand what makes a Russian woman give her her cross.”
“It wasn’t a cross,” said a woman standing beside her. “It’s a brooch.”
“All right, all right,” said the house manager’s wife. “But whatever you choose to call it, it won’t be any help to her now—not with a nose like that.”
Craning her neck, Alexandra Vladimirovna watched Sofya Osipovna’s broad shoulders disappear into the gloom. She knew, with startling clarity, that she would never see her again.