WHETHER they were on the east bank or in Stalingrad itself, everyone imagined that the giant factories must be going through some cataclysm of destruction.
It never entered anyone’s head that all three of these factories—the Barricades, Red October and the Tractor Factory—might still be working as usual, continuing to repair tanks and to produce artillery pieces and heavy mortars.
Everyone operating machine tools, carrying out autogenous welding, working power hammers and presses or adjusting jammed parts of tanks brought in for repair—everyone, of course, experienced difficulties. These difficulties, however, were easier to endure than the agony of awaiting one’s fate in a cellar or bomb shelter. It is easier to face danger when working. War’s manual labourers—sappers, gunners, mortarmen and infantrymen—all know this. Even in peacetime they had found meaning and joy in labour; they knew it could be still more of a comfort at a time of deprivation and loss.
Andreyev’s parting from his wife had been painful. He could remember her timid, bewildered expression—a child’s rather than an old woman’s—as she looked for the last time at the curtained windows and locked door of their empty house and at the face of the man she had lived with for forty years. Once again Andreyev saw the back of Volodya’s head, and his dark neck, as Varvara set off with him towards the river port. Tears clouded Andreyev’s eyes, and the dark, smoky shop floor dissolved in a mist.
Repeated explosions echoed around the steelworks. The cement floor and steel ceilings shook. The stone beds of the furnaces, full of molten steel, trembled from the roar of anti-aircraft guns. Nevertheless, the bitterness of parting and the pain of witnessing the death of a whole way of life—a pain yet more agonizing when you are old—were accompanied by an intoxicating sense of strength and freedom, akin perhaps to what some old man from the Volga might have felt nearly 300 years earlier as he left his house and family to fight alongside Stenka Razin.54
It was a strange feeling, a kind of joy Andreyev had never known before—different from what he had felt when he was first allowed to return to work at the beginning of the war, and no less different from the hours of inexplicable happiness he had experienced from time to time in his youth.
It was as if he could see tall fragrant reeds and the pale bearded face of a man gazing through morning mist at the wild, breathtaking expanse of the Volga.
And, with all the grief, with all the strength of a master worker, he wanted to shout, “Here I am!”—as more than one peasant and worker had shouted during the Civil War, looking down over this same river, ready to sacrifice his life to the cause.
Andreyev looked at the factory’s high glass roof, now covered in soot. Seen through the glass, the pale blue summer sky looked grey and smoky, as if the sun, the sky and the whole universe were also factories, layered with their own grime and soot. He looked at his fellow workers; these hours might be the last they all spent together. Years of his life had gone by here and he had put his heart and soul into his work.
He looked at the furnaces. He looked at the crane sliding carefully and obediently high above people’s heads. He looked at the small shop-floor office, at the apparent chaos of the huge workshop, where in reality everything was as carefully ordered as in the little house with the green roof, the home that his wife had created but now abandoned.
Would Varvara return to the house where they had lived for so many years? Would he ever see her again? Would he ever again see their son, and their grandson? Would he ever again see this shop floor?