7

THE YOUNGER generation had gathered in Seryozha’s little room, where Spiridonov had somehow managed to squeeze in his piano.

They were joking about who did, and who didn’t, look like who else in the family. With his dark eyes and slender build, Seryozha looked like his mother, the wife of Alexandra’s son, Dmitry. He had her dark hair, her olive skin and her nervy movements. He also had the same quick look in his eyes, a look that could be both timid and bold. Tolya was tall and broad-shouldered. He had a broad face and a broad nose, and he was constantly looking in the mirror and smoothing his straw-blond hair. When he took from his tunic pocket a photograph of himself next to his half-sister Nadya, a small thin girl with long fine plaits, everyone burst out laughing—so little did the two resemble each other. Nadya was now with her parents in Kazan; they had been evacuated from Moscow. As for Vera—tall, rosy-cheeked and with a short, straight nose—she had nothing in common with any of her three cousins; she did, however, have the quick, fiery brown eyes of her young aunt Zhenya.

Such a lack of external resemblance between members of a single family was especially common in the generation born just after the Revolution, a time when marriages were entered into simply for love, regardless of differences of blood, nationality, language and social class. The inner, psychological differences between family members were equally great; the products of these unions were endowed with rich and complex characters.

That morning Tolya and his travelling companion, Lieutenant Kovalyov, had gone to the Military District HQ. Kovalyov had learned that his division was still being held in reserve, somewhere between Kamyshin and Saratov. Tolya had also received instructions to join one of the reserve divisions. The two lieutenants had resolved to stay an extra day in Stalingrad. “We’ll be seeing more than enough of the war,” Kovalyov had said sensibly. “It won’t run away from us.” But they had decided not to wander about the streets, in case they were picked up by a patrol.

Throughout the difficult journey to Stalingrad, Kovalyov had helped Tolya in all kinds of ways. Kovalyov had a mess tin, while Tolya’s had been stolen the day he graduated from military school. Kovalyov always knew at which stations they would be able to find boiled water, and which of the army canteens would provide them with smoked fish and mutton sausage and where they would only get pea and millet concentrate.¹⁴

At Batraki he had managed to get hold of a bottle of moonshine, and he and Tolya had drunk it together. Kovalyov had told Tolya how he loved a girl from his village and would marry her as soon as the war was over. This had not prevented him from talking about his front-line liaisons with a frankness that took Tolya’s breath away and made his ears burn.

Kovalyov also told Tolya many things about war that you can never learn from books or service regulations and that are important only to those who are actually fighting, with their backs against the wall—not to those trying to imagine the reality of the war many years later.

This good-natured friendship, on the part of a lieutenant who had seen his share of action, was flattering to Tolya. He had pretended to be older than his years, to be a young man who knew the ways of the world. “That’s women for you,” he had said when the conversation turned to girls. “Best just to love ’em and leave ’em.”

Now, though, Tolya wanted more than ever to talk freely to his cousins, but, without understanding why, he felt embarrassed. If it weren’t for Kovalyov, he’d have talked about all the things he usually talked about with them. There were moments when he felt burdened by Kovalyov’s presence, and this made him feel ashamed: Kovalyov had, after all, been a loyal travelling companion.

He had lived his whole life in a world he shared with Seryozha, Vera and his grandmother, but this family reunion now seemed like something chance and ephemeral. He was now fated to live in a different world, in a world of lieutenants, political instructors,¹⁵ sergeants and corporals, of triangles, diamonds and other badges of rank, of travel warrants and military ration cards. In this world he had met new people; he had made new friends and new enemies. Everything was different.

Tolya had not told Kovalyov that he wanted to enter the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics and that his ambition was to bring about a scientific revolution that would eclipse both Newton and Einstein. He had not told him that he had already made a short-wave radio receiver and that, shortly before the war, he had begun building a television. Nor did he say that he used to go to his father’s institute after school and help the laboratory assistants assemble complex apparatus or that his mother used to joke, “How the boy’s managed to inherit Viktor’s scientific gifts I really can’t understand!”

Tolya was tall and robust-looking. His family liked to call him a “heavyweight,” but at heart he was timid and sensitive.

The conversation was not flowing. Kovalyov was at the piano, playing “The town I love can sleep peacefully” with one finger.¹⁶

“And who’s that?” he asked with a yawn, pointing to a portrait hanging above the piano.

“That’s me,” said Vera. “It was painted by Auntie Zhenya.”

“It’s not like you at all,” said Kovalyov.

The worst embarrassment of all was Seryozha. Any normal boy would have been full of admiration for two young lieutenants—especially for Kovalyov, with his scar and his two medals “For Bravery”—but Seryozha was just supercilious and mocking. He didn’t ask even a single question about military school. This was particularly upsetting; Tolya was longing to talk about their sergeant, about the shooting range, and about the cinema he and his mates had managed to visit without authorization.

Everyone knew Vera’s habit of bursting into laughter for no apparent reason, simply because laughter was always there within her. Now, though, she was sullen and silent. And she kept staring at Kovalyov, as if sizing him up. As for Seryozha, anyone would have thought he was taking a malicious pleasure in being unfailingly tactless.

“Vera, why are you being so silent?” Tolya asked crossly.

“I’m not being silent.”

“The wounds of love,” said Seryozha.

“Imbecile!” said Vera.

“She blushed—and that’s a fact!” said Kovalyov, giving Vera a roguish wink. “No doubt about it, she’s in love. With a major, yes? Every young woman today complains about lieutenants and says they get on her nerves.”

“Lieutenants do not get on my nerves,” said Vera, looking Kovalyov straight in the eye.

“So it’s a lieutenant, is it?” said Kovalyov. He was a little upset, since no lieutenant likes a young woman to fall for another lieutenant. “Well then,” he went on after a pause, “I think we should drink to the two of them. I’ve got the necessary here in my water bottle.”

“Yes!” said Seryozha with sudden animation. “Let’s drink to them!”

Vera demurred, but ended up downing her vodka in one. And then, just as if she were a soldier too, she took a hunk of dried bread from a green bag.

“You’re the kind of companion a soldier needs,” said Kovalyov.

And Vera began laughing like a little girl, wrinkling her nose, tapping her foot and tossing her mane of fair hair.

Seryozha became tipsy straightaway. First, he launched into a critique of Soviet military operations; then he began reciting poems. Tolya kept glancing at Kovalyov, afraid he would be laughing at Seryozha, that he would think it ridiculous for a young man to be waving his arms about and reciting Yesenin, but Kovalyov was listening attentively. Now less like a lieutenant and more like an ordinary young man from a village, he opened his knapsack and said, “Stop. Let me write it down!”

As for Vera, she frowned, fell into thought and then turned to Tolya. Stroking him on the cheek, she said, “Oh Tolya, dear Tolya, what do you know about anything?”

She sounded more like a sixty-year-old than an eighteen-year-old.