MANY YEARS before the Revolution, Alexandra Vladimirovna Shaposhnikova—now a tall, imposing old woman—had studied natural sciences at a women’s college. After her husband’s death, she had worked first as a teacher and then as a chemist in a bacteriological institute. For the last few years she had been head of a small laboratory that monitored working conditions in factories. She had never had many members of staff and now, with the war, she had still fewer; she herself had to visit factories, railway depots, grain silos, shoe factories and clothes factories in order to collect dust samples and check the quality of the air. She loved her work and in her small laboratory she had constructed her own apparatus for the quantitative analysis of air pollution in industrial enterprises. She could analyze metallic dust, drinking water, water for industrial use and a variety of lead compounds and alloys. She could detect the presence of mercury and arsenic vapours, carbon bisulphite, nitric oxides and harmful levels of carbon monoxide. And she loved people no less than her work; during her visits she made friends with lathe operators, seam-stresses, millers, blacksmiths, electricians, stokers, tram conductors and engine drivers.
A year before the war she had begun working during the evenings in a library for the applied sciences, doing translations for herself and for engineers in various Stalingrad factories. She had learnt English and French as a child, and German when she and her husband were political exiles, living in Bern and Zurich.
When she got home on the day of the family party, she spent a long time in front of the mirror, arranging her white hair and pinning a small brooch—two enamel violets—to the collar of her blouse. She looked once again in the mirror, thought for a moment, unpinned her brooch with an air of decision and placed it on the bedside table. The door half opened and Vera announced in a loud whisper, “Hurry up, Granny! That scary old man’s here—Mostovskoy!”
After another moment of uncertainty, Alexandra put her brooch back on again and walked quickly towards the door.
She found Mostovskoy in the tiny hall, which was piled high with baskets, old suitcases and sacks of potatoes.
Mikhail Sidorovich Mostovskoy was a man of inexhaustible vitality—the kind of man of whom others say, “He’s a breed apart.”
Before the war, he had lived in Leningrad. After surviving four months of the Blockade, he had been flown out in February 1942. He was still light on his feet. He had good sight and good hearing. His memory and mental faculties were intact and he retained a genuine, lively interest in life, the sciences and people. All this in spite of the fact that the experiences he had been through were enough for several more ordinary lives: forced labour and exile, persecution, disillusion, bitterness, joys and sorrows, deprivations of every kind, and endless nights of unceasing work. Alexandra had first met Mostovskoy before the Revolution, when her late husband was working in Nizhny Novgorod. Mostovskoy, who had gone there to help organize clandestine political activities, had stayed in their apartment for a month.
Mostovskoy stepped into the main room and looked around: at the wicker armchairs and stools by the table, at the white tablecloth spread out in anticipation of guests, at the wall clock, the wardrobe and the folding Chinese screen on which an embroidered silk tiger was moving stealthily through yellow-green bamboo.
“If your room were to be dug up in a thousand years,” he said, “an archaeologist could learn a great deal about the juxtaposition of different social strata in our time.” There was a hint of laughter in his eyes; the little wrinkles around them appeared, disappeared and reappeared. Pointing to the plain wooden shelves, he went on, “Look. Here we have Das Kapital and Hegel in German. And on the wall—portraits of Nekrasov and Dobrolyubov.17 That’s your revolutionary past. But the silk tiger must be from your merchant father. And the huge wall clock too. And then there’s a cupboard, a vase as big as a cupboard and a huge dining table—they’re all symbols of our new prosperity, the prosperity of the present day. They must have been brought here by your chief engineer son-in-law.” Then he raised an admonitory finger. “Oh! Judging by the number of place settings, this is going to be a real banquet. Why didn’t you say? I’d have got out my best tie!”
Alexandra always felt uncharacteristically unsure of herself in Mostovskoy’s presence. Now too, thinking he was criticizing her, she blushed—the sad, touching blush of an old person.
“I yielded to the demands of my daughters and grandsons,” she said. “After a winter in Leningrad, I fear all this must seem strange and excessive.”
“Far from it, far from it,” Mostovskoy replied. He sat down at the table, began filling his pipe and then held out his tobacco pouch, saying, “You enjoy a smoke too. See what you think of this!” He looked at her tobacco-stained fingers and added, “But you really should use a cigarette holder.”
“It’s better without,” she replied. Once again, she felt the need to justify herself. “I started when we were in exile, in Siberia. Goodness knows how many times Nikolay and I argued about it. But I’m hardly likely to stop now.”
Mostovskoy took a flint from his pocket, along with a piece of thick white string and a steel file. “I’m having trouble with my Katyusha,”18 he said. He and Alexandra smiled at each other. His Katyusha truly was refusing to light.
“Let me get some matches,” said Alexandra.
“No,” said Mostovskoy, with a dismissive wave. “Why waste precious matches?”
“Yes, nowadays people like to hang on to their matches. I’ve got a tiny night light in my kitchen and my neighbours are always coming round ‘to borrow a light.’”
“It’s the same everywhere. People tend their little flames like cave dwellers thousands of years ago. And the old like to keep two or three matches in reserve. They’re afraid the war may bring them some night-time surprise.”
She went to the cupboard, came back to the table and said with mock solemnity, “Allow me, from the bottom of my heart . . .” And she held out an unopened box of matches.
Mostovskoy accepted her gift. They both lit up, drew on their pipes and exhaled at the same time. The two curls of smoke met and drifted lazily towards the window.
“Are you thinking about leaving?” asked Mostovskoy.
“Yes, of course. Who isn’t? But we haven’t yet talked about it at all seriously.”
“And where might you go, if it’s not a military secret?”
“To Kazan. Part of the Academy of Sciences has been evacuated there. And Ludmila’s husband’s a professor, or rather, he’s a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences,19 and so they’ve been given an apartment. Well, two rooms, anyway—and he’s asking us to go and join them. But don’t worry—you’ll be all right. I’m sure the authorities will take proper care of you.”
Mostovskoy looked at her and nodded.
“Are they really so unstoppable?” asked Alexandra. There was a note of despair in her voice that somehow didn’t fit with the confident, even haughty expression of her handsome face. Slowly, with effort, she began again, “Is fascism really so very powerful? I don’t believe it. For the love of God, tell me what’s happening! This map on the wall—sometimes I just want to take it down and hide it. Day after day Seryozha keeps moving the little flags. Day after day—the same as last summer—we hear about some new German offensive. Towards Kharkov. Then, all of a sudden, Kursk. Then Volchansk and Belgorod. Sevastopol has fallen. I keep asking, ‘What’s happening?’ None of our soldiers can tell me.”
She fell silent for a moment and then, moving one hand as if to push away some frightening thought, she went on, “I go over to the bookshelves you were just talking about. I say to Lenin, Chernyshevsky, and Herzen,20 ‘Can we really not defend you? Is this really going to be the end of you?’ And then I say, ‘Defend us! Help us! Some kind of darkness has fallen on us.’”
“What do our soldiers tell you?” said Mostovskoy.
Just then, from behind the kitchen door, came the sound of a young woman’s voice—half amused, half angry: “Mama! Marusya! Where are you? The pie’s burning.”
“A pie!” said Mostovskoy, clearly glad to evade Alexandra’s questions. “Seems this is going to be quite a dinner!”
“A feast in time of plague,”21 Alexandra replied. Pointing towards the door, she went on, “Zhenya, my youngest . . . you’ve met her. Really all this was her idea. She arrived just a week ago, unexpectedly. Everyone else is parting from their nearest and dearest—while here we have this surprise reunion. And there’s another of my grandchildren, Ludmila’s son, Tolya. He’s on his way to the front, he’s just passing through. So we decided to celebrate both meetings and partings.”
“It’s all right,” said Mostovskoy. “No need for explanations. Life goes on.”
“It’s harder when you’re old,” Alexandra said quietly. “I feel the country’s tragedy differently from the young. Forgive me weeping, but who else can I say these things to? Nikolay so loved and respected you. And then we’re all . . .” Looking straight at Mostovskoy, she went on, “Sometimes I just want to die. And then I think not—that I’ve still got the strength to move mountains.”
Mostovskoy stroked her hand and said, “Quick—or the pie really will burn.”
•
“And now—the moment of truth,” said Zhenya, bending down towards the half-open oven door. Glancing at Alexandra and then putting her lips to her ear, she said very quickly, “I got a letter this morning . . . Long ago, before the war . . . Remember, I told you about him . . . A commander I once met, Novikov. . . We met again on a train. Such a strange coincidence. And then today . . . Just imagine, I was thinking about him as I woke up. He’s probably no longer alive, I said to myself. And an hour later there was a letter from him. And our meeting in the train, when I was on my way here from Moscow, that was extraordinary too.”
Zhenya put her arms around Alexandra’s neck and began kissing her—first on the cheek and then on the white hair falling over her temples.
When Zhenya was studying at the Art Institute, she had been invited to some gala at the Military Academy. There she met a tall, slow, heavy-footed man, the “elder” for his year. He had escorted her to her tram and then called on her several times. He graduated from the academy in the spring and then left Moscow. He wrote to her two or three times, asking her to send him a photograph but not saying anything about his feelings. She sent a very small photo she had had taken for her passport. And then, around the time she finished at the Art Institute and got married, he stopped writing.
But when she left Krymov and was on her way to her mother’s, the train had stopped in Voronezh and a tall, fair-haired commander had entered her compartment.
“Do you remember me?” he asked, holding out a large, pale hand.
“Comrade Novikov,” she replied, “of course I remember you. Why did you stop writing?”
He smiled, silently took a small photograph out of an envelope and showed it to her.
It was the photograph she had sent him long ago.
“The train was just coming to a stop,” he said, “and I saw your face in the window.”
The two elderly women doctors sitting in the compartment with them listened avidly to every word she and Novikov said. For them, this meeting was an unexpected diversion; after a while, they joined in the conversation. One of them, with a spectacle case sticking out of her jacket pocket, talked almost without stopping, recalling all the unexpected meetings she could think of—in her own life and in the lives of her friends and family. Zhenya felt grateful to her; Novikov—evidently seeing this meeting as deeply significant—seemed to be wanting a heart-to-heart conversation, whereas she just wanted to be quiet. Novikov got out at Liski, promising to write, but he never did. And now she had suddenly received a letter from him, which had reawoken thoughts and feelings from a time she had thought gone forever.
As Alexandra watched Zhenya working away in the kitchen, she admired her fine gold chain, thinking how it looked just right against her pale neck. She noticed how her perfectly chosen comb brought out faint gleams of gold in her dark hair. But had they not been touched by the living beauty of a young woman, the comb and the gold chain would have been nothing. There was a sense of warmth, she thought, that emanated not from her daughter’s flushed cheeks or half-parted lips but from somewhere deep in her clear brown eyes—eyes that had seen so much, that were now so much older and wiser, yet still as immutably childlike as two decades earlier.