15

VERA WAS still in the hospital. She was on night shift. After the evening round, she made her way out of the ward.

The corridor was lit by a blue lamp. Vera opened the window and stood there, leaning her elbows on the sill.

From the third floor there was a good view of the city. The river was white and gleaming. The blacked-out windows of buildings gave off a faint, grey-blue light, the colour of mica. There was no kindness, no warmth, no life in this icy blue—a light reflected first from the dead face of the moon and then from the dust-covered windows and the cold night-time water. It was a fragile, uncertain light. You had only to turn your head a little and it would disappear; once again the windows and the Volga would be a lifeless black.

Over on the east bank Vera could see a vehicle with lit headlamps. High in the sky above her, the beams from two searchlights had crossed; it was as if someone with a pair of pale blue scissors was shearing the curly clouds. Down below, in the garden, she could hear quiet voices and see little red lights; some of the patients from the convalescent ward must have slipped out through the kitchen door to enjoy a secret smoke. The wind off the Volga brought with it the freshness of the water, a clean cool smell that sometimes got the better of the heavy smell of the hospital but sometimes yielded to it, making it seem as if not only the hospital but also the moon and the river smelled of ether and carbolic acid, and that it was not clouds scudding across the sky but dusty balls of cotton wool.

Vera knew this monotonous groan of the dying, of those who could no longer ask for anything—neither food, nor water, nor even morphine.

The door of the ward opened; two men were bringing out a stretcher. First came Nikiforov, short and pockmarked; at the other end of the stretcher was Shulepin, who was tall and thin. Because of Nikiforov, Shulepin had to take unnaturally short steps.

Without turning round, Nikiforov said, “Slow down a bit, you’re pushing me.”

It seemed as if the dead man had pulled the blanket over his head himself, so as not to see these walls, these wards and corridors where he had suffered so cruelly.

For a moment Vera imagined she was an important doctor, with the rank of general, who had just flown in from Moscow. The chief surgeon would lead her into the room for the dying and say, “This one’s a goner.” “No, you’re wrong,” she would reply. “Prepare him to be operated on straightaway. I’ll carry out the operation myself.”

From the commanders’ ward on the second floor came the sound of laughter and quiet singing:

Tanya, Tatyana, Tanyusha,

Remember that glorious May?

I know we shall never forget—

Such joys can’t be taken away.

She recognized the voice of Captain Sitnikov, wounded in the left hand. The military prosecutor had made inquiries, but there turned out to be nothing untoward about this wound—a splinter from a German mortar bomb was indeed found in it.³⁰ Then someone else quietly joined in, probably Kvasyuk, the quartermaster lieutenant with a broken leg. He had been driving a small truck full of watermelons for the canteen and a three-ton ammunition truck had crashed straight into him.

Sitnikov had pestered Vera day after day, begging her to bring him some alcohol from the pharmacy. “Even if it’s only fifty grams,”³¹ he had kept saying. “How can you say no to a soldier?”

Vera had steadfastly said no—but since Sitnikov and Kvasyuk had become friends, she had smelt alcohol on their breath several times. Evidently one of the pharmacy duty nurses had proved more compassionate.

Here, standing by the window, she sensed two different worlds with apparently no points of contact between them. There was a fresh, cool world unlike anything else, a world of stars, moonlit water and ethereal pale blue light that appeared and disappeared in the windows, a world born from heroic romances and night-time dreams, a world without which she felt life was not worth living. And there was another world right beside her, advancing on her from all sides, entering her nostrils, rustling her white medicine-impregnated gown—a world of groans, coarse tobacco and clomping boots. This more prosaic world was everywhere—in the tedious registration forms she kept having to fill in, in tetchy remarks by doctors, in the bowls of millet she ate day after day, in the hospital commissar’s dull lectures, in the dust of the streets and the howls of the air-raid siren, in her mother’s moralizing, in conversations about shop prices, in the endless queues, in her quarrels with Seryozha, and in family discussions of the merits and faults of friends and relatives. She could sense this world’s presence in her rubber-soled shoes and in her father’s old coat, now re-tailored to fit her.

Behind her, Vera heard the quiet click of crutches. Her elbows on the sill, she lifted her head to look up at the sky. She was forcing herself to look at the clouds, at the stars, at the play of moonlight on windows—but all she was really aware of was the sound of crutches, coming towards her out of the dark corridor. Only one pair of hospital crutches sounded like this.

And then she laughed, amused by her own little pretence, by her own unnatural voice.

“What is it?” he asked again, starting to laugh too. Whether she was feeling cheerful or sad, he wanted to show his meek readiness to join in her feelings—simply because they were hers.

“It’s nothing,” said Vera. “Nothing at all. I heard you perfectly. I knew you were coming. I wasn’t really lost in a dream, only pretending.”

But here too she was only playing at telling the truth. She felt these words would help love’s cause, that they would show Viktorov how strange and unusual she was, how unlike any other woman. But learning this game of love was impossible—and anyway it was unnecessary. Impossible, because it was too complex and difficult; unnecessary, because her love was growing within her all the time, like it or not.

“No!” Vera exclaimed, once Viktorov had duly told her how extraordinary she was. “I couldn’t be more ordinary. I’m dull and boring. There are tens of thousands of women in the city just like me.”

Viktorov had been brought to the hospital two weeks earlier. Some Messerschmitts had shot him down over the steppe and he had been wounded in the leg by an explosive bullet. A truck had happened to pass by and had picked him up in the middle of nowhere. His clothes and his long fair hair were full of burs, thorns and bits of dry grass and wormwood. He had lain there on his stretcher, his head turned to one side on his long thin neck. His pale face looked dirty and dusty, his mouth was open and there was a strange, touching look in his eyes—a mixture of childish fear and the anguish of the old.

Vera had remembered how, when she was little, she once saw a young turkey that had just been clubbed. Its thin neck was curved back, its beak was open and its eyes were starting to glaze over. Bits of grass and straw were stuck to its rumpled feathers.

As they got ready to put Viktorov on the operating table, he had looked at Vera. Then he had seen his soiled underwear and looked away. And Vera, who had seen hundreds of naked male bodies, had felt embarrassed; tears of pity and shame had come to her eyes.

It wasn’t the first time convalescent patients had made a play for her. Some had even tried to embrace her in the corridor. One political instructor had declared his love for her in a letter and asked her to marry him. When he was being discharged, he had asked her to give him a photograph.

Senior Sergeant Viktorov had never tried to talk to her, though she had often sensed him looking when she went into the ward. It was she who had started their first conversation: “Your unit’s not far away. Why don’t any of your comrades come to visit you?”

“I’d just been transferred to another regiment. And I hardly know anyone any longer in my old regiment. They’re all new.”

He was slow to respond. She understood that he was suppressing the wish to reply the way pilots usually reply to questions like this from a young woman. Looking very serious, he said, “Yes.”

They were both embarrassed. Both wanted the relationship between them to be special, not just something fleeting and shallow. And for both it was as if a bell had rung out, solemnly proclaiming that their wish was being realized.

Viktorov turned out to have been born in Stalingrad. At one time he had worked as a metal fitter. Spiridonov had often visited his workshop and had made his presence felt there.

But the two of them had no shared acquaintances. Viktorov lived six kilometres from Stalgres and had always gone straight home from work, not joining any sports teams or staying for any of the films shown in the club.

Vera noticed that he liked the same books as Seryozha—books she didn’t find very interesting.

“What I like best are historical novels. But it was difficult to get hold of them—there were only a few in the club library. I used to go into the city on Sundays and order from Moscow.”

The other patients liked Viktorov. Vera once overheard a commissar say, “He’s a good lad, someone you can rely on.”

He smoked a lot. She would bring him cigarettes and loose tobacco. And soon afterwards the whole ward would be full of smoke.

On one arm he had a tattoo of an anchor and a length of cable. “That’s from when I was at factory school,” he said. “I was quite wild. Once I was almost expelled.”

She liked his modesty. He never boasted. If he mentioned his combat experience, what he spoke about was always his comrades, his plane, the engine, the weather, the flying conditions—anything but himself. But he preferred to talk about life before the war. When the conversation did turn to the war, he usually said nothing at all—though he probably had a great deal to say. And certainly a lot more than Sitnikov, the munitions supply officer who was the ward’s chief orator.

Viktorov was thin, with narrow shoulders, small eyes and a large, wide nose. Vera was fully aware that he was not handsome—but since she liked him, she saw this as not a fault but a virtue. No one but her, she believed, could understand just how special he was. His smile, his gestures and movements, the way he looked at his watch or rolled a cigarette—everything about him was special.

When Vera was twelve, she had planned to marry her cousin Tolya, and at the age of fifteen she had fallen in love with the Komsomol³² organizer; the two of them had gone to the cinema and the beach together. She had thought there was nothing she didn’t know about love and romance and she had listened with a condescending smile to talk about such matters at home. When she was in her last year at school, girls in her class had said things like, “One should marry a man ten years older than oneself, a man who’s found his place in the world.”

The corridor window became their meeting place. Often, if she had a free moment, she needed only go there and think about Viktorov—and she would hear the sound of his crutches, as if she had sent him a telegram.

Sometimes, though, when he was looking thoughtfully out of the window and she was standing beside him, looking at him in silence, he would suddenly turn round and say, “What?”

They often talked about the war, but sometimes it was their more casual, childish words that mattered the most.

“Senior Sergeant—I like that!” she would say. “How senior can you be when you’re only twenty!”

That night, after she’d pretended not to hear him coming, they went on standing side by side, their shoulders touching. They were talking all the time, though neither was really listening. More important than any words was the way he would go very still, waiting for her to touch him again, if her shoulder moved away from him. Trustingly, she would move closer. Sensing this apparently chance contact, he would look sideways at her neck, at her ear, at her cheek and at a lock of her hair.

In the blue light, Viktorov’s face appeared dark and sad. Vera looked at him with a presentiment of tragedy. “I don’t understand. At first I thought I just felt sorry for you, because you’d been wounded. But now it’s myself I’m starting to pity.”

He wanted to put his arms around her. He wondered if this was what she wanted too, if she was waiting patiently for him to stop being so hesitant. And then he just said, “Why? What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said. And she looked up at him, the way a child looks at an adult.

Choking with emotion, he leaned towards her. His crutches fell to the floor and he let out a little cry. He hadn’t actually put any weight on his wounded leg; he had simply been afraid he might do.

“Yes,” he said. “My head’s spinning.” And he put his arms around her shoulders.

“No,” he replied. “Let’s stay like this.” And they went on embracing. To Viktorov it felt as if, rather than Vera supporting him because he was clumsy and helpless, it was he who was defending Vera, protecting her from a huge and hostile night sky.

Soon he would be fully recovered and he would be back in his Yak³³ again, patrolling the sky over Stalgres and the hospital. He could hear the roar of his engine—in his mind he was already pursuing a Junkers. Once again, he experienced that desire so difficult for anyone but a pilot to understand—the desire to get close to an enemy who may be your death. Ahead of him he could see the lilac flicker of tracer bullets and a cruel, pale face—the face of a German gunner and radio operator—that he had once glimpsed during a dogfight over Chuguev.

He pulled open his hospital gown and wrapped it around Vera. She pressed herself against him.

For a few moments he stood there in silence, looking down at the floor, sensing her warm breath and the pressure of her breast against his chest. He would be happy, he felt, to stand there on one leg for the next year, holding this young woman in a dark and empty corridor.

She helped Viktorov to sit down on the windowsill. “Why?” she asked. “Why does it all have to be like this? Everything could have been so good. My cousin’s just left for the front. And the surgeon says you’re healing unusually quickly. You’ll be discharged in ten days.”

“Never mind,” he replied, with the insouciance of a young man choosing not to think about love’s future. “Come what may, what we have now is good.” And then, with a little smile, he added, “You know . . . I mean . . . You know why I’m getting better so quickly? It’s because I love you.”

Later that night, lying on a little white-painted wooden bench in the duty room, Vera thought and thought.

Was it possible, in this vast four-storey building full of groans, blood and suffering, for newborn love to survive?

She remembered the stretcher and the body covered with a blanket. She was gripped by a sharp, heart-rending pity for a man whose name she did not know and whose face she had forgotten, a man whom the orderlies had already taken out to be buried. This feeling was so powerful that she cried out and folded her legs up towards her, as if to fend off a blow.

But she knew now that this joyless world was dearer to her than the heavenly palaces of her childish dreams.