ZINA MELNIKOVA was aware that Vera’s family disliked her and disapproved of Vera’s friendship with her. Zina was only three years the older, but to Vera she seemed a model of worldly wisdom. She had been married for two years, she had visited Moscow several times, and she and her husband had lived not only in Kiev and Rostov but also in Central Asia. In 1940 she had managed to travel to Lvov145 and had come back with shoes and dresses, white rubber boots, a transparent pale blue raincoat, round sunglasses to wear on the beach and some fashionable check scarfs. She had also brought back an unusual hat, shaped rather like a large telescope. Her girlfriends, however, had rolled about laughing when she showed it to them, and so she had never worn it.
In the course of the last year Zina had seen a great deal. In autumn 1941 she had been in Rostov with her mother. She had failed to leave the city in time and had lived for a while under the Germans, before the Red Army recaptured the city in late November. During those weeks, Zina had travelled to Kiev and Kharkov. She had intended to go on to the Baltic republics, but she had returned to Rostov with supplies of food for her mother, meaning to stay for only a day or two—and just then the Red Army had retaken the city.
In late July 1942, when Zina, once more in Stalingrad with her husband, heard that the Germans had captured Rostov a second time, she had said to Vera, “It doesn’t matter. The trains will be up and running again in a couple of months. Either I’ll bring my mother here or I’ll go and visit her again in Rostov.”
“You really think the Red Army will retake Rostov?” Vera had asked in surprise.
“I can’t say I’m counting on it,” Zina replied, with a mischievous smile.
“You’re not meaning to stay here in Stalingrad under the Germans, are you? There’ll be terrible fighting. If it were me, I’d die of fear alone.”
“I’ve seen fighting. Last year in Rostov. It’s not as bad as you think.”
“Well, I certainly feel terrified myself. I can’t bear the thought of bombs and blazing buildings. I’d panic. I’d drop everything and run.”
“You’ve been reading too many newspapers,” Zina said with a patronizing smile. “It’s not like that in real life. And anyway, it’s people one should be afraid of. They’re more dangerous than any incendiaries.”
The evening she’d shouted at Zhenya and thrown a gramophone record on the floor, Vera had gone straight round to Zina’s. Viktorov had been discharged from hospital that very morning, sooner than expected, and sent on to the transfer point in Saratov. After completing her shift, Vera had happened to see a list of names signed by the hospital director. The original list of twelve had been typed out, in alphabetical order, but then one more name had been written in by hand: Viktorov. They had not even been able to say a few last words in private; she’d rushed straight to his ward, but he was already making his way down the stairs with eight other patients. The hospital bus had been waiting below.
Vera had never known such grief in her life. The only person she felt able to confide in was Zina. They talked until two in the morning. Then Zina made up a bed for Vera on the sofa, turned out the light and said, “Let’s go to sleep!”
Vera lay there in silence, sleepless, gazing into the darkness with wide-open eyes. She thought Zina was asleep, but after an hour or so Zina suddenly said, “Are you awake?”
“Yes,” Vera replied—and they carried on talking till dawn.
After that, Vera called round every evening, sitting and talking with Zina until shortly before the curfew.
Sometimes people become friends because they are similar, but often it is because they are different.
Vera saw Zina as a striking and romantic figure, a woman of great heart and soul. As for her brightly coloured dresses, her dozens of unusual items of clothing that made men say “What a woman!” while more plainly dressed girls looked on in envy—these were merely a fitting backdrop, an appropriate outer expression of Zina’s emotional depths. It never occurred to Vera that it might be the other way round, that Zina’s romantic talk and extravagant behaviour might be no more than a carefully chosen accompaniment to her striking looks.
For her part, Zina was both attracted and amused by Vera’s evident purity and simplicity. She saw in Vera a kind of essential salt—a clarity of thought and feeling—that she valued in others but was unable to find in herself.
People who are very similar often feel a mutual dislike; their similarities engender only envy and ill will. And polar opposites are sometimes united by their very differences. It is the same with understanding; it too does not always bring people closer. Sometimes, one person sees another’s secret failings all too clearly; the second person is aware of this and resents it. Conversely, people sometimes feel grateful and affectionate towards those who do not understand them, who are blind to their weaknesses.
Zina Melnikova may not have understood Vera, but she understood very well how Vera imagined her. And she took care to show Vera the particular qualities—the freedom from calculation and convention—that she knew Vera most wanted to see in her.
•
One day Vera came round to find Zina lying on a sofa and reading.
She was young and beautiful—and she saw it as her duty to be young and beautiful. This was clear from her every look and gesture.
She put down her book and moved up a little to make room for Vera to sit down. Taking Vera’s two hands between her palms, as if they were icy cold and needed warming, she said, “Life’s a struggle, isn’t it?” And without giving Vera a chance to answer, she went on, in the tone of an experienced doctor resolved to tell the whole truth to a patient, “I’m afraid it’s not going to get any easier.”
“If only I’d known earlier! Then I could have said a proper goodbye to him. It’s awful—I just can’t think about anything else.”
“He’ll write as soon as he gets to the hospital in Saratov.”
“What do you mean? He’ll be sent straight to the front. He’ll be flying again in a week. I know it—I’ll never see him again.”
“No!” said Zina. “None of us knows anything. I’ve seen so much that is extraordinary. I’ve seen miracles. More than miracles, really. Love cannot be calculated or predicted.” And she went on to tell Vera about a German officer who had fallen in love with a young Russian girl. The day the Germans withdrew from Rostov, this officer had been elsewhere. He had been unable to take the girl with him. The two had been separated. And then, a month after this, someone had knocked at the young woman’s door. It was the German officer. For the sake of the girl he loved, he had abandoned everything—uniform, medals, family and country. He was not afraid of being cursed by his parents. The girl had fainted. Then they had spent the night together. Come morning, he had gone to the commandant’s office and given himself up. He said he had crossed the front line for the love of a Russian woman. They had asked him to name her, but he had refused. They had accused him of espionage, saying that if he named the woman, he’d be treated as a prisoner of war—but if not, he’d be shot as a spy. He had remained silent. And then, just before he was shot, he had said, “Oh, if only I could let her know that I have no regrets!”
Zina’s story made a deep impression on Vera. Wanting to hide this, she said, “No, that kind of thing doesn’t happen. It’s just a story someone’s made up.”
Zina smiled such a strange, sad smile that Vera’s heart missed a beat. She suddenly wondered if the story might have been about Zina herself, but she didn’t dare ask—and a moment later Zina was talking about something else.
Then Zina showed Vera some stockings she had bought in the market, in exchange for sugar off her ration card. Vera looked at Zina’s delicate fingers, at her almond-shaped eyes and her slim legs—still slimmer in these semi-transparent stockings—and thought that the German who had given up his life for her love had done right.
“If there’s one person I can’t understand,” Zina suddenly began, “it’s your Aunt Zhenya. She must be blind to her own power. Why on earth doesn’t she dress better? With a face and a figure like hers, and her wonderful hair, she could be quite something! She could have whatever she wants in life.”
“I believe she intends to marry a colonel,” Vera replied quietly. “A staff officer.”
Zina failed to understand that this was meant as a criticism. She took it as a sign not of excessive pragmatism but of Zhenya’s naiveté, of her repeated failure to make the most of her opportunities. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “She could marry someone from one of the embassies. She could live wherever she chooses, somewhere without blackouts, without ration cards and endless queues for every least item of clothing. As it is, she’ll be sent off to some dump like Chelyabinsk. She’ll be living on a thousand roubles a month and have to stand in a queue to buy milk for her baby.”
“Oh!” said Vera. “There’s nothing I want more than to stand in a queue to buy milk for my baby.”
They both laughed. But once again Zina failed to understand her friend. She thought Vera was joking; she did not realize that Vera was trying not to show that she had tears in her eyes.
Vera had a burning desire to become a mother, to give birth to a child with Viktorov’s eyes, with his slow smile, with the same delicate neck, and—despite poverty, despite deprivation—to tend this child as one tends a flame in the dark. Never before had Vera known such feelings, and they were both bitter and sweet, a source of both joy and shame. But there was no law forbidding a young girl to love and be happy. No! She had no regrets and she never would have regrets; she had acted as it was right and proper to act.
All of a sudden, as if reading Vera’s mind, Zina asked, “Are you expecting?”
“Don’t ask,” Vera said quickly.
“All right, all right, I just wanted to take advantage of being older and wiser and say one thing. Being with a pilot is no joke. Alive today, dead tomorrow—and there you are on your own with a baby. A grim business!”
Vera put her hands over her ears and shook her head. “No, no, I’m not listening!”
On her way home, Vera thought about Zina’s story. Now that Viktorov had been discharged and would soon be flying again, wild, reckless love felt like the only real and meaningful thing in the world. At night, she imagined all kinds of fantastic scenarios. Viktorov would be lying on the ground wounded. She would rescue him and take him away to safety, further and further east. Remembering books she had read as a child, she dreamed of a little house in a northern forest or a hut on an uninhabited island. Life in a wilderness, in a hut surrounded by bears and packs of wolves, seemed an idyll compared with life in a city soon to be attacked by the Germans.
Vera believed that Zina lived in a different world from other people. For Zina, the laws of feeling were the laws of existence. After talking to Zina, Vera always felt more clearly than ever that love was the mightiest power in the world. Love took no account of tanks, guns, aeroplanes or blazing buildings. Love crossed trenches, did not recognize frontiers and feared no suffering or sacrifice.
She felt certain that Viktorov’s life would end tragically. In his eyes she had seen a look of sadness, a recognition of an inescapable fate. The thought of their fleeing together to the peace of a northern forest was no more than a foolish dream. In his MIG, Viktorov was like a twig being swept away by a storm, through a sky full of dark flames.
At home she found Zhenya, Novikov and Sofya Osipovna. She wanted very much to tell Zhenya the story of the German officer. She wanted Zhenya to understand the triviality of the calm, comfortable love known by those who prosper in life. She wanted her to recognize that there is another kind of love, a love that knows neither good fortune nor boundaries.
She recounted the story. She spoke quickly and with feeling, looking Zhenya straight in the eye. She was like a preacher, castigating human vices.
Everyone was deeply shocked.
Sofya was first to respond. “It’s true that Homer tells of a girl who was going to live with Achilles, even though he had killed her father and three brothers and burned down her city. But in those days people lived by a different code. And pirates and brigands like Achilles were respected figures, admired by everyone. It’s not like that today.”
“What on earth’s the Iliad got to do with it?” said Zhenya. She said this quietly, but in a way that made everyone look at her. And then she struck the rim of her glass with her spoon. Her face had turned white and her lips were tight and trembling, but it was the high-pitched ring of the glass that most truly expressed her fury. “Idiot girl!” she added, more shrilly.
“Maybe I am—but I understand what I need to understand.”
“How dare you use the word love about such vulgar, obscene filth! Look around you! Look at all the grey hairs and haggard faces! The graves! The burning buildings! The ashes! Look at all the broken families, all the orphans, all the people going hungry! Love has meaning when it inspires people to sacrifice—otherwise it’s just base passion. When two people love, their love elevates them. They become willing to sacrifice their strength, their beauty, even their lives. Love knows everything—joy, torment, and sacrifice. Love knows great deeds. Love is ready to meet death. But this . . . This thing you’ve just told us . . . It’s petty, foul, dirty. What you’ve just told us is contemptible. You call it love, but I call it a sickness. It’s vile. It’s like an addiction to cocaine or morphine. I want to spit in its eyes.”
Vera was looking at her with sullen obstinacy. Her jaw dropped open; she could have been a schoolgirl dumbfounded by an unexpectedly fierce telling-off from a teacher. She looked helpless—and Zhenya seemed to feel it wrong to expend any more of her fury on her. She turned to Sofya and went on, in the same shrill voice, “And you should be ashamed of yourself too, Sofya! What’s Homer got to do with any of this? What Vera’s told us is filth—and that’s clear enough to anyone with a Russian heart. There’s no need to drag Homer and Achilles into it. I know it’s not for me to give you lectures, but really, you ought to know better . . .”
Sofya agreed with every word Zhenya had said to Vera. But being quick-tempered, she took offence at Zhenya’s mention of a Russian heart. She gasped. Her broad chest swelled. Her cheeks, her ears and even her forehead turned a bright red. The locks of grey hair across her forehead seemed about to catch fire.
“Yes. Of course. A Russian heart. Mine, of course, is a mere Jewish heart. Yes, I understand.” She pushed her chair back, scraping the legs on the floor, and left the room.
“What’s got into you, Sofya Osipovna?” said Zhenya. “Has the war damaged your mind too?” Then she turned back to Vera. “Yes, you should be ashamed of yourself. You’ve been brought up as a revolutionary, as a member of the intelligentsia. How dare you talk like that! Thank God Granny’s not here. She wouldn’t have forgiven you till the end of her days.”
Zhenya was speaking more quietly, but it was these last words that upset Vera most of all. Zhenya’s first outburst had made her shrink into herself. Now, though, Zhenya sounded less out of control—and so Vera began to feel more angry. She was like a blade of grass, returning to the upright after being flattened by a blast of wind.
“Don’t bring Granny into it. It’s not as if you’ve got much in common with either her or Grandad. Granny was first imprisoned at the age of eighteen. You’re twenty-six now—and what have you got to show for yourself? Only a failed marriage—though it seems there may be a second one on the way!”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” Zhenya said coldly. “Just try to get it into your head that love and morphine are different things. A drug addict ready to suffer or die for their fix is not a hero. They’re more like a prostitute. If you can’t understand that, then there’s nothing more to be said.”
She made a gesture of dismissal, like a haughty queen exiling a disgraced courtier.
Vera left the room.
Zhenya and Novikov remained silent for a while. Then Zhenya said, “Vera thinks it’s just her I’m cross with, but really I’m more cross with myself. Remember our conversation down by the river?”
Novikov replied quietly, “Zhenya, there’s something I have to tell you: I’m going to Moscow very soon. I’ve been called to the Central Cadres Administration. I’m to be given a new posting.”
Zhenya looked at him in astonishment, not understanding.
“When are you going?”
“Any day now, by plane.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I was afraid you’d be angry. But after hearing the way you spoke to Vera just now, I felt bolder.”
“The only person I have any right to be angry with is myself. Embarking on any serious relationship at a time like this is sheer madness. I can’t believe I was such an idiot as not to see that!”
“Madness isn’t such a bad thing,” said Novikov, thinking how beautiful Zhenya looked when her feelings were roused. “As long as it’s madness about something that matters.”
“We seem to be exchanging roles,” Zhenya replied. “You’ve started preaching the things I said down by the river, and I’m coming out with the boring good sense I was complaining about.”
“To be honest,” said Novikov, “I already have committed a tiny, infinitesimal act of madness. Remember when I sat in the train with you, from Voronezh to Liski? Really, I should have been on my way north, to Kashira, but I saw your face in the window and got in a train going south, or rather south-east. When I got out at Liski I had to wait twenty-four hours for a train back.”
Zhenya gave him an intent look and started to laugh.