“WHAT’S happened to our Sarkisyan?” Krymov asked Semyonov. “He should have been here long ago.”
Semyonov bent forward and whispered in Krymov’s ear, “A soldier passed by not long ago. He said there’s no one at all to the west. Just no man’s land. We need to move east—at least another twenty kilometres.”
“No,” said Krymov. “We must wait here for Sarkisyan. But we’re not staying the night with these rotgut-makers. Go and have a look in that barn over there—there’ll probably be some hay we can sleep on.”
Semyonov wanted to protest: Where was he going to find hay? Seeing the grim look on Krymov’s face, he walked silently to the gate.
It turned dark. The street was quiet and deserted. There was a glow in the sky from some distant blaze, and an evil, uncertain light hung over the whole of this Cossack village, over its houses, barns, wells and orchards.
Dogs were beginning to howl and from somewhere to the eastern edge of the village Krymov could hear singing, wailing and drunken shouts. Above him he could hear buzzing and whining. Night-flying Heinkels were circling over the burning earth.
Looking at the sky and listening to the voices, Krymov recalled a terrible moment from the winter offensive. Lieutenant Orlov, a bold, cheerful nineteen-year-old, had asked to be released from duty for two hours—his unit had just retaken the town where he had been born and he wanted to see his family. Krymov never saw him again. After discovering that his mother had left with the Germans as the Red Army approached, Orlov had shot himself.
“Betrayal. A mother’s betrayal. What could be more terrible?” Krymov said to himself.
The distant fire was still burning.
Krymov felt someone quietly draw near him, looking at him. It was the young woman. Unconsciously, not even thinking about her, he must have expected this; seeing her so close to him was no surprise. She sat down on one of the steps of the porch, her arms round her knees.
Lit by the distant glow, her eyes were shining and the now soft, now sinister light brought out her beauty to the full. She must have sensed, not with her mind or even her heart but through every inch of her skin, that he was looking at her bare upper arms, at the play of light on her legs, at the two smooth, slippery braids that fell down from her neck and curled onto her knees. She said nothing, knowing that there were no words to express what was happening between them.
This tall man with the furrowed brow and calm dark eyes looked very different from the young drivers and soldiers who, in exchange for love, had offered her tinned meat, petrol and millet concentrate.
She was not shy or submissive. These days she was having to fight for her life as roughly, as straightforwardly, as any man. She ploughed, shod horses and chopped wood; she mended roofs and walls. Little boys and old men were now doing most of the women’s work—digging the garden, herding the cattle and looking after the babies—and she was doing the work usually done by the adult men.
She put out fires, chased thieves from the grain store, delivered the wheat to the district town and negotiated with the military authorities about the use of the mill. She knew how to cheat, and if anyone tried to cheat her, she knew how to outwit them, how to deceive the deceiver. And even her ways of deceit were male—more like the bold fraud of an important bureaucrat than the simple tricks of a peasant woman.
It was not her style to add water to milk or to swear that yesterday’s milk, already beginning to turn, was fresh from the cow. Nor did she come out with quick, shrill, peasant-woman curses. When she was angry, she cursed and swore like a man, slowly and expressively.
And in these days of the long retreat, in the dust and thunder of war, as Heinkels and Junkers buzzed about the sky, she found it strange to remember the quiet, shy days of her youth.
The man with greying hair looked at her. There was vodka on his breath, but there was a serious look in his eyes.
It was a joy to have her sitting beside him. Krymov would have liked to go on sitting like this, beside this young and beautiful woman, for a long time, for the rest of the evening and the next day too. In the morning he would go out into the garden, then into the meadow. Come evening he would sit at table and, by the light of an oil lamp, watch her strong, bronzed hands make the bed. When she turned towards him, he would see in her fine eyes a look of gentle trust.
Still not saying a word, the young woman got to her feet and walked a little way across the bright sand.
He watched her walk away, knowing she would come back. And she soon did. “Come along. Why sit here all on your own? Everyone’s in that house over there.”
Krymov called Semyonov, ordering him to check his sub-machine gun and not to leave the car.
“Are the Germans close?” she asked. Krymov didn’t answer.
He followed her into a large house. The room felt hot and airless; it was crowded and the stove was lit.
Sitting at the table were a number of women, some old men and some young, badly shaven lads in jackets.
A very pretty young woman was sitting by the window, her hands on her lap.
When Krymov spoke to her, she bowed her head and, with the palm of one hand, began to brush invisible crumbs from her knees. Then she looked at him. There was a purity in her eyes that neither hard labour nor grim need could darken.
“Don’t try anything on with her!” the other women called out, laughing. “Her man’s in the Red Army. She’s waiting for him. She lives like a nun. But she’s got a good voice. We’ve asked her here so she can sing to us.”
A man with a black beard and a broad forehead, evidently the man of the house, was making sweeping gestures with his long arms and shouting hoarsely, “Let’s make it a party! It’s the last day I’ll be drinking with you, my friends!”
He was drunk, and he looked mad. Sweat was dripping down his forehead and into his eyes and he had to keep wiping it away, sometimes with a handkerchief, sometimes with his hand. He walked heavily, and each step he took set objects in the room trembling. Dishes, glasses and cutlery clinked on the table—as in a station buffet when a heavy freight train goes past. Women kept letting out little cries—he repeatedly seemed about to crash to the ground. Nevertheless, he kept going; he even tried to dance.
The old men had pink faces. They too were sweating—from vodka and the lack of fresh air.
Beside these old men, the young lads seemed quiet and pale. Either they weren’t used to drinking and were feeling sick or else vodka wasn’t enough to quell their anxieties. If your whole life still lies ahead of you, then war makes you more anxious.
When Krymov looked at these lads, they avoided his eyes; probably they had found some ruse to escape conscription.
The old men, on the other hand, came up to him and struck up conversations of their own accord. The man with the black beard said, “You should have stood firm! Yes, by God, you should have held your ground!” He then flung up his hands in despair and hiccupped with such violence that even the old women, used to him as they were, looked startled.
There was a rich spread—everyone must have brought whatever they could. Looking at the food on the table, the women repeated, “We must feast while we can—tomorrow the Germans will be helping themselves!”
On the table were fried eggs—in huge pans the size of the sun—and ham, pies, fatback, bowls of dumplings with cream cheese, jars of jam, bottles of wine made from grapes, and vodka made from real sugar.
The man with the black beard, gesticulating with arms that seemed to reach almost from the table to the wall, yelled out, “Eat and drink, eat and drink! Tonight’s for feasting—and then it’s the Fritzes! Here’s to feasting and freedom!”
Approaching Krymov, he seemed to turn suddenly sober. He offered him food and said, “Eat, comrade chief! My eldest son’s fighting too—he’s a lieutenant!”
Then he went over to a very silent man sitting in an armchair beside the oak sideboard. Krymov heard him say, “Eat, my good man, eat and drink! We’ve held nothing back from you—so don’t hold back now! Eat all you can!” And then, with no apparent connection, “My elder brother was in the tsar’s personal bodyguard. He served with devotion till that last day in Dno.”153
Drunk as he was, the bearded man was still able to say the right thing to the right person; he knew who to tell about his son, who was in the Red Army, and who to tell about his elder brother.
Krymov looked at the silent man. He had foxy eyes and the face of a wolf. Sensing some hostility on his part, he asked, “And who are you?”
“I live here in the village. I’m a Cossack,” the man replied in a slow, lazy voice. “I’ve come for the feast.”
“What feast?” asked Krymov. “Has there been a birth or a wedding? Or is it the tsar’s name day?”
The man seemed to be one and the same colour all over; his skin and hair, his eyes and even his teeth were all the same dusty yellow. There was an exaggerated, almost sleepy calm about his gaze, and about his manner of speech, that reminded Krymov of the careful movements of a tightrope walker treading a familiar but mortally dangerous path under the high dome of a circus tent.
Smirking a little, the man slowly got up from the table and tottered towards the door. He did not come back. He too may not have been as drunk as he seemed. There was a general silence as he made his sleepy way out, and two of the old men exchanged looks.
It was as if Krymov had happened upon a secret—some secret knowledge shared by these pink-faced, sly yet simple-minded old men.
Now and again Krymov noticed that the woman who had brought him along was looking at him. Her eyes were sad and stern, questioning.
Then, from different parts of the room, people began asking the pretty young woman by the window to sing. She smiled, straightened her hair and her blouse, laid her hands on the table, glanced at the blacked-out window and began to sing. Everyone joined in, quietly and seriously—you’d have thought not one of them had been drinking.
The man with the black beard, whose voice had been louder than anyone’s while they were talking, sang so quietly that he could barely be heard. He had the air of a diligent schoolboy, and he didn’t take his eyes off the young woman. She looked taller now; her white neck had grown long and fine, and her face had taken on a rare look of joy and kindness, of triumphant gentleness.
Probably nothing but song could have expressed the trouble and anguish now weighing on these people. There was one song Krymov thought he might have heard before, long ago. It touched something deeply hidden, something he had not known was still present within him. Only rarely, as if suddenly able to look down from above and glimpse the whole length of the Volga, from the hidden springs of Lake Seliger to the salty delta where it enters the Caspian Sea—only very rarely is a human being able to bring together in their heart all the different parts of their life, the sweet years of childhood, the years of labour, hopes, passions and heartbreak, and the years of old age.
Krymov saw tears running down the cheeks of their black-bearded host.
The young woman was looking at him again. “There’s little cheer,” she said, “in our good cheer.”
You can write down the words of a song. You can describe the singer, the melody and the look in the listeners’ eyes. You can write about the listeners’ sorrows and longings—but will all this conjure a song into being? A song that makes people weep? Of course not. How could it?
“Yes,” said Krymov. “Sadly little cheer.” He went outside and walked over to his car. Semyonov had moved it—it was now close up against a fence.
“Are you asleep, Semyonov?”
“No,” said Semyonov. “I’m not asleep.” Childishly happy to see Krymov, he looked at him out of the darkness. “It’s very quiet now, and dark and frightening. That fire’s burnt itself out . . . I’ve spread out some hay for you in the barn.”
“I’ll go and lie down now,” said Krymov.
•
What Krymov remembered afterwards was the half-light of the summer dawn, the smell and rustle of hay, and stars in the pale morning sky—or had it been the young woman’s eyes, against her pale face?
He told her about his grief, about how hurt he had been by Zhenya. He told her things he had never even told himself.
And she whispered quickly and passionately to him, begging him to stay with her. Not far from the village of Tsimlyanskaya she had a house and garden. There was wine there, and cream, and fresh fish, and honey. No one there would betray them. They would marry in church and she swore to love no one but him. She would gladly live all her life with him—but if he tired of her, he would always be free to leave her.
She said she did not understand what had happened to her. She had known her fair share of men, had known and forgotten them. But Krymov, it seemed, had bewitched her. She was trembling all over, gasping for breath. No, she had never known anything like this.
Her words and her looks pierced his heart. “Maybe this is it,” he thought. “Maybe this is happiness.” And then he answered himself, “Maybe it is, but it’s not happiness that I want.”
He went out into the orchard. Ducking his head, he passed under the low branches of the apple trees.
Semyonov called out from the yard, “Comrade Commissar, it’s Sarkisyan, it’s our mortars!”
The joy in Semyonov’s voice made it clear how anxious he had felt earlier, listening to the hum of Heinkels and the rumble of Soviet bombers, looking up at the sky and the mute glow of the distant blaze.
That evening they crossed the Don yet again. Running his tongue over his dust-parched lips, Krymov said, “It’s not the same soldiers on the pontoons. The two sappers from the other day must have been killed. They didn’t serve long, but they served honourably.”
Semyonov did not answer; he was concentrating on steering. Once they were safely across and on their way east again, he said, “That Cossack was a real beauty, comrade Commissar. I thought we’d be staying a day longer.”