THAT MORNING Varvara had given little Volodya his tea and then got ready to go to the bathhouse.
Going to the bathhouse usually made her feel calmer. She liked talking to friends in the warm, quiet half-light. And the sight of their pink-skinned young daughters and granddaughters brought back memories of her own youth, which was sad yet also pleasurable. At least for half an hour, Varvara expected to be able to forget about the impending journey and her many griefs.
But even in the bathhouse there had been no escaping the war, and Varvara’s misery had not been relieved for even a minute. There were a number of young girls who were serving in the Red Army; the changing room was full of green skirts, soldiers’ boots and soldiers’ tunics with triangles on the collar tabs.11 There were two stout young women who seemed to have only just arrived in Stalingrad. She had not seen anyone whom she knew.
This bathhouse had been an important part of Varvara’s life for several decades, but to these girls it was just one among many. They talked about other bathhouses they had been to during the last year—in Voronezh, Liski and Balashov. In a week or two, probably, they’d be washing in some bathhouse in Saratov or Engels. They laughed so loudly that it made Varvara’s head ache. As for the two stout women, they talked quite obscenely about all kinds of extremely private matters. Varvara began to feel quite grubby, afraid she’d end up dirtier than when she came in.
“Oh well, it’ll all be written off by the war,” one of them said loudly, with a toss of her wet perm.
The other, looking at Varvara, grinned nastily and asked, “Why are you staring at me like that, Granny? Not going to inform on me, are you?”
“No,” she replied, “I’d rather give you a good talking-to myself.” And then she wound a towel round her head. Instead of washing her hair as usual, she would keep it dry and leave the bathhouse as soon as she could.
Soon after she left, there was an air-raid alert, just as she was passing a patch of wasteland where some anti-aircraft guns had been sited. The guns opened fire with an ear-splitting roar. Varvara began to run, but she stumbled and fell. She was still hot and damp from the bath-house and so a lot of dust and other muck clung to her. She returned home looking very dirty indeed.
Natalya had just returned from work. She was standing on the porch, eating some bread and cucumber.
“What happened?” she asked. “Did you fall over?”
“I’m worn out,” said Varvara. “I’ve no more strength.”
Natalya didn’t reply. She just turned round and went back into the kitchen.
To Natalya it seemed that no one in the house understood her. If she spent time with friends or went to the cinema, it was because she was trying to take her mind off her own unhappiness—and she was unhappy because, day and night, she missed her husband. She had started smoking. She repeatedly took on the heaviest work she could find. Once she spent almost forty-eight hours at a stretch in the children’s-home laundry, washing 280 sheets, pillowcases and items of children’s underwear—anything to take her mind off her sorrows. Had she been feeling carefree and well, she would not have started smoking or spent so much time visiting friends. But the only person who understood her was her new friend Klava, one of the children’s-home nurses.
Varvara, however, particularly disapproved of Klava. Mother and daughter-in-law couldn’t understand each other and, despite their shared anxiety over Anatoly, didn’t want to understand each other. Varvara went to the church to pray and paid several visits to a fortune-teller. But neither God nor the gypsy woman could help her to unravel a knot first knotted in times immemorial. The mother who had given her son life and the wife who had given life to this son’s child—both had the right to primacy in the home. A shared right, however, is no right at all, and both women understood, or half understood, the stark truth that in the end there is no right but might.
Varvara cleaned herself up in the hallway, wiped the dirt off her shoes with a rag and went through into the main room. She asked her grandson, “Is Grandad not back yet?”
Volodya mumbled something incomprehensible. Screwing up his eyes, he was standing by an open window and gazing up into the sky, at the fluffy white trail left at some enormous height by an invisibly humming plane.
“A reconnaissance plane,” he said. “It’s taking photographs.” He had been chatting to the anti-aircraft gunners.
“Of course he’s not back,” she said to herself. “If he were, I’d have seen his cap on the nail. He must have stayed on for the morning shift.”
There was no getting away from the bitterness of her present life. She did not want Natalya to see her tears and so she went out into the garden to weep among the cheerful red tomatoes. But Natalya was already there—sitting on the ground and weeping.
After lunch, some strange old man knocked on the door. At first Varvara thought he was an evacuee looking for somewhere to live, but he said quite straightforwardly, “Greetings, Mother, I’ve come to see Pavel Andreyevich.”
“Mother!” she thought crossly. “I think you mean ‘daughter,’ you old cretin.” She had seen at once that Mostovskoy was an old man; her quick eye had not been deceived by his strong voice and his brisk movements. She let him in, though she feared that what had lured this old fellow to their apartment was the hope of vodka.
But after only a few minutes, after he’d asked her about her children and her life in general, she was talking freely to him. Far from feeling suspicious, she felt as if she had been wanting for ages to open her heart to him and pour out her troubles. Before going into the room, he had spent a long time carefully wiping his feet on the mat in the hallway. He asked if she minded him smoking, saying that if she did, he could go out onto the porch. In the end, when he asked for an ashtray, instead of putting out the tin lid used by Pavel Andreyevich, she handed him the fine ashtray in which she kept her supply of buttons, thimbles and hooks.
After looking around the room, he said, “How nice you’ve made it in here. It’s beautiful!”
He was simply dressed and he had no airs and graces. After a while, however, she realized that he was far from being a lowly worker or peasant. Who was he? An accountant? An engineer? A doctor from the hospital? She couldn’t place him. Then it dawned on her that this must be someone her husband knew not from Red October but from the city. Perhaps a relative of the Shaposhnikovs.
“Do you know Alexandra Vladimirovna?” she asked.
“I do indeed,” he said, and he shot her a quick glance, impressed by her perceptiveness.
Then Varvara got more and more carried away. She told Mostovskoy about her husband: how wrongly he behaved, how little he cared about their lives, their home or their belongings. She talked about her son. Nearly every mother thinks her children are the best in the world, she said—but not her. She was well aware of her children’s failings. She had two married daughters, both living in the Far East—and she could see their faults quite clearly. Anatoly, however, was another matter—he just didn’t have any faults. As a child he had been calm and quiet. Even as a little baby, he had slept right through the night. She had fed him in the evening—and after that he hadn’t once cried out or called for her. Come morning, he had just lain there quietly when he awoke, his eyes wide open.
From talking about Anatoly as a baby in swaddling clothes, Varvara jumped straight to his marriage—as if there had been only a month or two in between. Probably that’s the way it always is—it may well be that, until the end of her days, a mother can never clearly distinguish between the fair-haired infant and the forty-five-year-old with greying temples and a wrinkled forehead.
How could she have imagined that her son would marry a woman who had no redeeming features at all?
From Varvara’s stories Mostovskoy learned a great deal about the treachery of women; there was much that he had not read about even in Shakespeare. He was struck by the intensity of the passions at play in what he had imagined to be a small, quiet and united family. This family was clearly not going to bring him comfort or reassurance; it was, rather, his role to comfort them.
Andreyev appeared, greeted his guest, sat down at the table and began to cry. Varvara, who had been laying the table, rushed off to the kitchen and stood there dumbfounded, a tomato in one hand and a knife in the other; never before had she seen tears in her husband’s eyes. She felt that death had entered her home and that their last hour must have come.
It was agreed that Mostovskoy would stay the night. The two old men sat together at the table. They went on talking well into the small hours.
When Mostovskoy got back home in the morning, Agrippina Petrovna handed him a note from Krymov. Krymov wrote that his unit would be stationed in Stalingrad for some time, but that he now had to return to the front. Next time he was in Stalingrad, he would call round again straightaway. As a postscript he had written, “Mikhail Sidorovich, you cannot imagine how I long to see you.”