More metal, more guns!

POSTER SLOGAN

Because of the Germans’ heavy losses at Stalingrad and the devastating outcome of Operation Edelweiss, Army Group A was ordered to withdraw from Vladikavkaz, which at the time was still Ordzhonikidze, and by the end of the year the Military Road was open and passable again. Stasia was able to make her way home. In March 1943, she reached Tbilisi. Simon’s last letter, unusually sentimental for him, had frightened her, but she would not allow herself to think the worst. She knew from Christine that Kostya was alive and had served with distinction on the Leningrad front. She reached the grand house on the hill whose garden had long since run wild, its fountains dried up, its treasures sold on the black market. She fell into her daughter’s arms and tried to weep, to experience some sort of relief, but she couldn’t. It was only bit by bit that she learned from Kitty and Christine what had happened in her absence: Andro’s disappearance, and the sad, anxious months in Tbilisi, where at least no shots had been fired. It was only much later that Kitty mentioned a miscarriage, as if in passing, without wishing to discuss the subject in more detail.

They sat in the kitchen, baked corn bread, and gazed at each other in rapture. Christine kept massaging her older sister’s shoulders; she made her a face mask of cucumber peel, prepared hot hibiscus tea to renew her strength, heated buckets of water for her so she could take a bath, gave her new stockings and boots, and cut her hair.

For the first few weeks, Stasia was in a sort of daze. She couldn’t bring herself to go out, couldn’t concentrate during their conversations. Her eyes would close of their own accord, and she would yawn constantly. Kitty and Christine went about their daily business: they took the food vouchers and went shopping, went to the hospital, cleaned, cooked, darned jackets and coats for soldiers at the front, fetched wood, cooked meals, and listened, spellbound, to the old Blaupunkt radio.

Some nights, Stasia heard loud screams in the house; heard Christine’s bedroom door open as she hurried down the corridor to the former playroom where Kitty slept. Heard her daughter whimpering, moaning, raising her voice, then Christine’s soothing words. Sitting up in her bed, she heard Christine talking to Kitty for some time, until their voices fell silent again and Christine returned to her room.

On those nights Stasia wished she could find the strength to go down and take her daughter in her arms. To whisper just such soothing words in her ears; to ask her where this despair came from, what had made her so afraid. But she feared the secret Kitty shared with her aunt; she feared Kitty’s nightmares, which might be contagious.

*

Spring brought people out onto the streets, into the parks, into the wide boulevards and the narrow alleys. The ice-cream sellers were heard again, touting their wares; the neighbourhood women, sitting on benches, exchanging the latest gossip; the dice rolling across the backgammon boards. Fresh laundry hung again in inner courtyards, transforming them into white, war-free zones.

The old man who used to have the big fruit stall on the corner now sold his few apples and plums out of zinc buckets. The academic’s fat wife wore feathers in her hat again; crowds of gypsies wandered the streets telling people’s fortunes — only the happy, bright, promising ones, of course. Bad tidings in wartime could lead to a sound thrashing.

On sunny days like these, Kitty, Christine, and Stasia went for walks around the hilly streets of Vera, ate sunflower seeds, drank malt beer. By May there was still no news from Simon, so Stasia went to the military People’s Commissariat and submitted an application in the hope of learning something of her husband’s whereabouts. Stasia had already given up hope when a letter arrived for her with a Moscow postmark. The message was brief: the Red Lieutenant had most probably lost his life in the glorious victory of the Battle of Stalingrad. She should take this letter to the relevant commissariat in Tbilisi. They could be of more assistance to her there, particularly with regard to her widow’s pension.

At the commissariat a young woman in uniform explained to her that, although her husband was not to be found on any of the casualty lists, she should be aware that they had suffered very high losses in Stalingrad.

‘You mean there’s no body?’ asked Stasia, sounding composed.

‘We’ve contacted his division. Your husband is still registered as missing. But it’s assumed he was killed in the final days of the battle.’

He had fought heroically, would probably be awarded a posthumous medal for bravery. Stasia interrupted her. ‘As long as there’s no body, he can’t be dead,’ she declared. Then she turned and walked out of the building.

Christine and Kitty were stunned when Stasia repeated to them, calmly and collectedly, what they had told her at the commissariat. Kitty chewed her lower lip nervously, and Christine’s eyes filled with tears. It was clear from her expression that she accepted the news of Simon’s death as fact. She wondered whether the certainty that Simon would not return also gave her the dreadful certainty that Andro could never return, either.

And Kitty wondered whether Christine was weeping for the loss of her own husband, and of her face; and she wondered whether Kostya would share Simon’s fate.

Suddenly Kitty too began to sob.

‘Why are you crying?’ asked Stasia. ‘He’s not dead. He’s just missing. This man has been missing for half his life; it’ll be no different this time. He’ll turn up again, don’t you worry.’

‘He’s dead!’ gasped Kitty.

‘Where there’s no body, where there’s no grave, there are no dead, either!’

Stasia’s tone left no room for doubt. She seemed absolutely certain.

‘But of course there are dead with no graves!’

There was something leaden, something lifeless, in Kitty’s voice that made Stasia sit up and take notice. Timidly, she rose to her feet and went to her daughter. The abyss in Kitty frightened her; she didn’t trust herself to peer into it, she was afraid of losing her balance. She tried to take Kitty in her arms, but Kitty recoiled.

*

Konstantin Jashi survived. In the last days of fighting, he sustained a serious leg injury and had to have an operation. The clinics in Leningrad were full to overflowing, so he was flown out on an NKVD plane to a military hospital in Moscow. Far away from the shooting and grenades, well fed, and under a warm blanket, the stay in hospital must have seemed to him like a sort of paradise. He was given two weeks’ home leave, which he took, with some hesitation: it was akin to a medal of honour, as it was not generally permitted to Red Army soldiers. Someone must have put in a good word for him. Who could it be, Kostya wondered; but his deliberations did not supply an answer.

It was years since he had last been in his homeland. During the first two years of the war he had corresponded regularly and at length with his father and Giorgi Alania, his former roommate, but he only ever sent short telegrams to Tbilisi. He didn’t know how to put the things he had experienced into words that would be comprehensible to his aunt, his sister, his mother.

He had preferred to remain in a state in which he asked no questions and hoped for no answers, no meaning. He wanted to forget that anything else existed beyond the daily certainty of death. Things like grief, happiness, disappointment, hope, and, above all, intimacy. Happiness had been a sip of schnapps and a piece of black bread smeared with fat; happiness was the sacks of flour and tins of food they smuggled into Leningrad for months on end; happiness was ships unscathed; happiness was mere survival. And everything that had existed beyond this no longer mattered. It didn’t exist any more, and Kostya felt the hope of its return as a hindrance — dangerous, even, in certain circumstances.

Memories make the heart soft and transparent. You can’t shoot well with a transparent heart, Brilka: you miss your target, and soon become a target yourself.

*

It seemed an age before Stasia, who opened the door to her son when he arrived, finally took him in her arms. Her whole body was trembling, and she pressed his head to her neck so hard he almost suffocated. Stasia yelled for Christine, and her voice filled the house. Kostya staggered, but quickly regained his balance by leaning on the walking stick he was to rely on for three weeks after his operation. Christine appeared at the end of the long corridor. It was where she used to stand when he was little, waiting for him to dash up to her after school and fling his arms around her neck. He stared at the unveiled right half of her face. How beautiful she was, he thought; and at the same time her halved beauty made him infinitely sad: his heart contracted, and he felt his palms grow damp. Looking at her, he couldn’t help thinking of Ida.

Christine stopped in front of him and gazed at him, as if they had been writing love letters to one another all their lives and were meeting now for the first time.

‘Kostya, Konstantin, my beautiful Konstantin, you’re back, you’re here, with me!’ Stasia stepped back, allowed her younger sister to celebrate her symbiotic intimacy with her nephew, allowed her son to accept this intimacy, to garland himself with it, for everything about his body and his face suggested terrible hardship.

Later, when Kitty came home from the hospital and heard her brother’s voice in the kitchen, she stopped for a while in the corridor, pressing herself against the wall, taking deep breaths, trying to get her body under control; and before she burst into the kitchen she spent a few seconds practising her old, unbridled laugh, trying to remember what her voice had sounded like when she had been happy.

*

Unlike Stasia, Kostya had a lot to say. He described in unremitting detail his time in Sevastopol, the raid on Constanta, and, above all, what had happened at Lake Ladoga. He wolfed down everything that was put in front of him; his hunger seemed insatiable, and he drank the bitter chacha that loosened his tongue still more.

But Kitty noticed that the way he talked about all these things — the battles, the attacks, the bombs, the hunger, the harsh fight for survival — sounded artificial, almost dispassionate.

Christine and Stasia told him many things, too, but their stories were less tidy: they interrupted one another, argued about details that each remembered differently. When the conversation turned to Andro, Christine lowered her voice and told him what she knew, or rather, what she didn’t know: that it was assumed he had joined a partisan movement and was fighting on the side of the Wehrmacht. Kitty felt betrayed by Christine’s words, even though Christine was just reporting facts; she was also annoyed that Kostya had managed to draw Christine entirely into his orbit in the space of just a few hours. Andro’s story provoked a tirade of abuse from Kostya. He grew heated talking about this betrayal of the Motherland, and launched into a monologue about the importance of the correct ideology, about loyalty and fidelity, about the duties of every Soviet citizen, and repeated that he had always suspected Andro would go astray, that he would bring shame on the family.

Kitty didn’t dare intervene; she didn’t want to get into a fight with Kostya on his very first evening with them, disappointing her mother and aunt. She also knew that her arguments in support of Andro were too weak. Nonetheless, it was hard for her to see him portrayed so simply as a traitor to the Motherland. It wasn’t the truth. For the others, the easiest thing to do was to sacrifice him to his own mistakes.

‘Father’s dead, isn’t he?’

Kostya’s question came very suddenly, as unannounced as a summer storm. He had just been speaking of his experiences in Moscow. Christine bowed her head. Stasia cleared her throat briefly and scratched her forearm.

‘You should know … he’s missing, he’s just disappeared.’ Stasia tried to answer as casually as if she were talking about the weather.

‘Will you stop this!’ shouted Kitty.

‘He’s disappeared, we have no proof that he’s dead!’ Stasia sounded indignant, as if offended that her truth was being called into question.

‘He was last seen in the final days of Stalingrad, outside the German headquarters, just before it was blown up.’ Kitty was breathing fast.

‘And they haven’t found his body!’ Stasia remained stubborn, repeating it like a magic spell that would protect her from reality.

‘Tell her, Kostya — we have to have him declared dead, we can’t go on living like this,’ Kitty implored her brother.

‘I’ll go the commissariat myself tomorrow. They’ll give me more precise information,’ he answered calmly.

*

With the arrival of the summer heat the whole family set off for the town where Stasia and Christine were born. They stayed in the chocolate-maker’s old house, where Lida now lived alone in the half that was still hers. They visited their parents’ graves. They gazed at the gravestones, sat on the grass. They all repeated ‘Amen’ after Lida said a prayer for the dead. The very next day, Kostya commissioned a new gravestone engraved with the name ‘Simon Jashi’ and had it erected beside the graves of his grandparents and his mother’s twin sister. Stasia refused to accompany them to the graveyard to mourn her husband. She announced that she would only acknowledge her husband’s death when his bones lay beneath the gravestone.

In the little town that was once destined to become the Nice of the Caucasus, it seemed unimaginable that somewhere out there a cataclysmic war was raging. Everything appeared so peaceful, almost provocatively quiet.

Kitty and Kostya were bewildered when their mother borrowed a Kabardin and disappeared into the steppe. Christine, too, was bewildered, wandering the little streets and alleyways of the town where once she had walked so proud and aloof. She stood for a long time in front of the barred doors and boarded-up windows where the chocolate factory used to be; where — it seemed like centuries ago — she had first met her husband. On her walks through the town, Kitty avoided the park with the green-painted benches. She avoided all the streets where she had walked with Andro, and the places where she had hidden from him in the hope that he would find her.

The evening before their departure, Kostya and Kitty walked again side by side through the crooked streets of the old town, stopped in front of the closed shops, argued over what used to be in this or that building. They bought candyfloss from an old woman on a street corner, and both nibbled on the sticky cloud. Kitty took Kostya’s arm; he kept stopping because of the pain in his leg.

‘Aren’t you afraid?’ she asked her brother suddenly.

‘What would I be afraid of?’

‘When you’re out there: that this could be the end? I mean really every second.’

‘Yes, sometimes.’

‘How can you stand it?’

‘I don’t think about it. I just try and do my duty.’

‘Which is to kill or be killed?’

‘Which is to make sure that as few of us as possible are killed. And as far as the enemy’s concerned: if you don’t kill them, they kill you. There’s no mercy. You don’t think about it.’

‘Aren’t they human beings?’

‘They’re sick fascists.’

‘And what are we? Sick communists?’

‘Only you could say a thing like that! Is that your boyfriend’s sick ideology?’

‘We grew up together, Kostya, all three of us. He was like a brother to you.’

‘No. A traitor cannot be my brother. He shouldn’t have done it.’

‘He just wanted to be free.’

‘Free? With the fascists? Are you serious? And you shouldn’t have got involved with him.’

‘We were engaged.’

‘You were engaged?’

‘Yes. And now I don’t even know if he’s alive.’

‘Grow up, Kitty. It’s high time. Engaged!’ Kostya shook his head vigorously.

‘The fact that I refuse to see this world with your eyes doesn’t mean that I don’t see it at all.’

‘Don’t cry over him, he’s not worth it. He’s deceived our family — the family that saved him.’

‘Saved? His mother was shot. What was her crime? Are you surprised he refused to accept this system as just? Wouldn’t you feel the same way if Deda or Christine or I —’

‘They’ll have had their reasons.’

‘How can you say such a thing? You know it’s not true. You know it’s not right.’

Kitty had stopped walking and was looking at her brother in total incomprehension.

‘The war won’t last forever. The Germans are finished. The whole world is against them. Afterwards, everything will get on the right track.’

‘People are waiting, you’re waiting, and nobody knows what’s coming.’

‘Even the USA is supporting us now. They’re supplying us with new tanks,’ Kostya continued, as if he hadn’t heard his sister’s objection. ‘We’re all fighting together now against the Germans.’

‘And you?’ They had stopped at a junction. The silence on the streets was almost ghostly. ‘What do you plan to do, afterwards?’

‘If I survive this, you mean? I’ll do what my duty requires of me.’

‘And what is your duty?’

‘To carry on working for the good of my country. It’s that simple, Kitty.’

‘But …’

‘But what? What do you think Papa gave his life for? Why do you think countless heroes have lost their lives?’

‘Papa lived for the military. You’re not him. He was never there; we missed him all the time. You, me, Deda. Do you want to live like that, too?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean? We missed him? How can you dare to question the path he took?’

‘What I’m questioning is the paths you and I are taking.’

‘You’d do better to see to it that you forget all this rotten ideology your boyfriend has filled your head with, as fast as possible. You should find yourself a real man!’

‘He has a name — his name is Andro! You won’t infect yourself by saying his name!’

Kitty flung the stick of candyfloss aside in fury and strode on ahead.