Two Captains (51 page)

Because before some three or four hours had passed all this-our wonderful swim together, the dreamy pool of the river with its motionless banks reflected in it, the boy with the net and a thousand other thoughts, feelings and impressions-all this was suddenly gone, swept miles and miles away, looking small, insignificant and infinitely remote as if seen through the wrong end of binoculars.

September 3, 1941. If time could be made to stand still, I would have done it the moment when, running back to town and no longer finding Sanya there, I had got off the tram in Nevsky Prospekt and stopped in front of a huge shop window displaying the first communique issued by the High Command.

Standing close to the window I read the communique, then turned to see the grave anxious faces behind me, and a curious feeling took hold of me, as if this reading of mine was taking place in some new strange life. That evening, the first warm evening that summer, the pale shadows walking the pavements, the moon riding the sky above the Admiralty spire with the sun still up-all these belonged to that mysterious new life. The first words in that life were written in heavy letters across the whole width of the window. People kept coming up to read them, and there was nothing you could do about it, however desperately you wanted to.

Rosalia had given me Sanya's note and I kept taking it out of my bag and reading it.

"Darling Pi-Mate," ran the hastily scribbled note on the bluish sheet from his pocket-diary, "I embrace you. Remember, you believe."

When we lived in the Crimea we had a dog named Pirate, who used to follow me about whenever I went. Sanya used to laugh and invented the name

"Pi-Mate" for the two of us. "Remember, you believe"-those were my words. I had once said that I believed in his life. He was in excellent spirits.

Though we didn't say goodbye to each other, he did not even mention it in his note, it didn't mean anything.

I returned to the dacha and spent the night there, but I don't think I slept a wink. I must have done, though, because I suddenly woke up dismayed, with a wildly beating heart. "It's war. And there's nothing you can do about it."

I got up and woke Nanny.

"We must pack up. Nanny. We're leaving tomorrow."

"You do keep changing your mind," Nanny said crossly, yawning.

She was sitting on the bed in a long white nightgown, grumbling sleepily, while I paced up and down the room, not listening to her, then flung the windows open. Out there, in the young, smiling wood, such a stillness reigned, such a joyous peace!

Grandma heard us talking and called me.

"What's the matter, Katya?" she demanded.

"We didn't say goodbye. Grandma! I don't know how it happened, but we didn't!"

She looked at me and gave me a kiss, then furtively made a sign of the cross.

"It's a good thing that you didn't. It's a good sign. It means that hell come back soon," she said, and I cried and felt that I couldn't bear it, just couldn't bear it.

Pyotr arrived by the evening train, looking tired and worried, but determined, which was quite unlike him.

It was from him that I first heard that children were to be evacuated from Leningrad, and it seemed so fantastic that we had to leave this cottage in the country, where we had been so happy, where Nanny and I had planted flowers-stocks and marigolds-and the first tender shoots were coming up, that we had to take little Pyotr in a crowded, dirty railway carriage, in this heat-all through June the weather had been cold, and now it had started getting hot and stuffy-take him not only to Leningrad, but farther to some other strange town!

Pyotr said that the Artists' Union was sending members' children to Yaroslavl Region. He had already signed on little Pyotr and Nina Kapitonovna. With Nanny, it was more difficult, but he would have to try again.

The train with the children was due to leave at four o'clock and it did so punctually on time. Pyotr came running up at the last moment. His son was handed to him through the window, and he took him in his arms and pressed his dark little head to his face. Grandma began to get nervous, so he kissed him hastily and handed him back.

To this day I cannot recall without distress that scene of the children going away, a distress that was all the more poignant because I feel so powerless to describe it adequately. Although I had lived through so much during those two months of war, and such strange, powerful impressions had stamped themselves for ever in my heart and mind, that day stands before me quite apart, all on its own.

September 7, 1941. Rosalia set up a first-aid station in the office of the former Elite Cinema and the local Defence Committee invited me to work there as a nurse, Rosalia having told them that I had some experience in nursing sick people.

"Bear in mind, my dear," the genial old doctor, a member of the Defence Committee, said to me in confidence, "if you refuse we shall immediately assign you to fortification work."

Work on fortifications, or "trenching", as people in Leningrad called it, was of course harder than nursing. Nevertheless, I said thank you and declined.

We went out late in the afternoon and dug anti-tank ditches all night.

The ground was hard and clayey and had to be broken up first with a pick before a spade could be used. I found myself working with a team from one of Leningrad's publishing houses, which had already shown a high standard of performance in the "digging of Hitler's grave", as it was jokingly called.

The team was made up almost entirely of women-typists, proof-readers, editors, many of them surprisingly well-dressed. I asked one pretty brunette, an editor, why she had turned up to dig trenches in such a smart dress, and she laughed and said that she simply hadn't any other.

The grey, spectral light that hung motionless between earth and sky was suddenly shot through with something fresh and morning-like, and even the faint breeze which stole through the field and stirred the bushes that masked the anti-aircraft guns seemed to generate a different, dawning light.

Far out over the city the barrage balloons, silvered by the still invisible shafts of the sun, resembled huge amiable fishes.

Everyone looked rather wan by morning, and one girl felt faint, 4 but still, our team finished their stint ahead of the others. We were very thirsty, and the brunette with whom I had made friends overnight dragged me off to where people were queuing up for kvass. Tents had been pitched near an old, tumbledown church, and we queued up there. My editor friend on a sudden impulse suggested that we climb up the belfry. It was silly, because my back ached and I was dead tired, but to my own surprise I found myself consenting.

I recognised our section from above by the hand-barrow stuck into the ground with a wall newspaper fixed to it. New people were coming up to it.

Had we done so little, I wondered? But our section merged into another, and that into another, on and on. As far as the eye could see, women were breaking the clay in ten-foot deep ditches, throwing it out with shovels and carrying it away in wheel-barrows. There was not one amongst them who would not have laughed heartily had anyone told her two months before that she would drop her home and her work and go outside town at night into an empty field to dig up the earth and build ditches, earthworks and trenches. But they had gone out and now had nearly completed these gigantic belts which girdled the city and broke off only at the roadblocks.

I got home the next day at noon. Dog-tired, I lay down and closed my eyes. The moment I did so my head began to swim with whirling visions of girls lifting barrows loaded with hard, heavy clay, wheelbarrows slowly sliding along planks, and the sun gleaming on the dark-red walls of the trenches.

Then daylight broke through, faint and lingering after the bright night, and the paling world slipped away from me as I began to drop off. I felt so good, so wonderfully good, but for that dreary long-drawn moan-or was it a song?-which came from behind the partition. How I wished it would stop...

"Katya, the alert!"

Rosalia was shaking me by the shoulder.

"Get up, it's the alert!"

September 16, 1941. A few days ago I met Varya Trofimova in Nevsky. She was the wife of an aviator. Hero of the Soviet Union, with whom Sanya had served in the S.P.A. Varya and I had travelled together to Saratov once to visit our husbands, and I remember having been surprised to learn that she was a dentist.

She was a tall, ruddy-cheeked, robust woman, who walked with a purposeful stride. She reminded me somehow of Kiren, especially when she laughed loudly, showing her long beautiful teeth.

"And my Grisha," she said with a sigh, "would you believe it, he's bombing Berlin. Did you read about it?"

We fell into conversation and she suggested that I come and work at the Stomatological Clinic of the Military Medical Academy.

While I was turning this over in my mind Varya added quickly that I had better come and see what it was like first, because one young lady she had recommended had given up the job after two days, saying that she couldn't stand the smell.

Varya hated "young ladies"-that, too, I remembered from the time we went to Saratov together.

As a matter of fact the smell really was impossible-it hit me the moment I entered the corridor, which had wards on both sides. It was a smell that made me feel sick right away and kept me feeling sick all the time Varya Trofimova was introducing me to the other nurses, the radiologist, the head physician's wife and a lot of other people.

Here lay men who had been wounded in the face. Just as I arrived they brought in a young man who had had his face blown away by a mine.

In nursing these men-I realised this the second or third day of my work there-one had to keep reassuring them, as it were, that it didn't matter, there was nothing to worry about if a scar remained, that they must grin and bear it and hardly anything would be noticeable. But how was one to deal with that hidden, unspoken fear lurking behind every word, that horror with which a man gets his first glimpse at his own disfigured face, that endless standing in front of the mirror on the eve of discharge, those pathetic attempts to look smart, spruce themselves up?

September 23, 1941. Yesterday I spent the night at home instead of at the hospital, and early in the morning I went in search of Rosalia, since there was no one in the flat. I found her in the courtyard. Three boys were standing in front of her and she was teaching them how to mix paint.

"Too thick is as bad as too thin," she was saying, "Where's the board?

Vorobyov, don't scratch yourself. Try it on the board. Not all at once."

Automatically, she started to speak to me in the same lecturing tone.

"Fire-prevention measures. Painting of attics and other wooden upper structures. Fire-resistant mixture. I'm teaching the children to use paint... Oh, Katya, look at me!" she exclaimed. "There's a letter for you! I have paint on my hands, pull it out."

I put my hand in her pocket and drew out a letter from Sanya...

I ran through it first to leam whether anything had happened to him, then I reread it more slowly, word by word.

"Do you remember Grisha Trofimov?" he wrote towards the end of the letter. "We used to spray Paris green together over the lakes. Yesterday we buried him."

I did not remember Trofimov very well. He had flown off somewhere almost as soon as I arrived in Saratov. I had no idea that he had been serving in the same regiment as Sanya. Then I pictured Varya, poor Varya, and the letter dropped from my hand, the sheets scattering on the ground.

It was time to go to the hospital, but I found myself trudging back to the house, forgetting that I had given Rosalia the key to the flat. On the stairs I ran into the "learned nurse", who at once began complaining that she couldn't fix up anywhere-nobody would employ her because there wasn't enough to eat-and that one domestic help had got a job with the Tree-Planting Trust, but she no longer had the strength for such work, etc., etc. I listened to her, thinking:

"Varya, poor Varya."

Arriving at the hospital, where I avoided going into the Stomatological Clinic for fear of running into Varya, I reread the letter, and it struck me that Sanya had never written me such letters. I recollected that one day in the Crimea he had come home pale and tired, saying that the stuffy heat gave him a pain at the back of his head. But next morning his navigator's wife told me that their plane had caught fire in the air and they had made a crash landing with a load of bombs. I ran to Sanya, but he said with a laugh: "You dreamt it."

Sanya, who had always sheltered me, who deliberately spared me any knowledge of the dangers of his professional life-Sanya had suddenly written-and in such detail-about the death of a comrade. He had even described Trofimov's grave.

"In the middle we laid out some dud shells and large stabilisers with smaller ones for a border, making a sort of flowerbed with iron flowers."

The locker containing my white overall was in the Stomatological Clinic and I hastily put it on and went out onto the landing leading to the hospital. Just before I reached my ward I heard Varya's voice, saying: "You must do it yourself if the patient can't do it yet." She was telling off one of the nurses for not having washed out a patient's mouth with hydrogen peroxide, and her voice was the same firm, ordinary voice as that of yesterday and the day before, and she walked out of the ward with the same brisk mannish stride, issuing instructions as she went. I glanced at her-the same old Varya. She knew nothing. For her nothing had happened yet.

Ought I to tell her that her husband had been killed? Or should I say nothing, and leave it for that sad day to bring her the black message: