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
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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 learn 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.'
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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:
'Killed in action in defence of his country', a message that was coming
to hundreds and thousands of our women. At first she would not grasp
it, her heart would refuse to accept it, then it would start fluttering like a
captive bird. There was no escape from it, nowhere you could hide away
from it. This grief was yours—receive it! All that day I hurried past the
room where Varya was working without raising my eyes.
The day dragged on endlessly, with the wounded coming in all the
time until the wards were full up and the senior sister sent me to the
head physician to ask whether she might put some beds in the corridor.
I knocked on the door, first softly, then louder. There was no answer.
I opened the door a little and saw Varya.
The head physician was not there and she must have been waiting for
him, standing there by the window, her shoulders slightly bent,
drumming monotonously on the window-pane with her fingers.
She did not turn round, did not hear me come in, did not see me
standing in the doorway. Slowly, she moved away from the window and
