clad in an army tunic with an officer's insignia-not a major, surely? His
skull bones were now prominent. His eyes, unblinking, wide-open,
seemed to have something new in them-weariness perhaps?
'I've changed, haven't I?' he said, seeing that I was studying him. 'The
war has turned me inside out. Everything is changed-body and soul.'
If it was changed he would not be telling me about it.
'Where did you get all this food, Misha? Stole it?'
Apparently he did not hear the last two words.
'Tuck in, tuck in! I'll get some more. You can get anything here. You
people just don't know how to go about it.'
'Really?'
'Yes, of course. You have to know the right people.'
I don't know what he meant by that, but instinctively I put my
sandwich back onto the plate.
'Have you been in Leningrad long?'
'Two days. I was transferred from Moscow at the disposal of the chief
of Voentorg (-a retail organisation of army and navy stores.— Tr.) I was at the
Southern Front. Caught in encirclement. Broke through by nothing
short of a miracle.'
It was the truth, for me a shocking truth, but I listened to him
carelessly, with a long-forgotten sense of my power over him.
'We retreated towards Kiev. We didn't know that Kiev was cut off. We
thought the Germans were God knows where, but they met us near
Khristinovka, within two hundred kilometres of the front. It was hell,'
he added with a laugh. 'But that's another story. Now I wanted to tell
you that I saw Nikolai Antonich in Moscow. Strange to say, he stayed in
Moscow, didn't evacuate.'
'Is that so?' I said indifferently.
We were silent for a while.
'Didn't you want to talk to me about something, Misha?' I said at
length. 'If so, come into my room.'
He stood up and straightened his back. Drew his breath and adjusted
his belt.
'Yes. Do you mind if I take some wine with us?'
'No.'
'Which one?'
'Anyone you like, I won't drink.'
He took a bottle and some glasses from the table, thanked Rosalia and
followed me out. We settled down-I on the sofa, he at the table, which
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had once been Sasha's. Her paint brushes in a tall glass still stood on it
untouched.
'It's a long story.'
He was agitated. I was calm.
'A very long and... Do you smoke?'
'No.'
'Lots of women have started smoking during the war.'
'I know. They're waiting for me at the hospital. You have exactly
twenty minutes.'
'Very good,' Romashov enunciated slowly. 'I won't tell the story of
how I came to be in the South. We fought near Kiev and were defeated.'
He said 'we'.
'At Khristinovka I joined a hospital train which was making for
Uman, bypassing Kiev. They were ordinary goods trucks with the
wounded lying in them on bunks. A lot of them badly wounded. We
travelled three, four, five days, in stuffy heat and dust...'
Bertha was praying in the next room.
He got up and shut the door.
'I was shell-shocked a couple of days before I joined the hospital
train. True, just lightly-stabs once in a while in my left side. It still gets
sort of brownish, you know,' he added with a strained smile.
Varya, who had changed his clothes that night, had said that his left
side was burnt-I suppose that is what he called 'gets brownish'.
'I found myself taking things in hand on our train-managing the
household, you know. The first thing to be done was to organise meals,
and I'm proud to say that throughout the journey-we were a good
fortnight travelling-no one died of starvation. But I'm not talking about
myself.'
'About whom then?'
'Two girls, students from a Teachers' College at Stanislav, were
travelling with us. They carried meals to the wounded, changed
dressings, did everything they could. Then one day one of them called
me to an airman, a wounded airman lying in one of the trucks.'
Romashov poured out some wine.
'I asked the girls what it was about. 'Talk to him.' 'What about?' 'He
doesn't want to live, says he'll shoot himself, cries.' We went to see him-
it so happened that I had never been in that particular truck before. He
was lying on his face, his legs bandaged, but very carelessly, clumsily.
The girls sat down next to him, called him...'
Romashov fell silent.
'Why don't you have a drink, Katya?' he said in a voice that had gone
husky. 'I'm drinking all by myself. I'll get drunk-what will you do then?'
'Turn you out. Finish your story.'
He tossed off the glass, took a walk round the room, and sat down
again. I took a sip. After all, the world was full of airmen!
Here is the story as Romashov told it.
Sanya had been wounded in the face and legs. The lacerated wound in
the face was healing. He had said nothing about the circumstances in
which he was wounded-Romashov got that quite by accident from the
army newspaper Red Falcons, which carried a paragraph about Sanya.
He was bringing me that newspaper, and would have brought it but for
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that stupid accident, when he almost got drowned in the basement
trying to save the children. But that didn't matter, he remembered the
paragraph by heart:
