sinking up to our chests in the snow. For a long time we didn’t know that war had broken out. They concealed it. And suddenly—an offer. Volunteer for penal battalions at the front and, if you chance to come out of the endless battles alive, you’ll all go free. And then attacks, attacks, miles of electrified barbed wire, mines, mortars, month after month under a hail of fire. It was not for nothing that in these companies we were known as ‘the condemned.’ We’d be mowed down to a man. How did I survive? How did I ever survive? But, imagine, that whole bloody hell was happiness compared to the horrors of the concentration camp, and not at all owing to the harsh conditions, but to something else entirely.”
“Yes, brother, you’ve drunk a bitter cup.”
“It wasn’t just washing clothes you could learn there, but anything you like.”
“An amazing thing. Not only compared to your convict’s portion, but in regard to the whole previous life of the thirties, even in freedom, even in the well-being of university activity, books, money, comfort, the war came as a cleansing storm, a gust of fresh air, a breath of deliverance.
“I think collectivization was a false, unsuccessful measure, and it was impossible to acknowledge the mistake. To conceal the failure, it was necessary to cure people, by every means of intimidation, of the habit of judging and thinking, and force them to see the nonexistent and prove what was contrary to evidence. Hence the unprecedented cruelty of the Ezhovshchina, the promulgation of a constitution not meant to be applied, the introduction of elections not based on the principle of choice.2
“And when the war broke out, its real horrors, real danger, and the threat of real death were beneficial in comparison with the inhuman reign of fiction, and brought relief, because they limited the magic power of the dead letter.
“Not only people in your situation, at forced labor, but decidedly everybody, in the rear and at the front, breathed more freely, with a full breast, and threw themselves rapturously, with a feeling of true happiness, into the crucible of the fierce fight, deadly and salutary.
“The war is a special link in the chain of revolutionary decades. The action of causes that lay directly in the nature of the upheaval came to an end.
“The indirect results began to tell, the fruits of the fruits, the consequences of the consequences. A tempering of character derived from calamity, nonindulgence, heroism, readiness for the great, the desperate, the unprecedented. These are fantastic, stunning qualities, and they constitute the moral flower of the generation.
“These observations fill me with a feeling of happiness, in spite of the martyr’s death of Christina, of my wounds, of our losses, of all this high, bloody price of the war. The light of self-sacrifice that shines on her end and on the life of each of us helps me to endure the pain of Orletsova’s death.
“Just when you, poor fellow, were enduring your countless tortures, I was released. At that time, Orletsova was studying history at the university. The nature of her scholarly interests placed her under my guidance. Much earlier, after my first term in the camps, when she was still a child, I had paid attention to this remarkable girl. While Yuri was still alive, remember, I told you about her. Well, so now she turned up among my auditors.
“The custom of students publicly criticizing teachers had just come into fashion then. Orletsova fervently threw herself into it. God only knows why she picked on me so ferociously. Her attacks were so persistent, bellicose, and unjust that other students in the department occasionally rose up and defended me. Orletsova was a remarkable satirist. Under an imaginary name, in which everybody recognized me, she mocked me to her heart’s content in a wall newspaper. Suddenly, by complete chance, it turned out that this deep-rooted hostility was a form of camouflage for a young love, strong, hidden, and long-standing. I had always felt the same.
“We spent a wonderful summer in forty-one, the first year of the war, just on the eve of it and soon after it was declared. Several young students, boys and girls, and she among them, had settled in a summer place outside Moscow, where my unit was later stationed. Our friendship began and took its course in the circumstances of their military training, the forming of suburban militia units, Christina’s training as a parachutist, the repulsing of the first German air raids by night from the rooftops of Moscow. I’ve already told you that we celebrated our engagement there and were soon parted by the beginning of my displacements. I never saw her again.3
“When there were signs of a favorable change in our affairs, and the Germans began to surrender by the thousand, I was transferred, after two wounds and two stays in the hospital, from the anti-aircraft artillery to seventh division headquarters, where there was a demand for people with a knowledge of foreign languages, and where I insisted that you, too, should be sent, after I fished you up as if from the bottom of the sea.”
“The linen girl Tanya knew Orletsova well. They met at the front and were friends. She told many stories about Christina. This Tanya has the same manner of smiling with her whole face as Yuri had, have you noticed? For a moment, the turned-up nose and angular cheekbones disappear, and the face becomes attractive, pretty. It’s one and the same type, very widespread among us.”
“I know what you’re talking about. Maybe so. I hadn’t paid attention.”
“What a barbaric, ugly name, Tanka Bezocheredeva, ‘Tanka Out-of-Turn.’ In any case it’s not a surname, it’s something invented, distorted. What do you think?”
“She did explain it. She was a homeless child, of unknown parents. Probably somewhere in the depths of Russia, where the language is still pure and unsullied, she was called Bezotchaya, meaning ‘without father.’ Street kids, for whom this derivation was incomprehensible, and who get everything from hearing and distort it, remade the designation in their own way, closer to their actual vulgar parlance.”
3
It was not long after the night Gordon and Dudorov spent in Chern and their nighttime conversation there. Overtaking the army in the town of Karachevo, which had been razed to its foundations, the friends found some rear units that were following the main forces.
The clear and calm weather of the hot autumn had settled in for more than a month without interruption. Bathed in the heat of the cloudless blue sky, the fertile black soil of Brynshchina, the blessed region between Orel and Bryansk, was burnished to a chocolate-coffee color by the play of sunlight.
The town was cut by a straight main street that merged with the high road. On one side of it lay collapsed houses, turned by mines into heaps of building rubble, and the uprooted, splintered, and charred trees of orchards flattened to the ground. On the other side, across the road, stretched empty lots, probably little built upon to begin with, before the town’s destruction, and spared more by the fire and powder blasts because there was nothing there to destroy.
On the formerly built-up side, the shelterless citizens poked in the piles of still-smoldering ashes, digging things up and carrying them to one place from the far corners of the burned-down site. Others hastily burrowed into dugouts and sliced layers of earth so as to cover the upper parts of their dwellings with sod.
