On the opposite, unbuilt side there were white tents, a crowd of trucks and horse-drawn wagons of various second-line services, field hospitals strayed from their division headquarters, confused units of every sort of depot, commissariat, supply dump, lost and looking for each other. There, too, relieving themselves, snatching something to eat, sleeping, and then trudging further west, were companies of skinny, ill-nourished adolescent draftees in gray forage caps and heavy gray coats, with wasted, sallow faces, bloodless from dysentery.
The town, blown up and half reduced to ashes, went on burning and exploding in the distance, where timed charges had been planted. Now and then men digging in their gardens interrupted their work, stopped by a trembling of the ground under their feet, straightened their bent backs, leaned on the handles of their spades and, turning their heads in the direction of the blast, rested, looking off that way for a long time.
There, first in pillars and fountains, then in lazy, ponderous swellings, the gray, black, brick-red and smokily flaming clouds of airborne trash ascended into the sky, thinned out, spread into plumes, scattered, and settled back down to earth. And the workers took up their work again.
One of the clearings on the unbuilt side was bordered with bushes and covered completely by the shade of the old trees growing there. The clearing was fenced off from the rest of the world by this vegetation, like a covered courtyard standing by itself and immersed in cool twilight.
In the clearing, the linen girl Tanya, with two or three persons from her regiment and several self-invited fellow travelers, as well as Gordon and Dudorov, had been waiting since morning for a truck sent for Tanya and the regimental property she was in charge of. It was stowed in several boxes piled up in the clearing. Tatiana kept an eye on them and did not move a step away, but the others also stayed close to the boxes, so as not to miss the possibility of leaving when it presented itself.
The wait had lasted a long time, more than five hours. The waiting people had nothing to do. They were listening to the incessant chatter of the garrulous girl, who had seen a lot. She had just told them about her meeting with Major General Zhivago.
“That’s right. Yesterday. Brought in person to the general. Major General Zhivago. He was passing through here and made inquiries about Christina, asked questions. Of eyewitnesses who knew her personally. They pointed me out. Said I was her friend. He summoned me. So I’m summoned, brought to him. Not scary at all. Nothing special, just like everybody else. Slant-eyed, dark. So what I knew, I laid out. He listened, said thank you. And you yourself, he says, where from and what sort? I, naturally, hemmed and hawed and nay-sayed him. What’s there to boast of? A homeless child. And so on. You know it yourselves. Correctional institutions, vagrancy. But he won’t hear of it, go ahead, he says, don’t be embarrassed, there’s no shame in it. So I said the first timid word or two, then more, he nods away, I got bolder. And I do have things to tell. If you heard, you wouldn’t believe it, you’d say—she’s making it up. Well, it was the same with him. Once I finished, he got up and paced up and down the cottage. You don’t say, he says, what wonders. Well, here’s the thing, he says. I’ve got no time now. But I’ll find you, don’t worry, I’ll find you and summon you again. I simply never thought I’d hear such things. I won’t leave you like this, he says. I’ll have to clarify a thing or two, various details. And then, he says, for all I know I may yet put myself down as your uncle, promote you to a general’s niece. And send you to study in any school you like. By God, it’s true. Such a jolly leg- puller.”
Just then a long, empty cart with high sides, such as is used in Poland and western Russia for transporting sheaves, drove into the clearing. The pair of horses hitched to the shafts was driven by a serviceman, a
“What did you tell the general?” asked Gordon. “Repeat it for us, if you can.”
“Sure, why not?”
And she told them her horrible story.
4
“And it’s true I’ve got things to tell. I’m not from simple folk, I was told. Either other people told me, or I tucked it away in my heart, only I heard that my mama, Raissa Komarova, was the wife of a Russian minister, Comrade Komarov, who was hiding in White Mongolia. He wasn’t my father, wasn’t my kin, you can only suppose, this same Komarov. Well, of course, I’m an uneducated girl, grew up an orphan, with no father or mother. It may seem funny to you that I say it, well, I’m only saying what I know, you’ve got to put yourselves in my position.
“Yes. So, it all happened, what I’m going to tell you now, beyond Krushitsy, at the other end of Siberia, beyond Cossack country, closer to the Chinese border. When we—our Red Army, that is—started approaching the main town of the Whites, this same Komarov the minister put mama and all their family on a special reserved train and had it take them away, because mama was forever frightened and didn’t dare take a step without him.
“And he didn’t even know about me, Komarov didn’t. Didn’t know there was anybody like me in the world. Mama produced me during a long absence and was scared to death that somebody might let it slip to him. He terribly disliked having children around, and shouted and stamped his feet that it was all just filth in the house and a big bother. I can’t stand it, he shouted.
“Well, so, as I was saying, when the Red Army was approaching, mama sent for the signalman’s wife, Marfa, at the Nagornaya junction, three stops away from that town. I’ll explain right away. First the Nizovaya station, then the Nagornaya junction, then the Samsonovsky crossing. I see now how mama got to know the signalman’s wife. I think Marfa came to town to sell vegetables and deliver milk. Yes.
“And I’ll say this. It’s obvious there’s something I don’t know here. I think they tricked mama, told her something else. Described God knows what, it was just temporary, a couple of days, till the turmoil calmed down. And not for me to be in strangers’ hands forever. To be brought up forever. My mama couldn’t have given away her own child like that.
“Well, you know how they do with children. ‘Go to auntie, auntie will give you gingerbread, auntie’s nice, don’t be afraid of auntie.’ And how I cried and thrashed afterwards, how my child’s little heart was wrung, it’s better not to speak of it. I wanted to hang myself, I nearly went out of my mind in childhood. Because I was still little. They must have given Auntie Marfusha money for my keep, a lot of money.
“The farmstead at the post was a rich one, a cow and a horse, well, and of course all sorts of fowl, and a plot for a kitchen garden as big as you like, and free lodgings, needless to say, a signalman’s house, right by the tracks. From our parts below, the train could barely go up, had trouble making the climb, but from your Russian parts it went at high speed, had to put on the brakes. In autumn, when the forest thinned out, you could see the Nagornaya station like on a plate.
“The man himself, Uncle Vassily, I called daddy, peasantlike. He was a jolly and kind man, only much too gullible, and when he was under the influence, he ran off at the mouth—like they say, the hog told the sow, and the
