Life And Fate

'I was looking through it again.'

'Do you like it?'

'I prefer Dickens.'

'Dickens!' said Seryozha in a tone of mockery and condescension.

'What about La Chartreuse de Parme} Do you like that?' asked Katya.

'Not much,' replied Seryozha after a moment's thought. Then he added: 'I'm going with the infantry today to clean out the Germans from the shack next door'.

Katya looked at him. Understanding the meaning of this look, Seryozha went on: 'Yes, I've been ordered to by Grekov.'

'What about Chentsov and the rest of the mortar team. Are they going?'

'No. Just me.'

They fell silent for a moment.

'Is he after you, then?' asked Seryozha.

She nodded her head.

'How do you feel about it?'

'You know very well,' she said, thinking of the tribe of Asra who die in silence when they love.

'I'm afraid they'll get me today,' said Seryozha.

'Why are you being sent with the infantry anyway? You're a mortar man.'

'Why's Grekov keeping you here, for that matter? Your wireless set's been smashed to pieces. You should have been sent back to the regiment ages ago. You should have been sent to the left bank. You're just hanging around doing nothing.'

'At least we see each other every day.'

Seryozha gave a wave of the hand and walked away.

Katya looked round and saw Bunchuk looking down from above and laughing. Seryozha must have seen him too. That was why he'd left so abruptly.

The Germans kept the building under artillery fire until evening. Three men were slightly wounded and a partition wall collapsed, blocking the exit from the cellar. They dug out the exit – only for it to be choked with rubble again after another shell smashed into the wall.

They dug their way through a second time. Antsiferov peered into the dust-filled darkness and asked: 'Hey! Comrade radio-operator! Are you still with us?'

'Yes,' answered Katya, sneezing and spitting out red dust.

'Bless you!' said Antsiferov.

When it got dark, the Germans sent up flares and opened up with their machine-guns. A plane flew over several times, dropping incendiary bombs. No one in the building slept. Grekov himself manned a machine-gun; the infantry sallied out twice to repel advancing Germans, swearing for all they were worth and shielding their faces with spades.

It was as though the Germans had foreseen the impending attack on the nearby building they had just occupied.

When the firing died down, Katya could hear the Germans calling out to one another. She could even hear their laughter. Their pronunciation was very different from that of her German teachers.

She noticed that the cat had crawled off its pile of rags. Its back legs were quite motionless; it was dragging itself along on its fore-paws, trying desperately to reach Katya. Then it came to a stop; its jaw opened and closed several times… Katya tried to raise one of its eyelids. 'So it's dead,' she thought in disgust. Then she realized that the cat must have thought of her when he realized he was about to die; that he had crawled towards her when he was half-paralysed… She put the body in a hole and covered it over with bits of brick.

The cellar was suddenly lit up by a flare. It was as though there were no longer any air, as though she were breathing some blood-coloured liquid that flowed out of the ceiling, oozing out of each little brick.

Maybe the Germans would appear any moment out of the far corners of the cellar. They would come up to her, seize her and drag her away. Or maybe they were cleaning up the first floor right now – the rattle of their tommy- guns sounded closer than ever. Maybe they were about to appear through the hole in the ceiling.

To calm herself down, she tried to picture the list of tenants on the door of her house: 'Tikhimirov -1 ring; Dzyga – 2 rings; Cheremushkin – 3 rings; Feinberg – 4 rings; Vengrova – 5 rings; Andryushenko -6 rings; Pegov – 1 long ring.' She tried to imagine the Feinbergs' big saucepan standing on the kerosene stove with its plywood cover, Anastasya's washing tub with its cover made of sacking, the Tikhimirovs' chipped enamel basin hanging from its piece of string… Now she would make her bed; where the springs were particularly sharp, she would spread out an old torn coat, a scrap of quilt and her mother's brown shawl.

Then her thoughts turned to house 6/1. Now the Germans were so close, now they were actually tunnelling their way through the ground, she no longer felt upset by the soldiers' foul language. She didn't even feel frightened by the way Grekov looked at her; previously not only her cheeks had blushed, but even her neck and shoulders. Yes, she certainly had heard some obscenities during her months in the army. There had been one particularly unpleasant conversation with a bald lieutenant-colonel who had flashed his metal fillings at her as he had explained what she must do if she wanted to stay on the left bank, at the signals centre… She remembered a mournful little song the girls used to sing under their breath:

Under a fine autumn moon The commander took her to bed. He kissed her till it was dawn And now she belongs to the men.

The first time she had seen Seryozha he had been reading poetry; she had thought to herself, 'What an idiot!' Then he had disappeared for two days. She had kept wondering if he had been killed, but had been too embarrassed to ask. Then he had suddenly reappeared during the night; she'd heard him tell Grekov how he'd left Headquarters without permission.

'Quite right,' said Grekov. 'Otherwise you wouldn't have rejoined us until the next world.'

After that he had walked straight past her without even a glance. She had felt first upset and then angry; once again she had thought, 'What an idiot!'

Soon afterwards she'd heard a discussion about who was likely to be the first man to sleep with her. Someone had said: 'Grekov – that's a certainty!'

'No, that's not for sure,' someone else had said. 'But I can tell you who's at the bottom of the list – young Seryozha. The younger a girl is, the more she needs someone with experience.'

Then she noticed that the other men had stopped joking and flirting with her. Grekov made it very clear that he didn't like anyone else making a play for her. And once Zubarev called out: 'Hey! Mrs house-manager!'

Grekov was in no hurry, but he was very sure of himself. She could feel this all too clearly. After her wireless set had been smashed, he had ordered her to make her home in one of the far corners of the cellar. And yesterday he'd said: 'I've never met a girl like you before. If I'd met you before the war, I'd have made you my wife.'

She'd wanted to reply that he'd have had to ask her view on the matter first. But she'd been too frightened to say anything at all.

He hadn't done anything wrong. He hadn't even said anything coarse or brazen. But she was frightened.

Later on in the day he'd said sadly: 'The Germans are about to launch their offensive. Probably not one of us will be left alive. This building lies right in their path.'

He had then given her a long, thoughtful look – a look that Katya found more frightening than what he'd said about the German offensive – and added: 'I'll come round some time.'

The link between this remark and what he'd said before was by no means obvious, but Katya understood it.

He was very different from any of the officers she'd seen round Kotluban. He never threatened people or shouted at them, but they obeyed him. He just sat there, smoking and chatting away like one of the soldiers. And yet his authority was immense.

She'd never really talked to Seryozha. Sometimes she thought he was in love with her – but as powerless as she herself before the man they admired and were terrified by. She knew he was weak and inexperienced, but she kept wanting to ask for his protection, to say: 'Come and sit by me.' And then there were times when she wanted to comfort him herself. Talking to him was very strange – it often seemed as though there were no war, no house 6/1 at all. Seryozha appeared to understand this and tried to adopt a coarse, soldierly manner. Once he even swore