No one answered when he knocked at the second hut. Either it was empty or the door was bolted on the inside.
The door of the third hut was half-open. He walked into the porch; no one challenged him. He went inside.
He could smell the warmth. He felt dizzy and lay down on the bench by the door. Breathing heavily, he looked round at the white walls, the icons, the table and the stove. After the cattle-pen of the camp, all this seemed very strange.
A shadow passed by the window. A woman walked in, caught sight of Semyonov and screamed.
'Who are you?'
Semyonov didn't say anything. The answer was obvious enough.
That day his life and fate was decided not by the merciless forces of warring States, but by a human being – old Khristya Chunyak.
She gave him a mug of milk. He drank, swallowing it greedily but with difficulty. After he finished the mug, he felt sick. He vomited over and over again; he felt he was being torn apart. He wept, sucking in each breath as though it were his last.
He tried to control himself. There was only one thought in his mind. He was unclean, foul – the woman would throw him out.
Through his swollen eyes he saw her fetch a rag and start to wipe the floor. He wanted to say that he'd clear it up himself, that he'd do anything she wanted – if only she didn't throw him out! But he could only mutter incoherently and point with his trembling fingers. Time passed; the old woman went in and out of the hut several times. She still hadn't tried to throw him out. Perhaps she was asking a neighbour to call a German patrol or the Ukrainian police?
She put an iron pot on the stove. The room grew hotter. Clouds of steam began to appear. The old woman's face looked hard, hostile.
'She's going to throw me out and then disinfect the place,' he thought to himself.
She took some trousers and some underwear out of a trunk. She helped Semyonov undress and made his clothes into a bundle. He could smell his filthy body and the stench of his pants; they were soaked with urine and bloody excrement.
She helped him into a bathtub. He felt the strong, rough touch of her palms on his louse-eaten body. Warm, soapy water ran over his chest and shoulders. He suddenly began to choke and tremble. He felt dizzy. Whining, swallowing down snot, he howled: 'Mama…! Mamanka…! Mamanka…!'
She wiped the tears from his eyes with a thick grey towel and dried his hair and shoulders. She put her hands under his armpits and lifted him onto a bench. She bent down to dry his thin, stick-like legs, slipped a shirt and some drawers over him and did up the white cloth-covered buttons.
She poured the filthy black water into a bucket and carried it away. She spread a sheepskin jacket over the stove, covered it with a piece of striped cloth, and put a large pillow at one end. Then she lifted Semyonov into the air, as easily as if he were a chicken, and laid him out on the stove.
He lay there in semi-delirium. His body knew that an unimaginable change had taken place: the merciless world was no longer trying to destroy a tormented beast. But he had never experienced such pain, neither in the camp nor on the journey… His legs ached, his fingers ached, his bones ached. His head kept filling with some damp, black sludge, then suddenly emptying and starting to spin. There were moments when he felt a twinge of pain in his heart, when it seemed to stop beating, when his insides filled with smoke and he thought Death had come for him.
Four days passed. Semyonov climbed down from the stove and began to walk about the room. He was amazed how much food there was in the world. In the camp there had been nothing but rotten beet. He had forgotten that there were other foods than that thin, cloudy, putrid-smelling soup. And now he could see millet, potatoes, cabbage, lard… He could hear a cock crow.
He was like a child who thought that the world was ruled by two magicians – one good and the other evil. He couldn't rid himself of the fear that the evil magician might once again overpower the good magician, that the kind, warm world would vanish with all its food, that he would again be left to chew at his leather belt.
He busied himself with trying to repair the small hand-mill; it was appallingly inefficient. His forehead would be dripping with sweat after he had ground a mere handful of damp grey flour.
He cleaned the drive with a file and some sandpaper and then tightened the bolt between the mechanism and the grindstones. He did everything that could be expected of an intelligent mechanic from Moscow; at the end of his labours the mill worked worse than ever.
He lay down on the stove, trying to work out how best to grind wheat. In the morning he took the mill to pieces again and rebuilt it using some cogs from an old grandfather clock.
'Look, Aunt Khristya!' he boasted, showing her the double train of gears he had contrived.
They spoke to each other very little. She never mentioned her husband who had died in 1930, her sons who had disappeared without trace, or her daughter who had moved to Priluki and quite forgotten her. Nor did she ask him how he had been taken prisoner or where he was from – the city or the country.
He didn't dare go out onto the street. He would always look long and carefully through the window before going out into the yard – and then hurry back inside. If the door slammed or a mug fell to the floor, he took fright; it seemed as though everything good would come to an end, as though the magic of old Khristya Chunyak would lose its power.
Whenever a neighbour came in, he climbed up onto the stove and tried not to breathe too loudly or sneeze. But the neighbours very seldom called round. As for the Germans – they never stayed long in the village; their billets were in the settlement by the station.
Semyonov didn't feel any guilt at the thought that he was enjoying warmth and peace while the war raged on around him. What he did feel was fear – fear that he might be dragged back into the world of the camps, the world of hunger.
He always hesitated before opening his eyes in the morning. The magic might have run out during the night. He might see camp guards and barbed wire; he might hear the clang of empty tins. He would listen for a while with his eyes closed, checking that Khristya was still there.
He seldom thought about the recent past – about Commissar Krymov, Stalingrad, the camp or the train journey. But every night he cried out and shouted in his sleep. Once he even climbed down from the stove, crawled along the floor, squeezed under the bench and slept there till morning. He was unable to remember what it was he had dreamed.
Sometimes he saw trucks drive down the village street with potatoes and sacks of grain; once he saw a car, an Opel Kapitan. It had a powerful engine and the wheels didn't skid in the mud. His heart missed a beat as he imagined guttural voices in the porch and a German patrol bursting into the hut.
When he asked Aunt Khristya about the Germans, she answered:
'Some of them aren't bad at all. When the front came this way, I had two of them in here. One was a student and the other an artist. They used to play with the children. Then there was a driver. He had a cat with him. When he came back, she would run out to meet him. She must have come all the way from the frontier with him. He would sit at the table nursing her and giving her lumps of butter and bacon-fat… He was very good to me. He brought me firewood. Once he got me a sack of flour. But there are other Germans who kill children. They killed the old man next door. They don't treat us like human beings -they make a filthy mess in the house and they walk around naked in front of women. And some of our own police from the village are just as bad.'
'There are no beasts like German beasts,' said Semyonov. 'But aren't you afraid to keep me here, Aunt Khristya?'
She shook her head and said there were lots of freed prisoners in the countryside – though of course they were mostly Ukrainians who'd come back to their own homes. But she could say Semyonov was her nephew, the son of her sister who'd gone to Moscow with her husband.
Semyonov knew the neighbours' faces by now; he even knew the old woman who'd refused to let him in on the first day. He knew that in the evening the girls went to the cinema at the station, that every Saturday there was a dance. He wanted to know what films the Germans showed, but only the old people called round and none of them ever went there.
One neighbour showed him a letter from her daughter who'd been deported to Germany. There were several passages he had to have explained to him. In one paragraph the girl had written: 'Vanka and Grishka flew in; they
