men are eating dry rusks. Third – your political instructor Soshkin was roaring drunk. And now…'
Podchufarov listened, astonished at how much his commanding officer had noticed. The second-in-command of a platoon had been wearing German trousers… the officer in command of No. 1 Company had been wearing two watches…
Byerozkin ended with a warning.
'The Germans are going to attack. Is that clear?'
He set off towards the factory. Glushkov, who had managed to nail his heel back on and stitch up the tear in his jacket, asked: 'Are we going home now?'
Instead of answering directly, Byerozkin turned to Podchufarov.
'Phone the regimental commissar. Tell him I'm on my way to Dyrkin's – in the factory, the third shop.'
He winked and added: 'And I want you to send me some sauerkraut. After all, I am a senior officer myself.'
15
Again there was no letter from Tolya… In the morning Lyudmila Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova would see her mother and husband off to work, and her daughter Nadya off to school. Her mother, Alexandra Vladimirovna, worked as a laboratory chemist in the famous Kazan soap factory; she was always the first to leave. As she passed her son-in-law's room, she would repeat a joke she had heard from the workers at the factory: 'We, the owners, must be at work by six, our employees by nine.'
Next, Nadya would go to school – or rather, gallop to school. It was impossible to get her out of bed in time; she always jumped out of bed at the last minute, grabbed her stockings, jacket, textbooks and exercise-books, gulped down her tea, and rushed down the staircase, flinging on her coat and scarf as she went.
By the time her husband, Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum, sat down to breakfast, the teapot would already be quite cold; Lyudmila would have to heat it up again.
Alexandra Vladimirovna would get quite angry when Nadya said: 'If only we could escape from this terrible hole!' Nadya didn't know that Derzhavin had lived in Kazan, that Aksakov, Tolstoy, Lenin, Zinin and Lobachevsky had all lived here, that Maxim Gorky had once worked in a Kazan baker's.
'What terrible senile indifference!' Alexandra Vladimirovna would say. It was strange to hear such a reproach levelled by an old woman at an adolescent girl.
Lyudmila could see that her mother remained interested both in the people she met and in her work. As well as awe at her mother's strength of character, she felt almost shocked: how could she, at such a terrible time, be interested in the hydrogenization of fats, in the streets and museums of Kazan?
Once, when Viktor said something about Alexandra Vladimirovna's youthfulness, Lyudmila, unable to restrain herself, had replied: 'It's not youthfulness. It's just senile egoism.'
'Grandmother's not an egoist, she's a populist,' said Nadya, and added, 'Populists are good people, but not very intelligent.'
Nadya always expressed her opinions both categorically and -perhaps because she was always in such a hurry – extremely abruptly. 'Rubbish!' she would say, rolling the V. She followed the reports of the Soviet Information Bureau, kept up with the course of the war, and butted in on conversations about politics. After her spell on a
Like many children from well-off families that had not needed to think about food or money before the war, Nadya, after their evacuation to Kazan, was constantly discussing rations and weighing up the good and bad points of the various ration-centres. She knew the pros and cons of each kind of buckwheat, the advantages of oil over butter and of lump sugar over granulated.
'Do you know what,' she would say to her mother. 'From today I want you to give me tea with honey instead of with condensed milk. It's all the same to you and it will be more nutritious for me.'
Sometimes Nadya would grow sullen and gloomy. Then she would smile contemptuously and be extraordinarily rude. Once, in Lyudmila's presence, she called her father an idiot. She pronounced the word with such venom that Viktor was too taken aback to reply.
Sometimes her mother saw Nadya crying over a book: the girl considered herself an unfortunate, backward creature who was doomed to live a difficult, colourless life.
'No one wants to be friends with me, I'm too stupid and boring,' she once said when they were at table. 'No one will want to marry me. I'll study to be a pharmacist and then go and live in a village.'
'They don't have pharmacies in remote villages,' said Alexandra Vladimirovna.
'And you're being much too pessimistic about your marriage prospects,' said Shtrum. 'You've grown prettier during the last few months.'
'Shut up!' said Nadya, glaring at her father.
That night Lyudmila saw Nadya reading a book of poetry, her thin bare arm sticking out from under the bedclothes.
On another occasion Nadya came back from the university ration-centre and announced: 'People, myself included, are vile swine to take advantage of all this. And Papa's a swine to sell his talents for butter. Why should weak children and sick men and women have to starve just because they don't understand physics and can't fulfil work-plans three times over…? Only the chosen can stuff themselves with butter.'
That evening she said defiantly: 'Mama, I want double helpings of honey and butter. I didn't have time to eat this morning.'
In many ways Nadya was just like her father. Lyudmila noticed that the traits in Nadya which Viktor found most irritating were those that he shared with her.
On one occasion, Nadya, imitating her father's way of speaking, said of Postoev: 'He's a rogue, a nonentity, a careerist!'
Viktor was indignant. 'How dare you, a half-educated schoolgirl, speak like that about an Academician?'
But Lyudmila could remember very well how when Viktor was a student, he had abused the various academic celebrities in almost the same words. As for Nadya, Lyudmila could see that she was far from happy; she was difficult to get on with and extremely lonely.
After Nadya's departure, it was Viktor's turn to have breakfast. He would squint at his book, swallow his food without chewing, make stupid, surprised faces, grope for his cup without taking his eyes off the book, and say: 'Can I have some more tea? And make it a bit hotter, if you can.' She knew all his gestures: how he would scratch his head, pout his lips, then make a wry face and start picking his teeth. At this point she would say: 'Vitya, for the love of God, when are you going to get your teeth seen to?' She knew very well that if he scratched his nose, pouted his lips and so on, it was not because his nose or lips were hurting, but because he was thinking about his work. She knew that if she were to say, 'Vitya, you're not even listening!', he would reply, still squinting at his book, 'I heard every word. I can even repeat what you said: 'For the love of God, when are you going to get your teeth seen to?'' Then he would gulp down another mouthful of tea, look surprised and begin to frown; this meant that he agreed with what his colleague had written on some points, but not on others. After that he would sit quite still for a long time, nodding his head sadly and submissively, with the same look in his eyes as an old man suffering from a brain tumour. This meant that he was thinking about his dead mother.
And as he drank his tea, thought about his work, or gave a despairing sigh, Lyudmila would look at the eyes she had so often kissed, at the curly hair she had so often rumpled, at the lips that had kissed her, at the hands with small, delicate fingers whose nails she had so often cut, and say to herself: 'Goodness me! What a sloven you are!'
She knew everything about him: how he liked to read children's books in bed; his face when he went out to
