37
Stumpfe, once the finest soldier in the company, a man the new recruits had regarded with frightened admiration, was now unrecognizable. His large, blue-eyed face was thin and sunken. His uniform and greatcoat were just crumpled rags that barely kept out the wind and frost. He had lost his sharp intelligence and his jokes no longer made anyone laugh.
An enormous man with a vast appetite, he suffered more acutely from hunger than anyone else in the company. His constant hunger drove him out foraging early in the morning. He dug about in the ruins, begged, gathered up crumbs, hung around outside the kitchen. Bach had grown used to his tense, watchful face. Stumpfe thought about food incessantly; he searched for it even when they were fighting.
As he made his way back to the bunker, Bach caught sight of the huge back and shoulders of this eternally hungry soldier. He was digging in a patch of wasteland where the kitchens and supply-depot had once stood. Here and there he found old cabbage leaves and tiny acorn-sized potatoes that had escaped the pot. Then an old woman appeared from behind a stone wall. She was very tall and was wearing a ragged man's coat, tied with a piece of string, and a pair of down-at-heel hobnailed boots.
She walked towards the soldier, staring down at the ground as she stirred around in the snow with a hook made from a thick piece of twisted wire.
Their two shadows met on the snow; otherwise they would have been unaware of each other's presence.
Finally the vast German looked up at the old woman. Trustingly holding out a cabbage leaf that was stone-hard and full of holes, he said slowly and solemnly: 'Good day, madam.'
The old woman pushed back the piece of rag that had fallen forward onto her forehead, looked at him with dark eyes that were full of kindness and intelligence, and said equally slowly and majestically: 'Good day, sir.'
It was a summit meeting between the representatives of two great peoples. Bach was the only witness; the soldier and the old woman forgot the meeting immediately.
As it grew warmer, big flakes of snow settled on the ground, on the red brick-dust, on the crosses of graves, on the turrets of abandoned tanks, in the ears of dead men waiting to be buried.
The snow filled the air with a soft grey-blue mist, softening the wind and gunfire, bringing the earth and sky together into one swaying blur.
The snow fell on Bach's shoulders; it was as though flakes of silence were falling on the still Volga, on the dead city, on the skeletons of horses. It was snowing everywhere, on earth and on the stars; the whole universe was full of snow. Everything was disappearing beneath it: guns, the bodies of the dead, filthy dressings, rubble, scraps of twisted iron.
This soft, white snow settling over the carnage of the city was time itself; the present was turning into the past, and there was no future.
38
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Bach was lying on a bunk behind a cotton curtain that screened off a small corner of the cellar. A woman was sleeping beside him, her head on his shoulder. Her face was very thin and looked somehow both childish and withered. Bach looked at her thin neck and at the outline of her breasts under her dirty grey blouse. Very gently, so as not to disturb her, he lifted an untidy tress of hair to his lips. It was springy and smelt of life and warmth.
The woman opened her eyes.
On the whole she was a sensible, practical woman. At different moments she could be tender, sly, patient, calculating, submissive, quick-tempered. Sometimes she seemed morose and stupid – as though something had broken her; sometimes she sang arias from
Bach had never tried to find out what she had done before the war. He had come to see her when he felt like sleeping with her; otherwise he had never given her a thought. He had never worried about whether she had enough to eat, whether she might have been killed by a Russian sniper. Once he had given her a biscuit he happened to find in his pocket; she had seemed grateful and had then offered the biscuit to her elderly neighbour. At the time he had been touched, but he had seldom remembered to bring her anything to eat.
She had a strange, very un-European name – Zina.
Until the war, Zina seemed not to have known the woman who lived with her. She was an unpleasant old woman, amazingly hypocritical, full of insincere flattery, and obsessed with food. At this moment, with a wooden pestle and mortar, she was methodically grinding some mouldy grains of wheat that smelt of petrol.
Until the encirclement, the Germans had quite ignored the Russian civilians; now they visited their cellars frequently and got the old women to help with all kinds of tasks: washing clothes – with cinders instead of soap – cooking up bits of garbage, darning uniforms… The most important people in the cellars were the old women, but the soldiers did call on the younger women as well.
Bach had always thought that no one knew of his visits to this cellar. One day, however, he had been sitting on the bunk, holding Zina's hand between his own, when he had suddenly heard German being spoken behind the curtain. A voice that seemed familiar was saying: 'No, no, don't go behind that curtain. That's the lieutenant's Fraiilein.'
They lay there, side by side, without saying a word. His friends, his books, his romance with Maria, his childhood, his ties with his birthplace, his school, his university, the Russian campaign itself- his whole life had become insignificant… All that was simply the path he had followed on his way to this bunk fashioned from the remains of a charred door… The thought that he might lose this woman was appalling. He had found her, he had come to her; everything that had happened in Germany, in the whole of Europe, had been merely a prelude to this meeting. Until now he had failed to understand this. He had often forgotten her. He had enjoyed seeing her simply because he had thought there was nothing serious between them. But now she was all that remained of the world. Everything else lay buried under the snow… There was only this wonderful face, these slightly dilated nostrils, these strange eyes, the tired, helpless, childish look on her face that drove him so crazy. In October she had visited him in hospital; she had found out where he was and had come all the way on foot. And he hadn't even got out of bed to see her.
She knew he wasn't drunk. But he was on his knees, kissing her hands, kissing her feet, pressing his forehead and cheeks against her knees; he was talking quickly, passionately, but she couldn't understand, he knew she couldn't understand, she didn't know that terrible language of his.
Soon the wave which had carried him to this woman would tear him away from her, would separate them for ever. Still on his knees, he threw his arms round her legs and looked into her eyes. She listened, trying to guess what he was saying, trying to understand what had happened to him.
She had never seen such an expression on the face of a German. She had thought that only the eyes of a Russian could look so tender, so imploring, so mad, so full of suffering.
He was telling her that here, in this cellar, as he kissed her feet, he had understood love for the first time – not just from other people's words, but in his heart, in his blood. She was dearer to him than all his past, dearer to him than his mother, than Germany, than his future with Maria… He had fallen in love with her. Great walls raised up by States, racist fury, the heavy artillery and its curtain of fire were all equally insignificant, equally powerless in the face of love… He gave thanks to Fate for having allowed him to understand this before he died.
She couldn't understand what he was saying. All she knew, all she had ever heard was
