Life And Fate

purpose of a revolution is to free people. But Lenin just said: 'In the past you were led badly, I'm going to lead you well.' '

Seryozha had never heard such forthright condemnations of the NKVD bosses who had destroyed tens of thousands of innocent people in 1937. Nor had he heard people talk with such pain of the sufferings undergone by the peasantry during collectivization. It was Grekov who raised these matters most frequently, but Kolomeitsev and Batrakov talked of them too.

Every moment Seryozha spent at Army HQ – away from house 6/1 - seemed interminably wearisome. There was something quite absurd in conversations about the duty-roster, about who had been called to see which commanding officer. Instead, he tried to imagine what Polyakov, Kolomeitsev and Grekov were up to now.

It was evening; things would be quietening down. Probably they were talking yet again about Katya.

Once Grekov had decided on something, neither the Buddha nor Chuykov would be able to stop him. Yes, that building housed a bunch of strong, remarkable, desperate men. Zubarev would probably be singing his arias again… And she would be sitting there helplessly, awaiting her fate.

'I'll kill them!' he thought, not knowing who he had in mind.

What chance did he have? He'd never kissed a girl in his life. And those devils were experienced; they'd find it easy enough to make a fool of her.

He looked at the door of the bunker. Why had he never thought before of simply getting up, just like that, and leaving?

Seryozha got up, opened the door, and left.

Just then the duty-officer at Army HQ was instructed over the phone to send the soldier from the encircled building to Vasiliev, the head of the Political Section, as quickly as possible.

If the story of Daphnis and Chloe still touches people's hearts, it is not simply because their love was born in the shade of vines and under a blue sky. That story is repeated everywhere – in a stuffy basement smelling of fried cod, in a concentration-camp bunker, to the click of an accountant's abacus, in the dust-laden air of a cotton mill.

And now the story was being played out again to the accompaniment of the howl of dive-bombers – in a building where people nourished their filthy sweat-encrusted bodies on rotten potatoes and water from an ancient boiler, where instead of honey and dream-filled silence there was only noise, stench and rubble.

61

Pavel Andreyevich Andreyev, an old man who worked as a guard in the Central Power Station, received a letter from his daughter-in-law in Leninsk; his wife, Varvara Alexandrovna, had died of pneumonia.

After receiving this news Andreyev became very depressed. He called very rarely on his friends the Spiridonovs and usually spent the evening sitting by the door of the workers' hostel, watching the flashes of gunfire and the play of searchlights against the clouds. If anyone tried to start a conversation with him, he just remained silent. Thinking that the old man was hard of hearing, the speaker would repeat the question more loudly. Andreyev would then say: 'I can hear you. I'm not deaf, you know.'

His whole life had been reflected in that of his wife; everything good or bad that had happened to him, all his feelings of joy and sadness, had importance only in so far as he was able to see them reflected in her soul.

During a particularly heavy raid, when bombs of several tons were exploding around him, Andreyev had looked at the waves of earth, dust and smoke filling the power station and thought: 'Well, I wonder what my old woman would say now! Take a look at that, Varvara!'

But she was no longer alive.

It was as though the buildings destroyed by bombs and shells, the central courtyard ploughed up by the war – full of mounds of earth, heaps of twisted metal, damp acrid smoke and the yellow reptilian flames of slowly-burning insulators – represented what was left to him of his own life.

Had he really once sat here in a room filled with light? Had he really eaten his breakfast here before going to work – with his wife standing next to him wondering whether to give him a second helping?

Yes, all that remained for him now was a solitary death…

He suddenly remembered her as she had been in her youth, with bright eyes and sunburnt arms.

Well, it wouldn't be long now…

One evening he went slowly down the creaking steps to the Spiridonovs' bunker. Stepan Fyodorovich looked at his face and said: 'You having a hard time, Pavel Andreyevich?'

'You're still young, Stepan Fyodorovich. You're not as strong as I am. You can still find a way of consoling yourself. But I'm strong; I can go all the way.'

Vera looked up from the saucepan she was washing, unable for a moment to understand what the old man meant. Andreyev, who had no wish for anyone's sympathy, tried to change the subject.

'It's time you left, Vera. There are no hospitals here – nothing but tanks and planes.'

Vera smiled and shrugged her shoulders.

'Even people who've never set eyes on her before say she should cross over to the left bank,' Stepan Fyodorovich said angrily. 'Yesterday the Member of the Military Soviet came to our bunker. He just looked at Vera without saying a word. But once we were outside and he was about to get into his car, he started cursing me. 'And you call yourself her father! What do you think you're doing? If you like, we can have her taken across the Volga in an armoured launch.' But what can I do? She just refuses to go.'

He spoke with the fluency of someone who has been arguing day in day out about the same thing. Andreyev didn't say anything; he was looking at an all-too-familiar darn on his sleeve that was now coming undone.

'As if she's going to get any letters from her Viktorov here!' Stepan Fyodorovich went on. 'There's no postal service. Think how long we've been here – we haven't heard from Zhenya or Lyudmila or even from Grandmother… We haven't the least idea what's happened to Tolya and Seryozha.'

'Pavel Andreyevich got a letter,' said Vera.

'Hardly a letter. Just a notification of death,' replied Stepan Fyodorovich. Shocked at his own words, he gestured impatiently at the walls of the bunker and the curtain that screened off Vera's bunk. 'And this is no place for a young woman – what with workers and military guards around day and night, all of them smoking like chimneys and shouting their heads off.'

'You might at least take pity on the child,' said Andreyev. 'It's not going to last long here.'

'And what if the Germans break through?' said Stepan Fyodorovich. 'What then?'

Vera didn't answer. She had convinced herself that one day she would glimpse Viktorov coming through the ruined gates of the power station. She would catch sight of him in the distance – in his flying suit and boots, his map-case at his side.

Sometimes she went out onto the road to see if he was coming. Soldiers going past in lorries would shout out: 'Come on, my beautiful. Who are you waiting for? Come and join us!'

For a moment she would recover her gaiety and shout back: 'Your lorry can't get through where I'm going.'

She would stare at Soviet fighters flying low overhead, feeling certain that any moment she would recognize Viktorov. Once a fighter dipped its wings in greeting. Vera cried out like a desperate bird, ran a few steps, stumbled, and fell to the ground; after that she had back-ache for several days.

At the end of October she saw a dogfight over the power station itself. It ended indecisively; the Russian planes flew up into the clouds and the Germans turned back to the West. Vera just stood there, gazing up into the empty sky. Her dilated eyes looked so full of tension that a technician going through the yard asked: 'Are you all right, comrade Spiridonova? You're not hurt?'

She was certain that it was here, in the power station, that she would meet Viktorov; she couldn't tell her father, however, or the angry Fates would prevent this meeting. Sometimes she felt so certain that she would jump up, bake some rye-and-potato pasties, sweep the floor, clean her dirty boots and tidy everything up… Sometimes, sitting with her father at table, she would listen for a moment and say: 'Just a second,' then throw her coat over her shoulders, climb up, and look round to see if there was a pilot in the yard, asking how to get to the