Spiridonovs'.
Never, not even for one moment, did she think he might have forgotten her. She was sure that Viktorov thought about her day and night, just as she thought about him.
The power station was bombarded by heavy artillery almost every day. The Germans had found the range and their shells fell right inside the building; the ground was constantly shaken by the roar of explosions. Sometimes solitary bombers would fly over and drop their bombs. Low-flying Messerschmidts would strafe the station with their machine-guns. Occasionally German tanks appeared on the distant hills and you could hear the quick chatter of small-arms.
Stepan Fyodorovich, like the other workers, appeared quite accustomed to the bombs and shells, but they were all of them living on their last reserves of energy. Sometimes he felt overwhelmed by a sense of exhaustion; he just wanted to lie down, pull his jacket over his face and be still. Sometimes he got drunk. Sometimes he wanted to run to the Volga, cross over and make his way through the steppe without once looking back. He even felt ready to accept the shame of desertion -anything to escape the terrible whine of bombs and shells. Once he spoke to Moscow over the radio. The Deputy People's Commissar said: 'Comrade Spiridonov, greetings from Moscow to the heroic collective of which you are the leader!' This merely made Spiridonov feel embarrassed – it was hardly a matter of heroism. And then there were constant rumours that the Germans were preparing a massive raid on the power station, that they were determined to raze it to the ground with gigantic bombs. Rumours like that made his hands and feet go quite cold. All day long he would keep squinting up at the grey sky. At night he would suddenly jump out of bed, thinking he had heard the taut hum of the approaching German squadrons; his chest and his back would be covered in sweat.
He evidently wasn't the only person with frayed nerves. Chief Engineer Kamyshov once told him: 'I can't take any more. I keep imagining something terrible. Then I look at the road and think: 'God, why don't I just scarper?' ' And Nikolayev, the Party organizer, came round one night and said: 'Give me a drop of vodka, Stepan Fyodorovich. I've run out myself and I can't get to sleep without my anti-bomb medicine.' As he filled the glass, Stepan Fyodorovich said: 'You live and learn. I should have chosen a job with equipment that's easy to evacuate. But these turbines are nailed to the ground – and so are we. All the other factories were moved to Sverdlovsk months ago.'
'I just don't understand it,' Stepan Fyodorovich said to Vera one day. 'Everyone else keeps on at me to let them go. I've heard every excuse under the sun. And you still refuse, no matter what I say. If I had any choice in the matter, I'd be off right now!'
'I'm staying here because of you,' she answered bluntly. 'If it weren't for me, you'd be drinking like a fish.'
For all of this, Stepan Fyodorovich did more than sit there and tremble. There was also hard work, courage, laughter and the intoxicating sense of living out a merciless fate.
Vera was constantly tormented by anxiety about her child. She was afraid that it would be born sickly, that it would have been harmed by the life she led in this suffocating, smoke-filled cellar whose floor and walls were constantly shaken by explosions. She often felt sick and dizzy herself. What a sad, frightened baby it would be if its mother had had nothing to feed her eyes on but ruins, fire, tortured earth and a grey sky full of aeroplanes with black swastikas. Maybe it could hear the roar of explosions even now; maybe it cringed at the howl of the bombs, pulling its tiny head back into its contorted body.
But then there were the men – men in overcoats covered in oil and fastened at the waist with soldiers' canvas belts – who smiled and waved as they ran past, calling out: 'How are things, Vera? Vera, do you ever think of me?' Yes, she could sense a great tenderness around her. Maybe her little one would feel it, too; maybe he would grow up pure and kind-hearted.
Sometimes she looked inside the workshop used for repairing tanks. Viktorov had worked there once. She tried to guess which bench he had stood at. She tried to imagine him in his working clothes or his flying uniform, but she kept seeing him in a white hospital gown.
Everyone knew her there, the workers themselves and the soldiers from the tank corps. In fact, it was impossible to tell them apart – their caps were all crumpled, their jackets all covered in oil, their hands all black.
Vera could think of nothing but her fears for Viktorov and for the baby, whose existence she was now constantly aware of. The vague anxiety she felt about her grandmother, Aunt Zhenya, Seryozha and Tolya now took second place.
At night, though, she longed for her mother. She would call out to her, tell her her troubles and beg for help, whispering; 'Mama, dearest Mama, help me!'
She felt weak and helpless, a different person from the one who calmly told her father: 'There's nothing more to discuss. I'm staying here and that's that.'
62
While they were eating, Nadya said thoughtfully: 'Tolya preferred boiled potatoes to fried.'
'Tomorrow,' said Lyudmila, 'he'll be nineteen years and seven months old.'
That evening she remarked: 'How upset Marusya would have been, if she'd known about the Fascist atrocities at Yasnaya Polyana.'
Soon Alexandra Vladimirovna came in from a meeting at the factory.
'What splendid weather, Vitya!' she said to Viktor as he helped her off with her coat. 'The air's dry and frosty. 'Like vodka', as your mother used to say.'
'And if she liked the sauerkraut,' Viktor recalled, 'she used to say, 'It's like grapes.''
Life went on like an iceberg floating through the sea: the underwater part, gliding through the cold and the darkness, supported the upper part, which reflected the waves, breathed, listened to the water splashing…
Young people in families they knew were accepted as research students, completed their dissertations, fell in love, married, but there was always an undertone of sorrow beneath the lively talk and the celebrations.
When Viktor heard that someone he knew had been killed at the front, it was as though some particle of life inside him had died, as though some colour had faded. Amid the hubbub of life, the dead man's voice still made itself heard.
The time Viktor was bound to, spiritually and intellectually, was a terrible one, one that spared neither women nor children. It had already killed two women in his own family – and one young man, a mere boy. Often Viktor thought of two lines of Mandelstam, which he had once heard from Madyarov, a historian who was a relative of Sokolov's:
The wolfhound century leaps at my shoulders, But I am no wolf by blood.
But this time was his own time: he lived in it and would be bound to it even after his death.
Viktor's work was still going badly. His experiments, which he had begun long before the war, failed to yield the predicted results. There was something absurd and discouraging about the chaos of the data and the sheer obstinacy with which they contradicted the theory.
At first Viktor was convinced that the reason for these failures lay in his unsatisfactory working conditions and the lack of new apparatus. He was continually irritated with his laboratory assistants, thinking that they devoted too little energy to their work and were too easily distracted by trivia.
However, his troubles did not really stem from the fact that the bright, charming and talented Savostyanov was constantly scheming to obtain more ration-coupons for vodka; nor from the fact that the omniscient Markov gave lectures during working hours – or else spent his time explaining just what rations this or that Academician received and how this Academician's rations were shared out between his two previous wives and his present wife; nor from Anna Naumovna's habit of recounting all her dealings with her landlady in insufferable detail.
On the contrary – Savostyanov's mind was still clear and lively; Markov still delighted Viktor with his calm logic, the breadth of his knowledge and the artistry with which he set up the most sophisticated experiments: Anna Naumovna lived in a cold, dilapidated, little cubby-hole, but worked with a superhuman conscientiousness and dedication. And of course Viktor was still proud to have Sokolov as a collaborator.
Greater rigour in the execution of the experiments, stricter controls, the recalibration of the instruments – all these failed to introduce any clarity. Chaos had erupted into the study of the organic salts of heavy metals when
