The younger woman, Claudia, was equally clearly
Claudia in turn had a certain sense of her own superiority over Alla Sergeyevna. Darensky understood this as: 'All right, I may not be lawfully married, but at least I'm faithful to my Member of the Military Soviet. So you watch it! You may be properly married, but there are one or two things I could say about you.'
Volodya made no attempt to hide how strongly he was attracted to Claudia. He seemed to be saying: 'My love is hopeless. How can a mere cook hope to rival the Member of the Military Soviet? But even if I am only a cook, I love you with a pure love and you know it. All I ask is to be able to look into your pretty little eyes. As for what your Member of the Military Soviet loves you for, that doesn't matter to me.'
Darensky played very badly and Alla Sergeyevna took him under her wing. She liked this lean, elegant colonel. He said, 'I thank you,' and mumbled, 'Forgive me' if their hands touched during the deal; he looked pained when Volodya wiped his nose on his fingers and his fingers on his handkerchief; he smiled politely at other people's jokes and was extremely witty himself.
After one of his jokes she said: 'You're very witty, but it took me a moment to get the point. I'm losing my mind out here in the steppes.'
She said this very quietly, as if to let him know, or rather feel, how easily a conversation could develop between the two of them, a conversation that would send shivers up their spines, a conversation of the only kind that matters between a man and a woman.
Darensky continued to make mistakes and she continued to correct him; at the same time they began to play another game in which Darensky made no mistakes. Nothing had been said between them except, 'No, don't hang on to your low spades' or 'Go on, go on, there's no need to save your trumps'; but she already knew and appreciated all his charms – his strength and his gentleness, his discretion and his audacity, his shyness… Alla Sergeyevna sensed these qualities both because of her own perceptiveness and because Darensky knew how to display them. She for her part was able to show him that she understood the way he watched her smile, the way he watched her gesture with her hands or shrug her shoulders, the way he looked at her breasts under her elegant gabardine tunic, at her legs, at her carefully manicured nails. And he could tell that her voice was just a little more melodic than usual, that her smile lingered a little longer than usual – so that he could appreciate the beauty of her voice, her white teeth and the dimples in her cheeks…
Darensky was quite shaken by his sudden feeling of excitement. It was something he never got used to; it was always as though he was experiencing it for the first time. His considerable experience of women had never degenerated into mere habit; his experience was one thing, his joy and excitement quite another. It was this that made him a true lover of women.
It somehow came about that he had to stay the night at Army Headquarters.
The following morning he called on the chief of staff, a taciturn colonel who didn't ask a single question about Stalingrad itself or the position of the various fronts. By the end of their conversation Darensky had come to the conclusion that this colonel would be of no help at all; he asked him to stamp his documents and then went out to inspect the troops himself.
As he got into his jeep he felt a strange lightness and emptiness in his arms and legs, a total lack of thought or desire; he felt at once sated and drained. Everything round about seemed insipid and empty: the sky, the feather- grass and the hills that only yesterday had seemed so beautiful. He didn't want to talk or joke with his driver. Even his thoughts about his friends and relatives, about his beloved mother, were somehow cold and lifeless. His thoughts about this war in the desert, at the furthest limits of Russian territory, were equally lacking in passion.
Every now and then he spat, shook his head and muttered with a kind of obtuse surprise: 'What a woman…'
He thought remorsefully that this kind of affair always came to a bad end. He remembered something he had read, either in Kuprin or in some foreign novel, about love being like a lump of coal: hot, it burns you; cold, it makes you dirty. He wanted to cry, or rather to have a good moan, to find someone he could tell his troubles to. It wasn't his own choice, it was the will of Fate. This was the only kind of love he knew… Then he fell asleep. When he woke up, he thought suddenly: 'Well, if I don't get myself killed, I'll certainly drop in on Allochka on the way back.'
67
On his way back from work, Major Yershov stopped by Mostovskoy's place on the bedboards.
'One of the Americans heard the radio today: our resistance at Stalingrad has really upset the German strategy.'
Then he frowned and added: 'And there was a report from Moscow – something about the liquidation of the Comintern.'
'You must be crazy,' said Mostovskoy, looking into Yershov's intelligent eyes, eyes that were like the cool, turbid waters of spring.
'Maybe the American got it mixed up,' said Yershov, scratching his head. 'Maybe the Comintern's been expanded.'
During his life Mostovskoy had known several people who were like a diaphragm that resonated to the thoughts, ideals and passions of a whole society. Not one important event ever seemed to pass them by. Yershov was such a person; he was a mouthpiece for the thoughts and aspirations of the whole camp. But a rumour about the liquidation of the Comintern didn't hold the least interest for this master of men's minds.
Brigade Commissar Osipov, who had been responsible for the political education of a large military unit, was equally indifferent.
'General Gudz said that it was because of your internationalist propaganda that all this funk first set in. We should have brought people up in the spirit of patriotism, the spirit of Russia.'
'You mean God, the Tsar and the Fatherland?' said Mostovskoy mockingly.
'Nonsense,' said Osipov with a nervous yawn. 'Anyway, who cares about orthodoxy? What matters, dear comrade, is that the Germans are skinning us alive.'
The Spanish soldier known to the Russians as Andryushka, who slept on the third tier of boards, wrote ' Stalingrad ' on a scrap of wood and gazed at the word during the night. In the morning he turned it over in case the kapos caught sight of it as they came by on their rounds.
'If I wasn't sent out to work, I used to lie on the boards all day long,' Major Kirillov told Mostovskoy. 'But now I wash my shirt and I chew splinters of pine-wood against scurvy.'
The SS officers, known as 'the happy lads' because of the way they sang on their way to work, now picked on the Russians with even more cruelty than usual.
There were invisible links between the barrack-huts and the city on the Volga. But no one was interested in the Comintern.
It was around then that the emigre Chernetsov approached Mostovskoy for the first time. Covering up his empty eye-socket with the palm of his hand, he began talking about the broadcast the American had heard. Mostovskoy was pleased; he needed to talk about this very badly.
'The sources aren't very reliable,' he said. 'It's probably just a rumour.'
Chernetsov raised his eyebrows. It looked grotesque – an eyebrow raised in neurotic bewilderment over an empty socket.
'What do you mean?' he asked. 'It makes perfect sense. Our masters the Bolsheviks set up the Third International, and our masters the Bolsheviks developed the theory of so-called Socialism in One Country. That theory's a contradiction in terms – like fried ice. Georgiy Plekhanov wrote in one of his last articles: 'Socialism either exists as an international, world-wide system, or not at all.' '
'So-called Socialism?' repeated Mostovskoy.
'That's right, 'so-called'. Soviet Socialism.'
Chernetsov smiled and saw Mostovskoy smile back. They recognized their past in these jibes, in this mockery
