Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance)

Here, in Stalingrad, the glitter of sunlight on water, the colour of the sky and the clouds, struck him with a new intensity. It had been the same when he was a child: the patter of summer rain, a rainbow, his first glimpse of snow, had been enough to fill him with happiness. Now he had rediscovered this sense of wonder – something nearly all of us lose as we come to take the miracle of our lives for granted.

Everything Krymov had disliked in the life of these last years, everything he had found false, seemed absent from Stalingrad. ‘Yes, this is how it was in Lenin’s day!’ he said to himself.

He felt that people were treating him differently, better than they had done before the war. It was the same now as when he had been encircled by the Germans: he no longer felt he was a stepson of the age. Recently, on the left bank, he had been preparing his talks and lectures with enthusiasm, quite reconciled to his new role.

Nevertheless, there were times when he did feel a sense of humiliation. Why hadn’t he been allowed to continue as a fighting commissar? He had done his job well enough, better than many others . . .

There was something good about the relations between people here. There was a true sense of dignity and equality on this clay slope where so much blood had been spilt.

There was an almost universal interest in such matters as the structure of kolkhozes after the war, the future relations between the great peoples and their governments. The day-to-day life of these soldiers – their work with spades, with the kitchen-knives they used for cleaning potatoes and the cobblers’ knives they used for mending boots – seemed to have a direct bearing on their life after the war, even on the lives of other nations and states.

Nearly everyone believed that good would triumph, that honest men, who hadn’t hesitated to sacrifice their lives, would be able to build a good and just life. This faith was all the more touching in that these men thought that they themselves would be unlikely to survive until the end of the war; indeed, they felt astonished each evening to have survived one more day.