Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance)

Somehow it reminded him of the time he had spent eight hours in Rostov with his grandmother, waiting for the train to Sochi – he laughed at the absurd idea of comparing house 6/1 to a holiday resort. He kept begging the chief of staff to let him go, but the latter had had no definite instructions from the general. The general had already spoken to Shaposhnikov, but after two questions their conversation had been interrupted by a telephone call from his commanding officer. The chief of staff preferred not to let the boy go for the time being – the general might still remember him.

Every time the chief of staff came into the bunker, he felt Shaposhnikov looking at him. Sometimes he said: ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten,’ but at other times the boy’s constant look of entreaty really got under his skin. ‘Anyway,’ he demanded, ‘what are you complaining about? It’s nice and warm here and you get lots of food. There’ll be time enough to get yourself killed back at the front.’

When a man is plunged up to his neck into the cauldron of war, he is quite unable to look at his life and understand anything; he needs to take a step back. Then, like someone who has just reached the bank of a river, he can look round: was he really, only a moment ago, in the midst of those swirling waters?

Seryozha’s old life in the militia regiment now seemed almost unbelievably peaceful: sentry-duty at night in the steppe, a distant glow in the sky, the soldiers’ conversations . . .

Life in house 6/1 had blotted out everything that had gone before. Improbable though this life was, it now seemed the only reality; it was as if everything before was imaginary. Only now and then, at night, did he feel a sudden twinge, a sudden surge of love as he imagined Alexandra Vladimirovna’s grey head or Aunt Zhenya’s quick, mocking eyes.

During his first days in house 6/1 he had thought how strange and impossible it would be if people like Grekov, Kolomeitsev and Antsiferov were suddenly to appear at home . . . Now he sometimes thought how absurd his aunts, his cousin and Uncle Viktor would seem if they were suddenly to become part of his present life.

Heavens! If his grandmother could hear the way he swore now . . .

Grekov!

He wasn’t sure whether these men had always been exceptional, or whether they had only become exceptional on arriving in house 6/1.

Grekov! What an extraordinary combination of strength, daring, authority and common sense. He remembered the price of children’s shoes before the war; he knew the wages of a machinist or a cleaning lady, how much grain and money the peasants received for each unit of work on the collective farm where his uncle lived.

Sometimes he talked about how things had been in the army before the war: the purges, the constant examinations, the bribes you had to pay for an apartment. He talked about men who’d became generals in 1937 by writing dozens of statements and denunciations unmasking supposed enemies of the people.

Sometimes his strength seemed to lie in his mad bravery, in the gay desperation with which he would leap up from a breach in the wall, throw hand-grenades at the advancing Germans and shout: ‘No you don’t, you swine!’ At other times it seemed to lie in his easygoing simplicity, in the way he could be friends with everyone in the house.

There was nothing exceptional about his life before the war: he had been a foreman, first in a mine, then on a building site, before becoming an infantry captain in a unit stationed on the outskirts of Minsk; he had studied both in the barracks and in the field and had gone to Minsk for further training; in the evening he had read a little, drunk vodka, gone to the cinema, played cards with his friends and quarrelled with his wife, who was jealous, not without reason, of a large number of the women and girls in the district. Grekov had revealed all this quite freely. And now – in Seryozha’s eyes and in the eyes of many others – he had suddenly become a legendary warrior, a crusader for truth.

New people had entered Seryozha’s life, taking the place even of his nearest and dearest.

Kolomeitsev had been in the Navy. He had served on various ships and had been sunk three times in the Baltic. For all his contempt for many highly-esteemed figures, Kolomeitsev always showed the greatest respect for scientists and writers. Seryozha found this very appealing. No military commander, whatever his rank, was of the least importance beside a bald Lobachevsky or an ailing Romain Rolland.

Kolomeitsev’s views on literature were very different indeed from what Chentsov had said about instructive, patriotic literature. There was one writer, either an American or an Englishman, whom he particularly liked. Seryozha had never read this writer and Kolomeitsev couldn’t even remember his name; nevertheless, Kolomeitsev praised him so enthusiastically, in such coarse, colourful language, that Seryozha was convinced he was a great writer.

‘What I like about him,’ said Kolomeitsev, ‘is that he’s not trying to teach me anything. A bloke gets his leg over a woman, a soldier gets pissed, an old man loses his wife – and that’s that. It’s life. It’s exciting, you laugh, you feel sorry, and in the end you still don’t know what it’s all about.’

Kolomeitsev was a friend of Vasya Klimov, the scout.

One day, Klimov and Shaposhnikov had to go right up to the German lines. They climbed over the railway embankment and crept up to a bomb-crater that sheltered a heavy-machine-gun crew and an artillery officer. Pressed flat against the ground, they watched the Germans go about their tasks. One young man unbuttoned his jacket, tucked a red checked handkerchief under his collar and began shaving; Seryozha could hear the scrape of the razor against his wiry, dust-covered stubble. Another German was eating something out of a small flat tin; for a brief moment Seryozha saw his face take on a look of concentrated, lasting pleasure. The officer was winding up his watch. Seryozha felt like asking very quietly, so as not to frighten him: ‘Hey! What time is it?’

Klimov took the pin out of a grenade and dropped it into the crater. Before the dust had settled, he threw another grenade after it and then jumped in himself. The Germans were all dead; it was hard to believe they could have been alive only a moment before. Sneezing at the dust and gas, Klimov took what he needed – the breech-block from the machine-gun, a pair of binoculars and the watch from the officer’s still warm wrist. Very carefully, so as not to get stained with blood, he removed the soldiers’ papers from the remains of their uniforms.

When they got back, Klimov handed over his prizes, described what had happened, asked Seryozha to splash a little water over his hands, then sat down next to Kolomeitsev, saying: ‘Now we can have a fag.’

Just then Perfilev rushed up. He had once described himself as ‘a peaceful inhabitant of Ryazan who likes fishing’.

‘Hey, Klimov! Don’t make yourself too comfortable!’ he shouted. ‘The house-manager’s looking for you. You’ve got to go behind the German lines again.’

‘All right,’ said Klimov guiltily. ‘I’m coming.’

He began collecting together his belongings – a tommy-gun and a canvas bag full of hand-grenades. He handled objects very carefully, as though he were somehow afraid of hurting them. He never swore and he addressed nearly everyone in the polite form of the second person.

‘You’re not a Baptist, are you?’ old Polyakov once asked this man who had killed a hundred and ten people.

Klimov was by no means taciturn, however, and he particularly liked talking about his childhood. His father had worked at the Putilov factory. He himself had been a skilled lathe-operator; before the war he had taught apprentices. He made Seryozha laugh with a story of how one of his apprentices had nearly choked to death on a screw; he had gone quite blue before Klimov managed to remove the screw with a pair of pliers.

Once Seryozha saw Klimov after he had drunk a captured bottle of schnapps; then he had been quite terrifying – even Grekov had seemed wary of him.

The untidiest man in the building was Lieutenant Batrakov. He never cleaned his boots and one of the soles flapped on the ground – people didn’t have to look up to know when he was coming. On the other hand he cleaned his glasses hundreds of times a day with a small piece of chamois; apparently the lenses were the wrong strength – it was as if they were blurred by dust and smoke. Klimov had brought him several pairs of German spectacles but, though the frames were good, the lenses were no better than his own.

Before the war Batrakov had taught mathematics at a technical school; he was very arrogant and he talked about his ignorant students with disdain. He had put Seryozha through a full-scale maths exam; everyone had laughed at his failure and told him he would have to retake the course.

Once, during an air-raid, when earth, stone and iron were being smashed apart by sledge-hammer blows, Grekov saw Batrakov sitting on top of what was left of a staircase, reading a book.

‘No,’ said Grekov, ‘the Germans haven’t got a hope. What can they do against madmen like that?’

Far from terrifying the inmates of the building, the German attacks only succeeded in arousing a certain condescending irony: ‘Hm, the Fritzes really are having a go at it today!’ ‘Look what those maniacs are doing now!’ ‘The fool – where does he think he’s dropping his bombs?’

Batrakov was a friend of Antsiferov, the commander of the sapper detachment, a man in his forties who loved talking about his various chronic illnesses. This was unusual at the front: when people were under fire, ulcers and sciaticas usually cleared up of their own accord.

Even in Stalingrad, however, Antsiferov continued to suffer from the numerous diseases that had attacked his enormous body; captured German medicines were of no help. He had a large, bald head, a full face, and his eyes were round. At times there was something quite bizarre about him – especially when he was sitting in the sinister light cast by the distant fires and drinking tea with his soldiers. He suffered from corns and he always felt hot; usually he took off both his shoes and his tunic. There he would sit – sipping hot tea from a cup decorated with tiny blue flowers, wiping his bald head with a huge handkerchief, smiling, sighing and blowing into his cup. The sullen Lyakhov, a bandage round his head, would constantly refill this cup with boiling water from a soot-encrusted kettle. Sometimes Antsiferov would climb up on a small mound of bricks, wheezing and groaning, to see what was happening in the world. Bare-foot, with no shirt, he might have been a peasant coming to the door of his hut during a downpour to keep an eye on his garden.

Before the war he had been a foreman on a building site. His experience of construction now proved useful for the opposite purpose: he was constantly mulling over the best way to destroy cellars, walls, even entire buildings.

Most of his discussions with Batrakov were about philosophical matters. He evidently needed to think over this shift from construction to destruction, to find meaning in it. Sometimes, however, they left the heights of philosophy (Does life have a meaning? Does Soviet power exist in other galaxies? In what way is Man intellectually superior to Woman?) to touch on more mundane matters.

Stalingrad had changed everything; now the muddle-headed Batrakov seemed a man of wisdom.

‘You know, Vanya,’ said Antsiferov. ‘It’s only through you that I’ve begun to understand anything. I used to think there was nothing more I needed to know about life: all I had to do was to get new tyres for one person’s car, give another some vodka and something to eat, and slip a hundred roubles to a third . . .’

Batrakov seriously believed that it really was his muddle-headed philosophizing – rather than Stalingrad itself – that had led Antsiferov to see people in a different light.

‘Yes, my friend’, he said condescendingly. ‘It’s a real pity we didn’t meet before the war.’

The infantry were quartered in the cellar. It was they who had to beat off the German attacks and, at Grekov’s piercing call, launch counter-attacks themselves.

Their commander, Lieutenant Zubarev, had studied singing at the Conservatory before the war. Sometimes he crept up to the German lines at night and began singing ‘Don’t Wake Me, Breath of Spring’, or one of Lensky’s arias from Eugene Onegin.

If anyone asked why he risked his life to sing among heaps of rubble, he wouldn’t answer. It may have been from a desire to prove – to himself, to his comrades and even to the enemy – that life’s grace and charm can never be erased by the powers of destruction, even in a place that stank day and night of decaying corpses.

Seryozha could hardly believe he had lived all his life without knowing Grekov, Kolomeitsev, Polyakov, Klimov, Batrakov and the bearded Zubarev. He himself had been brought up among intellectuals; he could now see the truth of the faith his grandmother had repeatedly affirmed in simple working people. He was also able to see where his grandmother had gone wrong: in spite of everything, she had thought of the workers as simple.

The men in house 6/1 were far from simple. One statement of Grekov’s had particularly impressed Seryozha:

‘No one has the right to lead other people like sheep. That’s something even Lenin failed to understand. The 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.