Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance)

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 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.’