Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance)

He rang; the door opened and he felt the closeness inside. Then, in a corridor littered with trunks and broken baskets, he caught sight of Yevgenia Nikolaevna. He saw her, but he didn’t see her black dress or the white scarf round her head, he didn’t even see her eyes and face, her hands and her shoulders. It was as though he saw her not with his eyes but with his heart. She gave a cry of surprise, but she didn’t step back as people often do at some unexpected sight.

He greeted her and she answered. He walked towards her, his eyes closed. He felt happy; at the same time he felt ready to die then and there. He sensed the warmth of her body.

He realized that this previously unknown feeling of happiness had no need of eyes, thoughts or words.

She asked him about something or other and he answered. As he followed her down the dark corridor, he clung to her hand like a little boy afraid of being lost in a crowd.

‘What a wide corridor,’ he thought. ‘Big enough for a tank.’

They went into a room with a window looking out onto the blank wall of the house next door. There were two beds, one on each side – one with a grey blanket and a flat crumpled pillow, the other with fluffed-up pillows and a bedspread of white lace. Above this second bed hung Easter and New Year cards with pictures of men in dinner-jackets and chickens hatching out of eggs.

The table was cluttered with sheets of rolled-up drawing-paper; in one corner stood a bottle of oil, a chunk of bread and half of a tired-looking onion.

‘Zhenya,’ he said.

There was a strange look in her usually alert, mocking eyes.

‘You’ve come a long way,’ she said. ‘You must be hungry.’

She seemed to want to destroy something new that had arisen between them, something it was already too late to destroy. Novikov had become somehow different – a man with absolute power over hundreds of men and machines, a man with the pleading eyes of an unhappy schoolboy. This incongruity confused her: she wanted just to look down on him, to pity him, to forget his strength. Her happiness had seemed to lie in her freedom; and yet even though this freedom was now slipping away from her, she still felt happy.

‘Do you still not understand?’ said Novikov abruptly.

Once again he stopped listening to what either of them was saying. Once again he felt a sense of happiness well up inside him, together with the somehow connected feeling of being ready to die then and there. She put her arms round his neck. Her hair flowed across his forehead and cheeks like a stream of warm water; through it he could glimpse her eyes.

Her whispering voice blotted out the war, drowned the roar of tanks.

In the evening they ate some bread and drank some hot water. Yevgenia said: ‘Our commander’s forgotten the taste of black bread.’

She brought in a saucepan of buckwheat kasha she had left outside the window. The frost had turned the grains blue and violet. In the warmth of the room they began to sweat.

‘It’s like lilac,’ said Yevgenia.

Novikov tried some lilac and thought, ‘How awful!’

‘Our commanding officer’s even forgotten the taste of buckwheat,’ said Yevgenia.

‘Yes,’ thought Novikov. ‘It’s a good thing I didn’t take Getmanov’s advice and bring her a parcel of food.’

‘At the beginning of the war I was with a fighter squadron near Brest,’ he told her. ‘The pilots all rushed back to the airfield and I heard a Polish woman shout out: “Who’s that?” A little boy answered: “A Russian soldier.” At that moment I felt very acutely: “I’m Russian, yes I’m Russian!” Of course I’ve always known very well that I’m not a Turk, but at that moment it was as though my whole soul was singing: “I’m Russian, I’m Russian!” Of course we were brought up in a different spirit before the war . . . And today, the happiest day of my life, it’s just the same – Russian grief, Russian happiness . . . Well, I just wanted to say that . . . What is it?’ he asked suddenly.

In her mind’s eye Yevgenia had glimpsed Krymov and his dishevelled hair. God, had they really separated for ever? It was when she was happiest that she found this thought most unbearable.

For a moment she felt she was about to reconcile this present time, the words of the man now kissing her, with that time in the past; that she was about to understand the secret currents of her life, about to glimpse what always remains hidden – those depths of the heart where one’s fate is decided.

‘This room,’ she said, ‘belongs to a German. She took me in. This angelic little bed belongs to her. In all my life, I’ve never met anyone more innocent and more helpless . . . It sounds strange to say this while we’re at war, but I’m sure there’s no kinder person in the whole city. Isn’t that strange?’

‘Will she be back soon?’

‘No, the war’s already over for her. She’s been deported.’

‘Thank God for that.’

She wanted to tell him how sorry she felt for Krymov. He had no one to write to, no one to go home to, nothing but hopeless gloom and loneliness. She also wanted to tell him everything about Limonov and Shargorodsky. She wanted to tell him about the notebook where Jenny Genrikhovna had written down all the funny remarks she and the other children had come out with; if he wanted to, he could read it right now – it was there on the table. And she wanted to tell him the story of her residence permit and the head of the passport office. But she still felt shy; she didn’t trust him enough. Would he really want to know all this?

How strange . . . It was as though she were reliving her break with Krymov. Deep down she had always thought she could make things up, that she could bring back the past. This had consoled her. But now she was being carried away by a new force; she felt frightened and tormented. Was what had happened final, irrevocable? Poor, poor Nikolay Grigorevich! What had he done to deserve all this?

‘What’s going to become of us all?’ she asked.

‘You’re going to become Yevgenia Nikolaevna Novikova,’ he answered.

She looked him in the face and laughed.

‘But you’re a stranger. You’re a stranger to me. Who are you?’

‘That I can’t tell you. But you’re Novikova, Yevgenia Nikolaevna.’

Now she was no longer somewhere up above, looking down on her life. She poured some more hot water into his cup and asked: ‘More bread?’

‘If anything happens to Krymov,’ she began abruptly. ‘If he ends up crippled or in prison, then I’ll go back to him. That’s something you should know.’

‘Why should he end up in prison?’ asked Novikov, frowning.

‘Who knows?’ said Yevgenia. ‘He was a member of the Comintern. Trotsky knew him. He even said about one of his articles: “That’s pure marble!”’

‘All right then. Go back to him. He’ll send you packing.’

‘That’s my affair.’

He told her that after the war she would be the mistress of a large beautiful house with its own garden.

Was all this final, for ever?

For some reason she wanted Novikov to understand that Krymov was extremely talented and intelligent, that she was attached to him, that she loved him. It wasn’t that she consciously wanted to make him jealous, though her words did indeed have that effect. She had even told him, and him alone, what Krymov had once told her, and her alone: those words of Trotsky’s. Krymov could hardly have survived the year 1937 if anyone else had known about that. Her feelings for Novikov were such that she had to trust him; she had entrusted him with the fate of the man she had wronged.

Her head was full of thoughts – about the future, about the present, about the past. She felt numb, happy, shy, anxious, sad, appalled . . . Dozens of people – her mother, her sister, Vera, her nephews – would be affected by this change in her life. What would Novikov find to say to Limonov? What would he think of their conversations about poetry and art . . . ? But he wouldn’t feel out of place – even if he hadn’t heard of Chagall and Matisse . . . He was strong, strong, so strong. And she had given in to him. Soon the war would be over. Would she really never, never see Nikolay again? What had she done? It was best not to think of that now. Who knew what the future might bring?

‘I’ve only just realized: I don’t know you at all. You’re a stranger – I mean it. What’s all this about a house and garden? Are you being serious?’

‘All right then. I’ll leave the army and work on a construction site in Eastern Siberia. We can live in a hostel for married workers.’

Novikov wasn’t joking.

‘Perhaps not the hostel for married workers.’

‘Yes,’ he said emphatically. ‘That’s an essential part of it.’

‘You must be mad. Why are you saying all this to me?’ As she said this, she thought to herself: ‘Kolenka.’

‘What do you mean – why?’ Novikov asked anxiously.

But he wasn’t thinking about the past or the future. He was happy. He wasn’t even frightened by the thought that he’d have to leave her in a few minutes. He was sitting next to her, looking at her . . . Yevgenia Nikolaevna Novikova . . . He was happy. It wasn’t important that she was young, intelligent and beautiful. He loved her. At first he’d never even dared hope she might become his wife. Then year after year he had dreamed of nothing else. Even now, he still felt shy and timid as he waited for her smile or for some ironic comment. But he knew that something new had been born.

She watched him get ready to leave and said: ‘The time has come for you to rejoin your complaining companions and cast me into the approaching waves.’fn1

As Novikov said goodbye, he began to realize that she wasn’t really so very strong, that a woman was still a woman – for all the sharpness and clarity of her mind.

‘There’s so much I wanted to say and I haven’t said any of it,’ she said.