Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance)
5
Yevgenia finished cleaning the room and said to herself with a sense of satisfaction: ‘Well, now that’s over and done with.’ It was as though order had been brought back both to the room and to her own soul. The bed was made, the pillow-case was no longer rumpled, there were no more cigarette-ends on the edge of the bookcase, no more ash on the floor . . . Then she realized she was lying to herself and that there was only one thing in the world she really needed – Novikov. And she also wanted to talk to Sofya Osipovna – to her, not to Lyudmila or her mother.
‘Oh Sonechka, Sonechka, my little Levinton . . . ,’ she said out loud.
Then she remembered that Marusya was dead . . . She realized that she just couldn’t live without Novikov and banged her fist on the table in desperation. ‘Damn it! Who says I need anyone anyway?’ Then she knelt down where Novikov’s coat had just been hanging and whispered: ‘Stay alive!’
‘It’s all just a cheap farce,’ she thought. ‘I’m a bad woman.’
She wanted to hurt herself. Some sexless creature inside her head let loose a flood of cynical accusations:
‘So the lady got bored, did she? She wanted a man around, did she? She’s used to being spoiled a bit and these are her best years . . . She sent one packing – and quite right! Who needs a man like Krymov? He was on the point of being expelled from the Party. And now she’s after the commanding officer of a tank corps. And what a man! Well, why not . . . ? But how are you going to keep hold of him now? You’ve given him what he was after, haven’t you? Well, you’ll have plenty of sleepless nights now. You’ll be wondering whether he’s got himself killed, whether he’s found some pretty little nineteen-year-old telephonist . . .’
This mean, cynical creature then came out with a thought that had never even occurred to Yevgenia herself:
‘Never mind, you’ll be able to fly out and visit him soon.’
What she couldn’t understand was why she no longer loved Krymov. But then why should she understand? What mattered was that she now felt happy.
Then she said to herself that Krymov was standing in the way of her happiness. He was always standing between her and Novikov, poisoning her joy. Even now he was still ruining her life. Why all this remorse? Why this self-torture? She no longer loved him – and that was that. What did he want from her? Why did he pursue her so relentlessly? She had the right to be happy. She had the right to love the man who loved her. Why did Nikolay Grigorevich always seem so weak and helpless, so lost, so alone? He wasn’t that weak. And he certainly wasn’t so very kind.
She felt more and more angry with Krymov. No, no! She wasn’t going to sacrifice her own happiness for him . . . He was cruel and narrow-minded. He was a fanatic. She never had been able to accept his indifference to human suffering. How alien it was – to her and to her mother and father. ‘There can be no pity for kulaks,’ he had said when tens of thousands of women and children were dying of starvation in villages all over Russia and the Ukraine. ‘Innocent people don’t get arrested,’ he had said in the days of Yagoda and Yezhov. Alexandra Vladimirovna had once recounted an incident that had taken place in Kamyshin in 1918. Some property-owners and merchants had been put on a barge and drowned, with all their children. Some of these children had been school-friends of Marusya. Nikolay Grigorevich had just said angrily: ‘Well, what would you do with people who hate the Revolution – feed them on pastries?’ Why shouldn’t she have the right to be happy? Why should she pity someone who had always been so pitiless himself?
For all this, she knew deep down that Nikolay Grigorevich was by no means as cruel as she was making out.
She took off her thick skirt, one she had bought by barter at the market in Kuibyshev, and put on her summer dress. It was the only dress she had left after the fire in Stalingrad. It was the dress she had worn that evening in Stalingrad when she and Novikov had gone for a walk along the banks of the Volga.
Not long before she was deported, she had asked Jenny Genrikhovna if she had ever been in love. Clearly embarrassed, she had replied: ‘Yes, I was in love with a boy with golden curls and light blue eyes. He had a white collar and a velvet jacket. I was eleven years old and I knew him only by sight.’
What had happened to the boy with the curls and the velvet jacket? What had happened to Jenny Genrikhovna?
Yevgenia sat down on the bed and looked at the clock. Shargorodsky usually came to see her around this time. No, she wasn’t in the mood for intellectual conversation.
She quickly put on her coat and scarf. This was senseless – the train must have left long ago.
There was a huge crowd of people around the station, all sitting on parcels and sacks. Yevgenia walked up and down the little backstreets. One woman asked her if she had any ration coupons, another if she had any coupons for railway tickets. A few people glanced at her sleepily and suspiciously. A goods train thundered past platform number one. The station walls trembled and the glass in the windows rang. She felt as though her heart were trembling too. Then some open wagons went past; they were carrying tanks.
Yevgenia felt suddenly happy. More and more tanks came by. The soldiers sitting on them with their helmets and machine-guns looked as though they had been cast from bronze.
She walked home, swinging her arms like a little boy. She had unbuttoned her coat and she kept glancing at her summer dress. Suddenly the streets were lit up by the evening sun. This harsh, dusty city, this cold city that was now preparing for another winter, seemed suddenly bright, rosy and triumphant. She went into the house. Glafira Dmitrievna, the senior tenant, who had seen the colonel coming to visit Yevgenia, smiled ingratiatingly and said: ‘There’s a letter for you.’
‘This is my lucky day,’ thought Yevgenia as she opened the envelope. It was from her mother in Kazan.
She read the first few lines and gave a plaintive cry: ‘Tolya! Tolya!’