Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance)

It wasn’t so bad when he was working; what was most difficult was when he was off duty.

There was sand everywhere; dry, rustling, slippery sand. Of course, even this supported life. You could hear the rustle of lizards and tortoises and see the tracks left by the lizards’ tails. Here and there you came across small thorn bushes, themselves the colour of sand. Kites hovered in the air, searching for refuse or carrion. Spiders ran past on long legs.

The stern poverty, the cold monotony of the snowless November desert, seemed to have devastated the men who had been posted here. Their way of life, even their thoughts, seemed to have become equally dreary.

Little by little, Darensky had submitted to this monotony. He had always been indifferent to food, but now he thought of little else. The endless meals of sour-tasting soup made from pearl barley and marinated tomatoes – followed by pearl-barley porridge – had become a nightmare. Sometimes he found it unbearable to sit in the gloom of the small barn, in front of puddles of soup splashed over a table knocked together from a few planks, watching everyone sipping this soup from flat tin bowls; all he wanted was to get out – to escape the rattle of spoons and the nauseating smell. But as soon as he left, he began to count the hours till the next day’s meal.

The huts were cold at night. Darensky slept badly; his back froze, his ears and legs froze, his fingers froze, his cheeks froze. He went to bed without undressing, with two pairs of foot-cloths round his feet and a towel round his head.

At first he had been amazed at the way people he met seemed almost to have forgotten the war; they seemed to have no room in their minds for anything except food, tobacco and clean laundry. But soon he noticed himself thinking of all kinds of trivia, all kinds of petty hopes and disappointments as he talked to the commanders of divisions and batteries about axle-grease, ammunition supplies and how best to prepare the guns for the winter.

Front Headquarters now seemed impossibly distant; his dream was to spend a day at Army Headquarters, near Elista. But it wasn’t Alla Sergeyevna and her blue eyes that he dreamed of: he dreamed of a bath, clean underwear and soup with white noodles.

Even the night he had spent at Bova’s now seemed pleasant and agreeable. It hadn’t been such a bad hut after all. And they hadn’t talked only about soup and clean laundry.

The worst torment of all was the lice.

It had taken him some time to realize why he was always itching; he had failed to understand people’s knowing smiles when he had furiously begun scratching his thigh or armpit in the middle of a serious discussion. Every day he had scratched with increasing zeal. He had felt a constant burning under his armpits.

He had thought he had eczema, that the dust and sand must be irritating his dry skin. Sometimes, on his way somewhere, he would stop and suddenly begin scratching his legs, his stomach, the small of his back. It was worst of all at night. He would wake up and scratch furiously at his chest. Once, when he was lying on his back, he had stuck his legs up in the air and moaned as he scratched at his thighs. His eczema seemed to be aggravated by heat. Under the blankets, it became unbearable; if he went out into the frost, it calmed down. He decided to go to the first-aid post and ask for some ointment.

One morning he had turned down his shirt collar and seen a row of sleepy, full-grown lice along the seam. There were dozens of them. He had looked round in embarrassment at the captain who slept in the next bed. He was sitting there with a ferocious expression on his face; he had spread out his pants and was squashing the lice that infested them. He was moving his lips silently, evidently keeping a tally.

Darensky took off his shirt and began doing the same. It was a quiet, misty morning. There was no shooting, and no planes going by overhead. You could hear distinct cracks as the lice perished, one after another, beneath the fingernails of the two officers. The captain glanced at Darensky and muttered:

‘There’s a fine one for you – a real bear of a louse! A breeding sow!’

His eyes still on his shirt collar, Darensky said:

‘Don’t they issue any powder?’

‘They do,’ said the captain. ‘But it’s a waste of time. What we need is a good wash, but there isn’t even enough water to drink. They can’t even wash the plates properly in the canteen. There’s certainly no chance of a bath.’

‘What about the ovens?’

‘That’s no use either. The uniforms come back scorched, and the lice just get a sun-tan . . . And when I think of the time we were quartered in Penza! I never even went to the canteen. The landlady fed me herself. She was a nice plump woman – and not too old. We had baths twice a week, beer every day . . .’

‘I know,’ said Darensky. ‘But what’s to be done? It’s a long way to Penza.’

The captain looked at him seriously and said, as if revealing a secret:

‘There is one good method, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel. Snuff! You grind up a brick, mix it with snuff and sprinkle it on your underwear. The lice begin sneezing. That makes them jump – and then they bash their heads in against the brick.’

The captain kept such a straight face that it took Darensky some time to realize this was a joke.

During the next few days, he heard at least a dozen stories in a similar vein. The folklore of lice was evidently a rich field of study.

Day and night, his mind was occupied with a host of questions: food, a change of underwear, clean uniform, louse-powder, extermination of lice by ironing them with a heated bottle, by freezing them to death, by burning them to death . . . He no longer thought of women at all. He remembered a saying the criminals had used in the camps:

‘You may live, but you won’t love.’