Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance)
62
It had been a difficult day on the barge. The clouds lay heavily on the Volga. There were no children playing outside, no women washing clothes in the holes in the ice; the icy Astrakhan wind tore at the frozen rags and bits of rubbish, forcing its way through crevices in the walls of the barge, whistling and howling through the hold.
Everyone sat there without moving, numb, wrapped up in shawls and blankets. Even the most talkative of the women had fallen silent, listening to the howl of the wind and the creaking boards. When night came, it was as though the darkness had sprung from the unbearable sadness, from the terrible cold and hunger, from the filth, from the endless torments of the war.
Vera lay with a blanket up to her chin. On her cheeks she could feel the draught that whistled into the hold with each gust of wind. Everything seemed hopeless: her father would never be able to get her out of here; the war would never come to an end; next spring the Germans would spread right over the Urals and into Siberia; there would always be the whine of planes in the sky and the thunder of bombs on the earth.
She began to doubt, for the first time, whether Viktorov really was nearby. After all, there were airfields in every sector of the front. And he might no longer even be at the front – or even in the rear.
She moved the sheet aside and looked at her baby’s face. Why was he crying? She must be passing her sadness to him, just as she passed on her milk and her warmth.
That day everyone felt crushed by the mercilessness of the cold and wind, by the vastness of the war that had stretched out over the Russian steppes.
How long can one bear a life of continual cold and hunger?
Old Sergeyevna, the midwife, came over to Vera.
‘I don’t like the look of you today. You looked better on the first day.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Vera. ‘Papa will be back tomorrow. He’ll bring some food with him.’
Even though Sergeyevna wanted the nursing mother to have some fats and sugar, she replied sourly:
‘Yes, it’s all right for you lot, you leaders and directors. You always get enough to eat. All we ever get is half-frozen potatoes.’
‘Quiet there!’ someone shouted. ‘Quiet!’
All they could hear was an indistinct voice at the other end of the hold. Then the voice rang out loud and clear, drowning every other sound. Someone was reading a news bulletin by the light of the oil-lamp.
‘ . . . A successful offensive in the Stalingrad area . . . Several days ago our forces on the outskirts of Stalingrad launched an offensive against the German Fascists . . . Our forces are advancing along two axes – to the north-west and to the south of Stalingrad . . .’
Everyone stood there and cried. A miraculous link joined them both to the men marching through the snow, shielding their faces from the wind, and to the men who now lay on the snow, spattered with blood, their eyes growing dim as their lives ran out.
Everyone was crying: workers, old men, women, even the children – whose faces had become suddenly adult and attentive.
‘Our forces have taken the town of Kalach on the east bank of the Don, Krivomuzginskaya railway station, the town and station of Abgasarovo . . .’
Vera was crying with everyone else. She too could feel the link between the exhausted listeners in the barge and the men marching through the darkness of the winter night, falling and standing up again, falling and never standing up again.
It was for her and her son, for these women with chapped hands, for these old men, for these children wrapped in their mothers’ torn shawls, that the men were going to their death.
She thought with ecstasy how her husband might suddenly come in. Everyone would gather round him and call him ‘My son!’
The man came to the end of the bulletin. ‘The offensive launched by our troops is still continuing.’