Unforgiving Years (25 page)

Our millions of dead are lost, a third of the city’s living are half dead, the Klims are lost, and yet we are saved, the stagnant war is beginning to turn our way, with the Nazis running out of steam, the American engine revving up — but how shall we be saved? As a luminous force or a persistent nightmare? The very question is treason, but how can I avoid asking it? Anguish is a betrayal of life only if it cries quits, anguish is a sacred warning: Beware the chasm, beware of what you may become! We alone know the nightmare we are trapped in, the ugly underside of our debilitated strength, and that our only hope lies in a resurrection from among the dead: from among defunct ideas and murdered ideologues … That’s why people talk so little nowadays. Klim hardly talks. Lobanova talks, the better to perfect her silence. Makhmudov never talks. Colonel Fontov talks to himself. Captain Potapov talks only to teach, as rarely as possible … To talk is to work on behalf of hope. People at the brink of exhaustion know the futility of this work, last hopes don’t need it. Where there is anguish and hunger, silence is more eloquent. It wastes less breath and it’s safer.

Climbing the stairs, Daria strained toward Klim. Klim whose muscles and sinews knew all that was amiss and made it all right, without a word … A thickset form was blocking the landing, dressed in black, surmounted by a black fur hat whose folded flaps exposed a white wool lining. Moving from foot to foot, the man cleared his throat and said, “I recognize you … It is you, isn’t it? Klim sent me.”

What had happened? Sick? Killed? (Bombs were falling to the west, earlier … ) Arrested? Gone? In any case, say nothing. Daria was calm as she always was in the face of misfortune. She did not doubt that misfortune had struck.

“So,” she said. “What?”

“He won’t be back tonight … Nor the coming nights either.”

“When, then?”

“He doesn’t know … maybe two months, if all goes well.”

The darkened landing was like the bottom of a pit.

“Is it orders?”

The soldier hesitated.

“Put it this way … we’re always under orders …”

“How dangerous is it?”

“No more than usual …”

“He didn’t give you any message? Nothing for me?”

“He’s not allowed. He’ll try to write … sometime soon … He’ll never forget you.”

“But nothing bad has happened to him?”

“Oh no, nothing. That’s all.”

Everything is kept secret. The death of a fighter in action, so as not to reveal our losses and not alarm the rear guard — which is alarmed enough by the secrecy. Arrest, so as not to alarm those already haunted by the expectation of arrest. Execution, because to conceal it is humane, and to divulge it too often, impolitic. War work, any combat mission, because enemy eyes and ears surround us and the enemy is also within, in each potential failure of nerve. Thought, because it is an indomitable force that never knows where it is going or what it will demand, may suddenly find itself mired in a maze of doubts, scruples, questions, inventions, and dreams. We want efficient, disciplined thinking, technical thinking — but how is that to be separated from the other, which is anarchic, ungovernable, obsessive, and unpredictable? How to silence the mischievous twin beneath a cloak of reproof and secrecy? If only I could, once and for all! He was right, the poet who advised:

He lived under a despotism. We …

Klim will never come back, because if he does I will no longer be here. It’s even more likely that he, that we will no longer exist. The same water never passes between the same banks twice, said Heraclitus … Heraclitus …

Daria flung herself down on the mattress in the storeroom, now stripped of life. The grimy walls were dismal like those of a cell. Tomorrow she would move to the barracks. The ceiling seemed covered with algebraic signs and masculine shapes. She felt repulsed by the cold little stove and the brown bread hardening on the trunk they’d used for a table. She felt a horror of the days to come. They would be as flat as a track beaten through the snow and dirtied here and there by smears of blood. Decoding messages, annotating documents, dictating reports for Captain Potapov, drawing abstract images of war for a largely useless bureaucratic exercise, translating at interrogations … Some of the prisoners were garrulous and cooperative, so eager to help it was sickening. The more slippery ones endeavored to mislead but failed, in most cases, caught out by basic cross-checks. Too bad for them. Others were ludicrous, rigid with a sense of duty yet twisted by fear into knots; they might have elicited grudging respect were they not hateful to the core, the type to torture our prisoners and set villages on fire, young thugs in gleaming boots who looked on as droves of Jewish women and tearful children were herded toward mass graves … The first kind betrayed their army in a bestial, abject gurgle bubbling from the gut: these were human. The second feigned consent to treachery, so as to betray the grain of trust they hoped to inspire. The third group, loyal to their murderous cause, were traitors to human nature … That’s what the men of this century have been turned into. We are better than they are. Really? Are we? Stop thinking, Daria! Klim: Klim is better. She opened her arms to the glacial air. Tears welled at the corners of her eyes without falling and grew cold on the rim of her lids.

Night fell and the cold became torture. It did not completely snuff out organic vitality, but condensed it into sharp, sleep-inducing suffering. Curled into a ball, Daria was hungry. She felt the blood cooling in her veins, her limbs going to sleep, and it was as though the slightest movement could make the blanket of cold settling slowly over her change to a hard sheet of ice. Her body merged into the vast wintriness of the city, the river, the battle-fields. Her last sparks of lucidity were like explosions of boreal brilliance over horizons of splendid, soft, deadly snow. Black water flowed toward the sea, icy river seeking icy ocean beneath the crust of ice. The ice is like a magnifying glass, I see someone walking on it through the phosphorescent night. It’s me, what am I doing so weightless and disembodied on the ice? And this little girl who comes to meet me opening eyes of black water and saying: I drowned, you did too didn’t you? Daria extended her disem-bodied hands, they clasped the drowned girl’s hands, she saw the hands join hands but had no sensation of it. We will never feel anything again. Child, dearest child, we will never be warm again … A brilliance surged up into the sky and against this silvery backdrop the spires of St. Peter and Paul’s were outlined, and the massive dome of St. Isaac’s, and an ancient crenellated tower somewhere near the Rambla de las Flores in Barcelona, no, no, it was a miniature Kazakh mosque in the desert … Where are we, child, do you know? We are everywhere and everywhere we are cold … “Listen, listen! We’ll not be cold soon!” The silver-white brilliance had won, it had girdled the universe with numberless beams of pale fire overlapping at the zenith, to the rhythmic crashing of cannon … “The war is finished, child, we’ve won, we’ve won, can it be true?” “No doubt about it, Daria my love,” it was Klim speaking, and heat broke through her at the touch of his bare chest … But, Klim, where is the child? The child who thought herself drowned when I was feeling robbed of myself, after walking on the ice for so long? Klim was laughing. What child? Our child, Dacha? They were blissfully warm and she was laughing too. Our child! The gigantic water, the water black beneath the ice creaked and moaned, full of menace …

“Were you asleep? So sorry to disturb you, Comrade, but …”

Dacha opened her eyes. A candle flame hovered in the emptiness of the storage room. A child, her head wrapped in old woolens, was bending over her. The drowned child with eyes of black frozen water was an aging woman. But who?

Daria felt for the revolver and was restored to reality by its touch.

“What is it? Who are you?”

“Pardon me … I’m your neighbor, Trofimova, Elena Trofimova … from the Budayev factory … Oh, I am sorry …”

“What do you want?”

“It’s my sister, she’s in a terribly bad way, oh, please come and see …”

Muffled thunderclaps punctuated the night, they were falling over Ligovo, at a guess.

“Hush, no need to apologize, I’m coming. Is she sick?”

“Yes! No … more like worn out, but she’s gutsy … top of her brigade …”

The next-door room was like a mine shaft, littered with dark and vaguely glistening objects. The candlelight brought forth a young, drawn face, gray lips stretched into a weak smile. “She won’t answer anything I say,” panted Elena Trofimova, “it’s as if she was dead, but her heart’s still going, oh God oh God what shall I do?” Daria warmed her hands over the flame before slipping them under the layers of clothing, to explore a skeletal rib cage with two flaps of skin for breasts. The heart was beating, just, to an irregular rhythm. “It’s all right, she’s only fainted!” Daria said nervously. A few more swoons of that sort and she’ll never come to, she’ll be walking disembodied on the ice toward the aurora borealis …

“Can you make a little fire?”

“We have no more wood … But I made her some hot flour gruel earlier, with a bit of glucose, I was telling her she mustn’t work so hard, take off sick for a couple of days! I was telling her … Oooh, Mitrofanov, he might have some hot water, I could ask him, if he’s got a drop left, oh God oh God!”

“Pull yourself together! From Mitrofanov or from the devil, just get us some hot water!”

“So she’s not dying then? Not yet this time? Oh God!”

Daria looked stonily into her face, into her eyes of unbearable black water.

“No, not this time. I know what I’m talking about. Stop talking! Bring hot water.”

She went back to her room and searched it blindly for the last of the vodka, the vitamin bottle, the tin of fish in brine, and the half-eaten bar of stale chocolate — all that she had. How terrified people are by death! How desperate to live another day! Why? Because it’s our strength, our human strength, though there’s nothing specifically human about it … We’re not afraid of death, yet we long to live a few more days in spite of death …

Next door was pitch black. Daria parted the cold lips and unresisting jaws with her fingers, lodged the neck of the vodka bottle between the teeth and carefully upended it. The throat jerked in a hiccup. She dribbled alcohol into her palms and rubbed the bony chest with its pathetic pouches of skin. The pulse beat more firmly. The swollen stomach became warmer. The kneaded flesh grew oily beneath her hand, in a melting of sweat and grime.

Elena Trofimova reappeared with the candle and an inch of hot water at the bottom of a tin. “What can I do?” she whispered submissively. “Die in your turn,” Daria said to herself, “but not yet.” “Oh thank you, thank you,” said the submissive voice, “she’s coming to, oh my God!” These invocations grated on Daria’s nerves. She shook the rest of the vodka into the warm water and said to the woman: “Drink a bit of this.”

“Hey, what about me, don’t I need spoiling too?” came a gruff, somewhat wheedling voice, and Daria saw the broad stooped figure of a man somewhere in his forties, though he might have been sixty. He had come in unnoticed, wearing a fur hat and a shapeless greatcoat cut out of heavy embroidered curtains. He was shivering; his eyes glittered in a face blackened up to the cheekbones by two days’ growth of stubble. Trofimova introduced him: “This is Mitrofanov, the head mechanic at the shoe plant … a Hero of Labor …”

“Hero my foot,” Mitrofanov growled, bending over the sick woman, “what I say is, if your sister keeps on with her heroics much longer she’s gonna die, and what good would that do? You explain to them, it’s all about holding on. The victory will be won by the living, not the dead.”

He spoke tenderly to the recumbent form: “C’mon, Tamarka, Tamarochka, open your peepers, don’t cha recognize me?”

The sick girl moved restively.

“It’s you, Anisim Savich, I feel better now … What’s the matter? Am I going to be late? I’m on the third shift …”

“Forget the third shift,” said Mitrofanov somberly. “They know you there; you’re not getting out of bed, and you’re staying put. You have nothing to fear.”

Daria was opening the canned fish. “Feed her this, all of it, please! And give her these pills, six times a day. Is that clear?” She spoke with all the authority she could muster, because four greedy eyes had locked onto the pale fatty piece of fish. “You know what, I think I’ll feed her myself.” “Safer bet by far,” drawled Mitrofanov. “Sit up, Tamarka, open wide …” The young girl obeyed, but was unable to swallow very much. “No more, I feel sick …” “Right then, split the rest between you,” Daria ordered. She wormed a flake of chocolate between the girl’s teeth. “No thanks, couldn’t possibly,” Mitrofanov said, and sniggered.

“It’s only exhaustion?” asked Daria, smiling at the patient.

“What do you think?” said Mitrofanov with an odd look of satisfaction. “This whole town’s like that. Where’ve you dropped in from, Citizen?”

“From Kazakhstan,” Daria said, immediately regretting a spontaneity against regulations.

“Sand, snakes, and camels … Wish I was there now.”

He was an odd mixture of malice and cordiality, with the shrewdness of a woodland bandit. “Not bad at all, that army fish … Had a whole tin to myself on Revolution day.” One sensed in him the canny old working man who knows how to steal and get away with it, how to make the most of a piece of metal or leather, how to trade a switchblade or stiletto in the marketplace among flocks of soldiers; a hero nonetheless, on whom productivity could rely. He stopped Daria in the shadowy passageway.

“They’re a pair of hopeless ninnies,” he told her. “I don’t give ’em two months if they don’t learn, and soon. The little one’s a sainted team leader, never misses a day, volunteers her time off to be one up on the quotas and what have you! The eldest, now, she’s in better shape, being as useless with her hands as with her head. But she don’t get as much to eat, her, except when she’s mopping the kitchen and makes off with the scrapings of the scrapings … Tell them to put the brakes on, that’s my advice as a Labor Hero … We got to work ourselves to death for the defense effort, but not stone dead. If we all kill ourselves dead, all at the same time, who’s left to win the war? Tactics and strategy, see! Right or wrong, Citizen?”