Meanwhile, Chuikov, gripping the corner of the map table between thumb and forefinger, kept thinking about Elena.
She came to him with a gramophone record of Shostakovich’s Opus 40, which Chuikov found mostly romantic and pleasant, although some passages of the third movement were beyond him.
What was it about her? He could have had one of the laughing, big-breasted nurses anytime he wanted…
There in his secret world, which resembled one of those stove-warmed boxes on sleds which keep our wounded alive on the way from the front line to the dressing station, she might possibly have given herself to him, but her effect on him made him uneasy; he couldn’t take her all in at once; just as the weak glare of the hanging lamp illuminates the center of the map, our immediate battle zone, more than it does the corners, so he perceived and experienced her, wanting to know her entirely, but only one man had ever been able to do that. There’s something about her, he kept thinking, but he didn’t know what it was.
He was only lonely and tired; that’s all. He almost never got to rest! Stalingrad had failed to break his health, but even now he desired sleep more than anything. And soon the ground would have thawed sufficiently to resume serious operations. Von Manstein had deflected our spearheads from the Dnieper and recaptured Kharkov; we’d have to rectify that. On 17 July, he’d take part in the Izyum-Barvenkov operation to assist our Voronezh Front’s southern flank against the German Fascist Operation Citadel.
He asked her how she won her Order of the Red Star, and she smiled with her red, red lips, lit a cigarette and said: It’s a secret. He liked that. She asked him about his own Order of the Red Star, and he said: I won it on the second front! She smiled again. She reached for another cigarette, and he leaned forward to light it for her. And that was all that happened between them.
Her hair was as dark as the lamp-wire on the pallid tent-wall.
Karmen had come back looking cheerful and pleased with himself; he had German tobacco for Elena and a pair of black Zeiss binoculars for the commissar. Moreover, on the way back he’d shot footage of another indomitable peasant grandmother in her ruined house, baking bread in a tin made from a piece of a German airplane’s wing. He took off his jacket; he hung up his grubby astrakhan hat. Then, his smile already becoming uncertain, he took a step toward her. But Elena was as silent as a steppe pony.
It did not do to transgress Elena’s silences. For instance, where had she been before they met in Spain? Her taciturnity about that contained within its snowy forests palisades and watchtowers, chains and gangways glimpsed through the gaps in its steel fences. Elena’s silences were warnings all the more fearful for their steadiness, I’d almost say tranquility. Oh, her beautiful face with its gentleness, its unmoving gentleness!
Once upon a time, R. L. Karmen, just back from filming a sports parade on Red Square—young women in lyotards hoisting giant Cyrillic letters over their shoulders, and overtopping them Comrade Stalin’s portrait (the women’s white shoes flashed when they marched; his lens had caught that)—took his wife to an art exhibition in Leningrad, not the retrospective of 1932, for he hadn’t even known Elena then; all the same, one artist who figured importantly on the walls, through the efforts of a certain Otto Nagel, was the woman whom he had photographed at the Belorussian-Baltic Station, hoping that her portrait would be published in Vsyermirnaya Ilustratsia. Oh, yes, our hopes! All the same, he still admired this K. Kollwitz; even today he thought that her monumental group portraits might afford new ideas for camera angles. (An example from 1965: One of our Red Army men feeds a smiling little Russian girl in “The Great Patriotic War,” directed by R. L. Karmen.)
Elena had already gone over to a corner of the room to browse through the monographs. Karmen followed her. Just as he came up to her, he saw her gazing calmly and beautifully at a page which quoted the artist as saying: I believe that bisexuality is almost a necessary factor in artistic production. Karmen felt a sensation of such extreme pain that he could hardly speak. Elena was conscious of him, of course; she knew that he was reading what she was reading; but later on, years later, he suspected that she had been oblivious of his pain; for who are we to think ourselves of such interest to others, even to our spouses, that they can truly read us? At the time it seemed to him that she was perfectly aware of his feelings, whose existence must naturally have been unpleasant to her, and that she calmly continued to be exactly what she was, knowing that this hurt him, distantly sorry for that, but certain above all that her nature neither could nor should be changed. He admired her steadiness; he hated and adored her; meanwhile he longed for each of them to be what neither could be; and all this happened in an instant, as they stood side by side reading I believe that bisexuality is almost a necessary factor in artistic production. That was how she was. That was who she was. And there was nothing he could do to satisfy her need for women.
But it wasn’t that at all! He really imagined that he could accept her being with any and every woman she chose, if only she were also fully present with him. That was what tortured him.
And at that moment he’d believed that Elena wasn’t bisexual at all, that her professed desires for other women were simply a smokescreen for her feelings for Shostakovich.
But maybe even that he didn’t believe; it might have been interpolated later; all he knew was that he and Elena, who now diverged so greatly in their desires to make love that the topic was agonizing for both of them, were standing side by side, reading something which reminded them both of that difference. Then Elena walked outside to smoke a cigarette. He did not follow her. Most likely she’d forgotten the moment immediately.
He never forgot. He remembered it now in this tent at Sixty-second Army Headquarters. His wife’s silence brought it back.
Elena went outside to smoke. Karmen leaning on his elbow as he sat at his desk, still wearing his jacket, looking pale and weary, preparing the shooting script.
After Stalingrad, the system of dual command had supposedly been abolished to reward the army: No longer would commissars dog our every breath. Epaulettes were introduced; there was even talk of allowing the troops to edit their own frontline newspapers. All the same, anyone who thought that the commissars were no longer dangerous was an innocent. (For instance—Comrade Alexandrov inserts this—all I had to do was pick up the telephone and two SMERSH operatives would be right over.)
And so perhaps the commissar was merely feeling bilious, or perhaps he was playing politics, but he was the one who told Karmen that his wife had visited Comrade General Chuikov, and there’d been music.
Karmen and the commissar were two men of the same breed. Their function was identicaclass="underline" to mobilize, encourage, strengthen, hearten. To do that, they had to portray things as they ought to be. And sometimes this made them very tired. We should not be surprised that they understood each other.
Where was Elena? Oh, she was over in Natalya Kovalova’s tent, translating something to do with the 
-Panzer Division “Adolf Hitler,” something top secret. And Karmen thought: Very possibly she prefers Natalya Kovalova.
He sat with the commissar, getting drunk.—I remember what she used to do and what she won’t do now, he said.
The commissar slapped him on the back, poured him another glass, and said: Don’t let her get to you, Roman Lazarevich! As Comrade Stalin says, feelings are women’s concern. Is it true that you’ve been to Comrade Stalin’s dacha?