Four days passed. Semyonov climbed down from the stove and began to walk about the room. He was amazed how much food there was in the world. In the camp there had been nothing but rotten beet. He had forgotten that there were other foods than that thin, cloudy, putrid-smelling soup. And now he could see millet, potatoes, cabbage, lard… He could hear a cock crow.
He was like a child who thought that the world was ruled by two magicians – one good and the other evil. He couldn't rid himself of the fear that the evil magician might once again overpower the good magician, that the kind, warm world would vanish with all its food, that he would again be left to chew at his leather belt.
He busied himself with trying to repair the small hand-mill; it was appallingly inefficient. His forehead would be dripping with sweat after he had ground a mere handful of damp grey flour.
He cleaned the drive with a file and some sandpaper and then tightened the bolt between the mechanism and the grindstones. He did everything that could be expected of an intelligent mechanic from Moscow; at the end of his labours the mill worked worse than ever.
He lay down on the stove, trying to work out how best to grind wheat. In the morning he took the mill to pieces again and rebuilt it using some cogs from an old grandfather clock.
'Look, Aunt Khristya!' he boasted, showing her the double train of gears he had contrived.
They spoke to each other very little. She never mentioned her husband who had died in 1930, her sons who had disappeared without trace, or her daughter who had moved to Priluki and quite forgotten her. Nor did she ask him how he had been taken prisoner or where he was from – the city or the country.
He didn't dare go out onto the street. He would always look long and carefully through the window before going out into the yard – and then hurry back inside. If the door slammed or a mug fell to the floor, he took fright; it seemed as though everything good would come to an end, as though the magic of old Khristya Chunyak would lose its power.
Whenever a neighbour came in, he climbed up onto the stove and tried not to breathe too loudly or sneeze. But the neighbours very seldom called round. As for the Germans – they never stayed long in the village; their billets were in the settlement by the station.
Semyonov didn't feel any guilt at the thought that he was enjoying warmth and peace while the war raged on around him. What he did feel was fear – fear that he might be dragged back into the world of the camps, the world of hunger.
He always hesitated before opening his eyes in the morning. The magic might have run out during the night. He might see camp guards and barbed wire; he might hear the clang of empty tins. He would listen for a while with his eyes closed, checking that Khristya was still there.
He seldom thought about the recent past – about Commissar Krymov, Stalingrad, the camp or the train journey. But every night he cried out and shouted in his sleep. Once he even climbed down from the stove, crawled along the floor, squeezed under the bench and slept there till morning. He was unable to remember what it was he had dreamed.
Sometimes he saw trucks drive down the village street with potatoes and sacks of grain; once he saw a car, an Opel Kapitan. It had a powerful engine and the wheels didn't skid in the mud. His heart missed a beat as he imagined guttural voices in the porch and a German patrol bursting into the hut.
When he asked Aunt Khristya about the Germans, she answered:
'Some of them aren't bad at all. When the front came this way, I had two of them in here. One was a student and the other an artist. They used to play with the children. Then there was a driver. He had a cat with him. When he came back, she would run out to meet him. She must have come all the way from the frontier with him. He would sit at the table nursing her and giving her lumps of butter and bacon-fat… He was very good to me. He brought me firewood. Once he got me a sack of flour. But there are other Germans who kill children. They killed the old man next door. They don't treat us like human beings -they make a filthy mess in the house and they walk around naked in front of women. And some of our own police from the village are just as bad.'
'There are no beasts like German beasts,' said Semyonov. 'But aren't you afraid to keep me here, Aunt Khristya?'
She shook her head and said there were lots of freed prisoners in the countryside – though of course they were mostly Ukrainians who'd come back to their own homes. But she could say Semyonov was her nephew, the son of her sister who'd gone to Moscow with her husband.
Semyonov knew the neighbours' faces by now; he even knew the old woman who'd refused to let him in on the first day. He knew that in the evening the girls went to the cinema at the station, that every Saturday there was a dance. He wanted to know what films the Germans showed, but only the old people called round and none of them ever went there.
One neighbour showed him a letter from her daughter who'd been deported to Germany. There were several passages he had to have explained to him. In one paragraph the girl had written: 'Vanka and Grishka flew in; they mended the windows.' Vanya and Grisha were in the air force: there must have been Soviet air-raids. Later in the same letter she wrote: 'It rained just like in Bakhmach.' That was another way of saying the same thing – at the beginning of the war the railway station at Bakhmach had been bombed.
That evening a tall, thin old man came to see Khristya. He looked Semyonov up and down and said, with no trace of a Ukrainian accent:
'Where are you from, young man?'
'I was a prisoner.'
'We're all of us prisoners now.'
The old man had served in the artillery under Tsar Nikolay and he could recall the commands with astonishing accuracy. He began to rehearse them in front of Semyonov, giving the commands in Russian, in a hoarse voice, and then reporting their execution in a young, ringing voice with a Ukrainian accent. He had obviously remembered his own voice and that of his commanding officer as they had sounded years ago.
Then he began abusing the Germans. He told Semyonov that people had hoped they would do away with the kolkhozes - but they must have realized that the system had its advantages for them too. They had set up five-hut and ten-hut co-operatives, the same old 'sections' and 'brigades' under another name.
'Kolkhozes, kolkhozes,' Aunt Khristya repeated mournfully.
'Why do you say that?' asked Semyonov. 'Of course there are kolkhozes. What do you expect?'
'You be quiet!' said the old woman. 'Remember what you were like when you first arrived? Well, in 1930 the whole of the Ukraine was like that. When there were no more nettles, we ate earth… Every last grain of corn was taken away. My man died. As for me – I couldn't walk, my whole body swelled up, I lost my voice…'
Semyonov was astonished that old Khristya could once have starved just like he had. He had imagined hunger and death to be powerless before the mistress of the good hut.
'Were you kulaks?' he asked.
'What do you mean? Everyone was dying. It was worse than the war.'
'Are you from the country?' asked the old man.
'No, I was born in Moscow and so was my father.'
'Well,' said the old man, 'if you'd been here during collectivization, you'd have kicked the bucket in no time. You know why I stayed alive? Because I know plants. And I'm not talking about things like acorns, linden leaves, goosefoot and nettles. They all went in no time. I know fifty-six plants a man can eat. That's how I stayed alive. It was barely spring, there wasn't a leaf on the trees – and there was I digging up roots. I know everything, brother – every root, every grass, every flower, every kind of bark. Cows, sheep and horses can die of hunger – but not me. I'm more herbivorous than any of them.'