She saw him sitting there with his shoulder-tabs torn off and his face covered in grey stubble; she saw him lying on a plank bed at night; she saw his back as he walked up and down the prison yard… He must be thinking she had had a premonition of his fate and that was why she had left him. All night he was thinking about her. Madam general…
She had no idea whether these thoughts sprang from love, pity, a guilty conscience or a sense of duty.
Novikov had sent her a pass and arranged by radio for a pilot he knew to take her by Douglas to Front HQ. Her superiors had given her three weeks' leave to visit him.
She tried to reassure herself, telling herself over and over again, 'He'll understand. He's sure to understand. There just wasn't anything else I could do.'
She knew very well how badly she had behaved towards Novikov. There he was, still waiting for her.
She had written him a mercilessly truthful letter. After sending it off, she had realized that the letter would be read by the military censors. All this could make terrible problems for him.
'No, no, he'll understand,' she repeated to herself.
Yes, of course he would understand – and leave her for ever.
Did she really love him, or was it just his love for her that she loved?
When she thought about the inevitable break with him, she was overwhelmed by fear, melancholy and a sense of horror at the thought of being left on her own. It was unbearable to think that she had destroyed her happiness with her own hands. It was equally unbearable, on the other hand, to think that there was nothing she could do about it, that it was now up to Novikov whether or not they finally separated.
When the thought of Novikov became unbearable, she tried to imagine Nikolay Grigorevich. Perhaps she would be summoned for a confrontation… Hello, my poor darling…
Novikov was tall, strong, broad-shouldered and in a position of power. He didn't need her support; he could take care of himself. She thought of him sometimes as her knight in armour. She would never forget his handsome, charming face. She would always grieve for him, always grieve for the happiness she had destroyed. But what of it? She wasn't sorry for herself. She wasn't afraid of suffering.
But then she knew that Novikov wasn't really so very strong. Sometimes she had glimpsed a timid, almost helpless look on his face… Nor was she really so pitiless towards herself, so indifferent to her own sufferings.
As though she had just read her sister's thoughts, Lyudmila asked:
'So what's going to happen about this general of yours?'
'I can't bear to think.'
'What you need is a good hiding.'
'But there just wasn't anything else I could do,' pleaded Yevgenia.
'I don't like your continual wavering. If you leave someone, you should make a clean break of it.'
'Oh yes,' said Yevgenia. 'Take good care of yourself and keep out of trouble. I'm afraid I can't live like that.'
'That's not what I mean. I don't like Krymov, but I respect him. And I haven't even set eyes on your general. But now you've decided to be his wife, you do have a certain responsibility towards him. And you're not behaving responsibly at all. An important officer with a wife sending parcels to someone in camp? You know how that could end.'
'I do.'
'Do you love him or not?'
'Leave me alone!' said Yevgenia, sounding as though she were about to cry. At the same time she asked herself, 'But which of them do I love?'
'No, I want you to answer.'
'There was nothing else I could do. People don't cross the threshold of the Lubyanka just for the fun of it.'
'You shouldn't think only of yourself.'
'I'm not thinking only of myself.'
'Viktor agrees with me. Really, it's just pure egotism.'
'You do have the most extraordinary sense of logic. It's amazed me ever since I was a child. Is this what you call egotism?'
'But what can you do to help? You can't change his sentence.'
'If you ever get arrested, then you'll learn what someone who loves you can do to help.'
To change the subject, Lyudmila asked:
'Have you got any photographs of Marusya?'
'Just one. Do you remember? It was taken when we were in Sokolniki.'
Yevgenia put her head on Lyudmila's shoulder. 'I'm so tired,' she said plaintively.
'Go and lie down for a while. You need a rest. You shouldn't go anywhere today. I've made up the bed.'
Yevgenia shook her head. Her eyes were still half-closed.
'No, no. There's no point. I'm just tired of living.'
Lyudmila went to fetch a large envelope and emptied a heap of photographs onto her sister's lap. Yevgenia went through them, exclaiming:
'My God, my God… yes, I remember that, it was when we were at the dacha… How funny little Nadya looks… That was after Papa had come back from exile… There's Dmitry as a schoolboy, Seryozha looks so like him, especially the upper part of his face… And there's Mama with Marusya in her arms, that was before I was even born…'
She noticed that there weren't any photographs of Tolya, but didn't say anything.
'Well, Madam,' said Lyudmila, 'I must give you something to eat.'
'Yes, I've got a good appetite. Nothing affects that. It was the same when I was a child.'
'I'm glad to hear it,' said Lyudmila, giving her sister a kiss.
23
Yevgenia got off the trolleybus by the Bolshoy Theatre, now covered in camouflage, and walked up Kuznetsky Most. Without even noticing them, she went past the exhibition rooms of the Artists' Foundation; friends of hers had exhibited there before the war and her own paintings had once been shown there.
It was very strange. Her life was like a pack of cards shuffled by a gypsy. Now she had drawn ' Moscow '.
She was still a long way away when she recognized the towering granite wall of the Lubyanka. 'Hello, Kolya,' she thought. Perhaps Nikolay Grigorevich would sense her presence. Without knowing why, he would feel disturbed and excited.
Her old fate was now her new fate. What had seemed lost for ever had become her future.
The spacious new reception-room, whose polished windows looked out onto the street, had been closed; visitors now had to go to the old room. She walked into a dirty courtyard, past a dilapidated wall, and came to a half-open door. Everything inside looked surprisingly normal – tables covered in ink-stains, wooden benches along the walls, little information-windows with wooden sills.
There seemed to be no connection between this ordinary waiting-room and the vast, many-storeyed stone building that looked out over Lubyanka Square, Stretenka, Furkasovsky Lane and Malaya Lubyanka Street.
There were lots of people there; the visitors, mostly women, were standing in line in front of the windows. A few were sitting on the benches, and there was one old man, wearing glasses with thick lenses, who was filling in a form at a table. Looking at these faces – young and old, male and female – Yevgenia noticed that the expression in their eyes and the set of their mouths all spoke of one thing. If she had met any of these people on the street or in a tram, she could have guessed that they frequented 24 Kuznetsky Most.
She turned to the young man by the door. He was dressed in an army greatcoat, but for some reason he looked very unlike a soldier. 'Your first time?' he asked, and pointed to one of the windows. Yevgenia took her place in the queue, passport in hand, her fingers and palms damp with sweat. A woman in a beret who was standing in front of her said quietly:
'If he's not here in the Inner Prison, you must go to Matrosskaya Tishina and then to the Butyrka – but that's only open on certain days and they see people in alphabetical order. If he's not there, you must go to the Lefortovo military prison, and then back here again. I've been looking for my son for six weeks now. Have you been to the military prosecutor yet?'
The queue was moving very quickly. That seemed a bad sign – the answers people were getting must be vague and laconic. Then it was the turn of a smart, middle-aged woman and there was a delay; the word went round that the man on duty had gone to check something in person – a mere telephone call hadn't been enough. The woman had turned round and was half-facing the queue; her slightly narrowed eyes seemed to be saying that she had no intention of letting herself be treated in the same manner as this miserable crowd of relatives of the repressed.