Her mother sometimes talked to her about Dmitry, horrified at what had happened to him.
'He was honest as a boy and he remained honest all his life. And then suddenly – "espionage, plotting to murder Kaganovich and Voroshilov"… A wild, terrible lie. What's the point of it? Why should anyone want to destroy people who are sincere and honourable?' Once Lyudmila had told her: 'You can't vouch for Mitya entirely. Innocent people don't get arrested.'
She could still remember the look her mother had given her.
Another time she had said to her mother about Dmitry's wife: 'I never could stand the woman and I'm not going to change my mind now.'
'But just imagine!' her mother had protested. 'Being given a ten-year sentence for not denouncing your husband!'
And once she had brought home a stray puppy she'd found on the street. Viktor hadn't wanted to take it in and she'd shouted: 'You're a cruel man!'
'Lyuda,' he had answered, 'I don't want you to be young and beautiful. I only want one thing. I want you to be kind-hearted – and not just towards cats and dogs.'
She sat there on the deck, for once disliking herself instead of blaming everyone else, remembering all the harsh things that had ever been said to her… Once, when he was on the telephone, she'd heard her husband laugh and say: 'Now that we've got a kitten, I sometimes hear my wife sounding affectionate.'
Then there was the time when her mother had said to her: 'Lyuda, how can you refuse beggars? Just think: you've got enough to eat while someone else is hungry and begging…'
It wasn't that she was miserly: she loved having guests, and her dinners were famous amongst her friends.
No one saw her crying there in the darkness. Yes, yes, she was callous; she had forgotten everything she had ever learnt; she was useless; no one would ever find her attractive again; she had grown fat; she had grey hair and high blood pressure; her husband no longer loved her and thought she was heartless. But if only Tolya were still alive! She was ready to admit everything, to confess to all the faults her family accused her of – if only he were still alive!
Why did she keep remembering her first husband? Where was he? How could she find him? Why hadn't she written to his sister in Rostov? She couldn't write now because of the Germans. She would have told him about Tolya.
The sound of the engine, the vibrating deck, the splash of water, the twinkling of the stars, all merged into one; Lyudmila dozed off.
It was nearly dawn. A thick mist swayed over the Volga and everything living seemed to have drowned.
Suddenly the sun rose – like a burst of hope. The dark autumn water mirrored the sky; it began to breathe and the sun seemed to cry out in the waves. The steep banks had been salted by the night's frost and the red-brown trees looked very gay. The wind rose, the mist vanished and the world grew cool and glass-like, piercingly transparent. There was no warmth in the sun, nor in the blue sky and water.
The earth was vast: even the vast forest had both a beginning and an end, but the earth just stretched on for ever… And grief was something equally vast, equally eternal.
On the boat were a number of passengers going to Kuibyshev. In the first-class cabins were important officials from the People's Commissariats, wearing long khaki overcoats and colonels' grey Astrakhan hats. The second-class cabins housed important wives and important mothers-in-law, also wearing uniforms appropriate to their rank – as though there were one for wives and another for mothers and mothers-in-law. The wives wore fur coats and white fur stoles; the mothers and mothers-in-law wore blue cloth coats with black Astrakhan collars and brown scarves. The children who were with them had bored, dissatisfied eyes.
Through the cabin-windows one could see their food-supplies. Lyudmila's experienced eye could easily distinguish the contents of the different bags: clarified butter and honey were sailing down the Volga in string-bags, in soldered tins and in big dark bottles with sealed necks. Now and then she overheard snatches of conversation between the passengers on the deck; she gathered that their main concern was the train leaving Kuibyshev for Moscow.
It seemed to Lyudmila that these women looked quite indifferently at the soldiers and subalterns sitting in the corridors – as though they themselves had no sons or brothers at the front. Instead of standing by the loudspeaker to listen to the morning news bulletin with the soldiers and crew, these women just screwed up their sleepy eyes and carried on with their own affairs.
Lyudmila heard from the sailors that the whole steamer had originally been assigned to the families of the officials returning via Kuibyshev to Moscow. Then the military authorities in Kazan had ordered an additional embarkation of both soldiers and civilians. The legitimate passengers had made a scene, refusing to let the soldiers on board and making telephone calls to a representative of the State Defence Committee.
It was very strange indeed to see these soldiers – bound for Stalingrad – looking awkward and uncomfortable because they had crowded the legitimate passengers.
Lyudmila found the calm eyes of these women unbearable. Grandmothers beckoned their grandchildren to them and, without even breaking off their conversation, stuffed biscuits into their mouths with practised movements. A squat old woman in a Siberian polecat coat emerged from a cabin in the bows to take two boys for a walk on the deck; the women all greeted her hurriedly and smiled, while an anxious, ingratiating expression appeared on the faces of their husbands.
If the radio were to announce the opening of a second front or the breaking of the blockade of Leningrad, not one of them would bat an eyelid. But if someone were to say that the first-class coach had been taken off the Moscow train, the events of the war would pale before the terrible passions aroused by the allocation of seats for the 'soft' and 'hard' coaches.
How extraordinary it all was! And yet Lyudmila herself, in her own fur stole and grey Astrakhan coat, was wearing the same uniform as these first- and second-class passengers. And she too, not long before, had been furiously indignant that Viktor had not been given a ticket for a 'soft' coach.
She told an artillery lieutenant that her son, a gunner lieutenant himself, was in the hospital at Saratov with severe wounds. She talked to a sick old woman about Marusya and Vera, and about her mother-in-law who had died in occupied territory. Her grief was the same grief that breathed on this deck, a grief that had always known the way from the military hospitals and graves of the front back to the huts of peasants, huts without numbers standing on patches of waste ground without a name.
She hadn't brought a mug or even any bread; she had thought she wouldn't want to eat or drink during the journey. On the steamer, however, she had felt desperately hungry all day and had realized that things were going to be difficult. And then, on the second day, the soldiers came to an arrangement with the stokers and cooked some millet soup in the engine-room; they called Lyudmila and poured some into a mess-tin for her.
She sat on an empty box, eating burning-hot soup from somebody else's tin and with somebody else's spoon.
'It's fine soup!' said one of the cooks. When Lyudmila didn't answer, he asked sharply: 'It is, isn't it? Isn't it good and rich?' There was an openness and simplicity of heart in this demand for praise, addressed to someone the man had himself just fed.
She helped another soldier to repair a spring in a defective rifle -something not even a sergeant-major with the Order of the Red Star had succeeded in doing.
Listening to an argument between some artillery lieutenants, Lyudmila took a pencil and helped them to work out a trigonometric formula. After that, a lieutenant who had previously addressed her as 'Citizen' suddenly asked her name and patronymic.