During the night Lyudmila walked up and down the deck. The river looked icy cold and there was a pitiless wind blowing from downstream out of the darkness. Up above shone the stars; there was neither comfort nor peace in the cruel sky, the sky of ice and fire, that arched over her unhappy head.
27
Before the steamer reached Kuibyshev, the captain received orders to continue to Saratov and take on board wounded from the hospitals there.
The cabin passengers got ready to disembark, carrying out their suitcases and packages and piling them on the deck.
The silhouettes of factories began to appear, together with small huts and houses with corrugated iron roofs. The sound of the steamer's wash seemed different. Even the hammering of the engine sounded somehow more anxious.
The vast bulk of the suburb of Samara rose up, grey, brown and black, with its gleaming panes of glass and wisps of smoke from factories and locomotives.
The passengers disembarking at Kuibyshev were waiting on one side of the deck. They didn't say goodbye or even give a nod to the people still on board. No friendships had been struck up on the journey.
A black limousine, a Zis-101, was waiting to pick up the old woman in the Siberian polecat coat and her two grandsons. A man with a yellow face, wearing a long general's overcoat, saluted the old woman and shook hands with the boys.
In the course of only a few minutes the passengers had vanished, together with their children, suitcases and packages. Only soldiers' greatcoats and padded jackets were left on the steamer. The passengers might never have existed.
Lyudmila imagined that she would now be able to breathe more freely, more easily, among people bound together by the same grief and the same labour.
28
Saratov greeted Lyudmila rudely and cruelly.
Right on the landing-stage she encountered a drunk in a soldier's greatcoat. He stumbled into her and began cursing.
Lyudmila started to climb the steep, cobbled slope and then stopped, breathing heavily, to look round. Down below, between the grey warehouses on the quay, she could see the white steamer. As though reading her mind, it gave a soft hoot: 'Go on then, go on!' She went on.
At the tram-stop some young women quietly shoved past anyone who happened to be old or weak. A blind man in a Red Army hat, obviously only recently released from hospital and still unable to cope alone, moved anxiously from one foot to the other, tapping his stick rapidly in front of him. With childish eagerness he grabbed at the sleeve of a middle-aged woman. She pulled her arm away from him and stepped aside, her hob-nailed boots ringing on the cobbles. Still clutching her sleeve, the blind man hurriedly explained: 'I'm just out of hospital. Will you help me on to the tram?'
The woman swore at him and pushed him away. He lost his balance and sat down on the pavement.
Lyudmila looked at the woman's face.
Where did this inhuman behaviour come from? What could have engendered it? The famine of 1921 that she had lived through as a child? The man-made famine of 1930? A life full to the brim with need?
The blind man froze for a moment and then jumped up, crying out in a bird-like voice. Probably he had just caught a glimpse of himself waving his stick senselessly in the air, his hat on one side. He beat the air with his stick, expressing through these circular movements his hatred for the merciless world of the sighted. People were jostling each other as they climbed into the tram-car – while he stood there, weeping and shouting. It was as though everyone Lyudmila had gathered together, with hope and love, into one great family of labour, need, grief and kindness, had conspired to behave inhumanly. It was as though they had made an agreement to refute the view that one can always be sure of finding kindness in the hearts of people with dirty clothes and grimy hands.
Something dark and agonizing touched Lyudmila, filling her with the cold and darkness of thousands of miles of desolate Russian steppe, with a feeling of helplessness amidst life's frozen wastes.
For a second time she asked the conductor where she should get off.
'I've already announced it,' the woman replied matter-of-factly. 'Have you gone deaf?'
The passengers standing in the aisle didn't respond when Lyudmila asked whether or not they were getting out. They just stood there as though turned to stone, reluctant to make any movement at all.
When she was a child, Lyudmila had gone to the preparatory, 'alphabet' class of the Saratov girls' high school. On winter mornings she had sat at table, her legs dangling, drinking her tea while her father spread some butter on a piece of warm, white bread… The lamp had been mirrored in the samovar's fat cheek and she hadn't wanted to leave her father's warm hand, the warm bread, the warmth of the samovar.
It seemed as though there had been no November wind in this city then – no hunger, no suicides, no children dying in hospital, only warmth, warmth, warmth.
Her elder sister Sonya, who had died of croup, was buried in the cemetery here. Alexandra Vladimirovna had named her Sonya in memory of Sofya Lvovna Pyerovskaya. She thought her grandfather was buried here too.
She walked up to a three-storey school-building. This was the hospital where Tolya was.
There was no sentry at the door, which seemed a good omen. She found herself in the stifling hospital atmosphere. It was so sticky and viscous that however chilled you were by the frost, you wanted to go back outside rather than stay and enjoy its warmth.
She went past the washrooms which still had notices saying 'Boys' and 'Girls'. She went down the corridor, past the smell of the kitchens, and came to a steamed-up window through which she could see a stack of rectangular coffins in the inner yard. Once again, as in her own entrance-hall with the still unopened letter, she thought: 'Oh God, what if I drop dead this moment!' But she strode on, along a strip of grey carpet, past some bedside tables with familiar house-plants -asparagus and philodendrons – till she came to a door where a hand-written sign saying 'Registry' hung next to the board saying 'Fourth Form'.
Lyudmila pulled open the door just as the sun broke through the clouds and struck the window-panes. Everything in the room began to shine.
A few minutes later a talkative clerk was looking through a long drawer of filing cards caught in the sunlight.
'So, so, Shaposhnikov A. Ah… Anatoly V… So… You're lucky you didn't meet the commandant still in your outdoor coat. He really would have given you what for…! Now then… Shaposhnikov… Yes, that's him, that's right, Lieutenant.'
Lyudmila watched his fingers taking the card out of the long plywood drawer. It was as though she were standing before God; it was in his power to pronounce life or death, and he had paused for a moment to decide.
29
Lyudmila had arrived in Saratov a week after Tolya had been operated on for the third time. The operation had been performed by Dr Mayzel, an army surgeon. It had been protracted and complicated: Tolya had been under general anaesthetic for more than five hours and had had two intravenous injections of hexonal. This operation had never been carried out before in Saratov, neither by the doctors at the hospital nor the surgeons at the University clinic. It was known only from the literature: the Americans had included a detailed account of it in a 1941 army medical journal.
In view of the especial complexity of the operation Dr Mayzel had a long and frank discussion with the lieutenant after his routine X-ray examination. He explained the nature of the pathological processes that had been provoked by his grave wounds. At the same time he spoke very openly about the risks attendant upon the operation. The doctors he had consulted had not been unanimous in their decision: the old clinical physician Dr Rodionov had argued against it. Lieutenant Shaposhnikov asked Dr Mayzel two or three questions, thought about it for a moment and then gave his consent. Five days were then taken up with preparations for the operation.