Sometimes he talked about how things had been in the army before the war: the purges, the constant examinations, the bribes you had to pay for an apartment. He talked about men who'd became generals in 1937 by writing dozens of statements and denunciations unmasking supposed enemies of the people.
Sometimes his strength seemed to lie in his mad bravery, in the gay desperation with which he would leap up from a breach in the wall, throw hand-grenades at the advancing Germans and shout: 'No you don't, you swine!' At other times it seemed to lie in his easygoing simplicity, in the way he could be friends with everyone in the house.
There was nothing exceptional about his life before the war: he had been a foreman, first in a mine, then on a building site, before becoming an infantry captain in a unit stationed on the outskirts of Minsk; he had studied both in the barracks and in the field and had gone to Minsk for further training; in the evening he had read a little, drunk vodka, gone to the cinema, played cards with his friends and quarrelled with his wife, who was jealous, not without reason, of a large number of the women and girls in the district. Grekov had revealed all this quite freely. And now – in Seryozha's eyes and in the eyes of many others – he had suddenly become a legendary warrior, a crusader for truth.
New people had entered Seryozha's life, taking the place even of his nearest and dearest.
Kolomeitsev had been in the Navy. He had served on various ships and had been sunk three times in the Baltic. For all his contempt for many highly-esteemed figures, Kolomeitsev always showed the greatest respect for scientists and writers. Seryozha round this very appealing. No military commander, whatever his rank, was of the least importance beside a bald Lobachevsky or an ailing Romain Rolland.
Kolomeitsev's views on literature were very different indeed from what Chentsov had said about instructive, patriotic literature. There was one writer, either an American or an Englishman, whom he particularly liked. Seryozha had never read this writer and Kolomeitsev couldn't even remember his name; nevertheless, Kolomeitsev praised him so enthusiastically, in such coarse, colourful language, that Seryozha was convinced he was a great writer.
'What I like about him,' said Kolomeitsev, 'is that he's not trying to teach me anything. A bloke gets his leg over a woman, a soldier gets pissed, an old man loses his wife – and that's that. It's life. It's exciting, you laugh, you feel sorry, and in the end you still don't know what it's all about.'
Kolomeitsev was a friend of Vasya Klimov, the scout.
One day, Klimov and Shaposhnikov had to go right up to the German lines. They climbed over the railway embankment and crept up to a bomb-crater that sheltered a heavy-machine-gun crew and an artillery officer. Pressed flat against the ground, they watched the Germans go about their tasks. One young man unbuttoned his jacket, tucked a red checked handkerchief under his collar and began shaving; Seryozha could hear the scrape of the razor against his wiry, dust-covered stubble. Another German was eating something out of a small flat tin; for a brief moment Seryozha saw his face take on a look of concentrated, lasting pleasure. The officer was winding up his watch. Seryozha felt like asking very quietly, so as not to frighten him: 'Hey! What time is it?'
Klimov took the pin out of a grenade and dropped it into the crater. Before the dust had settled, he threw another grenade after it and then jumped in himself. The Germans were all dead; it was hard to believe they could have been alive only a moment before. Sneezing at the dust and gas, Klimov took what he needed – the breech-block from the machine-gun, a pair of binoculars and the watch from the officer's still warm wrist. Very carefully, so as not to get stained with blood, he removed the soldiers' papers from the remains of their uniforms.
When they got back, Klimov handed over his prizes, described what had happened, asked Seryozha to splash a little water over his hands, then sat down next to Kolomeitsev, saying: 'Now we can have a fag.'
Just then Perfilev rushed up. He had once described himself as 'a peaceful inhabitant of Ryazan who likes fishing'.
'Hey, Klimov! Don't make yourself too comfortable!' he shouted. 'The house-manager's looking for you. You've got to go behind the German lines again.'
'All right,' said Klimov guiltily. 'I'm coming.'
He began collecting together his belongings – a tommy-gun and a canvas bag full of hand-grenades. He handled objects very carefully, as though he were somehow afraid of hurting them. He never swore and he addressed nearly everyone in the polite form of the second person.
'You're not a Baptist, are you?' old Polyakov once asked this man who had killed a hundred and ten people.
Klimov was by no means taciturn, however, and he particularly liked talking about his childhood. His father had worked at the Putilov factory. He himself had been a skilled lathe-operator; before the war he had taught apprentices. He made Seryozha laugh with a story of how one of his apprentices had nearly choked to death on a screw; he had gone quite blue before Klimov managed to remove the screw with a pair of pliers.
Once Seryozha saw Klimov after he had drunk a captured bottle of schnapps; then he had been quite terrifying – even Grekov had seemed wary of him.
The untidiest man in the building was Lieutenant Batrakov. He never cleaned his boots and one of the soles flapped on the ground -people didn't have to look up to know when he was coming. On the other hand he cleaned his glasses hundreds of times a day with a small piece of chamois; apparently the lenses were the wrong strength – it was as if they were blurred by dust and smoke. Klimov had brought him several pairs of German spectacles but, though the frames were good, the lenses were no better than his own.
Before the war Batrakov had taught mathematics at a technical school; he was very arrogant and he talked about his ignorant students with disdain. He had put Seryozha through a full-scale maths exam; everyone had laughed at his failure and told him he would have to retake the course.
Once, during an air-raid, when earth, stone and iron were being smashed apart by sledge-hammer blows, Grekov saw Batrakov sitting on top of what was left of a staircase, reading a book.
'No,' said Grekov, 'the Germans haven't got a hope. What can they do against madmen like that?'
Far from terrifying the inmates of the building, the German attacks only succeeded in arousing a certain condescending irony: 'Hm, the Fritzes really are having a go at it today!' 'Look what those maniacs are doing now!' 'The fool – where does he think he's dropping his bombs?'
Batrakov was a friend of Antsiferov, the commander of the sapper detachment, a man in his forties who loved talking about his various chronic illnesses. This was unusual at the front: when people were under fire, ulcers and sciaticas usually cleared up of their own accord.
Even in Stalingrad, however, Antsiferov continued to suffer from the numerous diseases that had attacked his enormous body; captured German medicines were of no help. He had a large, bald head, a full face, and his eyes were round. At times there was something quite bizarre about him – especially when he was sitting in the sinister light cast by the distant fires and drinking tea with his soldiers. He suffered from corns and he always felt hot; usually he took off both his shoes and his tunic. There he would sit – sipping hot tea from a cup decorated with tiny blue flowers, wiping his bald head with a huge handkerchief, smiling, sighing and blowing into his cup. The sullen Lyakhov, a bandage round his head, would constantly refill this cup with boiling water from a soot-encrusted kettle. Sometimes Antsiferov would climb up on a small mound of bricks, wheezing and groaning, to see what was happening in the world. Bare-foot, with no shirt, he might have been a peasant coming to the door of his hut during a downpour to keep an eye on his garden.