In the days that followed, Yakushkin himself was put in charge of leading a thorough investigation into Danek’s murder, which naturally produced no results. The lack of reaction from Moscow was Yakushkin’s first real sign that Danek’s change of heart had come under unfavourable scrutiny from someone other than himself.
As the natural choice to succeed Danek, Yakushkin proved so successful that he had recently been informed of his transfer to headquarters in Moscow, to take effect as soon as this current task had been completed. For Yakushkin, this was a chance of a lifetime. Nothing could be allowed to prevent it, even if that meant the death of every partisan in Ukraine.
Such lofty goals do not come cheap to those who set them, and Yakushkin’s nerves were strained almost to breaking point.
The one thing which gave him comfort was the smell of food coming from the kitchen around the corner. Nurse Antonina was making tsapkhulis tsveni, a stew made with myslyvska sausages, apples, canned beans, eggplant and dried chilli peppers — all of which he had brought her as a gift the day before, with the understanding that they would be used to prepare a meal of which she would be allowed to eat a small portion. Yakushkin’s mouth flooded with saliva as he smelled the cardamom and pepper with which the sausages had been seasoned.
Since Yakushkin had begun paying visits to Antonina, the nurse had prepared several memorable meals: partridge in sour cream, venison with cranberries and khachapuri cheese bread. Of course, he had been obliged to supply the ingredients for these as well. A nurse at a field hospital could hardly be expected to find enough butter, eggs and meat to feed herself, let alone a man with such an appetite. But for someone of Yakushkin’s rank, these things were not hard to come by. It was finding someone to prepare them which provided the greater challenge.
Yakushkin listened to Antonina’s footsteps as she moved around the kitchen, the soft knocking of a wooden spoon against the sides of the stew pot as she stirred the meal and her humming of a tune he had not heard since childhood and whose name he’d never known.
It was past Yakushkin’s normal dinner time, but it had taken much longer than expected to oversee the clearing-out of munitions from the bunker where Andrich had been killed. By the time he arrived on Antonina’s doorstep, she had already gone to bed, but since Yakushkin had no intention of leaving without supper, he cajoled her into preparing a meal.
Yakushkin would have settled for a bowl of kasha, but instead Antonina had insisted on making a stew, which was taking forever to prepare, using all the ingredients he had given her.
Now Yakushkin wished he hadn’t come at all. In the hour he’d spent waiting, his stomach had become an empty chasm. When he got hungry like this, he became irrationally bad-tempered. His bodyguard, Molodin, knew to carry food on him at all times for just such occasions. The careers and even lives of men had been saved by Molodin’s quick thinking, as he pressed into the commander’s hand an apple, or a scrap of sweet churchkhela, made from rendered grape juice, flour and chopped walnuts, or a two-day-old vareniki dumpling stuffed with pickled cabbage, carefully saved in Molodin’s handkerchief.
Too irritated to sit still, Yakushkin got out of his chair and strode to the top of the stairs. The staircase descended to a narrow hallway, at the end of which was a door leading out to the street. Antonina’s apartment had no rooms on the ground floor, which was taken up by another apartment. ‘Molodin!’ he boomed.
The front door opened and, a moment later, Molodin himself appeared at the bottom of the stairs. He was a slight but agile man, with a pale, angular face, neatly shaved head and eyes the milky green colour of opals. Draped across his shoulders was a rain cape, in whose folds the sleet clustered like frog spawn. Slung across his chest beneath the cape, Molodin carried a PPSh sub-machine gun. ‘Is everything all right, Commander?’ he asked, and, as he spoke, his hand appeared from beneath his dripping rain cape. Pinched between his fingers was a piece of cheese, which he had been saving for his own breakfast. ‘Something to eat, perhaps?’
‘Keep it!’ Yakushkin smiled down at him. ‘I can’t steal another man’s meal!’ The truth was, Yakushkin would gladly have eaten Molodin’s last crumb of food, but he did not like the look of that cheese, cracked and yellowed like an old toenail, or the unwashed hand which held it out to him.
Molodin nodded, relieved not to be parting with his rations.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Yakushkin. ‘There’ll be plenty to eat when we get to Moscow.’
Molodin smiled gratefully although, in truth, he detested city life, and would never have set foot in Moscow unless ordered to do so.
‘Go on!’ Yakushkin waved him away cheerfully. ‘Back to work!’
‘Yes, Commander,’ replied Molodin, as he returned to his post outside the front door.
With his mood somewhat restored, Yakushkin returned to the little dining room. Easing himself back into the flimsy chair, Yakushkin picked up the knife, and examined the cutting edge, turning it in the light of an oil lamp in the middle of the table. Then he wiped the blade on his trouser leg and returned it to its place. After that, he repositioned his gun beside the knife, as if it were a piece of cutlery essential to the meal.
‘It’s almost ready,’ Antonina called to him from the next room. ‘It took a little longer than I expected.’
‘I will miss your cooking when I’m transferred to Moscow.’
‘You don’t have to miss it. You don’t have to miss anything at all.’
Yakushkin gave a nervous laugh. Antonina had made no secret of the fact that she wanted to accompany him to Moscow. He was her ticket out of this godforsaken place, for which her skill in the kitchen was not the only talent she seemed willing to provide. And now she spoke of Moscow as if he had already agreed to take her there, which he most definitely had not.
It was common practice for women to accompany high-ranking officers in the field, although spouses left at home were kept as ignorant as possible of the existence of these campaign wives. But Yakushkin didn’t have a wife at home and he didn’t want one out here either, especially one sporting a black eye; the result, she had told him, of trying to restrain a delirious patient at the hospital. What Yakushkin wanted was a decent cook, who would place his meal upon the table and then leave him to eat it in peace, rather than engage in banter whose horizontal outcome was never in serious doubt.
Antonina’s smiling face appeared around the corner, her forehead glistening with sweat from working over the stove. ‘Won’t it be nice to have a family to come home to in Moscow?’
‘A family?’ he spluttered. ‘Well, I don’t know. .’
‘You seem so uneasy, my love,’ she said. ‘Do you not enjoy our time together?’
‘Of course I do!’ Yakushkin gazed disconsolately at the empty plate. For pity’s sake, he thought, just bring out the food and stop talking.
‘When will we be leaving for Moscow?’
We, he thought. There is no we. The moment was fast approaching when Yakushkin would need to explain this to Antonina, but he had delayed this conversation for as long as possible, because he was in little doubt as to how disappointed she would be. And disappointed women were rarely good cooks. ‘It all depends upon those blasted partisans,’ he told her. ‘If things go the way they seem to be headed, my soldiers will soon be killing them in the hundreds.’
‘How could that be, after everything we have endured together in this war against the Fascists?’
‘I have asked myself that same question many times, darling. But as with everything in war, the answer is seldom what it should be. I believe these partisans, living behind the lines, have become infected with ideas that do not correspond to those of Comrade Stalin and the Central Committee. The simplest thing would be for them all to lay down their guns, come out of their forest lairs and place their collective fate in the hands of the Soviet Union, as it was before the war began. But it appears from recent events that this isn’t what they want.’