Laryssa of course loved it. As Zityakin told the spring story she would burst into incredulous laughter, but I could see that it appealed to some deep convictions in her nature.
Zityakin wanted us to stay until his spring visit but we had decided that we should make for Velinsky and Pechora beyond in the next few days. We had already been with the old hunter for almost two weeks.
We were, neither Laryssa nor myself, clear about our intentions. We seemed now to have been free so long that we could not really believe that we were still zeks. Somehow the fact that we had not escaped from Panaka of our own free will was important. Neither of us really worked it out. But we were both of the same mind as far as our men were concerned. Wherever they were, we wanted to be. For hours we would discuss with Zityakin what might have happened to them and always Laryssa and myself rejected the gloomy conclusion that they had been rounded up after the Panaka mutiny and transported east to follow all our old friends and enemies from Panaka One. Whenever we talked about it I thought of the doctor and that last dreadful plea, and guilt would rise in my throat, but I would turn my mind back to Anton, and that wasn’t hard.
There seemed to be, rational or not, no conclusion other than that we should make for Moscow. I knew where Anton’s mother lived on a collective farm outside the capital and we had somehow fixed on this as our one hope for information about Bubo and Anton. It was a slender, perhaps stupid hope, but what else did we have? It meant also that we would now become real escapees, and we shuddered to think of how many extra years that could gain us.
One day, after we had been with him for about a month, and this was long, long before spring, Zityakin harnessed up the horse to his sleigh and casually announced as we were washing the last night’s stew plates that he would take us into Velinsky. We knew how much he wanted us to stay.
That day we coursed across the snowfields and through the woods, the old horse sure-footed as a goat, or perhaps it was Zityakin’s steering that avoided the drifts and took us on long, curving detours to follow hillsides where the wind had swept the snow to a depth of an inch or two.
Most of the journey Zityakin sang, whether or not in the expectation of a village woman that night I have no idea. We didn’t ask him about his chances on an unscheduled visit.
We approached Velinsky in the early afternoon while it was still light. As we breasted the brow of the hill we stopped, and Zityakin reined the horse. The little town of Velinsky was below us, straddling the railway track. It was exactly as Zityakin had described it with the church and houses on either side of the track. Except that every building had been reduced to a foursquare of charred wooden posts with thick gray ash heaped inside. Nothing stirred, not a windborne scrap of paper or a wisp of smoke.
We drove down to the town and Zityakin hitched the horse to one of the burned house posts. He told us he was going to the Hunters’ Collective Building to see if anything remained. We felt he wanted to be once again alone.
For half an hour we kicked among the frozen ash. There were no bodies, nothing to suggest a battle, except, of course, the burned-out ghost town around us. We walked up to what must have been Lenin Square and an open space beside that was surely Zityakin’s market. And we walked to the charred ruin of St. Gregory-by-the-Bridge. We were staring up at the remains of the church when an old woman emerged from a blackened doorway.
We greeted her uncertainly and she us, but as if it were an ordinary day in an ordinary Russian town. She carried a dented tin pail in which there were half a dozen small potatoes rattling in the bottom as she moved her arms to make a point.
She was not mad, as we first thought, or perhaps she was, because she had refused, she told us, to be evacuated after the penals and Uzbeks had burned the town. The story was obviously totally confused in her mind, but I think at last we understood what had happened when the fighter planes attacked the penal train.
We wondered briefly, Laryssa and I, if it was our train. And both, I must admit, fervently hoped it was. We plied the old lady with questions. But she could tell us very little. After setting fire to the town, the Uzbeks and the zeks (as she called them) had left in the Uzbek soldiers’ motor vehicles, heading south to pick up the big road to Moscow where it begins at Ukhta.
“They’ll suffer there, too,” the old lady said with some satisfaction.
Zityakin asked us to return with him and stay until spring. By then he believed the townsfolk would have returned and rebuilt Velinsky. We could have told him that if it were to be rebuilt it would be done in concrete and tarpaper roofing. And there would be no room in the planner’s dream for a marketplace of women.
It was a sad parting because we had both become deeply attached to him, but as the old horse hauled the sleigh over the hillside, we turned back to the remains of the railway station and the problems of surviving until the next train came in a town of charred corner-posts and frozen ash.
Laryssa and I walked through the square looking for a place to spend the night. On this side of the town there were one or two concrete buildings and they had naturally suffered less than the wooden izbas. We chose in the end the Hunters’ Collective Building which had been burned out like the others but at least retained four walls and part of a roof. Laryssa soon had the stove going and a stew cooking from the food Zityakin had left us. I walked across to the church to ask the old lady to join us.
It was dusk and the snow was falling through the fire-ravaged roof. Inside great beams had collapsed as they burned through and now leaned crisscrossed against the charred, painted walls. I had been in churches before certainly, but not often and only with a touring group of Young Pioneers. In Leningrad the churches are mostly there to look at and wonder at the ignorance of the past. So, was it the fact that I was alone here (except for the old woman whose voice I could hear mumbling somewhere near the ikonastasis) that had such a powerful effect on me? Or was it the snow falling through the roof, the strange angles of the dark beams and my own desperate wish to see Anton again?
The old lady had heard me. She picked her way toward me through the rubble and I asked her if she would eat with us tonight.
“No, little daughter,” she said, “you’ll need your food if you’re staying here. And I have plenty.”
I was about to go but I suddenly turned back to her. “Let me ask,” I said, “have you always believed in God?”
She looked at me with surprise. “Believed in God? Of course. Any sensible person must.”
In the half-dark she must have seen my frown.
“Ah,” she said, “without God how can you explain our sufferings?”
“Surely, it’s the work of men.”
She half turned toward the west. “My husband and two sons died at the front,” she said as if it had happened only yesterday. “The work of men, but inspired by God.”
I thought again that she must be a little mad. I found it impossible to follow her meaning.
“Russia has suffered too much for us not to believe in God,” the old woman said, almost to herself. “It must be that we are a chosen people.”
“Chosen? For what?”
“Chosen to absorb the sins of the world,” she intoned crazily. “To redeem the world with our suffering. We, the Russian people.”
I said good-night to her and began to find my way back to the doorway.