time in twenty years she left home and sneaked out of Moscow,
umbrella in one hand and travelling-bag in the other.
Sanya always got up after six and we'd go for a swim before breakfast.
We did the same that morning, which looked no different from any
other Sunday morning.
No different. Then why do I remember it so well? Why do I see, as
though it were yesterday, Sanya and myself tripping down the hill hand
in hand, and he balancing as he glides along the aspen tree thrown
across the brook, while I take off my shoes and wade across, feeling the
thick folds of the sandy bed with my feet? Why is it that I can repeat
every word of our conversation? Why do I still feel the dreamy, misty
delight of the river in the slanting beams of the sun? Why, with a
tenderness that wrings my heart, do I remember every trivial detail of
that morning - the drops of water on Sanya's tanned face, shoulders and
chest and the wet tuft of hair on the back of his head when he comes out
of the water and sits down beside me clasping his knees? And that boy,
with his trousers rolled up, and carrying a home-made net, whom Sanya
255
had taught how to catch crabs with the aid of a campfire or a bait of
rotten meat?
Because before some three or four hours had passed all this-our
wonderful swim together, the dreamy pool of the river with its
motionless banks reflected in it, the boy with the net and a thousand
other thoughts, feelings and impressions—all this was suddenly gone,
swept miles and miles away, looking small, insignificant and infinitely
remote as if seen through the wrong end of binoculars.
September 3, 1941. If time could be made to stand still, I would have
done it the moment when, running back to town and no longer finding
Sanya there, I had got off the tram in Nevsky Prospekt and stopped in
front of a huge shop window displaying the first communiquй issued by
the High Command. Standing close to the window I read the
communiquй, then turned to see the grave anxious faces behind me,
and a curious feeling took hold of me, as if this reading of mine was
taking place in some new strange life. That evening, the first warm
evening that summer, the pale shadows walking the pavements, the
moon riding the sky above the Admiralty spire with the sun still up—all
these belonged to that mysterious new life. The first words in that life
were written in heavy letters across the whole width of the window.
People kept coming up to read them, and there was nothing you could
do about it, however desperately you wanted to.
Rosalia had given me Sanya's note and I kept taking it out of my bag
and reading it.
"Darling Pi-Mate," ran the hastily scribbled note on the bluish sheet
from his pocket-diary, "I embrace you. Remember, you believe."
When we lived in the Crimea we had a dog named Pirate, who used to
follow me about whenever I went. Sanya used to laugh and invented the
name "Pi-Mate" for the two of us. "Remember, you believe"-those were
my words. I had once said that I believed in his life. He was in excellent
spirits. Though we didn't say goodbye to each other, he did not even
mention it in his note, it didn't mean anything.
I returned to the dacha and spent the night there, but I don't think I
slept a wink. I must have done, though, because I suddenly woke up
dismayed, with a wildly beating heart. "It's war. And there's nothing you
can do about it."
I got up and woke Nanny.
"We must pack up. Nanny. We're leaving tomorrow."
"You do keep changing your mind," Nanny said crossly, yawning.
She was sitting on the bed in a long white nightgown, grumbling
sleepily, while I paced up and down the room, not listening to her, then
flung the windows open. Out there, in the young, smiling wood, such a
stillness reigned, such a joyous peace!
Grandma heard us talking and called me.
"What's the matter, Katya?" she demanded.
"We didn't say goodbye. Grandma! I don't know how it happened, but
we didn't!"
She looked at me and gave me a kiss, then furtively made a sign of the
cross.
"It's a good thing that you didn't. It's a good sign. It means that hell
come back soon," she said, and I cried and felt that I couldn't bear it,
just couldn't bear it.
256
Pyotr arrived by the evening train, looking tired and worried, but
determined, which was quite unlike him.
It was from him that I first heard that children were to be evacuated
from Leningrad, and it seemed so fantastic that we had to leave this
cottage in the country, where we had been so happy, where Nanny and I
had planted flowers—stocks and marigolds—and the first tender shoots
were coming up, that we had to take little Pyotr in a crowded, dirty
railway carriage, in this heat—all through June the weather had been
cold, and now it had started getting hot and stuffy—take him not only to
Leningrad, but farther to some other strange town!
Pyotr said that the Artists' Union was sending members' children to
Yaroslavl Region. He had already signed on little Pyotr and Nina
Kapitonovna. With Nanny, it was more difficult, but he would have to
try again.
The train with the children was due to leave at four o'clock and it did
so punctually on time. Pyotr came running up at the last moment. His
son was handed to him through the window, and he took him in his
arms and pressed his dark little head to his face. Grandma began to get
nervous, so he kissed him hastily and handed him back.
To this day I cannot recall without distress that scene of the children
going away, a distress that was all the more poignant because I feel so
powerless to describe it adequately. Although I had lived through so
much during those two months of war, and such strange, powerful
impressions had stamped themselves for ever in my heart and mind,
that day stands before me quite apart, all on its own.
September 7, 1941. Rosalia set up a first-aid station in the office of the
former Elite Cinema and the local Defence Committee invited me to
work there as a nurse, Rosalia having told them that I had some
experience in nursing sick people.
"Bear in mind, my dear," the genial old doctor, a member of the
Defence Committee, said to me in confidence, "if you refuse we shall
immediately assign you to fortification work."
Work on fortifications, or "trenching", as people in Leningrad called
it, was of course harder than nursing. Nevertheless, I said thank you and
declined.
We went out late in the afternoon and dug anti-tank ditches all night.
The ground was hard and clayey and had to be broken up first with a
pick before a spade could be used. I found myself working with a team
from one of Leningrad's publishing houses, which had already shown a
high standard of performance in the "digging of Hitler's grave", as it was
jokingly called. The team was made up almost entirely of women—
typists, proof-readers, editors, many of them surprisingly well-dressed. I
asked one pretty brunette, an editor, why she had turned up to dig
trenches in such a smart dress, and she laughed and said that she simply
hadn't any other.