The grey, spectral light that hung motionless between earth and sky
was suddenly shot through with something fresh and morning-like, and
even the faint breeze which stole through the field and stirred the
bushes that masked the anti-aircraft guns seemed to generate a
different, dawning light. Far out over the city the barrage balloons,
silvered by the still invisible shafts of the sun, resembled huge amiable
fishes.
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Everyone looked rather wan by morning, and one girl felt faint, 4 but
still, our team finished their stint ahead of the others. We were very
thirsty, and the brunette with whom I had made friends overnight
dragged me off to where people were queuing up for kvass. Tents had
been pitched near an old, tumbledown church, and we queued up there.
My editor friend on a sudden impulse suggested that we climb up the
belfry. It was silly, because my back ached and I was dead tired, but to
my own surprise I found myself consenting.
I recognised our section from above by the hand-barrow stuck into the
ground with a wall newspaper fixed to it. New people were coming up to
it. Had we done so little, I wondered? But our section merged into
another, and that into another, on and on. As far as the eye could see,
women were breaking the clay in ten-foot deep ditches, throwing it out
with shovels and carrying it away in wheel-barrows. There was not one
amongst them who would not have laughed heartily had anyone told her
two months before that she would drop her home and her work and go
outside town at night into an empty field to dig up the earth and build
ditches, earthworks and trenches. But they had gone out and now had
nearly completed these gigantic belts which girdled the city and broke
off only at the roadblocks.
I got home the next day at noon. Dog-tired, I lay down and closed my
eyes. The moment I did so my head began to swim with whirling visions
of girls lifting barrows loaded with hard, heavy clay, wheelbarrows
slowly sliding along planks, and the sun gleaming on the dark-red walls
of the trenches.
Then daylight broke through, faint and lingering after the bright
night, and the paling world slipped away from me as I began to drop off.
I felt so good, so wonderfully good, but for that dreary long-drawn
moan-or was it a song?-which came from behind the partition. How I
wished it would stop...
"Katya, the alert!"
Rosalia was shaking me by the shoulder.
"Get up, it's the alert!"
September 16, 1941. A few days ago I met Varya Trofimova in Nevsky.
She was the wife of an aviator. Hero of the Soviet Union, with whom
Sanya had served in the S.P.A. Varya and I had travelled together to
Saratov once to visit our husbands, and I remember having been
surprised to learn that she was a dentist.
She was a tall, ruddy-cheeked, robust woman, who walked with a
purposeful stride. She reminded me somehow of Kiren, especially when
she laughed loudly, showing her long beautiful teeth.
"And my Grisha," she said with a sigh, "would you believe it, he's
bombing Berlin. Did you read about it?"
We fell into conversation and she suggested that I come and work at
the Stomatological Clinic of the Military Medical Academy.
While I was turning this over in my mind Varya added quickly that I
had better come and see what it was like first, because one young lady
she had recommended had given up the job after two days, saying that
she couldn't stand the smell.
Varya hated "young ladies"- that, too, I remembered from the time
we went to Saratov together.
As a matter of fact the smell really was impossible-it hit me the
moment I entered the corridor, which had wards on both sides. It was a
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smell that made me feel sick right away and kept me feeling sick all the
time Varya Trofimova was introducing me to the other nurses, the
radiologist, the head physician's wife and a lot of other people.
Here lay men who had been wounded in the face. Just as I arrived
they brought in a young man who had had his face blown away by a
mine.
In nursing these men-I realised this the second or third day of my
work there—one had to keep reassuring them, as it were, that it didn't
matter, there was nothing to worry about if a scar remained, that they
must grin and bear it and hardly anything would be noticeable. But how
was one to deal with that hidden, unspoken fear lurking behind every
word, that horror with which a man gets his first glimpse at his own
disfigured face, that endless standing in front of the mirror on the eve of
discharge, those pathetic attempts to look smart, spruce themselves up?
September 23, 1941. Yesterday I spent the night at home instead of at
the hospital, and early in the morning I went in search of Rosalia, since
there was no one in the flat. I found her in the courtyard. Three boys
were standing in front of her and she was teaching them how to mix
paint.
"Too thick is as bad as too thin," she was saying, "Where's the board?
Vorobyov, don't scratch yourself. Try it on the board. Not all at once."
Automatically, she started to speak to me in the same lecturing tone.
"Fire-prevention measures. Painting of attics and other wooden upper
structures. Fire-resistant mixture. I'm teaching the children to use
paint... Oh, Katya, look at me!" she exclaimed. "There's a letter for you! I
have paint on my hands, pull it out."
I put my hand in her pocket and drew out a letter from Sanya...
I ran through it first to learn whether anything had happened to him,
then I reread it more slowly, word by word.
"Do you remember Grisha Trofimov?" he wrote towards the end of
the letter. "We used to spray Paris green together over the lakes.
Yesterday we buried him."
I did not remember Trofimov very well. He had flown off somewhere
almost as soon as I arrived in Saratov. I had no idea that he had been
serving in the same regiment as Sanya. Then I pictured Varya, poor
Varya, and the letter dropped from my hand, the sheets scattering on
the ground.
It was time to go to the hospital, but I found myself trudging back to
the house, forgetting that I had given Rosalia the key to the flat. On the
stairs I ran into the "learned nurse", who at once began complaining
that she couldn't fix up anywhere-nobody would employ her because
there wasn't enough to eat-and that one domestic help had got a job
with the Tree-Planting Trust, but she no longer had the strength for
such work, etc., etc. I listened to her, thinking:
"Varya, poor Varya."
Arriving at the hospital, where I avoided going into the
Stomatological Clinic for fear of running into Varya, I reread the letter,
and it struck me that Sanya had never written me such letters. I
recollected that one day in the Crimea he had come home pale and tired,
saying that the stuffy heat gave him a pain at the back of his head. But
next morning his navigator's wife told me that their plane had caught
fire in the air and they had made a crash landing with a load of bombs. I
ran to Sanya, but he said with a laugh: "You dreamt it."
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Sanya, who had always sheltered me, who deliberately spared me any