“Perhaps, but I can’t guarantee it.”
“With good psychological techniques, in well-planned societies… Help yourself.”
Daria contentedly unwrapped a piece of slightly moldy black bread. Klim was a young athlete without a trace of fat. His nose made a straight line down the middle of his face and his slash of a mouth drew a horizontal line below, as if nature were experimenting with a diagram; but nature’s plan had been foiled by large deep-socketed eyes, resembling the eyes of visionary saints drawn by the ancient icon painters… The soul trumps the diagram. No doubt Klim didn’t believe in the soul… The soul has every right to deny itself.
“Your name should be Cyril or Glaebius or Dimitri — ” Daria said, interrupting herself because she had just thought of Saint Dimitri the Assassinated.
“Why, don’t you like Klim?”
“Oh yes, I do!” she exclaimed, conscious of blushing like a fifteen-year-old.
“Names don’t matter, anyway. We’re all nameless. Incomplete.”
This was so true that they fell into a pensive, companionable silence. The smoking stove made the room feel like a nomad’s yurt. “Well then,” Klim said at last, “how shall we sleep, Daria Nikiforovna? We can make another mattress with our fleeces…”
“Together,” she said softly.
He answered without looking at her, “We’ll be warmer.”
They suddenly became aware of such overwhelming fatigue that their movements were slowed by it, the candlelight was dimmed, and nothing was able any longer to be thought or uttered, as though fatigue itself had taken over; and it was not the fatigue of the journey but a different kind, vaster, more penetrating, more irrevocable. The black bread, the knife, the tin of corned beef, the white cup in which they had taken turns drinking their murky brew of tea leaves were pitiful. Klim went out to shake the dusty blankets over the sheer drop, then spread them to form a bedding the color of earth. Lumpy pillows were improvised by stuffing bags and haversacks under the mattress. “Like sleeping on the bare ground,” Daria thought. My first night in the city of a million dead, our lovely victorious city! (So is victory the same as death?) She took her clothes off unselfconsciously, tingling with the cold, unable to see Klim but trying to picture him: the face that floated at the back of her brain was clean-cut, impersonal, and compelling, detached from everything, as singular as a new abstract sign. “We’re going to make love,” she thought, frozen. She tried to arouse something in herself. A man over a woman, the great shared upsurge of heat, both exhilarating and soothing… so many lackluster notions, devoid of desire. “Am I half dead already? Just us, joined together, the only reality in the universe for a moment, ourselves alone, in our intensity of life… And the rest, the fighting and the dying, those things will be as real as ever… But the dead aren’t real anymore… There will only be us…”
Notwithstanding the cold, playing for time, she tidied her clothes, casting about for an idea that would warm her. “Men at war are hungry for a woman, one has to give oneself, one must, so they can have at least that cry of joy…” But what if the cry contained no joy? The stove had gone out, but Daria naked did not feel the cold. She was not ashamed of her sagging breasts. She felt herself. A statue of flesh, straight-backed, resilient, nervous, nurturing, pale-faced, dry-eyed. The eyes that watched her from under the covers shone with dark brilliance.
“Put out the candle,” Klim said. “Light’s a limited commodity.”
“No, I’ll give you one, I’ve got some. I don’t like the dark.”
First she knelt on the bed, and as she did so uncovered, in one pull, the whole of Klim’s face; she was smiling, and the brightness of her smile seemed to reach to her shoulders because of the idea that was dawning on her. He’s a big child, a man-child from the dark of the war. How desperately they need to be enfolded between soft arms, soft legs, to be bathed in tenderness! They are chilled to the bone. How many youngsters just like this boy have fallen, never to know another second of tenderness! How many? Klim’s eyebrows rose into arcs of quizzical amusement. “You said how many, Dacha, how many what, or who? What are you counting now?”
“How many dead,” said Daria, still bending over him. He lost his temper.
“Strange woman! Don’t bother me with the dead. We’ll never finish counting them. We happen to be alive. Come to bed. I’m not one of your mystics.”
Her arms at her sides, eyelids half closed, Daria made no move to touch him; but listening to his breathing, she was aware through and through of Klim’s presence, like an inconceivable warmth about to break over her, a lulling that would bring her to rest. “I’ve been alone so long,” she whispered, “and now I’m cold…” The hard bar of an arm pinioned her neck, a scorching body pressed against hers. And the narrow boyish virile face dominated her from a great height; thus does the hawk dive from the heavens onto its earthbound prey… His lips tasted sour, his teeth were dry. Rapture is like that, bitter and violent, it hurtles out of a black sky onto the helpless creature and spears it… “Beautiful Daria, dear one,” Klim was mumbling, grateful and sloe-eyed. She started — “Don’t lie…” — but shaken as she was by the carnal storm, and full, so full of happiness, she might in truth have been beautiful…
Later, relaxed, hugging her close and stroking her — those calloused palms — he said, “You are good… Who are you? Tell me something about yourself… Me, I’m just another fighter, one of the lost generation; one who’s been lucky. I haven’t seen or done anything the others haven’t… Nothing interesting. I’m not at all interesting.”
“And I’m not anything, Klim. Nothing, do you hear? No one. A being, for work. A woman, for you… I’m not interesting either.”
That “for you” was subtly hurtful to both of them, because it could mean “for you just now” or “for you, or any other man.” Either way they couldn’t change it, whatever they might wish. War is a time for submission, for being rational; one can’t want anything for oneself beyond the fleeting moment. Klim spoke reasonably.
“I’ll be stopping here a week or so. I want you with me during that time.”
“If it’s possible, Klim. That’ll depend on the service.”
Daria was discovering a fantastic city, although the objects and beings it contained were of heartbreaking ordinariness. The Baltic sky covered it with a low ceiling of gray snows. The diminished light seemed to be on the verge of exhaustion. The broad straight avenues lay crushed by whiteness. The snow was banked into little odd-shaped mountains, around which a few rare pedestrians made their painful way along cleared paths. The buildings had aged by a couple of centuries in a few short seasons, just as men and women looked decades older in only a few months; the children had aged a lifetime before knowing what life was. People wrapped up in rags and tatters over furs showed plastery faces. The first glances Daria met disturbed her. Nowhere in the world had she come across this precise variety of human gaze. She clearly remembered the famine of her adolescent years, during the revolution, and yet this look was inexpressibly different from the looks of the past. She hadn’t known that eyes could change so, and cry out so loudly in silence something intolerable. It was neither pain nor hallucination. What, then? Daria plumbed each gaze, feeling guilty about her own well-being, because it must be plain to everyone that she’d just breakfasted on a can of pork and beans, and massaged her body with a flannel soaked in spirits and ice water. Her flesh still bore the imprint of love, she was heading for her work, and she was proud of this city, our invincible city, our granite stronghold! But neither the gladness to be alive nor the pathos of history and fine-sounding slogans could withstand the tiny blows dealt by the looks in those eyes. To be in good health, walking around in a clean, hale, supple body under the unforgiving sky, wearing a thick reindeer coat and new felt boots among so many rags brought a discomfort that shaded into guilt. The sullenness of the women and children planted motionless before a boarded-up cooperative, was that it? What were all these eyes saying? That they had weathered, day and night, indefinitely, the storms of snow and terror, of filth, exhaustion, cold, hunger, fright, sickness, with no hope of escape, no hope of healing… That they were watching life die away within themselves. One neighbor eyeing another: She won’t last three weeks. And I… The neighbor shiftily looking back: He’ll hold on longer than me, he’s a tough old bird! A small girl reckoning how long her mother and aunt were good for — maybe a month? The librarian on the third floor had those very same yellowish blotches around her mouth when she dropped on the stairs without a word and never moved again. The small girl’s name was Tonya and she was scared, she loved her mother and aunt, of course she did, but she also knew that by selling their clothes she could buy a few more weeks for herself. She’d heard the sisters whispering: “Much better for the little one if we can both die at the same time, so there’s only one funeral…” The mother added, “I’ve left instructions. I don’t want Tonya going hungry just to pay the gravedigger… Let’s be put out on the snow with the others, what’s it to us, eh, Nissia?”