The officers’ club was nothing but a small, uncomfortable room, but it was heated and ornamented with pine branches and red banners. The busts of the Leaders lined up on the mantelpiece contributed no more than a pale plaster presence. Next to them, but smaller, stood a bust of the perfect poet: Pushkin, daubed with blacking, did more to inspire reverie. Officers who were hard up came here to play checkers and listen to bombs falling on the city… Daria took a magazine from the table, most likely The New World, October, or The Star ; its cover was missing but it made no difference. The format, the paper, the crabbed grayish print, the content, all were the same from journal to journal, with as much variation as you’d discover within a regiment on the march. At first the ranks seem composed only of faded uniforms, but on closer inspection you start to notice the uniqueness of faces, you realize that humanity endures here, that man survives in solitude, perhaps, at the core of the multiple being, under his serial number, and that he may well be what gives it strength… Man, the atom of military power.
For this war, we need a mobilized, disciplined soul, the collective soul of a patient army. So let the imagination of poets and novelists put on a uniform and obey orders — but let each retain his gnarled or stony visage, as each wages war in his own way. The population of a rational society in danger must necessarily concentrate on the moment’s task. Not everything can be indulged at all times, not everything has to be expressed… If hypnosis is a weapon, another means of fortifying our resolve, of winning, then let hypnosis serve our ends! The ideal would be a hypnotic literature of endurance, willpower, obedience, sacrifice, of determination to survive beyond sacrifice. In modern warfare, the writer plays the part of the tribe’s witch doctor who praises the courage of warriors, conveys auspicious oracles, unleashes the communal visionary trance to the hoarse, hollow beating of the drums… The great brain that is the State assigns to the writer the duty of preparing souls for the ordeal, whether it be retreat or attack, and the writer sits down at his typewriter as though before a magic apparatus…
Daria could not conceive of literature as anything but an organized service, attuned to the needs of psychological strategy, military administration, resupply, the care of the wounded, and the reeducation of the mutilated. It was obvious that there had to be at least one decent novel and several slim volumes of verse on the topic of ambulances, triage centers, hospitals, and the nurses’ duty. A story by a lady writer dwelled on the enemy’s unspeakable cruelty and the edifying grandeur of our hate; then finding within herself extraordinary resources of love, she made stricken readers shed tears over the pages in which a wife worships her amputated and disfigured war hero, as a hundred cannon and a hundred searchlights turn Moscow’s skies into a cosmic extravaganza of victory. Lovingly she kisses the crushed face, and whispers, “You are the one who has achieved this, my darling! It is for you the hundred cannon boom in triumph! For you, the savior of us all!” A story that provided a much-needed support to the morale of amputees’ wives. Daria felt able to become such a wife, she almost wished it, and the image of a blinded Klim, shattered features seamed with pink welts, hobbling along on crutches, drifted before her mind’s eye and sickened her. Better for him to be killed outright! Better a grave on which to plant a young fir tree; better to brood over a grave, or before a horizon without a grave, than that! For love of you, Klim!
Feeling let down, as much by herself as by the lady writer, Daria was turning through the pages. She came across a dramatic piece whose title should really have been The Heroic Children; she remembered a play she’d seen in Paris about naughty ones, Les Enfants terribles. The characters were a couple of selfish, twisted little monsters, and there was a sequel, Les Parents terribles, about the same characters in middle age when they had become even more selfish and twisted, but rendered cowardly by what they called “experience.” And didn’t I once read a novel deserving of the title The Spoiled Children? Our managed literature is superior to the other, its children are more wholesome… The play was well written, full of poetic verve. One child, twelve-year-old Zina, has chestnut pigtails and toils away at her homework in a bombed-out house. Zina is passionately keen to become class leader, “because my big brother’s fighting the invaders, and this, Mother, is my way of fighting!” The siren wails, Zina shuts her exercise books and stuffs them under the floorboards, into the dirt, to preserve them from the flames, before contending with a classmate for another privilege — the job of helping the spotters out under the death-dealing sky. “It’s not fair, Irina, your class has already lost three pupils, and ours is still whole!” Daria began to chafe with annoyance, and skipped the rest of Act One. Around the middle of Act Two, here was little Vanya telling how he was tortured by the Nazis. He didn’t cry once, he scorned them, he hated them, he drew strength from hatred, he swore he would live to destroy them, he solemnly vowed as much to the Leader of the Fatherland, “and I didn’t tell them anything, I ran away!” “Me too, me too,” chirps Zoë, thirteen, “they beat me and burned my lips, look at the scars, and I didn’t tell them anything… The village was on fire, the sky was on fire and so was I…” In unison the children sing “The Fatherland loves us, now let us love the Fatherland.” Tossia declares she wants to be a schoolteacher, because there are millions of people to teach who are thirsty for knowledge…
Daria flung the magazine down on the straw. The lamp gave off a feeble glow, the earthen walls were animated by trickles of water. Some of the men were asleep, rolled up in their furs. The bearded telephonist said softly, “Careful with that paper, Comrade. It mustn’t get wet, it’s all there is to smoke.” Daria retrieved the magazine and put it on the stool next to the lamp. “Do you have any children?” she asked. “Three,” he said in his singsong brogue, “three little cherubs. Hah, what’s become of them…” “I didn’t mean to remind you,” Daria apologized. The bearded man said, “Makes no difference if I talk about it or I don’t, God will protect them if that is His will…”
Whoever wrote this play? Who was this author, who apparently had never met a child? Our children are heroic, or some of them are, but not like that. Funny how real heroes never talk the way they do in plays. What’s wrong with the genuine article, why fabricate a travesty when we are up to our eyes in authentic heroism, through no choice of our own? The author’s name was Anna Lobanova.
Daria’s memory of her was precise. In her mid-fifties, with beautiful white hair and a sad, square-jawed kind of pluck, Lobanova had been living in Moscow at a Writers’ Union house; she used to speak her mind quite freely, and once was arrested for several days. Her reputation rested on a powerful novel about the Yakuti penal colonies — those of the former regime, of course. However gritty and sincere the story, it was set in 1907: the old dodge of escaping into the past. Could she possibly be as sincere now, with this turgid rehash of official heroics? Daria asked around. The woman lived in the besieged city, that was something, it gave her the right to speak of courage… So many others had evacuated to Alma-Ata, to the very frontiers of China! Under orders, to be sure; you just have to pull a few strings to get your orders. Out there you can write great war scenarios while watching the apple trees blossom in peace…