Next door was pitch black. Daria parted the cold lips and unresisting jaws with her fingers, lodged the neck of the vodka bottle between the teeth and carefully upended it. The throat jerked in a hiccup. She dribbled alcohol into her palms and rubbed the bony chest with its pathetic pouches of skin. The pulse beat more firmly. The swollen stomach became warmer. The kneaded flesh grew oily beneath her hand, in a melting of sweat and grime.
Elena Trofimova reappeared with the candle and an inch of hot water at the bottom of a tin. “What can I do?” she whispered submissively. “Die in your turn,” Daria said to herself, “but not yet.” “Oh thank you, thank you,” said the submissive voice, “she’s coming to, oh my God!” These invocations grated on Daria’s nerves. She shook the rest of the vodka into the warm water and said to the woman: “Drink a bit of this.”
“Hey, what about me, don’t I need spoiling too?” came a gruff, somewhat wheedling voice, and Daria saw the broad stooped figure of a man somewhere in his forties, though he might have been sixty. He had come in unnoticed, wearing a fur hat and a shapeless greatcoat cut out of heavy embroidered curtains. He was shivering; his eyes glittered in a face blackened up to the cheekbones by two days’ growth of stubble. Trofimova introduced him: “This is Mitrofanov, the head mechanic at the shoe plant… a Hero of Labor…”
“Hero my foot,” Mitrofanov growled, bending over the sick woman, “what I say is, if your sister keeps on with her heroics much longer she’s gonna die, and what good would that do? You explain to them, it’s all about holding on. The victory will be won by the living, not the dead.”
He spoke tenderly to the recumbent form: “C’mon, Tamarka, Tamarochka, open your peepers, don’t cha recognize me?”
The sick girl moved restively.
“It’s you, Anisim Savich, I feel better now… What’s the matter? Am I going to be late? I’m on the third shift…”
“Forget the third shift,” said Mitrofanov somberly. “They know you there; you’re not getting out of bed, and you’re staying put. You have nothing to fear.”
Daria was opening the canned fish. “Feed her this, all of it, please! And give her these pills, six times a day. Is that clear?” She spoke with all the authority she could muster, because four greedy eyes had locked onto the pale fatty piece of fish. “You know what, I think I’ll feed her myself.” “Safer bet by far,” drawled Mitrofanov. “Sit up, Tamarka, open wide…” The young girl obeyed, but was unable to swallow very much. “No more, I feel sick…” “Right then, split the rest between you,” Daria ordered. She wormed a flake of chocolate between the girl’s teeth. “No thanks, couldn’t possibly,” Mitrofanov said, and sniggered.
“It’s only exhaustion?” asked Daria, smiling at the patient.
“What do you think?” said Mitrofanov with an odd look of satisfaction. “This whole town’s like that. Where’ve you dropped in from, Citizen?”
“From Kazakhstan,” Daria said, immediately regretting a spontaneity against regulations.
“Sand, snakes, and camels… Wish I was there now.”
He was an odd mixture of malice and cordiality, with the shrewdness of a woodland bandit. “Not bad at all, that army fish… Had a whole tin to myself on Revolution day.” One sensed in him the canny old working man who knows how to steal and get away with it, how to make the most of a piece of metal or leather, how to trade a switchblade or stiletto in the marketplace among flocks of soldiers; a hero nonetheless, on whom productivity could rely. He stopped Daria in the shadowy passageway.
“They’re a pair of hopeless ninnies,” he told her. “I don’t give ’em two months if they don’t learn, and soon. The little one’s a sainted team leader, never misses a day, volunteers her time off to be one up on the quotas and what have you! The eldest, now, she’s in better shape, being as useless with her hands as with her head. But she don’t get as much to eat, her, except when she’s mopping the kitchen and makes off with the scrapings of the scrapings… Tell them to put the brakes on, that’s my advice as a Labor Hero… We got to work ourselves to death for the defense effort, but not stone dead. If we all kill ourselves dead, all at the same time, who’s left to win the war? Tactics and strategy, see! Right or wrong, Citizen?”
Ashamed of being healthy and well-fed herself, Daria murmured, “Right, of course. But how to go about it?”
“Oh, there’s no end of tricks,” Mitrofanov said. “The proletariat knows them backward and forward. If there weren’t such tricks we’d have been done for years ago, take it from me, there’d be precious little left of the proletariat by now… Well, got seventy minutes left for my beauty sleep. Good night, Citizen.”
Back home, Daria lifted the sacks covering the little window. It was just before dawn, though the night gave no sign of it. This spiral suction deep inside is hunger — spreading like frost through the entrails. And this stabbing emptiness in the depth of my being, that’s loneliness. Hunger and loneliness, two tentacles of death. I too am beginning to die, almost painlessly, with no bitterness, in a house full of industrious lives ebbing toward death. No other kind of abode exists in this besieged, half-perished city. The awesome might of the half perished! If there is to be a victory some day, it will belong to them… The Mitrofanovs will have pulled through yet again. They will be vengeful, they will be barbaric, they will be cruelly, bafflingly tender, full of breathtaking sagacity… They will deploy an instant flair in the fight for life, not dissimilar perhaps to the instincts of Ice Age primitives. What’s more, they will have the enterprising brains of civilized men who have been cured of refinements. They will have the great yearning for warmth and fraternity of disaster survivors, in the knowledge that primal heroism is redemptive only when it is underpinned by communal egoism. What will we make of this peerless energy, for ourselves and for the world? A lever, or an ax for splitting skulls?
This question was tied to the shadow of Sacha. The thought of being back in the office the next day among military men who ate their fill, strutted their medals, computed the precise amount of shed blood, projected foreseeable casualties from hunger, cold, and fire, making this work into a rather placid profession, never uttering a living word, filled Daria with revulsion. Because I belong to the generation of those who were shot, the unadaptable generation! she said bitterly. What if I applied for an intelligence assignment with one of the partisan units operating behind enemy lines, in the snow-blanketed forest? Farewell, Klim. After the war, Klim. After death, Klim.
And Klim appeared to her under formless trees thickly veiled in purest white. “Come with me,” he said, “I’ll light us a big fire. Come and be happy… Tomorrow we’ll begin killing, because we love the earth, mankind, and life. Come, I love you…” “You mustn’t love me,” Daria answered through gathering mists of sleep, “I am a half-dead woman. I mean yes, you must love me… I’m a half-dead woman.” A wolf cub with a gallant plume of a tail and strangely understanding little eyes watched her from behind a screen of green-needled pine boughs, the kind that are placed on coffins with red ribbons.
III. Brigitte, Lightning, Lilacs
And still the habit of believing
more in the earth than in the grave…
IF THERE ever had been, if there ever were, somewhere in the world, another reality, it now remained in human memory as no more than a recollection, tinged more by doubt and sadness than by nostalgia. The past marked the older people most deeply, and some of them needed no prompting to talk about it, harping ad nauseam on the good old days. It was understandable that they could not avoid being intoxicated by the past, and that it pained them even more than it pained the people who wished they would shut up. In their chatter, periods and wars got mixed up: Let’s see, was that before the first war or the second? Was that under the Kaiser, the Revolution, Weimar, Versailles, under Brüning or the Führer? Explain yourself! How many wars have there been, sir? The revolution was also a war, you must realize that! The clearest answers — coming from people who seemed to have lived through so many events in the half century that they were probably exaggerating — remained obscure; and the price of a good dinner or the comfort of a railway journey came to sound like preposterous yarns or, more exactly, the gibberish of half-wits. So when Frau Krammerz, down in the bomb shelter below Kellerman’s Rathskeller under vaults glistening with saltpeter, took to reminiscing about how life used to be — the Sundays in the country, the exquisite pastries one could order from the cake shop, the party for Gertrude’s first communion — some of the adults looked at her with hatred; and they were delighted when a little girl took her grubby fingers out of her mouth to declare, with withering finality: “S’not true.” “Quiet, you snot-nose little guttersnipe…” The child went on with her irresistible “s’not true.” Nobody got up to give her a smack, in part because the ground was shaking (bombs were raining down on the other side of the canal, there being nothing left to flatten on this side, the connoisseurs explained, so it would be murderous bad luck if…), but mostly because she was, quite obviously, right. Frau Krammerz suddenly realized it herself. Her face, more wrinkled than an empty bottle, skin crudely decorated by primitives, crumpled as she brushed away her tears and admitted, with a pitiable attempt at a laugh, “No, it’s not true, mein Gott!”