‘Sure.’
‘I’ll go back with you. There are all sorts of things he’ll need –’
‘Leave it for a few hours. He’s asleep. He’s had his wound probed, and they removed the shrapnel. He’ll be knocked out at least until this afternoon. Anyway, it’s chaos down there. Stretchers all over the corridors, calls going out for blood, temporary theatres being set up all over the place. This is the first time I’ve been able to get off duty.’
She’s rummaging in the store-cupboard, reaching up with her back to him. The sash of her blue dressing-gown is pulled tight around her waist. She’s not slim, she’s rounded and strong. He takes in the curves of waist, hips, calves. He remembers the feel of her breasts. He’s sitting forward, and there’s so little space that her dressing-gown tickles his knees as she turns. He looks down quickly, so that she won’t see his thoughts in his face. He hears the chink of glass jars, then she brings out a jar of honey, opens it, and spreads honey on the bread for him. ‘Here, eat this.’
Bread and honey. It tastes like heather honey, dark and sweet and smoky. And the bread all the better for being a day old, with that chewy texture black bread gets on the second day. She’s put butter on it, as well as honey. He can taste the salt in the butter. Delicious. He hadn’t know he was so hungry until he swallowed the first mouthful. And the tea, just as he likes it, strong and with three lumps of sugar in the bottom of the glass. How did she know that was what he liked? She must have asked him, though he doesn’t remember it. He’s so tired. Tiredness is racing through him in waves. The truck, then the train. Hours of waiting on the platform beside the men. There was a crowd of peasants who’d flocked to the station with their bundles, and he made them break off bits of fencing to serve as makeshift stretchers. They didn’t want to do it at first.
‘We’ll get into trouble. They call this sabotage, don’t you know that? It’s more than my life’s worth to touch a railway fence. That’s State property, that is.’
‘That’s right, Sir, State property.’
They nodded self-righteously at one another, as if Andrei were a pitiful fool who didn’t know the way things worked.
‘I’ll give you State property,’ said Andrei. ‘I know your type. Break up those fences or I’ll order you to be shot.’
They believed him, maybe. Anyway, they did it, and so the worst cases got stretchers. And the strange thing was that the man who’d been the most difficult about the fencing fetched a bucket of water and a dipper, and went down the line of wounded, helping the men to drink. One of them was too far gone to drink from the dipper. The man with the bucket knelt down beside him. For five minutes he knelt there, dipping his fingers in the water and letting the wounded man suck them like a baby. And when he caught Andrei looking at him, a helpless, childish smile spread over his face, and he said, ‘This is what we do for the calves when they’re being weaned, Sir. Always works a treat with the calves.’
The sweetness of the tea spreads through Andrei. If he were alone he’d dip the last crust of the bread in it. Nothing nicer than black bread dipped in sweet tea…
‘Go ahead if you like. I don’t mind.’
‘What?’
‘Dip your bread. We all do here – me and Kolya, even Marina Petrovna.’
‘I shouldn’t be eating your ration.’
‘I gave it to you. Eat it.’
‘When I was in a dugout with your father, I used to dream about sitting in a kitchen, drinking tea.’ He doesn’t add that in the dream there was always a woman, warm, blurred, moving around the kitchen, brushing against him.
‘I know.’
‘You know?’ He doesn’t intend it, but all his meaning comes out in his voice. How can you know, when only we who were out there can ever possibly know.
‘I was there until two days ago. Farther back from the line than you, but not very far. We were digging an anti-tank-trap when the shells finally came too close even for us. Six women were killed, and then they ordered us out of the sector. We got a train back to Leningrad, just as if we’d been on a camping holiday. Except that the train was so full we weren’t sitting on seats, we were packed in so tight that even if we fell asleep we didn’t move an inch, we stayed upright. And the guard kept yelling, “Get those heads inside the window or they’ll be knocked off!”’
Packed in next to Evgenia. Their faces only centimetres apart.
Sometimes sleeping, sometimes talking about things which were over for ever, as if they were still going on.
‘I reckon pickaxe blisters are worse than spade blisters, don’t you?
‘No, a shovel’s worst of all, until you get used to it.’
‘That Lena still stuffing sausage into her face when we were running for cover. She wasn’t going to miss a mouthful, was she?’
‘Yeah, and shouting, “I’m not wasting bloody sausage!” when you told her to get a move on.’
‘Just about sums it all up, doesn’t it? “I’m not wasting bloody sausage.”‘
And Evgenia laughed, showing her white teeth.
But who could explain Evgenia to this young man who has never met her? Evgenia at the Baltic station, when their train had clanked into the platform at last, after spending hours in a siding just outside the city. The crowd of women clung together, even after they’d all got off the train. It was a warm morning, but they were shivering. In the everydayness of the station their filthy clothes and mud-caked boots looked terrible, though they’d seemed perfectly normal before. They were so tired that the station appeared like an hallucination of itself. But they were still in it together, a team, until a woman close to Anna said quietly, ‘Well, no use me hanging about here,’ picked up her pack, and trudged off alone, towards one of the exits.
They didn’t belong to one another any more. There were no orders to follow, no more digging and shovelling and entrenching to be done.
‘Not for now, anyway,’ said Evgenia, ‘though I reckon they’ll be needing us again, before long.’
Her red plait was coming undone, and her freckled skin was grimy.
‘So you go back to your place, and I’ll go back to mine,’ said Evgenia, ‘and maybe we’ll meet again.’ ‘Wait, I’ll give you my address.’
But Evgenia shrugged. ‘No need for that. If we’re meant to come together, we’ll come together. I don’t believe in all that giving addresses and keeping in touch.’
‘Don’t waste bloody sausage, that’s what I say,’ said Anna.
Evgenia laughed. Still laughing, she turned and plunged into the crowd, her red plait slapping between her shoulder blades as it unravelled. Suddenly she turned and bawled back:
‘And don’t let those hands get soft! Piss on your blisters!’
‘They pulled us back all along the line,’ says Anna to Andrei. ‘They couldn’t use us there any more, so we came home. I don’t know what’s going to happen next.’
‘We’ll consolidate –’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you know them? Those six who were killed, I mean. Were they friends of yours?’
‘Not really. Only one, who was killed earlier on. She was like a child, even though she was fifteen. She should never have been out there. She used to get me to brush her hair for her.’
‘You must have been close,’ says Andrei, trying to imagine the degree of intimacy which would be required before he brushed someone else’s hair. But of course, with women, it’s different.
‘No, I didn’t like her much. She was pretty, but she was spoiled. You know the type. Father in the Comintern, food parcels delivered to the apartment, summer camp at government resorts. I don’t suppose she’d ever stood in a queue in her life. But it wasn’t her fault.
‘I keep on thinking about her. You know the way you are at fifteen. Too much of some things, and not enough of others. Nothing had begun to add up for her, she wasn’t even really a person yet, and then she was dead. And we wrapped her up in a waiting-room curtain, with roses all over it. The worst thing is that the ro
ses looked so terrible. As big as cabbages, and the colour of mud.’
‘Don’t think about it.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’ll stick. You can’t go on remembering the curtains.’
‘Maybe it should stick.’
‘But not in you.’
He looks up at her, straight at her, intimate. No one looks at her like that. Even the nursery children, who long for her attention and are always trying to get as close to her as they can. When she tells them stories they creep forward, snuggling against her legs, patting her skirt. They notice everything about her. If she cuts her hair, or wears a new colour, or has had a bad night, they’ll pick it up at once.
‘Anna Mikhailovna, why are you looking in that face? Are you sad?’
She is their support system during the long days. They must check all the changes in her, in order to reassure themselves that she is still the same. And perhaps her father’s expression, when he looks at her, is not so very different. She is used to that kind of attention, and she can deal with it. But Andrei’s look makes her uncertain. He’s curious. He wants to know more. His gaze probes and grows close. Anna feels the warmth of her own skin, and the soft touch of her cotton wrapper on her thighs.
‘Have some more tea,’ she says, to restore her balance. She always feels safer when she is doing things for people. But he doesn’t seem to hear.
‘You have to protect yourself,’ he goes on. ‘Not become heartless, I don’t mean that. But when I first went on the wards, there were things that I couldn’t get out of my head for weeks. After a while I realized it wasn’t possible to be a doctor that way. You have to keep something inside yourself, that can’t be used up and taken away from you.’
‘And you’ve got that?’
‘I’m trying to. I suppose it’s the same for you, working in a nursery, with all those children. Your father told me about it. You must have had to work out a way of responding to them without being eaten alive.’
‘You’re right. But how strange that you knew it. Most people – my father, for instance – can’t see that my work involves anything of the kind. They see the routine and all the physical stuff you have to do – all that drudgery, he calls it – but they don’t imagine there can be any challenges. We go on and on about the workers, but because we’re all supposed to be improving ourselves all the time, and getting qualifications and making progress, we still can’t really value work unless it has status. So although my boss doesn’t understand anything about the children at all – in fact she doesn’t even like them – she’s the one who fills in the reports and makes decisions. And everyone accepts that this is the way it should be.’
‘Or maybe just that this is the way it is.’
‘It’s worse than that. We bow down to diplomas as if they were icons.’
‘Perhaps you’re right…’
‘No. I’m just prejudiced because I haven’t got any. Diplomas, I mean. And I’m sure I’ll be as bad as everyone else when it comes to Kolya. I’ll be shoving him on to get as many qualifications as he can. It won’t be hard for him. He can read already. He’s a real Levin.’
‘And you’re not?’
‘No, I’m not like them. All the Levins do brilliantly at school, and they love writing. Nothing is quite real to my father until he’s written it down. But I was nothing special at school.’
‘Like me.’
‘You’re a medical student.’
‘Yes, but I have to work at it. You wouldn’t believe how I have to work. But once we’re applying the theory, I’m fine. It’s a great feeling when patients come in and you notice a tiny thing about them – the colour of their eyeballs, or the way they stoop to one side. Even before they’ve started telling you what’s wrong, you’ve got an idea. That’s what I like.’
‘Yes.’
Without smiling, they exchange a glow of recognition. She watches his hands as he drinks the last of the tea. They are strong and broad, with long fingers. His hands look as if they know things. In the heat of the kitchen he’s unbuttoned his collar. There is a triangle of deep sunburn, and then a line of paler skin, fine and close-grained.
He puts down the glass, takes a small piece of folded paper from his breast-pocket and hands it to her.
‘This is the ward, and this is the name of the surgeon in charge. I’ve written it all down. You can come later. He’ll be awake then. But don’t be alarmed if he’s running a fever. It’s very common, at this stage, and it doesn’t mean there’s an infection.’
‘Of course, I understand,’ she says, even nodding her head as if to show her readiness and understanding. What is the matter with her? Why can’t she behave naturally? And why is she wearing this ugly old cotton wrapper of her mother’s? And above all why is she so conscious of the fabric against her nipples, rubbing them a little every time she changes position, making them harden until she’s afraid he’ll see their outline?
‘Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’
‘Perhaps, when you come to visit your father –’
‘I should have thanked you. It was such a shock when you came, and I thought you might have been –’
‘It was stupid to come so early. I ought to have thought. It was just that I wanted to tell you straight away that he was all right.’
He is holding her hand. Her nails are broken, and there are raised welts of callous across her palm. He doesn’t look, but he can feel them. He thinks of her digging with those hands. Without meaning to, he folds her fingers gently into a fist.
Well, goodbye.’
‘Yes.’
But they don’t separate. They stand close, her hand in Andrei’s. He takes her other hand. They stand like dancers: she sways a little, to music he almost believes she can hear. She is warm, fluid, soft.
‘Do you like dancing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Me too.’
We’ll go one night, shall we? If the bands are still playing.’ ‘They’re still playing at the Astoria. We could go there. You have to queue, but it’s worth it.’ ‘All right.’
They smile, too close, blindly. They want oblivion. They want night, and dancing.
Well, goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’
Dancing in the dark. That’s what they call it. Both of us together. I’ve never done it. Once I nearly did but I thought of Kolya. I thought, what if I get pregnant, and die?
I want to shut my eyes with him. Andrei Mikhailovich Alekseyev. Imagine, both our fathers are called Mikhail.
I want to shut my eyes with him. I want to see black velvet in front of us, and prickly stars. I don’t want to make tea for him, or take care of him. I want to dance in the dark with him. Can he tell that I want that?
11
‘Elizaveta Antonovna, two more unaccompanied children –’
‘Can’t you see I’m in the middle of important calculations?’ snaps Elizaveta Antonovna. The tip of her nose twitches. ‘Now I’ll have to add up these columns again. Take them into Hall Two with the other processed children, but for pity’s sake don’t go and mix them up with the unprocessed groups. And if you could kindly stop those boys running in and out of the end room. I can’t concentrate with all this noise.’
Elizaveta Antonovna ought to be in her element. She hasn’t had her clothes off for two days, as she’s already told Anna several times this morning. She just grabs a few hours’ sleep, then carries on. And where’s Anna been? Oh yes, of course, working on defences. But Elizaveta Antonovna doesn’t want to hear about that. What matters is what’s happening here, where she is.
‘So you’re back, are you? About time.’ Building defences has got nothing to do with the all-important crisis that circles around the vital figure of Elizaveta Antonovna. Lists, figures, snatching up of telephones, respectful listening to superiors and barking of orders at inferiors, that’s Elizaveta Antonovna.
The telephone cord has got twisted around the stand of her in-tray. Let her snatch it up one more time,
prays Anna. Let the cord pull tight and the tray slide off the edge of her desk. Let it fall on the floor and scatter all her important papers so that she’s got to spend an hour putting them in order and she won’t be able to stop us getting on with the work. But Elizaveta Antonovna notices the cord, frowns, untwists it.
Elizaveta Antonovna has been seconded to the District Evacuation Centre, and now she’s battling against all odds to fulfil her quota of processed children. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of children, who are now to be evacuated from Leningrad as soon as possible, into the deep rear. The Germans are going to attack from the air, everyone says. It could be worse than the blitz on London. Suddenly there is a cityful of children to be herded into buses and trams for the railway station.
Never has there been such an opportunity for lists, forms, quotas, processing and delegation. Rarely has a knowledge of the needs of children been of so little use. It’s a handicap, in fact.
‘I can’t go with them, I’m an essential worker. Here, take them. Remember, Nyusha, keep a hold of her hand, don’t let her run around or gobble up all her sandwiches before you even get on the train. Do what the lady tells you and you’ll soon be back home again. Quick now.’
You would have thought she felt nothing, but for the staring pallor of her face. The children, too, seemed numb. They were stuffed into their winter coats, as round as little cabbages. The little one held a bit of grey cloth, and stroked its silky edge against her face.
‘Put that back in your pocket. Only when you’re in bed, remember, or they’ll take it off you.’
The little girl whipped the cloth into her pocket, and huddled against Nyusha.
‘What’s this lady going to think of you, carrying round a bit of dirty old rag?’
The mother spat on her handkerchief, bent down, and briskly polished her daughters’ faces. ‘There. There’s good girls. Now then –’
But as she straightened up, Anna saw her face, tight with anguish.
She whispered, ‘Is it true what they say, that they’re bombing the railways the kids are going on?’