A Hero's Daughter Page 6

  When they showed this scene for the first time at the studio one of the bosses asked the director: “So why couldn’t he go to the square itself? What’s all that about just ten minutes’ walk away from’? It’s like doing a report on Red Square from Gorky Park!”

  “I already asked him that….” The director tried to excuse himself. “According to him, there’s not a Frenchman to be found in the square. Nothing but blacks and Arabs. Yes, that’s what he said. I give you my word. He said, ‘They’ll all think it was shot in Africa and not in Paris at all.’ That’s why he moved closer to the center to find some whites.”

  “Unbelievable!” bayed an official in the darkened auditorium. And the showing continued. The camera focused on a huddled clochard and a row of gleaming shop windows. And then once more there appeared yellowing shots of documentary footage from the period: the gray steppe, tanks bobbing up and down, as if at sea, soldiers captured, still alive, on camera.

  And Demidov appeared once more, no longer in his grease-stained jacket but in a suit, wearing all his decorations. He was in a classroom, seated behind a desk that was decked out with a little vase containing three red carnations. In front of him schoolchildren were religiously drinking in his words.

  The film ended with an apotheosis: the gigantic statue of the Mother Country, holding a sword aloft, towered up into the blue sky. Then the Victory Parade taking place on Red Square in 1945. The soldiers throwing down German flags at the foot of the Lenin Mausoleum. Hitler’s personal standard could be seen in the foreground as it fell. After that, against the exultant sound of music, Stalingrad-Volgograd, in all its splendor, arises once more from the ruins, filmed from a helicopter.

  And everything concluded with one final chord: Brezhnev appearing on the platform at the Twenty-sixth Party Congress, talking about the Soviet Union’s policies for peace.

  By about the middle of April the film was ready. Demidov had patiently endured the excitement of the filming and, in answering questions, had even managed to include the story of the little wellspring in the wood.

  “Well now, Ivan Dmitrevich,” the director said to him, when it was time to say goodbye. “On Victory Day, May ninth, or perhaps the day before, you must sit down with all the family in front of the television.”

  The film was called: The Heroic City on the Volga.

  On the afternoon of May 8, Ivan Dmitrevich was not working. He had been invited to the school for the traditional chat. He gave his usual talk and returned home with the three carnations in his hand.

  Tatyana was still at work. He puttered about in the apartment. Then he draped his best jacket, with its armor plating of medals, over the back of a chair, switched on the set and settled himself down on the divan. The film about Stalingrad was due to start at six.

  * * *

  The workshop foreman flourished the bottle and began pouring alcohol into the glasses: “Very good, my friends, one last nip and we all go home….” They all drank, slipped what remained of the food into their bags and left. In the street the women workers wished one another a happy holiday and went back to their lodgings.

  Tanya — no longer a girl, she was now known as Tatyana Kuzminichna — consulted her watch. “I have just enough time before the film to go to the store and pick up the veterans’ parcel.” Like all those who had served in the war, she would receive this package in the section of the store closed to ordinary mortals. People would watch the line of veterans there and quietly grumble.

  This time it was a real holiday parcel: four hundred grams of ham, two chickens, a can of sprats, and a kilo of buckwheat flour. Tatyana Kuzminichna paid, loaded it all into her bag and started for the door. One of the veterans called out to her.

  “Hi there, Kuzminichna. Is it a good one, today’s parcel?”

  “Yes, not bad. But there’s no butter.”

  “There’s butter to be had across the road today, at the Gastronom. But there’s a line a mile long!”

  Tatyana went over to the Gastronom store, saw a motley, winding line, looked at the time. The film was due to start in fifteen minutes. “Why not try to avoid standing in line?” she thought. “After all, it’s my right.” She took her veteran’s pass out of her bag and began to push her way toward the cashier.

  The tail end of the line swarmed out into the street and inside the store everything was dark with people. They pressed against one another, beating a path toward the counter. They shouted, they hurled insults at one another. The ones who had already made their purchases were weaving their way toward the exit, their eyes shining feverishly.

  “How many packs per person?” the people at the end of the line called out from the street.

  “Two each,” replied the people in the middle.

  “Give me six,” whined a woman close to the counter. “I’ll take my children’s as well.”

  “So where are they, your children?” asked the exasperated salesclerk.

  “Well, here she is, this little girl!” exclaimed the woman, tugging at the hand of a frightened schoolgirl with a satchel.

  “And where’s the other one?” insisted the sales-clerk.

  “Out there in the street, in the stroller.”

  The woman, who had finally got her way, rushed toward the exit, clutching the six packs of butter to her chest.

  A somewhat tipsy little bystander called out merrily: “But they’re not her kids! I know her. She doesn’t have any kids. She’s borrowed them from her sister! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  The line gave a spasmodic shudder and moved a pace forward. The manager appeared from the doorway to the storeroom, walked through the store and called toward the end of the line that was getting longer: “Don’t count on it at the back there. The butter’s almost run out. Only three more cases. It’s not worth your waiting. There won’t be enough for everyone, that’s for sure. You’re wasting your time.”

  But the people kept flocking up, asking who was the last and joining the line. And each of them was thinking: “Who knows? Maybe there’ll still be enough for me!”

  Tanya reached the cashier and, over the head of another woman, held out a crumpled three-ruble note and her veteran’s pass. She was not expecting such a unanimous explosion. The crowd seethed and bellowed with one voice: “Don’t let her go in front of the others!”

  “Isn’t that just typical! These veterans! Let them buy their butter in their own store!”

  “They already give them parcels. And we’ve been waiting here with the kids for three hours!”

  “My son was killed in Afghanistan. But I don’t put on airs. I wait my turn like everyone else.”

  “Don’t give her anything! They already get enough privileges.”

  Someone gave her a shove with a shoulder, the crowd gave a slithery twitch and slowly edged her away from the till. Tatyana did not argue, gripped the money and the book in her injured hand, and went back toward the exit to join the line. The crowd was so dense that different lines were mingling together. Afraid of losing their places, people pressed against each other. Suddenly someone tugged at Tatyana’s sleeve.

  “Kuzminichna, come in front of me. Maybe we can get some of this butter.”

  It was the old caretaker from their factory, Aunt Valya. Tatyana stood beside her and, so as to lull the vigilance of the people behind, they began chatting quietly together. After a moment Tatyana slipped into the throng without anyone noticing. Aunt Valya was halfway along.

  “It’s not too bad. This lot won’t take more than an hour,” she remarked. “We’ll get there before they close. As long as there’s still some butter left!”

  Tatyana looked at her watch. It was six o’clock. “It’s a shame, I’m going to miss the film about Ivan,” she thought. “But it’s on again tomorrow morning.”

  “That’s odd,” thought Ivan. “Tatyana’s still not back. She must be traipsing around the shops. Never mind. She’ll see it tomorrow.”

  On the screen a marshal was already talking in a solemn bass voice and a restl
ess reporter with prying eyes was asking him questions. This was followed by the jerky sequence of documentary footage from the period: the buildings of Stalingrad gently collapsing amid black clouds, as if in a state of weightlessness, beneath silent explosions.

  When these shots were shown Ivan could not hold back his tears. “I’ve become an old man,” he thought, biting his lip. His chin trembled slightly. From time to time he made silent comments to the soldiers running across the screen: “Just look at that idiot running along without keeping his head down! Get down, get down for heaven’s sake, imbecile…. Pooh! And they call that an attack! They’re rushing straight into the enemy machine gun fire without artillery support! By the look of it, there are so many people in Russia that soldiers don’t matter!”

  At length Ivan himself appeared on the screen. He froze, listening to every one of his own words, not recognizing himself. “And then, after that battle,” he was saying, “I went into … there was this little wood there … I look and what I see’s a spring. The water’s so pure! I lean over and see my own reflection…. It was very strange, you know. I’m looking at myself and I don’t recognize myself….” Here his story broke off and the voice-over, warm and penetrating, took up the tale: “The native soil… the soil of the Mother Country … this was what gave strength to the weary soldier, this was the truly maternal care that nurtured his courage and bravery. It was from this inexhaustible wellspring that the Soviet fighter drew his revivifying joy, the sacred hatred of the enemy, the unshakeable faith in Victory. …”

  * * *

  The salesclerk, trying to be heard above the noise of the crowd, shouted in a strident voice: “The butters finished!” and, turning toward the cashier added, in even more ringing tones: “Lyuda, don’t make out any more tickets for butter.”

  Tanya was handed two packs from the bottom of the third case. The last two went to Aunt Valya. They smiled at each other as they put them into their bags and began to elbow their way toward the exit.

  The disappointed crowd froze for a moment, as if unable to believe that all that time had been spent in vain, then shook itself and began to trickle slowly through the narrow door. Meanwhile there were people trying to squeeze in from outside who did not know the sale of butter was finished. At that moment a rumor began to circulate. Sausage had been delivered. The whole crowd flowed back toward the counter, forming into a line once more. More people than ever piled in from the street.

  The news reached the manager’s ears. She emerged from the storeroom again and bellowed out in a mocking voice, as if she were speaking to children: “What’s all this then? You must be out of your minds. What’s all this about sausage? There’s not a scrap of sausage here. And anyway, we’re closing in half an hour.”

  And now all anyone could think of doing was getting away. It was stiflingly hot in this compact mass of humanity. Tatyana was trying not to lose Aunt Valya, who was weaving her way very adroitly toward the door.

  Everyone was infuriated. They took a malign pleasure in jostling one another, eager for an opportunity to exchange insults. Tatyana was already close to the exit when she was swept away, as if by a whirlwind, and pinned up against a wall. Someone’s shoulder — she was aware of a woman’s blue raincoat — pressed hard into her breast. She tried to break free but did not succeed, so densely packed was the crowd. Her very powerlessness seemed to her ridiculous. She tried to transfer her bag to her other hand, but just at that moment was surprised to feel she could no longer breathe. Suddenly there was a silence, as if deep under water, and now she could make out all too clearly the gray cloth of the coat barring her way. When, with the time lag of a distant explosion, the pain swept over her, she could not even utter a cry.

  She was borne to the front of the building by a closely packed crowd…. No one had noticed a thing. It was only on the steps that, as it dispersed, the crowd let her go. Tatyana collapsed gently. The butter and the veteran’s pass fell out of her bag. People stumbled against her body. Some moved away hastily, others bent over her. The merry little bystander roared with laughter: “Well, what do you know? The little mother’s taken a drop too many in advance of tomorrow’s celebration!” Aunt Valya pushed aside the gaping onlookers, came up to her and called out in piercing tones: “Help! Look! This woman’s been taken ill! Quickly, someone call an ambulance!”

  Ivan arrived at the hospital wearing the jacket of his best suit. He had hurried through the evening streets accompanied by the jangling of his decorations. He was not allowed into intensive care. He stared at the doctor who was making reassuring remarks to him but took nothing in. His Gold Star, which had turned back to front as he ran, looked like a child’s toy.

  The following morning, May 9, the same doctor, reeking of tobacco, his face hollow from being on night duty, emerged and sat down in silence with Ivan on the wooden benches in the corridor. In some arcane corner of his mind, Ivan had already had time, not to consider what his life would be like without Tatyana, but to have a sharp and desperate presentiment of it. As this feeling welled up, the echoing void terrified him. He sat there without asking the doctor anything, following with an absent gaze the actions of an old cleaning woman as she wiped the dusty windows.

  Finally the doctor gave a sigh and said softly: “She should never have risked herself in our crowds. For her even wiping a window was dangerous.”

  * * *

  Olya arrived the next day She was so beautiful it was almost unseemly She herself felt uneasy with her tight skirt and the sound of her high heels in their now silent flat amid the whispers of people dressed in black whom she hardly knew. One of the women gave her a black head scarf for the funeral. But even with this scarf her beauty was astonishing. She wept a great deal. What devastated her was not so much the grim, emaciated face of her mother as the fragility of everything she had believed to be so natural and solid. Everything was crumbling before her eyes. From being a dashing hero, her father had turned into an old fellow with all the stuffing knocked out of him and red eyes. Now her parents’ lives struck her as unbelievably drab. A wretched, starved childhood, the war, more starvation and then right up to old age — no, right up to death itself— that absurd furniture factory, and that truck driver’s cab stinking of diesel oil. Olya looked around her in astonishment. The television her parents sat in front of each evening. The sofa bed where they slept. A photo on the bedside table: the two of them, still very young, before she was born, somewhere in the south, during the course of the only vacation trip of their lives. And just this photo, her father’s sandals — horrible sandals, reminiscent of dog muzzles —just her mother’s gesture, hiding her right hand, all this was enough to break her heart.

  Ivan hardly saw anything of his daughter. It was only on the last night, when the weary relatives had left them, that he came face to face with Olya. They were sitting one each side of the coffin, completely exhausted by the ceaseless agitation of the women fussing around, by the day’s endless and meaningless whisperings. Ivan looked at his daughter and thought: “She’s a woman now. She’s of an age to get married. It seems only yesterday that Tatyana was wrapping her in swaddling clothes. How time flies! Nursery school, grade school, and now Moscow, the Institute … She needs to find a good man, one who doesn’t drink … a soldier…. Although those guys hit the bottle nowadays like nobody’s business … ! I must speak to her. Now that we’re burying her mother

  It was only at the station, when they were waiting for the Moscow train that Ivan said to her: “You must work hard, Olya. Just…” Olya laughed sweetly.

  “But Dad, I’ve only got a few more weeks of classes. I’m just about to do my final exams.”

  “Oh, really?” said Ivan, amazed and embarrassed. “So where will you go after that?”

  “Wherever my Country calls me to serve,” joked Olya.

  She kissed Ivan and boarded the train. She waved to her father through the window for a long time, as he stood motionless in his tired dark suit on the platform flooded with sunligh
t.

  * * *

  Olya already knew where her Country would call her to serve…. Some of the students in her year expected to make a painless transfer from lecture room benches to well-upholstered chairs, lined up for them by their relatives in high places. Others resignedly prepared themselves for the drudgery of technical translations in a dusty office. Yet others dreamed of immersing themselves as soon as possible in the whirl of Intourist, anticipating with delight the cavalcade of European faces passing by too rapidly to grow wearisome, thrilled, in advance, to think of all those little gifts and the mirage of Western life.

  For Olya it was quite different. Sergei Nikolaievitch of Room 27 had long since been replaced by his equally impressive colleague, Vitaly Ivanovich. It was when she met him in April that Olya learned where her Country would call her to serve.

  They were in a hotel room, which was where their meetings often took place. Vitaly Ivanovich was smiling mysteriously and rubbing his hands, like a man who has a pleasant surprise up his sleeve. They were talking about their current business, the foreigner whom Olya was taking care of at the time. Then, as if he had suddenly remembered something, Vitaly Ivanovich exclaimed: “Listen, Olya! You’ll soon be finished at your Institute. Then it’ll be time for appointments. Have you already had preliminary appointments …? So, what sector have they assigned you to …? Well, obviously! Technical translation relating to patents in a factory. It’s not the greatest fun in the world. What are you planning to do …? But no, listen. You shouldn’t be such a pessimist. There’ll be time enough for you to bury yourself in all that dust. I’ve talked about this with my superiors. Your services are greatly appreciated. That’s why it’s been decided to recommend you — not officially, you understand — for work as an interpreter at the International Trade Center…. Hold your horses, don’t get carried away. Save your thanks for later. I don’t think there’s any need for me to explain to you that at the Center there are hundreds and thousands of foreigners. And so, our specific work, intelligence and counterespionage, as they call it in the detective stories, takes precedence….”