A Hero's Daughter Page 9

  The waiter brings the beer, sets the glasses down amid the moist streaks on the table. Suddenly, completely clearly, as it might occur to someone who has drunk nothing, a question rings out in Ivan’s head: “But where on earth can he be now, that little sailor? And that curly-haired accordionist?” And suddenly he is seized with pity for both of them. And, without knowing why, with pity, too, for his drinking companions. His chin begins to tremble and, half lying across the table, he holds out his arms to embrace them and can no longer see anything through his tears.

  Before leaving, they drink the third bottle of vodka and go staggering out into the street, holding one another up. The night is full of stars. The snow crunches underfoot. Ivan slips and falls. The signalman picks him up with difficulty.

  “It’s nothing! It’s nothing, Ivan! Don’t worry. We’ll take you home. You’ll get there, don’t worry….”

  After that something strange occurs. Nikolai turns off through a gateway. The signalman sits Ivan down on a bench, goes off in search of a taxi and never comes back. Ivan stands up with difficulty. “I’ll get there on my own,” he thinks. “There’s a store next, then the District Committee, and after that I turn left….”

  But on the corner, instead of seeing the four-story apartment building and its familiar entrance gate, he sees a broad avenue with cars driving along it. He stops, baffled, leans against the wall of the house. Then he retraces his steps unsteadily, in retreat from this broad avenue that does not exist in Borissov. Yet these snowdrifts certainly exist in Borissov. He needs to skirt around them. And this bench and this fence also exist. Yes, that’s it, all he has to do now is to cross this courtyard…. But at the end of the courtyard an improbable apparition rears up — a vast skyscraper, like a rocket, illuminated by thousands of windows. And once more he retraces his footsteps, slips, falls, picks himself up again, holding on to a tree covered in hoarfrost. Once more he heads for the familiar snowdrifts, and the bench, without realizing that he is not in Borissov but in Moscow, wandering around Kazan Station, where he got off the train this morning.

  Two vehicles pulled up almost simultaneously beside the snowdrift where Ivan lay. One of them, from the militia, was collecting drunks to take them to the sobering-up station; the other was an ambulance. The first of these was doing its midnight rounds, the second had been summoned by a kindhearted pensioner, who from his window had seen Ivan lying on the ground. His shapka had flown off five yards away when he fell. None of the passersby out late at night had taken a fancy to it. Who needs a truck driver’s battered old headgear? As he fell, Ivan had grazed his cheek on the edge of the bench, but the cold blood had solidified without even staining the snow.

  A drowsy militiaman got down from the cabin of the van; a young nurse sprang out of the ambulance, with a coat thrown on over her white blouse. She bent over the prostrate body and exclaimed: “Oh! This isn’t our responsibility. What’s the point of calling us? He’s a drunk! Any fool can see that. But they call you up and say, ‘Come quick. There’s someone on the ground, in the road. Maybe knocked down by a car. Or else a heart attack …’ A likely story! You can smell him a mile off.”

  The militiaman bent over as well, picked up the body by the collar and turned him over on its back.

  “Well, we’re not going to take him, that’s for sure. There’s blood all over his face. A boozer? Sure he’s a boozer. But there’s a physical injury…. It’s down to you to treat him. It’s not our job.”

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve,” cried the nurse angrily. “Treat him! He’s going to throw up all over the ward. And who’s going to clear up after him? It’s hard enough finding cleaners as it is….”

  “Well, picking up people with physical injuries isn’t our job, I’m telling you. He may croak in the van. Or under the shower. He could bleed to death in there.”

  “What do you mean ‘bleed to death’? Don’t make me laugh. From that little scratch? Here, take a look at it, this physical injury.

  The nurse crouched down, extracted a little vial of alcohol and a cotton pad out of her satchel and wiped the scratch on Ivan’s cheek.

  “There. There’s your ‘physical injury’” she said, showing the militiaman the cotton wool lightly stained with brown. “It’s not even bleeding.”

  “Fine, fine. Since you’ve started treating him, you’d better finish the job. Pick him up and let’s call it a day.”

  “No chance! Picking up drunks is your job. Otherwise what’s the point of having all your sobering-up stations?”

  “What’s the point? If we take him in now with his mug all bloody, tomorrow morning he’s going to be howling: ‘The cops worked me over.’ Everyone’s wised up these days. At the smallest bit of trouble, wham! you get a story in the paper: ‘Violation of socialist legality’ Sure thing! We’ve got glasnost now…. Thanks to Gorbachev, the whole place is swarming with rabble-rousers. Under Stalin they’d soon have put you where you belonged. If that’s how it is, write me a certificate testifying that he’s got a bloody head. Otherwise I’m not taking him.”

  “But I don’t have the right to make out a medical certificate until he’s been examined.”

  “Go ahead then. Examine him …”

  “No chance. We don’t have anything to do with drunks!”

  The argument dragged on. The driver got down from the ambulance; the second militiaman emerged from the yellow “Special Medical Service” van. He poked the body with his foot as it lay there and muttered: “Why are you wasting your breath? He may have kicked the bucket already Let me have a look.”

  He bent over and brutally applied pressure behind Ivan’s ears with two fingers.

  “Hey you should remember this little dodge.” He laughed, winking at the nurse. “It’s better than all your smelling salts. This’11 wake the dead.”

  In response to intolerable pain, Ivan opened wild eyes and gave a dull groan.

  “Alive!” chuckled the militiaman. “It’ll take more than that to finish him off. He looks like he’s lying under the streetlight to get a tan. All right, Seryozha, I suppose we’d better pick him up. There’s no way we can leave this guy in the hands of these quacks. They do in more people than they cure.”

  “And you’re plaster saints, I suppose!” retorted the nurse, glad to have won her battle at last. “I tell you, there was an article on sobering-up stations in Pravda the other day. When they bring a drunk in they empty his pockets. They steal his pay, his watch. They take everything. …”

  “All right, that’s enough of that,” the militiaman cut in. “We’ve had a bellyful as it is, what with Gorbachev and his speeches. Him and his perestroïka are a pain in the neck.

  The nurse jumped into the ambulance, slammed the door, and the vehicle drove off.

  They lugged Ivan into the van and let him fall on the floor. One of the militiamen got behind the wheel, the other unbuttoned the top of Ivans coat, searching for his papers. He took out a battered service record, held it up to the light and began to decipher it. Suddenly he uttered a whistle of surprise.

  “Oh my God, Seryozha, he’s a Hero of the Soviet Union! And those goddamned medics wouldn’t take him off our hands! So now what are we going to do?”

  “Well, what can we do? It’s all the same to us if he’s a Hero of the Soviet Union or even a goddamned cosmonaut. Our job’s simple: we find him, we pick him up, we take him back, that’s all. And at the station it’s up to the officer to decide. Okay, let’s go. Close that fucking door, my feet are frozen already.”

  Ivan had taken to drinking immediately after his wife’s death. He drank a lot, fiercely, without explaining it to himself, without repenting, without ever promising himself to stop. Borissov is a small town. Soon everyone knew about the Hero turned drunkard.

  The head of the motor pool called Ivan in from time to time and lectured him indulgently, as if talking to a child who has done something silly.

  “Listen, Dmitrich, this is not good at all. You’ve got another two years before
you retire and you carry on like this. That’s twice they’ve picked you up dead drunk in broad daylight. It’s lucky the local militia know you, otherwise you’d soon have been sent to the sobering-up station. I know you’ve got your troubles, but you’re not a finished man. And don’t forget you’re behind a wheel. You risk either knocking someone over or getting killed yourself And look what a bad example you’re setting the young people.”

  They summoned him to the District Committee and also to the Veterans’ Council, but in vain.

  At the District Committee, Ivan listened to the Secretary’s catalogue of reproaches and admonitions. Suddenly he interrupted him in a weary voice: “That’s enough pettifogging nonsense, Nikolayich. You’d be better employed working out how to feed the people. Instead of which you talk a lot of rubbish — the Communist’s duty, civic responsibility…. It’s a pain to listen to you!”

  The Party Secretary burst out furiously: “Your drinking makes you forget where you are, Hero! As a member of the Party, how can you say such things?”

  Ivan rose to his feet, leaned across the table toward the Secretary and observed in a low, dry voice: “As for me, now I can do anything…. Understood? And as for my Party card, I could chuck it right back at you here on the table, if I chose!”

  At the Veterans’ Council the retired officers gathered there were looking forward with relish to some free entertainment. Ivan disappointed them all. He offered no explanation or defense, and did not argue with his irate accusers. He sat there, nodding his head and even smiling. He thought: “What’s the point of offending these old men? Let them talk! Let them feel good. There’s no malice in them, they’re just bored. Look at that one, he’s getting so worked up he’s making his medals jangle. What a funny old codger. All dressed up and no place to go …”

  The entertainment did not take place.

  Toward May 9, as if he were observing a self-imposed fast, Ivan stopped drinking. He ran a broom over the rooms that for a long time had looked uninhabited. He cleaned his best suit, polished his medals and his Gold Star with tooth powder, and waited for the Pioneers. They usually came a few days before the Victory celebration, presented him with an invitation on a colorful card, and, after stammering out their prepared message, bolted down the staircase shouting gleefully.

  He spent nearly a week waiting for them. “The little rascals must have forgotten,” he thought. “They’ve got other things on their minds. Well, all the better for me. It was tiring in the long run, telling the same stories year after year.”

  But on May 8 he put on all his medals and went out. He wondered curiously: “Why haven’t they invited me? If they’ve invited someone else, who is it?”

  He walked past the school twice, but no one came out to meet him. Then he sat down in a square from which the entrance to the school could be seen. People walking past him greeted him with little disdainful smiles, as if to say: “Aha! The Hero! You’ve been seen dead drunk under a bench

  In his head, inevitably, he heard the echo of phrases from his talks in days gone by: “Now then, my friends, just picture the scorching heat on the steppe in the summer of ‘42. In the distance Stalingrad is in flames and we’re just a handful of soldiers….”

  He kept turning to look at the school gate more and more often, was annoyed with himself, but could not overcome his curiosity. At length the gate opened wide and the stream of schoolchildren poured out into the street, shouting and squabbling. The “lesson on remembrance and patriotism” was over. Then a soldier appeared in the doorway escorted by a teacher. The soldier was holding three red carnations in his hand. Ivan went up to him in the alleyway He was a young sergeant, the son of one of the drivers in their motor pool.

  “Alexei, you’re discharged already?” asked Ivan, with genial amazement.

  “Since last autumn, Ivan Dmitrevich. And after that I spent ages in hospital. I had a foot blown off. You can see the kind of clodhoppers I wear now.”

  Ivan looked down. On one of the young sergeant’s feet he was wearing a monstrously swollen orthopedic ankle boot.

  “And how’s it going back there in Afghanistan? It’s a funny thing, but they never mention it in the papers now….”

  “Well, what could they say about it? Back there we’re up to our necks in shit….”

  “So, you’ve just come from the school?”

  “Yes, they invited me to the lesson on patriotism.”

  “So what did the children ask you?”

  “They asked about the duty of internationalist soldiers and about the brotherhood of arms. And one rascal at a desk in the back row stood up and said: ‘Please tell me, Comrade Staff-Sergeant, how many mujahideen did you kill yourself?’ Well, there you are…. The artificial limbs they make for us are just god-awful. When you walk down the street you have to grit your teeth. And when you take them off your boots are full of blood. It’s as hard as … Well, Ivan Dmitrevich, have a good holiday. Happy Victory Day! Here, look at these flowers. Take them, Dmitrevich. You’re a Hero, you deserve them. Give them to your wife…. What…? But when …? Good God! That’s terrible! I knew nothing about it. I’ve only been out of the hospital for five days. Well, keep your chin up, Ivan Dmitrevich. And … Happy Victory Day!”

  A year later Ivan retired. The head of the motor pool heaved a sigh of relief. They bid him a solemn farewell; they presented him with a heavy gray marble writing set and an electronic watch. The watch Ivan sold almost immediately: vodka had gone up and his pension was barely adequate. No one wanted the writing set, not even for three rubles.

  That year Gorbachev came to power. Ivan watched his speeches on television. It was the month of May, the time for his abstinence. This animated and garrulous man, Gorbachev, created a strange impression when he spoke, forever removing his glasses, putting them on again and cracking jokes: “We must develop the system of vegetable plots,” he would say, waving his hands like a conjuror seeking to hypnotize his audience. “You know, little gardens, little vegetable plots. Several million men among us want to become the owners of land but we, for the moment, cannot satisfy their demands.

  There were very few people then who suspected that what this whole scenario, all these Vegetable plots,’ amounted to really was a magician’s patter to lull people’s vigilance. In Russia it was always necessary to act out this drama of humility as a preliminary to climbing onto the throne. Khrushchev performed folk dances in front of Stalin, Brezhnev feigned a heart attack in front of Kaganovich, Gorbachev performed magic tricks in front of the old mafiosi of the Politburo, whom he had to overcome.

  That year, as in the previous year, Ivan pulled himself together for several days. He did the housework in the apartment, walked through the town wearing all his medals, visited the cemetery. The photo of Tatyana in its oval frame set in the monument had turned yellow and the rains had warped it. But to Ivan she seemed strangely alive.

  As he passed by the town’s wall of honor he saw they had already removed his own photo. All that remained was an empty metal frame and the stupid remnant of an inscription “Soviet Hero … from Motor Pool No. 1 …”

  People did not forget that he was a Hero. For old time’s sake the militia would bring him home when he was laid low by vodka. When he did not have enough money for his bottle at the store the salesclerk would give him credit.

  Gradually his apartment emptied. He sold the carpet he had bought in Moscow with Tatyana in the old days. He disposed of all the salable furniture for almost nothing. Gorbachev’s speech about little vegetable plots was the last transmission he watched: he swapped his television set for three bottles of vodka. He carried all this out with a casual unconcern that surprised even himself He actually went as far as to get rid of the rings and earrings preserved in his wife’s jewel box and several silver spoons.

  One day in autumn he was unable to get hold of money for drinking. The cold wind kept his drinking companions at home; there was a new salesclerk working at the store now; his neighbors laughed and slammed t
he door in his face when he tried to borrow three rubles. For some time he wandered through the cold, dirty streets, then went home and took his best suit, complete with all the brass, out of the wardrobe. For a moment he studied the heavy gilded and silvered disks, fingering the cold metal, and removed the Order of the Red Banner of War. He did not have the courage to try to sell it in Borissov. People knew him too well here, and no doubt no one would be tempted. He went through his pockets, gathered up all the change, and bought a ticket to Moscow. He sold his medal there for twenty-five rubles and got drunk.

  After that he went to Moscow almost every week.

  The one thing he never touched was his Gold Star. He knew he would never touch it.

  So it was that when they went through his clothes at the sobering-up station in Moscow they found two “For Gallantry” medals and the Order of Glory second class, all wrapped in a scrap of crumpled newspaper. On it Ivan had written in ballpoint pen: “ten rubles” for each medal, “twenty-five rubles” for the Order, so as to avoid any mistakes in his drunken state — all the more because the sale would have to be made quickly in a dark corner. The duty officer informed the criminal investigation department of this find.