Life and Fate Page 11

  ‘No one wants to be friends with me, I’m too stupid and boring,’ she once said when they were at table. ‘No one will want to marry me. I’ll study to be a pharmacist and then go and live in a village.’

  ‘They don’t have pharmacies in remote villages,’ said Alexandra Vladimirovna.

  ‘And you’re being much too pessimistic about your marriage prospects,’ said Shtrum. ‘You’ve grown prettier during the last few months.’

  ‘Shut up!’ said Nadya, glaring at her father.

  That night Lyudmila saw Nadya reading a book of poetry, her thin bare arm sticking out from under the bedclothes.

  On another occasion Nadya came back from the university ration-centre and announced: ‘People, myself included, are vile swine to take advantage of all this. And Papa’s a swine to sell his talents for butter. Why should weak children and sick men and women have to starve just because they don’t understand physics and can’t fulfil work-plans three times over . . . ? Only the chosen can stuff themselves with butter.’

  That evening she said defiantly: ‘Mama, I want double helpings of honey and butter. I didn’t have time to eat this morning.’

  In many ways Nadya was just like her father. Lyudmila noticed that the traits in Nadya which Viktor found most irritating were those that he shared with her.

  On one occasion, Nadya, imitating her father’s way of speaking, said of Postoev: ‘He’s a rogue, a nonentity, a careerist!’

  Viktor was indignant. ‘How dare you, a half-educated schoolgirl, speak like that about an Academician?’

  But Lyudmila could remember very well how when Viktor was a student, he had abused the various academic celebrities in almost the same words. As for Nadya, Lyudmila could see that she was far from happy; she was difficult to get on with and extremely lonely.

  After Nadya’s departure, it was Viktor’s turn to have breakfast. He would squint at his book, swallow his food without chewing, make stupid, surprised faces, grope for his cup without taking his eyes off the book, and say: ‘Can I have some more tea? And make it a bit hotter, if you can.’ She knew all his gestures: how he would scratch his head, pout his lips, then make a wry face and start picking his teeth. At this point she would say: ‘Vitya, for the love of God, when are you going to get your teeth seen to?’ She knew very well that if he scratched his nose, pouted his lips and so on, it was not because his nose or lips were hurting, but because he was thinking about his work. She knew that if she were to say, ‘Vitya, you’re not even listening!’, he would reply, still squinting at his book, ‘I heard every word. I can even repeat what you said: “For the love of God, when are you going to get your teeth seen to?”’ Then he would gulp down another mouthful of tea, look surprised and begin to frown; this meant that he agreed with what his colleague had written on some points, but not on others. After that he would sit quite still for a long time, nodding his head sadly and submissively, with the same look in his eyes as an old man suffering from a brain tumour. This meant that he was thinking about his dead mother.

  And as he drank his tea, thought about his work, or gave a despairing sigh, Lyudmila would look at the eyes she had so often kissed, at the curly hair she had so often rumpled, at the lips that had kissed her, at the hands with small, delicate fingers whose nails she had so often cut, and say to herself: ‘Goodness me! What a sloven you are!’

  She knew everything about him: how he liked to read children’s books in bed; his face when he went out to clean his teeth; his clear, almost tremulous voice, when, dressed in his best suit, he had read his paper on neutron radiation. She knew that he liked Ukrainian borscht with haricot beans; she knew how he gave a quiet groan as he turned over in his sleep. She knew how quickly he always wore out the heel of his left shoe and dirtied the sleeves of his shirt; she knew that he liked two pillows in bed; she knew his secret dread of walking across large squares; she knew the smell of his skin, the shape of the holes in his socks. She knew the tune he hummed when he was waiting for lunch; the shape of the nails on his big toes; the names his mother had called him by when he was two; his slow, shuffling gait; the names of the boys he’d had fights with in his last year at school. She knew how he loved teasing his family and friends. Even now, for all his depression, he kept making fun of the way her closest friend, Marya Ivanovna Sokolova, had once confused Balzac and Flaubert.

  He was expert at baiting Lyudmila and always succeeded in making her angry. That time she had leapt earnestly to her friend’s defence.

  ‘You always make fun of the people I love. Masha doesn’t need to read a lot. She has impeccable taste and a real feeling for a book.’

  ‘Certainly,’ he had replied. ‘And she knows that Max and Maurice was written by Anatole France.’

  She knew his love of music and his political opinions. She had seen him cry. She had once seen him so enraged that he had torn his shirt and then got his legs tangled up in his trousers; he had hopped towards her with his fists clenched. She had seen his uncompromising fearlessness; she had seen him inspired; she had seen him reciting poetry; she had seen him taking a laxative.

  Outwardly nothing had changed, but she knew he was angry with her at present. She could tell this from the fact that he no longer talked to her about his work. He talked to her about their rations and the letters he got from friends. He talked about the Institute: about events in the laboratory; about the discussion of their work schedule. He would tell her stories about his colleagues: how Savostyanov had fallen asleep at work after a drinking-bout the previous night; how the laboratory assistants had been cooking potatoes in the boiler; how Markov was preparing a new series of experiments. But he no longer spoke to her about his real work, the work that went on in his head. Previously she had been his only confidant.

  Once he had told her that if he read out his notes or talked about half-formed hypotheses to his friends – even his closest friends – he would feel bad about it the next day; his work would seem dead, and he would find it hard to return to it. She had been the only person to whom he had been able to reveal his doubts, to whom he had been able to read both his fragmentary jottings and his boldest, most fantastic theories. But now he no longer so much as mentioned his work to her.

  Now he found relief from his depressions in making accusations against Lyudmila. He thought incessantly about his mother. And he thought about something he would never have thought about but for Fascism: the fact that he and his mother were Jews.

  In his heart he reproached Lyudmila for her coldness towards his mother. Once he had even said: ‘If you hadn’t got on so badly with my mother, she’d have been living with us when we were in Moscow.’

  She, for her part, kept going over Viktor’s many acts of injustice towards her son Tolya. She resented the way he had always been conscious only of Tolya’s faults. He had never let him get away with anything – though he had always been only too willing to pardon Nadya her rudeness, her laziness, her slovenliness and unwillingness to help in the house.

  Viktor’s mother, Anna Semyonovna, had indeed suffered a terrible fate. But how could he have expected her to get on with Anna Semyonovna when Anna Semyonovna didn’t like Tolya? That had been enough to make her letters and her visits to Moscow quite unbearable. It had always been Nadya, Nadya, Nadya . . . Nadya’s got Viktor’s eyes . . . Nadya’s absent-minded, Nadya’s quick-witted, Nadya’s very thoughtful. Anna Semyonovna’s tenderness and love for her son had extended into a tenderness and love for her grand-daughter. But as for Tolya – he didn’t even hold his fork in the same way Viktor had done.

  She had also begun to think more and more often of Tolya’s father, her first husband. She wanted to look up his relatives and his elder sister. Yes, they would immediately recognize Tolya’s eyes, Tolya’s wide nose, Tolya’s slightly deformed thumb as the very eyes, nose and thumb of Abarchuk.

  She now no longer remembered any of Viktor’s kindness towards Tolya. In the same way she no longer remembered any of Abarchuk’s cruelty towards herself –
even the fact that he had left her when Tolya was a new-born baby, forbidding her to give him his surname.

  In the morning Lyudmila would be left alone in the house. She looked forward to that; her family only got in her way. Everything in the world, the war, the fate of her sisters, Viktor’s work, Nadya’s unhappiness, her mother’s health, her own compassion for the wounded, her grief over the men who had died in German camps – everything sprang from the pain and anxiety she felt for her son.

  The feelings of her mother, the feelings of Viktor and Nadya, seemed to her to have been smelted from a quite different ore. Their devotion to Tolya, their love for him, seemed shallow. For her, the whole world was contained in Tolya; for them, Tolya was just a part of the world.

  The weeks passed and still there was no letter from Tolya.

  Every day Soviet Information Bureau bulletins were broadcast over the radio; every day the newspapers were full of the war. The Soviet forces were in retreat. The artillery was often mentioned in these bulletins and reports. Tolya served in the artillery. There was still no letter from Tolya.

  She felt there was only one person in the world who could understand her anguish: Marya Ivanovna Sokolova.

  Usually Lyudmila didn’t get on with the wives of the other academics; their endless talk about clothes, domestic servants and their husbands’ successes made her feel bored and irritated. But she had grown very attached to Marya Ivanovna – partly because her shy, gentle character was so unlike her own, partly because she was moved by her concern over Tolya.

  Lyudmila felt she could speak more freely about Tolya to her than to her own husband and mother; and she always felt calmer for these conversations. Even though Marya Ivanovna came round almost every day, Lyudmila would still wait for her impatiently, watching through the window for her slim figure and kind face.

  There was still no letter from Tolya.

  Footnotes

  fn1Kolkhoz: a collective farm.

  16

  Lyudmila, Nadya and Alexandra Vladimirovna were sitting in the kitchen. Now and then Nadya crumpled up pages of her exercise-book and threw them into the stove; for a moment the stove would be filled with flames. Alexandra Vladimirovna glanced at Lyudmila out of the corner of her eye and said: ‘One of the laboratory assistants invited me home yesterday. They certainly do live in cramped conditions. And the hunger! The poverty! We live like Tsars in comparison . . . ! Some neighbours came round and we started to talk about what we’d loved most before the war. Someone said “veal”. Someone else said “pickled cucumber soup”. And then my friend’s little girl said: “What I liked most of all was ‘lights out’ in the pioneer camp.”’

  Lyudmila looked at her in silence.

  ‘Grandmama, you’ve already got millions of friends here!’ said Nadya.

  ‘And you haven’t got any.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with that?’ asked Lyudmila. ‘It’s better than Viktor. These days he spends all his time at Sokolov’s. You should just see the rabble that gather there. I really don’t understand how Viktor and Sokolov can sit there for hours on end. Don’t they get tired of chewing the fat all night? And why don’t they give a thought to Marya Ivanovna? She needs a bit of peace. With all of them around the poor woman can’t even sit down for a minute. And they smoke like chimneys!’

  ‘I like that Tartar, Karimov,’ said Alexandra Vladimirovna.

  ‘A nasty piece of work.’

  ‘Mama’s just like me,’ said Nadya. ‘She doesn’t like anyone apart from Marya Ivanovna.’

  ‘You are a strange lot,’ said Alexandra Vladimirovna. ‘You’ve got your own little circle of fellow evacuees from Moscow. And everyone else, everyone you happen to meet in a train or in the theatre, is just a nobody. Your friends are the people who’ve built themselves dachas in the same place as you have . . . Your sister Zhenya’s just the same. The signs by which you recognize one another are almost invisible: “She’s a real nonentity. Do you know, she doesn’t even like Blok! He doesn’t like Picasso! She gave him a present of a vase made from cut glass. What taste!” But Viktor’s a democrat. He doesn’t care tuppence for such airs and graces.’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense,’ said Lyudmila. ‘Dachas have nothing to do with it. There are bourgeois philistines with or without dachas, and I prefer to avoid them.’

  Lyudmila seemed to be getting annoyed with her mother more and more frequently these days.

  She would give Viktor advice, tick Nadya off for something she had done wrong or let it pass, spoil her or refuse to spoil her – and be conscious throughout that her mother had her own opinions about everything that she did. She never expressed these opinions, but they made themselves felt. Sometimes Viktor would catch his mother-in-law’s eye and they would exchange mocking looks – as though they’d already discussed all Lyudmila’s strange quirks. And it didn’t matter whether or not they really had; what mattered was that a new force had appeared in the family, a force whose mere presence was enough to change all the existing relationships.

  Viktor had once said that if he were in Lyudmila’s shoes, he’d let Alexandra Vladimirovna take charge of the house; then she wouldn’t be conscious all the time that she was a guest. Lyudmila had thought this hypocritical. It even crossed her mind that by emphasizing the warmth of his feelings for her mother, he was trying to remind her of her own coldness towards Anna Semyonovna.

  She would never have admitted it, but there had been times when she had even been jealous of his love for Nadya. Now, though, it was no longer just jealousy. How could she admit, even to herself, that her own homeless mother had become a burden and an irritation to her? And yet, at the same time, she was ready to give her last dress away to Alexandra Vladimirovna, to share her last crust of bread with her.

  For her part, Alexandra Vladimirovna sometimes felt like bursting into tears for no reason. Or she wanted to die; or to spend the night on a colleague’s floor; or to pack her bags and set out to find Vera, Seryozha and Stepan Fyodorovich in Stalingrad.

  Alexandra Vladimirovna usually agreed with what Viktor did or said, while Lyudmila usually disagreed. Nadya had noticed this and would say to her father: ‘Go and tell Grandmama that Mama’s been nasty to you!’

  Now Alexandra Vladimirovna said: ‘You two are as gloomy as owls. But Viktor’s normal.’

  ‘Words, words . . . ,’ said Lyudmila wrily. ‘You and Viktor will be as glad as any of us when the time comes to go back to Moscow.’

  ‘When you do go back, dearest,’ said Alexandra Vladimirovna abruptly, ‘I think it would be best if I don’t come with you. There isn’t really enough room for me in your Moscow flat. Is that all right? Either I’ll get Zhenya to come and live here, or else I’ll go and live with her in Kuibyshev.’

  It was a difficult moment. Everything that had troubled both mother and daughter was now out in the open. Lyudmila, however, took offence – as though she herself were in no way to blame. Alexandra Vladimirovna saw the expression of hurt on her face and felt guilty.

  Usually both mother and daughter were cruelly forthright. Now, though, they felt frightened and tried to draw back.

  ‘“Truth is good, but love is better” – the title of a new play by Ostrovsky,’ remarked Nadya.

  Alexandra Vladimirovna looked with some hostility, even fear, at this schoolgirl who could work out things she hadn’t yet worked out for herself.

  Soon after this Viktor came back from work. He let himself in and appeared suddenly in the kitchen.

  ‘What a pleasant surprise!’ said Nadya. ‘We thought you’d be all night at the Sokolovs’.’

  ‘How really splendid to find you all sitting at home by the stove!’ said Viktor.

  ‘Wipe your nose!’ said Lyudmila. ‘And I don’t understand. What’s so splendid about it?’

  Nadya giggled. Imitating her mother’s tone of voice, she said: ‘Go on then! Wipe your nose! Don’t you understand plain Russian?’

  ‘Nadya, Nadya!’ cautioned her mother. The right to t
ry and educate Viktor was something she reserved for herself.

  ‘Yes, yes, there’s a cold wind outside,’ said Viktor.

  He went through to his room. He left the door open and they could see him sitting there at his desk.

  ‘Guess what Papa’s doing?’ said Nadya. ‘He’s writing on the cover of a book again.’

  ‘Well, that’s none of your business,’ said Lyudmila. She turned to her mother. ‘Why do you think he’s so pleased to find us all sitting here? He’s quite obsessive – if any of us aren’t at home, he gets worried. Right now he’s working out some problem and he’s glad there won’t be anything to distract him.’

  ‘Sh!’ said Alexandra Vladimirovna. ‘We probably really do distract him.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Nadya. ‘If you speak loudly, he doesn’t pay any attention. But the minute you start whispering, he rushes in and says: “So what’s all this whispering about then?”’

  ‘Nadya, you sound like a guide at the zoo talking about the instincts of the different animals,’ said Lyudmila.

  They all looked at each other and began to laugh.

  ‘Mama, how could you be so unkind to me?’ said Lyudmila.

  Alexandra Vladimirovna patted her on the head without saying a word.

  Then they all had supper together. That evening the warm kitchen seemed to Viktor to be endowed with a peculiar charm.

  Viktor’s life still rested on the same foundation. Recently he had been constantly preoccupied by a possible explanation of the contradictory results of the experiments carried out in the laboratory; he was itching to pick up his pencil and return to work.

  ‘What splendid buckwheat stew!’ he said, tapping his spoon against his empty bowl.

  ‘Is that a hint?’ asked Lyudmila.

  He passed his bowl to her. ‘Lyuda, you remember Prout’s hypothesis?’

  Taken aback, Lyudmila paused, her spoon in the air.