Unforgiving Years

II. The Flame Beneath the Snow

THE ANTIQUATED bomber banked ponderously through the freezing mist. “Difficult zone… Tara-ta-ta…” breathed Klimentii. The cold cut through his furs because the cold was already in his bones. To make a joke of it, he joyfully exaggerated the chattering of his teeth. He said, “I’ve gone through it so often, nothing can happen to me now. Only trouble is, Comrade, I know that’s a superstitious idea… so it bothers me just a bit. What if luck were a superstition, when luck is all a man has left?” Daria said, “You’re not superstitious, you’re healthy as a wolf… You look like a wolf… True luck is courage, when it comes down to it. Nothing more real.”

“But I’m permanently scared stiff!”

“Well, that’s real courage, to be always scared and still do what has to be done…”

Klimentii glanced around the inside of the plane. It was cluttered but comfy, like a sturdy tent in the snow, where in spite of the cold you feel good. “It would take so little,” he murmured, “and then…” Daria understood, she shrugged her shoulders, said, “And then what?” She tucked the bearskin she’d slept in more snugly around her. The plane’s hold made her think of a metal tunnel crammed with parcels and people. The glacial air stank of the excretions of one desperately wounded man. Daria rubbed her face with her fingers, as she often did on waking. “Want to see the earth?” Klimentii offered. The metal body, punctured by shrapnel, had been hurriedly and badly patched up. The soldier shifted a metal plate that was blocking a crescent-shaped hole next to his knee. Daria gasped with pleasure as a jet of damp, cold, but fresh air hit her full in the face. “See the front line? They always take potshots at us around here.” But the fog was milky and opaque. “It’ll be touch and go landing…” In a low, amused voice he told the story of the luckless VIPs whose plane had strayed off course in this cursed Baltic fog, and landed smoothly, obeying all the usual signals… behind Finno-German lines. All of them shot after a week’s interrogation. “Tara-ta-ta, one day the happy life will come, Comrade!”

“Are you trying to scare me, you moron?” said the woman, her eyes pale as the fog.

“Whoa, don’t get mad, Daria Nikiforovna! I’ll never be cured of fear, no one will, but I don’t care, it hardly bothers me anymore. I put up with it like a chronic bellyache, that’s all. Man is such a small thing… We don’t matter, you, me, whoever, it’s the country that counts… I really did mean the happy life, the one in which man will count, will be built one day over our graves. This city is one big graveyard. And I love it. You can’t help but love it. I promise you a glass of firewater, you’ll see…”

“Is your wife waiting for you?”

“Faithfully, below ground. No carbohydrates, no vitamins, thirteen-hour days at the plant, she went out in six months like a lamp starved of oil… I applied to have her evacuated, but the wives of technicians, officers, and heroes come first. As they should. By the time I got my medal, it was too late. I’m cold to the marrow, no one’s waiting for me, I’m the one waiting — waiting for what luck will bring. The epilogue, or another attachment… It’s always the same warm rush between two people, isn’t it? The warmth of the past is never completely dead, while I’m alive… I won’t remarry until after our victory, though. ‘Togetherness without tears,’ that’s my motto.”

“And quite right too, Klim,” Daria said.

He concluded, proudly or mockingly, it was hard to tell with him: “I’ve learned.”

The whitish mist was thinning under the bomber’s belly, allowing glimpses of flat black country marbled with white veins. A wide dark loop sliced through it, like a fissure in the earth’s crust. They haven’t invented war toys to split open the planet yet, but they will at the rate we’re going… “The Neva!” Klimentii cried.

Stupidly, like a schoolchild, Daria found herself imagining that intelligent sadistic brute Czar Peter, pacing the moors on the banks of this river and suddenly pulling his sickly-soft, wrinkled, feline face into a mask of will, saying, “On this spot I will build a city!” Asia will open a window on the West here, we will no longer be Asia… His inspired folly aimed at our escape from Asia. Then he had the severed head of his wife’s young lover preserved in a jar which he put on the mantelpiece under the great mirror so his wife, Empress Catherine, could join the three-headed tête-à-tête supper… We have good examples to follow.

When I came through this city four years ago, Daria was thinking, we were coming back to life. The passably well-dressed crowd of the privilegentia ambled down the central prospect in soft spring sunshine. Our dead shivered within me, but the crowd was indifferent to them. It only wanted to live its own life; there was a lot of dancing… I was aghast at the nightmare of the coming war, of which the crowd knew nothing because the papers were full of the peace policy and how it would prevail, if it meant a pact with the Devil himself. Let the Devil take his hellfire elsewhere, we just want to live in peace and quiet, and we’ve earned the right having suffered so much more than the egotistical, degenerate bourgeois West… It’s the West’s turn to pay for a change: let it learn that life’s not just about a good meal, a good roll in the hay, and a good night’s sleep but something ferocious, so ferocious there’s no name for it. We know that, don’t we — for having tried to change the world (and no doubt too for failing to put a more human world in its place, or to prevent the return of the cruel ones…). On the broad sidewalk with its leisurely succession of palaces, where bronze horse trainers rear over the four entrances to a bridge, I met corps-de-ballet starlets who were more or less the mistresses of influential men; writers doing their best to produce a felicitous page in spite of the censor, and spending more time censoring themselves than writing; engineers released from concentration camps with medals; historians fresh from prison who were busy tracing the glorious continuity between Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and socialism with all the rigor they once applied to demonstrating the same thing between Gracchus Babeuf, the Paris Commune, Karl Marx, and ourselves… “But, you see,” a fat academician assured me, “it’s all true, we’re just widening the scope of historical continuity…” He may have been right. Dramatists were writing plays about betrayal, and I met one who had hastily adapted his epic for the treason market so that in Act Five, the hero is unmasked as an enemy agent. It was the hit of the season.

They flirted, they talked books, they led silky hounds on leashes. The cathedral colonnade of Our Lady of Kazan seemed svelte, white clouds were reflected in the dark water of the canal, the church of the Holy Savior on the Blood (an emperor’s blood) was as vividly colored as an illuminated manuscript, for blood causes color to blossom from stone… A group of us went to look at the gilded, winged lions of a small Chinese bridge, and I was pestered for news about Paris fashions and the bombing of Madrid, rather more about the fashions than about the bombing (though it was good form to seem concerned about the demise of Spain). There were finely bound books for us to leaf through. I went to admire the vertical waves of pink granite of the security building, erected on the site of the small old law court burned down in 1917… Fifteen stories high, how many offices! A towering proof of progress. The prison next door looked unchanged… Painful topics were never broached, out of understandable caution or as a kindness to me. No one seemed to doubt the future… I listened politely to the views of a man of letters. “Tragedy is just one of history’s overhead costs… Paris frolicked while Robespierre’s men were being killed. Paris was right. The true, the lasting revolution was never about extreme issues, the justice or otherwise of the guillotine, the victories in rags. It was all about vitality, the Parisian flair for l’amour, its lust for life in spite of everything, its rich exuberance… I’m going to write a novel about Madame Récamier. Marvelous character!” “What about Madame Rolland?” I demanded. “Wasn’t she quite a character too?” “Dear me no, she’s a bore. So pedantic, up to the very last minute! And a Girondist. I can’t bear the Girondists.” This scribbler was installing his porcelain collection in a villa on the gulf, and pressed me to visit: “I have some extraordinary Meissen!” I promised, cravenly, without mentioning that at least the Girondists had given up fine china… His gaze was keen and melancholy. I nearly asked him, Why do you always lie? But that would have sent him off drinking for a week. He was killed at the front. His last war dispatches were completely worthless… He had a sentimental kindness. He cried like a child over calves killed in the fields, so whenever he had to interview some optimistic general, his attempts at valiant patriotism gave off a hollow ring…

“Has the city suffered very much, Klimentii?”

“Not as much as you’d expect… At least not the stones. It’s architecture that ensures permanence, after all. We suffered a little less than a million dead last winter, or perhaps more than a million, who knows? One in three, let’s say. In some areas, one in two…”

“What are you saying!”

“Don’t get upset, Daria Nikiforovna. In a country like ours, a million is one hundred and eightieth… In a war like this… Anyway, isn’t the earth already overpopulated, in relation to the means of production?”

Again Daria had to wonder whether he was being simply honest or unpleasantly scathing; she inclined toward the first. Dexterously he closed up the horrible gash in the plane’s belly. The badly wounded man had fallen into a fitful, whistling sleep. A cockpit voice intoned “Prepare for landing…” Klimentii’s pallid thinness concealed no irony. It seemed to say: This is how we are, the young generation, what’s left of us: resigned, aware, steadfast, no more bitter than the statistics, no more discouraged than the course of history. The river believes in itself. Ferrying blocks of ice, bits of straw, dead bodies, or fecund silt, the river passes — and remains — with no regret for the drops left behind among wild bul-rushes, or dashed against the granite quays. Klimentii was fitting the straps of a knapsack over his shoulders. Daria thought suddenly about herself.

The release she had been waiting four years for brought her no joy, probably because there was no joy left in the world. The bitter years fell away in one go, without regret or longing, with barely a dull wonder at this unexpected new start. A message had arrived from district command with her marching orders, the next combat mission, as though nothing had happened since Paris: “…to report to Service X, Army X…” “When can you be ready to leave?” the district commander asked. “Oh… by tomorrow,” Daria replied unthinkingly. I could just as well leave tonight, there’s nothing to keep me in your desiccated wastes, your sordid tedium, my useless life…

All she needed was the time it took to collect some linen and a few clothes, the time to burn the journal she had kept to ward off the fear of sinking into obsession. A curious document, this journal, whose carefully chosen words sketched out only the outer shapes of people, events, and ideas: a poem constructed of gaps cut from the lived material, because — since it could be seized — it could not contain a single name, a single recognizable face, a single unmistakable strand of the past, a single allusion to assignments accomplished (about which it is forbidden to write without prior permission). No expression of torment or sorrow (this for the sake of pride), no expression of doubt or calculation (for the sake of prudence), and nothing ideological, naturally, for ideology is the sludge at the bottom of the pitfall…

The construction of this featureless record, similar to a thought puzzle in three dimensions turned entirely toward some undefinable and secret fourth dimension, had furnished her with an exhilarating occupation. In it, Daria could not evoke either Barcelona or the Caproni bombers, or the efforts to save a republic in its death throes, or even the ravishing interludes of those times: her nights with a man of artless energy for whom the slaking of passion was such a feast that afterward he would talk on and on, with a touch of genius, about the war, the future, the sense of the human, the whole world which he loved… Of these discussions punctuated by embraces nothing, nothing! Every sentence, read by a professional third party, would have prompted an unjust condemnation, and this man might still be living (with another woman — fortunate woman! — I only hope she understands him). Daria wrote of the colors of the sea, the heave of the swell contemplated from the top of the nameless mountain they had picked for their meetings. And it did help to refresh her at times when the hot sand rolling in swirling waves of suffocation across the desert clouded the village, penetrated the low clay hovel, and made the flame of the lamp tremble. Daria described the man’s breathing without saying it was the lover’s breathing, and the enchanted tremor of his muscles without saying it was during the communion of love. Waves, swells, exhalations, movements, tightenings, releases, surrenders of the flesh, phosphorescences of the spirit transmuted into inner riches she’d had no inkling of before, an inexhaustible treasure that she could draw up from a well of darkness and carry into the light! No wave, no contoured shoulder, no quiver of lashes can ever be wholly expressed… We live almost without seeing, and now it turns out we see what is no more, but once was, through a prodigious magnifying lens, so that the rough grain of a skin or the carved planes of a torso gain an intensity of pathos whose pale echoes we recognize in a fragment of Greek sculpture. The broken piece of statue arrays itself in mystery, stirs the imagination, and should it happen to be a breast swollen with life, that breast, alone and unique on earth, asserts its own human density and the whole of woman.

The man’s face would have filled a book in itself, if overwhelming feelings had not often interrupted her as she worked on those pages. All faces are illuminated in a single one; yet his appeared incomparable, its radiance lighting up souls without number. Daria didn’t feel strong enough to confront so great, so stabbing a vision on her own. The face stirred the totality of life, internal and external simultaneously, communicating through the natural marvel of the eyes, of expression… The dizziness of looking, the dizziness of standing on the edge of a sovereign understanding… Daria fell back to the world, that is, to the sensation of a storm in calm weather, in the middle of a blessedly fine spring day when several modern reinforced-concrete buildings suddenly blew up, expelling all of their human contents from their carcasses; but there was no description of falling rubble, of a city gone mad beneath the planes, of planes in the fulminating noonday sky; the writing created only a naked feeling of storm and terror, of revulsion and murder, of a fragile universe; it was a sensation born for no apparent reason out of the gilded blue zenith.

How to express, in this tangential language embroidered with arabesques around essential blanks, the anguish of thought? Present and absent, it was everywhere at once, and everywhere elusive. How to refine a set of contradictory yet blinding clarities into nuances of shadow? Daria believed she had done it. That first rendezvous with Sacha at the Jardin des Plantes, then in the back room of a Parisian bar on boulevard de l’Hôpital, translated into the play of light on the streets, a drab scent of autumnal decay floating among pruned shrubs, a blue sheen of greenhouses in the distance, an unease of footsteps on the path, a tan-upholstered interior in all its tense, hospitable, anonymous, shattering banality. Sacha himself was associated with images of tropical landscapes that she was wary of developing. (Because they knew she had never been to the tropics and might ask: Who do you know in those countries? They might even guess.) Instead she painted — in words — a little bamboo wood in an Adjari botanical garden near Tsikhes-Dziri, those names unspoken though, no names, no names! Thin green shoots after rainfall, the pungency of red earth, the graceful thrust of ferns… She also wrote a gloss on Lermontov’s classic poem “Three Palms,” in which the sensations of her childhood were ramified.

The worst questionings, the ones born of devastating bereavements, had her filling a notebook on the death of the musician, the death of the gold-seeker, the death of the inventor, the death of the great atheist believer, the death of the devout but limited believer, the death of the cynic, the surprise at death of the intelligent utopian, the indignation at death of the misled fighter, and how each of them faced up to the end with scruple, astonishment, courage, consciousness of the void, furious disappointment, desolate faith, quailing flesh… This was the most imprudent of the notebooks — and the one it would have been impossible not to write. She did not, however, write about the simple death of the militant, and most often when she talked about death, she was really only talking to herself about the higher life of the mind. Not good enough! The abyss, the plunge into the abyss were unequaled… Those pages she burned quickly, well before her departure, and none too soon, because when Major Ipatov of the Special Troops showed up on a tour of inspection, he was affable and comradely, left some quality cigarettes and a flask of Armenian cognac — “more aromatic than Hennessy, you know” — while inquiring in a familiar way about just what this deportee could possibly be writing through the long and lonely evenings in her hut. “I know how many copybooks you order, I know you write and write, I know everything!” Daria slapped her notebooks onto the table. “May I?” He thumbed through them, paying careful attention to some passages, and wanting to know the reason for certain crossings-out. “Good gracious, you’re turning into a regular prose stylist, Daria Nikiforovna! Are these the preparations for a book?” “Yes.” “I sincerely hope they’ll let you publish… You could make twenty thousand rubles out of it one day. Very fine, this paragraph on the rain. Of course, it might be a bit too disjointed for the average reader… But here, this piece about the hands, deeply moving I think…” It was too dark for Major Ipatov to see the exile’s face redden. “I see male and female hands, I sense a complexity of relation between them… In such a refined form, I wonder if it’s really publishable… You have talent!” Since he was not untalented himself as a lettered-bloodhound-reader, Daria congratulated herself for having destroyed the death notebook two days earlier. Major Ipatov might actually have understood it.

She burned all the books without a twinge of regret. (There was not one line in them about regret.)

The little village, made up of some fifty Kazak families, lay along the edge of a streambed blessed with a muddy trickle for a few weeks only, during the spring in the mountains. Its fifty-odd uneven shacks leaned at angles, like outcroppings of the earth, that is, of hardened sand; the tallest, reaching twelve feet to the top of its crumbling turret, was surely the most godforsaken of all the Prophet’s mosques, though an ardent faith still burned among its faithful. Flat roofs shone dustily red at this sunset hour. Timeless women seemed fixed motionless around the well, thick silhouettes becoming graceful as one drew near: the young ones had slender bodies, angular features, and eyes like fawns; the old ones, worn down at thirty by the privations of this lonely spot, had been drained to the bottom of their black gaze by the unvarying spectacle of the desert and relentless worrying about food and water — since the fitful stream of the Ak-Aul dried up even quicker than maternal breasts… Beside them crouched the freakish outline of a camel with flaccid humps.

The peaceful fire of the horizon set interiors ablaze with gold reflections. Daria had to visit almost every house in order to say goodbye to the schoolchildren. “I won’t be able to tell you any more stories about the Golden Cockerel and the Cat That Purred. Work hard on the alphabet and love our great country, which is destined for a happiness you’ll know when you’re grown up…” (Those of you who do grow up, if the enemy universe doesn’t slaughter us, if our own young egotism doesn’t drag us down to the abyss…) “Your elder brothers are fighting as bravely as the warriors of Timur-Lenk…” That at least was something they understood: Tamerlane! A historic figure who now seemed distinctly modern… The ironwork glinted on ancient chests; old people rose to receive her, tiny women hung with necklaces of antique silver coins and their bronzed, wizened menfolk, stern, morose, wearing robes of brightly striped cloth eaten away by filth. Grave, parchmenty faces inclined before her, thin dark lips shaped words of good wishes for the future in formulas prescribed by the Koran to attend the departure on a journey of a friendly traveler, be he an infidel…

Daria distributed her riches: a kilo of dried black bread, a pound of sugar, some boiled sweets, and a bar of perfumed soap which she cut into slices to go around to the new brides and young mothers, kindling sparks of delight in the glossy sable pupils, for “you’d think it was a cake of roses,” even if nobody here could have the least idea of what roses were. Daria left some borax to treat the children’s eyes, inflamed by the mineral dust and often eaten away by conjunctivitis resulting from venereal disease. She urged the Polish woman to take over the school, assuring her of official backing to come. “The intelligence of those children, it’s so alive! Their minds are as thirsty as the earth…” Then, a knapsack on her back, she walked away alone into the flat distance, the tragic, darkening horizon where the quenched fires of evening had left only violet dunes, a yellow-blue sky, the sense of a vast cicatrization covering vast mute sorrows…

“Congratulations,” said the chief of the region, “I’m going to drive you to the aerodrome myself.” He was smoking coarse seedy tobacco rolled in newspaper. Outside, the petrified sand sparkled. Seeing this officer in this abandoned office — scrawny, his right eye covered with a black patch, his hands dirty — Daria realized for the first time that his feeble persecution of the deportees was merely a way to escape the suffocation of total boredom. “What news from the front, Akim Akimich? The second front?” “Oh yes, the second front of those imperialist scum, you believe in that, do you?” sneered the one-eyed man. “They’re all in it together, they intend to wipe us out, you mark my words. We’re on our own.” And the fire went out of him; he seemed exhausted by this small fit of verve. Daria told him about the school, sixty-seven eager children, two hour-long lessons every day, reading, writing, arithmetic, I’d recommend the Polish woman, she’s very keen… The regional boss, Akim Akimich, whose eye had been put out by a Polish bullet, replied sharply, “She’s a landowner’s daughter, she’s the widow of an insurance company tycoon, a capitalist, and a Catholic to boot! How can you answer to me for her where the education of our children is at stake?”

“I’m not answerable for anyone, in any shape or form, I wouldn’t even answer for you, if they asked me! But the school happens to be under your jurisdiction, Akim Akimich. If you could arrange to have a professional teacher sent here, I should be delighted to hear it…”

That deflated him, for he was both leery of responsibility and flattered to have some degree of it in the midst of all this hateful sand which makes you want to drink yourself into oblivion. Mentally, he considered the pleasure of ordering in the Polish woman for an interview laced with implicit threats, at the end of which might lie the belly of a white woman…

“I’ll think about it… It’s true that we should make the most of the human material we’ve got… How’s morale among the Kazaks?”

“They’re hungry, Akim Akimich.”

“And you think I’m not hungry too?”

“Much less than they are, Akim Akimich.”

He spat into the inkwell and scraped at it with a classroom quill.

“I’m even starved of ink. The newspapers I read are a month old. I haven’t seen a blade of grass for two years.”

“The Kazaks of Aul-Ata have never seen one,” Daria reflected, and they never will… But she was beginning to warm to this embittered lonely officer who probably doesn’t trust his trio of Uzbek soldiers. “Will you permit me to send you some books about the war?” “Not about the war. I know all there is to know about that. What it does to men! No book can do it justice… You can send me things on plants. With pictures of trees, if possible. A botanical treatise.”

“Or the tale of the Sleeping Forest?”

“And of the whispering reeds, Comrade!”

They regarded each other amicably. And yet how he had plagued her, this wrinkled, red-haired, crafty Akim, delaying the mail and spreading ridiculous rumors about her with the wiles of a village sorcerer — just to enliven the tedium of the desert days and give himself the illusion of existing as a human!

A blizzard of thickly falling snowflakes, more opaque than white, held nightfall back over the airfield and gave Daria her first deep thrill. Snow, I salute you, dear whirling snow, you that soften the cold and fill the darkest of nights with intimations of lightness, blotting the pathways, making space huge, and setting the wolves to howling! You deliver me from the sands, no more desert, yesterday is simply the past. You deliver me from the rot of inaction. We never feel ourselves dying in life except through such contrasts, when one present suddenly splits apart to let another in, and we come back to life as yesterday’s being dies. When the slaughter is over, perhaps man will find that by transcending erstwhile distances, by flying over continents and climates, he has grown and conquered the possibility of self-renewal. Who knows, one day neuroses may be treated with airplane travel.

“Military ID check. Are you dreaming, Citizen?”

“Yes, I am,” said Daria joyfully.

The small snow-covered shack was glacial; a single bulb struggled fearfully against the piercing night. Haggard NCOs, their boney faces framed in fur, were working noiselessly. One murmured numbers into the telephone. Another was changing the dressing on his right wrist. The one who had just spoken was going over some papers. He sniffed as he heard the crump of an explosion reverberating into the emptiness beyond, like the dying sigh of some colossal monster.

“They’ve got ammunition to spare, the bastards! It’s the same thing night after night.”

Her three documents were in order, unambiguously so, yet tainted by a whiff of mystery and prison. The man looked her coldly up and down, not without sympathy. People so rarely emerge from mysteries and prisons these days… Then again, it seems it’s possible to survive and that nearly everyone will have his turn…

“You won’t be able to report to military headquarters until tomorrow… Do you want to spend the night here in the barracks? You’re welcome to my bunk, Citizen. It’s all right as shelters go. I’m on duty till dawn.”

Klimentii stepped in and Daria realized that he was waiting for her. “The citizen can easily spend the night at my place…” The checkpoint corporal stared at them. He was around twenty years old, extremely skinny, with scarcely more than a glimmer, an indomitable spark, of vitality left in him.

“Been at the front long?”

“Oh, about a hundred years.”

“Is that all?”

“Not enough in your opinion? Try it.”

Embarrassed at seeming to rebuff a kindness, Daria said, “Thanks all the same, Comrade.” He threw a black look at before resuming his businesslike manner. “Four hundred yards to the truck. Compulsory wearing of shrouds. And no smoking!” One swoops down from the sky, having vanquished distance and danger, and then one puts on a shroud to go into the city at night… The conceit pleased Daria as she got into the loose, hooded overgarment of white canvas. The twenty-year-old NCO sang under his breath:

He walked ahead of the new arrivals through the swarm of gray flakes that softly buried everything around. Their shrouded forms, resembling dim cutouts of fog, were invisible at more than three paces. Klimentii was silent. Daria continued the poem in her mind, lines once written by a poet (who had recently died or been killed at the front) for another poet, who had killed himself.[27] So it goes with our poets, Old Russia, Young Russia!

Frustrated at being unable to recall more than that one quat-rain, she racked her brain for other important lines, those two lines that say it all — how do they go? She stumbled in the pathless snow, dark as cinders. Klim’s arm held her up firmly as she was about to fall, and Daria regained her balance like a dancer on her partner’s arm. “What did you say?” he asked softly. “Nothing, I was remembering two lines of poetry…” But he had already let go, and the two meaningful lines shone for her alone, unspoken:

She almost bumped into the ghostly truck. The journey was slow, guided by phosphorescent signals that moved along the ground. The invisible convoy traveled through a shifting, milky gloom of formless shadows. A desperate cold penetrated the flesh. The suffering was one of organic extinction and it effectively extinguished all thoughts apart from the craving for deliverance, the craving for warmth. Klim, Daria, and three shapeless, faceless soldiers squeezed together into a human heap at the back of the truck so as to conserve their meager supply of warmth. At times all that Daria could see were a pair of slanted eyes, green as a cat’s, seemingly full of quiet anger. It went on forever. Toward the end, a hand crawled between the compacted furs and bodies to find Daria’s gloved hand as though by instinct, squeezed it, and she returned the friendly pressure. Klim said, “We’re entering the city…” How did he know? They couldn’t see a thing. But through the gash in the mica window black walls slid by. The truck was weaving slowly, no doubt to avoid the potholes. Melodious night-watchmen’s whistles rang out. Klim extracted himself from the huddle. “Ahoy, comrade chauffeur! Stop your dreadnought. I’ve reached port.” The driver was clearly in no hurry to oblige, either because he was hanging on to the wheel half asleep or because he had no sympathy for someone who thought he’d reached port: you’re never home safe in this bloody life, or when you are, it blows up in your face. No such thing as a port! Not even a berth in the cemetery, unless you can produce half a loaf for the grave-digger! Barely raising his voice, Klim displayed his cursing abilities with contained fury in a barrage of the filthiest army swearwords combined with imperious supplication. The truck hiccupped to a halt, like a drunken mastodon. Klim helped Daria to get down. All that could be seen of the driver was his bearish bulk as he hopped up and down on the ground to get his circulation going and to shake off the cold. (The dancing bear, the fossil mastodon…) It was no longer snowing; there was not a spark of life in the night.

“I couldn’t stop before, idiot, it’s not a good place. Bombs fall on it. I don’t give a fart for your skin, but I’m responsible for the vehicle, you jackass.”

“My skin, your skin, and your rolling rat-trap, add ’em all up and the price is still cheap,” observed Klim sagely. “Here, take a swig.”

He passed his canteen to the dancing-bear man.

“That’s better,” the driver said, after drinking. “Thanks, brother. Six months I’ve been driving this piece of shit over this god-damn road, and still not a scratch! Can’t last, can it?”

“Sure it can, brother. The road can last.”

“Wiseass!” said the other, chuckling.

“There is no right to live and no right to die,” thought Daria, who had grown so stiff with cold and immobility that she found it hard to walk. “Klim, where are we?” “Near the Tauride Palace.” A handsome, wealthy district in its time, built around a little palace with a cupola and white peristyle; a poem of a park with pond, willows, silver birches; the history of the heady days of 1917. And now there was nothing left but the towering cliffs of a dead city. Yet there were watchful souls in this necropolis, since suddenly, inexplicably, one was beside them, and a ragged voice was saying, “Your papers, please, Citizens.” The watchful soul played its torch beam over the frame of a door where the wind gusted malignantly through two gaping holes. “These are not permits to circulate at night, Citizens.” Now it was a woman’s voice, cracked and hoarse. “Orders to complete mission. Valid twenty-four hours,” explained Klim. Swaddled in sheepskin to the eyes, to the mouth, the woman leveled her short carbine at them. “Drink,” said Klim, proffering the canteen. Before accepting she shone her light into their two faces and was reassured. “Show us your face too,” Daria said gently. The woman with the carbine turned a furtive beam onto herself. Her hard features seemed molded out of gray clay, nostrils like flared dark holes, tiny penetrating black eyes. “Look at me,” she cackled, comforted by a draft of alcohol, “a beauty, right?” Her laugh was bitter, cut off abruptly. “Now don’t take that street, you’d be stopped by the artillery gang, real pains in the ass… Go around by the demolition site, and watch out for the crater, it’s a nasty one…” One arm pointing the way through nothingness, she guided them on for a while. “I know my way around here, thanks,” Klim began to say; at that moment he tripped and nearly fell over something like a flabby stone. Stooping, he whispered, “It’s someone,” having bitten back the words “a corpse.” All three knelt down to touch the elongated human form. “Wasn’t there when I made my rounds,” grumbled the militiawoman. “Always the same thing…” The flashlight revealed the supine body of a woman in a cavalry greatcoat, whose open eyes inertly reflected the light playing over them. “Dropped dead,” said the militiawoman. “No mistaking those eyes… They go out without a permit and drop dead in a vacant lot.” “Dropping dead without a permit,” commented Klim. The pocket lamp threw the dead woman’s hands into momentary relief. The right was still clasped around an end of twine, leading to a small sled piled with broken boards and a saucepan full of ice. “She’s from the neighborhood, for sure…” the woman said ruminatively. “Was it hunger?” Daria asked. “What d’you think? Ah, well. I’ll take care of it tomorrow. Our daily bread, as you might say.”

And the right to die… “Klim,” asked Daria, pressing into the young soldier’s side as they walked, “is suicide punished, in the army?” “Obviously, if you bungle it… And it should be. Selfishness must be punished — so must incompetence.” They circled the massive crater: at the bottom, under fissured ice, they half glimpsed the murkiness of water with eyes that had grown accustomed to unrelieved night. A street welcomed them, petrified but intact. “Home!” Klim announced. “Be the welcome guest, Daria Nikiforovna, I offer thee bread and salt.” She looked up at the strangely smooth wall, four stories high, which seemed to be — no, was — swaying with a faraway deadened crackle, as of winds in sails. “Unusual architecture, hmm? You can admire it in the morning. Canvas, light wood frames, some paint, and you’d be fooled at a hundred yards. Well, no one is fooled anymore… The wall collapsed six months ago under a bomb. Four picturesque and habitable apartments survived…” He knocked on a rickety door, sending waves up the façade. “Who’s there?” Klim spoke his name, a small grill half opened, and someone could be heard dislodging the timbers that braced the entrance. It was a grizzled old man whom nothing could surprise, of that race of solitary hunters from the forests of the north who have preserved the same beard, the same eyes, the same attire, the same gait since Scythian times. “Still alive and kicking, then, Frol!” “Yes, God forgive me,” quavered Frol into his beard with unexpected meekness. “How about the tenants?” The reply came vaguely: “To each his fate…” “When’s this filthy war going to end, Uncle?” They had begun speaking by the light of a match, now they could not see one another. Idly the old Scythian cracked his joints. “Never, my boy, never. Good night.” He began to re-barricade the entrance.

The staircase mounted steeply toward the sky whose cloudy vastness was visible. To the right, on the very edge of the drop, Klim unlatched a door which he closed behind Daria. The air, though it felt less icy cold in this obscurity, was rank and stagnant, clammy with slumber: a glow between his fingers revealed two blond infants, packed side by side into a sort of basket. The skin lay so gray over their bones that they might have been dead. At last he undid the padlock to his room. He lit a church candle which yielded but a tiny flame, joyful after so much night. He rubbed his hands, dropping satchels, muster bag, and parcels to the floor. “Make yourself at home, Daria Nikiforovna, we’re going to make a fire…” They were in a storage closet measuring some six feet square. It contained only a mattress covered by a knot of grubby blankets, a small brick stove whose pipe vanished through a clumsily hacked hole in the wall, and a splendid armchair with green velvet upholstery. Designed for the soft white ass of some high-ranking functionary, preserved through wars, revolutions, industrializations, and bombardments, this old-fashioned armchair provoked a half-crazed squeal of laughter in Daria. In a corner lay some gas masks and a German helmet. The fire, already built up with splintered parquet for kindling, burst into life at once. Klim went to wake the neighbors and scrounge a little water; he put the kettle on. “Whenever I go away,” he explained, “I build a fire. It’s my love of comfort. And if one day I don’t return, the citizen who takes over the room will know I was someone who thought ahead. That’s all he’ll know of me…” He looked frail with his sheepskin off, “almost an adolescent,” Daria thought, but he was wearing the epaulettes of an NCO and two medals. “How old are you, Klim?” He clicked his heels, snapped to attention, and introduced himself. “Sublieutenant Gavrilovich Rybakov, twenty-three years of age, eighteen months at the front, three times wounded, three citations, ex-would-be teacher, bedrock optimist, some reservations about human nature.” “Me,” Daria said, “I’m an optimist about human nature, but over the very long term…” The young man was applying his army knife to a can of American corned beef. “Would a thousand years do for you, dear Comrade?”

“Perhaps, but I can’t guarantee it.”

“With good psychological techniques, in well-planned societies… Help yourself.”

Daria contentedly unwrapped a piece of slightly moldy black bread. Klim was a young athlete without a trace of fat. His nose made a straight line down the middle of his face and his slash of a mouth drew a horizontal line below, as if nature were experimenting with a diagram; but nature’s plan had been foiled by large deep-socketed eyes, resembling the eyes of visionary saints drawn by the ancient icon painters… The soul trumps the diagram. No doubt Klim didn’t believe in the soul… The soul has every right to deny itself.

“Your name should be Cyril or Glaebius or Dimitri — ” Daria said, interrupting herself because she had just thought of Saint Dimitri the Assassinated.

“Why, don’t you like Klim?”

“Oh yes, I do!” she exclaimed, conscious of blushing like a fifteen-year-old.

“Names don’t matter, anyway. We’re all nameless. Incomplete.”

This was so true that they fell into a pensive, companionable silence. The smoking stove made the room feel like a nomad’s yurt. “Well then,” Klim said at last, “how shall we sleep, Daria Nikiforovna? We can make another mattress with our fleeces…”

“Together,” she said softly.

He answered without looking at her, “We’ll be warmer.”

They suddenly became aware of such overwhelming fatigue that their movements were slowed by it, the candlelight was dimmed, and nothing was able any longer to be thought or uttered, as though fatigue itself had taken over; and it was not the fatigue of the journey but a different kind, vaster, more penetrating, more irrevocable. The black bread, the knife, the tin of corned beef, the white cup in which they had taken turns drinking their murky brew of tea leaves were pitiful. Klim went out to shake the dusty blankets over the sheer drop, then spread them to form a bedding the color of earth. Lumpy pillows were improvised by stuffing bags and haversacks under the mattress. “Like sleeping on the bare ground,” Daria thought. My first night in the city of a million dead, our lovely victorious city! (So is victory the same as death?) She took her clothes off unselfconsciously, tingling with the cold, unable to see Klim but trying to picture him: the face that floated at the back of her brain was clean-cut, impersonal, and compelling, detached from everything, as singular as a new abstract sign. “We’re going to make love,” she thought, frozen. She tried to arouse something in herself. A man over a woman, the great shared upsurge of heat, both exhilarating and soothing… so many lackluster notions, devoid of desire. “Am I half dead already? Just us, joined together, the only reality in the universe for a moment, ourselves alone, in our intensity of life… And the rest, the fighting and the dying, those things will be as real as ever… But the dead aren’t real anymore… There will only be us…”

Notwithstanding the cold, playing for time, she tidied her clothes, casting about for an idea that would warm her. “Men at war are hungry for a woman, one has to give oneself, one must, so they can have at least that cry of joy…” But what if the cry contained no joy? The stove had gone out, but Daria naked did not feel the cold. She was not ashamed of her sagging breasts. She felt herself. A statue of flesh, straight-backed, resilient, nervous, nurturing, pale-faced, dry-eyed. The eyes that watched her from under the covers shone with dark brilliance.

“Put out the candle,” Klim said. “Light’s a limited commodity.”

“No, I’ll give you one, I’ve got some. I don’t like the dark.”

First she knelt on the bed, and as she did so uncovered, in one pull, the whole of Klim’s face; she was smiling, and the brightness of her smile seemed to reach to her shoulders because of the idea that was dawning on her. He’s a big child, a man-child from the dark of the war. How desperately they need to be enfolded between soft arms, soft legs, to be bathed in tenderness! They are chilled to the bone. How many youngsters just like this boy have fallen, never to know another second of tenderness! How many? Klim’s eyebrows rose into arcs of quizzical amusement. “You said how many, Dacha, how many what, or who? What are you counting now?”

“How many dead,” said Daria, still bending over him. He lost his temper.

“Strange woman! Don’t bother me with the dead. We’ll never finish counting them. We happen to be alive. Come to bed. I’m not one of your mystics.”

Her arms at her sides, eyelids half closed, Daria made no move to touch him; but listening to his breathing, she was aware through and through of Klim’s presence, like an inconceivable warmth about to break over her, a lulling that would bring her to rest. “I’ve been alone so long,” she whispered, “and now I’m cold…” The hard bar of an arm pinioned her neck, a scorching body pressed against hers. And the narrow boyish virile face dominated her from a great height; thus does the hawk dive from the heavens onto its earthbound prey… His lips tasted sour, his teeth were dry. Rapture is like that, bitter and violent, it hurtles out of a black sky onto the helpless creature and spears it… “Beautiful Daria, dear one,” Klim was mumbling, grateful and sloe-eyed. She started — “Don’t lie…” — but shaken as she was by the carnal storm, and full, so full of happiness, she might in truth have been beautiful…

Later, relaxed, hugging her close and stroking her — those calloused palms — he said, “You are good… Who are you? Tell me something about yourself… Me, I’m just another fighter, one of the lost generation; one who’s been lucky. I haven’t seen or done anything the others haven’t… Nothing interesting. I’m not at all interesting.”

“And I’m not anything, Klim. Nothing, do you hear? No one. A being, for work. A woman, for you… I’m not interesting either.”

That “for you” was subtly hurtful to both of them, because it could mean “for you just now” or “for you, or any other man.” Either way they couldn’t change it, whatever they might wish. War is a time for submission, for being rational; one can’t want anything for oneself beyond the fleeting moment. Klim spoke reasonably.

“I’ll be stopping here a week or so. I want you with me during that time.”

“If it’s possible, Klim. That’ll depend on the service.”

Daria was discovering a fantastic city, although the objects and beings it contained were of heartbreaking ordinariness. The Baltic sky covered it with a low ceiling of gray snows. The diminished light seemed to be on the verge of exhaustion. The broad straight avenues lay crushed by whiteness. The snow was banked into little odd-shaped mountains, around which a few rare pedestrians made their painful way along cleared paths. The buildings had aged by a couple of centuries in a few short seasons, just as men and women looked decades older in only a few months; the children had aged a lifetime before knowing what life was. People wrapped up in rags and tatters over furs showed plastery faces. The first glances Daria met disturbed her. Nowhere in the world had she come across this precise variety of human gaze. She clearly remembered the famine of her adolescent years, during the revolution, and yet this look was inexpressibly different from the looks of the past. She hadn’t known that eyes could change so, and cry out so loudly in silence something intolerable. It was neither pain nor hallucination. What, then? Daria plumbed each gaze, feeling guilty about her own well-being, because it must be plain to everyone that she’d just breakfasted on a can of pork and beans, and massaged her body with a flannel soaked in spirits and ice water. Her flesh still bore the imprint of love, she was heading for her work, and she was proud of this city, our invincible city, our granite stronghold! But neither the gladness to be alive nor the pathos of history and fine-sounding slogans could withstand the tiny blows dealt by the looks in those eyes. To be in good health, walking around in a clean, hale, supple body under the unforgiving sky, wearing a thick reindeer coat and new felt boots among so many rags brought a discomfort that shaded into guilt. The sullenness of the women and children planted motionless before a boarded-up cooperative, was that it? What were all these eyes saying? That they had weathered, day and night, indefinitely, the storms of snow and terror, of filth, exhaustion, cold, hunger, fright, sickness, with no hope of escape, no hope of healing… That they were watching life die away within themselves. One neighbor eyeing another: She won’t last three weeks. And I… The neighbor shiftily looking back: He’ll hold on longer than me, he’s a tough old bird! A small girl reckoning how long her mother and aunt were good for — maybe a month? The librarian on the third floor had those very same yellowish blotches around her mouth when she dropped on the stairs without a word and never moved again. The small girl’s name was Tonya and she was scared, she loved her mother and aunt, of course she did, but she also knew that by selling their clothes she could buy a few more weeks for herself. She’d heard the sisters whispering: “Much better for the little one if we can both die at the same time, so there’s only one funeral…” The mother added, “I’ve left instructions. I don’t want Tonya going hungry just to pay the gravedigger… Let’s be put out on the snow with the others, what’s it to us, eh, Nissia?”

There were ways and ways of dying slowly while remaining partly alive, getting dressed, walking down the street, doing the day’s work, eating tasteless food, submitting to the ceaseless assaults of the belly and its deliriums during sleep. Some shrank till they were nothing but insubstantial bags of skin over the knobs of their bones, with dreadful ball-like eyes… Others swelled up. Others became hollowed from within, pretending to be fit until the day they collapsed against the wall, saying, like Valentinov the schoolmaster: “Here we go, I’m dying… Twenty-three years in the teaching profession… Please doctor, put a little piece of sugar on my tongue. Ah, so good, thank you… And tell the principal from me that…” This man expired in a sigh of euphoria, but was it really wise to lavish sugar upon the dying? Doctor and nurse shook their heads uncertainly, one cube the poorer. You can’t be rational to the bitter end. The doctor could always tell the ones who were faking it, both men and women, even military officers, even technicians! They had themselves brought in on a toboggan dragged by a woman, feigning to be at death’s door, all to obtain a drop of glucose. Once he found an old friend reduced to this ploy, a professor of mathematics named Aristi Petrovich. “You, my dear friend, and in such a state!” The doctor was playacting too, as though he had been taken in. He rummaged in his precious store cupboard for an onion (but not the largest, to be fair): “Here, Aristi Petrovich, it’ll do you good, you must eat it in three stages to avoid a stomach upset…” (That old Aristi, he got around me!)

Each corpse was firmly tied to a sled pulled on a string by its next of kin; a new breed of resourceful specialists earned their food by sewing discarded sheets or squares of sackcloth around the remains: There, look, isn’t that nice, almost as snug as a coffin! Daria passed several such mummies on the street, rigid pods floating just above the trodden snow. A living man or woman to pull the string and sometimes a child behind, steering the mummy so as to spare it too many knocks and jolts — a somewhat superfluous solicitude… Inclined like a figurehead, a solitary form was plowing toward you, in a fading halo of snow. Her shawl framed the slightly scary face of a wizened child, and what she was pulling could not have weighed much — a small form neatly parceled in tar paper and string, with some naïvely cut-out cloth flowers pinned to its breast. Daria greeted her. “Going far, Citizen?” “Too far by half! The Smolenskoe cemetery…” “That’s on my way,” Daria said, “give me the string for a bit.” No, not heavy at all, not even with the weight of a question… The young woman was explaining nonetheless. “There used to be four of us and now I’m all alone in the world. It’s probably for the best, don’t you think?… If I can hang on for another three months, the factory’s promised me an evacuation permit. I’m still meeting my production quotas, though!” “I’m going too fast, sorry,” Daria said, “you’re out of breath.” “Oh, don’t mind me, I’m always out of breath!” The young survivor halted, with a brief smile of distress. The cold was gentle…

There were caved-in roofs, whole stories exposed to the air and clogged with snow, gaping bays, stage-set façades of wood and sailcloth with rows of windows painted sketchily across them. A faded inscription read INTREPID CITY! TOMB OF — — . As the banner was torn, its last words missing, the city could be the tomb of whoever you liked… Daria noticed the absence of huge pictures of the Chief, and indeed it was hard to imagine one. How would he look? Standard confident smile, full cheeks, bushy mustache? No portraitist would dare to give him the only face appropriate for this city — hollow as a death’s-head, wet with tears. The only things that must remain officially foreign to a nation’s Leader are tears, desperate suffering, the most human of human things… So how is it that leaders do not go mad? “Perhaps they are mad,” Daria answered herself.

A tram, looking out of place on these streets, clanged slowly past a rubble of white armor platings, snow-caked sandbags, the burned-out carcass of another tram. “Their artillery often targets this crossroads, once they got sixty people in one hit, a whole tramload…” It was by the public library that used to house the books of Voltaire. The streets were punctured with what looked like wells dug into the cemented snow, boreholes over burst pipes, where women and children and people recovering from their wounds lined up with listless discipline to lower a saucepan, a jug, a can on the end of a wire hook, down into the greenish sludge. An icing of snow lay over the mountains of human waste scraped together in the center of vast square courtyards; what a festering would be released by the thaw, what epidemics would steam from the ground poisoned by rotting shit! But that’s the least of our worries, for spring is an age away, and who knows which of us will live to see it! The squares stood triumphant as ever, lined with colonnaded palaces, dominated by golden spires, gigantic and deserted. The empire of cold whiteness. To cross them was to plunge into implacable solitude; and should some bomb land just then, its nearby explosion was endowed with a natural solemnity that in no way disturbed the dignity of these spaces and architectures. A cupola that once had shone pale gold, now dull, reigned over the iceberg city.

Daria walked into a nondescript house where she found a guardroom scrupulously swept of dust, but brown with ingrained dirt from floor to ceiling. She showed her papers and was given a pass for the second floor. A man with a bayonet opened a door onto an expanse of freezing corridors, there was a marble staircase, a warm whiff of cabbage soup, and an anteroom full of captains having a smoke; then the astounding office of Major Makhmudov. Astounding in that it was spacious, heated, with green filing cabinets and leather armchairs, tastefully adorned with drapery and plants; in short, a proper office in a city whose apartments were now little more than lairs for beasts. Telephones, the Leader’s picture (he was looking well), maps, calendar — this was no painted scenery, the presence of Major Makhmudov testified to that. At first all she saw was a razored, greeny-pink scalp. “Sit,” he said, without looking up. Burly, almost fat, how strange. His blue pencil was underlining words on an arcane mottled document. “Well, what?” he said. “Your report?” The voice was neutral, too low for that polished-stone dome. Daria pushed her papers across. He went “Ah!” A round face, two yellowish chins, a blob of a nose, puffy eyelids, no neck; he lacked the infernal eyes of the street people, but the erratic gaze was animal in its own way… The upper lip peeled back, presumably in lieu of a smile. “Four years in Kazakhstan… Cured of a few errors, are we, Comrade? Serious medicine. Well, you come recommended by Krantz, that’s good enough for me. Speak German? Sehr gut. You’re assigned to office 5 downstairs, room 12, under Captain Potapov. On the front line. Here the front line is everywhere, I warn you…” (As though to confirm this, an emphatic explosion resounded some hundred yards away… A blinding idea: that it was supposed to land here, between the telephone and the winged chair, no it couldn’t land here…) “Dismissed.” He called her back with a short cluck of the tongue. “The rule is discipline and silence, understood?” “Understood, Comrade Major.” He dialed a number, pressing his foot on a bell button hidden beneath the carpet, and a door swung open to the right. Through it came a young soldier in green, pistol in hand, followed by a bespectacled man with a beard, clad in the tunic of a Wehrmacht officer. Makhmudov began shouting, “So, Herr Dingel, you lied to me!” Daria caught the German’s muffled, shaky reply: “It was my duty…”

In room 12, Captain Potapov asked his secretary, a small ugly woman in uniform, to leave them. Daria guessed that this old officer had not had an easy time of it; he seemed browbeaten, chastened, secretly discouraged despite his ramrod figure, buttoned into a relatively neat uniform made from cheap material. His epaulettes did not shine. Aged about fifty, he had spare features and excessively shiny glasses covering the opacity of his eyes. Nothing alive in this tiny office except the ferns of crystalline frost that curled over the panes of a double window. Potapov questioned her laconically, with an absent air. Then: “Quite right. Our work consists in deciphering enemy intentions, through enemies who are often themselves ignorant of them… Let me put it this way: the average prisoner is in possession of, at best, one letter of the coded alphabet. Are you with me?” The old officer was not as insignificant as he looked.

“War is a great game of psychology. The enemy calculates and so do we. Strength only enters as a function of these calculations. An error is sometimes the product of a flawless but excessively linear calculation which fails to allow for the unstable, the unknowable, the irrational, call it energetic or mindless folly… Hence reverses and defeat are the penalty of error. This enemy is conducting a technicians’ war. He is convinced of his superiority, and with good cause. His machines are better and more numerous, his special forces are better trained, more numerous and organized than ours, its officer class more highly educated. I would even grant that its winter equipment makes a mockery of ours… But winter is on our side. We are winter men…”

Daria took pleasure in listening to the veteran captain, who must have few opportunities to hold forth; strange of him to open up so on their first meeting. (Was he aware of her history as a deportee? Or perhaps he was steeling her for the task ahead?) She asked with concern, “Do you think, then, they might take Leningrad and win the war?”

“I do not. Beware of false deductions, they lie at the end of the shortest line of reasoning. The world is only logical in appearance, on the lower scale of perception; in reality, it is rather mad… I am persuaded that, for precisely the reasons I have listed — and several more besides — the Germans will never take Leningrad, and the Germans will lose the war.”

“A brilliant paradox, Captain. Perhaps you’re counting on the Allies?”

He looked bored and dull for a few seconds, before rousing himself to pick up the thread of his ideas.

“The art of war, as I understand it, excludes paradox, the better to comprehend facts that are hidden or contradictory. Although it cannot exclude what the Americans call wishful thinking, passionate thought that wills itself into truth… How can any side prevail without passionate thinking? I am not interested in the Allies. Above all they need the blood of our muzhiks, as we used to call them, for they are economical with their own; they loathe us, and would perhaps be only too pleased to postpone victory until five minutes after we were crushed. They’re mistaken on that score, and will be thwarted. I understand Russia. I know Russia’s wars, this being my fourth…”

“Your fourth? How is that?”

“Carpathian campaign in ’17; two civil wars, Comrade: a year with Denikin’s Volunteer Army, against the revolution, and that’s where I came to understand Russia, because the revolution was Russia, apparently senseless and beyond that highly reasonable, exceedingly logical in order to master and exploit her deep incoherence… Then three years with the Red Armies, Volga, Urals, Baikal, Crimea… Remember: we never wage anybody’s war but our own, which is selfish and messianic — messianic in the service of a boundless selfishness, the selfishness we need to survive. We have plenty of wombs in production — God bless the women! — plenty of men, and so much space that we can afford to lose territory and troops in the interests of gaining time; we can inflict on our foes the weariness and despair of expanses without roads, victories without solutions… Indeed that’s all we can do — at first: suffer more than they do. But before overpowering us, the Germans would have to reach Tobolsk, Novosibirsk, the Yenisey; and by then they would be falling prey to our distances and our winters, and still wondering how to reach Vladivostok, how to take the Arctic… And since we should be incapable of capitulating in good faith, their task would be interminable. You see, this old Mother Russia of ours is providentially blessed with a most rudimentary organism. Cut her into six pieces, and the six will live on… We cannot be invaded, and this is something intuited by the rudest yokel of the Irtysh, confusedly and then with sudden clarity while defending a wood with his trusty automatic rifle and nimble legs, always quick to run away, but only so as to turn and charge again. His tactics are all in his nerves, without quixotism or panache: only by killing the enemy can he lay hands on enemy boots and vitamin pills, and thus our very deprivation becomes a source of strength, a primordial strength as irrational as life, and imperfectly understood by the strategists of the old industrial empires… If the enemy high command were staffed by genuine Nazis, that is, by a gang of déclassé adventurers, it would be far more deadly, for those are people who know how to unleash instinct along with tanks, shrewd calculation, and a hefty pinch of absurdity… But it is made up of generals of my generation or older, formed in the days of bourgeois reason and the equations of profit; thrifty, sober, cautious planners for whom each operation must yield at the very least a tactical benefit, just as each commercial transaction must be seen to pay off at least in terms of publicity. It is only the primitive energies of man that are invincible, and they are indifferent to waste; material gain counts, certainly, but in a peculiar, non-mercantile way; it may be more important to capture a stockpile of potatoes than an oil field… Our Field Marshal Mikhail Illarionovich Golenischev-Kutuzov was one of the first to grasp this, precisely because he was somewhat stupid. He pitted our instinctive, sometimes blockheaded, common sense against the genius of Napoleon, and Napoleon paid dearly for the superfluity of his genius. Go back to Tolstoy, who knew nothing about war but understood the Russian land and its people…”

He had pronounced Kutuzov’s name with dry gravity, as though from a lectern; professorially.

“Have you ever taught, Comrade Captain?”

“I have. Even in the concentration camp… But please refrain from interrupting. I am speaking to you because I must…” (Here he managed a faint smile). “I do so with pleasure. I have faith, and you must have it also. Without faith, it’s the end of Leningrad, the end of Russia, do you understand? A reasoned faith, no more farfetched than that of the baby which never doubts its mother’s breast. Axiom: Russia will only lose a war when she loses faith in herself, or when she feels at odds with her faith, God forbid…”

Why did he speak in the future tense rather than the conditional? Daria thought she heard a bitter undertone of menace in his voice. She shivered. Captain Potapov went on.

“So we find ourselves at a disadvantage, half beaten, yet doubly invincible since we cannot be beaten further without succumbing, and it is absolutely impossible for us to succumb. Concretely speaking, however, we do find ourselves in a fairly desperate predicament. Any technician worth his salt, steeped in Clausewitz, Moltke, Schlieffen, Ludendorff, and Foch, would come up with twenty-seven irrefutable reasons for concluding that the war is lost. But from our point of view, the only conclusion is to go on the offensive, beginning with retreat, if necessary. Usually it is. I give you a principle of our military art: retreat is the preparation for a counterattack, flight is the opportunity to regroup, and defeat is fundamentally a maneuver. Another principle: strategy is not a game of chess played with a quantity of machines, it is above all a duel of wills. The enemy is so technically ferocious that we must humanly outdo him, be harder and more ruthless, toward ourselves in the first instance. Okay?”[28]

“Okay.”

“We are poorly fed and poorly dressed compared to them, and more harshly disciplined. Our officers have the right, indeed the duty, to shoot any combatant who falters under fire, without trial or delay — an excellent provision, though no civilized country would have the nerve to adopt such a law. The war leader is essentially the man with a license to kill beyond the reach of law. We are freer in battle than the enemy, more enthusiastic, first because we are defending the motherland, second, because we rely upon ourselves rather than upon technique. And so technique, which we do not neglect, becomes a part of man unleashed, rather than the controller of a motorized soldiery… If one day this relation is reversed, we are doomed…

“My guess is that the enemy deliberately put off the conquest of this position, here, when he could quite easily have taken it. He wanted to choose his moment, ensure his dominance over a hinterland, seize a great and serviceable port and not an isolated city, requiring to be fed, however little… It was a sensible decision but the moment has passed, never to return. In strategy as in life, lost opportunities are lost for good. The single factor of action with an overwhelming probability of disobedience is time, which is an admirable factor of inaction…”

“That sounds a bit confused.”

“Not at all, not to me… Inaction is never total, in that it stores up the givens for action… We are experts at the war of inaction, allowing opportunities and forces to ripen, rather than throwing them away… Another of the enemy’s disadvantages: its integrity. Their men march all of a piece, like clockwork. If one division breaks up, two rational units emerge to cancel each other out. We, by contrast, never lose sight of our instinctive cohesion even in the depths of incoherence… We are the richer in internal contradictions. Our men are prone to fury, to panic, to flight, to turning in on themselves, and then the cowards become the bravest fighters on earth. We possess limitless resignation, steeped in limitless strength. I doubt whether the average German can ever feel completely resigned to this war, which only brings him intolerable privations likely to terminate in a stupid death. We don’t tend to ask ourselves such questions, we believe in neither comfort nor death, the individual or…”

The old officer’s voice tailed off in mid-sentence. Daria pretended not to notice.

“Because we retain a primitive belief in ourselves, because our ideas are the reflection of ourselves, an obscure, communal we, advancing toward consciousness… There’s nowhere that ideas, even unsustainable ones, are more alive than here. Over and above our contradictions, we have an ultimate unity which harmonizes the feeling for death, murder, and pillage — indispensable to war — with our love of a peaceful world and of mankind; with our slavish submissiveness and our revolutionary sense of justice… We redress error through terror…”

“Are you a Party member, Comrade Captain?”

“A sympathizer. A professional. I am drawn to war as an art. Pure thought, dialectics, mathematics, surgery, patriotism, the rampage of the unconscious, paranoia… Do you follow?

“One last point. In this service we are the eyes, the ears, the antennae, the calculating machine and the imagination of the army. We decipher the undecipherable, almost without fail. In cases of serious misjudgment do not expect leniency. Now get yourself into uniform, I’m busy.”

Daria’s initial job was writing analyses of prisoners’ letters. Half a dozen people combed through the packets that were brought in from the front line, revealing, in the form of soiled bits of paper, the very substance of sacrificed lives. Photographs: a beaming young woman at a garden gate, a baby, a gentleman with a walrus mustache beside a sad, stout lady; a basset hound with human eyes; naked Fraüleins; a village high street… Sublieutenant Effros gathered the whole team around his desk to apply a magnifying glass to some tiny, wildly salacious snapshots found in the notebook of Hauptman Lazarus Meister. “The dirty dog!” hooted Effros. Ostentatiously he dropped the pictures into an envelope marked “For the Captain’s Attention”; the others felt sure that he would contrive to keep a few back… Daria took a closer look at Hauptman Meister’s book. Apart from addresses, there were quotations from Schopenhauer and the Führer. She read: “ ‘In defending myself against the Jews, I am fighting to defend the work of the Lord’ (Mein Kampf, page 72).” In the margin was scrawled “Jewesses.” Didn’t he know that the Lord was a child of Israel, born to a woman of Israel? “What happened to that swine,” Daria demanded, “is he dead?” She must have been assuming he was, because it was a surprise to be told, “No, it’s from a POW camp.” A certain sadness mingled with her disgust, but she found herself glad to know the fellow was alive.

Back at her own desk beside the stove, she read the letters written by a peasant woman to her husband from Württemburg. “My dearest Albrecht…” The children were in good health, two cows had calved, Hermann was sending some cloth from Paris, the Polish prisoners were better workers than the French but one of them had just been thrown into jail, likely to be executed for sleeping with the widow G: “what a trollop, can you imagine, when she was questioned in public she said a man was a man, they gave her a good flogging, but we send her milk and preserves all the same…” Nothing of interest here. A man is a man. “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life…” Daria stared at the yellowed ceiling. In a bundle of unsent letters from First Sergeant Wilhelm-Hans Guterman, she found a story which she was able to summarize by collating extracts and rounding them out with notes.

The story haunted her for days… Garrisoned in a small Ukrainian town, Sergeant Guterman met a flaxen-haired girl in the marketplace, “just like our girls at home,” named Svetlana, Clara. She was “strong and quiet,” again “just like our girls” and they probably took strolls around the ponds together. “A handsome people, the Ukrainians,” he mused, “very similar to our Teutonic ancestors…” When Svetlana fell pregnant, Guterman “hatched a plan” to send her to his family in Thuringia as a work volunteer, but she suddenly refused to leave the country and he expected to be moved on with his division to some new destination at any minute, for the inscrutable purposes of strategy. He promised Svetlana he’d come back for her “after the war”; he got a friend, whose strong suit was mathematics, to compute his chances of surviving, mutilated or whole, in captivity or otherwise, assuming the war lasted for eighteen months from such-and-such a date… Guterman was popular with the locals, since he performed all sorts of small favors for them. This was how matters stood when a band of partisans ambushed a supply train, to the spitting fury of the commander. Guterman indirectly conveyed his relief at being passed over for the reprisals detachment. (Not a bad sort, this boy, Daria thought; Klim in Germany would behave the same way…) “Twelve arrests in the Little Woods quarter,” noted Guterman. Svetlana was scared, “she looked so adorable with those great frightened eyes in the moonlight, my God, why must they…” Piecing together the rambling chitchat of the letters, Daria glimpsed Svetlana’s arrest and the terrible time that began for the sergeant, not daring to speak up to anyone, haunted by those great frightened eyes… His letters to his sister turned into a journal that would never be mailed. “She’s at the Grange, guarded by the special detachment…” He manages to smuggle some biscuits through to her. First Lieutenant F summons him for questioning on the subject of this girl — a partisan’s niece, convicted of having run missions to the forest. “You’re aware, Guterman, that you could have got yourself into very serious trouble indeed? You have a good record. I’ll simply note the facts on a file card. The girl will be hanged.” Guterman cried over her in dry lines, not daring to reveal himself on paper, ignorant of any but stock phrases from popular novels. Out of prudence, perhaps, he went so far as to justify martial law, whilst pleading to the Captain on behalf of a misguided creature “who bears in her womb a future soldier of the Great Reich” (a clever touch, that!). But the captain, good fellow, retorted: “In the first place, who’s to say it won’t be a girl, or maybe two? Second, there’s been no official pronouncement as yet on the legal status of minors in this category. And lastly, I’ll only mention it to the chief if I find him in a good mood, otherwise it’ll just be another black mark against you…” And one against himself too, for sure. The garrison commander was not in a good mood: the partisans were wreaking havoc on the railway. Guterman polished his uniform buttons and shined his boots in preparation for the parade of October 18, to be held on the town square in front of the small blue-domed white church. From his place in the rank he saw the scaffold made ready for seven hostages and criminals. He could still hope, there were more than twenty prisoners — oh, let her be spared! He is in the front row, thirty yards from the scaffold, hearing the sobbing murmur of the people, a chatter of prayer and malediction. He recognized Svetlana, she’d lost weight, her eyes seemed to be searching for him, he felt a trembling rising in his muscles, discipline kept him rigid, he fastened his gaze on the blue onion over the church while a mechanical voice in his head repeated “My God my God my God…” Then the mass shudder of the crowd broke over him and he saw Svetlana’s body dangling, oddly twisted, next to the long frame of an old man with his tongue hanging out.

Daria suggested to Captain Potapov that this narrative, revised by a writer (for it was poorly expressed, marred by clumsy attempts to dissemble), could usefully be published. “I’ve read few that are so moving,” she said. Her superior listened, doodling stars onto his blotter.

“Moving? War is not moving. Human testimonies, if authentic, are more apt to be demoralizing… Let our unionized pencil pushers do their own writing, they know their business. I shall want those papers for the psychology department. You must focus your attention on information with some practical use. Have you made a note of the movements of this Gutman, dates, unit numbers, and so forth?”

“Yes, Comrade Captain.”

“That’s what we need.”

There was a touch of pained reprimand in his tone, as though he had been about to say: What are you so bothered by? One atom of cruelty in the bloody nebula we inhabit? It doesn’t mean a thing, nothing counts now except pitiless efficiency, get that into your head and start being a tiny cog in the machine… At least, that was how Daria took it.

The shelter with its log ceiling provided a deceptive impression of security… You scrambled down an embankment and entered an underground passageway, at the end of which the command post opened out like a roomy cave, lit by oil lamps. It had bunks, telephones, a stove; the pungent scents of leather, tinned food, and urine hung in a dank chill of cellars. The liaison officer, Ivanchuk, sat permanently glued to the receiver: his dimpled, rosy cheeks were a welcome sight. He was just in from Siberia, and still radiated the plenitude of life. Everyone who met him must have said to himself: “If you only knew what you were in for…”

Colonel Fontov, by contrast, was a greenish individual with a visionary glare, ravaged face, too-long neck, and jutting, prickly beard; he usually leaned on a thick wooden stick and seemed not to have slept for weeks; he stared at you with the eyes of a nocturnal bird capable of strange divinations. That night he was there only for some raids that had been put off by a shower of torpedoes and a blizzard of snow. His glance frequently alighted, with pleasure, on Daria. A woman in the midst of all this, a real woman, recalling to mind the lost world out there; it was better than a big glass of alcohol in the belly, for it sharpened the faculties. As heavy crashes shook the earth around them, Fontov rose from his table and paced up and down, smoking (he limped without his stick; his beard poked irascibly sideways). “Everything all right?” he asked the telephonist. “Yes, Comrade Colonel.” “Check on post 4.” The younger man was trying not to look rattled while bits of earth sprinkled down from the quivering ceiling, like the sly patter of hail: it was thoroughly unnerving.

Fontov sent some lieutenants up to reconnoiter what was happening outside. It’s best to keep the men busy under bombardment, especially the younger combatants. So they won’t have time to think, so they’ll only follow orders. “Quite a hailstorm,” said the colonel to Daria. (If he addressed her, it was as an excuse to look at her without embarrassment.) “Can’t think why the sons of bitches are squandering so much ammunition, they’d be insane to attack in this sector… But insane is what they are, sometimes.” A troubling thought shifted his gaze, and Daria was forgotten: of course, there was always the possibility of treachery. A soldier strides over pack ice, sure of himself and of the awesome cold; but the ice is cracked, the trap powdered with new-fallen snow, the somber waters beneath suck you into their bubbling vortex, goodbye to the man, the darkness carries away what they call a drowned man… The shelling having tapered off, the Colonel assembled his officers for going out. Daria volunteered to go along. “No,” he said, “it’s not advisable, that hail can fall again at any moment…” He was a man without nerves, who spoke in a penetrating voice, managed never to lose his temper, and mastered himself with unanswerable firmness. Daria was amazed that the human animal could be brought so firmly to heel. She saw that he had been worn down to the last fiber — the last, steely fiber that held him together. The only puzzle, thought Daria, is whether he will be wounded again before his nerves break down, or whether he will crack up before his next wound… In the first case, he will be decorated and nominated for promotion; in the second, he could wind up in front of a firing squad — for raving in the middle of a division chiefs of staff meeting, or declaiming a speech during the launch of an attack, or howling at the moon all alone in the snow!

Daria could not know that Colonel Fontov had already been through those stages; that he kept his crises in check by smoking, that he no longer expected anything either for or from himself, and that he adored a callous man-made deity which may be no realer than other gods but which you have to believe in to impose perfect discipline on soldiers, whether on the production line or the line of fire: the god Labor, brother of Death since its ultimate effect is to destroy the laborer. The machine invisibly devours the mechanic’s very substance, which is time. Production, you say? Production feeds and prepares war, which is a destruction of production and of man. Expanded production of the means of production is expanded destruction of human substance; the production of consumer goods has as its object maintaining the workforce in a fit state for labor, that is for wearing itself out, and this is the ring that closes the chain of pan-destruction… Idle for a few minutes (it was never more than four), he had spoken again to Daria. “I’m more of an economist myself. Political economy is worse than war…”

If he had begun to speechify — but before whom? — he would have said: “Our beautiful language, forged by serfs and by sages, employs the same word to denote two concepts: will and freedom… One word for an absolute antinomy, of a nature to delight the philosophers, who are for the most part mystifiers. What we mean by the will only acts to suppress freedom; what we mean by freedom is nothing but an illusory flight from the will… The living writhe between these two poles of incomprehensibility. I admire the determinists who think they’ve understood. I’d like to show them a bit of introspection five minutes before the signal to attack! The soldier obeys: neither will nor freedom, is that clear? The leader needs no more, and the leader himself obeys. It’s all anybody needs! The soldier is trapped between several formidable fears: fear of being killed while obeying orders, fear of being executed for disobeying them, fear of being a coward or appearing to be one, fear of despising himself, and many other fears all churning in his belly, causing him to piss and shit abundantly. What we mean by courage is decanted through this physio-psychological process which answers to profound natural causes: wounds to an emptied bowel are much less dangerous than wounds to a full one… Savages have magic formulas. In war, we are savages furnished with technical know-how. My magic formula comes down to this: work! Labor operates a practical synthesis of obscure imperatives, more potential than actual, more imaginary than real: will, liberty, necessity, finality. Labor destroys men, objects, and time, but it is a destruction which provides itself with aspects of creation. That may be the last myth. In war it’s clear and even yields an instant gain in accord with brute instinct. I work to destroy the enemy, a breed of men which must be destroyed so that our own breed may be able work in peace… I work to defend four kilometers of threatened road, whose loss would translate into twenty thousand deaths inside the city within a week… So, to work! Since the work consists of killing, it is only natural that we shall eventually be killed ourselves… To work!” Earlier, Fontov had exchanged only a few elliptical remarks with Daria while he was soaking his feet in a bucket of warm water; but Daria reconstituted what he would have said if he had expressed himself at leisure; which he never did, lacking leisure but also disdaining words, and out of prudence. The worker must be prudent and fear nothing so much as expressing truth or sincerity.

This night’s mission was to obtain information by capturing enemy troops — but not men out on patrol, who don’t carry anything on them. Battalion commanders would send raiding parties out into the enemy lines or against advanced outposts. Vosskov designated six men and a lieutenant. He seemed to know them personally, to be assessing the fortitude and destiny of each man as he considered him. Daria wished she could see into their souls. They were an ordinary bunch, with ordinary names. The inevitable Ivanov plus a Sidorov, to refine the banality, both unremarkable, stumpy, and gray-skinned; a Tziulik from the Ukraine whose name made the others laugh and who indeed had a tiny head on the body of an extremely wiry Punchinello; a moon-faced Tartar oozing deceptive sweetness named Maymedov-Oglu; Dzilichvili, a wiry Caucasian highlander; and Leifert, who was of German ancestry. Finally there was Lieutenant Patkin, who sported black tufts of eyebrows over a snub nose, and resembled the kind of small-time hood that prowls around marketplaces — clever brutes with a knack for counterfeiting and bootlegging, slipping home a blade under cover of a brawl, hopping over fences and bamboozling the girls with fine-sounding words (not one of which they mean). “Quite the charming rogue,” whispered Daria into Major Vosskov’s ear. “You’ve got it. He started off as a child of the road and the wastelands, spent two years in a penal colony, recently graduated as a cadre, with several commendations… He’s both astute and extremely brave. After the war, I can see him making a first-rate gangster…” Patkin was memorizing the map of the operation. Here the ice is cracked; but over here, right in the middle of the impassable section — as they believe it to be — the ice has resealed itself, the planks are laid, you can wriggle across one behind the other. There are forty yards between the two machine-gun nests on the opposite bank. Their trenches are damaged, and badly guarded ever since they pulverized ours; we’ve ostensibly moved our earthworks a little farther back… This is where their shelters begin… “Only shoot as a last resort, bring two or three prisoners back, whatever the cost. Whatever the cost,” repeated Patkin, frowning as he measured this authorization to sacrifice his companions if need be. “It’ll be done, Comrade Commander.” He spoke the words unemphatically, in an unwilling, almost bitter voice.

The six men waiting in the shelter formed an obscure mass, huddled within its silence. How many would return? They were a broad sample of the people of the Union. Each had turned over his documents — penciled letters and few personal belongings; the commander was now arranging these in little piles on the table, like the possessions of the dead. What a gap is left inside a man, when he has to part with his letter from home! They were trying on the white shrouds, lowering hoods over eyes, experimentally… Anonymous, faceless; dim white phantoms equipped with light weapons and a square of chocolate (chocolate is a treat even for those who court death, but it must not be eaten straightaway, however annoying it can be to die before eating it…). A tram driver from Rostov-on-Don — Rostov, that had been burned to the ground; a tractor mechanic from the country outside Voronezh — the bombed, the ransacked Voronezh; a schoolteacher from Chernikov — occupied, ransomed Chernikov, inhabited by the hanged; a cattle farmer from the steppes of the lower Volga — a Muslim or perhaps a Buddhist, and the war was almost there; a young wine grower from the green and russet hills of Kakhetia — its hamlets emptied of young men; a printer from Moscow — wounded, famished, blacked-out Moscow… What will they achieve tonight, what will become of them, these peaceful men who believe in the future? Six, seven men counting the lieutenant, twenty-five bereavements suspended in their wake, en route to the torture of cold, darkness, fire, murder, and unknowable death…

They know it all, Daria thought, they are plunging tranquilly into an abyss, they are monstrously aware. If their souls could explode, broadcasting their lamentation to the world, all wars would end, how simple it would be! Simply impossible. The Ukrainian, Tziulik, asked the commissar for a glass of vodka. “Wiseass! You know how to exploit the situation,” said the commissar. “Pass the bottle around to the others, schoolteacher.” “If I don’t come back, you’ll be sure to write to my wife?” “I promise, but you’ll be writing to her yourself, lucky bastard.” The voices of these men were fraternal. The commissar put on a satisfied expression. “As for me, if one of these days I don’t make it back from the middle of nowhere, there won’t be anyone writing to anybody… I don’t have anyone left. A bird in the air with no nest!” Tziulik clapped him heartily on the back. “You’re a lucky bastard too.” Move! Daria was seeing men moving out for the first time in her life. She realized that such sorties had been taking place for years now, a hundred, a thousand times a day or night, along thousands of miles of battlefronts, on both sides of the lines, for the others are like us — the same dread, the same obedience. A hundred thousand times already these men had moved out never to return, but always they were replaced by fresh men sprung from the depths of the earth and the wombs of women, from the depths of the weeping and gnashing of teeth, from the depths of rotting cadavers and of love. Pure madness.

The commando unit moved off down a winding lane through the snow dune. It was instantly swallowed up by sepulchral whiteness. The twilit land was beginning to merge with empty space, and space into darkness. On the other side of a half-invisible sloping bank, pale as death, the presence of the river was palpable under its crust of ice and snow, an expanse of camouflaged pitfalls crisscrossed by hidden threats. The woods, that by day gave every horizon a bluish tinge, were now invisible, and there was nothing left but the absolute silence of uninhabited expanses. Distant explosions and quick-fading flashes in the sky did not interrupt so much as magnify the silence and the vastness. This site of immobility evoked only feelings from beyond despair: total extinction, uselessness, the biting cold. The landscapes of dead planets must look like this. “From here, Daria Nikiforovna, you can see a long way into enemy positions, but take care not to go past the salient, they have it under observation… We’ve had men killed there.” But there was nothing to be seen, neither there nor here, the two dead men had left no trace. And yet numberless eyes were on the lookout, trained through lenses; sound detectors were listening; radar beams were searching through space; field telephones were active from station to station; patrols were crawling over the ice… This is what man has become, this murderous worm! Machines for riddling puny human bodies, smashing holes into concrete, pulverizing the earth, whipping snow into squalls, drowning the night under torrents of fire, orchestrating screams of agony, drinking the blood of sacrifice, all these latent machines were crouched expectant on the brink of fury. The earth was as primed with violence as the air was with cold, the sky with snow, and the human spirit with that resigned anguish which journalists have distilled into “Bravery.”

At the command post, men were playing cards with a pack reduced to tatters. Noncoms were on the line to other hidden dens, swiftly writing down the hour, the minute, the response, “all quiet, all quiet.” Vosskov had dropped off with his elbows on the map, a wax dummy. Time flowed like invisibly falling snow, the time of the last certainty, charged like all else with the inevitability of catastrophes moving closer and closer. A devouring second toward what, yet another second toward what? Who will ever understand?

“It’s starting,” whispered the chubby-cheeked telephonist.

“Right,” Vosskov said, shaking himself out of his torpor, “pass me the receiver.”

The voice at the other end launched into an algebraic report, the pencil traced a curve on the map as though impelled by a will of its own. “I see, good, very good…” This meant: disastrous. Major Vosskov was no longer listening, but he could hear through the silence. Patkin’s six stumble into hell one hour before the projected time. Bad. They will be destroyed because of that timing. First a volley of machine-gun fire rips through the emptiness, instantly followed by tracer bullets striping the night with low arcs, like maddened colored stars. Now a planet ignites in the sky and spreads a colossal glare over the white desert it conjures into being. Ice and snow become peopled with shadows, obscure forms drawing bursts of projectiles from automatic weapons; most of these shadows turn out to be illusory. Everything dies down suddenly in a panicked silence, a darkness of inexistence. And then it all begins again, the rising and sinking of northern lights, the whistling upward blast of a torpedo… Major Vosskov rose to his feet and put on his shroud, imitated by several men and by Daria. Outside, at first, they saw nothing. Even the snow was black. But there are different kinds of nothingness, and this one was a sham. Sure enough, less than a mile away a searchlight skimmed the snows like a small, jerky snake. Were the seven men headed back across the river already? Was that possible? Downstream bright planets leaped, the facing shore thundered chaotically, silence fell, and the river arched its back in an eruption of black water and fire. “They’re breaking up the ice, the vicious bastards!” Vosskov hesitated. Should we start firing, to create a diversion? His orders were to operate discreetly and husband the ammunition. The enemy would fire back, which could hamper the return of the commando unit and entail the loss of a few men… Things might escalate into an artillery duel, prompting the division to hold an inquiry into the waste of munitions occasioned by his recklessness… Then should he do nothing? Like an anxious schoolboy, Vosskov imagined the general shouting: “And you simply sat back? Where did your duty lie?” A note would appear in his file: “Lacks initiative.” Where did his duty lie? Our bank was silent, or nearly. Ring through to post 4 with instructions to open fire? Patience, I shall be patient as death. “Find out,” he told the liaison officer in a steady voice, for the leader must display exemplary calm. “What have they seen? Have they spotted them?” Under a rigid posture, he was squirming. “No, sir.” A cone of pink light had stabilized out there, boiling on the spot with each regular explosion. At last the riposte was under way. Vosskov was delighted to see that the order had been given by someone else (one less responsibility). Dark white sprays spurted up beyond the Neva, a thick cloud blurred the left flank of the luminous cone. “Ten to one the survivors are through safe… Did you understand the operation?” he asked Daria. “I think so…” It was hideously beautiful. “You there, Rodion, run back and check the casualty figures. If our people are inside the sector, increase firing for another five minutes…” He stooped to light his pipe under a soldier’s coat. “I reckon they’ve taken more losses than we have… That big strike you saw, it must have hit a blockhouse…” His pipe had gone out immediately; he was inhaling imaginary smoke and expelling it through protruded lips. “All right, the night has had its little epileptic fit. Home we go.” The battle was tapering off into ever-shorter spasms of brilliance and noise. Darkness reclaimed the snow, dappled at first, then total.

Nothing had happened. “Reporting sporadic incoming fire, location, time…” Propped over the map, Vosskov was dozing again, a wax statue. One hundred and four hours on duty and so little sleep! All he wanted was sleep. He would lie down in piles of warm fresh straw, he would sleep on stoves in peasant kitchens, sleep in meadows of grass, rest against the wall of a shelter, collapse wherever he could! The miracle of sleep began to steal over him, there was a lively country fair, children singing… “Right,” he groaned, his blissful expression morphing into a scowl, “hand me the receiver…” Colonel Fontov was on the line. “No, Comrade Colonel, no sign of them yet… Nothing to report…” Time crept onward, malign and inconceivable. Daria was prowling back and forth between the claustrophobic shelter, the trench, and the eternity of darkness beyond. There she ran into the colonel. During the incident, he had given himself one of those injections against physiological depression. (Humiliating to know how much we depend on our glands!) “Ah, it’s you! Enjoying a breath of northern air? Bracing, isn’t it? Did you like our little party? It went off very well. My plan executed to the letter. Our men are coming back…” She was still lost for a reply when he turned and ambled off, spry despite the stick, trailing a fan of shadows. Daria wrung her hands in the emptiness.

Four men returned, bringing one prisoner. Patkin reported the death of Tziulik, the Ukrainian. “I crawled up to him, I felt his head, my fingers went into his brains. A minute later the ice turned over under him. Sidorov” (the tractor mechanic from Voronezh, who had made no physical impression) “took several bullets in the back, the stretcher bearers picked him up… Leifert, dead for sure, he was a real brick, he drew the enemy fire so we could get through… I think he was in the way of that torpedo…” Killed several times over, then, the printing worker of German descent. “We’ve brought you one NCO, the other drowned.” “Congratulations, Patkin!” the colonel said loudly (his face was like a Chinese mask with bad teeth). “Go get some rest. Have them bring in the prisoner…” The basic mission had been accomplished. The colonel’s rheumatic knee, the right, was aching.

The prisoner marched in with a certain assurance. Stripped of his white shroud and the fur coat of Tziulik the Ukrainian, he appeared in a faded Wehrmacht uniform, with the insignia of a subaltern. Wrists lashed together, age about twenty-five, fair hair, domed forehead, pale clipped mustache, fluttering eyes.

“No weapons on him? Untie his hands!” the colonel ordered.

Two lamps placed at either end of the desk illuminated the captive from below. He snapped to attention. Vosskov stood behind him. Daria sat to one side with a notebook on her lap, ready to interpret. Colonel Fontov began: “Surname, first name, rank, specialty, unit!”

The prisoner, calm, answered with unhurried precision.

“How long has your unit held this position on the Neva?”

Daria noticed that the prisoner was swaying very slightly on the spot. As she translated, he looked oddly at her, blinking his eyes, and leaned toward the colonel to murmur something.

“What’s that, Sublieutenant? Repeat please.”

He repeated, in a low, strangled voice, “Why this playacting? I know where I am.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Forgive me…”

He waggled his head feebly.

The colonel demanded: “Are you feeling well? Are you sick?”

“I am feeling quite well, Inspector, thank you.”

He raised his eyes to the damp log beams above them, gleaming with icicles. A smile half formed on his face; the blue gaze was erratic and veiled, as if by smoke. His elbows twitched, so violently that Vosskov and the Mongolian soldier both jumped, ready to grab him… The colonel banged the flat of his hand on the table.

“Ask him if he’s frightened and if so, of what. Tell him we treat prisoners fairly here, in compliance with the rules of war…”

Daria went right up to the young man to look him in the face, and it was she who felt a touch of fear. The blue eyes were transparent, intoxicated. He was grimacing.

“Repeat, woman,” he said with an effort. “My head hurts… No, I am not frightened. Of anything. Why are you trying to deceive me? Why are you talking this foreign language? It is not worthy of you. I was expecting to be arrested. I have committed a serious offense before the Party and the Führer and I am ready to admit it.”

He threw back his head, making the Adam’s apple bulge against the rim of his collar, begging for the cutthroat’s invisible knife… Major Vosskov flung a glass of cold water into his face. It had an immediate effect. He wiped his face with his knuckles, and said, “I am obliged to you, sir. Ah! That’s better!”

“Are you a Nazi?”

(Almost all of them deny it…)

“Ja, Herr Offizier. Heil Hitler!”

He gave the raised-arm salute, impeccably smart.

“Ask him whether he understands his situation?”

“I understand. Tell the Military Police Inspector that I don’t expect clemency. The culprits are Klaus Heimann, Heinrich Sittner, Werner Biederman…”

Daria wrote down the names as fast as she could. “Units?” She translated in some perplexity as the prisoner went on,

“Klaus Heimann brought the enemy radio broadcasts back from Stettin. Sittner copied them on the regimental typewriter… Biederman gave me four pages that I hid in my kit so as to give them to the authorities… I’ve done my duty, and if I deserve to be punished I…”

Vosskov punched him hard between the shoulder blades. The prisoner rounded on him furiously, but was grappled back. He said, “Water, quick, please…” He took a face full of water without blinking, he was laughing out loud.

The colonel cocked his revolver and put it on the table.

“Tell him that if he doesn’t put an end to this pointless masquerade, I will blow his brains out.”

The prisoner was laughing, not listening. They allowed him to bend his head over to stare at the revolver. “Not mine,” he announced. Daria confronted him. “Listen here, prisoner of war. Look at me! Can you see me clearly? Now look at the colonel…” The word colonel brought him down to earth. He regarded Fontov with set chin, calmly. “The colonel has warned you…” The prisoner responded calmly enough, but his mouth grew unsteady.

“Kill me? But I’m innocent… You’ve no right… I’ve made amends. I await your orders, Colonel! Sir!”

His forehead wrinkled as he remembered something. “Prisoners of war? I don’t know…” A telephone call alerted them to some focused artillery fire against eastern positions, in such-and-such a sector… In case it were the prelude to an attack, the battalion urgently requested instructions and ammunition. Division wanted an evaluation of the raid’s success, with the number and quality of prisoners taken… Bits of ice and grit rained onto the table as the ground, shaken by an explosion, vibrated violently. Vosskov knocked over the nearest lamp as he dived for the shelter door; the light went down by half and shadows rebounded. All Colonel Fontov saw was the cherubic telephonist, going, “Post 7 is out, the line must be down, post 7 is out, the line…” “Will you please shut up!” scolded the colonel, his face sickly tense in the gloom, his beard blending with the mobile darkness. “Where’s Sitkin?” he asked, too loudly (Sitkin was the chief of staff). No one answered. The prisoner said, “Sittner was arrested last night.”

Daria translated without thinking.

“What?” asked Fontov who was assessing the strength of the threatened battalion, the quantity of available munitions, the ominous silence of post 7, and the wrath of the division. “What’s that, Sitkin arrested?” “No, no, Sittner.” “Who’s Sittner?” The floor rumbled again; there followed a gaping silence. Fontov caught sight of his revolver and the smoke-blind eyes of the prisoner, who was smiling, held by the arms. Daria translated: “Tell the colonel I am immortal. Immortal, it’s appalling… I am very sorry…”

“He is mad,” Daria whispered, her face white.

The colonel was not feeling very sane himself. “Make him shut up,” he said, shoving the gun back into its holster. “If he’s playacting, he’s damn good. But for pity’s sake, shut the bastard up.” The prisoner was gabbling in German, staccato. A blanket was thrown over his head; muffled yells came from beneath the hood. It took several men to restrain him, momentarily turning the shelter into a grotesque wrestling ring. Finally the prisoner was hustled away, bound with straps, to be thrown into the snow. “Sitkin is badly wounded… Allow me to replace him for the time being.” Major Vosskov’s day-old stubble was brilliant with ice crystals, as were his eyelashes and the hairs in his nose. “Good,” the colonel said. “Send the lunatic to division…” “What lunatic?” The earth trembled, lifted on a swell. Fontov shrugged. Daria heard him answer, “No, do not open fire until I give the order…” She groped her way out of the shelter, the cold earth vibrating against her hands. It was like emerging from a grave. Suddenly, as night faded, gray snow was slowly swirling… .It was like entering a vast tomb.

The officers’ club was nothing but a small, uncomfortable room, but it was heated and ornamented with pine branches and red banners. The busts of the Leaders lined up on the mantelpiece contributed no more than a pale plaster presence. Next to them, but smaller, stood a bust of the perfect poet: Pushkin, daubed with blacking, did more to inspire reverie. Officers who were hard up came here to play checkers and listen to bombs falling on the city… Daria took a magazine from the table, most likely The New World, October, or The Star ; its cover was missing but it made no difference. The format, the paper, the crabbed grayish print, the content, all were the same from journal to journal, with as much variation as you’d discover within a regiment on the march. At first the ranks seem composed only of faded uniforms, but on closer inspection you start to notice the uniqueness of faces, you realize that humanity endures here, that man survives in solitude, perhaps, at the core of the multiple being, under his serial number, and that he may well be what gives it strength… Man, the atom of military power.

For this war, we need a mobilized, disciplined soul, the collective soul of a patient army. So let the imagination of poets and novelists put on a uniform and obey orders — but let each retain his gnarled or stony visage, as each wages war in his own way. The population of a rational society in danger must necessarily concentrate on the moment’s task. Not everything can be indulged at all times, not everything has to be expressed… If hypnosis is a weapon, another means of fortifying our resolve, of winning, then let hypnosis serve our ends! The ideal would be a hypnotic literature of endurance, willpower, obedience, sacrifice, of determination to survive beyond sacrifice. In modern warfare, the writer plays the part of the tribe’s witch doctor who praises the courage of warriors, conveys auspicious oracles, unleashes the communal visionary trance to the hoarse, hollow beating of the drums… The great brain that is the State assigns to the writer the duty of preparing souls for the ordeal, whether it be retreat or attack, and the writer sits down at his typewriter as though before a magic apparatus…

Daria could not conceive of literature as anything but an organized service, attuned to the needs of psychological strategy, military administration, resupply, the care of the wounded, and the reeducation of the mutilated. It was obvious that there had to be at least one decent novel and several slim volumes of verse on the topic of ambulances, triage centers, hospitals, and the nurses’ duty. A story by a lady writer dwelled on the enemy’s unspeakable cruelty and the edifying grandeur of our hate; then finding within herself extraordinary resources of love, she made stricken readers shed tears over the pages in which a wife worships her amputated and disfigured war hero, as a hundred cannon and a hundred searchlights turn Moscow’s skies into a cosmic extravaganza of victory. Lovingly she kisses the crushed face, and whispers, “You are the one who has achieved this, my darling! It is for you the hundred cannon boom in triumph! For you, the savior of us all!” A story that provided a much-needed support to the morale of amputees’ wives. Daria felt able to become such a wife, she almost wished it, and the image of a blinded Klim, shattered features seamed with pink welts, hobbling along on crutches, drifted before her mind’s eye and sickened her. Better for him to be killed outright! Better a grave on which to plant a young fir tree; better to brood over a grave, or before a horizon without a grave, than that! For love of you, Klim!

Feeling let down, as much by herself as by the lady writer, Daria was turning through the pages. She came across a dramatic piece whose title should really have been The Heroic Children; she remembered a play she’d seen in Paris about naughty ones, Les Enfants terribles. The characters were a couple of selfish, twisted little monsters, and there was a sequel, Les Parents terribles, about the same characters in middle age when they had become even more selfish and twisted, but rendered cowardly by what they called “experience.” And didn’t I once read a novel deserving of the title The Spoiled Children? Our managed literature is superior to the other, its children are more wholesome… The play was well written, full of poetic verve. One child, twelve-year-old Zina, has chestnut pigtails and toils away at her homework in a bombed-out house. Zina is passionately keen to become class leader, “because my big brother’s fighting the invaders, and this, Mother, is my way of fighting!” The siren wails, Zina shuts her exercise books and stuffs them under the floorboards, into the dirt, to preserve them from the flames, before contending with a classmate for another privilege — the job of helping the spotters out under the death-dealing sky. “It’s not fair, Irina, your class has already lost three pupils, and ours is still whole!” Daria began to chafe with annoyance, and skipped the rest of Act One. Around the middle of Act Two, here was little Vanya telling how he was tortured by the Nazis. He didn’t cry once, he scorned them, he hated them, he drew strength from hatred, he swore he would live to destroy them, he solemnly vowed as much to the Leader of the Fatherland, “and I didn’t tell them anything, I ran away!” “Me too, me too,” chirps Zoë, thirteen, “they beat me and burned my lips, look at the scars, and I didn’t tell them anything… The village was on fire, the sky was on fire and so was I…” In unison the children sing “The Fatherland loves us, now let us love the Fatherland.” Tossia declares she wants to be a schoolteacher, because there are millions of people to teach who are thirsty for knowledge…

Daria flung the magazine down on the straw. The lamp gave off a feeble glow, the earthen walls were animated by trickles of water. Some of the men were asleep, rolled up in their furs. The bearded telephonist said softly, “Careful with that paper, Comrade. It mustn’t get wet, it’s all there is to smoke.” Daria retrieved the magazine and put it on the stool next to the lamp. “Do you have any children?” she asked. “Three,” he said in his singsong brogue, “three little cherubs. Hah, what’s become of them…” “I didn’t mean to remind you,” Daria apologized. The bearded man said, “Makes no difference if I talk about it or I don’t, God will protect them if that is His will…”

Whoever wrote this play? Who was this author, who apparently had never met a child? Our children are heroic, or some of them are, but not like that. Funny how real heroes never talk the way they do in plays. What’s wrong with the genuine article, why fabricate a travesty when we are up to our eyes in authentic heroism, through no choice of our own? The author’s name was Anna Lobanova.

Daria’s memory of her was precise. In her mid-fifties, with beautiful white hair and a sad, square-jawed kind of pluck, Lobanova had been living in Moscow at a Writers’ Union house; she used to speak her mind quite freely, and once was arrested for several days. Her reputation rested on a powerful novel about the Yakuti penal colonies — those of the former regime, of course. However gritty and sincere the story, it was set in 1907: the old dodge of escaping into the past. Could she possibly be as sincere now, with this turgid rehash of official heroics? Daria asked around. The woman lived in the besieged city, that was something, it gave her the right to speak of courage… So many others had evacuated to Alma-Ata, to the very frontiers of China! Under orders, to be sure; you just have to pull a few strings to get your orders. Out there you can write great war scenarios while watching the apple trees blossom in peace…

On her way home to Klim, she stopped by an old mansion house in what used to be Basseynaya Street, a writers’ hive since the time of Dostoyevsky. A little girl who was brushing snow and excrement in the square courtyard directed her to staircase C, “third floor on the right, yes she’s there, she nearly never goes out…” Daria offered a dry biscuit, receiving a startled glance in exchange. The child stuffed the prize into her clothes. Daria edged through a half-open door into a hallway lined with bookshelves. Dusty volumes were piled one on top of the other, abandoned, sprawling, and, she guessed, decimated by the needs of the stove. A pale man with a cough pointed her to a door. The apartment smelled of manure, but the hum of a sewing machine could be heard and a gas ring with a saucepan on top was alight in a recess of the passage. Daria knocked at the left-hand door. “Come in?” The ceiling was tarred by smoke. Good pieces of mahogany furniture from the time of mad, murdered Czar Paul were buried under rancid clothes, broken-backed books, crumbs of food. The writer Anna Lobanova, looking paler and more creased than she remembered her — altogether a shriveled old woman — lay on the bed under a rug, holding a bound book between hands encased in gray wool. “Oh! Who are you?”

Daria said, “You might remember me, we met, years ago… Permit me to give you these.”

The white hair had lost its sheen but the eyes lit with childish avidity. The visitor pushed vials, ashtray, and candle stump aside to make room on the bedside table for some biscuits, a pack of cigarettes, and a jar of American vitamins.

“Thank you very much,” Anna Lobanova said with a broad smile. “It’s my legs, you know, what with no food — first-degree malnourishment — and the cold… You in the army? Can’t quite place you.”

“Think back. We met several times at Illarionov’s in Moscow; I was with…”

Daria stopped short in discomfiture, with a name on the tip of her tongue that must on no account ever be pronounced, a presence-absence that did not exist. It had been crossed from the record of the living and the dead: D. “Indeed,” the writer filled in quickly, lashes fluttering with the same embarrassment, “perhaps, perhaps… Hardly knew Illarionov, of course…”

Daria adopted a casual tone to say, “I’ve not read anything of his for ages. I have so little time for reading! I did like his style… An extraordinary stylist, don’t you agree? Any idea of what he’s up to, these days?”

The old lady’s face hardened with hostility and alarm. Her gaze became clouded and at the same time more piercing. The effect was so incongruous that Daria understood: Illarionov was now beyond the pale as well. Anna Lobanova said, “Oh, I’ve heard nothing of him for years… Never interested me. It’s wrong of you to like his style, it was mannered and reactionary… Yes, I don’t mind calling it what it was. Counter-revolutionary.”

Silence divided them. Daria was taking it in — no more Illarionov. The man, the work, both gone: the name, to be erased from memory. Should she make her excuses and go? Leaving the other sick with foreboding…

“I read your play at the front. The Heroic Children.”

“It’s not by me.”

“Sorry, I meant A Tale of Red Children…”

The writer would not be drawn out. Her silence seemed to shout: Clear off! You’ve nothing to say to me, why should I trust you! Daria lied: “I thought it was rather powerful…”

The old lady stared straight ahead. The skin around her mouth was pursed into wrinkles; the aquiline nose remained plump, but only because of the unhealthy puffiness of the flesh. The mouth looked like a stitched wound. It added up to a noble profile, made ugly by sourness and morose affliction. Anna Lobanova pulled off a glove, fished under the rug for a cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke through her nostrils. At last, unwillingly, she spoke.

“I disagree with you there. A Tale of Red Children is terrible, a complete disgrace. Who ever saw children like those!”

“Surely,” mumbled Daria, “the main episodes were true to life…”

“Documentary authenticity has nothing to do with literary creation. Didn’t you read the reviews in the Literary Gazette? Bochkin pulled it to pieces and Pimen-Pashkov wiped the floor with them. So there we are. Nor did you read my open letter to the editor, I take it. In which I said that Bochkin and PimenPashkov were justified in their opinion and that it was a piece of agitprop garbage. Subjectively honorable, objectively detestable.”

Daria wanted to laugh, but felt inhibited by Lobanova’s prickly solemnity.

“A writer is a craftsman who must be able to recognize a botched job.”

“And what are you working on now?” Daria asked, in order to change the subject.

“Not very easy to write, with these clumsy gloves and swollen joints… I’m working on a novel about Berezina in 1812… I don’t understand the youngsters of today. Mine grew up in another era.”

“How are they?” (She felt idiotic saying this.)

“My son was killed at Smolensk. No news of my daughter or the grandchildren…”

A small voice shrilled behind the door: “Auntie Aniushka! The soup’s boiling!” “Then turn off the gas!” the writer called back tartly. Daria offered: “Shall I bring you your meal? I’d like to do something…”

“Nothing for you to do. I’m very well where I am.”

“I work for one of the staff services… I could get you evacuated, perhaps a kinder climate…”

“No. I’m not leaving this city, or my books and papers.”

“I understand.”

“No you don’t. You can’t.” Lobanova relented a fraction. “You’re too young.”

There was nothing to say. This room embodied the utter extinction of all things. Lobanova chewed emptiness between her soft gums and said, “I never read the papers anymore. They annoy me. Think we have a chance?”

“Haven’t you heard, we’re saved? They’ll never take Leningrad…”

As Daria talked on, Lobanova listened with inquisitorial attention. Don’t even think of lying to me. I know so much. I smell out falsehood and I despise it. I need no consoling pieties to help me either die or live. I need good reason, at its just measure! She must have been satisfied, because she nodded approvingly once or twice.

“May God hear you!” she concluded, with a wry grimace. “You’re no airhead, I’ll give you that. Women have come on a great deal since the revolution… Now leave me alone, I’m tired.”

Daria stood up, buttoning her sheepskin uniform cloak. “So there’s nothing that you need? Or that I can do?” “No, nothing. But thanks for your visit! A bad play earning me a good visit… That’s nice… And after, there will be room for great literature, real literature.”

After us…

Daria asked affectionately, “How old are you?”

“Sixty-two… But I plan to go on working for at least five years. We writers receive good rations. And so we should. Someone has to defend the brain…”

Out of the blue, Daria thought back to Illarionov, whose name could not be spoken, to D (in a small tan café in Paris), to some of the dead. Killed: worse than dead.

“Real literature,” she echoed, “without fear or lies…”

The aged, exhausted face blanched with something like fright. In a different voice, as though speaking in public, Lobanova pronounced: “In my opinion, the wartime labor of the Writers’ Union has been exemplary… Always inspired by the directives of the Party and the Party’s Leader.”

Daria nodded vigorously at this. She managed a diffident smile.

“May I come and see you again?”

“If you like. There’s no need. I’m sure you have better things to do. Tell that child out there to bring me my soup.”

That morning, she’d had a curious interview with Major Makhmudov. This fat man with an ivory-pink cranium addressed her politely, coolly, not unaffably but with authority: “Are you married?” “De facto, yes.” “So I’ve discovered. It is not in your dossier. I should reprimand you. The personnel in this service are expected to apply for a marriage license, and to inform me of any changes to their civil status… However, your husband is a very highly regarded element among the subaltern cadres. I wish you both the best. Have you told him of your past?” “No.” “I see…” He surveyed her heavily. “I needn’t remind you of the rules of discipline…” “No, Comrade Major.” Daria looked squarely back at him. This is how things stand. “Very good, dismissed…”

She spent the day in the office. Some shells landed not far away. At dusk she set off home via a long detour, feeling obscurely anxious but telling herself it was nothing. The frozen Neva appeared wider than usual. People followed paths over the ice like columns of slow, dull, plodding ants. The snow turned dark beneath their footfalls. Everything was sluggish, low, muted, dingy, and white. The sporadic explosions likewise. The tall gilt spires of the old imperial fortress, built level with the white river, had lost their shine. Women clustered lethargically here and there around holes in the ice; some were staggering away under buckets and jerry cans of green water strewn with floating frost needles. The sky was bluish-yellow above these open stretches. Daria realized she barely had strength enough to think, that her ideas were unraveling into wisps the color of this sky and that some of them were oppressive, to be pushed back… So Illarionov is dead. A despicable character, though he had tremendous gifts… Sacha used to say: “As a human being he’s a nonentity, with next to no inner life, he’s heavy, he’s common: a bank account and a digestive tract. As a writer he might well be great, the remarkable parasite on vegetative man… Prisoner of the man, the writer tries his utmost to be a coward — he would like to specialize in novels written to order, fitting the ideological requisites of the season. And he writes them superbly, but here’s where the real plot thickens. The parasite writer is far more intelligent and less groveling than the vegetative host; he is even prone to bursts of bold, sentimental, convoluted genius, and likes to imagine that the authorities don’t really understand what he’s doing. Even his most official works contain a subtle undercurrent of vitality, making them suggestive of something other than their apparently orthodox line… The bureaucrats at the Literature Office tear at their hair over them. They implore our Illarionov to change twenty-seven passages, and he does, goddamn it — by getting totally drunk! And there are still bits that get away, overlooked by the censors… The censors are afraid of him. He’s undermined the careers of some of their top men. Illarionov is trembling as well, he drinks to reassure himself, but then in his cups he says things that could get him deported for life. After the hangover he’ll dash off a raft of mean, vacuous articles against all and sundry: colleagues whom he accuses of lukewarm ideological commitment, or blindness to the times we live in, or not admiring him enough. His friends no longer know whether they should shake his hand or not; but being the champion of political orthodoxy, it’s not a good idea to fall out with him. ‘You sure come off as some strange kind of bastard!’ I once told him fondly at the end of a gala dinner. Illarionov began whining, with tears in his eyes, that the essence of the old man is the old bastard… We were both drunk.”

Daria tried in vain to piece together a rounded picture of Illarionov. All she could recall was a boorish face, a conical forehead, a portly presence that looked at women as though they were for sale… But he did dress well. Unhealthy to remember the dead, they are all connected, they call out to one another, they congregate inside you, they are too many, too alive. There’s no getting rid of them once they have got possession of your soul, instead it’s they that banish sleep, derail the train of thought, lead you where you have no wish to go. Some of them would have known better how to defend this city, our land, our blood, our idea than many who are alive today… They defend us still. Their soul is present. Every one of our promises for the future was seeded by them…

“Am I still thinking within the materialist truth of history?” In wrestling with this question, Daria recalled with pleasure this phrase from Marx: “The tradition of dead generations weighs like a bad dream on the minds of the living…” It was from The Eighteenth Brumaire… While tradition is a nightmarish dead weight, it can also illuminate like a shaft of healing clarity: witness the Marxian tradition itself. Such is the mystery of consciousness… What did Sacha say about that, in our tan-upholstered café in Paris?

Our millions of dead are lost, a third of the city’s living are half dead, the Klims are lost, and yet we are saved, the stagnant war is beginning to turn our way, with the Nazis running out of steam, the American engine revving up — but how shall we be saved? As a luminous force or a persistent nightmare? The very question is treason, but how can I avoid asking it? Anguish is a betrayal of life only if it cries quits, anguish is a sacred warning: Beware the chasm, beware of what you may become! We alone know the nightmare we are trapped in, the ugly underside of our debilitated strength, and that our only hope lies in a resurrection from among the dead: from among defunct ideas and murdered ideologues… That’s why people talk so little nowadays. Klim hardly talks. Lobanova talks, the better to perfect her silence. Makhmudov never talks. Colonel Fontov talks to himself. Captain Potapov talks only to teach, as rarely as possible… To talk is to work on behalf of hope. People at the brink of exhaustion know the futility of this work, last hopes don’t need it. Where there is anguish and hunger, silence is more eloquent. It wastes less breath and it’s safer.

Climbing the stairs, Daria strained toward Klim. Klim whose muscles and sinews knew all that was amiss and made it all right, without a word… A thickset form was blocking the landing, dressed in black, surmounted by a black fur hat whose folded flaps exposed a white wool lining. Moving from foot to foot, the man cleared his throat and said, “I recognize you… It is you, isn’t it? Klim sent me.”

What had happened? Sick? Killed? (Bombs were falling to the west, earlier…) Arrested? Gone? In any case, say nothing. Daria was calm as she always was in the face of misfortune. She did not doubt that misfortune had struck.

“So,” she said. “What?”

“He won’t be back tonight… Nor the coming nights either.”

“When, then?”

“He doesn’t know… maybe two months, if all goes well.”

The darkened landing was like the bottom of a pit.

“Is it orders?”

The soldier hesitated.

“Put it this way… we’re always under orders…”

“How dangerous is it?”

“No more than usual…”

“He didn’t give you any message? Nothing for me?”

“He’s not allowed. He’ll try to write… sometime soon… He’ll never forget you.”

“But nothing bad has happened to him?”

“Oh no, nothing. That’s all.”

Everything is kept secret. The death of a fighter in action, so as not to reveal our losses and not alarm the rear guard — which is alarmed enough by the secrecy. Arrest, so as not to alarm those already haunted by the expectation of arrest. Execution, because to conceal it is humane, and to divulge it too often, impolitic. War work, any combat mission, because enemy eyes and ears surround us and the enemy is also within, in each potential failure of nerve. Thought, because it is an indomitable force that never knows where it is going or what it will demand, may suddenly find itself mired in a maze of doubts, scruples, questions, inventions, and dreams. We want efficient, disciplined thinking, technical thinking — but how is that to be separated from the other, which is anarchic, ungovernable, obsessive, and unpredictable? How to silence the mischievous twin beneath a cloak of reproof and secrecy? If only I could, once and for all! He was right, the poet who advised:

He lived under a despotism. We…

Klim will never come back, because if he does I will no longer be here. It’s even more likely that he, that we will no longer exist. The same water never passes between the same banks twice, said Heraclitus… Heraclitus…

Daria flung herself down on the mattress in the storeroom, now stripped of life. The grimy walls were dismal like those of a cell. Tomorrow she would move to the barracks. The ceiling seemed covered with algebraic signs and masculine shapes. She felt repulsed by the cold little stove and the brown bread hardening on the trunk they’d used for a table. She felt a horror of the days to come. They would be as flat as a track beaten through the snow and dirtied here and there by smears of blood. Decoding messages, annotating documents, dictating reports for Captain Potapov, drawing abstract images of war for a largely useless bureaucratic exercise, translating at interrogations… Some of the prisoners were garrulous and cooperative, so eager to help it was sickening. The more slippery ones endeavored to mislead but failed, in most cases, caught out by basic cross-checks. Too bad for them. Others were ludicrous, rigid with a sense of duty yet twisted by fear into knots; they might have elicited grudging respect were they not hateful to the core, the type to torture our prisoners and set villages on fire, young thugs in gleaming boots who looked on as droves of Jewish women and tearful children were herded toward mass graves… The first kind betrayed their army in a bestial, abject gurgle bubbling from the gut: these were human. The second feigned consent to treachery, so as to betray the grain of trust they hoped to inspire. The third group, loyal to their murderous cause, were traitors to human nature… That’s what the men of this century have been turned into. We are better than they are. Really? Are we? Stop thinking, Daria! Klim: Klim is better. She opened her arms to the glacial air. Tears welled at the corners of her eyes without falling and grew cold on the rim of her lids.

Night fell and the cold became torture. It did not completely snuff out organic vitality, but condensed it into sharp, sleep-inducing suffering. Curled into a ball, Daria was hungry. She felt the blood cooling in her veins, her limbs going to sleep, and it was as though the slightest movement could make the blanket of cold settling slowly over her change to a hard sheet of ice. Her body merged into the vast wintriness of the city, the river, the battle-fields. Her last sparks of lucidity were like explosions of boreal brilliance over horizons of splendid, soft, deadly snow. Black water flowed toward the sea, icy river seeking icy ocean beneath the crust of ice. The ice is like a magnifying glass, I see someone walking on it through the phosphorescent night. It’s me, what am I doing so weightless and disembodied on the ice? And this little girl who comes to meet me opening eyes of black water and saying: I drowned, you did too didn’t you? Daria extended her disem-bodied hands, they clasped the drowned girl’s hands, she saw the hands join hands but had no sensation of it. We will never feel anything again. Child, dearest child, we will never be warm again… A brilliance surged up into the sky and against this silvery backdrop the spires of St. Peter and Paul’s were outlined, and the massive dome of St. Isaac’s, and an ancient crenellated tower somewhere near the Rambla de las Flores in Barcelona, no, no, it was a miniature Kazakh mosque in the desert… Where are we, child, do you know? We are everywhere and everywhere we are cold… “Listen, listen! We’ll not be cold soon!” The silver-white brilliance had won, it had girdled the universe with numberless beams of pale fire overlapping at the zenith, to the rhythmic crashing of cannon… “The war is finished, child, we’ve won, we’ve won, can it be true?” “No doubt about it, Daria my love,” it was Klim speaking, and heat broke through her at the touch of his bare chest… But, Klim, where is the child? The child who thought herself drowned when I was feeling robbed of myself, after walking on the ice for so long? Klim was laughing. What child? Our child, Dacha? They were blissfully warm and she was laughing too. Our child! The gigantic water, the water black beneath the ice creaked and moaned, full of menace…

“Were you asleep? So sorry to disturb you, Comrade, but…”

Dacha opened her eyes. A candle flame hovered in the emptiness of the storage room. A child, her head wrapped in old woolens, was bending over her. The drowned child with eyes of black frozen water was an aging woman. But who?

Daria felt for the revolver and was restored to reality by its touch.

“What is it? Who are you?”

“Pardon me… I’m your neighbor, Trofimova, Elena Trofimova… from the Budayev factory… Oh, I am sorry…”

“What do you want?”

“It’s my sister, she’s in a terribly bad way, oh, please come and see…”

Muffled thunderclaps punctuated the night, they were falling over Ligovo, at a guess.

“Hush, no need to apologize, I’m coming. Is she sick?”

“Yes! No… more like worn out, but she’s gutsy… top of her brigade…”

The next-door room was like a mine shaft, littered with dark and vaguely glistening objects. The candlelight brought forth a young, drawn face, gray lips stretched into a weak smile. “She won’t answer anything I say,” panted Elena Trofimova, “it’s as if she was dead, but her heart’s still going, oh God oh God what shall I do?” Daria warmed her hands over the flame before slipping them under the layers of clothing, to explore a skeletal rib cage with two flaps of skin for breasts. The heart was beating, just, to an irregular rhythm. “It’s all right, she’s only fainted!” Daria said nervously. A few more swoons of that sort and she’ll never come to, she’ll be walking disembodied on the ice toward the aurora borealis…

“Can you make a little fire?”

“We have no more wood… But I made her some hot flour gruel earlier, with a bit of glucose, I was telling her she mustn’t work so hard, take off sick for a couple of days! I was telling her… Oooh, Mitrofanov, he might have some hot water, I could ask him, if he’s got a drop left, oh God oh God!”

“Pull yourself together! From Mitrofanov or from the devil, just get us some hot water!”

“So she’s not dying then? Not yet this time? Oh God!”

Daria looked stonily into her face, into her eyes of unbearable black water.

“No, not this time. I know what I’m talking about. Stop talking! Bring hot water.”

She went back to her room and searched it blindly for the last of the vodka, the vitamin bottle, the tin of fish in brine, and the half-eaten bar of stale chocolate — all that she had. How terrified people are by death! How desperate to live another day! Why? Because it’s our strength, our human strength, though there’s nothing specifically human about it… We’re not afraid of death, yet we long to live a few more days in spite of death…

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.