Good People (57 page)

‘That's what I always loved about you,' she said bitterly. ‘Unlike your friend Styopa and my husband, you're one of the few who still differentiate between truth and lies.'

…

She got up. The soldier grabbed her shoulder and pushed her towards the gate. The stench of burnt flesh, burnt grass, burnt wood. They tripped over piles of stones, wooden beams, fragments of shells, shattered household utensils and corpses in nightgowns, pyjamas, undershirts—the ruins of the living quarters where she had slept when she worked in the citadel.

‘We have to hurry,' she shouted. ‘My brother is there!' She started coughing. The sour taste of sick was in her mouth. The soldier didn't answer. The main thing was not to stop, to get away from all of this death. They moved away, but the stench grew stronger, wafting up from her skin and nightgown, from his uniform and face. She vomited. The soldier brought a canteen to her lips. The putrid water nauseated her. He grabbed the canteen from her hand and drank greedily.

‘We have to hurry!' she shouted again.

‘We're hurrying, we're hurrying,' he said, leading her to the central courtyard. Black locust and lilac branches had fallen into the trenches. For a moment their scent filled the air. Pits yawned in the earth, and bodies were scattered between them. From above fierce whistles were heard, and thunder rolled out of the trembling ground. She caught a glimpse of fire in the windows of the castle. A few soldiers stood near cannons and waited.

‘They don't have any ammunition,' said the soldier. ‘It's an army of shoeless soldiers and whores.'

The dust-covered citadel, full of smoke, and the soldiers standing at the cannon were terribly similar to the map of the war games she had drawn for the parade. He led her through a twisting tunnel with damp walls. There were groups of soldiers, women with unkempt hair, weeping women twirling their hair and wrapping it around rusty nails, men whispering to each other, young people who looked like gypsies, faces like none she had ever seen in the city. A chorus of panting and grunting, the shouts of the wounded and the cries of children.

She pushed in among them, and glanced right and left. Everywhere she looked became a focus of light, and among the hundreds of filthy faces she looked for Kolya. People cursed the officials who had abandoned the city, leaned over radio sets and pleaded for the help that was expected from Kobrin. A few children sat sharpening wooden sticks into knives around a big kerosene lantern in a niche in the wall. They talked about sticking their blades into the necks of German soldiers. ‘I'd even stick the blade deep into the throat of a girl soldier like nothing,' one boasted. She stroked the blade of her jackknife and dropped it. Another child grabbed it and the others jumped on him.

The heat was heavy. A stifling cloud crawled down the tunnels. Somebody was shouting after Viktor Nestorovich Kravchuk. Was he dead or a prisoner? The name sounded familiar. A long time ago, when she first came to Brest, she obtained a list of the soldiers in Kolya's unit. Every morning she wondered which of those soldiers were Kolya's friends and which his enemies. Kravchuk was one of the names on that list.

She squeezed her way into the bunch of drunken soldiers who were lying on the ground. She asked them about Kolya and Kravchuk.

‘We can't hear. Lean over!' they called to her and laughed. Then they said that Kravchuk was an NKVD border guard, but they didn't know anyone called Nikolai Weissberg. Maybe Nikitin knew.

‘Where is he?'

One of them, no more than a boy, put his hand under her dress and pinched her thigh. ‘We haven't seen him,' he laughed. ‘Probably dead.' His fingers were already inside her vagina. She kicked him and moved away. ‘That hurts more than the German,' he groaned, and a boyish laugh rang through the tunnels.

Near the wall people were speaking about women who had been captured by the Germans, about a girl named Valya Zenkina. A small group discussed whether they should break out, but there was nowhere to go. The city was falling. Better to dig in here until reinforcements came. The suggestions came in disgruntled fractured sentences, the desire to cling to illusions. How it had enslaved her in the past.

‘Has anyone seen Nikolai Weissberg?' she shouted. ‘Did you see the soldiers of the forty-second division?'

‘We haven't seen anything,' they roared angrily and shoved her.

Two girls in braids, wearing dresses filthy with dirt and blood, were begging for water. Their strict education showed in their erect posture, their proud tone. They were like small women, and their pleas were like orders. After they drank, happiness spread over their faces.

The soldier appeared again. ‘Don't disappear. I'm keeping an eye on you.'

Why didn't he leave her in peace? He gripped her shoulder again and pushed her forwards, steering her right and left like a puppet. She moved away from the girls and wished them a speedy death. When she understood they were going down below, she struggled to escape his grip. It was clear to her that Kolya wasn't there.

The soldier pressed her against the wall. ‘Where do you want to go?'

‘Upstairs.'

‘Outside?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you want to die?' He loosened his grip. She removed his hand and went up against the stream of people.

She was outside, running towards the cannon. The soldiers who had been standing beside them were gone, except for one who was curled up, his face smashed and his legs bent in a kind of broken circle. She leaned over him, stroked his hair and asked him if he had seen Private Weissberg, forty-second division. He grunted and was seized by a convulsion. She pushed his hand off her nightgown and went away.

More and more soldiers, some of whom had been stationed in defensive positions around the citadel, crossed the central courtyard—crawling, limping, on stretchers. She whirled among them, grabbing their bodies, howling, begging for information. A few said meaningless things, pointed in opposite directions. One said Private Weissberg was dead, another had seen his officer slightly wounded.

The dawn rose. A red cover spread over them and columns of smoke rose between earth and sky. A lookout holding binoculars who lay on the roof of the building shouted that columns of the Wehrmacht were marching in the streets of Brest.

People shouted that he was lying.

He insisted: the citadel was surrounded.

Podolsky's calculations had proved to be amazingly exact. The flow of retreating soldiers was now a trickle. Two soldiers stumbled from the western gate and rushed into the tunnels. She fell on them to ask if they had seen Private Nikolai Weissberg of the forty-second division. One of them, a blood-soaked rag wrapped around his arm, looked at her with dreamy eyes, whose thick lashes were burnt. It was Grigorian. Suddenly, as if he understood her intentions, he grabbed her hair in his good arm and dragged her after him into the tunnels.

She obeyed, shouting, ‘Is he dead? Tell me whether he's dead!' They squeezed between people, pushed and were pushed, kicked. News spread rapidly that everywhere except this part of the fortress
had fallen to the Germans. People in uniform grew scarcer: shirts, hats, belts, epaulettes and Red Army coats were rolled up hastily and stuffed into the water troughs. Some children fished them out and flaunted insignia and caps.

Grigorian didn't let go of her hair, and she held on to his belt. They pushed through secretions and sweat, vomit and blood, among the children's dreams of glory and those of two girls who had fallen asleep on the floor hugging each other, among people shouting orders, those who were encouraging, others who were silent, among those weeping for their imminent deaths, cursing the state and the army, among those whose wide open eyes reflected immeasurable imagined horrors.

‘Is he dead?' she asked.

Grigorian nodded.

‘Is there any doubt?'

‘No. He was sleeping next to me.'

‘Did he suffer?'

‘We got a direct hit from a shell. I flew into the wall. When I got up, he was dead.'

‘Did he talk about us sometimes?'

A voice called to Grigorian. ‘The doctor is here!'

He didn't move. ‘In the last days, when everyone understood that something big was going to happen, he spoke a bit more.'

‘What did he say?'

‘I don't know exactly. He spoke with Denislov.'

‘Is he dead too?'

‘I haven't seen him since this began. I'll look for him.'

‘It doesn't matter,' she said and turned away.

Now her memory bore him up and set him before her; she didn't resist, there was no time for that; in a little while the deceitful morning would rise, and offer cunning arguments, it would find proofs, it would enslave her consciousness to staying in this world. ‘Even if the thin guy dies,' Maxim said, ‘even if everyone you ever knew disappears, you'll still be a survival machine, like everyone: when it happens, you'll see.'

Part of her believed him. Part of her always believed Maxim Podolsky.

Suddenly other voices were heard around her—a battle was taking place near the Terespol Gate that defended the citadel from the west. A few hundred soldiers had dug in there and were repelling the Germans. The soldiers who had been lying on the ground were now loading their rifles and giving out hand grenades. Women and children gathered around and encouraged them. In a single row they rushed up: the boy who had fondled her strode forwards first, and Grigorian, in a new bandage, joined them.

‘We need reinforcements near the Kobrin Gate!' Shouts were heard. ‘And in hell, too, idiots!' A hoarse voice laughed, and other bitter laughter rolled around.

Hope bubbled up in the tunnels. The joy of action became infectious, tasks were assigned, maps spread out, the smell of despair disappeared.

She surveyed them with horror: even now are you clinging to life? She bent over and stuffed her fingers into her mouth to stifle a scream. The feeling of orphanhood crushed her, and she realised that she was buying time with her wits now, that vital strength was crawling into her body, that life was whirring inside her. Here was the ticking of the survival machine as it woke up. Father and Mother, freed from the gulag, would want at least one daughter, even Boris Godunov, a hint of Pavlik Morozov, but she was still their only daughter. She would give them grandchildren, and, as Maxim said, grandchildren are like children. Wasn't it strange that even while she was in the citadel, bombarded and surrounded, she still believed in her ability to choose to live or die?

She crawled out. Did she hope it would be hard to get out of the tunnels? She was afraid of horrible pain, of immeasurable suffering, but the certainty that her choice had been made long ago made her calm. Everything that had happened to her in the past seemed like a little mishap, sometimes even amusing. There was no reason for pathos. There had been bigger tragedies: for years people had been counting the arrested, the disappeared, the dead. Now corpses would be piled
up from here to Kobrin, to Minsk, maybe even to Leningrad, hundreds of thousands, even millions—here was her modest contribution to all that death. Sometimes, for a certain group, things come to an end, the world slams them against the wall; it's not exactly their fault.

But all the things that came to her mind now seemed pointless, little Maupassant ideas. She had only to give her body up to the movement, and she knew where she was heading.

She stood outside. From the west a squadron of German planes was approaching. She stepped to the centre of the courtyard. There wasn't a living soul around her, only bodies. The planes approached, the chatter of their machine-guns like drizzle on house roofs. Behind them the first scraps of sunlight sprayed their wings with all the grey-blue glow of the summer. Preceded by their heat, sparks of fire from the machine-guns were already burning her body. She stopped, threw her shoulders back and looked up at the sky.

‘Nadyezhda Petrovna'—she had sneaked a letter for her into her husband's suitcase—‘you wrote poems about me, calling me Boris Godunov and the beautiful twin of Pavlik Morozov. Everybody praises the change you underwent, but I understand: you wrote those poems for me, and maybe for the dead and the imprisoned. I only ask you that if I die here, and Kolya lives, take care of him. Your position is stronger now, and you can be a kind of guardian for him.'

The rumble of the machine-guns grew louder. She looked up. A mountain of red dust rose up before her and within it shone the sun and the plane wings. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them black smoke was curling up from the dust and the carved words. She identified Nadia's handwriting:

You won't die without him.

And anyway it doesn't matter, fool that you are.

You call the bundle of lies and baseness that we are ‘life'?

Day-night, winter-summer—it's only time, under the heavens of loss, that crouches on top of us.

We're chained to it like dogs to a kennel.

For a long time, as you realised, none of us has been alive.

*
Koba was Stalin's nickname when he was young. His old friends continued to call him that.

*
Alexander Pushkin, ‘To the Sea', trans. Babette Deutsch.

*
We betrayed our people and their rights.

*
Alexander Pushkin, ‘Exegi Monumentum', trans. Babette Deutsch.

*
A right-wing student union formed to oppose the forces of internationalism and promote
volkish
principles.

*
Relax, you're too eager.

*
They create a wasteland and call it peace.

*
Rilke, ‘Second Duino Elegy': You lovers, so sufficient to one another/ I ask you about us. You hold each other. Do you have proof?

*
Alexander Pushkin, ‘The Gypsies', trans. G. R. Ledger.

*
Line from a poem by Sergey Klichkov.

*
Podolsky is making fun of ‘Ariosto', a poem by Osip Mandelstam: ‘It's cold in Europe. In Italy, darkness.'