(I would understand! Tell me all about Dotty! This is going to be a heart-to-heart talk! You’ll feel so much better for it!)
“You see, young Klara, I was a very bad son. In her lifetime I never loved my mother as I should. I didn’t come home from Syria all through the war, not even to her funeral. . . . Hey, d’you think it may be a cemetery?”
They stopped. And shivered, in spite of the heat. It was indeed a cemetery! Strange that it had taken them so long. . . . This place of inviolate shade standing among cultivated fields could have been nothing else.
Not that they could yet see crosses or graves. They were still at the bottom of the dip, picking their way over the soggy patches. (Innokenty was a clumsier jumper than Klara, and one of his shoes sank into the mud, but she did not want to offend him by offering a hand.) Now they were ascending the unexpectedly steep bank.
The boundaries of the graveyard were marked by no wall, no fence posts, no ditch, no embankment, only by the unbroken row of close-planted ancient birches. The soil of the field merged with a magnificent luxurious sward, free from weeds and not overgrown, though it was neither trampled nor mown. Just the sort of grass you would wish to find in a graveyard!
How shady and quiet it was! The purest and kindest refuge in that carefully landscaped locality.
Some of the graves were fenced. Others were simply nameless grass-grown hillocks. There were even quite recent ones.
Innokenty was surprised how much room there still was. “There are a hundred graves here at most, and there’s easily room for fifty more. You probably don’t need to ask anyone; you just come along and dig. Where my mother is buried in Moscow, there was all the bother of getting a permit from the Moscow Soviet, then greasing the cemetery superintendent’s palm, and there isn’t room to put your foot between graves, and to cap it all, they dig up old graves to make room for new ones.”
Those old birches must have saved the spacious graveyard from tractors.
Their raincoats seemed to throw themselves on the ground, and they sat down without thinking, looking out over the rolling landscape. Now that they had left the sunlight for the shade, they had a clear view all around. The crossing keeper’s hut at the stop was a distant white shape. Smoke crept over the tops of the trees lining the track.
They looked, breathed deeply, and were silent. It was comfortable sitting there. “Ink” rested his head on his raised knees and was still. Klara could see the back of his neck. It was scrawny, like that of a little boy, but it had received the unhurried attention of a skillful hairdresser.
“Such a tidy graveyard,” Klara marveled. “No cattle dung, no spilled tractor fuel.”
Innokenty sighed happily. “Yes. This is the place to be buried! I won’t be so lucky! They’ll shove me onto a plane in a lead coffin, then rush me off in a truck somewhere. . . .”
“It’s a bit early to be thinking about that, Ink!”
“When everything is a lie, Klara dear, you get tired early. Very early, twice as quickly.” His voice sounded weak and weary.
Was he thinking of his work? Of life in general? Or just of his wife?
Klara could not ask him to explain.
“What was in the cabinet, then?”
“In the cabinet?” Innokenty, always tense and preoccupied, frowned in concentration. “I’ll tell you what was in the cabinet.” But the very thought of explaining in detail seemed to tire him. “No, it’s a long story. . . . Some other time perhaps.”
If it was too long a story then, when wouldn’t it be? Perhaps he was temperamentally capable of taking an interest only in what was new to him. If so, how could she ever catch up with his thoughts?
“You have no relatives left, then?”
“Just imagine, I have an uncle, my mother’s brother. But I knew nothing about him either until last year.”
“You’ve never met him?”
“Just once, when I was little. But I had no memory of him at all.”
“Where does he live?”
“In Tver.”
“Where?”
“In Kalinin, then. It’s only two hours by train, but I can never get around to visiting him. Anyway, how could I when I’m never in Russia? I wrote to him, and the old man was overjoyed.”
“Listen, Ink, you must go and see him! You’ll be sorry later if you don’t!”
“I intend to! I really do! I’ll go someday soon. I promise.”
Out of the punishing sun, Innokenty had recovered and was looking more cheerful.
Where to now? It was a long way to the forest, in any direction, and there were no paths. There was a field of sunflowers to one side of the graveyard and a beet field on the other. They could only return to their old path and follow the women toward the village. There would be more forest somewhere. They drifted on.
Innokenty had taken off his jacket. His shoulder blades stuck out sharply under his thin white shirt. He was wearing his hat again, for protection from the sun.
Klara was amused. “Know who you look like? Yesenin, coming home from Europe to his native village.”
Innokenty grinned and made an effort to remember Yesenin’s words. “My homeland . . . away from you what have I found . . . a stranger now to you, and to myself, knowing no longer how to plow or how to sow. . . .”
They were entering a deserted street. The facing rows of houses were ten meters apart, but the roadway was beyond repair, rutted and churned up by tractors and heavy trucks. There were knee-high ridges of baked mud in places, and in others pools of leaden sludge which no summer would ever be long enough to dry out. Communication between the two sides of the street would have been no more difficult if a river had flowed between them. There was firm footing only immediately in front of the houses, and once you had chosen one side of the street, you had to stick to it.
On their side a girl with a wicker basket walked quickly toward them.
“Little girl. . . ,” Innokenty began, but quickly realized that she was older than he had thought. “Er . . . young lady. . . .” But by now she was almost upon him, and it turned out that she was a woman of nearly forty, remarkably small and with cataracts on both eyes. Afraid that she might suspect him of sarcasm, Innokenty no longer knew what to call her.
“What’s the name of this village?” he asked.
“Rozhdestvo.” Her clouded eyes barely glanced at them, and she walked quickly on.
The two young people exchanged a look of surprise. Rozhdestvo? What an unusual name. “Why Rozhdestvo?” they called after her.
“How should I know? It’s just what they called it,” she answered over her shoulder and went on.
Where had all those bustling women from the train trickled away to? There was no sign of life on the street or in the yards. Neither the ill-fitting, matchwood doors, which seemed to belong to chicken coops rather than houses, nor the unopenable double windows without ventilation panes looked as though human life could be concealed behind them. The traditional pigs and poultry were nowhere to be seen or heard. Only the wretched rags and blankets hung out on clotheslines in one of the yards showed that someone had been there that morning.
Hot sunlight flooded the silent air.
They caught sight of someone moving deep inside one of the yards. A stout old woman in galoshes was shuffling between puddles, examining something she held in her hand.
They called to her, but she did not hear.
They called again.
She looked up.
“I’m hard of hearing,” she informed them in a cracked toneless voice. Her eyes showed no surprise at these sharply dressed passersby.
“Could we buy some milk from you?” Klara asked.
They didn’t want milk, but she knew from her visits to collective farms that this was the best way to strike up a conversation.
“No cows,” the old woman answered gravely. A yellow-white chick lay still in her hand, not struggling or twitching.
“Tell me, what was that church called?” Innokenty asked.
“What do you mean, was called?” She looked at him as though through a mist. There was a solemn self-assurance in her jowly face.
“Every church has a name, doesn’t it?”
“That’s about all it’s got,” she said. “They shut it down I don’t know how long ago. . . . In the twenties. It’s an hour by bus to the nearest church. There used to be a summer church near here, but the prisoners pulled it down.”
“What prisoners?”
“The Germans.”
“Why?”
“They sent the bricks to Nara. Look, my chicks keep dying. This is the fourth. Why d’you think that is?”
Klara and Innokenty shrugged sympathetically.
“Maybe she’s crushing them?” The old woman said thoughtfully, shuffling toward the low door of her cottage. After that, they saw nothing at all moving, not a soul right to the end of the street. No dog showed itself or barked. There was nothing but two or three hens quietly grubbing away. Then a cat slunk out of the thistles, stalking something, no longer a domestic animal. It did not turn its head to look at the two human beings but sniffed the ground all around and went on, toward the no-less-dead main street, on which this one abutted.
Where the two streets broadened and intersected, they came upon the church, a squat, solid building of ornamental brickwork with inset brick crosses and, looming over it, a bell tower with rows of apertures at two levels. Moss and weeds grew there, and many swallows and still smaller birds hovered noiselessly around the tower, restlessly darting into the slits and out again. The dome of the bell tower was inaccessible and undamaged, but the metal sheeting had been stripped from the roof of the church and only its bare ribs remained. Both roof crosses had survived for two decades and still stood in their places. The door at the base of the bell tower was wide open, a paraffin lamp was burning in the darkness inside, and milk cans stood there, but there was no one to be seen. The door to the crypt of the church was also open, and sacks stood on the steps, but again there was no one around.
There must once have been a fence around the church, and a paved yard, but no trace of them remained. Heavy trucks and tractors had crisscrossed the ground on both sides of the church and between the church and the bell tower, leaving deep ruts in their convulsive eagerness to struggle through the mud without getting bogged down, reach the storehouse, and escape, perhaps for the last time. The sick, mutilated earth was covered with incrustations of mud like hideous gray scabs and putrescent puddles of leaden sludge.
There was the church. But the two young people took a long time finding a dry path across the street to it. They had to walk away to one side, then follow a tortuous route, jumping from spot to spot. Broken, mud-caked slabs of marble littered the road, and there were smaller pieces, and chips of clean marble, white, pink and yellow, by the walls of the church. Innokenty was feeling the heat but was not flushed. If anything, the sun had made him paler. The wisps of hair straying from under his hat were wet with sweat.
They went closer to the church. There was a foul smell in the hot still air—from stagnant water, dead cattle, or an open sewer somewhere? They began to regret coming and had no wish to inspect the church, even if there had been anything to see. Beyond the church the ground sloped down to a host of huge rounded willows, a whole kingdom of willows, and their only way of escape lay through that wall of green.
But someone was calling out to them. “Wouldn’t have a smoke, would you, Citizens?”
A diminutive peasant with shoulders hunched up to his ears, as though he were permanently cold or frightened—but he looked crafty, too—had appeared from somewhere and was looking them over.
Innokenty looked apologetic but slapped his pocket as though he hoped against hope to find a pack.
“I don’t smoke, Comrade.”
“Too bad.”
In spite of this disappointment, the neckless one did not go away but continued examining these exotic newcomers with his restless eyes. Although he couldn’t see the car they must have come in, he obviously took them for a novel variety of the boss species.
“What was that church called?”
“Church of the Nativity,” he said, no longer respectfully. He had made up his mind about them as soon as they spoke, and he vanished as suddenly as he had appeared.
But a little farther down the slope, they noticed another man, this one with an uncovered wooden leg. He was wearing a blue cotton shirt with white calico patches and resting on a stone under a lime tree.
“Where did all the marble come from?” Innokenty asked him.
“Eh?” was the patchwork peasant’s reply.
“All those colored stones there.”
“Oh, that. They smashed the altar.” He thought a bit. “The iconostasis, I mean.”
“What for?”
He thought again.
“To make the road.”
“What’s that smell around here?” Klara asked.
“Eh?” The one-legged man was surprised. He thought a bit. “Ah . . . must be from the cattle yard. . . . Our cattle yard’s just over there.”
He pointed, but they did not look. They were in a hurry to get away to the willow trees down below.
“What’s down there?” they asked.
“Down there? Nothing.” He thought. “Just a brook.”
A path had been beaten down the slope. Klara felt like running downhill, but she looked anxiously at Innokenty’s pale face and walked slowly at his side.
“A village like that really makes the graveyard attractive,” she said, looking back. “Are you limping?”
“My shoe’s chafing.”
They stopped in the spreading shade of the first, huge willow and looked around. Away from the stench, all was moist and green and fresh, and they could see the church up on the hill, but not the dreadfully mutilated earth around it, only the dots that were birds darting and sailing around the belfry. The view was a pleasant one.
“You look very tired,” Klara said anxiously. “You must have a rest. And take a look at your foot.”
Throwing the coats down, he sat on the ground, leaning against a sloping trunk. He closed his eyes. Then lay back and gazed uphill at the church.
“You see, Klara dear, there are two Nativities. . . .”
“What do you mean, two?”
“Ours and the Western Christmas. Ours you’ve just seen. The Western Christmas is a sky lit up by neon signs, streets jammed with cars, people suffocating in shops, presents from everybody to everybody else. And in some wretched, dirty shopwindow—a crib and Joseph on a donkey.”
“What do you mean, Joseph on a donkey?”
Before he could answer, they caught sight of something they had failed to notice before. A grave with an obelisk stood on the edge of the steep bank by the church, where a row of limes had somehow survived.
“A pity we missed that.”
“I’ll run over and take a look.”
Klara darted across the hillside, ignoring the path. She ran as though she were enjoying it, but she didn’t feel at all happy.
She stood for a while, reading the inscription, then came back just as nimbly, sure-footedly avoiding the potholes.
“Right then, whose do you think it is?”
“Some priest’s?”
“It says, ‘Eternal Glory to the Warriors of the Fourth Division of the People’s Militia who died the death of the brave for the honor and independence’ et cetera, from the Ministry of Finance.”
“Ministry of Finance?”
His prominent ears twitched in surprise. “Would you believe it! Those poor clerks! How many of them fell here? I wonder. And how many men were there to a rifle? Fourth Militia Division, you say?”
“Yes.”
“A division without weapons! And the fourth such. . . . What an absurd war it was. People’s militia!”
“Why absurd?” Klara was puzzled.
Innokenty just sighed and looked downcast.
“Don’t you feel well? Mayb
e we’d better be getting back, Ink? Let’s not go any farther.”
He sighed again.
“No, it’s all right. Hot weather doesn’t suit me. And I’ve got the wrong shoes on; I wasn’t thinking.”
“I wish I’d chosen a more comfortable pair myself. Where does it hurt? Let’s put some newspaper under your heel; then it won’t rub so much.”
That did the trick.
Meanwhile, scudding clouds had appeared in the sky. From time to time, the sun was hidden, and it felt cooler.
“What do you say, Ink, shall we move on or not? We should have gone into the forest, shouldn’t we? If you like, we can walk along the river; it’ll be shady down there, too.”
He was feeling better.
“What a weakling I am,” he said. “Comes of spending my life in cars. You’re a heroine! Come on, which bank do you prefer?”
Downstream there was a plank bridge. Cables attached to it were secured to the trunks of willows on either bank so that floods could not carry it away.
To cross or not to cross. Different banks, different paths, different conversation, a different outing.
They crossed. There was another symmetrically aligned plantation on the gently rising ground beyond the stream. The thirsty willows had chosen the water’s edge, but behind them were rows and rows of birches and firs. There was a pond, too, with frogs and covered with fallen leaves. Its regular shape showed that it was man-made. Was this perhaps the derelict estate of some gentleman? There was no one to ask.
Seen from between the spreading willows, the church looked still more beautiful, high on the hill. This was the way that worshippers from another, nearby village would take, summoned by the bells.
But they had seen enough of villages and went on along the bank. It was very pleasant walking in this moist, shady, secluded world, where the stream gurgled and rippled in the shallows, while in deeper places the surface was still, except for occasional mysterious tremors, and everywhere dragonflies skimmed the water. There must surely be fish and crayfish. It would have been good to bare their legs up to the knees and wade like boys looking for crayfish, but there were impassable nettle beds and thickets of young aspens in their way.
In the First Circle Page 42
