The first to leave for the front from our house was Yura Isayev. I witnessed his departure. He was walking along with his wife, and a little behind, wiping her eyes, now with her kerchief, now with her apron, went his mother. When he had gone a few steps Yura looked round. There must have been someone in every flat standing at the open windows watching him go, just as we did. And Yura's heart must have ached at the sight of the little two-storied house amid the thick green bushes, and the people who lived in it—so near and dear…He saw Zoya and me at the window, smiled and waved his cap.
"Good luck!" he shouted.
"Good luck to you!" answered Zoya.
Yura kept looking back, as if he wanted to memorize everything he was leaving behind, every line of the house, as in the face of a friend—the open windows, the bushes all round.
It was not long before Sergei Nikolin was called up. He left the house alone: his wife was working at her factory and could not see him off. When he had gone a little way Sergei, like Yura, looked round at the house. They were different people and outwardly quite unlike each other, but at this moment of farewell their eyes seemed just the same: both embraced with a glance, full of love and anxiety, as much as they could, to carry away with them.
Life changed completely. It grew stern and troubled. A great change came over Moscow. The windows were plastered with paper strips—a plain crisscross was the prevailing pattern. The shop windows were shuttered up with plywood and barricaded with sandbags. The houses seemed to be glowering at you, gloomy and guarded.
We started digging a trench in the yard of our house. People took boards out of their sheds to line its walls. One of the neighbours insisted louder than anybody else that nothing should be spared for the common cause, but for some reason forgot to open his own shed. Instead, he suddenly pounced upon a couple of children playing in the yard (their father was at the front and their mother at work), and demanded that they bring some boards immediately. Zoya strode up to him and said calmly and distinctly, "Listen to this: you open your shed now and give us some boards. And while we're working, the mother of these children will come back from work and also do everything that's needed. It's easy to shout at children."
In the very first days of the war my nephew Slava called on us to say good-bye. He was in air-force uniform, with wings on his sleeve.
"I'm off to the front!" he informed us. His face was so full of joy he might have been going to a picnic. "Remember me kindly!"
We embraced each other hard, and he left after spending scarcely half an hour with us.
"What a pity they don't take girls in the Army!" said Zoya as she watched him go. And there was so much bitterness and growing resolve in these words that even Shura decided not to indulge in his usual practice of cracking a joke or starting an argument on the subject.
We never went to bed without listening to the Soviet Information Bureau's communiques. They were not cheerful dispatches in those first weeks. Zoya listened to them with knitted brows and clenched teeth, and would often abruptly leave us at the loud-speaker without saying a word. But once she burst out, "What sacred soil they are trampling!"
That was the first and only cry of pain which I heard from Zoya during all that time.
Next: The Parting