Why, when I had been a prisoner, nearly every night, under my breath, of course, I had talked to Irina and the kids, tried to cheer them up by telling them I'd come home and they mustn't cry. I'm tough, I said, I can stand it, we'll all be together again one day. For two years I had been talking to the dead!"
The big man was silent for a minute. When he spoke again, his voice faltered.
"Let's have a smoke, mate, I feel as if I was choking."
We lighted up.
The tapping of a wood-pecker sounded very loud in the flooded woodland.
The warm breeze still rustled the dry leaves of the alders, the clouds were still floating past in the towering blue, as though under taut white sails, but in those minutes of solemn silence the boundless world preparing for the great fulfilment of spring, for that eternal affirmation of the living in life, seemed quite different to me.
It was too distressing to keep silent and I asked:
"What happened then?"
"What happened then?" my companion responded unwillingly.
"Then I got a month's leave from the colonel, and a week later I was in Voronezh.
I went on foot to the place where I had once lived with my family.
There was a deep bole full of rusty water. The weeds all round came up to your waist. Everywhere was empty and still as a graveyard.
I felt it bad then, mate, I can tell you!
I stood there in sorrow, then I went back to the station.
I wasn't there more than an hour altogether. I went back to the division the same day.
"But about three months later I did get a flash of joy, like a gleam of sunlight through the clouds. I got news of Anatoly.
He sent me a letter from another front.
He had got my address from that neighbour of mine.
It seems he'd been to an artillery school to start with; his gift for mathematics stood him in good stead there.
After a year he passed out with honours and went to the front, and now he wrote he had been given the rank of captain, was commanding a battery of 'forty-fives', and had been awarded six Orders and medals.
In a word, he'd left his old man far behind.
And again I felt real proud of him.
Say what you like, but my own son was a captain, and in command of a battery. That was something!
And all those decorations too.
It didn't matter that his dad was just carting shells and other stuff about in a Studebaker.
His dad's time was past, but he, a captain, had everything ahead of him.
"And at nights I began having old man's dreams. When the war was over I'd get my son married and live with them. I'd do a bit of carpentry and look after the kiddies.
All the kind of things an old man does.
But that all went bust too.
In the winter we went on advancing without a break and there wasn't time to write to each other very often, but towards the end of the war, right up near Berlin, I sent Anatoly a letter one morning and got an answer the very next day.
It turned out that he and I had come up to the German capital by different routes and were now very close to each other.
I could hardly wait for the moment when we'd meet.
Well, the moment came .... Right on the ninth of May, on the morning of Victory Day, my Anatoly was killed by a German sniper.
"The company commander sent for me in the afternoon.
I saw there was a strange artillery officer sitting with him.
I went into the room and he stood up as if he was meeting a senior.
My C. 0. said:
'He's come to see you, Sokolov,' and turned away to the window.
Something went through me then like an electric shock. I knew there was trouble coming.
The lieutenant-colonel came up to me and said:
'Bear up, father.
Your son, Captain Sokolov, was killed today at his battery.
Come with me.'
"I swayed, but I kept my feet.
Even now it~eems like a dream the way that lieutenant-colonel and I drove in that big car along those streets strewn with rubble. I've only a foggy memory of the soldiers drawn up in line and the coffin covered with red velvet.
But my Anatoly I see as plain as I can see you now, mate.
I went up to the coffin.
Yes, it was my son lying there, and yet it wasn't.
My son had been a lad, always smiling, with narrow shoulders and a sharp little Adam's apple sticking out of his thin neck, but here was a young broad-shouldered, full-grown man, and good-looking too. His eyes were half-closed as if he was looking past me into the far distance.
Only the corners of his lips still had a bit of the smile my son used to have. The Anatoly I knew once. I kissed him and stepped aside.