Anna was exhausted. Although the family had helped with the cleanup operation, she’d wound up doing most of the work. The broken chair could probably be glued back together, but she’d had to throw away the floor lamp and the charred tablecloth. Eventually, the apartment had been returned to its former state, more or less, but as far as Anna was concerned, a kind of contamination remained, as if the place now bore a wound of indiscretion, inflicted on it by the Moscow literary world. Anna had put together an evening meal from the remains of the buffet. Viktor Ipalyevich, suffering the consequences of too much alcohol, had sought to regain control of his weakened body by moving very slowly and with great concentration. The poet was sincerely overjoyed at Leonid’s return and curious to observe the affection between the father and son. When Petya learned that his parents were going out that evening, he’d started to whine, but he’d been consoled by Leonid’s promise of a visit to the Red Army Museum.
As they walked down a winding street not far from the wall of the Kremlin, Anna and Leonid discovered a dimly illuminated sign for CINEMA UNDER THE ROOF and a poster that proposed A Long Night: Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace. A starstruck look came over Leonid’s face. “Do you remember?” he said, as though speaking to himself.
The film was several years old but still popular, and Anna knew that Leonid had taken part in it—along with ten thousand other soldiers in the Red Army. They exchanged looks, and the decision was made. Since the showing had already begun, they had to ring a bell for the cashier, who graciously sold them two tickets. Every seat in the screening room, a reconstructed attic, seemed to be occupied; not wishing to disturb anyone by searching for their places, Anna and Leonid sat on the steps in the aisle. Leaning against each other, they let themselves be carried away by the large, colorful images.
Every hour of procrastination, every hour when he didn’t say what he had to say, increased Leonid’s discomfort. At the same time, he admitted to himself that the many long months he’d spent living in barracks had made him almost forget the comforts of family life. With Galina, passion had swum into his ken; now he was thinking that he’d also earned a bit of tranquillity. Accordingly, he’d wait for the right time to make his disclosure. It might, he knew, cause the edifice of his former life to come tumbling down, but even so, the upheaval should not occur wantonly or before its time. And until then, who could deny him the right to play the home-comer, the welcome husband and father?
Leonid loved Bondarchuk’s War and Peace. On the screen, the first meeting between Prince Andrei and Natasha was taking place. The very young and beautiful actress Ludmila Savelyeva, in the part that made her famous, played Natasha. Then the director appeared, playing the central role of the noble Pierre. Leonid nudged Anna. “I know him.”
She snuggled closer to him, knowing that she’d soon hear the old story. Even though the final decisions were made at the highest level, the soldiers from the chosen garrisons had scrambled to take part in the filming. The epic of their homeland, the mightiest novel of all time, was to be turned into a movie seven hours long—a prospect that made every Russian heart beat harder. Strictly according to regulations, the enlisted men had to play the foot soldiers, while Soviet officers were given costumes corresponding to their rank and identifying them as members of the staff of General Kutuzov, Napoleon’s conqueror. Other Russian officers were assigned to wear uniforms of the French Grande Armée, but they refused and had to be replaced by actors.
Leonid had very much admired the director, Sergei Bondarchuk. With the help of dozens of assistants, he had made army groups move on cue, coordinated advancing cavalry units and pyrotechnics so that the trained horses would fall right in front of the camera, and in the end sent a thousand men marching into Napoleon’s cannon fire. Leonid had played a Russian adjutant; his uniform was too tight, and the boots were missing altogether, but he’d been assured that the camera was going to shoot him only from the chest up. With a resolute look on his face, Leonid had harkened to his general’s command and marched out of the frame a yard