Kirill was met by a former classmate, Maxim, who worked in the local department of culture; he knew everyone and everything in the archives, museums, and search departments. They were not friends, but the thread of liking one another from their student days was unbroken: they shared a weakness for poetics and metaphor instead of strict scholarship, and both were wounded by history—Maxim was looking for traces of his grandfather, who was taken prisoner of war in 1941 and died in the Stalags.
Maxim drove and talked about developments at the archives and the museum, Kirill listened with half an ear, looking at the road, the houses, the fields. The unclear dawn flickered, the car wallowed in potholes, avoided ruts, and they were enveloped in darkness, a gloomy illusion of the place itself.
He had the impression that through the Battle of Stalingrad something had happened to matter itself. Matter had been crushed and destroyed for so long and so persistently that its essential cohesion had been altered, and it no longer could retain its form. That is why the roads were like this, as if the dead were digging them up from below, and the winter fogs were so threatening—as if the evaporating snow were stealing another bit of the connectivity of matter, and reality thereby became more spectral and variable.
Maxim lived in an old Stalin-era house next to the Allée of Heroes, inherited by his wife; his own family would not have had such a place in the unspoken Stalingrad hierarchy, commensurate to rank, medals, and military lives.
Over tea, Kirill explained why he had come. He expected Maxim to send him to the city archives, but after hearing him out (Kirill had even described the strange fellow passengers on the plane), Maxim poured them some cognac and began talking.
“You know, I had a dream when I was a child in winter,” Maxim said. “At the panorama, by the battle museum, there’s a steep descent to the Volga. The stairs go down through a small tunnel. In December it’s dark by three there. I was always uncomfortable walking past on my way home from school, as if it was some animal’s den. In my dream ... I saw this bank as if in cross section, from the Volga. During the war it was riddled with foxholes, caves, the headquarters were inside the slope, and so were the people behind the lines, while the front was a hundred meters above, among the buildings. In my dream I saw a huge cave open from the Volga; dull campfires burned there and the distorted and self-enclosed space, like a Mobius strip, held all the houses, all the streets of the prewar city; all the residents of Stalingrad-Volgograd ended up there after they died, and they fought the Germans for eternity. And I knew that I would end up there.”
Kirill said nothing. The cognac, with lemon slices sprinkled with sugar and coffee grounds, had relaxed him, but there was still a fixed point of intense, detective-like attention within him. Maxim stopped, as if weighing whether he could trust Kirill with what he was about to say, and continued.
“Do you know how many bombs and shells they are still digging out? The earth is still exploding, the military metal is only slightly covered over. The postwar city is above, the prewar one with its cellars is below. They touch sometimes. They meet. And then the sparks begin. The old capsules come alive. Truth surfaces.”
When Kirill studied the history of the war, he paid attention to a special Stalingrad phenomenon. Not only did the big city allow the Soviet Army retreating over the steppe to grab on to the earth, hide beneath roofs, behind walls, in the depths of merchant cellars, amid factory workshops, behind brick chimneys, in blast furnaces, and stacks of rolled steel, it became a text: the soldiers wrote in blood, coal, paint, flame retardant on the walls; they left letters in cans, bottles, bullet casings, soap dishes, apothecary tubes, as if hope had returned and with it the grammatical category of future tense.
Beneath the walls of old buildings hastily plastered after the war, these writings still lived, the immortal messages lay in the ground. Kirill felt that if Mikhail had disappeared in any other city, he would have been lost with no hope of being found; but here time itself was riddled with mole tunnels, penetrating history, and therefore it was possible to get word of a person missing in action.
“Recently a German bank opened a branch here,” Maxim said. “They picked a mansion and bought it. They began reconstruction, broke through to the cellar. Our rules here require calling in museum workers and the police. In the spring of 1943, when it got warm, how did they bury the dead? Tossed them into a cellar and walled them in. So ... the whole city is built on bones. But there was something else in this cellar. Green trunks, metal lined. Military trunks. German. In the corners. And in the middle of the room, a desk, on it a German field telephone, the wire leading out beneath the rubble. It’s just there, inviting you to make a call. Our people and the German bankers, everyone’s crowded in there, raising dust. They broke open a trunk, it’s full of papers and shoulder patches. And each paper, each patch has the emblem of their bank, exactly. Turns out they were the accountants for the Sixth Army, paid the salaries. ... One of the German bosses turned gray and looked at the phone. As if it were a telephone to the other world. And you could call it.
“Our whole city is like that,” Maxim said firmly. “You can actually call there.”
***
A city where you can make a call to the other world.
The image captured Kirill’s imagination. It was terrifyingly realistic: they won’t hear you knocking or screaming, but you can call. As if somewhere on the outskirts, a single telephone booth has a phone that truly can connect worlds and eras; you can find it, the important thing is to know what number to dial and who to ask for from the otherworldly operator.
Kirill felt that this metaphor gave him a clear indication, albeit vague like all prophecies, of what he had to do.
Intoxicated by the freezing fog, the overwhelming darkness, and the low movement of the unfreezing Volga, he was prepared to believe that here he truly could make the call that would lead him to his great uncle. He rushed around the center of town, went into yards and entryways, the residents took him, wearing an expensive coat, for some kind of official, an inspector from above—that’s how they put it: you must be from above—and tugged at his sleeve to tell him about leaky roofs and broken elevators, as if this miraculous emissary from unknown agencies could show up once and fix everything. Kirill only heard that he was from above, from the surface, the upper world, and desperately sought the entrance to the lower world, the buried one.
On his third day, when he was walking along Lenin Prospect toward the Fallen Soldiers Square, where the Eternal Flame burns in a bronze wreath beneath a granite obelisk bayonet, he heard a strange sound, either a distant volley of guns, or the leaden icy sky cracking open. A push, and he fell into a snow bank, someone on top of him, pressing him into the snow crust, and overhead shrapnel whistled, explosions rumbled, and shards pierced his coat.
It stopped. He stood, wiping blood from his brow—he had scratched it on the icy crust of the snow bank. Next to him a man shook snow from himself and rubbed his hurt knee, his savior, a man in a military winter camouflage jacket, and missing his earflap hat; steam rose from his sweating head.
The wide sidewalk—in the city center they were cleared—for the length of forty meters was covered with broken ice. Small bits of ice scratched the windshields of parked cars, struck shop windows, left white vaccination marks on tree trunks. Cones lay in the middle of the sidewalk, remains of large ice blocks, surrounded by rings of white ice powder, like gunpowder traces on fabric after a close-up shot.
It was only then that Kirill realized he had almost been killed, saved by the silly-looking chubby officer, a lieutenant colonel, still looking for his cap, even though it was by his feet; if not for him, the long cornice-shaped sheet of ice that fell nine stories from the roof would have battered him into bloody pieces.
“Welcome to Volgograd,” the officer said in a cozy, professional sounding voice, now that he had found his hat. “Are you from St. Petersburg? I hear you use lasers to knock down icicles. Lasers! Here it’s like this. If it warms up a little
during the day, then watch out. We get two or three corpses every winter.”
“Thank you,” Kirill managed to say. “Thanks. You brought me back from the other world.”
The colonel looked him over, chuckled, surprised by the high-flown language, and offered his hand.
“Kirill.”
“Kirill,” responded Kirill.
“Ah,” said the colonel with interest. “So that’s how it is. Namesakes. We have to drink to this.”
“With great pleasure,” Kirill said, hearing his stupidly lively voice.
Kirill had money, but the colonel led him to a dive not far from the Central Market, where they sold Praskoveysky cognac and Krasnodar wines by the glass. At the market they bought a holey cheese redolent of the steppe, basturma with red-pepper powder on the rind, a bunch of marinated wild leeks, plump with brine, and ducked into the alcoholic warmth, where the floor and tables were spotted with wine, where the red-eyed regulars turned their glasses, counting the facets, and the drunken radio sang, “Let’s drink to us, let’s drink to you, and to Siberia and the Spetsnaz!”
Later everything swam in the smoky mists of intoxication, as if Kirill had been wrapped in a felt mat in order to suffocate him; they drank alone, then with someone else, and then just alone again. The colonel persisted in thinking Kirill was from St. Petersburg and explained that Stalingrad had suffered more than Leningrad; Kirill for some reason began talking about why he was there, and a circle of listeners formed around him. The colonel listened closely, covering his glass with his hat, and Kirill realized that his namesake was from the Eighth Guards Corps, who had been under General Rokhlin, and had fought in Chechnya, and for him Kirill’s great-uncle officer lost by the family was like a brother, like his comrades who did not come back from the war.
Another shot of cognac and Kirill was going to ask for mercy; a blizzard was howling outside the window, a warm, very snowy blizzard, for a thaw had spread over the last few hours; unrecognized earlier, it had weakened the grip of the ice on the roof and sent the ice blocks flying. Suddenly the colonel grew tense and looked around, trying to hear a sound of warning in the loud but friendly conversations of the drinkers; he grabbed his coat and hat and dragged Kirill outside.
The soft snow muffled sounds, dispersing them, swallowing them, but even Kirill could hear something: a distant rumble, the screech of metal, the squeal of large metal gears; it seemed that behind the wall of the blizzard, carousing and erasing buildings, blinding streetlights, swirling snow to create avatars of pedestrians, consuming the neon letters in signs, an ancient power had appeared.
They came out of the blizzard with increasing din—tanks, old T-34s, their long narrow trunks raised. It was impossible to see if anyone was driving the tanks, if men in helmets stuck out from the hatches; there was only the yellow light of the headlights, the coordinated movement, the blue-gray diesel smoke, and the design of the tracks in the snow. Kirill thought he had finally fallen into the well of time, for an invisible hand had removed all the cars, erased the pedestrians, and only the blinking yellow stop lights showed that this was still this world and not the next.
The tanks rode past, turned right onto the Square of Fallen Soldiers, to the department store, where Paulus and his staff were captured by the Soviet infantry in the basement.
The colonel grabbed his sleeve and dragged him down the sidewalk after the tanks. To the Eternal Flame, the flame of the Stalingrad hell, guarded, encircled by the ritual bronze wreath to keep it from escaping.
“Firebrands,” whispered the colonel. “They were like firebrands. Then, at New Year’s. I can’t stand the sight of fire since then. I can’t eat shashlik, I instantly see that. But, but ... once a year... I go far away. Alone. To the village where I was born. There’s no village anymore, just three houses. I have a field there. When we were children we had a bonfire there when we pastured the horses. At the riverbank. A pure, good river. So there ... I gather branches. And have a fire. Just a fire. Alone under the sky. And I think I feel better.”
The colonel stopped talking, staring into the mouth of the Eternal Flame. Kirill felt a cast-iron exhaustion; but through it came a vague image suggested by the colonel’s words. The tanks moved on into the blizzard, as if they had never been there. The snow covered their tracks, and Kirill realized that this had been a rehearsal of the annual parade celebrating the end of the battle; the colonel had been remembering his winter storming of Grozny, his first battle, in the winter of 1994–1995, when the Chechen grenade throwers burned the tank columns that entered the city without cover.
Kirill looked at himself. He felt as if he had been in battle—the wound on his cheek from ice shrapnel and the joy, mixed with alcohol, coursing through his veins of his lucky brush with death.
Priest, Officer, and Invalid Soldier: Kirill thought the solution to his puzzle was closer.
***
It was around three. Getting dark. The joyless winter sun hovered above the high bank, above the distant buildings of the city. A fine-grained drifting snow ran along the frozen sand sastrugi; white and beige sand was frozen in small waves. Whitecaps danced on the dark river.
Kirill gathered a pile of driftwood, branches and small logs, resembling smooth gray bones. One log still had some bast for kindling. The flames contorted the bast in fiery convulsions, a puff of smoke rose, and soon the teepee of driftwood was burning smokelessly, extending its bright and softly roaring tongue of flame to the darkening sky.
Long shadows of stumps and shrubs stretched along the frozen sand; the firelight expanded space, pushing the city to the north and the opposite bank even farther away, but bringing the forest closer and lowering the murky sky almost to his shoulders.
Kirill stood watching the flames; he liked fire, he liked solitary campfires at the edge of the world, but now didn’t know what to do next, where to look: at the sky, water, sand, grove, where to seek signs. The icy wind augmented the fire, the crimson coals trembled, and the flames entwined the logs in a spiraling movement, throwing splashes of light to the south, north, east, and west, like a lighthouse.
Kirill had an acute sense of the forest’s grimness. The gigantic poplars, willows, and oaks had grown on the fruitful river floodplains, contorted in burls, crowned with balls of mistletoe; beneath them were thick, entangled bushes; the Creator had tested his pencil here, and all the curlicues and scribbles took on wooden flesh and became the broken lines of tree trunks.
He saw himself standing by the campfire on the bank with the eyes of the forest, the dark pupils of the grove. He realized the point of the fire was not to bring someone to him but that the light would make him visible to the secret inhabitants of the forests, the ghosts, and to those who wouldn’t have to be next to him on this little island but could see him from afar. The fire was dying out, the winds tossed dead petals of gray ash onto the sand, and the last rays of the sunset vanished behind the city.
Kirill felt he had been noticed. He had made the call. There was a reason that he took a motorboat here, that he had chosen this island, Hungry Island as it was called, an enormous layer cake of river deposits cutting the Volga channel in half. The river had built it for centuries out its own deposits, washing it away and creating it anew, nibbling at the tumbling shores. In relation to the city—geographically—it was the bottom, collecting, absorbing everything the city disgorged, garbage, outflows; during the battle its slag precipitated here—blood, oil, ash, everything that the streams in the spring of 1943 washed out of the ruins, where stone, flesh, and iron were mixed. The island was a sponge, its soft silty layers were like tree rings, carrying the memory of cruel winters, fires, and volcanic eruptions.
Standing on the porous, pliant river terrain, ready to absorb and surrender everything under his feet, Kirill felt the gluttonous womb of silt, like the puffed up belly of a toad—you hardly had to press on it and out would seep jelly-like roe with black eyes, or digested insects, bleached butterflies, grasshoppers’ bony rapiers, beetles’ armor
with a pale greenish glimmer, and the tiny flakes of mosquito wings.
He had pressed an answer out of the island of dead effluvium. The fire cast shadows, and the shadows led him to the past.
Maxim had promised to take him to the storerooms of the Museum of the Battle of Stalingrad. Kirill wasn’t very interested in going; he hated the Soviet white tower of mourning, where on the lower floors, so dim that even camera flash couldn’t dissipate the gloom, exhibits gathered dust—weapons, uniforms, leaflets, banners, maps. The lower floors held the profane world of objects, while upstairs, on seventh heaven, where the winding staircases led, a panoramic mural depicted the battle from first to last day, closing time in a circle. The main truth of memory was entrusted not to real objects but to the artist’s brush, which had portrayed the locally honored saints of the battle, martyrs, heroes, whose names were given to new city streets.
However, Kirill always liked storerooms, special places for the stand-ins of history, the ones who didn’t have the scope or the opportunity (a superior officer killed) to rise into leader and hero. They were places for ideas that did not conquer the world, weapons that did not have a worthy target, canvases that would have hung in the gallery if their mastery had not been surpassed by another artistic genius; in other words, they held all the draft work of the world, all its failures, everyone who was second, third, fourth, fifth, after Columbus. Knowing and accepting his secondariness, Kirill felt this milieu was his own, and it would be easy to orient himself in it and find the signs he needed.
Kirill wandered around the rooms, moving deeper into the dimly lit areas until he hit a dead end. Cardboard boxes were piled in the corner; an old ornamented candlestick and binoculars in a leather case stuck out of one, the handle of a dagger or short sword from another. A painting in a gold frame leaned against the wall, a hunting rifle, a camera on a tripod; a greatcoat and parade tunic with a colonel’s insignia lay across the boxes; medals and orders glowed dully, they had not been polished in a long time: Red Banner, Red Star, the Order of Alexander Nevsky, the Order of Bogdan Khmelnitsky, the Order of the Patriotic War second class, the medal “For Taking Berlin,” and others, postwar, anniversary, another two dozen or so.
The Goose Fritz Page 24