Last Citadel

by David L. Robbins

Three miles below the high ground where he sat sky-watching flowed the skinny Luchanino River. On its banks, one mile to his right, stood the emptied village of Syrtsev. Two miles the other direction was the village of Luchanino. Every silo and home in these places had been turned into a fortification, embedded as part of the 6th Guards defensive works running east-west beside the Oboyan road. The little ghost towns were bristling with weapons and soldiers dug in behind their walls. Now the towns were solid with metal and a vigor that were never given to them in peacetime.

  Syrtsev and Luchanino, and Alekseyevka two miles to the west on the riverbank, served their greatest purpose now, waiting to be destroyed, to maul the Germans when they came to cross the Luchanino River here. To Dimitri’s left was the Oboyan road, the grand prize for the German assault, potholed and shredded but busy anyway with tanks and trucks moving up. Taking the Oboyan road was pivotal for Germany; the poor condition of Russia’s transportation system was one of the country’s greatest defenses. Germany had to control the few paved surfaces to bring up supplies, fuel, and reinforcements. Sending their trucks overland through the endless bogs, overrunning streams, mud, and fields of this immense country was not possible for them. Russians alone knew how to navigate the eternal muck, endless snows, swelling rains, the vast distances, with horses, wagons, hand-pulled carts, blisters, courage, anger. This is Russia, Dimitri thought. It does not want to be conquered.

  Overhead the German plane banked. It’s going to circle awhile, Dimitri noted, there’s lots to photograph down here.

  He kicked his feet against the barrel, dancing his heels on the canister full of diesel fuel. He smiled, almost merry at the scope of the coming battle. This is how you fight a war, he decided. Historic. Big.

  Dimitri did not know the numbers, the actual size of what he saw, and he did not care. It was enough that right in front of him - perhaps ten miles across on this clear day, crammed on this flat tableland of central Russia, from the Oboyan road west past the Pena River - was the greatest concentration of rifles, tanks, anti-tank guns, artillery, mines, barbed wire, blockhouses, and obstacles assembled in the entire war. All the big guns were concentrated and pre-aimed at key points. Over forty thousand anti-tank and antipersonnel mines had been laid in the ten-mile front of his 6th Guards; that was more than a mine per foot, over a million mines across the whole of the Kursk salient, the explosives laid during the spring in bare fields that were now overgrown with maize, wheat, mustard, sunflowers, and steppe grasses to make the mines almost impossible to detect. The defense works had arisen immense and deep. He’d driven his T-34 past these positions, called pakfronts, during weeks of drills and scrambles. Sixth Guards alone manned two belts in depths up to ten miles and widths to twenty. And there were thirteen more Soviet armies with defenses just as solid throughout the Kursk bulge, with seven extra armies held in reserve. There were eight defensive belts in all, the first three of which were gargantuan, and every one of them was connected by trenches, there must have been a thousand miles of trenches dug on 6th Guards’ front alone. Dimitri shook his head at just what little parcel of it all he could see. When the Germans finally do attack, they’ll have to wade through more than hell. Hell will be just their front door.

  What kind of force have the Germans put together on their side to believe they can smash through this? It’s got to be just as big. Just as historic. Dimitri thumped his heels again on the barrel to let the stupendousness of the idea sink in. He was a part of this history, though just a small and insignificant mote. Beneath the humming German plane come to take his picture sitting on his barrel, Dimitri resolved that insignificance would not be his lot.

  He stood from the barrel, his rear was sore and imprinted by the metal rim. He waved to the departing reconnaissance plane. Goodbye, he wished to the German pilot and photographer. I hope you got a good look.

  He brought his eyes down to the massive groundworks growing by the shovelful in front of where he stood. The sound of the plane faded, the slips of clouds obscured the wings.

  Dimitri stretched and yawned. He looked down the little rise from where his company of tanks sat under camouflage netting. One hundred meters away, a thousand civilians hacked at the earth with shovels and picks to excavate an anti-tank trench. He had been watching these girls, women, and old men work all morning, they dug like people out of the Bible, ancient Jews building something for a pharaoh, they filled buckets with dirt and the dirt was hauled away in barrows to dark piles, and these piles were hauled elsewhere to build protective berms. The ditch had grown to over ten feet deep and wide; it was perhaps a half-mile long. No tank could go into that and expect to get out. These trenches would serve to funnel the enemy attack to preordained channels, directly into minefields or under the sights of Soviet artillery. Dimitri had spent his morning watching these human ants nibbling at the steppe to change it, this was their own fight against the invaders.

  ‘Hey, Andrei!’ Dimitri shouted over to the next tank in line.

  ‘Yeah!’

  ‘Keep an eye on the General for me.’ Valentin was gone in a company truck to pick up their new crew for the General.

  Dimitri recalled the Cossack fable about the old stallion and the young colt. The young one said to the old, Let’s run down the hill and get us a filly! The old stud shook his great mane and replied, No. Let’s walk down and get them all.

  Dimitri strode into the steppe grass, the reeds were as high as his waist, the color of bare and untanned skin. He ran an open hand over their tops and recalled the feeling of silk skirts, long, clean hair, and gentle, nervous flesh. It had been a while.

  He walked to the lip of the trench and stopped. He was an old horse, yes, but he only wanted the one. He looked down at her, he’d kept a watch on this one all morning from his perch on the fuel barrel. She was one of dozens toiling below his boot-tips at the lip of the trench but she stood out. She would not lean on her shovel handle and gab, she paused only to mop sweat from her brow. She assaulted the soil and heaved great heaping shovelfuls into the waiting buckets, filling them with only three or four loads of her spade. She was not lean like some hungry peasant waif but a woman, with curves and swoops in her figure, she was ample. Around her worked old men in hats and beards with shirtsleeves rolled up, and girls dressed in billowy blouses and patterned skirts with kerchiefs around braided hair. She laughed once at something one of the girls said and he’d heard her through the scraping of a hundred tools and grunts and flopping dirt. He picked up an empty bucket with a rope attached to its handle and tossed it down into the trench. It landed with a hollow thump just where he willed it, at her feet.

  Without looking up, the woman righted the bucket. With a few deep stabs of her shovel, she topped it with dirt. She paused now to run her sleeve across her forehead. The bucket did not disappear the way it was supposed to. She followed the slack rope up the trench wall into Dimitri’s hands.

  ‘Take it away,’ she said.

  Dimitri tilted his head at her now that he had her eyes on him. Her voice was like her body, deep and round. He liked it.

  ‘Take it away,’ she said again, knowing what the old fool over her head was doing. She made her voice an instruction, a schoolmarm to a stupid student.

  Dimitri inclined his head as though she were royalty and tugged up the bucket. He dumped it at his own feet, not on the pile behind him where the dirt belonged, and tossed the pail down to her again. She raised her eyebrows and turned away to another empty bucket. She filled that, and found Dimitri at the rope of this one too, pulling it to the surface to dump the dirt again in the wrong place.

  She turned on Dimitri. Even ten feet below him, her eyes were sea green.

  ‘You’re not helping.’

  Dimitri put his hands to his hips. He pretended to be wounded by her scold.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’

  Dimitri clambered down the slope of the pit. His boots skidded and he almost fell, the ditch was steep. His hurry and lack of balan
ce made her laugh. This was her second laugh for his ears.

  Dimitri tugged his shirt tail out of his pantaloons and pulled the tunic over his head. Bare-chested, he reached for the woman’s shovel. She did not hand it over. He locked on to her eyes and saw how she took him in.

  ‘What?’ he prodded, expecting her to comment on his slim torso.

  ‘You’ve got no hair on your chest,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the chest of a woman.’

  Okay, Dimitri thought, good, the filly bucks. He pulled his eyes from hers and slid them down her.

  ‘So do you, my dear.’

  She sent her face skyward, shaking her noggin at something up there, her God, a dead husband, something, and said, ‘Ha!’

  She would not give up her shovel. Dimitri turned to the girl behind him, she was a teenager, and asked her if she needed a rest. The girl sighed in relief and handed over her tool.

  Dimitri made a display of his strength and stamina. He dug two to the woman’s one, filled buckets, and showed impatience when they were not hauled up fast enough. He worked for fifteen minutes, almost to the point of exhaustion. He finally speared his shovel into the ground and left it. She stood behind him with a ladle of water.

  He poured it over his head. He handed it back to her. She walked away to bring him another. Yes, Dimitri thought, she’s ample.

  She returned with the ladle dripping. He quaffed the lukewarm water and ran a filthy forearm across his lips. Again she laughed at him.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Dimitri Konstantinovich Berko. At your service. And who are you?’

  ‘Sonya.’

  ‘Just Sonya?’

  ‘Yes, Private. Just Sonya.’

  She did not smile when she called him Private. This was a hard one, this woman, not a silly girl from the villages. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, a well-preserved lass, even in these war years. She must be, in fact, a teacher or something like that, maybe one of those damned Communists. She was firm in her ocean eyes, even her smiles and laughter were resolute. Dimitri had the instant concern she was smarter and better born than him.

  ‘Yes, well.’ He made a face. ‘Just Sonya.’ He played the clown a bit for her. ‘I’m a private in this army. But actually, when there’s no war going on, I’m a hetman.’ He tapped his own chest, in the mud there from the dripping water. ‘My father was a hetman. And his father.’

  Sonya pursed her lips, impressed. ‘What is a hetman?’

  He narrowed his eyes. She doesn’t know. Ah, she’s too much trouble. One more go-round, then enough. Back to my tank.

  ‘I am a Cossack leader. In my sietch, I am the final say.’

  ‘Your sietch.’

  ‘Yes, woman. My… my community. Village. Me. The little private.’

  ‘The dirty little private. Are you a tanker, Dima?’ This was the diminutive of his name, the affectionate form.

  ‘Yes. Right up the hill there. Those tanks. The 3rd Mechanized Brigade.’

  ‘You’ll be fighting here, then. When it starts. Around this trench.’

  ‘Yes. Along the Oboyan road. The Germans are going to give it everything they’ve got to take it. But I think this trench alone will stop them. I mean, look at it. You’ve done a marvelous job. There won’t be much fighting for me to do.’

  Sonya took a deep breath and looked at Dimitri with softer eyes. He noted the change and heaped on more, this time for sympathy.

  ‘Me and my son. We’re in the same tank.’

  ‘The same tank.’

  ‘Yes. It’s an old tradition, Cossack families go to war together.’

  ‘That’s splendid.’

  And my daughter.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sonya smiled her best yet. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Up there. Somewhere.’ Dimitri pointed into the sky.

  Sonya’s face fell.

  ‘Oh, Dima, no. I’m so sorry. Ay.’ She clucked her tongue. ‘To lose a child.’

  No, he thought, you goose, Katya’s not dead! She’s a pilot…

  ‘How did she… ?’

  Dimitri froze for the moment, raising a hand to wave off the incorrect notion. Sonya touched his shoulder.

  ‘No, no, Dima, it’s alright. You don’t have to talk about her right now. I understand. It must be so hard for you.’

  Dimitri lowered his hand. He drooped his eyes to the dirt and sniffed once, faking. He left Katya unexplained. Sonya patted his neck. Katya would understand, he thought.

  She pulled her spade out of the facing wall. Dimitri followed suit. Sonya seemed to want to let some silence hover, to return to work, as though she dug now with a new purpose, for the dead daughter and the brave Cossack hetman who would fight beside his son here along the dangerous Oboyan road.

  She bent to her shovel. Dimitri, behind her, gave her buttocks a squeeze.

  * * * *

  June 31

  2130 hours

  Dimitri stayed in the trench, digging with the women and old men, the darling of the civilians. When he did not come out of the hole in an hour to return to his tank, Andrei wandered up to the lip to check on him. Below Andrei’s feet, he saw Sonya and barebacked Dimitri with a gaggle of women around him. The dairy farmer doffed his cigarette and his tunic, too, and stumbled down the wall of the trench. He was welcomed, introduced around, and handed a shovel. Within the hour, a dozen more tankers were in the trench, sweating and flinging dirt and flirting like it was a holiday. In the early evening, they shared a meal with the diggers.

  The air cooled with the lowering sun and the work slacked after the food. The sound of arriving trucks reached them down in the pit, come to take the laborers back to their camp miles to the east away from the front. Andrei got a peck on the cheek from the girl he’d worked beside. Some of the other tankers, unsure bumpkins, backed away, muttering, Nice to meet you, and clambered up the slope. Sonya told Dimitri, Thank you, she hadn’t laughed as much in a day for years. Thank you, Dima. He reached both hands into the water bucket and dipped water to splash his face, then grabbed Sonya in a bear hug. Her breasts against his chest stunned him for a moment, it had been all he thought about the whole day hefting the shovel. He wanted to give her something but had nothing in his pockets, so he gave her a truth. My daughter, he said, is not dead. She’s a pilot. Sonya did not take a swing at him for his gambit; instead she said, So, you are still a hetman, you have a clan. Yes, he said, proud the way she put it. Yes. You’re a good woman, he said. I am, she answered, and lingered in his arms, sea-green eyes flowing over his face. And you need to let me go.

  This is when Valentin arrived at the edge of the trench.

  ‘Let her go, Private.’

  ‘Your son?’ she asked Dimitri.

  ‘Yes. The bastard.’

  ‘Go,’ Sonya said.

  ‘A kiss first.’

  ‘No. I don’t know you that well.’

  ‘I’ve earned a kiss.’

  Valentin repeated his command. The sky behind him reddened.

  ‘Go, Dima. You’ll get in trouble.’

  ‘See. You do know me well! Kiss me, woman, and I’ll deal with the trouble.’

  Sonya bent her head to his and they touched lips; the kiss was softer than Dimitri wanted but, again, he found she was plenty. He let her pull away first and open her eyes.

  ‘Another time,’ she said.

  ‘Another time, Just Sonya.’

  He grabbed one more handful of her bottom and clambered away before she could consider taking a swipe at him. He flew up the trench slope to stand beside Valentin.

  ‘You should have gotten here sooner,’ he said to his son, looking down at all the women gathering their tools, washing their bare arms in the last of the water buckets. Then he made a face. ‘No. Perhaps not.’

  * * * *

  June 31

  2215 hours

  Two boys sat cross-legged on the ground in front of the General Platov. They jumped up when Valentin strode into the glow of their lantern.

  ‘Serge
ant!’ they said together.

  Dimitri came to stand beside his son, who addressed the two newcomers.

  ‘Men, this is your driver. Private…’

  Dimitri stepped forward before Valentin could make any more formal pronouncements. He held out his hand to each. Neither was out of his teens. More sons, Dimitri thought; Christ, more children to take into battle.

  ‘Dimitri Konstantinovich Berko,’ he said with each handshake. The boys had acne and nervous clasps. Dimitri felt expansive after his day in the trench with the woman, the digging made him tired in the good, old way of the farm. ‘Call me Dima. Tell me your names.’

  Both were short, the way tankers must be. One was thick, the other lean. Dimitri guessed the chunky one was the loader, he had to be strong to sling the shells around inside the tank, out of the bins and into the breech. The other would be the hull machine-gunner and radioman, if the General had a radio.