Tshernikhov and Vera had been serving in the regiment since its formation; they were used to and knew each other. In battle, in the trenches, or in march one doesn’t particularly care who his neighbors are—old or young. Now, however, amid the ordinary human utensils, he could even picture Vera as a woman—in a dress. When Tshernikhov gave her a non-military once-over, so to speak, and remembered all the five years they had been together, she shuddered: how could she not be tired.
“There’s sense for you,” Vera spouted off, “walk like a man, fight like a man, and should the need be—you’re a woman.”
In her raucous, husky voice there was a ring of tears. Tshernikhov was utterly shaken.
“We must end this war,” he stated flatly, as if Vera’s hurt and momentary weakness had just convinced him that this had to be done, that the only thing he had to do to end the war was to return to his company.
“Bring in the wounded!” He was already behind the door when he heard Vera’s normal voice ring out the “commanding,” as they used to joke in the regiment when she sent out the corpsman.
As he ambled to join his riflers, Tshernikhov was glad to see the little Bashkir liaison man of the second battalion, the flaps of his overcoat tucked up high, running up to the sanpoint house. Batcom two, apparently, was relaying his usual, terse message.
The scouts had entered the village with the second battalion. The first minutes or even hours after a victory the brew of success goes to one’s head and displaces all fatigue. Ilya felt hot; he felt no desire to eat or drink. Unsure of the enemy’s panicky retreat; distrustful of the quiet, dark windows; believing in nothing on this foreign soil—he was the first to rap with his rifle butt against the closed door of a solid-looking, squat house. It looked like a store. In the thickening dusk he could still make out mouth-watering, tightly-packed sausages and some alien, angular letters on the signboard.
The door didn’t give, but from the house Ilya could hear sounds—somebody was inside.
“Shall I let go at the windows,” Fimotchka eagerly suggested.
“No sense letting go,” Ilya drawled through clenched teeth. “You won’t hear a peep from them anyway.”
The door, though, was giving. Under force it creaked and fell off its hinges. Homey warmth and the odor of cooked meat burst forth to embrace them. “Get out,” Ilya shouted in the jargon he often used in interrogating identification prisoners, or “pigeons.” There was nobody to be seen in the semidarkness, but noises came from the next room. Beginning to lose his temper, Ilya cocked his automatic and headed toward the noise. Fimotchka swung at the second door from under which a dim light was slitting through—surprisingly, it gave easily.
The darkened room was large and cluttered, glowing with dying embers and dancing with locked-in shadows from the flickering light of a lamp which apparently had just been put on the table. Two of the trembling shadows, a man and a woman, seemed to have petrified in an erect pose the moment the scouts had broken in the door.
A black hole yawned in the buff floor, just below the table covered with a plush cloth. On it rings, bracelets sparkled and cried with brilliant tears next to a lusterless bundle of knives and forks feebly blinking in the poor lamp light.
The woman had been taking off an earring. She had frozen stiff in her motion—clutching her ear with both hands. She was rosy-skinned and fair-haired, dressed in a light housecoat which barely covered her shapely body. A moment later, coming out of her stupor, she darted forward and barred the table with herself, spreading her shapely arms. Her coat opened, exposing more of her semi-naked body to the scouts’ eyes. However, she didn’t care about herself, she was intent on defending her possessions.
Unquestionably, Ilya looked to them as the devil incarnated: a broad-jawed, green-eyed, squinting monster in a camouflage coat. He tore his eyes away from the woman and glanced at the man. What struck him was the German’s red hair and heavy, square jaw.
Suddenly, in a flash, this redhead, the hole in the floor, the scared shadows brought back to his memory the picture of his brothers and that frightful night of his childhood. He remembered again the dull glimmer of gold and the smell of blood. Slowly his automatic dropped.
Interpreting the indecision reflected on the face of the Russian soldier as favorable to her, the woman daringly made a step toward Ilya and at the same time said something briefly to her husband. Not making any attempt to cover herself, she smiled. The meaning of her smile would have been obvious even to an inhabitant of another planet. Ilya received the message: just stamp your foot, yell out, and the redhead will tiptoe out of the room and close the door behind him.
But Ilya felt no desire for their bracelets nor for their wives. He suddenly felt a wave of physical nausea. He whirled around and walked out of the sausage-smelling house. The detachment reluctantly followed.
This encounter had disturbed him so much that he couldn’t fall asleep after he set up his men for the night. The trauma of his past appeared to have survived here, on this foreign soil, lurking for its opportunity to poison him. He felt suffocating and tight inside. Dragging himself out, he strolled in the middle of the street, meticulously staying out of the shadows of the neat little houses carefully dressed in ivy. He felt he had to escape the putridity of his unhappy childhood which seemed to have burst forth this very evening, threatening to inundate him, smother him—as big and strong as he was.
Ilya’s heart informed on itself in a kind of disquieting palpitation. There was a group of lightly-wounded men, their fresh bands looming white in the darkness; he asked them for the direction of the Sandet. He hadn’t thought of the “pancake” slur until he came into the room and sat down on a free chair. Vera looked very busy; her iodine-stained fingers appeared to be moving with sure quickness, as if they had a mind of their own. It occurred to him that he shouldn’t expect any favors from her; perhaps he shouldn’t have come here at all. …
“Pour in half a glass,” Vera ordered the corpsman who had a bottle of Popov’s medicinal spirits in his hand. She took a glimpse at the pale, perspired face of the sergeant who lay on a stretcher, his legs splintered and bandaged up to his pelvis. The sergeant avidly drank down the liquid—she always had it on hand, unlike other medical officers who kept running out of it. She rightly believed that it was good to soothe pain and give extra strength to the badly wounded. The sergeant quieted down, too, by the time she was finishing the bandages on the next man’s shoulder.
The regiment’s job was done for a while but in this little house work was going on at full speed. Vera’s natural efficiency, her gentle voice—the voice she always used with the wounded men—and the imperturbable serenity of the silent corpsman, all that had a transquilizing effect on Ilya. He was beginning to feel good, and then … he took a look in the room and discovered two soldiers sitting to the right of him—not of his own kind but Germans. Two unarmed, impossibly filthy Germans sitting there—as calmly as they pleased. Only an act of witchcraft, he thought, could have put Germans in this room. Vera’s so busy that she doesn’t even seem them, he said to himself. Another second and he would have kicked them out the door when Vera beckoned to the older one, the one who had a rag bandaged around his head. “Davaii,” she said, pointing to the chair in front of her. She said no more than that word, a word which every German knew by now.
“Vera!” Ilya reproachfully reminded her.
“POW’s,” she replied without lifting her eyes. She began to change the bandages on the man’s head. The German was very patient although he must have been in pain. However, the moment he heard her clank the glass ampule and saw her fill a syringe, he reeled back in such overt terror that even the phlegmatic corpsman raised his eyebrows in amazement.
“Tod,” the German rasped, pointing at the hypodermic. His unshaven, dirty face became earth-grey.
“Go to hell,” Vera told him in a tired voice, not caring whether he understood or not. “Why would I have wasted bandages on you? Davaii, for God’s sakes.”
“Look stupid, it’s only a tetanus vaccine,” she assured him, slightly pricking her left arm below the elbow, barely squeezing the plunger.
The German watched in fascination as the needle disappeared under the skin of his arm. Raising apologetically at Vera the whites of his deep-sunk eyes, he made an attempt at a smile—but couldn’t quite make it. When it was all over, he got up, rattled off softly a remark to his younger companion in German, and dropped heavily to his own chair. Under the clean bandage his wet cap looked even dirtier.
Ilya rolled up a smoke for himself and waited resentfully for the prisoners to be taken away.
But nobody came for them. He noticed that the older prisoner hungrily stared at the smoking tobacco, not having the courage to look up at his face. Mad at himself, without even glancing at the German, Ilya silently reached him his shag-packed tin and a newspaper strip. The German carefully picked a pinch, just enough for a thin, thin smoke and abruptly blurted in Russian, “Thank you.”
His Russian words sounded so weird that even Vera tore her mind away for a moment from the last soldier she was attending.
The German was quick to explain, “I was in Russia—the last war; in prison.”
He spoke with an accent, but quite fluently.
“You were, yet you wanted more,” Ilya chuckled malevolently.
For the first time the German looked straight at him. He was at least forty, maybe older. The ordinary, middle-aged man with large, coarse hands, horny fingernails, and a tired face covered with weeks-old stubble. He obviously had felt keenly that the reticence of the Russian was an expression of hostility toward him.
“No, I didn’t want more,” he replied softly. His tone of voice had a touch of dignity to it. Perhaps, he remembered himself as he once was: unbegrimed, unmilitarized, a self-respecting, industrious man who, indeed, hadn’t wanted this war.
“Why are you hanging around here?” Ilya asked in an angry drawl.
“They’ll come for us. They promised they would,” the German apologized, glancing from Vera to Ilya and back again. “They’ll take us, they will.”
Ilya realized that the prisoners were afraid to go out into the street by themselves; they were afraid to be met by Russian soldiers.
Ilya’s feeling of hateful revulsion of the enemy was for some strange reason replaced by a curious involvement. It couldn’t have been friendliness—there was no room for warm feelings in this house where a Russian soldier was dying on a stretcher. Yet, it was a completely new feeling—something like the absence of enmity—a feeling hard to grasp. Making half a turn toward him, the German glanced at Ilya again, and Ilya was positive that both of them had the same thought on their mind. He even forgot about his quarrel with Vera and wasn’t at all surprised when she requested him amicably, “Ilya, boy, will you please take a look in the chest; maybe you can dig out a pair of men’s underwear. It’s cold outside; they are all wet and filthy like pigs.”
Ilya walked up to the chest and began to dig in it haphazardly, tossing out onto the floor every unsuitable thing. He stopped to admire a well-worn, neat chemise bearing signs of multiple mendings. As a matter of fact, he thought at first that this was a kind of embroidery. He marvelled at the precise neatness of the mendings. Then, he found that every single piece of apparel was speckled up with such meticulously done squares. “Took off. …” he smirked, collecting the whole pile from the floor and he put it back into the chest.
“Where did they go, these idiots?”
Eventually, men’s underwear was found. The prisoners changed hastily, ashamed of their thin, neglected bodies, and a short time later a carefree, little soldier from headquarters came for them.
Vera was so tired that she could hardly stand on her feet. Ilya thought it wiser not to bother her and left. Immense fatigue began to take hold of him too; he couldn’t wait to get to the pile of straw procured by the nimble Fimotchka.
It’s such a long, long time before you’re allowed to rest on the front lines, he thought, that when it comes, it’s so, so short. At least now, the progress was much faster, and before he knew it, he’d be in the rear again.
Toward dawn, from God knows where, German civilians made their entry into the village. They looked glum and confused. A window opened and from it a white sheet was hoisted. Ilya thought they wouldn’t have the guts to keep it. But the sheet remained there hanging. Later, an old face appeared behind it, timidly peeking at the Russians and hopefully watching the other windows. And then, many shutters began to open and white sheets began to crawl out.
“They are giving up, the lice,” a soldier gleefully shouted.
From behind sheets and pillowcases of all the windows, German men and women, mostly old people, began to look out, trying to smile, wave, behave as if they had just been waiting for this joyous opportunity, the entry of Russian soldiers into their village.
The scouts left the village behind, plunging into an accurately planted, but monotonously alien forest. They followed their leader at a fast pace. Each scout was engulfed in his own thoughts, about his homeland, and paid no attention to the lovely, loveless scenery all around.
Vera moved with the battalion. She responded to Ilya’s greeting with a nod of her head. The brisk, energetic pace of his platoon coming by made her think that this uneventful march was not going to last too long, that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to pick up another sanitary kit. She decided on the spur of the moment to get out and wait for the sancom, to fill up so to say, on the march. She got out of the column and sat down on the roadside ferns.
Soon the sancom lorries came along. Vera recognized the old, lazy good-for-nothing gelding, “The Ally,” as they called him, who’d never quicken his pace no matter how heavy the artillery fire.
The corpsman walked up to the lorry and pulled up the tarpaulin. While he was filling up his spare kit with all kinds of bandaging materials, “The Ally” kept his pace. Vera walked with Lusia, the pretty medsister from the sancom, a gay flapper who in comparison with her dressed like a doll (Lusia never had to crawl on her belly nor lie on the ground). Her quaint, box-calf boots had a sparkle; her military coat tailored in an officer’s fashion was spic and span.
Babbling like a brook and carried away with happiness, Lusia boasted of the long letter she had written home last evening; how proud her mother would be to learn that her daughter was writing from the enemy’s lair.
Having filled in Vera on all the details of her letter, Lusia also remembered that the liaison had been from in the division and brought a letter for Scout Shirayev. An open letter it was, and all the girls in the company had read it and cried—it was so touching. At the next halt it should be handed over to him.
“His wife,” Lusia chirped excitedly. “Apparently, she had no time to evacuate. She joined the guerillas, and all the time she’s been looking for him. She too, was awarded the medal of the Fatherland War, second class. She even sent a newspaper clipping from the place where her family is. She wants everybody who knows to tell her and help her find him. So touching, so touching …”
“Lord,” Vera breathed deeply, “gimme that letter, will you!”
The letter closed with: “And if he is not with you, please write me, Comrades. Also, please return the clipping—I have no other and I want to send it and write everywhere until I find him.”
Carefully nestling the letter amid the bandages, Vera got up onto the road. She began to run as fast as she could, trying to hold the pouches from flapping against her sides. She ran ahead to catch up with the advancing regiment.
She caught up with the third battalion; then, her strength failed her. She knew she couldn’t do it by herself—together, with the others, she would. The letter was rushed ahead, from hand to hand, from company to company until it reached the scouting platoon,
somewhere in front of everybody.
As soon as Ilya saw the familiar, fine letters packed into tight lines, he felt the blood rushing away from his face and his cheeks turning ice-cold. He even forgot that instead of reading while marching, reading and stumbling, he might have been allowed to break out of the column. Next, from cold he turned hot, so hot that he had to loosen his collar; he was so foolishly careful about it as though the most important thing of all was not to lose the button. He read and re-read the letters; he re-read the newspaper clipping in which her name and his were underlined in red.
The regiment kept moving on. His platoon moved silently ahead, guessing everything, not asking anything.
That’s how it was. While he had had his anxieties, moments of despair and doubts, the other heart had striven toward him with even greater force, perhaps. He sensed her timorous doubts in between her modest lines: “He must be looking for me too …”
“Must be? Silly Dovie Girl,” Ilya mused, choking up from tenderness and forgetting his own doubts of not so long ago, and his unusually hurtful jealousy that seemed now so absurd he would be ashamed to tell anybody about it or even admit it to himself.
He also felt a little remorseful; why did he search for his beloved in places where things were peaceful? Why had he indulged in all kinds of conjectures and never thought of perusing the honor rosters? Perhaps, had he believed in his spouse without reservations, he would have started from the rosters.
Time, however, did not wait. An order reached the head of the column … the same way the letter had, from company to company …
“The commander of the scouting platoon to the regiment commander!”
“Well, there goes our rest,” Fimotchka quipped, adjusting the automatic slung across his neck—it had needed no adjusting. “They want a ‘pigeon’ no doubt.”
Unable to hide his happiness now, Ilya flashed his white teeth in a grin. “Cut out the gab,” he pretended sternness. With a smile on his face he walked back, along the roadside, against the current of the marching columns.
Treasury of Russian Short Stories 1900-1966 Page 12