The Unwomanly Face of War

by Svetlana Alexievich

  “Saul, where’s my handkerchief? I just had it in my hands…Well, where is it?”

  “I memorized many of her stories and ‘tagged’ them, as they now say, for the grandchildren. Often I tell them not about my war, but about hers. I noticed it’s more interesting for them,” Saul Genrikhovich continues. “I have more specific military knowledge, but she has more feelings. And feelings are always more intense, they’re always stronger than facts. We also had girls in the infantry. As soon as one of them appeared among us, we pulled ourselves together. You can’t imagine…You can’t!” He catches himself. “I also picked up that little word from her. But you can’t imagine how good it is to hear a woman’s laughter at war! A woman’s voice.

  “Was there love in the war? There was! The women we met there are excellent wives. Faithful companions. Those who married in the war are the happiest people, the happiest couples. We, too, fell in love with each other at the front. Amid fire and death. That makes for a strong bond. There were other things, I won’t deny it, because it was a long war and there were many of us in it. But I mostly remember what was bright. Noble.

  “I became better in the war…Unquestionably! I became better as a human being, because in war there is a lot of suffering. I saw a lot of suffering and I suffered a lot myself. There what’s not most important in life is immediately swept aside, it’s superfluous. There you understand that…But the war took its revenge on us. But…We’re afraid to admit it to ourselves…It caught up with us…Not all our daughters’ personal lives worked out well. And here’s why: their mothers, who were at the front, raised them the way they themselves were raised at the front. And the fathers, too. According to the same moral code. At the front, as I’ve already said, you see at once how a person is, what he’s worth. You can’t hide there. Their girls couldn’t imagine that life could be different than in their homes. They had not been warned about the world’s cruel underside. And these girls, getting married, easily fell into the hands of swindlers, who deceived them, because it was all too easy to deceive them. This happened with many children of our friends from the front. And with our daughter, too…”

  “For some reason we didn’t tell our children about the war. We were probably afraid and took pity on them. Were we right?” Olga Vasilyevna ponders. “I didn’t wear my ribbons. There was an occasion when I tore them off and never pinned them on again. After the war I worked as a director of a bread-baking factory. I came to a meeting and my superior, also a woman, saw my ribbons and said in front of everybody: ‘Why have you pinned them on like a man?’ She herself had the Order of Labor, and she always wore it, but for some reason she disliked my military decorations. When we were alone in the office, I explained it all to her in sailor fashion. She was embarrassed, but I did lose the wish to wear the decorations. I still don’t pin them on. Though I’m proud of them.

  “It was only decades later that the well-known journalist Vera Tkachenko wrote about us in the central newspaper Pravda, about the fact that women were also in the war. And that there are frontline women who have remained single, have not arranged their lives, and still have nowhere to live. And that we were in debt to these saintly women. And then little by little people began to pay more attention to these frontline women. They were forty or fifty years old, and they lived in dormitories. Finally they began to give them individual apartments. My friend…I won’t mention her name, she might suddenly get offended…An army paramedic…Wounded three times. When the war ended, she studied in medical school. She had no family; they had all been killed. She lived in great want, had to scrub floors at night for a living. She didn’t want to tell anybody that she was an invalid and was entitled to benefits. She tore up all her certificates. I asked her: ‘Why did you tear them up?’ She wept: ‘And who would have married me?’ ‘Well, so,’ I said, ‘you did the right thing.’ And she wept still louder: ‘Those papers would be very useful to me now. I’m very ill…’ Can you imagine? She wept.

  “To celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Victory a hundred sailors were invited to Sevastopol, the city of Russian naval glory—veterans of the Great Patriotic War from all the fleets, and among them three women. My friend and I were two of them. And the admiral of the fleet bowed to each of us, thanked us before everybody, and kissed our hands. How can I forget it?!”

  “And would you like to forget the war?”

  “Forget? Forget…” Olga Vasilyevna repeats my question.

  “We’re unable to forget it. It’s not in our power.” Saul Genrikhovich breaks the prolonged pause. “Remember, Olya, on Victory Day, we met an old, old mother, who had a little old poster hanging on her neck: ‘Looking for Kulnev, Tomas Vladimirovich, reported missing in 1942 in besieged Leningrad.’ You could tell by her face that she was well over eighty. How many years has she been looking for him? And she’ll go on looking till her last hour. We’re the same.”

  “And I’d like to forget. I want to…” Olga Vasilyevna utters slowly, almost in a whisper. “I want to live at least one day without the war. Without our memory of it…At least one day…”

  —

  I remember the two of them together, as in the wartime pictures, one of which they gave me. They’re young in them, much younger than I am now. At once everything acquires a different meaning. It comes closer. I look at these young photos and already hear differently what I had just heard and recorded. The time between us disappears.

  They all meet me and talk to me differently…

  Some start telling their story at once, while still on the phone: “I remember…I keep it all in my memory as if it was yesterday…” Others put off the meeting and the conversation for a long time: “I have to prepare myself…I don’t want to wind up in that hell again…” Valentina Pavlovna Chudaeva is one of those who was fearful for a long time, reluctant to let me into her troubled world. For several months I called her every now and then, but one day we talked on the phone for two hours and finally decided to meet. At once—the very next day.

  And so—here I am…

  “We’ll eat pies. I’ve been fussing about since morning…” the hostess greets me cheerfully on the threshold. “We can talk later. And weep our fill…I’ve lived with my grief for a long time…But first of all—the pies. With bird cherry. Like we make in Siberia. Come in.

  “Forgive me for addressing you informally. It’s a frontline habit: ‘Hey girls! Come on, girls!’ We’re all like that, you know by now…You’ve heard…We haven’t acquired any crystal, as you see. All that my husband and I have squirreled away fits into a tin candy box: a couple of orders and medals. They’re in the cupboard, I’ll show you later.” She takes me inside. “The furniture’s old, too, you see. We’d be sorry to get rid of it. When things live in the house for a long time, they acquire a soul. I believe that.”

  She introduces me to her friend Alexandra Fyodorovna Zenchenko, a Komsomol worker in besieged Leningrad.

  I sit down at the set table…Well, so, if it’s pies, let it be pies, the more so if they’re Siberian, with bird cherry, which I had never tried before.

  Three women. Hot pies. But the conversation immediately turns to the war.

  “Only don’t interrupt her with questions,” Alexandra Fyodorovna warns me. “If she stops, she starts crying…And after the tears, she’ll say nothing…So don’t interrupt…”

  Valentina Pavlovna Chudaeva

  SERGEANT, COMMANDER OF ANTIAIRCRAFT ARTILLERY

  I’m from Siberia…What prompted me, a girl from far-off Siberia, to go to the front? From the end of the world, as they call it. Concerning the end of the world, a French journalist asked me that question at a meeting. He looked at me so intently in the museum, I even became embarrassed. What does he want? Why does he stare like that? Then he came up and asked through the interpreter to have an interview with Mrs. Chudaeva. I, of course, became very nervous. I thought: Well, what does he want? Hadn’t he listened to me at the museum? But he was evidently not interested in that. The first
thing I heard from him was a compliment: “You look so young today…How could you have gone through the war?” I answered him: “That proves, as you see, that we were very young when we went to the front.” But he was wondering about something else: how did I get to the front from Siberia—it was the end of the world! “No,” I figured out, “evidently you’re wondering why I, a schoolgirl, would go to the front, if there was no general mobilization.” He nodded his head “Yes.” “Very well,” I said, “I’ll answer that question.” And I told him my whole life, as I’m going to tell it to you. He wept…The Frenchman wept…In the end he confessed, “Don’t be offended, Mrs. Chudaeva. For the French, World War I caused a greater shock than World War II. We remember it; there are graves and monuments everywhere. But we know little about you. Today many people, especially the young, think it was only America that defeated Hitler. Little is known about the price the Soviet people paid for the victory—twenty million human lives in four years. And about your sufferings. Immeasurable. I thank you—you have shaken my heart.”

  …I don’t remember my mother. She died young. My father was a representative of the Novosibirsk local party committee. In 1925 they sent him to his native village to get bread. There was great want in the country, and the kulaks hid the bread and let it rot. I was nine months old then. My mother wanted to go to the village with my father, and he took her along. She took me and my sister, because she had no one to leave us with. Papa once worked as a farmhand for that kulak, whom he threatened at the evening meeting: “We know where you hide the bread. If you don’t hand it over yourself, we’ll come and take it by force. We’ll take it in the name of the revolutionary cause.”

  The meeting ended, and the family all gathered together. Papa had five brothers. Afterward none of them came back from the Great Patriotic War, and neither did my father. So they all sat down at the festive table—traditional Siberian dumplings. The benches stood along the windows…My mother sat between windows, one shoulder by a window, the other by my father, and my father sat where there was no window. It was April…At that time in Siberia you can still have frosts. Mother must have been cold. I understood that later, when I grew up. She stood up, threw father’s leather jacket over her shoulders, and began to nurse me. At that moment a rifle shot rang out. They were aiming at my father, at his leather coat…Mother only managed to say “Pa…” and dropped me onto the hot dumplings…She was twenty-four years old…

  Later my grandfather was chairman of the village council in that village. He was poisoned with strychnine; they put it in his water. I’ve kept a photograph of my grandfather’s funeral. There is a cloth draped over his coffin with the inscription “Died at the hands of the class enemy.”

  My father was a hero of the Civil War, commander of an armored train, which fought against the rebellion of a Czechoslovakian corps. In 1931 he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. At the time very few people were given that order, especially in Siberia. It was a great honor, and was greatly respected. My father was wounded nineteen times; there wasn’t an unhurt place on his body. My mother told—not me, of course, but our relatives—that the White Czechs sentenced my father to twenty years of hard labor. She requested a meeting with him; at the time she was in the last month of pregnancy with Tasya, my older sister. There was such a long corridor in that prison, and they didn’t let her walk down it to my father, they said, “Crawl, Bolshevik scum!” And she, just days before giving birth, crawled to my father along this long cement corridor. That’s how they had their meeting. She didn’t recognize my father; his hair was all gray. A gray-haired old man. He was thirty.

  Could I sit there indifferently when the enemy again came to my land, if I had grown up in such a family, with such a father? I was of his blood…his dear blood. He had lived through so much…He was denounced in 1937; they wanted to slander him. To make him out as an enemy of the people. Well, there were those horrible Stalin purges…Yezhovshchina*1….As Comrade Stalin said, when you chop wood, the chips fly. A new class struggle was proclaimed, so the country never stopped living in fear. In submission. But my father managed to be received by Kalinin,*2 and his good name was restored. Everybody knew my father.

  My relatives told me about these things afterward…

  And now it’s 1941…My last school bell just rang. We all had our plans, our dreams, we were young girls. After the commencement ball, we went for a boat ride down the river Ob to an island. So cheerful, happy…As yet unkissed, as they say. I’d never even had a boyfriend. We met the dawn on the island and went back…The whole city is seething; people are weeping. All around they repeat, “War! War!” Radios are turned on everywhere. We couldn’t fathom it. What war? We were so happy, we had made such grandiose plans: who was going to study where, to become what. And suddenly—war! The grown-ups wept, but we weren’t afraid; we assured each other that within a month we’d “beat the fascists’ brains out.” We sang prewar songs. Our army would certainly crush the enemy on their own territory…There wasn’t a shadow of doubt…Not a shred…

  We began to understand it all when death notices started to come back. I simply got sick: “So it was all lies?” The Germans were already preparing to parade on Red Square…

  My father was not taken to the front. But he stubbornly haunted the recruiting office. Later my father went. And that with his health, his gray hair, his lungs: he had chronic tuberculosis. Just doctored a bit. And at what age? But he went. He joined the Steel Division, or Stalin Division, as it was called.*3 There were many Siberians in it. We also thought that without us the war wasn’t right, that we, too, had to fight. Give us weapons at once! Our whole class ran to the recruiting office. On October 10 I left for the front. My stepmother cried a lot: “Valya, don’t go…What are you doing? You’re so small, so thin, what kind of fighter are you?” I had been rachitic for a long time, a very long time. It happened after my mother was killed. I didn’t walk till I was five…Where did all this strength come from!?

  We rode in freight cars for two months. Two thousand girls, a whole train. A Siberian train. What did we see as we approached the front? I remember one moment…I’ll never forget it: a broken-down train station and sailors hopping about the platform on their hands. They had no legs or crutches. They walked on their hands…The platform was full of them…They also smoked…They saw us and laughed. Joked. My heart went thump-thump…Thump-thump…What are we getting into? Where are we going? We sang to cheer ourselves up, sang a lot.

  There were commanders with us. They instructed us, encouraged us. We studied communications. We arrived in Ukraine, and there we were shelled for the first time. Just when we were in the bathhouse for decontamination. When we came to wash, there was a man on duty there, in charge of the bathhouse. We felt shy with him there; well, we were girls, quite young ones. But once the shelling began, we all clung to him for safety. We got dressed any old way, I wrapped my head with a towel, I had a red towel, and we ran outside. A first lieutenant, also young, shouted, “Run to the shelter, girl! Drop that towel! It breaks cover…”

  I ran away from him: “I’m not breaking any cover! Mama told me not to go out with a wet head.”

  He found me after the shelling: “Why didn’t you obey me? I’m your commander.”

  I didn’t believe him. “That’s all I need, you as my commander…”

  I argued with him like a kid. We were the same age.

  We were issued big, thick overcoats. We were like wheat sheaves in them; we didn’t walk, we waddled. At first there were no boots for us. What they had were men’s sizes. Then they issued us other boots: the foot part was red, and the upper was black tarpaulin. We strutted around in them! We were all skinny; the men’s army shirts hung loose on us. Those who could sew tailored them somehow. But we were girls; that wasn’t enough for us! So the first lieutenant started taking measurements. We laughed and cried. The battalion commander came: “Well, has the first lieutenant issued you all your women’s things?” The lieutenant says, “Measuremen
ts taken. They’ll get everything.”

  And I became a radio operator in an antiaircraft unit. On duty at the command point, in communications. And maybe I would have stayed on as a radio operator for the rest of the war, if I hadn’t received a notice that my father had been killed. My beloved papa was no more. The closest person I had. The only one. I started begging, “I want revenge. I want to pay them back for my father’s death.” I wanted to kill…I wanted to shoot…They tried to tell me that the telephone was very important in the artillery. But telephones don’t shoot…I submitted a request to the commander of the regiment. He refused. Then, without thinking twice, I addressed myself to the commander of the division. Colonel Krasnykh came to us, lined us all up, and asked, “Where is the girl who wants to be a gun commander?” I stepped forward: thin, skinny neck, and on that neck a submachine gun hanging, a heavy submachine gun, seventy-one cartridges…I was obviously such a pathetic sight that he even smiled. Second question: “What do you want?” I said, “I want to shoot.” I don’t know what he thought. He said nothing for a long time. Not a word. Then turned sharply and left. “Well,” I thought, “that’s it, he’ll refuse.” The commander came running: “The colonel has given his permission…”