“What is it? What do you want? You’re fine. They’re sending you to the rear. Everything will be all right. Count yourself among the living.”
He says, “I beg you. I’m an only son. You’ve saved me.” And he gave me a present—a ring, a small ring.
I didn’t wear rings, for some reason I didn’t like them. So I refused.
“I can’t. I really can’t.”
He insisted. The wounded men supported him.
“Take it, it’s from a pure heart.”
“It’s just my duty, don’t you see?”
They persuaded me. To tell the truth, I lost that ring later on. It was too big for me, and once I fell asleep in a car, there was a jolt, and it fell off somewhere. I was very sorry.
Did you find that man?
No, we didn’t meet. I don’t know whether it was the same one. But the girls and I spent the whole day looking for him.
…In 1946 I returned home. They asked me, “Will you wear army clothes or civilian?” Army clothes, of course. It never even occurred to me to take them off. One evening I went to the Officers’ House to a dance. Now you’re going to hear what the attitude toward army girls was.
I put on shoes and a dress, and left the overcoat and boots at the cloakroom.
An officer comes up to me and invites me to dance.
“You must be from other parts,” he says. “You’re a very cultivated girl.”
He spent the whole evening with me. Didn’t let me get away. The dances were over, he says to me, “Give me your token.”
He goes on ahead. They give him the boots and the overcoat from the cloakroom.
“These aren’t mine…”
I come up: “No, they’re mine.”
“You didn’t tell me you were at the front.”
“Did you ask me?”
He was at a loss. Couldn’t raise his eyes to me. He himself had just come back from the war…
“Why are you so surprised?”
“I couldn’t imagine you had been in the army. You see, a girl at the front…”
“You’re surprised that I was alone? Without a husband and not pregnant? Not wearing a padded jacket, not blowing strong cigarette smoke, and not using foul language?”
I didn’t allow him to take me home.
I was always proud that I had been at the front. Defending the Motherland…
Liubov Mikhailovna Grozd
MEDICAL ASSISTANT
My first kiss…
Second Lieutenant Nikolai Belokhvostik…Ah, see, I’m blushing all over, and I’m already a grandmother. We were young then. Very young. I thought…I was sure…That…I didn’t confess even to my girlfriend that I was in love with him. Head over heels. My first love…Maybe my only love? Who knows…I thought no one in our company had guessed. I had never liked anyone like that before! If I liked someone, it was not so much. But he…I walked around and thought about him all the time, every minute. That…It was real love. I felt it. By all the signs…Ah, see, I’m blushing…
We were burying him…He was lying on a tarpaulin; he had just been killed. The Germans were shelling us. We had to bury him quickly…Right away…We found some old birches; we chose one that stood a short way from an old oak. The biggest one. Next to it…I tried to remember, so I could come back and find this place afterward. The village ended there, there was a fork in the road…How to remember? How to remember if one of those birches was already burning right in front of our eyes…How? We began to take leave of him…They told me, “You go first.” My heart leaped, I realized…That…It turned out everybody knew about my love. Everybody…The thought struck me: maybe he knew, too? See…He’s lying here…They’ll put him into the ground now…a hole. They’ll cover him with sand…But I was terribly glad at the thought that maybe he knew, too. And what if he liked me? As if he were alive and would now answer me…I remembered how he gave me a German chocolate bar for the New Year. I didn’t eat it, I spent a month carrying it around in my pocket.
I’ve remembered it all my life…That moment…There were bombs falling around…He lay on a tarpaulin…That moment…I was happy…I stood smiling to myself. Crazy. I was happy that maybe he knew about my love…
I went up and kissed him. I’d never kissed a man before…That was the first time…
* * *
OF THE LONELINESS OF A BULLET AND A HUMAN BEING
* * *
Klavdia S—va
SNIPER
My story is a particular one…Prayers console me. I pray for my daughter…
I remember a saying of mama’s. Mama liked to say, “A bullet’s a fool; fate is a villain.” She had this saying for all sorts of troubles. A bullet is alone, and man is alone; a bullet flies wherever it likes, and fate twists a man however it likes. This way and that, this way and that. A man is a feather, a sparrow’s feather. You can never know your future. It’s not given to us…We can’t penetrate this mystery. When we were returning from the war, a Gypsy told me my future. She came up to me at the train station, called me aside…She predicted I would have a great love…I had a German watch; I took it off and gave it to her for this great love. I believed her.
And now I can’t weep enough over that love…
I was going to the war happily. As a Komsomol girl. Along with everybody else. We traveled in freight cars. There were inscriptions on them in black mazut: “Forty persons/eight horses.” There were a hundred of us stuffed in each car.
I became a sniper. I could have been a radio operator. It’s a useful profession—both in the army and in peacetime. A woman’s profession. But they told me they needed people to shoot, so I shot. I did it well. I have two Orders of Glory and four medals. For three years of war.
They shouted to us—Victory! They announced—Victory! I remember my first feeling—joy. And at once, that same moment—fear! Panic! Panic! How to live from here on? Papa had been killed at Stalingrad. My two older brothers had been missing in action since the beginning of the war. Mama and I were left. Two women. How were we to live? All our girls fell to thinking…We’d get together in the evening in a dugout…We discussed how our lives were only beginning. There was joy and fear. Before we had been afraid of death, and now—of life…It was equally frightening. It’s true! We talked and talked, then sat and said nothing.
Will we get married or won’t we? For love or without love? We told fortunes with daisies…We threw flower wreaths into the river, we melted wax…I remember in one village they showed us where a sorceress lived. We all rushed to her, even several officers. And all the girls. She told fortunes in water. By palm reading. Another time an organ-grinder had us draw paper lots. Tickets. I used to have lucky tickets…Where is that luck of mine?
How did the Motherland meet us? I can’t speak without sobbing…It was forty years ago, but my cheeks still burn. The men said nothing, but the women…They shouted to us, “We know what you did there! You lured our men with your young c——! Army whores…Military bitches…” They insulted us in all possible ways…The Russian vocabulary is rich…
A fellow took me home from a dance; I suddenly felt really bad, my heart started fluttering. I walked and walked and then sat down in a snowdrift. “What’s the matter?” “Never mind. Too much dancing.” It was because of my two wounds. Because of the war…I had to learn to be tender. To be weak and fragile. But my feet were used to size ten boots. I wasn’t used to being embraced. I was used to being responsible for myself. I waited for tender words, but I didn’t understand them. To me they seemed childish. Among men at the front there were foul Russian curses. I was used to that. My girlfriend who worked in the library kept telling me, “Read poetry. Read Esenin.”*3
I quickly got married. A year later. To our factory engineer. I dreamed of love. I wanted to have a home and a family. I wanted my home to smell of small children. I smelled my first baby’s diapers and was happy. The smell of happiness…A woman’s happiness…In war there are no women’s smells, they’re all men’s. War sme
lls of men.
I have two children…A boy and a girl. First I had a boy. A good, intelligent boy. He finished university. An architect. But the girl…My girl…She began to walk when she was five, said her first word, “mama,” at seven. Even now it comes out not “mama” but “moomo,” not “papa” but “poopo.” She…To this day I think it can’t be true. It’s some kind of a mistake. She’s been in an insane asylum…For forty years. Since I retired, I go there every day. It’s my sin…
For many years now, at the beginning of the school year I buy her a new primer. We spend a whole day reading the primer. Sometimes I come home from her, and it feels as if I’ve lost the ability to read and write. To talk. I don’t need any of that. What for?
I’ve been punished…For what? Maybe for having killed people? I sometimes think so…You have a lot of time when you’re old…I think and think. In the morning I go on my knees, I look out the window. And I pray to God…I pray for everybody…I don’t have a grudge against my husband, I forgave him long ago. The girl was born…He looked at us…He stayed for a while and left. Left with a reproach: “Would a normal woman have gone to the war? Learned to shoot? That’s why you’re unable to give birth to a normal child.” I pray for him…
Maybe he’s right? I sometimes think so…It’s my sin…
I loved the Motherland more than anything in the world. I loved…Who can I tell it to now? To my girl…To her alone…I recall the war, and she thinks I’m telling her fairy tales. Children’s fairy tales. Scary children’s fairy tales…
Don’t write my last name. No need to…
* * *
*1 Known in the West as the Cuban Missile Crisis, a two-week standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union over the stationing of Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba.
*2 Konstantin Rokossovsky (1896–1968) was a Polish-born Soviet officer. After serving with great distinction, he was arrested during the Great Purge and accused of treason. After being tortured and sent to the Gulag, he was rehabilitated, and during World War II became a key strategist in the major battles against the Germans. He was promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union, and led the victory parade in Moscow in 1945.
*3 Sergei Esenin (1895–1925) was one of the major Russian lyric poets of the twentieth century.
There was yet another war…
In this war no one marked on the map where no-man’s-land was, where the front line began. No one could count up all the soldiers. The numbers of weapons. People shot from antiaircraft batteries, machine guns, hunting rifles. From old Berdan rifles. There were no pauses, no general advances. Many fought single-handed. Died single-handed. It was not an army fighting—divisions, battalions, companies—but people, partisans and underground fighters: men young and old, women, children. Tolstoy called this many-faced surge “the cudgel of the people’s war” and “the hidden warmth of patriotism,” and Hitler (like Napoleon before him) complained to his generals that “Russians don’t fight according to the rules.”
To die in this war was not the most frightening thing. There was something else…Picture to yourself a soldier at the front, surrounded by his family—children, wife, old parents. He must be ready at every moment to sacrifice them, too. To send them to the slaughter. Courage, as well as betrayal, often had no witnesses.
In our villages on Victory Day there is weeping, not rejoicing. Many weep. They grieve. “It was so horrible…I buried all my family, I buried my soul in the war” (V. G. Androsik, underground fighter).
They begin to talk softly, and in the end almost all of them shout.
—
I am a witness…
I’ll talk about the commander of our partisan unit…I won’t name him, because his relations are still alive. It will pain them to read it…
The liaisons sent a message to the unit: the commander’s family had been taken by the Gestapo—his wife, two small daughters, and the old mother. There were notices hanging everywhere, and distributed in the market: if the commander did not surrender, the family would be hanged. He was given two days to think it over. The polizei went around the villages and agitated among the people, saying that the Red commissars didn’t pity their own children. They were monsters. Nothing was sacred for them. They scattered leaflets from a plane over the forest…The commander wanted to surrender, wanted to shoot himself. He wasn’t left alone all this time, he was watched. He was capable of killing himself…
His unit got in touch with Moscow and reported the situation. They received instructions…The same day a party meeting of the unit was convened. The decision was made: not to yield to German provocation. As a Communist, our commander submitted to party discipline…
Two days later scouts were sent to the town. They brought terrible news: the whole family had been hanged. The commander was killed in the first battle after that…Killed somehow incomprehensibly. Accidentally. I think he wanted to die…
Instead of words I have tears…How can I persuade myself that I must speak? Who will believe it…People want to have a calm and pleasant life, not to listen to me and suffer…(V. Korotaeva, partisan).
—
I, too, try to persuade myself that I must go on…
* * *
OF A MINE AND A STUFFED TOY IN A BASKET
* * *
Antonina Alexeevna Kondrashova
SCOUT FOR THE BYTOSHSKY PARTISAN BRIGADE
I carried out my mission…After that I couldn’t stay in the village and went to join the detachment. A few days later my mother was taken by the Gestapo. My brother managed to escape, but my mother was taken away. They tortured her there, questioned her about her daughter’s whereabouts. For two years she was held there. For two years, along with our other women, the fascists made her lead the way during their operations: they feared the partisan mines and always drove local people ahead of them—if there were mines, those people would be blown up, and the German soldiers would remain unharmed. A living shield. For two years they used my mother that way.
More than once, while waiting in ambush, we suddenly saw women followed by fascists. Once they came closer, you could see that your mother was there among them. And most frightful of all was waiting for your commander to give the order to fire. Everyone waited in fear for that order, because one would whisper, “There’s my mother,” another “And there’s my sister,” or someone would see their own child…My mama always went around in a white kerchief. She was tall, she was always the first to be noticed. Before I had time to notice her, someone would already report, “There goes your mother…” When they give the order to shoot, you shoot. And I myself didn’t know where I was shooting; there was one thing in my head: “Don’t lose sight of that white kerchief—is she alive, has she fallen?” A white kerchief…They all run away, fall down, and you don’t know whether your mother has been killed or not. For the next two days or more, I walk around, beside myself, until the liaisons come back from the village to tell me she’s alive. I can live again. Until the next time. I don’t think I could stand it now…I hated them…My hatred helped me…To this day the scream of a child who is thrown down a well still rings in my ears. Have you ever heard that scream? The child is falling and screaming, screaming as if from somewhere under the ground, from the other world. It’s not a child’s scream, and not a man’s either. And to see a young fellow cut up with a saw…Our partisan…After that, when you go on a mission, your heart seeks only one thing: to kill them, kill as many as possible, annihilate them in the cruelest way. When I saw fascist prisoners, I wanted to sink my claws into them one by one. To strangle them. To strangle them with my hands, to tear them with my teeth. I wouldn’t have killed them, it would have been too easy a death for them. Not with weapons, not with a rifle…
Before their retreat, this was already in 1943, the fascists shot my mother. My mother was like this, she gave us her blessing: “Go, children, you have to live. Rather than just die. It’s better not to just die…” Mama didn’t say big words, she found simple women
’s words. She wanted us to live and study, especially to study.
The women who shared her cell said that each time she was led away, she begged, “Oh, my dears, I weep only for this: if I die, help my children!”
After the war, one of those women took me into her home, her family, even though she had two young children. The fascists burned our cottage, my younger brother died fighting with the partisans, my mother was shot, my father had been at the front. He came back from the front wounded, sick. He didn’t survive much longer, he died soon. So, of my whole family, I was the only one left. That woman was poor herself, and what’s more she had two young children. I decided to leave, to go away somewhere. But she wept and wouldn’t let me.
When I discovered my mother had been shot, I lost my mind. I didn’t know what to do with myself, I had no peace. I had to find her…But they had been shot and their grave, in a big antitank trench, had been leveled out by tractors. I was shown approximately where she stood, and I ran, dug there, turning corpses over. I recognized my mother by the ring on her hand…When I saw that ring, I cried out, and I remember nothing more. I remember nothing…Some women pulled her out, washed her from a tin can, and buried her. I still have that can.
At night I sometimes lie and think: my mother died because of me. No, not because of me…If, in fear for my loved ones, I hadn’t gone to fight, and if another, a third and a fourth hadn’t either, what is now wouldn’t be. But to say to myself…To forget…How my mother walked…The sound of the order…I shot in the direction she came from. Her white kerchief. You can’t imagine how hard it is to live with. And the longer I live, the harder it gets. Sometimes, at night, there’s a sudden young laughter or voice outside the window, and you shudder, it suddenly sounds like a child crying, shouting. Sometimes you suddenly wake up feeling like you can’t breathe. The smell of burning chokes you…You don’t know the smell of a burning human body, especially in the summer. An anxious and sweet smell. With the job I have now, if there’s a fire, I have to go there, write a report. But if they say that a farm is on fire, that there are dead animals, I never go, I’m not able…It reminds me…That smell…Like burning people…And so you wake up at night, run and fetch your cologne, and it seems that in the cologne, too, there’s that smell. Everywhere…
The Unwomanly Face of War Page 27