My precious one…People still hate each other. They go on killing. That’s the most incomprehensible thing to me…And who is it? Us…It’s us…
Near Stalingrad…I was carrying two wounded men. I’d carry one for a bit, leave him, go back for the other. And so I carried them in turns. Because they were very badly wounded, I couldn’t leave them. How can I explain this simply? They had both been hit high up on the legs; they were losing blood. Minutes were precious here, every minute. And suddenly, when I had crawled away from the battle and there was less smoke around, suddenly I realized I was carrying one of our tankmen and a German…I was horrified: our people are dying there, and I’m saving a German! I panicked…There, in the smoke, I hadn’t realized…I see a man is dying, a man is shouting…A-a-a…They were both scorched, black. Identical. But then I made out a foreign medallion, a foreign watch, everything was foreign. That accursed uniform. So what now? I carried our wounded man and thought: “Should I go back for the German or not?” I knew that if I left him, he would die soon. From loss of blood…And I crawled back for him. I went on carrying both of them…
It was Stalingrad…The most terrible battles. The most, most terrible. My precious one…There can’t be one heart for hatred and another for love. We only have one, and I always thought about how to save my heart.
For a long time after the war I was afraid of the sky, even of raising my head toward the sky. I was afraid of seeing plowed-up earth. But the rooks already walked calmly over it. The birds quickly forgot the war…
1978–2004
BY SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH
Secondhand Time
Voices from Chernobyl
Zinky Boys
Last Witnesses
The Unwomanly Face of War
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH was born in Ivano-Frankovsk, Ukraine, in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own nonfiction genre, which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for “her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”
ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
Together, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated works by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Leskov, Bulgakov, and Pasternak. They have twice received the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (in 1991 for The Brothers Karamazov and in 2002 for Anna Karenina). In 2006 they were awarded the first Efim Etkind International Translation Prize by the European University of St. Petersburg. Most recently they have been collaborating with the playwright Richard Nelson on plays by Turgenev, Gogol, Chekhov, and Bulgakov.
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The Unwomanly Face of War Page 35