by Gert Ledig
A hand reached into his face. A shell burst had knocked over the candles. A shadow was feeling its way among the wounded. Another shadow began to sing in the dark.
‘Quiet!’ ordered Zostchenko. He unzipped his flies, and urinated. He felt the warm liquid spreading between his legs. What a blessing, to be relieved of the pressure. Gradually, his urine cooled. Zostchenko was lying in his own excrement. A layer of vapour hung over his belly. The acrid smell itched his face.
Just as unappetizing was the kitten as she crawled out of her mother’s belly in a caul of slime. He had flung it through the air, and smashed it against the wall. (Or was he thinking of the icon?) The frail little skull shattered like an egg. Blood had soiled his hand. The old cat began to yowl piteously. She trailed after him, along the village street, to his quarters. He looked for a stone, but could only find a long stick. He waved it at her threateningly. She sat on the street, with hair on end, snarled at him like a street dog. He turned and walked on. She followed him at a safe distance. Out of the corner of his eye, he looked back at her, suddenly spun round and charged at her. She retreated on all fours, green eyes fixed on his stick. He had never seen that before, a cat running backwards. The distance diminished. Now. The stick flew through the air, missed her head, struck the cat on the tail. A high-pitched wail. The beast was pinned to the spot. Her back arched like a Cossack sabre. The slime of her young that she had licked off it still clinging to her whiskers. She was unspeakably disgusting. He couldn’t bring himself to strangle her. But it cost him something to turn his back on her. Maybe she would jump on him, drive her claws into his neck. He walked faster. Trotted, ran. In panic, he looked round. The cat was running after him. Out of breath, he reached his quarters. Slammed the door. After a gulp of vodka, he felt better. He stared out on the street from his dark room. The cat was sitting in the dirt, not taking her eyes off the door. He reached for his rifle. Devil knows why, but he couldn’t get the animal in his sights! Also he was bothered by the window glass. He didn’t dare open the window for fear she might leap in. He stood a chair on the table, rested the rifle barrel between the seat and back. Now he got a fix on the cat’s head. (Or was it the icon?) The beast was sitting in the dirt, motionless, yowling. He could see her little teeth flashing. He squeezed the trigger and fired. The window shattered, the cat flew up into the air. Turned over. Lay there motionless. He felt profound satisfaction. Then he saw the animal getting to its feet again. The cat reeled, stared at the smashed window. Screamed. Eerily loud, like a child’s death screams. She trailed around in circles. He had to shoot free-handed. Bullet after bullet lashed into the road. But he didn’t hit her. (He didn’t hit the icon.) A dog came bounding out from next door. With tongue hanging out. He stopped shooting. Still the dog stayed at some distance from the cat. It was scared. Slithered about on its butt, restlessly. As though tormented by worms. His hands were damp with sweat. He reached for the bottle of vodka. The alcohol was going to his brain. Suddenly he thought it was all wonderful. The cat in its agony, the dog in its fear. He reached for his bayonet, and ran out. He stabbed at the cat till it no longer moved. He felt like giving it to the dog as well, but he had slunk away, yowling. He looked happily at his handiwork. Cat’s blood on his uniform. Red Guards had assembled round him and his victim. In spite of his drunkenness, he could sense their revulsion. He laughed, laughed loud at the sky.
The soldiers in the foxhole were up to something. They shone a light in Zostchenko’s face. They pretended they had lost one of their men. He had got used to the stench of his urine by now. His trousers clung to his thighs. It was more bearable when he squeezed his thighs together. He was dozing away. The soldiers’ voices tore him out of his doze. He couldn’t understand what they were saying. He only sensed that they meant him. The disgust with which they grabbed hold of him betrayed their intentions. They dragged him through the passage. Fresh pains ran through his hip. He tried desperately to clutch on to the damp earth. They tore him loose. For them, he was already a cadaver, decomposing.
Daylight struck his ash-grey face. He cursed the sun where he would soon breathe his last. He wanted to return to the tomb, where he felt sheltered. Not die like the cat in the dirt. Not like the icon on the barracks yard. He felt remorse and self-disgust. If the icon had moved then, his life would have been different. The kitten would have remained alive. He cursed the icon that had failed to give him a signal . . .
13
First, there was a vague sound from the west, that must be an airplane. Then the silver bird appeared directly over the height. It flew a few loops over the shattered blocking position.
Looking into the sun, Lieutenant Trupikov could barely make out the black Maltese crosses on the wings. The doomed band of Germans sent up white flares. He hoped the reconnaissance plane wouldn’t see them in the bright sunlight. He pressed himself against the wall of the trench, and followed every movement of the airplane. It seemed to be less interested in the barren hill than the frozen sector of Front by the swamp, where there was suddenly fearful quiet. The tanks pressed themselves into the ground like frightened beasts. Only the Germans, whose defensive hedgehog constituted a barrier between himself and the line of the swamp, exhibited signs of life. They waved canvas sheets that fluttered over their holes. They yelled and fired off shots, as though their noise could be heard by the men in the machine.
The plane circled endlessly, flew lower, and then climbed up into the sky with a yowl of its engines. As it flew towards the skeleton of the pylon and the debris of the tanks on the heights, Trupikov hoped it would turn away. No, the machine was merely snuffling around. It came back.
The Lieutenant had a queasy feeling. At last he understood why the plane refused to go away. A quiet buzzing became audible from the direction of Emga, and grew louder. Then he made out dark points in the sky. The air became a little oppressive. His men behind the line of swamp began to fret. The tanks seemed to lose their heads. Red Guards ran around in confusion like little insects. And then Trupikov heard the ack-ack guns, dull thumps, leaving little puffs of white in the sky. The squadron broke out of formation. The planes approached in single file.
The reconnaissance plane sheered off as though it had nothing to do with the affair. Until a swarm of rockets hissed from its silver body. The rockets fanned out towards the sector behind the swamp. Lieutenant Trupikov felt ashamed of his relief. Now he could make out the objective; not one of the rockets strayed to his position. Like a hawk, the first plane plummeted past the white fleecy clouds of ack-ack, towards the swamp position. It would pull out of its dive directly above his own section of the trench. Hideous siren wailing filled the air. Trupikov was helpless before the flight of the machine. Lamed with fear, he saw the flat cockpit and the raked wings making straight for him. He saw the bomb detach itself from the belly of the dive-bomber, and travel on in the direction of the flight. Now it was the bomb that threw him into panic. It was almost too much to believe that the thing would fly past his trench, and not land among the Germans either, but instead exactly where the rocket had hit the ground a moment ago, in the swamp sector. Earth spun through the air, a hail of mud, and fumes. The wave of the explosion reached the Lieutenant at the same time as the rattle of machine-gun fire. An invisible fist knocked him to the ground. A fresh howl began. The next greedy maw raced towards him. The squealing siren tore at his nerves. Plane after plane tilted down. Delivered its bomb. Behind the swamp, the earth heaved. The limber of a gun sailed aloft like a flying carpet. The gun turret of a tank flipped up in the wind, and floated over the brush. Performed an almost perfect landing.
The Lieutenant saw no men in this hell. They seemed to be extinguished in the fountains of dirt. But the tanks and all those who still survived behind the strip of swamp did not want to pass away quietly. At various points, the light anti-aircraft guns started to bark. A hail of bullets was launched towards the wailing planes. The machine guns on the tanks replied to those on the planes. A grisly spectacle, which the Germans i
n their trench watched with equal fascination. Lieutenant Trupikov sobbed with fury, as his tank platoon and all hope of rescue was blown up before his eyes. He kept his face pressed to the ground. Till a mighty explosion caused him to look up. With a savage bolt of flame, a mushroom cloud roared into the air. Wet clumps of mud flopped down in the trench. The guns had brought down a diving plane, the last in the line.
The rattling died away. The ack-ack guns barked forlornly after the departing Stukas. Then they too gave it up. The silence oppressed the Lieutenant. In front of him, on the downhill slope, was the jagged piece of trench occupied by the Germans. An aluminium wing as high as a house was jammed in no man’s land. From a distance, it looked like some kind of memorial. Behind it, and behind the swamp line, the landscape was volcanic. Steam squirmed over the ground. Black oilsmoke curled around crippled steel wreckage. Here and there, the tube of a gun pointed nakedly and uselessly heavenward. A bush was merrily ablaze like a tuft of straw, and human figures wandered to no end in among the craters. No. There was no hope of any support from there. The Lieutenant turned west again. Behind him the heights. The bleak hill with the steel skeleton and the two demolished tanks. No longer a victorious storm battalion. No attaining of the appointed objective. Future plans, deadlines, projections, all were as irrelevant as the commands that had led them to this point. The master of the hill was Death. The Germans and he, Lieutenant Trupikov, and his men – two useless groups of men, confronted by death. They might have done better to come to terms, like businesspeople.
The Lieutenant slipped back into the trench. He ignored the corpse whose outstretched hand smacked against his bootleg. One question tormented him: how would he and his men get back? Over the top? The German machine gun would mow them down. The only way was through the Germans. He owed his casualties the order for close-quarters combat.
The first bullets whistled over the crust of earth that was sheltering him. Further afield, the firing was flickering to life as well. He stepped up to the dugout entrance, unsure what to do. They carried a Red Guard past him. One of the kids they’d pulled out of school and shoved in his battalion. A foot dragged along the wall of the trench. On his face the astonishment of those who die without pain. The Lieutenant watched as the carriers held him by a hand and a foot apiece. They swung the body back and forth. Launched it over the rim of the trench. Now he was lying on the parapet, facing the Germans. A bullet slapped into the earth beside the dead man. The next one hit his helmet, which rolled with a clatter back into the trench. When a further bullet hit the dead boy in the head, the Lieutenant asked himself how that was helping the Germans. He shuddered. The face was no longer a face. The bullets lashed into the body as into the target at a fairground shooting stall. ‘Five, six, seven,’ he counted them with incredulity. He reached into the trench for a rifle – there were enough lying around. Cautiously, he pushed its muzzle over the rim. The puffs of smoke betrayed the whereabouts of the other. Glinting metal in the pallid afternoon sun had to be a rifle. Behind that, a patch of white: his face. He aimed carefully. But the bullet landed in something green. There’s no point, he thought. There’s no point in negotiating with them. They’re like wild animals. Either you kill them, or they kill you. There’s no other way.
The Major leaned against the wall of the trench just as he had come out of the low-lying swamp. Barefoot. With torn-off shoulder-tabs. A gaping tear in his tunic. Hands and face crusted with blood and earth. He was able to shake off the layer of mud like a brittle crust. He gripped his rifle stock, ready to shoot as soon as his inflamed eyes should see a target, to fight, to punch, to throttle. There was only one thing he didn’t want: the mosquitoes. Thousands of mosquitoes were buzzing round the trench. A blueish glittering cloud of little bodies, of tiny pricks. Insatiable for blood. A plague against which he was defenceless. They crawled over his neck, flew in his face, got in under his sleeves, settled on his bare feet. Little primordial beasts. They landed on his skin. Their stings darkened with his blood. They sipped and sucked till his flat hand crushed them, and the frail full bodies were splattered. They sacrificed their lives for a few seconds of pleasure. He was left with the itch. The biting pain. The round swellings. A rash over his collar like a scarf, around his wrists, swelling all over his feet. It was worse than a few shells, which would at least have driven them away for a little while. With his tongue, he licked the swellings on his hands. For his feet and neck, he could do nothing.
He had wanted to go to Hell, and by God, he had had his way. Tricked out with everything a sick brain could think of. And worse than putrescence, hopelessness, filth, itching and mosquitoes were his men. They had received him initially like lost souls, greedy and desperate. But slowly his presence had poisoned the air. What tank shells and hissing salvoes of bullets had failed to do – he had done it: the reins were loosening. The men received his commands with a leaden lack of interest. They eyed him suspiciously, as if he were preparing their funerals. It didn’t help at all, that he handed the command back to the NCO. The hatred was there. And now he was afraid of them. Or at the least, unsure of them. He, to whom life was a matter of indifference, who had wanted to throw it away on their behalf, now began to love it.
Here, between the rage of the enemy and the hatred of his own men, it appeared to have some value to him. The grief over his dead daughter, the memory of his wife, became somewhat notional to him. In the midst of this cratered landscape there was suddenly nothing more important than himself. In front of him the bombed scene, the Stuka wing, stuck in the earth like a splinter. Behind him the labyrinth of saps, with the cut-off platoon of Russians. Far back, the hill. Lifeless, cold, distant, like another planet. But he still lived: a filthy creature with bare feet, uniform in rags, disfigured hands, sunken cheeks and ashen skin. From all parts of the trench, his face popped up at him, his fever-burning eyes looked at him. A heap of lonely men. They envied one another the crumbled shreds of tobacco in their pockets. A crust of petrified bread. A fistful of bullets, scooped out of the mire. During the Stuka attack on the position behind the swamp, they had briefly made common cause. They had uttered bone-piercing yells. Had waved the shreds they wore over their nakedness. And then the disappointment when the squadron had disappeared over the horizon. As if they had expected more, even just a sign. WE’VE SEEN YOU! HANG ON! WE’RE COMING BACK FOR YOU! But nothing. They were left behind. Abandoned in the limitlessness of the battlefield. Forever in the expectation that, from in front or behind, the brown wave would roll up to them, shouts of hurrah! to accompany the whines of ricochets, the cracks of tank shells, the twittering of mortars. No, not quite yet. An oppressive silence. Accompanied by exhaustion, hunger and mosquitoes. No bandages. No water. And, worst of all, no ammunition. In their excitement, they had failed to notice how their supplies were dwindling. The first to notice were the ammunition carriers, who were running back and forth to the two machine guns.
‘Ammunition!’ The cry ran along the winding trench, as far as the foxhole. From the foxhole, someone yelled: ‘Surrender, for fuck’s sake! White flag!’ And, as if he’d gone crazy, the man banged off shot after shot. Aimed ferociously. Applauded every hit with a grisly whoop. The NCO swore at him to get him to shut up. His steel helmet bobbed along the trench, came to the Major.