In the army, though, they’d stuff you full of meat borshch and you had all the bread you could eat. The uniforms weren’t always new, but at least they weren’t full of holes. And the men in the army were the beloved sons of the people. Collar tabs were crimson for the infantry, black for the artillery, and light blue for the cavalry; and there were other colors too (red for the GPU). Life was organized on a precise schedule of drills, forming up, saluting, and marching, and your whole life had a purpose: life meant serving, and everyone had his job. He couldn’t wait to get into the army and joined even before he was called up.
And so he never had to adapt himself to anything other than army life, and he never married. Then the trumpet sounded to call him to this war as well.
In the army, Pavel Boyev realized that he was a born soldier, that he’d been meant for the army and it was his home. He knew that army routine—firing exercises, packing up the equipment, moving out, changing your maps, and adapting to new routine—was what life was all about. In ‘41 they lost some guns and tractors, but that didn’t happen again unless a gun had a direct hit or a tractor was blown up on a mine. War was a job, but one with no days off and no holidays, with his eyes peering through a binocular telescope. The battalion was his family, the officers his brothers, the soldiers his sons, and each one of them was a treasure. He had learned to live with the idea that life was a movement from one dodgy situation to another, that happy moments were short-lived, and that now there wasn’t a turn of events that could surprise or frighten him. He had completely forgotten how to be afraid. And if some extra duty or risky mission came up, he would always volunteer. Under the fiercest bombing and the heaviest bombardment, Boyev never prepared himself for death but tried only to comprehend what he had to do and how best to do it.
He opened his eyes (he hadn’t been sleeping). Toplev came in. The horses had arrived.
Boyev dropped his legs to the floor.
Toplev was still a boy, a bit delicate for an adjutant. But Boyev didn’t want to pull out any of his battery commanders for his staff and so he took Toplev off his post as head of reconnaissance.
“I want to see Boronets.”
The battalion sergeant major, Boronets, was a solid, clever fellow whose eyes never missed a thing. He had already anticipated his orders and had set aside all the unnecessary things—the booty they had picked up and other odds and ends—from the sleds. Three sleds were loaded with gear for the observation points—spools of wire, radios, binocular telescopes, grenades, the weapons and packs of the men in the headquarters platoons, and some rations.
“Did you see anyone on the road after Liebstadt? Any sign of the infantry?”
Boronets only smacked his lips and shook his large round head.
“Not a soul.”
So where was the infantry? Had they disappeared altogether?
Boyev went outside. The sky was covered in thick cloud, the ground white with snow. The silence all around was complete and unbroken. No more snow was falling.
All three battery commanders where just were they should be, waiting for orders. One was always with the battalion commander. That would be Myagkov, as usual. Proshchenkov and Kasyanov were each a kilometer away, one to his left, one to his right, at their preliminary observation posts, and they communicated with the battalion commander only through their batteries.
Well, they had all seen a thing or two and they knew their own troops. Now the most important thing was to pick places for the OPs. But first he had to decide how far forward he could and should site them. And how could he decide that in such darkness, silence, and without any screen of infantry? If they were too shallow they’d be useless; if they were too deep they might well stumble on the Germans.
“Just keep in mind, boys, that when it’s this quiet and this deserted, things could get very, very serious.”
To Toplev he said: “Zhenya, you have to find the infantry. Send out all the runners you’ve got to look for them. When you find them, have the CO of the regiment come and see me. Something’s not right . . . They’re taking too long . . . Find out the situation from brigade. I’m going to pick out some OPs and then I’ll contact you.”
He jumped into the first sled.
~ * ~
7
In the absence of the battery commander, the senior officer of Six Battery was the commander of First Platoon, Lieutenant Pavel Kandalintsev. Nearly forty, he was also senior in age to all the brigade’s platoon commanders. He was fairly tall, though without much of a military bearing. His shoulders were somewhat hunched, his hair prematurely gray, but he ran his platoon well. The other platoon commanders called him “Dad.”
Oleg Gusev, who had grown up among a group of street urchins in the city, had learned a good many things from Kandalintsev, things that could not be learned elsewhere.
Even before siting all four guns in their fire positions, Kandalintsev had set a screen of outposts in a semicircle fifty meters to their front. The tractors that had towed the guns had moved back and fallen silent, and Kandalintsev allowed the crews to man their guns in shifts. He pointed out to Gusev a small stone barn not far to their rear.
“Let’s go there for a bit and rest our weary bones.”
By shifting the location of the battery slightly he was able to give easier access to the nearby houses, and it would be easier to fire from here as well.
The gun crews off shift came here to sleep as well. Gusev had gone into two houses and twisted the dials on the radios there, hoping to find one that had its own power supply. But none of them was working. Private houses with radio receivers were something new that they found only in Europe. They took some getting used to: in the Soviet Union all radios had been confiscated for the duration of the war, and if you didn’t turn yours in, it was off to prison. But here . . .
Oleg really wanted to find out something about our breakthrough and pick up at least a few more details. But the battery’s radios could pick up only one of our stations, on the long wave, and there was no news at all about the breakthrough.
Kandalintsev had been called up from the reserves in 1941. He’d had two hard years at war on the Leningrad front, and after being wounded he’d been sent here, to the brigade, where he’d spent nearly two years.
Kandalintsev would never pass up the opportunity for even a few moments of rest.
They went into the barn and lay down side by side on the hay.
How quiet it was.
“Maybe the Germans have just fainted away, do you think, Pavel Petrovich? They’ve been cut off and pushed back, so now they’re crowding into Königsberg. Is this the end of the war, d’you think?”
Kandalintsev, though, was by no means exhausted by the war, and unlike the others he was ready to keep at it for a long time yet. “A-hh,” he sighed deeply.
He was lying there not saying a word. But it seemed he hadn’t fallen asleep.
Young officers would dream of what might happen: “People are saying that after the war everything at home is going to change for the better. We’ll have a free life! We’ll really start living! And they say that they’ll do away with the collective farms, what d’you think?”
He didn’t care if there were collective farms or not, but the whole fighting army was filled with such hopes. And, in fact, why shouldn’t they start living better and with more freedom?
Kandalintsev had heard all this many times before; he had gone through all the party purges hearing about it. In a tired though not contradictory voice, he said: “No, Oleg, nothing’s going to change at home. We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t get worse. The collective farms? No, they’ll never do away with them. The state can’t do without them. We shouldn’t be wasting our time. Let’s get some sleep.”
~ * ~
8
Yes, war was a heavy burden you bore every day, with times of sudden, violent eruptions when a careless man might easily fall on the battlefield or shed some blood. But even in war his heart was never as heavy as it had been
when he was a quiet, well-educated man working in the ravaged countryside in 1930 and 1931. While some maliciously calculated plague raged around him, he could only look at the eyes of the dying and listen to the wailing of women and the weeping of children. It was as if he himself had been vaccinated against this plague but also dared not help any of its victims.
That was what faced Pavel Kandalintsev immediately after his graduation, when he was a young agronomist at a plant breeding station in Voronezh Oblast. He tended the sprouts of the seedlings in the greenhouse, while around him human seedlings of two years or three months were being sent away on sleds in the bitter cold—on a long journey to their deaths. In his own eyes he was also one of the oppressors. And secretly he knew—and could not share his knowledge with anyone—that the peasants who opposed the collective farms were destroying their own stock or grinding up their best seed grain to make flour for their bread. They didn’t hide the fact that they were slaughtering their livestock, and they couldn’t be stopped. Then the grain collectors would come and scoop up every kernel that remained in their granaries, assemble a train of “Red carts,” and drive them into the city: “The peasants bring you their surplus.” There in the city a brass band would march at the head of the procession of carts.
The impressions of those months and years had caused Pavel Kandalintsev to become desensitized to the life around him, which now seemed somehow inauthentic. It was as if his nerve endings had grown numb, as if his vision, his sense of smell, and his sense of touch had become less acute and would never be fully restored. He felt he might never laugh again. That was how he lived—and with the constant apprehension that the regional committee would grow angry with him for something and fire this unreliable non-party man from his job. He’d be lucky if they didn’t arrest him. More than once they were dissatisfied with him, so with his same benumbed fingers he submitted his application for party membership, and with his same benumbed ears he sat through party meetings. And what a ridiculous chaos of ideas they shoved into people’s heads and people’s souls, beginning with the abolition of the week. The old Monday-Wednesday-Friday-Sunday was done away with, so that no one could count weeks any longer. Now there was the “uninterrupted” five-day week with no common days off. Everyone worked or studied on different days, and there was never a single day when he could get together with his wife and children. Life rumbled over everyone like the continuously moving track of a caterpillar tractor, its oblique treads cutting deep into the earth.
It was with these same forever deadened feelings and sense of detachment that Pavel went off to war in August ‘41 as a junior lieutenant from the reserves. He had been at war for more than three years now, still unable to feel anything with his whole being, as if alien even to himself and his own body. He had lain this way in a field near Leningrad, seriously wounded, until the medics came to look after him and send him to the hospital. And just as in the pre-war days, when any boorish fool from the regional committee could give Kandalintsev instructions about plant breeding, so in the army he was never astonished when given idiotic tasks to perform.
So now the war was drawing to a close. Had he actually survived it all? But even now Pavel was unable to feel anything fully: they might kill him yet; there was still time enough for that. Someone had to die in the final months of the war, after all.
Only one feeling survived that was still keen: for his young wife, Alina. He missed her terribly.
Well, it will be as God decides.
~ * ~
9
The sled moved noiselessly over the soft snow, with only the horses snorting from time to time.
The night was becoming brighter: the moon could be seen behind the clouds, and the layer of clouds was growing thinner. You could identify the patches of trees and tell where the land was open.
Boyev kept checking his map, using his sleeve to cover the beam of his flashlight. By the bends in this road across the fields he could tell where he should drop off his battery commanders, each at his own OP in this field covered with fresh snow.
This seemed to be a good spot, right here.
Kasyanov and Proshchenkov jumped from their sleds and came up.
“Just don’t get too far away from me, no more than a kilometer. It’s not likely we’ll have any work to do, and I expect we’ll be moved out in the morning. Still, you’d better dig in, just in case.”
The three of them went their separate ways. The horses moved off confidently. There weren’t many hills in this area, and it took some time to make out where the high ground was. If they don’t pull us out by morning, we’ll have to look for something better.
And still there wasn’t a sound to be heard. There were no black shapes moving across the field.
When there’s a tricky job to be done, you get your best man to do it. He called up the clever Ostanin: “Vanya, take one of your gunners and go up about a kilometer, find out what the ground’s like. See if there’s anyone up there. And take some grenades with you.”
Ostanin replied in his broad Vyatka accent: “You see someone moving around out there, best not ask, ‘Who goes there?’ You’ll get an answer from his machine gun. Or you try to fake it and say, ‘Wer ist da?’ and our own guys will let you have it.”
They went off.
Now they brought up some picks and spades and began hacking at the earth. The top layer of soil was as iron hard as it had been on the graves this morning. They led the horses behind some bushes. The radio operator, using his radio on the sled, was calling out: “Balkhash, Balkhash, this is Omsk. Give me Twelve. Request from Ten.”
“Twelve”—who is Toplev—replies.
“Have you located any of our ‘sticks’?”
“No sticks, no one,” comes his very concerned voice.
If there still are no infantry around Adlig, then they haven’t caught up with us. Where can they be?
“What about Ural?”
“Ural says you’re not looking in the right place. Keep searching.”
“Just who were you talking to?”
“Zero Five.”
That’s the head of brigade reconnaissance. He should be searching for them himself, up here, and not sitting in brigade headquarters thirty kilometers back. And why haven’t they moved out yet? When are they going to get here?
The digging was going slowly. Three small trenches should be enough, not even full depth. There’s no cover here anyway.
The agile Ostanin returned even earlier than expected.
“Comrade Major. About half a kilometer ahead the ground drops into a hollow, and it looks as if it reaches around to our right. I went off to our left, slantwise, and saw some people crawling around. Couldn’t tell who they were till one of them let out a full burst of good Russian curses when his spool of cable got snarled, so they’re our guys.”
“Who are they?”
“It’s the right-hand listening post. One spool of cable will be enough to link up with them, and we’ll have a direct line to their central station. So that’s fine.”
“Right, then let’s string out some cable. Your partner can do it.”
Still, how are we going to sight in our guns? Nothing’s been surveyed in, we’ll have to do it all by eye.
“Nobody else out there? No infantry?”
“Not even any tracks in the snow.”
“Right. Twelve, twelve, search for the sticks. Send out your people in every direction!”
~ * ~
10
The visibility was now a little better: you could make out the patch of forest that lay beyond Adlig on the left. The dark, spreading trees on the right could also be seen, but they were probably on the other side of the large hollow there.
Brigade headquarters had stopped responding to calls on the radio. That’s fine, they’ve probably moved out. Didn’t let us know, though.
Toplev was very nervous. He was often nervous. He was always concerned for everything to be correct so that no one would criticize him. He wanted to
avoid the smallest error, the tiniest flaw in his work, before his superiors spotted it and blasted him for it. But how can you always know the right thing to do?
And now he didn’t know where he should be. He had to check the screen of outposts; he had to go to the guns of Four and Five Batteries. There were just two men from each crew on duty. The others had gone off to houses in the village. Were they getting something to eat? There was food in the houses. Or were they loading up with booty? There was enough of that as well, and it could be packed away in the battery trailer. (There were still a few old men and women in the village, but they didn’t dare make a fuss.)
Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Page 14