Apricot Jam: And Other Stories

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  One of the streets of the village rises up the slope from our position; there are already some fresh, deep black shell holes in it. Beyond the small ravine to our right is a second street, a level one. A battery of seventy-sixes has deployed there. The houses seem to be empty; some of the villagers are in the cellars, some have gone off to the forest. None of the chimneys are smoking.

  Come on, Ovsyannikov, you don’t have that far to go.

  Here they come! An extended line of men is coming up from the little hollow. Even without my binoculars I can sense that they are our boys. They are marching cheerfully along, with Ovsyannikov setting the pace. And once they get here, the third rush job will begin: each listening post will collect its equipment, reels of cable, packs, and dry rations; and while these minutes tick away, Ovsyannikov will be establishing the exact location of each listening post, based on the estimations he made on his map. On the basis of the strengths of each crew, he has to determine which one will man the first post, the second post, and so on. Each crew chief has to hustle away to his post along an exact compass bearing, so as not to go astray. The forward observer has his own job to do. These ten or fifteen minutes when the whole battery is bunched up here are the most dangerous. It will be easier once all sixty of us aren’t crowded in the same spot.

  Our boys keep coming in, and they go on working just as they have been trained, by the book. The listening posts smartly make all their preparations for deployment. Ovsyannikov and I sit down on a fallen tree trunk to fix the location of the posts more precisely. There’s an argument over a reel of cable: someone has walked off with a good reel and left one with a lot of spliced wire.

  Everyone looks exhausted, and no one has had enough sleep. They wear their field caps every which way. Yet they move quickly, each of them well aware that we are not in some nameless little local operation, we are part of the Great Offensive! That itself gives them much more energy.

  The linesmen are connecting their cables and beginning to lay out double lines. The Germans are already sending over a shot: a heavy shell passes over us and goes on to burst with a spectacular crash. It was probably in Setukha, near the main road. Then comes the first “picture frame,” the twin-fuselage Focke-Wulf reconnaissance plane, buzzing about high overhead, looking for a target. Our antiaircraft don’t respond: it’s basically a waste of time firing at “picture frames,” they always manage to dodge the shrapnel. Then a few heavy bombers fly over as well, toward Setukha.

  We should be pinpointing our position while the morning is still cool. They hadn’t moved us out at the best time.

  Each listening post has four or five men, and they have a lot of heavy equipment to carry. A single storage battery is enough to throw out your shoulder; they usually need eight reels of cable, and sometimes more than ten; the sensor isn’t heavy, but it’s a cube, awkward to carry, and you have to guard it like your life so as not to tear the large diaphragm, and it would be useless if a shell fragment hit it. There’s also the transformer, the telephone, and some other small equipment. Submachine guns, carbines, sappers’ spades—all that has to be hauled out as well. (We’ve long since stopped wearing gas masks and just toss them all in the back of the truck.)

  Stocky little Burlov takes his crew to post number one, on the left. He holds his compass in his hand like a watch, always checking the bearing to make sure he’s on track. The lanky, imperturbable Siberian, Yermolaev, a man who can put up with anything, is in his crew; Ovsyannikov always picks the most reliable people for the distant posts. Then there’s Shmakov, who probably has some charges hanging over his head: he’d been in an anti-tank unit and couldn’t take the close combat, so he turned and ran and happened on our unit. We’ve had more than a few deserters of our own, so the commissar just said to hell with it, we’ll take him on. And he’s been a good soldier.

  Shukhov, a quick and capable fellow (we promoted him to corporal to replace a wounded sergeant) leads his crew to post number two. The dark, sullen Volkov is on post five, the other far one, on the right. The central listening posts are closer, with shorter cables and just four men in each.

  I go over the map with the gloomy, freckle-faced Yemelyanov (whenever we have an extra map, he’s the one who gets it): he’s the forward observer and has a delicate job, almost an officer’s, but the position means that he wears a senior sergeant’s insignia and is always the man at the very front. He has to react to every significant sound of firing and determine by ear the caliber, not wasting a second. (Later, someone closer to the shell burst can still correct him.)

  The forward lines are getting livelier, with mortars pounding on both sides. The seventy-sixers from our Zhelyabuga Village are already firing, and we’re still not ready. Once they need us, there can’t be any delay.

  Ovsyannikov is itching to get up to our farthest post: the final selection of a place to dig in the sensor is critical (the soldiers tend to choose the place that’s most comfortable, and close to some water as well). He also has to make sure that the location isn’t screened by any objects around it. (There was a case when a crew just hauled their equipment into a barn to get out of the rain; meanwhile, we were wondering what the hell was going on and why all the recordings were so blurred.) So Ovsyannikov strides off to catch up with Burlov.

  Behind us another little group is walking up to our position. These are the surveyors, carrying their striped poles and tripods. Come on, hustle, we need you right now! The commander of the survey platoon, Lieutenant Kuklin, a sweet-tempered young fellow with the face and the stature of a boy, has brought them up. My Botnev, not much bigger than he, is telling him off: “Where have you been, taking a nap? Without you we have to fix all our coordinates by eye, and what good is that?” And he’s right: someone’s always on our back, checking such things, and if they miss a target it’s always our fault. Would anyone ever walk out and check the surveyor’s work? That never happens. If the surveyors make a mistake in one of their fixes, the locations of all the targets will be off.

  I sit with Kuklin for a moment to show him where the posts are going, and ask him: “Yurochka, don’t be in a rush. But do the three nearest posts first, even if it’s just an initial fix. And send us the numbers right away.” I explain that I’ve seen our Third Battalion of guns on the move and they’ll be coming in somewhere nearby, but they still haven’t arrived.

  Kuklin takes his chain to the first clear reference point from which he’ll measure the distance to Shukhov’s post. (The reference point was taken from the map, and these can also be off. And a trigonometric network in a moving battle is never enough.)

  It’s hard to say who has the worst job in battle. The surveyors don’t really do any fighting, but they walk around with theodolites and levels, dragging their surveyors’ chains across the fields straight as the crow flies, and never mind that there might be a minefield there or that you might come under fire at any minute.

  And now our signalmen from brigade have found us. They’re running a cable to our central station, and the fellows are bringing up the reels of cable from the dammed-up stream below.

  Who else has found us? The battalions of guns we’ll be working with are still on the move. They’re running cables from the brigade headquarters, of course, and it’s from there that they’ll soon begin asking us for targets.

  If only we can get our location fixed in the early morning, before the air heats up. The Germans are already hammering away: there’s one gun firing over here, and another ten shells or more coming from over there, and we’re still not fully deployed. Our work through the day will be very poor; you can already tell it’ll be a scorcher, and that creates a heat inversion: the upper layers of the air thin out as they grow heated, and the sounds won’t be reflected downward to earth but will just go higher. The same thing happens with your normal hearing: the shells fall, but the shots themselves are harder to hear. The very best conditions for sound reconnaissance are high humidity, fog, and anytime during the night. That’s when the recordings
are very precise and the targets—whether they’re the sharp blasts of guns or the dull roars of howitzers—can easily be picked up.

  The people higher up have never taken this rule into account, though. If they had any sense, they’d have us move by day, not by night.

  We, an instrumental reconnaissance battalion, are a separate unit but always operationally subordinate to the heavy artillery; at this moment we’re working with a brigade of guns. It’ll be hot work for us today: we’re serving two of their battalions, the second, on our right, toward Zhelyabuga itself, and the third, on our left, toward Shiskov.

  Down in the cellar, people have already crowded around Botnev. They’ve hooked everything up and run the checks. The needles on the dials of the equipment are already quivering. All six of the tiny glass pens clamped within electromagnetic rings are ready to trace a recording on a strip of paper. The thin, agile Dugin is already at the recorder. (He’s good with his hands, and in every spare minute he’s busy manufacturing something—a cigarette holder for one person, a cigarette case for another. For me he fashioned some lovely notebooks for my war diaries using strips of sound-ranging records.)

  The man on the telephone, the saucy Yenko, has squeezed himself onto the bench beside the recorder. He already has a receiver on each ear, linked by a cord running over his head. One receiver is from the forward observer, the other from all the listening posts; they can hear one another, and if they all start chattering at once, the central operator has to try to keep them in check. But he’s greedy for any kind of news: what’s going at which post, who’s had a bucket knocked over by a shell fragment.

  Right behind the recorder is the interpretation table. Beyond that, with scarcely any space to sit, is the table where they determine the time differential. By the other wall are the plotter’s table and a map on a slanted frame. The dim cellar is lit up by three twelve-volt bulbs, one hanging over the square-ruled Whatman paper. We’re ready.

  Fedya Botnev isn’t what you would call a bold, intrepid warrior, but in the plotting platoon he doesn’t have to be. He’s careful, fussy, and very attentive to detail, just what’s needed for his job. (He’s even very curious about the equipment of the neighboring units and goes to take a look when he has an opportunity. He’s been through an industrial-technical school.) He loves to stand at the map board himself and plot the intersecting lines from the sensors.

  But the entire progress of any reconnaissance depends on the interpretation. We have Lipsky, a process engineer, and we’ve promoted him to sergeant. When there’s a lull in our work in the battery, he’s the only one addressed politely by his name and patronymic. (There’s one other man with higher education in my battery, Pugach, a lawyer. He’s a good lawyer and can always find some loophole to get him the easier jobs. But you can send him on any detail: “Give the political officer a hand”; “Put together a little news sheet for the boys.”)

  At the far end of the cellar there’s some faint muttering:

  “Listen to all that noise! What a commotion . . .”

  “You think I might get out and take a look to see they haven’t carried everything off? I left a ‘nameled basin out there.”

  “Well, Arfevna, you can’t bring it all in here. And if a shell drops down on it, you won’t even find your house.”

  “God spare us that.”

  It’s heating up outside. The light is already the bright yellow of a sunny, hot day. Even those tiny clouds have melted away, and the sky is a pure blue. There’ll be a lot going on in the sky overhead today.

  Smoke is already coming from Isakov’s kitchen in the bushes.

  The drivers are sweating to finish digging in their trucks, and a few men who are free are giving them a hand. Lyakhov is a tall, stolid fellow who never gives a sign that he’s tired out. Plump little Pashanin, from Nizhegorod, has stripped to the waist, but still his hairy chest and back are covered with sweat and he wipes his brow with his wrist. He was careless enough to tell the battery of his misfortune: the wife he loved so much, a singer in the variety theater, has abandoned him, and Pashanin has become both an object of sympathy and of mockery.

  I also have the battery political officer, Kochergarov, usually hanging around; but when things get hot and everyone else is rushing about, there’s no way you can make him lend a hand. Before the war he was a driver, though a driver for a party regional committee; and now he doesn’t seem to have enough sense to pick up a shovel and help Pashanin.

  The first call comes in. It’s from post three, the nearest one: they’re in position, have hooked up the cable, and are digging in. We test their connection: they give a clap right in front of the diaphragm of the sensor, and our recorder marks it as a shot. Everything’s working.

  When an aircraft flies over one of our posts, though, its sound spoils the transcription from three other posts.

  The cables that now fan out from the cellar are being dug in by the linesmen—each digging the one leading to his post. They bury the first fifty meters so that all the people walking around won’t tangle them and also to try to keep them from being hit by shrapnel.

  Here come some planes now! Six Henschel bombers. They’re flying high at first, then they drop down and turn to our left. We hear the pop of our antiaircraft guns. Missed. Once they’ve dropped their bombs they withdraw.

  Our troops here are crowded into a few square kilometers along the front line. There are light and heavy mortars, forty-five- and seventy-six-millimeter guns, 107-millimeter howitzers, and all kinds of vehicles half dug-in and camouflaged. Drop anything into that area and you’ll make a hit.

  Meanwhile, we have to find three more seats inside the cellar for the telephone operators from brigade and the two battalions. Our boys saw off three billets from the fallen linden—we’re never without our two-man saw—and roll them down the steps. Lyakhov has driven his ZIS truck down the ramp he’s dug. Pashanin has also moved his GAZ down. Well, that’s a relief.

  Shukhov, who has a bit of a lisp, reports that they’ve arrived at post two. We’ve tested the system and it’s working.

  They all take up approximate positions and would like to move to some spot that suits them better, but until Ovsyannikov checks their locations, there’s no point in digging themselves in.

  A shout comes from the cellar: “Call for you, Comrade Lieutenant!”

  I tumble down the brick steps as fast as I can. Yes, it’s brigade: we’re waiting for targets, Forty-two! “At least let us deploy and get hooked up,” I reply. “Give us a break!”

  A little nap would be just the thing now. I look at the boys in the cellar. They feel the same way.

  “Right, until we’ve got work to do you can put your heads down on the tables.”

  They don’t need any more invitation, and their heads go down immediately. This will be the last chance for half an hour’s rest.

  The sun rises higher and the heat grows more intense.

  Post four has now hooked up, along with the advance post. A rough estimate, at least, can be made using three posts—depending on the grid square they’re firing from.

  Two linesmen have been on duty since the central station has been operating. They run out along a line that’s been broken and splice the cable. Someone from the listening post runs out to meet them so that there are two people searching for the break (you never can tell which end is closest to it). Repairing a line is one of the most dangerous jobs of all: you’re fully exposed and standing, no matter how much you try to bend down; and if there’s shelling, all you can do is flop down on the ground. If there’s no sign of an artillery barrage, the duty linesman goes out himself; he knows his job. But when there’s an urgent need, someone has to decide whom to send out. If Ovsyannikov is here, then it’s him; if not, it’s me. Depending on the job, it can be done without an officer; the sergeant manning the central equipment can go out himself. He’s responsible: without a listening post, we can’t locate the target, and that could cause an even bigger loss. Every trip along the
line could cost a linesman’s life. We’ve already lost Klimansky that way. And it’s precisely when there’s firing, when the shells are flying, that we need to pinpoint our target.

  Right now it’s Andreyashin on duty. He’s sat down on the earth floor, his back against the arched brick wall. He’s a nimble fellow, short and swarthy, with small ears. Born in 1925, he’s only just been called up. He jumps to his feet when I come in.

  “Stay where you are, no need to keep getting up!”

  But he’s already on his feet, and his dark, glittering eyes look imploringly at me: “Comrade Senior Lieutenant, can you let me off to go to Oryol for a few hours?”

  He’s from Oryol. He grew up on the streets, as a homeless orphan, but he puts everything he has into his job. Though he has no family, he has people he wants to see or look up in Oryol.

  “We’ll make it to Oryol ourselves before long, Vanya. Just be patient.”

  “But how long will that be? I can catch up with you, that’s for certain.”

  “I’ll let you go, and maybe for more than just a few hours. We’ll be in Oryol for a good while.”