Twenty or thirty years later, when May 9 came round, Tatyana would often be asked this question: “Tatyana Kuzminichna, how did you come to meet your Hero?” On that particular day the whole varnishing workshop — ten young girls, three older women workers, including herself and the foreman, a bony man in a blue overall caked with varnish — holds a little celebration. They crowd into an office piled high with old papers, out-of-date wall newspapers, pennants celebrating the “Heroes of Socialist Emulation,” and hastily begin to eat and drink, proposing toasts in honor of the Victory.
The office door leads out onto the rear courtyard of the furniture factory. They keep it open. After the noxious acetone fumes it is absolute heaven. They can feel the sunny May breeze, still almost unscented, light and airy. In the distance a car can be seen, raising a cloud of dust, as if it were summer. The women produce modest provisions from their bags. With a knowing wink, the foreman removes from a small battered cupboard a filched bottle of alcohol, labeled “Acetone.” They all become animated, lace the alcohol with jam, add in a drop of water, and drink: “To the Victory!”
“Tatyana Kuzminichna, how did you meet your Hero?”
And for the tenth time she embarks on the story of the little mirror and the hospital in the school that springtime long ago. They already know how it goes but they listen and are amazed and touched, as if they were hearing it for the first time. Tatyana does not want to go on remembering the village burned from both ends or the old, silent peasant woman leading her toward the barn….
“That year, my friends, it was one of those springs…. One evening we walked to the end of the village. We stopped. All the apple trees were in bloom, it was so lovely it took your breath away. So what do apple trees care about war? They still blossom. And my Hero rolled himself a cigarette and smoked it. Then he screwed up his eyes like this and said
It seems to her now that they really did have these meetings and long, long evenings together…. As the years have gone by she has come to believe it. And yet there was only that one evening in the icy spring, the black carcass of the burned-out roof And a hungry cat sidling warily along beside the fence, staring at them with an air of mystery, as animals and birds do at twilight when they seem to stir things up in people’s minds.
They had one more evening together, the last one. Warm, filled with the rustling and chattering of swifts. They had gone down toward the river, had stayed stock-still for a long while, not knowing what to say to each other; then, clumsily, they had kissed for the first time.
“Tomorrow, that’s it, Tanya … I’m returning to my unit. … I’m going back to the front,” he said in somewhat somber tones, this time without screwing up his eyes. “So, listen carefully to what I say. Once the war’s over we’ll get married and we’ll go to my village. There’s good land there. But for now you must just…”
He had fallen silent. With lowered eyes she was studying the footprints made by their boots in the soft clay of the bank. Sighing like a child breathless from long weeping, she had said in a subdued voice: “It doesn’t matter about me … but you….”
In the summer of 1941, when he escaped from the burned-out village to join the partisans, he was just seventeen. He could still picture the face of the German who had killed little Kolka. It had stayed with him, the way the pitching of a staircase collapsing beneath your feet in the pallid terror of a vivid nightmare stays with you. This face stuck in his memory because of the scar on one cheek, as if bitten from inside, and the sharp stare of the blue eyes. For a long time the notion of an appalling vengeance obsessed him, a personal settling of accounts, the desire to see this man, who had posed for the photograph with the child’s body impaled on his bayonet, writhing in terrible torment. He was absolutely convinced he would encounter him again.
Their detachment of partisans had been wiped out. Miraculously, by spending a whole night in the reeds up to his neck in water, he had managed to escape with his life. When he reported to the regional military committee, he had added a year to his age and two days later had found himself sitting on a hard bench with other boys in fatigues, lean, with cropped heads, listening to a noncommissioned officer’s very military language, blunt but clear. He was talking about “tank phobia,” explaining that there was no need to be afraid of tanks and that running away as they approached was a sure way to be had. You had to be smart. And the sergeant had even drawn a tank on the old blackboard, showing its vulnerable points: the caterpillar tracks, the fuel tank….
“In a nutshell: if you’re scared of tanks, you’ve no place in the ranks,” the sergeant concluded, highly pleased with his own wit.
Two months later, in November, lying in a frozen trench, with his head raised slightly above the clods of frozen earth, Ivan was watching a line of tanks emerging from the transparent forest and slowly forming up. Beside him lay his rifle — it was still the ancient model invented by Mossin, a captain in the czarist army — and two bottles of explosive liquid. For the whole of their section, as they clung to this scrap of frozen earth, there were only seven antitank grenades.
Had it been possible to stand up, they could have seen the towers of the Kremlin with the aid of field glasses, through the cold fog to the rear of them.
“We’re an hour’s drive from Moscow,” a soldier had said the previous day.
“Comrade Stalin’s in Moscow,” the officer replied. “Moscow will not fall.”
Stalin!
And suddenly the temperature rose. For him, for their Country, they were ready to take on the tanks with their bare hands! For Stalin’s sake it all made sense: the snow-filled trenches, their own greatcoats, which would soon stiffen forever under the gray sky, and the officer’s harsh cry as he hurled himself beneath the deafening clatter of the tank tracks, his grenade in his hand, with the pin removed.
* * *
Forty years after that bitterly cold day Ivan will find himself seated in the humid dullness of a dimly lit bar chatting amid the hubbub from neighboring tables with two newly encountered comrades. They will already have slipped the contents of a bottle of vodka into their three tankards of beer on the q.t. and embarked on a second, and will be in such good spirits that they don’t even feel like arguing. Just listening to the other guy and agreeing with whatever he has to say.
“So what about them, those men of the Panfilova Division? Were they heroes? Throwing themselves under tanks? What choice did they have, for God’s sake: ‘What stands behind us is Moscow,’ says the political commissar. ‘No further retreat is possible!’ Except that what stood behind us wasn’t Moscow. It was a line of machine guns blocking the way, those NKVD bastards. I started there, too, Vanya, the same as you. Only I was in the signal corps….”
Ivan Dmitrevich will nod his head, embracing the speaker with a vague and almost tender gaze. What’s the use of talking about it? And who knows what really happened? “And yet,” the words form silently in his mind, “at that moment the thought of a line blocking the way never occurred to me. The lieutenant shouted: ‘Advance! For Stalin! For our Country!’ And in a flash it all went. No more cold. No more fear. We believed in it….”
* * *
It was at the battle of Stalingrad that he won the Gold Star of a Hero of the Soviet Union.
And yet he had never seen Stalingrad. Just a streak of black smoke on the horizon, above a dry steppe so boiling hot you could feel the crunch of sand in your mouth. He never saw the Volga, either, only a grayish void in the distance, as if poised above the abyss at the end of the world. Sergeant Mikhalych gestured in the direction of the black smoke on the horizon.
“That’s Stalingrad burning. If the Germans cross the Volga the city’s a goner. We’ll never be able to hold it.”
The sergeant was sitting on an empty shell case, drawing on the last cigarette of his life. Half an hour later, amid the din and dust storm of the battle, he would emit a gasp and slowly collapse onto his side, clapping his hand to his chest, as if to pluck from it a tiny, jagged sliver
of shrapnel.
How had they come to find themselves with their gun on this high ground between that sparse woodland and a ravine full of brambles? Why had they been left on their own? Who had given the order for them to occupy this position? Had anyone actually given such an order?
The battle had lasted so long that they had become a part of it. They had ceased to feel separate from the heavy shuddering of the 76-millimeter antitank gun, the whistling of the bullets, the explosions. Pitching and tossing like ships, the tanks surged across the devastated steppe. In their wake the dark shadows of soldiers were moving about in clouds of dust. The machine gun rattled out from a little trench on the left. After swallowing its shell the gun spat it out again, as if with a “phew” of relief. Six tanks were already smoldering. The rest of them drew back for a time, then returned, as if magnetically attracted to the hill stuffed with metal. And once again, in a fever of activity, completely deafened, their muscles tensed, the artillerymen became indistinguishable from the gun’s frenzied spasms. They had long since ceased to know how many of them were left, as they carried up the shells, even stepping over dead men. And they would only become aware that one of their comrades had died when the rhythm of their grueling task was broken. At intervals Ivan looked behind him and each time saw the red-haired Seryozha sitting comfortably beside some empty ammunition crates. Each time he wanted to yell at him: “Hey! Sergei! What the fuck are you doing there?” But just then he would notice that all the seated man had left of his stomach was a bloody mess. And then in the din of the fighting and the racket of gunfire he would forget, would look back again, would again be on the brink of calling out to him and would again see that red stain….
What saved them was the first two tanks burning and blocking a direct attack by the Germans. The ravine protected them on the left, the little wood on the right. Or, at least, so they thought. Which is why when, with the sound of tree trunks smashing, a tank loomed up, flattening the scrub, they did not even have time to be afraid. The tank was firing at will but the person huddled within its stifling entrails had been in too much of a hurry.
The explosion flung Ivan to the ground. He rolled into the trench, groped around in a hole to find the stick grenades handle, removed the pin, and, bending his arm back, hurled it. The earth shook — he did not hear the explosion but felt it in his body. He raised his head above the trench and saw the black smoke and the shadowy figures emerging from the turret. All this amid a deafness that was at once ringing and muffled. No submachine gun to hand. He threw another grenade, the last one….
Swathed in the same hushed silence, he left the trench and saw the empty steppe, the smoking tanks, the chaos of plowed-up land, of corpses and trees torn to shreds. Seated in the shadow of the gun was an aged Siberian, Lagun. Seeing Ivan, he got up, signed with his head, said something and — still in an unreal silence — went over to the machine-gunner’s little trench. The latter was partly lying on his side, his mouth half open and twisted in such pain that, without hearing it, Ivan could see his cry. On his bloodied hands only the thumbs remained. Lagun began to dress his wounds, bathing his stumps with alcohol and binding them tightly. The machine-gunner opened his mouth even wider and rolled over on his back.
Ivan stumbled around the tank covered in leaves and broken branches and made his way in under the trees. Two ruts left by the tank tracks gleamed darkly vivid in the torn-up grass. He crossed them and headed toward where the shade was deepest.
Even in this copse the forest could be sensed. Midges swirled around in the slender, quivering rays of sunlight. He caught sight of a narrow rivulet brimming with water the color of tea, dizzyingly limpid. Water spiders skated about on its smooth brilliance. He followed its course and after a few steps found the tiny pool of a spring. He knelt down and drank greedily. His thirst quenched, he raised his head and lost his gaze in the transparent depths. Suddenly he noticed his reflection, the face he had not seen for such a long time — this young face turned slightly blue with the shadow of its first beard, the eyebrows bleached by the sun and devastatingly distant, alien eyes.
“Its me” — the words formed slowly in his head — “me, Ivan Demidov. …” For a long time he contemplated this somber reflections features. Then shook himself. It seemed to him that the silence was becoming less dense. Somewhere above him a bird called.
Ivan got up, leaned over again and plunged his flask into the water. “I’ll take it to Lagun, he must be baking back there under his gun.”
* * *
From the citation drawn up on the orders of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union he was to learn that that day they had “contained the enemy’s advance in a direction of vital strategic importance” and had “resisted more than ten attacks by a numerically superior enemy.” In this text the names of Stalingrad and the Volga would be mentioned, neither of which they had ever seen. And how little these words would reflect what they had lived through and experienced! There would be no mention here of Mikhalych and his gasp of pain, nor of Seryozha in his blackened and reddened battle dress, nor of smoking tanks amid trees stripped bare and drenched in blood.
There would be no mention, either, of the little pool of fresh water in the wood reawakening to all the sounds of summer.
Throughout the war he had received only two brief letters from Tatyana. At the end of each of them she wrote: “My comrades-in-arms, Lolya and Katya, send you warm greetings.” He kept these letters, wrapped in a scrap of canvas, at the bottom of his knapsack. From time to time he reread them so that he came to know their naive contents by heart. What he particularly cherished was the handwriting itself and the mere sight of those regulation folded triangles of creased writing paper.
When victory came he was in Czechoslovakia. On May 2 the red flag was hoisted over the Reichstag. On May 8 Keitel, his eye furious behind his monocle, signed the deed of Germany’s unconditional surrender. The next day the air resounded with Victory salvos and the postwar era began.
Yet on May 10, Hero of the Soviet Union, Guards Staff Sergeant Ivan Demidov, was still seeking out the dark silhouettes of tanks in his sights and urging on his soldiers, yelling his orders in a cracked voice. In Czechoslovakia the Germans did not lay down their arms until the end of May. And, like stray bullets, the death notices kept winging their way back to a Russia that might have expected that after May 9 no one else would die.
Finally this war, too, came to an end.
Two days before demobilization Ivan received a letter. Like all letters written on behalf of someone else, it was a trifle dry and muddled. Furthermore it had taken more than a month to reach him. He read that in April Tatyana had been seriously wounded, had recovered, following an operation, and was currently in the hospital in Lvov.
Ivan studied the hastily handwritten note for a long time. “Seriously wounded …” he repeated, feeling something grow tense within him. “The arm? The leg? Why not spell it out clearly?”
But along with pity he felt something else that he did not want to admit to himself.
He had already exchanged the hundred Austrian schilling gold pieces for rubles, had already breathed the air of this Europe, devastated but still well ordered and comfortable. On his tunic the Gold Star shone, and the deep red enamel of the other two orders and the bluish silver of the medals “For gallantry” glittered. And, passing through liberated towns, he was aware of the admiring looks of young women throwing bunches of flowers on the tanks.
He was already dreaming of finding himself as quickly as possible back in a railroad freight car among his newly discharged companions, amid the acrid smell of tobacco, looking out through the wide-open sides at the dazzling greenery of summer, running out at halts in search of boiling water. Apart from his knapsack he had a little wooden coffer reinforced with steel corners. In it a length of heavy moiré material, half a dozen wristwatches found in a ruined store, and, best of all, a big roll of first-class leather to make boots from. The mere scent of this leather, with its fine grain, mad
e his head spin. Just imagine putting on creaking boots and strolling down the village street with your medals jingling…. And indeed a comrade from his regiment did invite him to go and settle with him, in Ukraine. But before that? It would be an idea first to visit those of his nearest and dearest who were still alive, before seeking his fortune in a new place. “I could find a pretty girl down there, and besides the people there are much wealthier and more generous …”
Again he read that letter and the same voice whis-pered to him: “I promised … I promised…. Well, so what? We weren’t married in church. I did go a bit too far, it’s true … But that was what the situation called for! And now what? Do I have to commit myself for the rest of my life? This letter’s a riddle. Let the devil make head or tail of it if he can. ‘Seriously wounded …’ What does that mean? After all, what I need is a wife, not a cripple!”
Very deep within him another voice made itself heard. “You’re pathetic, Hero, that’s what you are. All mouth and no action. You’d have been a dead duck without her. You’d be rotting away in a communal grave with a Fritz on one side and a Russian on the other.
Finally Ivan decided: “All right! I’ll go there. It’s pretty much on my way in any case. I’ll do the right thing. I’ll go see her. I’ll say thank you to her one more time. I’ll explain to her: ‘Look, this is how it is …’” And he decided to think about “this” on the journey.
When he walked into the hospital ward he did not notice her right away. Knowing she was seriously wounded, he pictured her lying there, swathed in bandages, unmoving. It had not occurred to him that the news was two months old.
“There she is, your Tatyana Averina,” said the nurse who showed him in. “Don’t stay too long. The meal’s in half an hour. You can go into the little garden.”
Tatyana was standing at the window; her hand hung at her side, holding a book.
A Hero's Daughter Page 2