Last Witnesses

by Svetlana Alexievich

  Belarus was liberated…Dead Germans lay everywhere. We picked up our own people and buried them in mass graves, but those lay there for a long time, especially in winter. Children ran to the field to look at the dead…And right there, not far away, they went on playing games of war or “Cops and Robbers.”

  I was surprised when, many years later, that dream about the dead German appeared…I didn’t expect it…

  And that dream haunted me for decades…

  My son is already a grown-up man. When he was little, I was tormented by the very thought of trying to tell him…to tell him about the war…He kept asking me, but I avoided the conversation. I liked reading him stories, I wanted him to have a childhood. He grew up, but I still don’t want to talk about the war with him. Maybe someday I’ll tell him about my dream. Maybe…I’m not sure…

  It would destroy his world. A world without war…People who haven’t seen a man kill another man are completely different people…

  “EVERYBODY WANTED TO KISS THE WORD VICTORY…”

  Anya Korzun

  TWO YEARS OLD. NOW A ZOOTECHNICIAN.

  I remember how the war ended…May 9, 1945…

  Women came running to the kindergarten.

  “Children, it’s Victory! Victory-y-y-y!”

  Everybody laughed and cried. Cried and laughed.

  They all began kissing us. Women we didn’t know…Kissing us and crying…Kissing…We turned on the loudspeaker. Everybody listened. But we were little, we didn’t understand the words, we understood that joy came from up there, from the black dish of the loudspeaker. The grown-ups picked some of us up…the others climbed by themselves…they climbed on each other like a ladder, only the third or fourth one reached the black dish and kissed it. Then they traded places…Everybody wanted to kiss the word Victory…

  In the evening there were fireworks. The sky lit up. Mama opened the window and burst into tears.

  “Little daughter, remember this all your life…”

  When my father came home from the front, I was scared of him. He would give me candy and ask, “Say ‘papa’…”

  I would take the candy, hide with it under the table, and say, “Mister…”

  I had no papa during the war. I grew up with mama and grandma. With my aunt. I couldn’t imagine what a papa would do in our home.

  He’d come with a rifle…

  “WEARING A SHIRT MADE FROM MY FATHER’S ARMY SHIRT…”

  Nikolai Berezka

  BORN IN 1945. NOW A TAXI DRIVER.

  I was born in 1945, but I remember the war. I know the war.

  Mother would lock me up in another room…or send me outside with the other boys…But I still heard how my father screamed. He screamed for a long time. I clung to the crack between the doors: my father held his ailing leg with both hands, rocking it. Or he rolled about, pounding the floor with his fists: “The war! The cursed war!”

  When the pain passed, my father took me in his arms. I touched his leg. “It’s the war that hurts you?…”

  “The war! Curse it!” answered my father.

  And then this…The neighbors had two little boys…I was friends with them…They were blown up by a mine outside the village. That was probably already in 1949…

  Their mother, Auntie Anya, threw herself into their grave. They pulled her out…She screamed…people don’t scream like that…

  I went to school wearing a shirt made from my father’s army shirt. I was so happy! All the boys whose fathers had come back from the war had shirts sewn from their fathers’ army shirts.

  After the war, my father died from the war. From his wounds.

  I don’t have to make anything up. I’ve seen the war. I dream about the war. I cry in my sleep that they will come tomorrow and take my papa away. The house smells of new military cloth…

  The war! Curse it!…

  “I DECORATED IT WITH RED CARNATIONS…”

  Mariam Yuzefovskaya

  BORN IN 1941. NOW AN ENGINEER.

  I was born in the war. And I grew up during the war.

  And so…We’re waiting for papa to come back from the war…

  What did mama not do with me: she shaved my head, rubbed me with kerosene, applied ointments. I hated myself desperately. Felt ashamed. I wouldn’t even go out in the yard. Lice and blisters in the first year after the war…There was no escaping them…

  And then the telegram: father is demobilized. We went to meet him at the train station. Mama dressed me up. She tied a red bow to the top of my head. What it was tied to isn’t clear. And she kept yanking my arm: “Don’t scratch yourself. Don’t scratch yourself.” But the itching was unbearable! The cursed bow was about to fall off. And there was this buzzing in my head: “What if my father doesn’t like me? He hasn’t seen me even once.”

  But what actually happened was even worse. My father saw me and rushed to me first. But right then…for a moment, for just a moment—but I felt it at once, with my skin, with my whole little body—it was as if he backed away…For a single moment…And it was so hurtful. So unbearably bitter. And when he took me in his arms, I pushed him away with all my might. The smell of kerosene suddenly hit my nose. It had been following me everywhere for a year, I had stopped noticing it. I got used to it. But now I smelled it. Maybe it was because my father had such a nice and unusual smell. He was so handsome compared to me and my exhausted mama. And it stung me to my very soul. I tore off the bow, threw it on the ground, and stepped on it with my foot.

  “What are you doing?” my father asked in surprise.

  “It’s your character,” laughed mama, who understood everything. She held my father with both hands, and they walked home like that.

  At night I called mama and asked her to take me to bed with her. I had always slept with mama…All through the war…But mama didn’t answer, as if she was asleep. I had no one to tell how hurt I was.

  Before falling asleep, I firmly decided to run away to an orphanage…

  In the morning, my father gave me two dolls. I didn’t have real dolls till I was five. Only homemade rag dolls. My grandmother’s. The dolls that my father brought had eyes that closed and opened, their arms and legs could move, one of them squeaked a word like mama. It seemed magical to me. I treasured them. I was even afraid to take them outside. But I showed them in the window. We lived on the ground floor, all the children in the yard gathered to see my dolls.

  I was weak and sickly. I was always unlucky. Either I bruised my forehead, or I cut myself on a nail. Or I would simply fall in a faint. And the children were reluctant to include me in their games. I tried to gain their trust however I could; I invented all sorts of ways. It reached a point where I started fawning on Dusya, the caretaker’s daughter. Dusya was strong, cheerful, everybody liked to play with her.

  She asked me to bring out my doll, and I couldn’t resist. However, not at once. I still refused for a little while.

  “I won’t play with you,” Dusya threatened me.

  That worked on me at once.

  I brought out the doll that “spoke.” But we didn’t play for long. We quarreled over something, and it turned into a cock fight. Dusya grabbed my doll by the legs and smashed it against the wall. The doll’s head fell off and the speaking button fell from its stomach.

  “Dusya, you’re crazy,” all the children began to cry.

  “Why is she giving the orders?” Dusya smeared the tears on her cheeks. “Since she has a papa, she can do anything. Dolls, a papa—all just for her.”

  Dusya had neither a father nor any dolls…

  Our first Christmas tree was set up under the table. Back then we lived at my grandfather’s. It was pretty cramped. So cramped that the only empty space left was under the big table. That’s where we set up the little Christmas tree. I decorated it with red carnatio
ns. I remember very well how fresh and clean the tree smelled. Nothing could overcome that smell. Neither the cornmeal mash that my grandmother cooked, nor my grandfather’s shoe polish.

  I had a glass ball. My treasure. I couldn’t find a place for it on the tree. I wanted to hang it in such a way that it shone from wherever you looked at it. I placed it up at the very top. When I went to bed, I took it down and hid it. I was afraid it would disappear…

  I slept in a washtub. The tub was made of zinc. It had a bluish sheen with frosty veins. No matter how we scrubbed it after doing laundry, the smell of the ashes we used instead of soap, which was a rarity, lingered. I liked it. I liked to press my forehead to the cold edges of the tub, especially when I was sick. I liked to rock it like a cradle. Then its rumbling would betray me, and I would get scolded. We cherished that tub. It was the only thing we had left from our life before the war.

  And then suddenly we bought a bed…With shiny beads on the headboard…All this caused me indescribable excitement! I climbed on it and immediately rolled down on the floor. What? Is it possible? I couldn’t believe that anyone could sleep in such a beautiful bed.

  Papa saw me on the floor, picked me up, and hugged me tight. And I hugged him…I put my arms around his neck the way mama did.

  I remember how happily he laughed…

  “I WAITED A LONG TIME FOR MY FATHER…ALL MY LIFE…”

  Arseny Gutin

  BORN IN 1941. NOW AN ELECTRICIAN.

  On Victory Day, I turned four…

  In the morning I started telling everyone that I was already five years old. Not in my fifth year, but five years old. I wanted to grow up. Papa would come back from the war, and I’d already have grown up.

  That day the chairman of the kolkhoz summoned the women: “Victory!” He kissed them all. Each one. I was with mama…I rejoiced. And mama cried.

  All the children gathered…Outside the village, we set fire to rubber tires from the German trucks. We shouted “Hurray! Hur-ray! Victory!” We beat on the German helmets that we had gathered earlier in the forest. We beat on them like drums.

  We lived in a mud hut…I came running to the mud hut…Mama was crying. I didn’t understand why she was crying and not rejoicing on such a day.

  It started to rain. I broke a stick and measured the puddles around our hut.

  “What are you doing?” people asked me.

  “I’m measuring how deep the puddles are. Because papa may come and fall into them.”

  The neighbors cried, and mama cried. I didn’t understand what “missing in action” meant. I waited a long time for my father…All my life…

  “AT THAT LIMIT…THAT BRINK…”

  Valya Brinskaya

  TWELVE YEARS OLD. NOW AN ENGINEER.

  Dolls…The most beautiful…They always remind me of the war…

  As long as papa was alive, as long as mama was alive, we didn’t speak of the war. Now that they’re gone, I often think of how nice it is to have old people at home. While they’re alive, we are still children. Even after the war we were still children…

  Our papa was a soldier. We lived near Bielostok. For us, the war started from the first hour, the first minutes. In my sleep I heard some sort of rumbling, like thunderclaps, but of an unusual, uninterrupted sort. I woke up and ran to the window—above the barracks in the village of Grayevo, where my sister and I went to school, the sky was burning.

  “Papa, is that a thunderstorm?”

  “Stay away from the window,” papa replied. “It’s war.”

  Mama prepared his campaign trunk. My father was often called in when the alarm was raised. Nothing seemed unusual…I wanted to sleep…I fell back in my bed, because I didn’t understand anything. My sister and I went to bed late—we had gone to the movies. Before the war, “going to the movies” was quite different than now. Films were brought only before holidays, and there weren’t many: We Are from Kronstadt, Chapaev, If There Is War Tomorrow, Jolly Fellows. The screening was set up in the Red Army mess hall. We children didn’t miss a single show and knew all the films by heart. We even gave the cue to the artists on the screen or skipped ahead and interrupted them. There was no electricity in the village, nor in the army unit; we “rolled” the film with a portable motor. The motor crackled—we dropped everything and ran to take seats in front of the screen, and even brought along our own stools.

  Watching movies was lengthy: the first part ends, everybody waits patiently while the projectionist winds the next reel. It’s all right if the film is new, but if it’s old, it keeps breaking. We wait while they glue it back and the glue dries. Or, even worse, the film would catch fire. When the motor stalled, it was a totally lost cause. Often we didn’t have time to watch a movie to the end. The order would be given: “First company—prepare for action! Second company—fall in!”

  And if the alarm was raised, the projectionist ran off. When the breaks between the parts were too long, the spectators lost their patience, agitation set in, whistling, shouts…My sister would climb on a table and announce, “The concert begins.” She herself liked terribly to declaim, as we used to say. She didn’t always know the words perfectly, but she climbed on the table fearlessly.

  She had been like that ever since kindergarten, when we lived in the military garrison near Gomel. After the poems, my sister and I would sing. For an encore we would sing “Our Armor Is Strong and Our Tanks Are Swift.” The windows shook in the mess hall when the soldiers picked up the refrain:

  With fiery thunder, steel armor gleaming,

  The tanks will furiously enter the fray…

  And so, on June 21, 1941…the night before the war…for maybe the tenth time, we watched the movie If There Is War Tomorrow. After the movie, we didn’t disperse for a long time, father barely managed to herd us home: “So you’ll sleep tonight? Tomorrow is a day off…”

  I woke up finally when there was an explosion nearby and the windows in the kitchen shattered. Mama was wrapping my half-awake little brother Tolik in a blanket. My sister was already dressed. Papa wasn’t home.

  “Hurry, girls,” mama urged us. “There’s been a provocation at the border.”

  We ran to the forest. Mama was out of breath. She was carrying my little brother, and she kept repeating, “Don’t fall behind, girls…Duck down, girls…” For some reason I remember how the sun hit me straight in the eyes. It was very bright. Birds were singing. And there was that piercing roar of airplanes…

  I trembled, but then I felt ashamed that I was trembling. I had always wanted to be like the brave heroes from the book Timur and His Gang, by Arkady Gaidar,* and here I was trembling. I took my little brother in my arms and started rocking him and even singing “And the young girl…” There was this love song in the movie The Goalkeeper. Mama often sang it, and it perfectly suited my mood and condition in that moment. I was…in love! I don’t know what science says, what the books about adolescent psychology say, but I was constantly in love. There was a time when I loved several boys at once. But at that moment, I liked only one—Vitya, from the Grayevo garrison. He was in the sixth grade. The sixth graders were in the same classroom with the fifth. Fifth graders in the first row of desks, sixth graders in the second. I can’t imagine how the teachers managed to conduct classes. I didn’t care about studying. How was it I didn’t break my neck staring at Vitya!

  I liked everything about him: that he was short—we were well matched; that he had blue, blue eyes, like my papa’s; and that he was well-read—not like Alka Poddubnyak, who gave painful “flicks” and who liked me. Vitya especially liked Jules Verne! So did I. The Red Army library had his complete works, and I read them all…

  I don’t remember how long we stayed in the forest…We stopped hearing explosions. Silence fell. The women sighed with relief: “Our boys fought them off.” But then…in the midst of that silence�
��suddenly we heard the roar of flying airplanes…We ran out to the road. The planes were flying toward the border: “Hur-ray!” But there was something “not ours” about those planes: the wings were not ours, and the sound wasn’t ours. They were German bombers, they flew wing to wing, slowly and heavily. It seemed like they left no empty space in the sky. We started counting, but lost track. Later, in the wartime news reports, I saw those planes, but my impression wasn’t the same. The filming was done at airplane level. But when you look at them from below, through the thick of the trees, and what’s more, with the eyes of an adolescent—it’s a scary sight. Afterward I often dreamed about those planes. But the dream went further—the whole of that iron sky slowly fell down on me and crushed me, crushed me, crushed me. I would wake up in a cold sweat, shaking all over. Horrible!

  Somebody said that the bridge had been bombed. We got frightened: what about papa? Papa wouldn’t be able to swim across, he couldn’t swim.

  I can’t say exactly now…But I remember that papa came running to us: “You’ll be evacuated by truck.” He gave mama the thick photograph album and a warm, quilted blanket: “Muffle up the children, or they’ll catch cold.” That was all we took with us. In such a hurry. No documents, no passports, not a kopeck of money. We also had a pot of meatballs my mother had prepared for the weekend, and my brother’s little shoes. And my sister—a miracle!—grabbed at the last moment a package, which contained mama’s crepe de chine dress and her shoes. Somehow. By chance. Maybe she and papa wanted to visit some friends for the weekend? Nobody could remember anymore. Peaceful life instantly disappeared, fell into the background.

  That’s how we evacuated…

  We quickly reached the station, but sat there for a long time. Everything trembled and rattled. The lights went out. We lit a fire with paper, newspapers. Somebody found a lantern. Its light cast huge shadows of people sitting—on the walls, on the ceiling. They stood still, then moved. And then my imagination ran away with me: Germans in a fortress, our soldiers taken prisoner. I decided to try and see if I could endure torture or not. I put my fingers between two boxes and crushed them. I howled in pain. Mama got frightened. “What’s the matter, dear?”