Nevertheless, the regiment reached its assigned position. Sighing with relief and pleasure, the men slid down into the trenches and dugouts constructed several months earlier. They took off their boots and stretched out on the dirt floor, in a dusty golden half-darkness that shielded them from the sun.
Lying with his eyes shut beside a log wall, Seryozha experienced a sweet sense of peace and exhaustion. He had no thoughts at all; his bodily sensations were too strong, and there were too many of them. His back was aching, the soles of his feet were inflamed, the blood was hammering against his temples, and his cheeks had been burnt by the fierce sun. His whole body felt heavy, as if cast from metal, yet at the same time so light as to be almost weightless—a fusion of opposites possible only at moments of extreme fatigue. And this acute sense of exhaustion engendered in him a certain boyish sense of self-respect. He was proud not to have fallen behind, not to have complained or begun to limp, not to have begged for a place on the cart. He had been at the very end of the column, next to an elderly carpenter by the name of Polyakov. As they marched through the Sculpture Garden and the factory district, women had shaken their heads and said, “A grandad and a child—those two will never make it to the front line.”
Polyakov had grey hair and his face was all wrinkles and dense grey stubble. Beside him, skinny little Seryozha with his sharp nose and narrow shoulders did indeed look like a fledgling.
Both the child and the grandad, however, showed endurance and determination, and they finished the day in better shape than many of their comrades. Neither developed blisters.
Polyakov had drawn strength from pride, from the need of an aging man to prove that he is still young. Seryozha had drawn strength and perseverance from the eternal quest of the young and inexperienced to appear strong and mature.
It was calm and quiet in the dugout. The only sounds were the men’s heavy breathing and the occasional rustle of a clod of dry earth sliding down the wooden wall.
Then came the sound of a familiar voice. Kryakin, their company commander, was bellowing out commands. He was drawing nearer.
“Already, come to torment us again!” exclaimed Gradusov, one of the other militiamen. “He was marching alongside us. I’d thought he’d want some rest too, that he’d leave us alone for a while.” He went on, almost tearfully, “But I’m not getting up—no, not even if the man threatens to shoot me.”
“You’ll get up all right!” said Chentsov, another of the men lying nearby. He appeared to take pleasure in saying this, as if he himself would be allowed to stay where he was.
Gradusov sat up. He looked at his comrades, all still lying down, and said, “Yes, we’ve been burnt by the sun, well and truly.”22
Gradusov’s plump neck and freckled arms had gone scarlet rather than brown, and he looked as if he had been scalded. His large, freckled face had also gone scarlet. He was clearly in pain.
Kryakin was now just above them. “On with your boots!” he called out. “And fall into line!”
Polyakov had appeared to be asleep, but he quickly got up and began putting on his foot cloths. Chentsov and Gradusov were already pulling on their boots, groaning repeatedly. Their feet were badly blistered and their foot cloths rigid from dried sweat.
Only a moment ago Seryozha had been thinking that no power in the world could prompt him to move; he would sooner die of thirst, he had said to himself, than get up and try to find water. But now, quickly and silently, he too began putting on his foot cloths and boots.
Soon the company had formed up, and Kryakin was walking down the line, calling the roll. He was a short man with high cheekbones, a wide mouth and large nose, and bronze-coloured eyes that seemed fixed in position; if he needed to look to one side, he turned his whole head and torso. Before the war he had been a district inspector for the fire brigade, and some of the soldiers had come across him in the course of their previous jobs. They remembered him as rather quiet, even shy, always smiling and ready to oblige; he had usually gone about in a green tunic worn with a thin belt, and black trousers tucked into his boots. Now, though, he was a company commander—and all his traits and quirks, all his particular understandings of the world, which had formerly hardly mattered to anyone, were now of immense importance to dozens of men, both young and old. He did his best to seem like a man used to ordering others about—but, being weak and unsure of himself, he could only do this by being harsh and brutal. Seryozha had once heard him say to Bryushkov, one of the platoon commanders, “You must learn how to speak to your men. I heard you say to one of them, ‘Why is one of your buttons missing?’ That’s not good—you should never use the word why. The man will immediately come out with some reason: He’s lost his needle, there’s no thread and he’s already reported this to the sergeant . . . You should address them like this.” And he bellowed out, “Replace button!”
Kryakin’s bellow was like a blow to the chest.
Although barely able to stand upright himself, Kryakin had ordered his men to line up. He berated some for standing out of line and others for their poor articulation during roll call. Next, he checked their weapons and found that Ilushkin appeared to have lost his bayonet.
Ilushkin, tall and sullen-looking, stepped hesitantly forward. Kryakin addressed him: “What am I to reply if asked by higher command, ‘Commander of the 3rd Company, where is the bayonet, entrusted to your safekeeping, from rifle number 612192?’”
Ilushkin tried to glance out of the corner of his eye at the men behind him. Not knowing how to reply, he remained silent. Kryakin questioned Ilushkin’s platoon commander and learned that during a brief halt Ilushkin had used his bayonet to hack down some branches; he had wanted to keep off the sun off his face as he lay on the ground. Ilushkin then remembered: Yes, he must indeed have forgotten to replace his bayonet at the end of the halt.
Kryakin ordered him to go back and retrieve his bayonet. Rather slowly, Ilushkin set off towards the city. Quietly but gravely, Kryakin called out after him, “Step to it, Ilushkin, step to it!”
In Kryakin’s eyes there was a look of sober, severe inspiration. By keeping his exhausted company standing in the full heat of the sun, he believed he was making both them and himself into better men.
“Gradusov,” he said, “take this report to the battalion commander. He’s in that ravine over there, 450 metres distant.” And he opened his orange map case, took out a sheet of paper folded in four and handed it to Gradusov.
Gradusov returned twenty minutes later, at a brisk pace, and cheerfully handed Kryakin a small grey envelope. After dropping down into the dugout, Gradusov told his comrades that the battalion commander, after reading the report, had said to his chief of staff, “What the hell does that oaf think he’s up to? Reviewing his men in the open steppe—does he want to call up enemy planes? I’ll write him a note—his last warning.”
During that first day, life in the open steppe had seemed impossible; there was no water, no kitchen, no glass windows, no streets, no pavements—only purposeless bustle, secret despair and the shouting of orders. There were no mortars where there were mortar bombs, and no mortar bombs where there were mortars. It had seemed that no one was giving any thought to the company, that they would remain in the steppe forever, forgotten by everyone. But then, come evening, barefoot young lads and girls in white headscarves had appeared from Okatovka. There was singing, laughter and the strains of a concertina. Soon the tall feathergrass was littered with white pumpkin seed husks. And suddenly the steppe became habitable. There in the gully, among the bushes, was a rich and pure spring of water; someone brought buckets and then a used petrol barrel. The briar roses on the gully’s steep slopes and the rough, twisted branches of the low-growing steppe pears and cherries were quickly festooned with calico shirts and foot cloths. Watermelons, tomatoes and cucumbers appeared. Snaking its way through the grass, connecting them to the city they had left behind, was a black signals cable. And on the second night some three-tonners drew up, bringing Molotov cocktai
ls, mortars and mortar bombs, and machine guns and cartridges, all straight from the factory workshops. Field kitchens arrived—and, an hour later, two artillery batteries. There was something moving about this sudden appearance, in the night steppe, of bread from the main Stalingrad bakery and weapons produced by Stalingrad factories. The weapons felt friendly. Only a few weeks ago, many of the militiamen had themselves been working at the Tractor Factory, the Barricades and Red October. When they put their hands on the gun barrels, the deadly steel seemed to be bringing them greetings from their wives, neighbours and comrades, from their workshops, streets, bars, flower beds and kitchen gardens, from a life that now lay far behind them. And the bread, covered by sheets of tarpaulin, was as warm as a living body.
That night, the political instructors began distributing copies of Stalingrad Pravda.
By the end of the second day the men had settled into their trenches and dugouts, trodden paths to the nearby spring and discovered for themselves what was good and what was bad about life in the steppe. At times they almost forgot that the enemy was approaching; life might go on like this forever, in quiet steppe that was grey, white and dusty in daytime, and a deep blue in the evenings. But in the night sky they could see two distinct areas of light—one from the giant Stalingrad factories, the other from fires now blazing in the west—and they could hear not only the factories’ distant rumble but also the explosions of bombs and shells near the banks of the Don.
20
SERYOZHA had left his home and everything he was accustomed to. He was living among people he had not known before, and in a world governed by codes of conduct that were unfamiliar to him. At times he was undergoing considerable physical deprivation.
In new and difficult situations, even adults discover that many of their ideas turn out to be mistaken and that their knowledge of the world is inadequate. As for Seryozha, he sensed at once how little the real world had in common with what he had been told about it at home and at school, with what he had read in books and deduced from his own small observations. What was truly surprising, however, was something very different. Once he had known real exhaustion, once he had experienced at first hand the harsh ways of the sergeant and sergeant major, once he had seen something of the simplicity of the soldiers’ life and become attuned to the eloquence of their foul language, spoken both in jest and in anger—once he had got used to all this, he found that his own inner world still stood firm, strong and sound as ever. His respect for work, truthfulness and freedom, everything given to him by school, teachers and comrades, everything he had learned from books and from life itself—all this remained intact. None of it had been destroyed by the storm that had swept him up. Here amid the steppe dust, amid the soldiers’ night-time talk and the orders yelled out by commanders, he found it strange and difficult to remember Mostovskoy’s white hair and his grandmother’s stern eyes and white collar. Nevertheless, he had not lost his sense of inner direction. His path still lay straight before him, neither broken nor bent.
As they drew nearer to the front, the hierarchies within the company had begun to change. During the first chaotic days, in barracks, when proper classes and exercises had yet to be organized and much of their time was frittered away in drawing up lists and then confirming them, with often fruitless discussion of possible ways of obtaining a leave of absence, Gradusov had been a dominant figure. He was smart, nonchalant and worldly-wise.
Within an hour of enlisting and making his way to the barracks, Gradusov was confidently repeating, “No, I won’t be hanging around here for long. I’ll get myself sent off on some mission.”
And he did indeed display a remarkable gift for getting secondments. He turned out to know people everywhere—in the Militia HQ, in the District HQ, and in the medical and quartermaster sections. After obtaining a leave of absence for four hours, he came back from the city with some pencils and good-quality writing paper for the regimental HQ secretariat. He gave the political instructor a safety razor made from English steel. And he brought the regimental second in command a present from the housewives of the Beketovka district: a pair of box-calf boots. But for the obstinacy of the company commander, he’d have probably got himself transferred to either the medical or the quartermaster section. Kryakin, however, twice refused to release him, explaining his reasons in a note to the commissar. The regimental commander just shrugged and said, “All right then, let him stay in his company.” He had been thinking for some time that Gradusov would make a good personal messenger.
Gradusov developed such a hatred of Kryakin that he hardly thought any longer about the war, about his family or about the future. But he could talk and think about Kryakin for hours on end. When Kryakin stood there in front of the company and opened the map case Gradusov had once given to him as a present, Gradusov could barely contain himself.
Gradusov seemed untroubled by contradictions. He would talk proudly about his years as a factory worker, about his recent work in the provincial housing construction bureau and about patriotic speeches he had given at meetings. He would denounce cowards and people who were only out for themselves—and then say how stupid he had been not to get himself exempted from conscription. He would express his contempt for traders and former merchants—and then boast about his successful acquisition of a tweed suit, a fur coat for his wife or some corrugated iron. Or he would tell everyone how smart his wife had been in her own business dealings. While visiting her family in Saratov, she had sold tomatoes from their kitchen garden, bought fabrics and cigarette-lighter flints and then, on her return to Stalingrad, sold these scarce items at a profit. After listening to these stories, Gradusov’s comrades would say, “Yes, it’s all right for some, isn’t it?” Deaf to their irony, he would respond, “Yes, we had a good life once. Eat—or be eaten!”
He liked to joke about how Seryozha and Polyakov had both cheated their way into the militia, one by adding a year to his age, one by subtracting a year.
Later, however, when they got down to serious drill and real military discipline, during political-instruction sessions or when they were learning about mortars and machine guns, Gradusov ceased to impress. The man who stood out now was Chentsov, a lean, dark-eyed postgraduate student from the Construction and Engineering Institute.
Chentsov was a Komsomol member, though he had recently applied to join the Party. Seryozha was close to him not only in age, but also in many other respects.
They both disliked Gradusov, and they hated the silly rhyme he so loved to repeat: “Everything’s swell—all gone to hell.” He seemed to think these words excused him from all moral obligations.
In the evenings Seryozha and Chentsov often talked together for a long time. Chentsov would question Seryozha about his studies, then abruptly ask, “So, have you got a girl waiting for you in Stalingrad?” Sensing Seryozha’s embarrassment, he would add condescendingly, “Don’t worry—everything still lies ahead of you.”
He often talked about his own life.
He was an orphan. In 1932, after completing his seven years at a village school, he had come to Stalingrad and got a job as a messenger in the main office of the Tractor Factory. Then he had gone to work in a foundry and also begun attending evening classes in a technical college. During his third year at the college he had passed the entrance exams for the Construction and Engineering Institute and been accepted as a correspondence student. In his diploma dissertation, which was largely devoted to the work of the foundry, he had proposed a new formula for the furnace burden. This proposal, which would allow all the raw materials to be of Soviet origin, led to his being called to Moscow and offered a place as a graduate student in a scientific research institute. When the war began, he had been due to go to America for a year, along with a group of other young engineers.
Seryozha liked Chentsov’s calm, practical good sense and self-confidence, the interest he took in all aspects of the company’s day-to-day life and his ability to tell people what he thought about them straightforwardly
, without embarrassment. There were no technical questions he did not understand and his advice and explanations to the mortarmen, as he helped them prepare their firing data, were clear and authoritative. Seryozha enjoyed listening to Chentsov’s accounts of his work at the research institute, his stories about his childhood and the distant village where he had been brought up, and about how timid he had felt when he first started work at the foundry.
Chentsov had a remarkable memory. He could still remember all the questions from his final exams, three years ago.
Not long before the war, he had married, and his wife was now in Chelyabinsk. “She’s finishing her teacher training there,” he said. “And she’s the best student in every subject.” Then he laughed and said, “We’d just bought a gramophone. We were about to start learning ballroom dancing—and then, the war.”
He was always interesting—except when he spoke about books. He had once said of Korolenko, “He’s a remarkable writer and patriot. He fought for our truth in tsarist Russia.” This had made Seryozha feel awkward. He hadn’t thought anything of the kind when he read The Blind Musician. He had simply begun to cry.23
Seryozha was surprised that Chentsov, who had a good knowledge of many foreign writers as well as of the Russian classics, had not read Gaidar’s children’s books.24 And Chentsov had never even heard of Mowgli, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. “How could I have found the time when they weren’t even on the syllabus?” he exclaimed indignantly. “You try completing a five-year degree course in three years at the same time as doing a full-time job in a factory! I was only getting four hours’ sleep a night as it was.”
Both in the barracks and during exercises he was quiet and conscientious. He never complained about feeling tired.
His gifts were particularly obvious during study sessions. His answers to the commanders’ questions were quick and always to the point. The other militiamen liked him—except that one day he went and informed the political instructor that the clerk was issuing un-warranted leaves of absence. This, naturally, was held against him. Galiguzov, formerly a dock worker and now the commander of a gun crew, said, “No doubt about it, comrade Chentsov, you’re a born bureaucrat.”
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