The bombs reached the ground and plunged into the city. Buildings began to die, just as people die. Tall, thin houses toppled to one side, killed on the spot; stockier, sturdier houses trembled and swayed, their chests and bellies gashed open and exposing what had always been hidden from view: portraits on walls, cupboards, double beds, bedside tables, jars of millet, a half-peeled potato on a table covered with an ink-stained oilcloth.
Bent water pipes and bundles of cables and iron girders between floors were laid bare. Water was flowing everywhere, like tears and blood, making puddles on the streets and pavements. Heaps of red brick appeared; the thick dust coming off them made them look like heaps of steaming red meat. Thousands of buildings went blind, leaving the pavements covered with broken glass like a shining carpet of tiny fish scales. Huge tram cables fell to the ground with a grinding clatter, and plate-glass windows flowed out of their frames as if turned to liquid. Hunched, buckled tram rails were now sticking up from the streets. More fragile structures, however, seemed strangely untouched by the shock waves. A tin arrow with the words CROSS HERE! and a pale blue plywood kiosk for the sale of soft drinks were still standing. The many panes of glass of a frail telephone booth still shone. Everything most immovable—everything made of stone and iron—had become fluid; everything into which people had instilled the power and idea of movement—trams, cars, buses, locomotives—had come to a stop.49
The air was thick with brick dust and pulverized chalk. It was as if the city had been enveloped by mist and this mist was now spreading down the Volga.
The fires started by tens of thousands of incendiary bombs began to blaze. A huge city was dying, overwhelmed by fire, smoke and dust, amid thunder shaking the earth, the sky and the water. And yet, terrible though all this was, it was not as terrible as the eyes of a six-year-old child crushed by an iron girder. There is a power that can raise huge cities from the dust, but no power in the world can lift the almost weightless eyelashes that have closed over the eyes of a dead child.
Only people on the east bank of the Volga, ten or fifteen kilometres away, in Burkovsky Hamlet, Upper Akhtuba, Yami, Tumak and Tsyganskaya Zarya could see the fire as a whole and grasp the extent of the disaster. Hundreds of explosions merged into a single monotonous roar and, even there on the east bank, the iron weight of this roar made the earth shake. Oak leaves trembled and the windows of the little wooden houses rattled. The chalky mist, now lying like a white sheet over the city’s tall buildings and across the Volga, continued to spread, creeping as far as Stalgres, the shipyard repair workshops and the outlying districts of Beketovka and Krasnoarmeisk. Then the mist gradually disappeared, blending with the yellow-grey murk of the fires.
From a distance people could see how swiftly the fires in neighbouring buildings were joining together. Building after building joined in a single blaze and whole burning streets fused into a single, living, moving wall. In some places tall columns rose up from this wall, along with swelling cupolas and fiery bell towers. Red gold, smoky bronze, it was as if a new city of fire had appeared over Stalingrad. Near to the shore, the Volga was steaming. Black smoke and flame slid over the water. Fuel tanks had been hit; the fuel had found its way to the river, and this too was on fire. A great cloud of black smoke was billowing up from it, growing denser and blacker. Caught by the steppe winds, the smoke thinned out and spread slowly across the sky. Weeks later, it still hung in the air, visible even at a distance of fifty kilometres. Swollen and bloodless, the sun made its daily journey through a pale murk.
The flames of the blazing city to the north were seen in the twilight by ferrymen crossing the Volga at Svetly Yar and by women on their way to Raigorod with sacks of grain. Old Kazakhs in carts, on their way to Lake Elton, saw a strange gleam to the west; their camels, sticking out their slobbery lips and extending their dirty swan necks, kept looking back at it. Fishermen in Dubovka and Gornaya Proleika saw a light to the south. And Colonel General Paulus’s staff officers stood in silence on the bank of the Don, drawing on their cigarettes as they watched the patch of flickering light in the dark sky.
What did the strange blaze in the distance portend? Whose defeat? Whose triumph?
Radio, telegraph and ocean cables were already promulgating the news of the Germans’ massive strike. Politicians in London, Washington, Tokyo and Ankara worked all through the night. Ordinary labourers of every race were studying newspapers. There was a new word on the front pages: Stalingrad.
It was a catastrophe. As during floods, earthquakes, avalanches and steppe or forest fires, every living thing wanted to leave the dying city.
First to leave were the birds. Helter skelter, staying close to the water, the jackdaws crossed to the east bank; they were overtaken by grey flocks of sparrows, alternately drawing close together and spreading far apart.
Unbelievably large rats—magnates and patriarchs that had probably not left their lairs for many years—sensed the heat of the fire and the trembling of the earth. Emerging from the cellars of food stores and harbourside granaries, momentarily blinded and deafened, they rushed hither and thither in confusion. Then, as instinct took over, they dragged their tails and fat grey behinds down to the water and made their way along boards and ropes onto barges and old, half-submerged steamers lying close to the shore. Ignoring the rats and mice, cats took refuge in pits and crevices between the rocks.
A horse overturned its cart, tore its harness, bolted along the shore and straight into the water, still dragging its reins and traces behind it. Crazed-looking dogs leaped out of the smoke and dust, ran down the slope towards the river, threw themselves into the water and began to swim towards Krasnaya Sloboda and Tumak.
Only the white doves and blue rock pigeons, chained to their dwellings by an instinct still more powerful than that of self-preservation, went on circling over the burning buildings. Caught by fierce currents of incandescent air, they perished in smoke and flame.
33
VARVARA Alexandrovna Andreyeva was due to leave on Sunday, with her daughter-in-law, Natalya, and her grandson, Volodya. Natalya had persuaded Tokareva, the children’s-home director, to allow Varvara and little Volodya onto the boat allocated to the children’s home. By Friday, everything had been packed into sacks and bundles, sewn up securely and taken down to the port by handcart, along with the baggage from the children’s home.
On Sunday morning Varvara and her grandson arrived at the agreed meeting point in the port. After saying goodbye first to her husband—who had to go to the steelworks—and then to her house and garden, she had felt demoralized and defeated. Up to the very moment of departure she had gone on worrying: about the firewood, which hadn’t been locked away securely enough; about how long her house would be standing empty while her husband was out at work; about there being no one to keep an eye on the tomatoes in the vegetable patch; about how someone was sure to pilfer their apples before they were even fully ripe; about the many items she had failed to properly sew, darn, wash or iron; about the sugar and fats ration that she would now never collect; about which of her belongings she needed to take with her and which she did not. It now seemed as if all her belongings were essential: her iron, her meat grinder, the embroidered rug over the bed, and her old, resoled felt boots.
Her husband had accompanied her and Volodya to the corner of the street. She had kept telling him about the many things—some important, some of no importance at all—that he simply mustn’t forget about. But when she looked around and saw his broad, slightly humped back, when she looked for the last time at the apple tree’s leafy crown and the grey roof of her home—all her petty worries fell away. And with a feeling close to fear she realized that there was no one in the world nearer and dearer to her than her old friend and companion. Pavel Andreyev had looked back one last time and disappeared around the corner.
Sitting on the ground by the landing stage were hundreds of people with thin sallow faces: young mothers with children in their arms, unkempt old greybeards in winter coa
ts, the soles of their boots tied on with string. The young mothers’ faces looked empty and drained, as if everything had disappeared but their shining eyes; the belts of their fashionable coats were hung with kettles and flasks. Their children looked pale and weak.
She saw fifteen-year-old girls in blue ski trousers, with heavy hiking boots on their feet and knapsacks strapped across their thin shoulders. There were women her own age or still older, their heads uncovered, their grey hair uncombed and dishevelled. They were sitting with their brown, sinewy hands on their knees, watching the dark, oily water carry away pieces of swollen watermelon peel, a dead fish with white eyes, rotten logs and greasy scraps of paper.
While she still had a home of her own, she had felt cross when she heard these strangers asking the way to the bathhouse, to the port, to the rations-card office or to the market. It was as if they brought disaster with them, as if they were infecting the earth itself with tears, hunger and homelessness. Local women standing in queues—herself among them—had complained angrily, “They’re locusts—they gobble up everything. And look what they’ve done to the prices!” Now, though, to her surprise, it was these same refugees who were able to console her in her seemingly inconsolable pain. All had lost husbands, sons and brothers. All had left their own homes; all had left their stores of firewood and potatoes. All had left behind them unpicked vegetables and unharvested fields; many had left stoves that were still warm.
She talked to a high-cheekboned old woman from Kharkov and marvelled at the similarity of their fates. The woman’s husband was a workshop supervisor. In autumn 1941 he had been evacuated to Bashkiria with his factory. She had then gone to Millerovo, where she had lived for six months with the parents of her eldest son’s wife. Now her two sons were at the front and she was going to join her husband in Bashkiria, along with her daughter-in-law and her grandson. And the young woman sitting next to Varvara, the wife of a commander, said that she and her two children and her mother-in-law were going to live with her sister in Ufa. And an old Jew, a dental technician, said that this was the third time he had been uprooted. First he had moved from Novograd-Volynka to Poltava, then from Poltava to Rossosh, where he had buried his wife, and now he and his two granddaughters were on their way to Central Asia. His daughter, the little girls’ mother, had died of hepatitis before the war, and their father, an engineer in a sugar factory, had been killed in an air raid. While the old man was recounting all this, the girls clung to his jacket and gazed at him as if he were a heroic warrior, even though he looked so frail that you could knock him down with a feather.
The other people on the landing stage had come from towns and villages Varvara had never heard of and they were on their way to many different places—Krasnovodsk, Belebey, Yelabuga, Ufa, Barnaul—yet they had all, essentially, suffered the same fate. The country’s fate and the fate of her people were one and the same; Varvara had never before sensed this so clearly.
Time continued to pass. Steamers dappled with grey and green camouflage paint, their funnels draped with withered branches, set off from the port. “Just like at Whitsun!” Varvara said to herself.50 Volodya had already made friends with some of the other boys and she kept losing sight of him and having to call him back. The clear blue sky was troubling, and she kept gazing up at it. She was growing more and more anxious, and her only solace lay in thinking about her husband.
She was still unable to understand why he hadn’t wanted to leave with her, what made him so determined to carry on working until the very last day. She felt more and more impatient and frightened, but at the same time she felt an ever-greater respect and tenderness towards her old husband. She understood that he hadn’t just acted out of obstinacy or pride. She longed to see him, however fleetingly. But then, once again, she would be overwhelmed by a fear that left no room for any other feelings.
A few small cumulus clouds appeared in the sky. Dark water splashed and gurgled. Paddle wheels struggled noisily against the current. There was anxiety everywhere. It was, of course, all the fault of her daughter-in-law. Probably, she had told her to go to the wrong landing stage and the steamer with the children was already well on its way to Kamyshin.
Not until around midday did Volodya leap out in excitement from behind the stacks of baggage and shout, “They’re here, Grandma! They’re here! Mama’s here too!”
Varvara hurriedly picked up her bags and followed her grandson. There they all were: along with the children, the orphanage staff were walking down the steep cobbled slope to the river. The children were walking in pairs, the eldest in front. Some wore red ties and all had knapsacks and bundles over their shoulders. The adults were shouting and waving their arms about, and the dozens of small hurrying feet were clopping along like hooves.
“Which way?” Varvara asked agitatedly. “Hey, Volodya, where are you? Come here—or we’ll get left behind!”
Varvara was afraid that Tokareva—an imposing woman with a large bust and an angry face—might, at the last moment, refuse to take her on board. And so she kept rehearsing what she would say: “Yes, yes, I’ll do all I can to help the children. I can darn and sew, I can do whatever needs doing.”
As it neared the shore, their launch was caught by a current. As if mocking Varvara for her impatience, it overshot the pier. The helmsman switched the engine on again, and the launch made its way slowly back upstream. The same thing happened a second time, and a third time. Then the elderly captain, a short man with a wrinkled face and a faded forage cap, seemed to lose his temper. After he had yelled and cursed, with the help of a brass megaphone, at the sailors, the helmsman and even the launch itself, everything all of a sudden went smoothly. “Nothing like a few good curses,” Varvara said to herself. “You shouldn’t have held back for so long!”
A ladder with rope rungs was put in place. Two sailors and a policeman with a rifle began to let the passengers on board. There was the sound of children’s boots knocking against the deck, and the rustle of canvas shoes.
“Oi! Granny!” shouted the policeman. But Tokareva called out from the deck, “It’s all right. She’s one of us!”
There was a comfortable-looking spot at the bow, near some crates, but Varvara was afraid the launch might hit a mine. Anyone near the bow would be blown into the air just like that. And so she chose a place at the stern. There was oil everywhere, and the deck was littered with chains and boards, but she could see a small dinghy, and a life-belt hanging close by.
“Grandma,” said Volodya. “Why don’t I stay behind with Grandad?”
“I’ll tie you up like a goat,” she replied, hitching up her skirt to try and keep it out of the oil. “Or maybe you can go and look at the engine. We’ll be off in a moment.”
But the launch took its time.
A truck was supposed to be bringing the linen, the tinned food, the plates and dishes and the children who were too ill to walk, but it was badly delayed, not arriving until after three o’clock. The driver made out that this was because of damage to the suspension, but he had, in fact, been driving with broken springs for the whole of the previous week. His day had begun with a little job he had agreed to do “on the side”; in exchange for some light tobacco, he had delivered a sack of barley from the market to someone’s home. Then he’d needed more petrol. He and one of his mates at the garage had chatted about the military situation for a few minutes—or maybe three-quarters of an hour. Then they’d had a little to drink. This had put the driver in a good mood and he’d bought some tomatoes and some dried fish. Only then had he gone to the children’s home and collected the two boys from the sickbay and all the boxes and trunks. While he was helping to load the launch, the driver picked up a patterned towel that fell out of a bag and tucked it under his seat. He then said goodbye to the director and wished her a good journey.
Last of all, he waved to his friend Klava Sokolova, who was standing on one side of the launch. He had spent the night with her several times and it was she who had persuaded him to take the bo
xes and trunks to the landing stage. “Write, Klava!” he called out, looking at her large breasts, which were resting on the rail. “I’ll come and see you in Saratov.”
Klava laughed, showing her white teeth.
Without waiting for the launch to cast off, he started his engine and drove away. The truck stalled as he was climbing the slope and he had to tinker with the carburettor for a few minutes before he could get started again.
As he continued up the slope, he could hear the engine struggling.
Then he heard the howl of a falling bomb. He pressed his head to the steering wheel, sensed with all his body the end of life, thought with awful anguish, “Fuck that”—and ceased to exist.
34
EVERYONE and everything were now on board; agitation and bustle on the quayside had yielded to agitation and bustle on the deck. In their excitement the children didn’t want to leave the deck for even a second, and only a few girls and the very youngest children went down to their cabins.
Marusya was to accompany the children as far as Kamyshin, where she needed to speak to people from the education section and the Party committee.
She sat down for a while in the cabin with the two boys from the sickbay—Slava Berozkin and the obstinately silent Ukrainian—and fanned her face with her handkerchief.
“A few more minutes and we’ll be on our way!” she said to Tokareva, who had come in just after her. She was proud that it was thanks to her that the children had been allocated this launch. “Let’s just hope we get to Kamyshin without any hitches.”
“I’d never have managed without you,” said Tokareva. “This heat’s really killing me. But maybe it won’t be so bad once we’re out on the water.”
“I’ve just realized,” Marusya said thoughtfully, “that my whole family could have come too. What a shame! They could have come with us to Kamyshin, boarded the steamer there and gone all the way to Kazan.”
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