But the minutes, each of which could have been the last, slowly turned into hours, and unbearable tension gradually gave way to quiet anguish.
“Home, home,” a child’s voice repeated monotonously. “Mama, let’s go home.”
“And so here we sit,” said a woman, “waiting for the end, humiliated and insulted.”53
Zhenya tapped her on the shoulder and said, “No—insulted, but not humiliated.”
“Sh! Sh! There are planes up above,” said a man’s voice behind her.
“Dear God,” said Zhenya, “it’s like being in a mousetrap.”
“Put out that cigarette. People can hardly breathe as it is.”
Feeling sudden hope, Zhenya shouted, “Mama, Mama, are you there?”
Dozens of voices replied, “Sh! Sh! Don’t shout like that!”
As if in confirmation of this absurd fear that the enemy could detect their buried voices, they heard a thin sound overhead. At first barely audible, it grew quickly louder. A harsh roar filled all space, forcing everyone to the ground. The earth let out a loud crack. The entire cellar shook from the blow of a one-ton hammer, dropped from a height of over a mile; stones showered down from the walls and ceiling, and everyone gasped in shock.
It seemed as if darkness would bury them all forever, but at that very moment the electric light came back on, shining on the people now rushing towards the exit. The walls and the whitewashed ceiling were still in place; evidently, the bomb had exploded very close, but not directly above them. The light shone only briefly, but these few seconds of bright, clear light were enough to relieve everyone from the worst fear of all—their sense that they had been abandoned in the bottom of a dungeon. No longer were they cut off from the world; no longer were they mere grains of sand in a storm.
Zhenya caught sight of her mother. There she was, hunched, grey-haired, sitting by the cellar wall. Kissing her mother’s hands, kissing her shoulders and hair, she said, “It’s Stepan, Mama! It’s our Stepan Fyodorovich! He gave us light from Stalgres! Oh, I so want to tell Marusya and Vera. He gave us light at a terrible moment, at the most terrible moment of all! We won’t be broken, Mama. No, our people will never be broken!”
Could Zhenya ever have imagined, as she ran down the street, that she would, that same day, feel not only terror, but also love, faith and even pride?
37
VERA WAS in the hospital, on the stairs between the second and third floors. Suddenly she stopped dead.
The entire building had shuddered. Windowpanes were imploding and chunks of plaster falling to the floor. Vera shrank, covering her face with her hands; she was afraid that flying shards of glass might scar her lips or her cheeks and that Viktorov would never want to kiss her again. Then came more explosions, one after another. The sounds were drawing nearer—any moment now a bomb would fall on the hospital.
A voice up above her called out, “Smoke! Where’s it coming from?”
“Fire!” several voices shouted back. “An incendiary!”
Vera ran down the stairs. It seemed to her that the roof and the staircase were about to come crashing down and that people were shouting at her, trying to catch her, to stop her escaping.
Running down the stairs along with her were cleaning women, assistant nurses, the head of the hospital club, two young women from the pharmacy, the doctor with a moustache from admissions and dozens of wounded from different wards. Above them, on the top floor, they could hear the hospital commissar. Authoritative as always, he was giving orders.
Two of the wounded threw their crutches away and slid down the bannisters on their bellies. They appeared either to be playing some game or to have gone crazy.
Faces Vera knew well now looked completely different; they had turned white and she could hardly recognize them. She thought she must be suffering vertigo and that her vision must be distorted.
At the foot of the stairs, she stopped again. Fixed to the wall above the words BOMB SHELTER was an arrow, and everyone was running in the same direction, following this arrow.
A nearby explosion flung Vera against this same wall.
“If I hide in the shelter,” she thought, “my department head’s sure to send me back up again, to the top floor, maybe even onto the roof.” Instead of entering the shelter, Vera ran out onto the street. Once, before her family moved to Stalgres, she had gone to a school on this street. It was here that she had bought toffees, drunk fizzy water with syrup, fought with the boys, whispered secrets to girlfriends, imitated Auntie Zhenya’s peculiar gait, or hurried along, swinging her bag, because she was afraid of being late for the first lesson.
There was broken brick everywhere, and there was no glass in the windows of her school friends’ apartment blocks. In the middle of the street were a burning car and a soldier’s charred body—his head on the roadway, his feet on the pavement. He looked uncomfortable and she wanted to prop up his dead head, but she ran on.
A quiet little street she knew well—her own little life, now trampled and burnt. Vera was running back to her mother and grandmother, and she knew that this was not to help them, not to save them, but to throw herself into her mother’s arms, to howl, “Mama! Why? Why? Why did you bring me into this world?”—and weep as she had never wept in all her days.
But Vera did not run back home. She stopped and stood for a moment amid the dust and smoke. There was no one beside her, no mother, no grandmother, none of her superiors. The decision she had to take was hers alone.
What made this little girl turn back towards the burning hospital? Did she hear a pitiful cry from a ward where the wounded were still waiting to be taken to the operating theatre? Was she seized by a childish rage at her own cowardice? Did she then feel an equally childish determination to overcome this cowardice? Or was it a sense of mischief, the same love of wildness that had once made her read adventure books, fight with the boys, and clamber over fences to steal from other people’s gardens?
Or did she remember the discipline of the workplace, the disgrace of desertion? Or did she just act at random, without motivation? Or was it an act that, in a natural and predictable manner, subsumed into a single resultant force all the good instilled in her during her life?
Vera walked back, along the burning street of her life. It was no surprise to her to find that Titovna, the bad-tempered cleaning lady, and Babad, the short-sighted doctor, had carried a wounded soldier out on a stretcher, laid him down in the yard and returned to the burning building.
There were many others trying to rescue the wounded. Among them were the hospital commissar; Nikiforov, an orderly who had always seemed rather slow and sullen; a handsome, cheerful political instructor from the convalescent ward; and Ludmila Savvichna, a forty-five-year-old senior nurse whose attempts to remain appealing to men, largely through spending a great deal of money on powder and eau de cologne, had always amused Vera.
There was also Doctor Yukova, who was always kind and talkative; Anna Apollonovna, the housekeeper, suspected of drinking hospital alcohol; and Kvasnyuk, a hospital technical assistant who had also, very recently, been admitted as a patient. He had been injured in a collision with a three-ton truck carrying watermelons but was being discharged early for selling a hospital blanket; he had spent part of the money on vodka and sent the rest to his family. There was a young assistant professor, Viktor Arkadievich, who wore a signet ring and whom the nurses saw as a cold, arrogant Moscow dandy, and many, many other doctors, orderlies and assistant nurses whom Vera had always thought rather uninteresting.
Vera understood at once that all these very different people had something in common, something that bound them together. She even felt surprised that she had not been quicker to see this.
The absence of certain other members of staff, whom one might have expected to be present, did not surprise her.
As for those who were working away in the fire and smoke while bombs exploded all over Stalingrad, they were certainly well aware of her faults. Once, a patient had nee
ded her when she had just sat down for a few minutes to read a few more pages of Alexandre Dumas—and Vera had said, “Oh, for the love of God, let me finish the chapter!” Once, after finishing her own portion, she had eaten the whole of someone else’s portion of the main dish in the hospital canteen. She had several times left work early, without asking permission. She had had an affair with one of the patients. All in all, she was considered cheeky, obstinate and generally troublesome. Nevertheless, no one was surprised when Vera joined them in the burning hospital.
Wiping the sweat off her dirty face, Ludmila Savvichna said to Vera, “So much for the duty doctor and the hospital director—they’ve just vanished into thin air.”
Vera went up into the burning building. When she got to the second floor, someone shouted, “Don’t go any higher. You won’t find anyone still alive up there!”
She went on, up the very same staircase she had run down in panic only half an hour earlier. She made her way to the third floor, through hot smoke. She did this out of a desire to prove to others, to people not afraid of death, that she too was not afraid of death—and that she was quicker and more daring than any of them. But then Vera groped her way, coughing and blinking, into a room where the ceiling had collapsed and that was now full of whirling, burning smoke. When a thin man who had fallen onto the floor stared into her eyes and reached out towards her, his hands almost as pale as the white smoke, she felt such overwhelming emotion that she wondered how there could be room for it in her heart.
Two of the four men left to die in this ward were still alive. Vera remembered how the orderlies had always complained about the hopeless cases being kept so high up—carrying the corpses down three flights of stairs was no easy matter.
She understood from the way these two men looked at her that they had been suffering something still grimmer than the agony of impending death. They had thought they had been abandoned. They had been hating and cursing the human race for forgetting those who must never be betrayed and forgotten, those whose mortal wounds have left them as weak and helpless as a newborn infant.
Vera’s heart filled with motherly love. She understood what her presence meant to these men.
She began to drag one of them out of the ward. The other asked, “Will you come back?”
“Of course,” she said. And she did.
Then she had to be carried out of the building. She heard a doctor say, after a quick glance at her face, “Poor girl. Burns on her chin, her cheek and her forehead. And I fear her right eye may be damaged. Put her on the evacuation list.”
During a brief lull in the bombing, Vera, lying in the hospital garden, saw with her undamaged eye how the old, familiar world had once again blotted out the world revealed to her in the fire. People emerging from the shelter began bustling about and giving orders, and now and then she heard a familiar sound: that of the hospital director shouting loud reprimands.
38
WHETHER they were on the east bank or in Stalingrad itself, everyone imagined that the giant factories must be going through some cataclysm of destruction.
It never entered anyone’s head that all three of these factories—the Barricades, Red October and the Tractor Factory—might still be working as usual, continuing to repair tanks and to produce artillery pieces and heavy mortars.
Everyone operating machine tools, carrying out autogenous welding, working power hammers and presses or adjusting jammed parts of tanks brought in for repair—everyone, of course, experienced difficulties. These difficulties, however, were easier to endure than the agony of awaiting one’s fate in a cellar or bomb shelter. It is easier to face danger when working. War’s manual labourers—sappers, gunners, mortarmen and infantrymen—all know this. Even in peacetime they had found meaning and joy in labour; they knew it could be still more of a comfort at a time of deprivation and loss.
Andreyev’s parting from his wife had been painful. He could remember her timid, bewildered expression—a child’s rather than an old woman’s—as she looked for the last time at the curtained windows and locked door of their empty house and at the face of the man she had lived with for forty years. Once again Andreyev saw the back of Volodya’s head, and his dark neck, as Varvara set off with him towards the river port. Tears clouded Andreyev’s eyes, and the dark, smoky shop floor dissolved in a mist.
Repeated explosions echoed around the steelworks. The cement floor and steel ceilings shook. The stone beds of the furnaces, full of molten steel, trembled from the roar of anti-aircraft guns. Nevertheless, the bitterness of parting and the pain of witnessing the death of a whole way of life—a pain yet more agonizing when you are old—were accompanied by an intoxicating sense of strength and freedom, akin perhaps to what some old man from the Volga might have felt nearly 300 years earlier as he left his house and family to fight alongside Stenka Razin.54
It was a strange feeling, a kind of joy Andreyev had never known before—different from what he had felt when he was first allowed to return to work at the beginning of the war, and no less different from the hours of inexplicable happiness he had experienced from time to time in his youth.
It was as if he could see tall fragrant reeds and the pale bearded face of a man gazing through morning mist at the wild, breathtaking expanse of the Volga.
And, with all the grief, with all the strength of a master worker, he wanted to shout, “Here I am!”—as more than one peasant and worker had shouted during the Civil War, looking down over this same river, ready to sacrifice his life to the cause.
Andreyev looked at the factory’s high glass roof, now covered in soot. Seen through the glass, the pale blue summer sky looked grey and smoky, as if the sun, the sky and the whole universe were also factories, layered with their own grime and soot. He looked at his fellow workers; these hours might be the last they all spent together. Years of his life had gone by here and he had put his heart and soul into his work.
He looked at the furnaces. He looked at the crane sliding carefully and obediently high above people’s heads. He looked at the small shop-floor office, at the apparent chaos of the huge workshop, where in reality everything was as carefully ordered as in the little house with the green roof, the home that his wife had created but now abandoned.
Would Varvara return to the house where they had lived for so many years? Would he ever see her again? Would he ever again see their son, and their grandson? Would he ever again see this shop floor?
39
AS ALWAYS when some catastrophe tests people to the utmost, many of the inhabitants of Stalingrad behaved in unexpected ways.
It has often been said that during a natural disaster people cease to act like human beings, that they become puppets, driven by some blind instinct of self-preservation. And there were indeed people in Stalingrad who pilfered what had been entrusted to them, who looted vodka shops and food depots. There was pushing and shoving, and sometimes fighting, as people tried to board ferries. There were some whose duty was to remain in Stalingrad but who chose to cross to the east bank. There were others who liked to make out they were born warriors but who on this day showed only the most pitiful weakness.
Such observations are often made in a sad whisper, as if they constitute some unpalatable but inescapable final truth. In reality, however, they are only a part of the truth.
Amid the smoke and thunder of exploding bombs, steelworkers at Red October remained by their open-hearth furnaces. The main Tractor Factory workshops—the hot shop and the assembly and repair shops—worked on without a minute’s break. At Stalgres, the engineer in charge of the boiler did not leave his post, even when he was showered from head to foot with shattered brick and glass and a splinter from a heavy bomb took out half of the control lever. There were more than a few policemen, firemen, soldiers and militiamen who died trying to extinguish fires that could not be extinguished. There are many accounts of the wonderful courage of children and of the calm, clear wisdom shown by elderly workers.
At times like t
his, misconceptions are exposed for what they are.
The burning streets of Stalingrad were a testing ground for a true measure of man.
40
SOON AFTER seven o’clock in the evening, a staff car drove at speed onto a German airfield near a small copse of stunted, dust-covered oaks and braked sharply beside a twin-engine plane. The plane’s engines were already running; the pilot had started them when the staff car first reached the airfield. Wearing a flying suit and holding a side cap in one hand, General Richthofen, commander of the 4th Air Fleet, emerged from the car. Ignoring the greetings of the technicians and mechanics, he strode up to the plane and began to climb the ladder. He looked strong and vigorous, with a broad back and muscular thighs. Sitting in the seat usually occupied by the radio operator, he put on an aviator cap with headphones and then, like all airmen preparing for a flight, took a quick, casual look at the people he was leaving behind on the ground. He fidgeted for a moment, then settled into position on the hard low seat.
The engines howled and roared. The grey grass trembled, a huge plume of white dust shot out, like glowing steam, from beneath the plane.
The plane took off, gathered height and flew east. At an altitude of 2,000 metres, the plane was met by its escort of Fokkers and Messerschmitts.
The fighter pilots would have liked to chat and joke on their radios in their usual way, but they knew that the general would hear what they said.
Half an hour later Richthofen was flying over the burning city. Lit by the setting sun, the cataclysmic scene was clearly visible 4,500 metres below him. In the fierce heat, white smoke had risen high into the sky; this bleached smoke, purified by height, had spread out in wavy forms much like white clouds. Below these white clouds rolled a heaving, seething ball of thicker, heavier smoke; it was as if some Himalayan peak were slowly dragging itself out of the earth’s womb, spewing out thousands of tons of hot, dense ores of different colours—black, ash-grey and reddish-brown. From time to time a hot, bronze flame would shoot up from the depths of this vast cauldron, scattering sparks for thousands of metres.
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