He held out a large rectangular parcel, wrapped in crisp parchment paper tied with a plaited silk cord.
“I serve the Soviet Union,”42 she replied in a hoarse voice as she took the parcel from the commissar’s hands.
In his ordinary, everyday voice, Shvedkov said, “Open it now. We’re curious too. We want to know what the American women have sent you.”
Lena removed the cord and began to unwrap the parcel. The crinkly paper squeaked and rustled. There were many different items inside, some very small, and she squatted down to prevent anything falling out and getting lost. There was a beautiful woollen blouse, embroidered with a red, blue and green pattern; a fluffy bathrobe with a hood; two pairs of lacy trousers with matching shirts adorned with little ribbons; three pairs of silk stockings; some tiny lace-embroidered handkerchiefs; a white dress made from fine lawn, also trimmed with lace; a jar of some fragrant lotion; and a flask of perfume tied with a broad ribbon.
Lena looked at the two commanders. There was a moment of silence around the station, as if to prevent anything from disturbing the grace and delicacy of her expression. Her look said a great deal: not only that she knew she would never now become a mother but also that she took a certain pride in her harsh fate.
As she stood there in the pit, in her soldier’s boots and badly fitting uniform, about to refuse these exquisite gifts, Lena Gnatyuk looked overwhelmingly feminine.
“What use is all this?” she said. “I don’t want it.”
The two men felt troubled. They understood something of the young woman’s feelings—her pride, her understanding that she was doomed and her mistaken belief that she looked awkward and ugly.
Shvedkov felt the edge of the woollen blouse between his fingers and said in embarrassment, “This is good wool. It’s not just any old cloth.”
“I’ll leave everything here. It’s no use to me,” Lena repeated. She put the parcel down in a corner and wiped her hands on her tunic.
Filyashkin examined the contents of the parcel and said, “These stockings aren’t so very strong—they’ll ladder in no time at all. But they’re pretty. You could wear them to a ball.”
“And when will I be going to a ball?” Lena retorted.
At this point Shvedkov got angry, which helped him to resolve a thorny international issue of a kind he had not encountered before.
“All right then. If you don’t want them, don’t take them. Quite right! What’s got into those people? Do they think Stalingrad is some kind of holiday resort? Are they making fun of us? Silk stockings and bathrobes—whatever next!” He glanced at Filyashkin and said, “I’ll go and have a look round now. I need to have a word with the men.”
“All right, you go ahead, and I’ll follow,” Filyashkin said hurriedly. “I’ve just checked the area around here. Move carefully—there are German snipers only 150 metres away. The least sound—and you’re a goner.”
“Permission to leave?” Lena asked as Shvedkov crept away.
“Just a moment,” said Filyashkin. He always felt awkward when he was first left alone with a young woman, exchanging the tone of a commander for that of a lover. “Listen, Lena,” he went on, “this is important. Forgive me. During the march I behaved grossly and presumptuously. Stay here so we can say a proper goodbye. We may not live through another day. There’s nothing that won’t be written off by the war.”
“As far as I’m concerned, comrade Battalion Commander, there isn’t anything to be written off,” Lena replied. Taking a deep breath, she went on, “First, there’s no need for anyone at all to forgive you. I’m not a little girl, I know what’s what and I’m responsible for myself. When I went to your hut, I knew very well what I was doing. Second, I won’t be staying here—I must return to the aid post. Third, I’ve got my own uniform and I don’t need any of these gifts. Permission to leave?”
Her last sentence no longer sounded like a conventional formula.
“Lena,” said Filyashkin. “Lena . . . do you really not understand?” His voice sounded very strange. Lena looked at him in astonishment. He got to his feet, as if to say something important, but then he just said with a smile, “All right then.” After pointing towards the west, he went on in a calm, flat voice, “Don’t let yourself be taken prisoner. Keep that captured pistol at hand, the one I gave you, just in case . . .”
She shrugged and replied, “And fourth, I can shoot myself just as well with my own revolver.”
And she left, not looking back at the senior lieutenant, nor at the fine, useless rags now lying on the ground.
43
IN THE twilight, as she made her way to the aid post, Lena Gnatyuk came to the 3rd Company’s command post.
A sub-machine-gunner challenged her, but he recognized her at once and said, “Ah, Senior Sergeant, please pass.”
She felt momentarily disorientated: Was Senior Sergeant Gnatyuk really the same being as the young girl who, two years earlier, in Podyvotye, in the province of Sumy, had worked as a brigade leader during the beet harvest? Was she really the girl who had come back home in the evening and called out merrily to her mother, “Come on, Mama, give me some food! I’m starving!”?
Kovalyov was asleep, leaning against a large beam that propped up the basement ceiling. There was a candle nearby, stuck on top of an upturned brick. Hand grenades lay scattered about the floor, like netted fish thrown onto the ground.
Kovalyov’s sub-machine gun lay on his lap. His blackened hands were clasping his kitbag against his stomach.
Lena walked over to him, stumbling on the empty sub-machine-gun magazines that littered the floor.
“Misha, Misha!” she called out. She touched him on the sleeve, then took his hand. Out of habit, she felt his pulse.
“What is it?” he asked. He opened his eyes but didn’t move. “Is that you, Lena?”
“Are you tired?” she asked.
“Just resting a little,” he replied. As if excusing himself, he went on, “Yes, the sergeant major’s on duty, and I’m resting.
“Misha!” she repeated quietly. “I’ve come to say goodbye.”
“Off to the rear, are you? To the other bank?”
“To the other world, more likely. Like all of us.”
Kovalyov yawned.
“Misha,” she said quietly.
“Hm?”
“Are you angry with me?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Misha, you don’t understand.”
“Let me be, Lena,” he replied. “Really, there’s nothing to say. I’ve got a girl waiting for me back at home. What’s there to say goodbye about?”
She suddenly clung to him, laying her head on his shoulder.
“Misha, we may only have one more hour,” she said hurriedly. “What I did that night doesn’t mean anything. I was being stupid—surely you can see that? There were so many wounded today. They kept bringing in more and more of them—and I rushed over every time in case you were there . . . Something came over me that night. I don’t know why, sometimes people just don’t know what they’re doing. Ask any of the girls from the medical unit—they all know how much I love you. I’ve just come from the battalion command post. I didn’t even want to look at the man. Please, please, I beg you—believe me! Believe me! Don’t be so obstinate! Why won’t you understand?”
“Maybe I don’t understand, comrade Gnatyuk . . . But you understand too much. With me, you get what you see. I’m simple, I’ve no secrets. Go ahead, understand all you like. But I don’t need to ’cos, unlike some folks, I don’t cheat.”
And as if seeking support for his difficult decision, Kovalyov held his cherished kitbag still closer, stroking it with his palm.
For a few moments they said nothing. Then, in a loud voice, he said, “You have permission to leave, comrade Senior Sergeant.”
He wanted to put an end to this conversation, and these were the words that came to him. He could feel in every cell of his body, in his back and in the nape of his neck, how deep
ly wrong these wooden words sounded.
There were two soldiers lying on the ground. They both sat up and looked around sleepily, wondering who had just been reporting to their company commander.
44
YAKHONTOV was lying on a pile of greatcoats removed from the dead. He was not moaning or groaning. His eyes dark, his pupils dilated by suffering, he was gazing almost greedily at the sky, which was dotted with stars.
“Go away, you’re hurting me!” he yelled in a whisper to the orderly trying to move him. “Let me be, your hands are like stone!”
Next, he could see the face of a woman, and he could sense her breath. Tears were falling on his forehead and cheeks. He thought they were drops of rain.
Then he realized that they were tears. If they seemed hot, and if the hand now stroking him seemed hot, it was because life was departing from him. The touch of a living body felt hot to him, just as it might if he were a piece of cold metal or wood. And he thought it was because of him that the woman was crying.
“You’re good and kind. Don’t cry, I’ll feel better in a while,” he said, but the young woman didn’t hear this. He thought he was pronouncing words, but all she heard was a gurgle.
Lena Gnatyuk did not sleep that night.
“Don’t shout, don’t shout, the Germans are very close,” she said to a soldier with two broken legs. Stroking his forehead and cheeks, she went on, “Be patient. In the morning we’ll send you to the army hospital. They’ll put your legs in plaster.”
She went over to another of the wounded. The soldier with the broken legs called out, “Mother, come back, I need to ask you something.”
“In a minute, my son,” she replied. To her, and to everyone there it seemed entirely natural for a man with grey stubble to be calling her “Mother,” and for her, aged twenty-four, to be calling him “my son.”
“Will they sedate me?” he asked. “It won’t hurt when they put me in plaster?”
“It won’t hurt. Be brave. Be brave until morning.”
In the dawn light, as it went into a dive over the railway station, the nose and wings of the Stuka turned pink. A high-explosive bomb fell in the pit where Lena Gnatyuk and two orderlies were caring for the wounded. Every last breath of life was cut short.
A cloud of dust and smoke, reddish brown in the light of the rising sun, hung in the air for a long time. Then a breeze off the Volga dispersed it over the steppe to the west of the city.
45
BY ELEVEN o’clock in the morning the situation around the railway station was truly hellish. Amid dust and smoke from fierce mortar and artillery fire, amid black clouds from exploding bombs, to the accompaniment of whining aeroplane engines and the rattle of Messerschmitt machine guns, the battalion—or rather its last remnants—continued to fight off the German attack.
Out of their minds from pain, men lay in pools of blood or crawled about, desperately searching for shelter. Cries and groans mingled with the sound of yelled-out commands and bursts of fire from machine guns and anti-tank rifles. But each time the German artillery fell silent, each time the German foot soldiers, bent almost double, ran forward—each time the Germans thought the battle was over, the mute, dead, ploughed-up ruins of the railway station and its surrounding buildings came back to life.
Filyashkin was lying on a pile of used cartridges, holding down the trigger of a machine gun. He glanced round at Shvedkov, who had a sub-machine gun. Shvedkov was a poor shot, but he was firing away diligently.
The Germans were attacking yet again.
“Stop!” Filyashkin called out to himself, realizing that he needed to move the machine gun to a new location. Seizing hold of the barrel, he shouted to his number two, a young soldier who was looking at his commander with devotion and reverence, “Quick—help me drag it over here, beside this wall!”
While they were setting up the machine gun, Filyashkin was wounded in the left shoulder. He thought this was a very slight wound, a mere cut.
“Bandage my shoulder!” he said to Shvedkov, unbuttoning his tunic collar. “Use some of that tat Lena Gnatyuk didn’t want.” But then he pushed Shvedkov’s hand away. “No, they’re at it again,” he said, and began aiming his machine gun. “I began as a machine-gunner,” he muttered, “and now I’m a machine-gunner once more.” Then he turned to his number two, to ask for another ammo belt.
Filyashkin was issuing commands to himself and then carrying them out himself. He was, at one and the same time, sub-unit commander, forward observer and machine-gunner.
“Enemy 300 metres ahead and to the left!” he shouted in the role of observer.
“Aim at attacking infantry, half a belt, continuous fire!” he shouted in the role of commander. Gripping the backplate handle, he slowly moved it from left to right.
The sight of some grey-green Germans leaping up from behind a mound made him almost choke with fury. Rather than thinking that he had to defend himself against a sly, crafty, advancing enemy, he saw himself as the attacker.
A single simple thought, like an echo from the grinding fire of his machine gun, now took up all of Senior Lieutenant Filyashkin’s consciousness. This thought furnished him with an explanation for everything of importance: his success and disappointments, his feeling of condescension to those of his peers who were still mere lieutenants, and his envy of those who had already reached the rank of major or lieutenant colonel. “I began as a machine-gunner and I’m ending as a machine-gunner.” This simple, clear thought was an answer to all that had troubled him during the last few hours. To machine-gunner Filyashkin, everything bad and painful in his life had ceased to matter.
Shvedkov never managed to bandage Filyashkin’s shoulder with strips of cloth torn off a bathrobe. Filyashkin suddenly lost consciousness, smashed his chin against the back of the machine gun and fell dead to the ground.
A German artillery observer had been watching Filyashkin’s machine gun for some time. When it went quiet, he suspected a ruse.
Shvedkov never kissed the battalion commander’s dead lips. He never had time to mourn him, nor to feel the burden of command he should have assumed after Filyashkin’s death. Shvedkov was killed by a well-aimed shell that landed right in the embrasure of his little hiding place.
•
Kovalyov was now the battalion’s senior commander, but he did not know this—he had lost contact with Filyashkin at the beginning of the German attack.
Kovalyov no longer looked in the least like the shock-headed, bright-eyed young man who, two days before, had been rereading inscriptions on photographs and verses copied down in a school exercise book. Not even his own mother would have recognized this exhausted-looking man as her son—with his hoarse voice, inflamed eyes and locks of grey, dust-layered hair glued to his forehead.
He was severely concussed and his ears were clicking and ringing. His head felt as if it were on fire. Blood was pouring from his nose, tickling his chin and soaking his chest, and he had to keep wiping it away with his hand.
Walking had become difficult. He had fallen to the ground several times, crawling some distance on all fours before he could get back onto his feet.
Despite the hours of shelling and repeated infantry attacks, his company had suffered somewhat fewer casualties than the battalion’s other companies and sub-units.
Kovalyov had gathered his remaining men into a tight circle and they were keeping up a surprisingly dense, concentrated fire. When the Germans attacked, it was as if the dead took up arms again and were standing shoulder to shoulder with the living.
Through the dust and smoke he could see tense, grim faces. His men were firing their sub-machine guns, flattening themselves against the ground while shells exploded around them, leaping to their feet again and shooting, then falling silent as they watched the grey-green creatures advance from all sides.
These moments of silence as the enemy drew nearer brought with them a complex mixture of fear and joy.
Backs, arms and necks tightened. Fingers
gripped the levers of hand grenades, pulled the safety pins and waited. All the tension the men felt as the Germans approached was concentrated in their grip.
And then the air would fill with dust and the din would make it impossible to think.
To Kovalyov the sound of the Soviet grenades was entirely distinct from that of the German grenades—as distinct as the voices of people from Nizhny Novgorod, with their long, accented o’s, from the guttural cries of Berliners and Bavarians. And even if the defenders’ yells were inaudible in the din, there was no doubt that the anti-tank grenades booming over the railway station, over the city as a whole and even over the Volga, were yelling out the most terrible of Russian curses.
The dust would disperse. From the stony murk would emerge piles of rubble, dead bodies, smashed German tanks, a gun lying on its side, a collapsed bridge and abandoned, eyeless houses. And as the German infantry once again got ready to attack, their artillery would return, with renewed determination, to its task of pounding people and stone.
Kovalyov lived through a great deal in these minutes.
Sometimes his consciousness would dim and nothing remained but a sense of speed and desperate determination, as if there were no longer anything in the world but grey running figures and the grinding of tanks. The Germans would advance in small groups, usually on a diagonal. Sometimes it seemed they were only pretending to advance and that their real aim was to retreat. It looked as if someone were pushing them from behind and they were charging forward to escape this invisible pressure, then running about from side to side before they scattered and turned back. Kovalyov would want to put an end to their deceptive game. Calmly and carefully, he would choose his target, his sharp eyes swiftly determining whether an enemy had dropped flat, found shelter, fallen down dead or was just slightly wounded.
Stalingrad Page 100