“Vera, come here,” he would call in a calm, clear voice. And then, after a brief silence, “Vera, what’s keeping you?”
He couldn’t understand why his wife was being so slow. For a while he said nothing. Then a new thought came to his feverish mind, “Semyonovich . . . Pyotr . . . What do you think? Will they open a second front soon?”
“Sh!” said Vavilov. “Be quiet.”
“I want to know if they’re going to open a second front. Yes or no?” Rysev whispered angrily. Then, at the top of his voice, “Can’t you hear me? I want to know. Or are you that blind you think it doesn’t concern you?”
Rezchikov put his hand over Rysev’s mouth. “Stop it, you fool!”
“Leave me alone, leave me alone,” muttered Rysev. He was choking, trying to push his mate’s hand away.
The Germans heard. A few bursts of blood-coloured tracer fire whizzed overhead and some Germans called out anxiously to one another by their first names. Then everything went quiet. Most likely, the Germans had decided it was just a dying man calling out in delirium. Which it was.
“Who’s there?” Vavilov asked abruptly.
There was the quiet knock of a falling stone. Someone was creeping towards them.
“It’s me, it’s me!” came the voice of Usurov. “And you’re still alive! I thought the Germans had finished you off.” After a pause, he added, “Give me a smoke!”
“First, cover yourself with your greatcoat,” said Vavilov.
Usurov lay down beside Rysev and very slowly, repeatedly snuffling and clearing his throat, pulled his greatcoat over his head.
“How do I recognize them in the dark?” Usurov wondered aloud, sticking his head out from under his greatcoat. His need to talk to his comrades must have been stronger than his wish to smoke. He put out his cigarette and said in a quick whisper, “One of them was creeping along. There was something different about him. He didn’t move quite like us and the noise he made was different too, more like the noise of an animal. But I didn’t dare shoot, I just used my hands.”
Mulyarchuk was building walls, working quickly and quietly.
“You’re a good builder,” whispered Rezchikov, not wanting to hear what Usurov was saying.
“I used to be a stove maker,” Mulyarchuk replied. “I was thinking just now how good life used to be. After work, I would go straight back home. I lived in the district town.”
“It’s quietened down now,” said Vavilov. “Probably they’ll stay quiet till dawn. But don’t talk too loud!”
“Are you married?” Usurov asked Mulyarchuk.
“No, I lived with my mother, in Polonnoye,” Mulyarchuk answered, glad to feel that his life was of interest to someone. He went on, “My mother’s a good woman. And I was a good son to her, I gave her everything I earned. But she worried a lot. If there was an evening meeting or if anything held me up, she’d come out and look for me. I didn’t drink and I didn’t go out with women. I was a stove maker in the district-town kolkhoz.”
“I was a widower, and there were no children,” said Rezchikov. Like Mulyarchuk, he now spoke about himself in the past tense. “Oh, brother, how I loved vodka! I loved vodka like a cat loves milk, and the women loved me. They never said no.”
“Let’s just sit here together,” said Usurov. “We’ve got until dawn. And forget that wall—we can’t keep death away now.”
“True,” said Vavilov. “I just thought we should keep working, to make death less frightening.”
“But we’re fucked,” said Usurov. “Maybe we should just shoot ourselves?”
“What I think,” said Vavilov, “is that we should all sit here together, till dawn. And why shoot ourselves? We’re not out of ammunition yet.”
“Tell us one of your stories, Rezchikov,” said Usurov.
“I’ve been telling stories all my life,” said Rezchikov. “I’ve not got much longer. Let me be quiet for a minute before death.”
Articulating each syllable, wanting his words to be remembered, Mulyarchuk said, “My mother was called Marya Grigorievna, and I’m Mikola Mefodievich.”
It upset Mulyarchuk to think that, unless he told them now, his comrades would never know about the beauty of the small town of Polonnoye in summer and the excellence of the local sugar refineries. Nor would they know that his mother was a kind and good woman and a skilled dressmaker. In a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, he went on, “My mother could sew anything she turned her hand to, but she did most of her work for the peasants nearby. Coats and quilted jackets for the men in winter; sachki—that’s winter jackets for the village women; and the bright-coloured waistcoats they call korsetki; and lyshtvi—embroidered skirts for the holy days; and then plain skirts, light summer jackets . . . Yes, there was nothing she couldn’t do . . . As for me, I made stoves. Big stoves, little stoves, stoves with sleeping benches . . . Eight years I worked—in Polonnoye, Yampol and the villages round about. People said I made good stoves.”
Calmly, without fear of the Germans, Vavilov struck a match and lit a cigarette. Everyone saw two black tears flow down his grimy cheeks.
“Go on, Mulyarchuk,” he said. “Say more! I was going to rebuild our own stove, during the summer.”
Usurov bent down to get a light from Vavilov. The light fell on his huge palms.
“Wounded in the hands?”
“No, that’s not my blood. I felled two of them with a spade. While I was creeping towards you.” With a sob, Usurov added, “We’re like wild beasts now.” Then, listening intently, and almost gasping, he said, “There’s no sound from Rysev, he’s stopped breathing.” He stood up, sat down again and looked around. “The sky’s like a fur coat. The clouds are never this thick in Samarkand, not even in July.” He touched Rezchikov anxiously. “Don’t sleep, don’t sleep. Sit and talk a little longer.”
“Don’t be afraid, Usurov,” said Vavilov. “Better men than us have died already. I just wish I could see my home again, just for a minute. But death’s nothing, it’s no different from sleep.”
“And you’ve still got a bar of chocolate to give to your daughter,” Rezchikov said with a smile.
A Soviet flare appeared over the Volga. It ripened like an ear of wheat—first wax-coloured, next a milky white, then yellow. Then it drooped, faded and scattered its grains. And the night turned even blacker.
The men waited silently for the dawn, exchanging only an occasional word. There is no knowing what they thought, or whether they even dozed for a few minutes. Later, though, they were on guard, watching avidly, anxiously and submissively as light came silently into being, out of the darkness that filled both heaven and earth.
The earth around them turned a more solid black, while the still-dark sky began to separate from it, as if the earth had drawn off a little of the sky’s darkness and this darkness was peeling away, settling on the earth in silent flakes. There was already not one dark in the world but two: the calm, even dark of the sky and the dense, crazed dark of the earth.
And then the sky lightened a little, as if touched by ash, while the earth went on filling with darkness. The line separating sky and earth began to break up, to lose its straightness; small bumps and notches appeared on the earth’s surface. But this was not yet light on earth; it was darkness being made more apparent as the sky grew brighter. Then clouds appeared. One of them—the highest and smallest—let out something like a sigh, and a hint of pink, living warmth touched its cold, pale face.
Down by the Volga, half-sleeping soldiers from other battalions of the 13th Guards Division heard a sudden commotion from the railway station: hand grenades, rounds of machine-gun fire, shouts of German, rifle shots, mortar bombs, the rumble of a tank.
“Still fighting,” they said in amazement. “They’re a tough lot!”
But not one of these Soviet soldiers saw the sun’s slant rays fall for a moment on a middle-aged man as he climbed out of a black pit, threw a grenade, and looked all around him, his bright, alert gaze out of keeping with his
torn clothes and the black, bristly stubble on his sunken cheeks.
Vying with one another, German machine guns greedily opened fire on this man. He stood there in a cloud of bright yellow dust. When he was no longer to be seen, it was as if, rather than collapsing in a dead bloody lump, he had dissolved in the dusty, milky, yellowish mist swirling in the morning sun.
47
GERMAN burial teams worked all through the following day, collecting the bodies of German soldiers and officers and loading them onto trucks.
On a deserted hill on the city’s western outskirts, surveyors marked out grave sites. Special detachments prepared coffins, crosses, turf, pebbles and bricks; they brought in sand to sprinkle on the paths of the new cemetery.
The crosses were perfectly aligned; the distance between each two graves, and between each two rows of graves, was always the same. And the trucks kept on coming, raising clouds of dust as they brought in the dead, along with empty coffins and sturdy, factory-made crosses impregnated with a chemical compound to protect them from damp.
On small rectangular plaques, a team of painters stencilled in black Gothic script the first name, surname, rank, and date of birth of each of the dead.
There were hundreds of different names and surnames, hundreds of different birth dates, but every plaque bore the same date of death—the day of the storming of the railway station.
•
Lenard and Bach wandered about the ruins, looking at the bodies of the Soviet soldiers.
Lenard sometimes touched these bodies with the toes of his elegant boots, wondering if they might contain some secret. What, he wanted to know, was the hidden source of the grim, monstrous obstinacy of these men now lying dead on the ground? They looked strangely small, with their grey or yellowish faces, in their green tunics and rough boots, with their black or green puttees.
Some lay with outstretched arms; others were sitting; others had curled up in a ball, as if feeling the cold. Many lay beneath a thin sprinkling of stone and earth. There was a kirza boot with a broken heel, sticking out of a shell hole. A thin, wiry man had collapsed with his chest pressed against the overhang of a wall. His small hand was still gripping the lever of a grenade, but his skull was shattered; he must have been killed as he rose to throw the grenade.
“This pit is like a whole storehouse of corpses,” said Bach. “To start with, they must have been bringing all their dead here. Look—it’s like a social club. Some are sitting, others lying down, and this one here could be delivering a speech.”
Another pit was more like a bunker; it must have served as a command post. Among shattered beams, the two officers found a broken radio transmitter and the splintered green case of a field telephone.
A commander lay with his head against a machine gun with a crushed, twisted barrel. Close beside him lay a man with a commissar’s star on his sleeve. Hunched by the entrance was an ordinary soldier, probably a telephonist.
There was a haversack lying on the ground by the commissar. With a look of distaste, Lenard picked it up between thumb and finger and ordered a soldier to take the map case off the officer leaning on the machine gun. “Take it along to HQ,” he added. “Our translator should have a look at it.”
“This is very different from one of our abandoned trenches,” said Bach, holding a handkerchief to his nose. “Ours are usually surrounded by piles of newspapers and magazines, but here there’s only a pile of shit.”
“They may not have wiped their arses,” Lenard replied, “but I’ve noticed something more important. This was a command post. These men were officers and, judging by the way their corpses have swelled up, they were killed on the first day of fighting. We’ve always assumed that Russian soldiers lack initiative. But it appears that the rank and file soldiers here at the station kept on fighting like stubborn beasts—even without their officers.”
“Let’s go,” said Bach. “The smell turns my stomach. I won’t be able to eat tinned meat for days.”
They caught sight of a small group of German soldiers.
“Look,” said Bach. “The comradeship of soldiers!”
He gestured towards Stumpfe, who had put his arm around Ledeke and was pretending to push him onto a corpse that had one arm sticking up in the air.
“You’re a sentimental fool,” Lenard burst out in sudden irritation.
“What do you mean?” replied Bach. He felt startled. Was Lenard sneering at him because of his long confession during that first night in Stalingrad? He had been a fool to talk like that to a Nazi, to an SS lieutenant rumoured to be a member of the Gestapo. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Don’t you think that comradeship between soldiers is a wonderful thing?”
Lenard did not reply. He was unable to say that this same Stumpfe, whom everyone so loved, had recently handed him a written denunciation of Ledeke and Vogel, accusing them of voicing subversive opinions.
The two officers went on their way, while the soldiers continued wandering about the ruins.
Ledeke glanced down into a semi-basement with a collapsed ceiling.
“This must have been an aid station,” he said.
“Look, Ledeke, a woman!” said Vogel. “Specially for you!”
“There’s quite a stench.”
“Don’t worry. Soon they’ll round up some civilians to come and bury all this.”
Ledeke glanced casually at the dead bodies and said, “We won’t find anything much here. I doubt we’d find even a decent towel or a handkerchief.”
Stumpfe, however, continued working away, kicking mugs and mess tins to one side and diligently checking through the meagre contents of haversacks.
In one haversack he found a chocolate bar wrapped in a clean white cloth.
Among some notebooks, papers and letters in a lieutenant’s kitbag, he found a penknife, a small mirror, and a quite decent razor. He paused, then threw them away.
But eventually his diligence was rewarded. When Lenard and Bach left the commanders’ dugout, Stumpfe went down into it himself. In one corner he came across a package half-buried by clay.
It turned out to contain elegant women’s clothing. Everything was brand new; none of it had even been tried on. Stumpfe was overjoyed. He even began to sing.
“Look!” he shouted. “Look what I’ve found here! A bathrobe! A shirt with lace edging! Silk stockings! A bottle of perfume!”
48
MARYA Nikolaevna Vavilova woke up early in the morning, sometime before five, and quietly called out to her daughter, “Nastya, Nastya, time to get up!”
Nastya stretched, rubbed her eyes and began to get dressed. Frowning crossly and lamenting how tired she still felt, she began to comb her hair. To help wake herself up, she tugged violently on the comb.
Marya cut some bread for little Vanya, who was still asleep, poured out some milk and covered the mug with a towel, not wanting the cat to help herself to the milk before Vanya got up. Then she went over to the trunk and put away the awl, the bread knife and the matches—dangerous items in which Vanya had been known to take a special interest during his long, lonely mornings. She wagged her finger at the cat and looked expectantly at Nastya, who was still drinking her milk.
“Time we were off!” she said.
“For heaven’s sake, let me at least finish my bread!” said Nastya, sounding like an old village woman. She let out a sigh and added, “Ever since you were appointed brigade leader, you’ve been unbearable.”
Marya went towards the door, looked around the room, came back again, opened the trunk, took out a piece of sugar and put it under the towel along with Vanya’s bread and milk.
“What’s got into you?” she said to Nastya. She didn’t need to look at her to realize that she was upset. “You’re not little any longer. You’ll manage.”
When they were outside, Marya looked at the road ahead and said quietly, “It’s four months to the day since your father left.”
Seeming to understand what her mother was thinking, Nastya said,
“Do you really think I begrudge Vanya his sugar? He can have all the sugar he wants. I don’t even like sugar any longer.”
After the close air of the hut Marya found it a joy to be walking along a country track still moist with dew, to look at places beloved since childhood, and to allow any last trace of tiredness to dissolve in the rhythm of her stride.
In the light of the September sun, the winter wheat looked thick and silky; stirred by the east wind, it seemed like a single creature, alive and young, testing its strength, rejoicing in life, light and the pleasing cool of the air. The shoots’ feathery tops were almost transparent, allowing the rays of sunlight to pass right through them. A greenish light shimmered over the whole field.
Each tiny shoot had its tender, timid charm. Each stout, whitish stalk was straight as an arrow and endowed with a stubborn strength. Each stalk had laboured hard to fight its way up; its green shoulders had pushed aside clods of earth equivalent to huge blocks of granite.
And everything about this young wheat—its green charm, its translucence, its freedom from care—was in sharp contrast to the brown grass round about, to the yellowing aspen and birch leaves and the general autumnal sadness. This piercing green was the only young life in a fading world of grey, lifeless gossamer and small clouds already pregnant with snow. Tall fir trees stretched their heavy branches over the track, but their sullen, dusty green was of a different order.
Nevertheless, for all its bright richness, this winter wheat was not like the shoots and blossoms of spring. Its close ranks, its tautness and density signalled an alert wariness. It was preparing for what was to come; long before it was fully grown, it would encounter storms and blizzards.
The young shoots were like soldiers, standing shoulder to shoulder, ready to confront whatever fate threw at them. And when an absentminded cloud passed over the sun and its broad shadow drifted silently across the fields and onto the winter wheat, the shoots turned so dark as to be almost black, their wary, grim strength now more apparent than ever.
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