Spiridonov came back again only late at night. He tiptoed to his bed.
“I’m not asleep,” said Vera. “You can turn on the light.”
“I don’t need to. I’m only lying down for an hour—I won’t even undress. I have to go straight back to work.”
“How have things been today?”
“A shell hit the boiler-house wall. Two burst in the yard and some of the windows in the turbine hall have been smashed.”
“Anyone wounded?”
“No. But why aren’t you asleep?”
“I don’t feel like it. I can’t. It’s stifling in here.”
“I heard at HQ that the Germans have broken through to the Kuporosnoye Gully again. You must leave, Vera. I’m afraid for you. You’re all I have now. I must answer to your mother for you.”
“You know I’m not leaving, so why keep on about it?”
They remained silent for some time, both looking into the darkness, the father conscious that his daughter was lying awake, the daughter conscious that her father was worrying about her.
“Why are you sighing?” asked the father.
“I’m glad about Pavel Andreyevich,” said Vera, not answering the question.
“Nikolaev came up to me and said, ‘What’s up with our Verochka? Something’s the matter with her.’ What is it? Are you worrying about your fighter pilot?”
“Nothing’s the matter with me.”
“I was only asking.”
There was a brief silence. Spiridonov could sense that Vera was still wide awake.
“Papa,” Vera said all of a sudden, in a loud voice, “I’ve got something to tell you.”
Spiridonov sat up. “Yes, my girl.”
“Papa, I’m going to have a baby.”
Spiridonov got up, walked around the room, coughed and said, “Well . . .”
“But please don’t turn on the light.”
“I wasn’t going to.” Spiridonov went to the window, lifted the blackout curtain and said, “That’s . . . I really . . . I don’t know what to say.”
“Why? Are you angry?”
“When are you due?”
“Not till winter.”
“Ye-es,” Spiridonov said slowly. “It really is stifling in here. Let’s go out into the yard.”
“All right, I’ll get dressed. You go on out, Papa. I’ll join you in a moment.”
Spiridonov went out into the yard. It was a cool, starry night, with no moon. The large insulators of the high-voltage cables to the transformer were white and shining. Through gaps between the Stalgres buildings he caught glimpses of a dark, dead city. From the factory district to the north came occasional lightning flashes of artillery and mortar fire. Then a blur of light flickered briefly over the dark streets, as if a huge bird were sleepily flapping a pink wing; a night bomber must have dropped a large bomb.
The sky was full of sounds and movement. There were green and red threads of tracer fire. And high above him, at that impossible height that is both height and abyss, shone the autumn stars.
Spiridonov heard his daughter’s light steps behind him. Then she was standing beside him. He could sense her alert gaze.
Turning towards her, he looked at her intently, shocked by the sudden force of his feelings. In her sad, thin face, in her dark, staring eyes, he saw not only the weakness of a small helpless being, a child waiting anxiously for her father to speak, he could also see a remarkable and beautiful power, a power with the strength to triumph over the death now storming across the earth and through the sky.
He put his arms around Vera’s thin shoulders and said, “Don’t be afraid, my daughter—we’ll manage. We won’t let your little one come to harm.”
52
ALTOGETHER, the fighting in the centre of the city and on the southern outskirts lasted for approximately two weeks.
On 18 September, Yeromenko ordered the 62nd Army to counterattack, to prevent the Germans from transferring troops to the factory district in the north. Soviet forces deployed to the north-west of Stalingrad attacked at the same time.
Neither offensive met with success. The Germans still held their positions by the Volga, splitting the Soviet front line.
On 21 September, five German divisions—two tank, two infantry and one motor infantry—attacked the city centre. The main blow fell on Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Division and the two infantry brigades. The fighting was fiercer still on the following day.
Rodimtsev repelled twelve attacks. The Germans eventually forced him to withdraw from the city centre, but Rodimtsev counter-attacked, throwing his reserves into the fight and regaining some of the ground he had lost. And from that day, though unable to recapture the city centre, Rodimtsev kept an unshakable hold on the stretch of ground further east, along the shore of the Volga.
The focus of the battle then crept slowly northwards, away from Rodimtsev’s positions and towards the factory district. Throughout October, the main German offensives were directed against the three giant factories.
More reinforcements kept arriving. Rodimtsev’s division was followed by Gorishny’s; Gorishny was followed by Batyuk. Gorishny deployed to the right of Rodimtsev; Batyuk to the right of Gorishny. Sokolovsky joined them. All three divisions were positioned close to Mamaev Kurgan, near the meat-packing plant and the water towers.
More new divisions deployed further north. The divisions commanded by Guriev, Gurtiev, Zheludyov, and then Ludnikov all took up position in the factory district.
Further north still, on the extreme right flank, were the brigades commanded by colonels Gorokhov and Bolvinov.
The density of the defending forces was constantly increasing; an entire full-strength division now defended a single factory. General Guriev’s Guards division was positioned in Red October; Colonel Gurtiev’s Siberian division in the Barricades; and General Zheludyov’s Guards division in the Tractor Factory, where he was later joined by General Ludnikov.
These vast numbers of men had all been ferried across from the east bank and were deployed in a narrow strip of land parallel to the Volga. Only here and there was the distance from the front line to the river greater than 1,000 or 1,200 metres; more often it was between 300 and 500 metres.
All supplies and equipment had to be ferried across the Volga. Otherwise the Soviet forces were entirely cut off.
German spearheads had reached the Volga in two places. A northern spearhead separated Stalingrad’s defenders from the Don Front. A southern spearhead separated them from General Shumilov’s 64th Army.
Stalingrad’s defenders were armed with all kinds of light weapons: easily manoeuvrable mobile cannons, small-calibre mortars, machine guns, sub-machine guns, ordinary rifles, sniper rifles, hand grenades, anti-tank grenades and Molotov cocktails. Sapper battalions had at their disposal a large quantity of TNT, along with anti-personnel and anti-tank mines. The entire Soviet position had become a single, carefully engineered structure, covered by an intricate network of trenches, communication trenches, dugouts and bunkers.
This new city—this strong, resilient network of cellars, staircases and bomb craters, of water pipes, sewers and underground tunnels, of gullies and ravines running down towards the Volga—had quickly become densely populated. In it were located the 62nd Army HQ, divisional HQs, the command posts of dozens of infantry and artillery regiments, and a still greater number of infantry, engineer, machine-gun, chemical and medical-battalion command posts.
All these HQs and command posts were connected with the troops and with one another by telephone cables, radio transmitters, and a system for sending messengers and signallers on foot.
The Army and divisional HQs were in radio communication with the east bank—both with Front HQ and with their own heavy artillery.
The electromagnetic waves travelling between radio transmitters and radio receivers connected the front line not only to Front HQ and the fire positions of heavy and medium artillery, but also to rear positions and support services extending almost
infinitely far to the east. These included fighter and bomber airstrips, the blast furnaces of Magnitogorsk, the tank factories of Chelyabinsk, the coking ovens of Kuznetsk, the collective and state farms of Siberia and the Urals, and the fisheries and military bases of the Pacific coast.
The scale of the battle was clear even to those taking part in it only from afar: railway workers; men working in support services; fuel-supply workers delivering fuel to cars, trucks and tanks; ammunition workers supplying divisional depots with tens of thousands of mortar bombs and hand grenades, with the shells devoured every day by the thousands of artillery pieces, and with millions of cartridges for rifles, anti-tank rifles and sub-machine guns.
Firepower testified to strength of spirit. There was a direct correlation between the thousands of tons of shells, grenades and cartridges delivered to Stalingrad and the furious self-sacrificing struggle of the men expending these mountains of steel and explosives in battle.
The scale of the battle was clear to people living in the Transvolga steppe, thirty or forty kilometres from the river. There was a constant glow in the sky. The rumble of gunfire grew louder or quieter but, night or day, it never fell silent.
The scale of the battle was felt by lathe operators, by troubleshooters at ammunition plants, by train despatchers and railway-station porters, by miners, steelworkers and blast-furnace operators.
The scale of the battle was felt in printing presses, in radio and telegraph offices, in the editorial offices of the thousands of newspapers published in different parts of the country, in the depths of forests and in remote polar stations. It was equally apparent to injured veterans, to old women working on collective farms, to children at village schools and to famous academicians.
The battle was an overwhelming reality not only for people, but also for birds flying through the smoke-filled air and for the fish in the Volga. Huge catfish, ancient pike, and giant sturgeon all kept close to the riverbed, trying to escape the deafening bombs, shells and torpedoes and the violent eruptions of the water itself.
Ants, beetles, wasps, grasshoppers and spiders in the surrounding steppe were no less aware of the battle. Field mice, hares and ground squirrels slowly became used to the smell of burning, to the sky’s new colour, to the earth’s constant trembling. Even several metres below ground, lumps of clay kept falling from the walls and ceilings of their burrows.
Livestock and domestic animals in the Transvolga steppe were as agitated as during a wildfire. Cows dried up; camels screamed and dug in their heels. Dogs howled all night, lost their appetite and hung their heads; hearing the whine of German aircraft, they whimpered and tried to shelter in holes and cracks in the ground. Cats stayed indoors, pricking up their ears mistrustfully in response to the rattling and tinkling of windowpanes.
Many frightened birds and animals fled the area altogether, moving north towards Saratov or south into the Kalmyk steppe, towards Astrakhan and Lake Elton.
The tension of this battle was felt by millions of people in Europe, China and America. It came to determine the thoughts of diplomats and politicians in Tokyo and Ankara; it influenced the tone of Churchill’s secret conversations with his advisers and the spirit of appeals and decrees signed by President Roosevelt.
Soviet, Polish and Yugoslav partisans lived and breathed this battle—as did members of the French Resistance, prisoners of war in the German camps, and Jews in the Warsaw and Białystok ghettos. For tens of millions of people the fire of Stalingrad was the fire of Prometheus.
An awesome and joyful hour for mankind was approaching.
53
IN SEPTEMBER the Supreme Command ordered the disbandment of the anti-tank brigade that had first confronted the German tanks on Stalingrad’s northern outskirts.
Towards the end of the month, after spending two weeks in the reserves, Nikolay Krymov received a new posting: he was to give lectures on politics and international affairs to the soldiers and commanders of the 62nd Army.
He found a billet in Srednaya Akhtuba. This dusty little town, full of small wooden buildings, now housed the propaganda department of the Front Political Administration.
At first, life in this town seemed tedious, anodyne and oppressive. But then Krymov was summoned one evening and ordered to make his first trip to Stalingrad.
From across the Volga could be heard an unceasing rumble. It was always present—in the dark of night, in the clear hours of morning, and during a quiet, contemplative sunset. Flickers of light from distant artillery ran across the grey board walls and the blacked-out windows; red noiseless shadows skittered across the night sky; sometimes a bright white flame—lightning engendered not by the heavens but by man on earth—called out of the night a hill covered with small houses, or a grove of trees by the flat bank of the River Akhtuba.
A group of young girls was standing by the gates of a house on a corner; a fourteen-year-old boy was quietly playing the accordion. Four of the girls—two couples—were dancing together, lit by an uncertain, faltering light; the others watched in silence. There was something ineffable about this conjunction of the distant rumble of battle with soft, timid music; the light that shone on the girls’ blouses, that fell so gently on their arms and their blonde hair, was death-dealing fire.
Krymov stopped; for a moment he forgot his immediate tasks. The soft music and the dancers’ restrained, thoughtful movements were endowed with a bitter charm, a strange sadness and poetry. What he saw and heard was a far cry from the usual, frivolous merriment of the young.
In the pale light of the distant fire, the dancers looked serious and intent. They were looking towards Stalingrad, and Krymov could see on their faces how inseparable they felt from the boys now shedding their young blood there. Their faces expressed the sadness of being alone, a tentative yet indestructible hope of a meeting to come, and the girls’ faith in their young charm and in happiness. As well as the pain of separation, he could see something else, something both girlishly strong and girlishly helpless, something great and simple for which there were no words and that could be expressed only by a bewildered smile or a sudden sigh from the heart. And Krymov, who during the past year had lived through so much and thought through so much, stood there without moving, forgetting everything as he gazed at the dancers.
As he prepared his lectures, Krymov had looked through a pile of foreign newspapers delivered by plane from Moscow. The word STALINGRAD appeared in the headlines of newspapers from all over the world, in huge capitals; it was present in news bulletins and editorials, in telegrams and despatches. Everywhere—in England, China, Australia and the Americas, in India and Mexico, in Spitsbergen and Cuba, in Greenland and in South Africa—people were talking, writing and thinking about Stalingrad. And the foreign schoolgirls who bought pencils, notebooks and blotting paper with emblems of Stalingrad on them, the old men going to the pub for a glass of beer, the housewives meeting at grocery and vegetable shops, in cities and villages at every latitude, on every continent and island of the globe—these people of every age and nationality wanted to discuss Stalingrad not out of idle curiosity but because Stalingrad was now a part of their daily reality. The city had woven itself into school lessons, into working families’ weekly food budgets, into their calculations of what they would have to pay for potatoes and swedes, into all the plans and hopes without which no sentient person can live.
Krymov had noted down quotations exemplifying the extent to which the diplomatic positions of neutral powers, the workings of international treaties, and important speeches by prime ministers and ministers of war were now being determined by the flames and thunder of Stalingrad. He knew that the word Stalingrad had appeared, written in coal and red ochre—the black and red ink of the masses—on the walls of apartment blocks, workers’ hostels and camp barracks in dozens of cities throughout occupied Europe. He knew that this word was on the lips of partisans and paratroopers in the Bryansk and Smolensk forests; that it was an inspiration to the soldiers of the Chinese People’s Li
beration Army; that it had the power to stir hearts and minds even in the death camps, igniting hope and the will to fight where one might think that there was no possibility of hope. Krymov knew all this very well; in his lectures he would be emphasizing, more than anything, the universal significance of the bitter fighting in which they were now engaged. Krymov was moved by these thoughts and he could already sense in his heart the strong, stern words he would soon be speaking.
But now, listening to the accordion, watching the girls who had gathered like a little flock of birds by the board wall of a small Akhtuba home, he felt emotions for which there are no words.
54
AS HE GOT into the cab of the truck in his usual way, pushing his bulging knapsack to one side so that he could lean back against the seat, Krymov realized that he was about to encounter something the like of which he had not experienced during the whole year of the war.
With a sense of trepidation, he looked at his driver’s anxious, frowning face and said, as he had so often said to Semyonov, “All right, let’s be off.”
He then sighed, thinking, “Not a sign of Mostovskoy, and not a sign of Semyonov. It’s as if they’ve both been swallowed up by the earth.”
A full moon was rising. The street and the little houses were lit by the strong, even, un-white light that artists and poets have tried so doggedly to capture and that may perhaps always elude them because there is something contradictory in the very essence of moonlight, not only in the feelings it evokes in us. In it we recognize both the power of life, which we associate with light, and the power of death, clearly present in this celestial dead body’s cold and stony brightness.
The truck went down the steep slope to the River Akhtuba, which looked as dreary as a canal, crossed the pontoon bridge, passed a little grove of thin, sickly trees, and turned onto the main road towards Krasnaya Sloboda.
Along the road stood tall panels, bearing inscriptions: “For us there is no Land beyond the Volga!” “Not One Step Back!” “We will Defend Stalingrad!” Other panels listed the exploits of Red Army soldiers who had destroyed German tanks, self-propelled guns and artillery pieces and killed large numbers of shock troops.
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