A Hero's Daughter Part 1

Andrei Makine.

A Hero's Daughter.

Annotation.

Early works of an author who has. .h.i.t the big-time are often reissued for reasons more venal than literary. None of the pre- and post- publications of Tracy Chevalier come anywhere near the standard of The Girl with the Pearl Earring, but that didn't stop them being rushed into instant print once best-sellerdom was declared and the film came out.

Andrei Makine gained international recognition only when his fourth novel, Le Testament Francais, won two prestigious prizes. Famously, the refugee from the Soviet Union who wrote in French hadn't been able to get his first novel published until he pretended it was translated from "the original Russian" by the mythical "Francoise Bour".

It's a cute story, but why has that one, A Hero's Daughter, suddenly come out in English 14 years after publication? Are the translator and/or publishers jumping on a bandwagon in the light of later prizes awarded to them both?

At 163 elegant pages, and featuring only two central characters that is, "without the bewildering patronymics or the excessive length" of most Russian novels (a grab on the back cover) A Hero's Daughter lightly realises huge moments in recent Russian history.

Starting with the atrocious encounters between Germany and Russia in World War II, when existence was a frozen trench and the lads are kept going with vodka and blind loyalty ("For Stalin's sake it all made sense..."), it skips over 40 pretty good years to bring the eponymous hero into the '80s, the era of Gorbachev and perestroika.

Life starts changing in ways incomprehensible to an old soldier, if 53 can be called old. Ivan feels old because he is a veteran, and because, by great good luck, he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union for simply surviving the Battle of Stalingrad. The real act of heroism that he did commit, no one ever saw. But Ivan has a precious Gold Star to prove the benevolent idiocy of the authorities, and he will never sell it, not even to numb his misery with vodka after his wife dies in their backwoods village, when life holds nothing for him.

Well, not nothing. Although their son died, Ivan and Tatyana had a daughter, Olya, a model child who studied hard and went away to Moscow to become a translator. By now, Western snouts are poking greedily into Russian troughs and there is plenty of work for a girl who knows a language or two. And who is prepared to go the extra mile the businessmen staying in the huge hotels expect more than mere translation. The valuta they pay for services rendered means that Olya can shop at the Beriozki shops for luxury goods only available in Western currency.

Deep down she doesn't approve of this lifestyle, although perhaps it is justified by the small-time espionage she can engage in while her drugged clients are snoring. It all makes sense for the New Russia's sake. Though it would kill her father if he were to find out. She'd drop it all anyway, the moment she found a nice boy to marry.

While Olya is ambivalent about her compromises, Ivan gets some real shocks. For the first time he is no longer trotted out to speak to local schoolchildren about his role in the great battle; and in Moscow one of his old mates spills the beans on what translators really do. Ivan gets drunk and goes berserk. The damage he does in a Beriozka becomes a radio news item, and grounds for Olya's rich Russian "fiance" to give her the flick, even though she's just survived an abortion with complications. All she wants to do is to shuck off her sordid life and take her father back to the village, where she can look after them both. Unfortunately, he dies suddenly of a heart attack. Olya sleeps with a man one last time, in order to raise the money for the coffin flogging the Gold Star doesn't do it.

The stories of Ivan and Olya are truly tough, but strangely uplifting. Life in the Soviet Union was never easy, and whatever benefits rampant capitalism might be about to provide lie outside the novel's time-frame.

Meanwhile, the penury, shortages and brutal hards.h.i.+p that drive ordinary citizens to alcoholism and prost.i.tution are countered by some kind of irreducible humanity. Olya emerges as an innately good girl who will one day find her proper level; Ivan is moved by an untutored morality based on vague but sound instincts. Their friends are all pals to them and to each other.

The human face of Soviet society may have been covered with warts, but virtue of a sort shone out of it, as it also does from this deceptively slight, excellently translated, and deeply involving first novel.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

Andrei' Makine was born and brought up in Russia, but A Hero's Daughter, his first novel to be published, was, like his subsequent novels, written in French. The book is set in Russia, and the author includes a number of Russian words in the French text, most of which, with his agreement, I have kept in this English translation. These include shapka (a fur hat or cap, often with ear flaps); dacha (a country house or cottage, typically used as a second or vacation home); izba (a traditional wooden house built of logs).

The text contains a number of references to events and inst.i.tutions from the years of the Second World War, 1941 to 1945; the polizei was a force of Russian collaborators recruited by the occupying German power to a.s.sist them; the Panfilova Division (the 316th Rifle Division led by Major General Ivan Panfilov) became celebrated for the heroism of twenty-eight of its soldiers, who threw themselves with their grenades in the path of advancing German tanks in the defense of Moscow during the winter of 1941 and prevented them from breaking through.

There are also a number of references to inst.i.tutions and personalities from the Communist era in Russia. A soviet was an elected local or national council as well as the building it occupied in a town or village. The NKVD (Narodny Kommissariat Vnutrenikh Del), the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, were the police charged with maintaining political control during the years of Stalin's purges from 1934 to 1946. The KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti), the Committee of State Security, was created in 1953, on Stalin's death, to take over state security with responsibility for external espionage, internal counterintelligence and internal "crimes against the state"; its most famous chairman was Yuri Andropov. A kolkhoz was a collective farm, a kolkhoznik a member of the farm collective; a kulak was the derogatory term for a wealthy peasant, considered to be an enemy of the Soviet regime under Stalin. The Komsomol was the Communist youth organization, the junior branch being the pioneers. "Iron Felix" was Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the "Cheka," the forerunner of the NKVD; COMECON, the Council for Mutual Economic a.s.sistance, was an economic a.s.sociation of East 'European countries during the Soviet era. "Beriozka" stores were created exclusively to sell goods to foreign visitors, who paid not in rubles but in foreign currency; some of these accepted vouchers from Soviet citizens who worked abroad and could exchange foreign currency for vouchers. Marshal Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov was army chief of staff from 1941 onward; Geidar Ali Rza Ogly Aliev was a KGB general. A kommunalka was a communal apartment. The terms perestroika (reconstruction, reorganization) and glasnost (openness) became watchwords during the period of Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalization of the Soviet regime from 1985 onward.

G. S.

A HERO'S DAUGHTER.

1.

HOW FRAGILE AND STRANGE EVERYTHING IS down here.

on earth...

What his life had depended on was a fragment of tarnished mirror held in the fingers, blue with cold, of a medical orderly, slim as a young girl.

For there he lay, in this vernal meadow churned up by tanks, amid hundreds of greatcoats, all solidified during the night into an icy ma.s.s. The jagged ends of shattered beams bristled upward from a dark crater to the left of them. Close at hand, its wheels sunk into a half collapsed trench, an ant.i.tank gun pointed up at the sky.

Before the war, from reading in books, he used to picture battlefields quite differently: soldiers carefully lined up on the fresh gra.s.s, as if, before dying, they had all had time to adopt a particular significant posture, one suggested by death. In this way each corpse would be perceived in the isolation of its own unique encounter with mortality. And each of their faces could be studied, this one with his eyes uplifted toward the clouds, as they drifted slowly away, that one pressing his cheek against the black earth.

Which is why, when he was first skirting that meadow covered with dead, he had noticed nothing. He walked along, painfully heaving his boots out of the ruts on the autumn road, his gaze fixed on the back of the man in front of him, the faded gray greatcoat on which droplets of mist glistened.

Just as they were emerging from a village skeletons of half-burned izbas - a voice in the ranks behind him called out: "Holy s.h.i.+t! They sure had it in for the people!"

Then he took a look at the meadow that stretched away toward a nearby copse. He saw the muddy gra.s.s piled high with gray greatcoats, Russians and Germans, lying there at random, sometimes bundled together, sometimes isolated, face down against the earth. Then something no longer recognizable as a human body, a kind of brownish porridge, clothed in shreds of damp fabric.

And now he was one of these dead lumps himself. Stretched out there. Trapped in a little puddle of frozen blood beneath his neck, his head lay at an angle with his body that was inconceivable for a living being. His elbows were so violently tensed under his back that he looked as if he were trying to wrench himself up from the ground. The sun was only just glinting on the frost-covered scrub. In the forest, where it bordered on the open land and in the sh.e.l.l craters, the violet shadow of the cold could still be observed.

There were four medical orderlies: three women and a man who was the driver for the field ambulance into which they loaded the wounded.

The front was receding toward the west. The morning was unbelievably still. In the frozen, sunlit air their voices rang out clear and remote. "We must finish before it thaws out, otherwise we'll be up to our knees!" All four of them were dropping with weariness. Their eyes, red from sleepless nights, blinked in the low sun. But they worked effectively and as a team. They treated the wounded, loaded them onto stretchers, and slowly made their way to the van, crunching the lacework of ice, turning over the dead and stumbling in the ruts. The third year of the war was slipping by. And this springtime meadow covered in frozen greatcoats lay somewhere in the torn heart of Russia.

Pa.s.sing close by the soldier, the young orderly hardly paused. She glanced at the puddle of frozen blood, the gla.s.sy eyes and the eyelids distended by an explosion and muddied with earth. Dead. With a wound like that no one could survive. She continued on her way, then went back. Averting her gaze from those horrible bulging eyes, she took out his service record.

"Hey, Manya," she called out to her comrade, who was tending a wounded man ten paces away from her, "he's a Hero of the Soviet Union!"

"Wounded?" asked the other one.

"Afraid not... dead."

She bent over him and began breaking the ice around his hair so as to lift up his head.

"Well, then! Come on, Tatyana. Let's carry mine."

And Manya was already slipping her hands under the armpits of her wounded man, whose head was white with bandages.

But Tatyana, her hands moist and numb, hastily sought out a little fragment of mirror in her pocket, wiped it with a sc.r.a.p of bandage and held it to the soldier's lips.

In this fragment the blue of the sky appeared. A bush miraculously intact and covered in crystals. A sparkling spring morning. The glittering quartz of the h.o.a.rfrost, the brittle ice, the resonant, sunlit void of the air.

Suddenly the whole icy scene softened, grew warmer, became veiled with a little film of mist. Tatyana jumped to her feet, holding the fragment aloft, as the light cloud of breath rapidly faded, and called out: "Manya, he's breathing!"

The hospital had been improvised in a school building on two floors. The desks were piled high beneath the staircase, the bandages and medicines filled the cupboards, the beds were lined up in the cla.s.srooms; it had been made ready in great haste. When he recovered consciousness after four days in a deep coma, what he made out through the whitish veil that shrouded his eyes in a viscous and painful fog was the portrait of Darwin. Below it he made out a map on which could be seen diffuse patches of three colors red for the Soviet Union, green for the English colonies, and purple for those of France. Then the torpor began to be dispelled. Little by little he came to be aware of the nurses and to feel a burning pain when they changed his dressings.

A week later he was able to exchange a few words with his neighbor, a young lieutenant, who had had both legs amputated. This young officer talked a great deal, as if trying to forget, or to keep boredom at bay. Sometimes he would reach out with his hand toward the bottom of his bed, feeling for his missing legs and, getting a grip on himself, would almost jovially and with a certain bravado come out with something the Hero of the Soviet Union had heard before and would hear again from the mouths of soldiers: "G.o.dd.a.m.n it! My legs are blown to h.e.l.l but they're still itching. Now that's a miracle of nature!"

It was this lieutenant who had told him the story of the mirror. He had caught occasional glimpses of the woman who had saved his life. From time to time she helped to bed down the wounded, or brought lunch around, but most of the time, as before, she was traveling over the fields in the ambulance.

When she came into their ward she often glanced timidly in his direction and, with his eyes half closed, as he felt the pain easing and giving way to periods of relief, he would smile lengthily He lay there, smiling, and what occupied his mind was very simple. He was reflecting that he was a Hero of the Soviet Union; he was still alive, his legs and arms were intact; yesterday they had for the first time opened the window to the warm spring air, with a dry earsplitting noise of coa.r.s.e paper being torn, tomorrow he would try to get up, to walk a little, and, if he could manage to do so, he would get to know the slim young girl who kept stealing glances at him.

The next day he got up and made his way across the room toward the door, savoring the bliss of these still clumsy first steps. In the corridor he stopped by the open window and gazed with joyful hunger at the pale haze of the first greenery, the dusty little courtyard where the wounded were exercising, some of them on crutches, others with their arms in slings. He rolled a cigarette, lit it. He was hoping to meet her that very day, catch her eye ("On your feet already, after a wound like that!") and speak to her. He had given it much thought during those long days and long weeks. He would give her a little nod as he inhaled a mouthful of smoke, screw up his eyes and remark carelessly: "I have a feeling we've met somewhere before..."

But occasionally it struck him that he should start the conversation quite differently. Yes, begin with the words he had one day heard in a play his cla.s.s had gone to see. The actor, swathed in his black cloak, had observed to the heroine who was clad in a pale, frothy lace dress: "So it is to you, Madam, that I owe my life..." Words that struck him as splendidly n.o.ble.

Abruptly she appeared. Caught off his guard, he hastily rolled a cigarette and screwed up his eyes. He had not even noticed she was running. Her big boots and skirt were spattered with mud, her hair clung to her brow in moist locks. The Chief Medical Officer was coming out of the room next door. He saw her and stopped, as if to say something to her. But she rushed up to him and, with a sob that burst out like a laugh, she exclaimed: "Lev Mikhailovich! The van... It's. .h.i.t a mine. Near the stream... The stream's burst its banks... I'd already got out to look for the ford..."

The Chief Medical Officer was already steering her into his office in the teachers' room. She went on jerkily: "Tolya tried to drive across the field. It was packed with mines... It was such a blaze you couldn't get near it... Manya... Manya was burned as well..."

There was a rapid commotion in the corridor. The nurses came running, their first-aid kits in their hands. The Hero of the Soviet Union leaned out of the window. The Chief Medical Officer rushed across the school yard, dragging his leg that had been injured in a bombardment. You could hear the throbbing sound from the engine of the van, with its slatted sides reinforced by planks of green wood.

They only became acquainted later. They talked and listened to each other with feelings of joy they had never experienced before. Yet what did they have to talk about? Their two villages, one near Smolensk in the west, the other far away to the north in the marshlands of Pskov. A year of famine lived through in their childhood, something that now, in the midst of the war, seemed quite ordinary. A summer long ago spent in a Pioneer camp, fixed forever in a yellowed photograph thirty little urchins with close-cropped heads, caught in a tense, somewhat wary pose, beneath a red banner: "Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!" He was seated to the right of a robust Pioneer who was frowning behind his drum and, like all his comrades, stared spellbound at the camera...

One evening they walked out of the school, strolled slowly through the half-burned village, talking all the time, and stopped beside the very last izba. All that was left of it was a blackened carca.s.s, a charred tracery in the cold spring air. Discernible within it was the gray shape of a great stove, covered with half-burned timbers. But all around it on the ground you could already see the blue gleam of new gra.s.s. Above a smashed-in fence the pale branch of an apple tree in bloom glowed timidly in the dusk.

They did not speak. He studied the inside of the izba, as if curious. She stroked the white cl.u.s.ters of apple blossom distractedly. "That's quite a stove!" he said finally. "It looks like ours. Ours had a shelf on the top just like that." Then, without further ado, he began talking, his gaze fixed on the izba's charred entrails.

"Where I lived it was summer when the Fritzes came. They occupied the village, took up their quarters. Two days later the partisans attacked in the middle of the night. They blew up the Fritzes' storehouse and killed several of them. But no chance of driving them out... They weren't well-enough armed. They fell back into the forest. In the morning the Germans were furious. They set fire to the village at both ends. The people who tried to escape were killed on the spot. Even though there were only women and children left. Plus old men, of course. My mother had the baby with her that was my brother, Kolka. When she saw what was happening, she pushed me out into the vegetable patch. 'Save yourself she said. 'Run toward the forest!' I started running but I saw the whole village was surrounded. So then I turned back. And they were already coming into our yard. There were three of them with submachine guns. In a little meadow near our izba there was a haystack. I thought: 'They'll never find me under that!' Then, just as if someone had whispered in my ear, I see a big basket next to the fence. You know, an enormous basket, with two handles. And I dive under it. I don't know how long I stayed in there. The Germans went into the house. And they killed my mother... She screamed for a long time... I was so scared I lay there stock still... then I see them come out. One of them I couldn't believe my eyes he's holding Kolka head downward by his feet. The poor kid started to yell... What saved my life then was my fear. If I'd had my wits about me, I'd have gone for them. But I didn't even catch on to what was happening. At that moment I saw one of them take out a camera and the other one skewers Kolka with his bayonet... He was posing for a photo, the dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.d! I stayed under the basket. And that night I ran for it."

She listened to him without hearing, knowing in advance that his story would contain all the horror that surrounded them, that they encountered at every step. She was silent, remembering the day their van had entered a village recaptured from the Germans. They had begun to tend the wounded. And from somewhere or other a shriveled, half-dead old woman had appeared like a ghost and wordlessly tugged at her sleeve. Tanya had followed her. The old woman had led her into a barn; there on the rotten straw lay two young girls both of them killed by a bullet through the head. And it was there, in the dim light, that the peasant woman found her voice. They had been killed by their own countrymen, the Russian polizei, who had shot them in the head and violated the still warm bodies as they writhed in their death throes...

They remained for some moments without speaking, then took the road back. He lit a cigarette and gave a little laugh, as if he were recalling something funny.

"When they left the yard they pa.s.sed close by the haystack. I watched them. They stopped and began sticking their bayonets into it. They thought someone was hiding there..."

Twenty or thirty years later, when May 9 came round, Tatyana would often be asked this question: "Tatyana Kuzminichna, how did you come to meet your Hero?" On that particular day the whole varnis.h.i.+ng workshop ten young girls, three older women workers, including herself and the foreman, a bony man in a blue overall caked with varnish holds a little celebration. They crowd into an office piled high with old papers, out-of-date wall newspapers, pennants celebrating the "Heroes of Socialist Emulation," and hastily begin to eat and drink, proposing toasts in honor of the Victory.

The office door leads out onto the rear courtyard of the furniture factory. They keep it open. After the noxious acetone fumes it is absolute heaven. They can feel the sunny May breeze, still almost unscented, light and airy. In the distance a car can be seen, raising a cloud of dust, as if it were summer. The women produce modest provisions from their bags. With a knowing wink, the foreman removes from a small battered cupboard a filched bottle of alcohol, labeled "Acetone." They all become animated, lace the alcohol with jam, add in a drop of water, and drink: "To the Victory!"

"Tatyana Kuzminichna, how did you meet your Hero?"

And for the tenth time she embarks on the story of the little mirror and the hospital in the school that springtime long ago. They already know how it goes but they listen and are amazed and touched, as if they were hearing it for the first time. Tatyana does not want to go on remembering the village burned from both ends or the old, silent peasant woman leading her toward the barn...

"That year, my friends, it was one of those springs... One evening we walked to the end of the village. We stopped. All the apple trees were in bloom, it was so lovely it took your breath away. So what do apple trees care about war? They still blossom. And my Hero rolled himself a cigarette and smoked it. Then he screwed up his eyes like this and said..."

It seems to her now that they really did have these meetings and long, long evenings together... As the years have gone by she has come to believe it. And yet there was only that one evening in the icy spring, the black carca.s.s of the burned-out roof. And a hungry cat sidling warily along beside the fence, staring at them with an air of mystery, as animals and birds do at twilight when they seem to stir things up in people's minds.

They had one more evening together, the last one. Warm, filled with the rustling and chattering of swifts. They had gone down toward the river, had stayed stock-still for a long while, not knowing what to say to each other; then, clumsily, they had kissed for the first time.

"Tomorrow, that's it, Tanya... I'm returning to my unit... I'm going back to the front," he said in somewhat somber tones, this time without s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up his eyes. "So, listen carefully to what I say. Once the war's over we'll get married and we'll go to my village. There's good land there. But for now you must just..."

He had fallen silent. With lowered eyes she was studying the footprints made by their boots in the soft clay of the bank. Sighing like a child breathless from long weeping, she had said in a subdued voice: "It doesn't matter about me... but you..."

In the summer of 1941, when he escaped from the burned-out village to join the partisans, he was just seventeen. He could still picture the face of the German who had killed little Kolka. It had stayed with him, the way the pitching of a staircase collapsing beneath your feet in the pallid terror of a vivid nightmare stays with you. This face stuck in his memory because of the scar on one cheek, as if bitten from inside, and the sharp stare of the blue eyes. For a long time the notion of an appalling vengeance obsessed him, a personal settling of accounts, the desire to see this man, who had posed for the photograph with the child's body impaled on his bayonet, writhing in terrible torment. He was absolutely convinced he would encounter him again.

Their detachment of partisans had been wiped out. Miraculously, by spending a whole night in the reeds up to his neck in water, he had managed to escape with his life. When he reported to the regional military committee, he had added a year to his age and two days later had found himself sitting on a hard bench with other boys in fatigues, lean, with cropped heads, listening to a noncommissioned officer's very military language, blunt but clear. He was talking about "tank phobia," explaining that there was no need to be afraid of tanks and that running away as they approached was a sure way to be had. You had to be smart. And the sergeant had even drawn a tank on the old blackboard, showing its vulnerable points: the caterpillar tracks, the fuel tank...

"In a nutsh.e.l.l: if you're scared of tanks, you've no place in the ranks," the sergeant concluded, highly pleased with his own wit.

Two months later, in November, lying in a frozen trench, with his head raised slightly above the clods of frozen earth, Ivan was watching a line of tanks emerging from the transparent forest and slowly forming up. Beside him lay his rifle it was still the ancient model invented by Mossin, a captain in the czarist army and two bottles of explosive liquid. For the whole of their section, as they clung to this sc.r.a.p of frozen earth, there were only seven ant.i.tank grenades.

Had it been possible to stand up, they could have seen the towers of the Kremlin with the aid of field gla.s.ses, through the cold fog to the rear of them.

"We're an hour's drive from Moscow," a soldier had said the previous day.

"Comrade Stalin's in Moscow," the officer replied. " Moscow will not fall."

Stalin!

And suddenly the temperature rose. For him, for their Country, they were ready to take on the tanks with their bare hands! For Stalin's sake it all made sense: the snow-filled trenches, their own greatcoats, which would soon stiffen forever under the gray sky, and the officer's harsh cry as he hurled himself beneath the deafening clatter of the tank tracks, his grenade in his hand, with the pin removed.

Forty years after that bitterly cold day Ivan will find himself seated in the humid dullness of a dimly lit bar chatting amid the hubbub from neighboring tables with two newly encountered comrades. They will already have slipped the contents of a bottle of vodka into their three tankards of beer on the q.t. and embarked on a second, and will be in such good spirits that they don't even feel like arguing. Just listening to the other guy and agreeing with whatever he has to say.

"So what about them, those men of the Panfilova Division? Were they heroes? Throwing themselves under tanks? What choice did they have, for G.o.d's sake: 'What stands behind us is Moscow,' says the political commissar. 'No further retreat is possible!' Except that what stood behind us wasn't Moscow. It was a line of machine guns blocking the way, those NKVD b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. I started there, too, Vanya, the same as you. Only I was in the signal corps..."

Ivan Dmitrevich will nod his head, embracing the speaker with a vague and almost tender gaze. What's the use of talking about it? And who knows what really happened? "And yet," the words form silently in his mind, "at that moment the thought of a line blocking the way never occurred to me. The lieutenant shouted: 'Advance! For Stalin! For our Country!' And in a flash it all went. No more cold. No more fear. We believed in it..."

It was at the battle of Stalingrad that he won the Gold Star of a Hero of the Soviet Union.

And yet he had never seen Stalingrad. Just a streak of black smoke on the horizon, above a dry steppe so boiling hot you could feel the crunch of sand in your mouth. He never saw the Volga, either, only a grayish void in the distance, as if poised above the abyss at the end of the world. Sergeant Mikhalych gestured in the direction of the black smoke on the horizon.

"That's Stalingrad burning. If the Germans cross the Volga the city's a goner. We'll never be able to hold it."

The sergeant was sitting on an empty sh.e.l.l case, drawing on the last cigarette of his life. Half an hour later, amid the din and dust storm of the battle, he would emit a gasp and slowly collapse onto his side, clapping his hand to his chest, as if to pluck from it a tiny, jagged sliver of shrapnel.

How had they come to find themselves with their gun on this high ground between that spa.r.s.e woodland and a ravine full of brambles? Why had they been left on their own? Who had given the order for them to occupy this position? Had anyone actually given such an order?

The battle had lasted so long that they had become a part of it. They had ceased to feel separate from the heavy shuddering of the 76-millimeter ant.i.tank gun, the whistling of the bullets, the explosions. Pitching and tossing like s.h.i.+ps, the tanks surged across the devastated steppe. In their wake the dark shadows of soldiers were moving about in clouds of dust. The machine gun rattled out from a little trench on the left. After swallowing its sh.e.l.l the gun spat it out again, as if with a "phew" of relief. Six tanks were already smoldering. The rest of them drew back for a time, then returned, as if magnetically attracted to the hill stuffed with metal. And once again, in a fever of activity, completely deafened, their muscles tensed, the artillerymen became indistinguishable from the gun's frenzied spasms. They had long since ceased to know how many of them were left, as they carried up the sh.e.l.ls, even stepping over dead men. And they would only become aware that one of their comrades had died when the rhythm of their grueling task was broken. At intervals Ivan looked behind him and each time saw the red-haired Seryozha sitting comfortably beside some empty ammunition crates. Each time he wanted to yell at him: "Hey! Sergei! What the f.u.c.k are you doing there?" But just then he would notice that all the seated man had left of his stomach was a b.l.o.o.d.y mess. And then in the din of the fighting and the racket of gunfire he would forget, would look back again, would again be on the brink of calling out to him and would again see that red stain...

What saved them was the first two tanks burning and blocking a direct attack by the Germans. The ravine protected them on the left, the little wood on the right. Or, at least, so they thought. Which is why when, with the sound of tree trunks smas.h.i.+ng, a tank loomed up, flattening the scrub, they did not even have time to be afraid. The tank was firing at will but the person huddled within its stifling entrails had been in too much of a hurry.

The explosion flung Ivan to the ground. He rolled into the trench, groped around in a hole to find the stick grenade's handle, removed the pin, and, bending his arm back, hurled it. The earth shook he did not hear the explosion but felt it in his body. He raised his head above the trench and saw the black smoke and the shadowy figures emerging from the turret. All this amid a deafness that was at once ringing and m.u.f.fled. No submachine gun to hand. He threw another grenade, the last one...

Swathed in the same hushed silence, he left the trench and saw the empty steppe, the smoking tanks, the chaos of plowed-up land, of corpses and trees torn to shreds. Seated in the shadow of the gun was an aged Siberian, Lagun. Seeing Ivan, he got up, signed with his head, said something and still in an unreal silence went over to the machine-gunner's little trench. The latter was partly lying on his side, his mouth half open and twisted in such pain that, without hearing it, Ivan could see his cry. On his bloodied hands only the thumbs remained. Lagun began to dress his wounds, bathing his stumps with alcohol and binding them tightly. The machine-gunner opened his mouth even wider and rolled over on his back.

Ivan stumbled around the tank covered in leaves and broken branches and made his way in under the trees. Two ruts left by the tank tracks gleamed darkly vivid in the torn-up gra.s.s. He crossed them and headed toward where the shade was deepest.