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.

The road was broad and straight, and tens of thousands of men had recently passed along it. Arrows with broad black circles around them indicated: “To the Volga,” “To Stalingrad,” “To the 62nd Crossing.” No road in the world could have been simpler, cleaner, sterner and more demanding.

The road would be no less straight—Krymov said to himself—during moonlit nights after the war, and people would follow it as they transported cloth, grain and watermelons to the river crossing. Or they would take little children along it, on their way to visit grandmothers in Stalingrad. And Krymov drifted off into thought, trying to divine the feelings of the men and women driving along this road in years to come. Would they think of the soldiers who had marched from Akhtuba to the Volga in September and October 1942? Perhaps not. Perhaps they would not recall them at all. But, dear God! What was it? What made him, all of a sudden, catch his breath? What made him so sure that, even thousands of years from now, people would feel a chill in their hearts as they looked at these osiers and willows? Look! Here! Yes, this was the road soldiers had once marched along. This was the road followed by battalions, regiments and divisions. Their mortars had banged and clattered; the muzzles of their rifles had glittered in the sun; the light of the full moon had fallen on the burnished barrels of their anti-tank rifles.

And only the autumn trees, only silent copses had witnessed those tens of thousands of men, their homes now far behind them, marching towards the Volga crossing, and to that most bitter ground.

No one, no one had come to meet them. No one, no one had seen all those young and old faces, those pale and dark eyes, all those thousands of men from steppe, town and forest, from the Black Sea and the Altay Mountains, from Moscow, from smoky Kemerovo and bleak Vorkuta.

Here they had marched in their long columns: young lieutenants walking along the side of the road, sergeant majors and sergeants surveying the ranks, battalion and regimental commanders marching in step with their soldiers . . . Here some young adjutant had come running past, his map case dangling at his side, to deliver an order.

What strength, what sadness. What emptiness all around these men. Yet the whole of Russia had been watching them.

On a Saturday evening in fifty or sixty years’ time, a group of young men and girls would pass by in a truck, laughing and joking, on their way to Stalingrad from the Akhtuba steppe. The driver would stop and get out to check the carburettor or fill up the radiator. And suddenly it would fall quiet in the back of the truck. Why? Was it the wind stirring the dust on the road, rustling the treetops? Or was it something more like a sigh? Or the thud of footsteps? And then it would become quieter still—you could hear a pin drop. Why? What was it that so wrung their young hearts? Why were they looking so anxiously down the straight, empty road? What was it? A dream, a steppe mirage?

Krymov could no longer distinguish between his own thoughts and feelings and those of the people he imagined looking back from the future.

Tell me, why are you weeping? Why do you listen so sadly,

Hearing these stories of Trojans and Greeks, of long-ago battles?

All was decreed by the Gods—to make songs for far-off descendants.⁴⁶

Perhaps in 800 or 1,800 years, when this road and these trees no longer existed, after this land and this life had fallen asleep forever, covered by a new land and a new life of which we can know nothing—perhaps some old greybeard would walk slowly by, stop for a moment and say to himself, “There were trenches here once. Long ago—in the days of the Great Revolution, of the great construction projects and terrible invasions—soldiers came this way, marching towards the Volga.” And he would remember a picture from a children’s textbook: soldiers marching through the steppe with simple, kind, stern faces, in old-fashioned clothes and old-fashioned boots, with red stars on their caps. The old man would stop. He would prick up his ears. What was it? A sigh? The thud of footsteps? Men marching?

When they reached the scattered houses of Burkovsky Hamlet, the driver turned off onto a narrow track running through a dense young forest. “A little detour,” he said. “The main road gets bombed day and night.”

Instead of slowing down after leaving the main road, the driver accelerated. The truck creaked and groaned as its wheels bounced over tree roots or dropped into ruts.

The sound of gunfire was getting louder, no longer drowned out by the engine. The roar of the Soviet artillery was distinct from the sound of exploding shells; it seemed to be some inner instinct, more than the ear, that told these sounds apart. Calmly indifferent to the roar of the Soviet guns nearby, nerves tensed and hearts missed a beat in response to the German shells. The brain, for its part, would carry out swift calculations: shell or mortar bomb? Large or small calibre? Had the shell passed overhead or fallen short? Or had a German artillery piece now accurately bracketed them?

As they drove on, the trees became visibly shorter. As if trimmed by huge scissors, they stood there without leaves or branches. What Krymov saw around him was not a forest but a palisade—thousands of stakes and poles stuck into the ground. German shells had spawned hundreds of thousands of shell splinters, and these had torn off bark and sliced through leaves, branches and twigs. The forest was transparent. In the moonlight shining through it, it was a skeleton forest, a forest that no longer moved or breathed.

Now Krymov could see flashes of gunfire, earthen parapets, freshly made clearings, the pale wooden doors of dugouts, camouflaged trucks half-buried in the ground. And the closer they drew to the Volga and the 62nd Crossing, the greater the tension—a tension that seemed to emanate not from Krymov or his driver but from the entire surrounding world: the earth’s sandy pallor, the silence of the leafless forest, the trembling moonlight and stars.

All of a sudden, they left the forest behind them. The driver braked sharply, held out a pencil and a sheet of paper, evidently prepared in advance, and said, “Sign this, comrade Battalion Commissar. I’ll be off now.” He clearly did not want to stay by the crossing a moment longer than necessary.

Krymov took a few steps and looked around. Stacked in a hollow beneath a high earthen wall were crates of shells, sacks of bread, piles of winter uniforms and large wooden boxes of tinned food. Dozens of men were quietly carrying these crates and sacks towards a long wooden platform.

In a narrow gap between dense willow thickets and the far end of the earthen wall lay the Volga, bright in the moonlight. Krymov went up to the traffic controller, an elderly soldier with a large round face, and asked, “Where can I find the crossing commandant?”

Just then came a flash of light and the sound of powerful explosions from the forest behind them. The soldier turned towards Krymov, waited for a moment of quiet and said, “Under those trees over there you’ll find a small dugout. There’s a sentry standing outside it.” He paused, then asked, “On your way to the city, comrade Commander?”

There were more explosions, still more deafening, to their right, to their left and behind them.

Krymov looked around him. No one was dropping to the ground or running to take shelter. The men at the foot of the earthen wall were carrying on with their work. The elderly soldier had not even moved; he was quietly waiting for Krymov to reply to his question. In a no less friendly and relaxed tone, Krymov said, “Yes, I’m on my way to Stalingrad. Someone should have received a phone call about me.”

“Then you’ll be going on the motorboat,” said the soldier. “The barge won’t be crossing tonight. It’s too bright and clear—a night for finding needles in haystacks.”

Krymov set off towards the commandant’s dugout. Before he reached it, shells whistled and screeched overhead, then exploded in the forest nearby. Dense smoke whirled through the air; everything crackled and crunched. It was as if a great shaggy bear made of smoke had got up on its hind legs, roared, spun round and started crushing the trees. Yet everyone just carried on with their work, as if this had nothing to do with them, as if their life might not be snapped off at any moment, like a thread of spun glass.

Krymov did not yet fully understand the mood of exaltation now taking hold of him, nor was he entirely conscious of his astonishment at the calm, matter-of-fact majesty with which everyone he met was going about their business. Nevertheless, he looked greedily and joyfully around him, slowly taking in that something in the world had changed.

During the past year he had met all too many people like his sullen, chain-smoking driver, who had done a swift U-turn and then put his foot on the gas, desperate to get away from the crossing. Might that driver—Krymov asked himself—be the last of this dispiriting breed?

Quick anxious looks, abrupt laughs and silences, the gross rudeness of people trying to hide their sense of panic. The bowed shoulders of tired men walking along the dusty roads of the first year of the war. Wide eyes gazing up at the sky: Were those bastards up there still at it? The hoarse, enraged, pistol-waving lieutenant at that pontoon bridge over the Don . . . Scraps of overheard conversation: “They’re not far away,” “They’ve sent up rockets,” “They’ve dropped paratroopers,” “They’ve cut the road,” “They’ve encircled our forces.” Talk about German spearheads and pincers, about the might of the German air force, about German generals issuing orders that stated the day and hour when Moscow would capitulate and then went on to emphasize the importance of soldiers brushing their teeth regularly and their being provided with seltzer water at halts.

Later, Krymov would often recall his first glimpse of the soldiers at the 62nd Crossing working away in the moonlight.

Krymov entered the dugout, which was still shaking from the nearby shell bursts. A fair-haired, broad-chested, strong-looking man in a fur waistcoat was sitting on a new little white stool at a new little white desk. He introduced himself: “Perminov, commissar of the 62nd Crossing.”

He told Krymov to sit down and said that there would be no barge that night but that he would be taken to the city by motorboat, along with two commanders due to arrive soon from Front HQ.

After asking if Krymov would like some tea, he went over to a small iron stove and came back with a shining white teapot.

Perminov must have been about to write a report. He moved a small inkwell and a few sheets of paper to one side. He seemed glad to talk, though he did not waste words.

He had recognized Krymov as a veteran, a man who knew what was what. There was an immediate rapport between the two men.

“We’re doing all right. We’ve got our own bakery. And a decent bathhouse. The kitchen functions. All underground, of course.”

“Yes, at least in daytime. The Stukas cause real damage. The others aren’t so bad—they drop most of their bombs in the water. We can’t go outside till dark, of course. The Germans keep hard at it.”

“It depends. Sometimes it’s waves. Sometimes, the odd lone wolf. But they keep at it. Dawn to dusk. So we hold talks and lectures during the day. And we sleep. While the Germans keep ploughing away.”

Perminov gestured dismissively towards the heavens, where the Germans were so pointlessly ploughing away. “And then it’s mortar and artillery fire all night long—as you can hear.”

“Mainly, but now and again it’s their 210s. And sometimes they try out their 103s.⁴⁷ They do all they can, there’s no denying it. But where does it get them? We fulfil our plan. They can’t stop us. Though there are, of course, barges that don’t get across.”

“Only from direct hits—we’re well dug in. But they did damage the kitchen yesterday. A hundred-kilogram bomb.”

Perminov leaned across the table. Lowering his voice, as if wanting to boast to a friend about his close, harmonious family, he said, “My men are astonishingly calm—sometimes I can barely believe it. They’re mostly from the Volga, many of them from Yaroslavl. Not so young. Most of the sappers are getting on for forty. But the way they work under fire—you’d think they were just building a school back home in their village. Not long ago we were constructing an assault bridge—from here to Sarpinsky Island. Well, you know what the Germans are like.” Perminov gestured again towards the sky over the Volga. “They realized what we were up to with our carpentry and they opened fire for all they were worth. But our sappers just carried on. You should have seen them, comrade Commissar—it was quite something! They thought things through and took their time. They stopped now and again for a smoke. No botched work, nothing done in a rush. I saw one man pick up a log, squint at it and measure it. Then he shook his head, rolled the log to one side, picked up a second log, measured it against a string, notched it with his fingernail and began to trim it. And the Germans didn’t let up for one moment. Concentrated fire on the whole sector.”

A look of pain crossed Perminov’s face. Then he recovered himself and said, “But who are we to talk? Compared with the west bank, this is a holiday camp. It’s over there, in Stalingrad, that you see real war! That’s what I hear again and again from my sappers: ‘What we’ve got here is nothing. In Stalingrad, it’s real war.’”

Soon after this, the two commanders from Front HQ arrived—a young captain and a lieutenant colonel. At three in the morning the duty sergeant came and said that the boat was ready and that they should embark. A tall young soldier came in too, holding two large thermoses. He asked Perminov for permission to cross to the west bank.

“I’m taking fresh milk to our commander. Doctor’s orders. Someone goes every other day—but our boat was sunk a few hours ago.”

“It’s a bright night, comrade Commissar, a full moon . . . A mortar bomb, mid-river. No survivors. I waited and waited. Then I decided to come here.”

Perminov climbed up out of the dugout along with Krymov and the others. He looked up at the bright sky and said, “Well, I can see a few clouds, even if they aren’t very big ones. But don’t worry. It’ll go fine. Your pilot knows what he’s doing. He’s a young lad from Stalingrad.” Turning to Krymov, he added, “Why not stop for a few hours on your way back? You could give a lecture to our men too!”

Krymov and the three other passengers set off in silence behind a messenger. Rather than taking them past the stores of supplies, he led them along the edge of the forest. They passed a smashed-up three-tonner and some graves with small wooden obelisks and five-pointed stars. The moon was so bright that the names of the dead sappers and pontooners, written in indelible ink, were clearly visible.

As they walked by, the soldier with the thermoses read aloud, “Lokotkov, Ivan Nikolaevich,” and added, “My namesake, laid to rest.”

Krymov felt his anxiety growing. It seemed unlikely, on this bright night, that he would get across the Volga alive. Back in the dugout, he had been thinking, “Will this be the last stool I sit on? Is this the last mug of tea I’ll ever drink?”

And when he saw the Volga gleaming between the dense willows, he said to himself, “Keep going, Nikolay. These may be the last steps you’re fated to take on this earth.”

But fate did not allow Krymov to take these steps in peace. A heavy shell exploded in the willows close by. A red, ragged flame shot up amid a huge cloud of smoke. Momentarily deafened, all five men dropped onto the fine cold sand close to the water.

“Quick, into the boat!” shouted the messenger, as if it were safer there than on land.

No one was hurt. But everyone’s head was ringing, clicking, buzzing and fizzing.

A man in a greasy padded jacket, with a thin, young face, bent down towards Krymov. In the gentlest of voices, he said, “Don’t sit there, you’ll get oil on your clothes. You’ll be more comfortable over here.” He then turned to the messenger, who was still standing by the willows, and said, in the same calm voice, “Vasya, get me today’s paper in time for my next trip. I’ve promised a copy to the lads in Stalingrad. Otherwise, they’ll have to wait till tomorrow.”

“What a man!” thought Krymov. He wanted to sit closer to the pilot and ask him all about himself. What was his name? How old was he? Was he single or married?

The lieutenant colonel held out his cigarette case to the pilot and said, “Light up, hero! And tell me—how old are you?”

The pilot smiled and said, “What’s that got to do with anything?” And he took a cigarette.

The engine began to knock. Bending willow branches slapped against the side of the boat, then straightened again with a swish. The boat left the creek for the open river. At first there was only the smell of petrol and hot oil, but that soon yielded to the calm, fresh breath of the night-time Volga.