EVENING was already drawing in. The steppe sunsets that summer were especially splendid. The dust raised by countless explosions—and by millions of feet, wheels and tank treads—hung high in the upper air, suspended in the crystalline strata bordering the cold of cosmic space.
Refracted by this fine dust, the evening light took on a whole range of colours before reaching the earth. The steppe is immense, like the sky and the sea. And like the sky and the sea, so the hard, dry steppe—grey-blue or yellowy-grey during the day—takes on many different colours at sunset. Like the sea, it can turn from pink to deep blue, and then violet-black.
And the steppe gives off wonderful scents; fragrant oils in the sap of herbs, flowers and bushes, vaporized by the summer sun, cling to the gradually cooling earth and move through the air in slow distinct streams.
The warm earth gives off a smell of wormwood or of still-damp hay. Going down into a hollow, you meet the heavy scent of honey. From some deep ravine comes first the smell of young herbs and grasses, then of dry, dusty, sun-baked straw, and then, all of a sudden, something neither grass, nor smoke, nor wormwood, nor watermelon, nor the bitter leaves of the wild steppe-cherry but what must be the very flesh of the earth: a mysterious breath, in which you sense, all at once, the lightness of the earth’s dust, the heaviness of the layers of stone fixed in the lower darkness and the piercing cold of deep underground springs and rivers.
Not only is the evening steppe full of smells and colours; it also sings. The steppe’s sounds cannot be perceived separately. Barely touching the ear, they go straight to the heart, bringing not only calm and peace but also sorrow and a sense of alarm.
The tired, indecisive creak of crickets, as if asking whether or not it is worth making sound of an evening; the calls of the grey steppe partridges just before dark; a distant squeak of wheels; the whispering of grass as it quietens down for the night, rocked by a cool breeze; the constant hurrying of field mice and ground squirrels; the scraping sound of beetles’ hard wings. And then, alongside these peaceful signs of the day’s retreating life: the brigand-like cries of owls; the sombre hum of night hawk moths; the rustle of yellow-bellied sand boas; the sounds of predators emerging from burrows, holes and gullies, from crevices in the dry earth. And over the steppe rises the evening sky, and the earth is reflected in it; or maybe it is the sky that is reflected in the earth, or maybe earth and sky are two huge mirrors, each enriching the other with the miracle of the struggle between light and dark.
In the sky, at a terrible height, in the indifferent astronomical silence, without smoke, without the constant din of explosions, fires light up one after another. First it is only the very edge of one calm grey cloud—but a minute later this entire high cloud is ablaze, like a multistorey building, all red brick and dazzling glass. Then more and more clouds catch fire. Huge or small, cumulus or flat as a slab of slate—all catch fire alike; they crumble, collapse, fall on top of one another.
Nature is eloquent. Moist earth, covered in tiny shoots of young aspen and splinters from recent felling; a bog, overgrown with sharp-leaved sedge that cuts your fingers; small woods and glades on the edges of cities, threaded by roads and paths that have gone bald from the many feet passing over them; a small river losing its way amid marshy tussocks; the sun, peeping out from behind clouds to look at a freshly harvested field; misty, snow-covered mountains, more than five days’ walk away—all this speaks about friendship and loneliness, about fate, about happiness and sadness . . .
Wanting to save time, Krymov told Semyonov to take a shortcut, turning off the main road onto a barely visible track, overgrown with grass, that looked as if it ran from north to south and so would cross all the roads running west from the Don.
Squat stems of grey-blue feathergrass and silvery wormwood beat against the sides of the car, brushing away the dust and releasing small clouds of pollen. Krymov had hoped to save time, but this track merely passed the far side of a small hollow and then rejoined the main road—the road being taken by everyone now retreating from Chuguev, Balakleya, Valuiki and Rossosh. Other roads and tracks, from all the nearby towns and Cossack villages, also kept joining this road.
“We’ll never get through here,” Semyonov pronounced authoritatively—and braked.
“Keep going,” said Krymov. “Soon we’ll be able to turn off.”
Also making their slow way through the steppe were long herds of exhausted, stumbling cows, shaking their heavy heads, and flocks of sheep that had fused into a single grey mass, a living, flowing stain of grey.
Both on and off the road were people on foot, carrying green plywood suitcases and bundles and sacks of every kind; on their faces was a look of calm, habitual fatigue. There were slow, creaking trains of farm carts, carrying refugees in makeshift cabins covered by plywood, by bright-coloured Ukrainian sackcloth or by sheets of tin, painted red or green, from the roofs of houses.
Within these cabins could be seen biblical beards, children’s heads of hair—pale blonde, gold and black—and women’s faces, seemingly stone calm. Old men, women and girls, children—all appeared still and silent. They had lost homes and loved ones; they had lost everything they owned. They had known heat, thirst and hunger. They were covered in dust that penetrated their bread, their clothes, their hair and each cell of their body, that grated against their teeth and scratched their reddened eyes. Their ordeals had taken away all hope of anything good but left them afraid of something still worse. They were dissolving in the vastness of this slow movement amid yellowish clouds of dust, across the hot grey-blue steppe. Everything around them was creaking, grinding and humming; it was impossible for anyone to step away from the general flow, to make a fire, take a rest or wash in some stream or pool. People still sensed the cart in front of them, the oxen’s heavy breathing and the pressure of those walking behind them, but they sensed even their own selves only as particles of a single mass moving slowly and laboriously eastwards.
Those in front raised clouds of dust that settled on those behind. “How come they kick up so much dust?” asked those behind. “Why do they always have to keep pushing at us?” asked those in front.
Like migrating birds or animals, the individuals in this slow-moving stream had lost much of what made them individuals. Their world had had become simpler, a matter of bread, water, dust, heat and river crossings. Even their sense of self-preservation and their fear of being bombed had become muted; they were subsumed in a stream now too vast to be blocked or erased.
Krymov’s heart clenched tight with pain.
Fascism wanted to subordinate all human life to rules similar in their soulless, senseless and cruel uniformity to those that govern dead, inanimate nature, the laying down of sediments on the seabed or the erosion of mountain ranges. Fascism wanted to enslave the mind, soul, labour, will and acts of mineralized human beings. Fascism wanted its slaves, deprived of freedom and happiness, to be both cruel and obedient; it wanted their cruelty to be like that of a brick falling off a roof onto a child’s head.
Krymov felt his heart take in the whole of this vast picture. The sunset of ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West97—these were nothing compared with the tragedy now threatening humanity’s most sacred dream. The struggle to realize this dream had occasioned incalculable suffering; its victorious embodiment held out the promise of happiness.
Soon the twilight thickened, as if cold grey-black ash were falling onto the earth. Only in the west did the long white summer lightning of artillery salvos stubbornly continue to disturb the gloom, while high in the sky shone a few stars, as white as if cut from the bark of a young silver birch.