Life and Fate Page 9

  13

  After the fire, Lieutenant-General Yeremenko decided to cross to the right bank and visit Chuykov. This dangerous journey served no practical purpose, but there was a very real human and moral necessity for it; Yeremenko wasted three days waiting to cross the river.

  The bright walls of his bunker in Krasniy Sad seemed very peaceful, the shade of the apple trees very pleasant. But the distant rumble of Stalingrad merged with the sound of the leaves and the sighing of the rushes and felt somehow strangely oppressive; Yeremenko always cursed and swore as he went for his morning walk.

  Yeremenko informed Zakharov of his decision to visit Stalingrad and ordered him to take command during his absence. He joked with the waitress laying the table for breakfast, gave permission to his deputy chief of staff to fly to Saratov for two days, and acceded to a request from General Trufanov – the commander of one of the armies in the steppe – that he should bomb a powerful Rumanian artillery position: ‘All right, all right, you can have your long-range bombers!’

  Yeremenko’s aides tried to guess the reason for his good mood. Good news from Chuykov? A telephone conversation with Moscow? A letter from home? But such matters seldom escaped their notice; in any case the news from Chuykov had been bad and there had been no call from Moscow.

  After breakfast, Yeremenko put on a jacket and went out for a walk. Parkhomenko, one of the aides, followed ten yards behind. Yeremenko walked with his usual unhurried stride, stopping now and then to scratch his thigh and glance towards the Volga.

  Yeremenko stopped by a group of middle-aged labourers digging a pit. The napes of their necks were tanned dark brown and their faces were sullen and gloomy. They worked on in silence, glancing irritably at the stout man in a green cap who was standing idly by the edge of the pit.

  ‘Tell me now,’ said Yeremenko. ‘Which of you is the worst worker?’

  This question seemed very opportune; the men were tired of wielding their spades. They all looked round at a man who was busy emptying his pocket, pouring out breadcrumbs and tobacco-dust into the palm of one hand.

  ‘Maybe him,’ said two of them, looking round at the others for their agreement.

  The man in question gave a dignified sigh and looked meekly up at Yeremenko. Realizing that Yeremenko was asking questions purely for the sake of it, he didn’t say anything.

  ‘And which of you is the best worker?’

  They all pointed at a man with grey, thinning hair.

  ‘Troshnikov,’ said one of them. ‘He really does put his heart into it.’

  ‘He’s used to hard work – he just can’t help it,’ said some of the others. It was almost as though they were apologizing on his behalf.

  Yeremenko fumbled in his trouser-pocket and took out a gold watch that gleamed in the sun. Bending down with considerable awkwardness, he held it out to Troshnikov. Troshnikov looked at him blankly.

  ‘Go on!’ said Yeremenko. ‘That’s your reward.’ Still looking at Troshnikov, he said: ‘Parkhomenko, write out a certificate for him!’

  He walked on, leaving a buzz of excitement behind him. Everyone was laughing, gasping with amazement at the hard-working Troshnikov’s amazing stroke of luck.

  Yeremenko waited three days to cross the river. Communications with the right bank had almost been severed. Those launches that did get through to Chuykov were holed fifty to seventy times in only a few minutes. They arrived at the right bank with their decks covered in blood.

  Yeremenko was irritable and quarrelsome. The officers in charge of the crossing came to be more afraid of his anger than of the German bombs and grenades. He seemed to think it was negligent majors and idle captains who were to blame for the excesses of the German mortars, cannons and aircraft.

  One night Yeremenko left his bunker and stood on a sand-dune beside the water. What had once been a map spread flat on a table was now suddenly alive – thundering, smoking, and breathing out death.

  He seemed to recognize the red dots of the front line, the thick arrows of Paulus’s thrusts towards the Volga, the key defences, the concentrations of artillery that he himself had circled in coloured pencil. But looking at the map, he had felt he had the power to bend and shift the line of the front. He had been the master; the power to order the heavy artillery to open fire from the left bank was his . . . His feelings now were very different indeed. The glow of the fire, the slow thunder in the sky were awesome. And their power had nothing to do with him, in no way depended on him.

  He heard a faint cry from the area of the factories, a cry that was almost drowned by the shell-bursts and gunfire: ‘A-a-a-a-a-h!’ There was something terrible, but also something sad and melancholy in this long cry uttered by the Russian infantry as they staged an attack. As it crossed the cold water, it lost its fervour. Instead of valour or gallantry, you could hear the sadness of a soul parting with everything that it loved, calling on its nearest and dearest to wake up, to lift their heads from their pillows and hear for the last time the voice of a father, a husband, a son or a brother . . .

  Yeremenko felt the same sadness in his own heart. Suddenly he had been sucked in by the war he was used to directing from outside. There he was – a solitary soldier on the shifting sands, stunned by the fire and thunder, standing on the bank like tens of thousands of other soldiers. He knew now that this people’s war was beyond his understanding and outside his power . . . This was perhaps the highest understanding of the war he was ever to reach.

  Just before morning Yeremenko crossed to the right bank. Chuykov had been notified by telephone; he walked down to the water and watched the armoured launch as it sped across.

  The gangplank bent under Yeremenko’s weight as he got out. He stepped clumsily over the pebbles and went up to Chuykov.

  ‘Greetings, comrade Chuykov!’

  ‘Greetings, comrade Lieutenant-General!’

  ‘I wanted to see how you’re getting on over here. Well, you certainly don’t seem to have got yourself burnt! You’re still as shaggy as ever . . . And you haven’t even grown thin – we must be feeding you all right after all!’

  ‘Do you expect me to grow thin from sitting all day and night in a bunker?’ asked Chuykov. Still offended at Yeremenko’s greeting, he went on: ‘But what am I doing – receiving a guest out here on the bank?’

  Now it was Yeremenko’s turn to feel angry. It was very galling indeed to be referred to as a guest in Stalingrad. When Chuykov invited him in, he said: ‘It’s all right. I’ll stay out here in the fresh air.’

  The right bank, lit up by flares, shell-bursts and burning buildings, seemed quite deserted. The light brightened and faded, flaring up for a few seconds at a time with blinding intensity. Yeremenko gazed at the slopes pitted with bunkers and communication trenches, at the heaps of stone by the water – massive shapes that loomed out of the darkness and quickly slipped back into it.

  Just then a loudspeaker struck up from across the river. An immense voice began to sing:

  May noble fury boil up like waves!

  This is the people’s war, a sacred war.

  Since there were no human beings in sight, and since everything round about – the earth, the sky and the Volga – was lit up by flame, it seemed as though the war itself were singing this ponderous song.

  Yeremenko was embarrassed by the interest he felt in the picture before him; it really was as though he was a guest come to see the master of Stalingrad. It angered him that Chuykov appeared to understand the anxiety that had led him to cross the Volga, to know how tormented he had felt as he paced about Krasniy Sad listening to the rustle of dry leaves.

  He began questioning the master of this fiery hell about the disposition of his reserves, the co-ordination between the infantry and the artillery, and the build-up of German forces around the factories. Chuykov answered in the customary tone of an officer being questioned by a superior.

  They fell silent for a moment. Chuykov wanted to say: ‘This has been the greatest defensive action in his
tory. But still, what about a counter-offensive?’ But he didn’t dare. Yeremenko would think that the defenders of Stalingrad lacked endurance, that they were begging for a burden to be lifted from their shoulders.

  Suddenly Yeremenko asked: ‘Your mother and father are from the country, aren’t they? Somewhere round Tula?’

  ‘That’s right, comrade General.’

  ‘Does the old man write to you?’

  ‘Yes, he does. He’s still working.’

  They looked at one another. The lenses of Yeremenko’s spectacles were pink from the glow of the fire.

  Another moment and it seemed they might begin the one conversation that really mattered – about the meaning of Stalingrad. But Yeremenko just said: ‘You probably want to ask the usual question an officer puts to his superior – about reinforcements and supplies of ammunition.’

  The one conversation that could have had meaning failed to take place.

  A sentry on the crest of the slope glanced down at them. Hearing the whistle of a shell, Chuykov looked up and said: ‘I bet that sentry’s wondering who on earth the two eccentrics by the river can be.’

  Yeremenko sniffed and started to scratch his nose. The moment had come for him to leave. It was an unwritten law that a superior officer standing under enemy fire should only leave when his subordinate asked him to. But Yeremenko’s indifference to danger was so complete and so unfeigned that this rule seemed irrelevant.

  A mortar-bomb whistled past. He turned his head quickly and unthinkingly to follow its trajectory.

  ‘Well, Chuykov, it’s time I was off!’

  Chuykov stood for a while on the bank and watched the launch disappear. The foam of the wake reminded him of a white handkerchief – as though a woman were waving goodbye to him.

  For his part, Yeremenko stood on the deck and gazed at the left bank. It was undulating gently in the dim glow from Stalingrad, while the river itself was as still as stone. He paced irritably about; once again his mind was full of dozens of familiar thoughts and anxieties. There were new tasks before him. What mattered now were his instructions from the Stavka: to build up a concentration of armour in readiness for an attack on the enemy’s left flank.fn1 This was something he hadn’t so much as mentioned to Chuykov.

  Chuykov himself returned to his bunker. The soldier on sentry-duty, the duty-officer inside, Guryev’s chief of staff – like everyone else who jumped up at the sound of Chuykov’s heavy footsteps – could see that their commander was upset.

  He was indeed – and not without reason. His troops were slowly melting away. In the alternation of attack and counter-attack, the Germans were slowly gaining precious metres of ground. And two full-strength infantry divisions had been brought up from the rear and disposed opposite the Tractor Factory; there they remained ominously inactive.

  No, he certainly had not expressed all his fears and anxieties to Yeremenko . . . But neither of the two men quite understood why their meeting had been so unsatisfactory; that the main thing about it was not the practical part, but what they had both been unable to say.

  Footnotes

  fn1 Based in the Kremlin, the Stavka was the Soviet equivalent of GHQ and was responsible for the strategic direction of the war.

  14

  One cold October morning, Major Byerozkin woke up, thought about his wife and daughter, about heavy machine-guns, and listened to the now familiar rumble of gunfire. Then he called his orderly, Glushkov, and told him to fetch some water.

  ‘It’s nice and cold, just as you like it,’ said Glushkov, smiling at the thought of the pleasure Byerozkin always took in his morning wash.

  ‘It’s probably already been snowing in the Urals,’ said Byerozkin. ‘That’s where my wife and daughter are. Do you know, I still haven’t heard from them.’

  ‘You will, comrade Major,’ said Glushkov.

  While Byerozkin was drying himself and putting on his shirt, Glushkov told him about the events of the small hours.

  ‘A shell fell on the kitchen block and killed the storeman. The chief of staff of the second battalion went out to relieve himself and was caught in the shoulder by a splinter. And some sappers caught a five-kilo pike-perch that had been stunned by a bomb. I’ve seen it myself – they gave it as a present to Captain Movshovich. And the commissar’s been round – he wants you to phone him when you wake up.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Byerozkin. He drank a cup of tea, ate some calf’s-foot jelly, rang the chief of staff and the commissar to say he was going out to inspect his battalions, put on his jacket and walked to the door.

  Glushkov shook out the towel and hung it up on a nail, felt the hand-grenade hanging from his belt, slapped his pocket to check his tobacco-pouch was in place, took a tommy-gun from the corner and followed the regimental commander outside.

  Byerozkin screwed up his eyes as he came out into the light. He had been in Stalingrad for a month and the picture before him was by now familiar: clay scree and a brown slope dotted with the tarpaulin roofs of soldiers’ dug-outs and the smoking chimneys of improvised stoves. Higher up he could see the dark silhouettes of factories whose roofs had fallen in.

  On the left, towards the Volga, were the tall chimneys of the ‘Red October’ factory and some goods wagons that looked like a herd of animals huddled around the body of their dead leader – a locomotive that was lying on its side. Still further away one could see the skeletons of ruined buildings, with thousands of patches of open sky appearing through what had once been windows. Smoke was rising from the factory workshops, there were glimpses of flame, and the air was filled with a staccato banging. It was almost as though these factories were still working.

  Byerozkin carefully looked over the 300 metre-wide sector – most of it the small houses of a workers’ settlement – where his regiment was disposed. Some sixth sense enabled him to tell apart, in the chaos of ruined buildings and alleyways, the houses where his own soldiers were cooking their buckwheat kasha and those where the Germans were eating fatback bacon and drinking schnapps.

  A mortar-bomb whistled through the air; Byerozkin bowed his head and cursed. There was the crash of an explosion and a cloud of smoke covered the entrance to a bunker on the opposite slope of the gully. Still in his braces, the chief signaller of the neighbouring division emerged from the bunker. He’d barely taken a step, however, when there was another whistle; he ducked back and closed the door as another mortar-bomb burst only ten metres away.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Batyuk had been watching this episode from the doorway of his own bunker at the top of the gully. As the signaller had taken his first step, Batyuk had shouted out in his Ukrainian accent: ‘Fire!’ It was, in fact, just then that the obedient German had fired his mortar. Batyuk caught sight of Byerozkin and called out: ‘Greetings, neighbour!’

  This little walk of Byerozkin’s was mortally dangerous. After they’d had a good sleep and some breakfast, the Germans kept an especially close eye on this path. Not sparing their ammunition, they took potshots at everyone who passed by. At a corner, Byerozkin stood for a while by a heap of rubble; looking across a deceptively silent empty space, he said: ‘You go first, Glushkov.’

  ‘What do you mean? There’s sure to be a sniper.’

  It was a superior’s privilege to be the first to cross a dangerous spot; usually the Germans were too slow to open fire straight away.

  Byerozkin glanced round at the houses occupied by the Germans, winked at Glushkov and ran. As he reached the embankment, there was a sharp crack just behind him; a German had fired an explosive bullet. Byerozkin stood there and lit up a cigarette . . . Then Glushkov ran across, taking long, quick strides. A burst of machine-gun fire kicked up the dirt under his feet; it was almost as though a flock of sparrows had suddenly shot up from the ground. Glushkov swayed, stumbled, fell, jumped up again and finally reached Byerozkin.

  ‘He almost got me – the bastard!’

  After he’d got his breath back, Glushkov explained: ‘I thought he’d be annoyed
at letting you through and that he’d break off for a cigarette. But he obviously doesn’t smoke – the swine!’ He fingered the torn flap of his jacket and began cursing again.

  When they reached the command-post, Byerozkin asked: ‘Are you wounded, comrade Glushkov?’

  ‘It’s all right. The bastard just chewed the heel off my boot, that’s all.’

  The cellar of a large grocery store housed the command-posts of both an infantry and a sapper battalion. On the table stood two tall lamps made from empty shellcases. The damp air was full of the smell of sauerkraut and apples. A placard nailed to the door read: ‘Customer and shop-assistant, be polite to one another!’

  The two battalion commanders, Podchufarov and Movshovich, were sitting at the table and eating breakfast. As he opened the door, Byerozkin heard Podchufarov’s excited voice.

  ‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s watered-down booze. I’d rather do without altogether.’

  Seeing Byerozkin, they both got up and stood to attention. At the same time, the chief of staff buried a quarter-litre bottle of vodka under some hand-grenades and the cook moved sideways to hide the famous pike-perch. Podchufarov’s orderly jumped to his feet; he had been squatting down, about to put on the record ‘Chinese Serenade’. He just had time to take off the record, but he left the gramophone humming idly away. He stood there, looking straight ahead with an open, soldierly gaze; when the accursed machine hummed particularly loudly, he caught an angry glance from Podchufarov out of the corner of his eye.

  They were all well aware of the strange quirks of superior officers: how they seem to expect everyone in a battalion always to be fighting, peering at the enemy through binoculars, or puzzling over a map. But a man can’t be shooting or on the phone to his superiors and subordinates twenty-four hours a day; he has to eat sometime.

  Byerozkin looked askance at the murmuring gramophone and grinned.