A Train to Moscow(13)
January 15, 1942
With a pencil I keep in the driest corner of my backpack, I draw Seryoga and our sergeant, but they come out one-dimensional and static, lacking the dark anger we’ve all acquired in the trenches. The paralyzing fear of the first German bombing, when my bowels instantly turned to water, has by now retreated into the pit of my stomach, where it lies curled up like a diseased dog. I stood in shock amid craters and burned grass, as planes were speeding toward us, filling the sky over the field with a deafening roar—alien iron machines armed with death—and Seryoga had to slap me and pull me down and shove me into the trench, where I sat shivering in a warm, stinking mess inside my pants. I’ve become angry since then, and my heart has hardened around the edges. In two months, I’ve learned to curse and down vodka, both of which would make my mother clutch at her heart and wipe her dampened glasses with a handkerchief, both of which would make my father proud.
“Hey, Da Vinci,” calls the sergeant, looking over my shoulder. “Make sure you finish that masterpiece before the next attack. The Hermitage can’t wait.”
The sergeant knows nothing about the Hermitage. He is from a small town on the other side of the Urals where he probably failed drawing in middle school because of his contempt for anything that isn’t real, and I know he has never been to Leningrad.
“Never read any fiction,” he boasts, picking his teeth with a finger and sucking down bread crumbs that got stuck there when we chewed on our rations.
“Come on,” says Seryoga. “You never read Pushkin in school? They never made you read Turgenev’s ‘Mumu’?” He pleats his eyebrows into a pitiful wave as he says “Mumu,” a story we all read in fourth grade about a heartless landlady who forces a poor peasant to drown his dog. I remember fighting back tears as I was approaching the end of the story when the peasant cuddles the little mutt for the last time before tossing it over the side of the boat.
The sergeant spits out a black glob; the soot from burning telephone cable we use to thaw the ice in the trench has sifted down and settled in our lungs. “Next time the Fritzes come with their tanks or their planes, they’ll show you ‘Mumu,’” he says and stabs his finger toward the Germans’ positions. “This is what’s real.” He is a man of utter concreteness, and this time he is right. No Michelangelo or El Greco can shield you from machine guns. No Pushkin, or Turgenev, or even Tolstoy, who knew all about war, can protect you from a shell fragment piercing your back or a tank crawling over your trench. When the sergeant yells, “Attack!” we attack, even if we are ordered to run up a hill where a German machine gun sits buried in a cemented bunker, spewing fire we can’t extinguish. We attack, and after the first waves of us are mowed down, there are always more bodies to throw into the maw, more amateur soldiers to be fed to the meat grinder of battle by the decisions of our military commanders. They yell, “Attack,” and we attack. And those who don’t, those who are afraid to die, those who retreat toward the rear, are mowed down by machine guns of our own domestic making. Our own troops stationed in the rear, shooting all of those with weak nerves, those whose minds are clouded by seeing too many human guts wound around tank turrets, too many bodies with heads blown off, a bloody mess instead of legs, too much death. For fleeing death, they get death. Traitors is the word now attached to their corpses. What’s real is the only thing that matters at the front.
The words in the last sentence are smudged, and Sasha has difficulty making them out, but traitors is pressed into the paper. Was she also a traitor, she wonders, when she didn’t feel upset, like everybody else, at the news of Stalin’s death? Was she a traitor when she didn’t cry, along with all the teachers and other students?
On March 5, 1953, when Marik and Sasha were both ten, Marik’s mother interrupted her literature class and announced that everyone must proceed to the Pioneer meeting room without delay to listen to important news. She said “important,” not “sad” news, but as Sasha shuffled down the stairs next to Marik, she saw their math teacher on the stair landing, leaning on the wall, her shoulders trembling, her hand wiping tears from her face with a checkered handkerchief. This looked strange because Sasha never imagined their math teacher capable of any emotion beyond an angry frown when one of them couldn’t recite the multiplication table without tripping over 6 x 9.
In the meeting room called the Communist Auditorium, students filed in. There were whispers rustling across the aisles; there was an occasional chair scraping the floor, and she saw Andrei among the other sixth graders two rows behind her. Their gym teacher was rubbing her eyes with her fists, and their usually stern and erect principal, Natalia Petrovna, was plodding to the front of the room, her shoulders slumped. She stood silently, waiting for the last whisper to die down, and Sasha saw a tear rolling down her cheek that she didn’t even attempt to dry.
“Today is a day of mourning for all of us,” she began in a fragile voice unfitting for a principal. “Our great leader, our father, our genius, our dear Comrade Stalin has died.” Her last words were barely audible, but everyone heard them in the absolute silence that now congealed the air in the room, in the whole school, in the entire town. It was so quiet that Sasha heard the steady dripping of water from a melting icicle hitting the sill outside the window. She was probably one of the very few people there who’d seen the real, live Stalin in Red Square three years earlier, which was still as clear in her memory as if she’d looked at it through the shiny glass of a newly washed window.