A Train to Moscow(22)

March 22, 1942

Seryoga and I are pulling a cannon, harnessed like the horses in Ivanovo that used to pull loaded carts along the main road when I lived there. Only here, the ground is maimed with bomb craters and pocked with shrapnel, and no horse would be able to make its way forward. The whistle of mines and the louder roar of artillery shells rip through the air, and we roll into a trench, into something viscous on the bottom. From the explosions, we are almost buried by the falling dirt, but we are still alive. I try to move my arms and legs, still there. I can see Seryoga digging himself out, spitting out dirt, wiping his eyes of the muck from the bottom of the trench. We’ve survived this time. We get up.

The sticky stuff on the bottom of the trench is someone’s guts and blood, but it isn’t ours. The wind rains shrapnel, and we bend to get back into our harness when the lieutenant crawls out of a bomb crater next to us. His face is black from dirt, the fringe of his coat is burned over his knees, but he is brandishing a handgun.

“Attack!” he yells, pointing forward, like the statue of Lenin in front of the Finland railway station. We both look at where he is aiming. Three German tanks are crawling from behind a grove of trees, rattling over the maimed earth, their clatter filling the air.

“Move fucking forward!” the lieutenant screams, and for a few seconds, I stand there questioning the order to attack with guns and grenades the roaring tons of steel with turrets of fire aimed in our direction. I hear the blood rushing through my veins, protesting, with each pump of my heart, my oncoming death, demanding to preserve this unaccomplished, short-lived life.

But Seryoga and I know better now than to question the commander’s order, no matter how reckless or futile. So we clutch grenades in our sweaty fists, and we attack. There are four of us, four human decoys in the tank shooting gallery. The lieutenant stays behind, and if any of us survives, he knows that he may get a bullet in his back the next time he leads an attack himself. The tanks are creeping forward slowly, as if amused by this pathetic sight: four men walking toward three advancing bunkers of steel.

Then there is a series of explosions and flashes of flames, and I can no longer see Seryoga. I can no longer see anyone. The tank turrets are moving, focusing on those of us who remain standing. I’m still standing, so I pull the pin and toss the grenade. The detonation hits so close that the wave of heat throws me back, into one of the trenches that crisscross the field.

I am not alone in the trench. There is a soldier, one of the four of us, slumped on the bottom against the wall, his chin touching what used to be his chest and is now just a red porridge of flesh and bone. His eyes stare straight ahead, and his hand sits in the middle of the crater in his chest, as if he were trying to stop the bleeding in his last few seconds of life. Only an hour earlier, I saw him reading a letter from home. There is a smell of gunpowder and warm blood, a stench that makes me retch. I am on my knees, vomiting the vile mess onto what’s left of the soldier’s body. Vile on top of vile.

Then there is screeching and roaring, more deafening with every second, and the tank’s caterpillar tracks are hanging over the trench, over the man with a funnel in his chest, ironing him into his grave in the trench wall, a half a meter away from where I crouch, trying to become invisible, trying to flatten myself into the mutilated earth.

This is death, I think. This is the end. I think of Nadia as the sliver of gray sky disappears above my head. I crawl another meter to the left, where the trench ends, to keep the sky visible, as if the sight of the torn edge of a rain cloud over the mangled earth could save me. Sweat pours into my eyes, but I can’t wipe it off because every part of me is shaking from the racket and the stench, from the metal heat and the terror beating inside my chest, from not wanting to die yet. As the tank swivels right and left over the trench, pulverizing the dead soldier into a mash, I press into the sticky muck on the bottom and lie there like a wet rat, suffocating, mortified, and already half-dead.

And then it becomes light, and I can see the sky again. The tank has moved forward. I dig out, spitting out fetid dirt, bumping into the sole of a crushed boot, and peek out. The tank is clattering away; the other two are far ahead, all but disappearing behind the grove. I remember what Seryoga told me: When all you see is its back, it can’t hurt you. This is when the tank, with all its crew, all those who were safe and untouchable only minutes earlier, is yours. Strike their motor in the back, Seryoga instructed, and when they start to climb out, shoot them, one by one.

I have one more grenade. I wait until the tank clatters about ten meters forward, then pull the pin and throw. The explosion shakes the air and flings me back onto the bottom of the trench. Seryoga was right. Two figures clamber out of the tank hatch. There is desperation in their jerky movements, in their arms and legs that twitch as if pulled by strings. I wait until they jump on the ground, and then I shoot each of them with a handgun, one after the other, one bullet for each. That’s all they’re worth, two bullets. “This is for you, Seryoga,” I want to say, but I don’t, because the words refuse to leave my throat. They are caught inside, together with the taste of trench dirt, together with the smell of warm blood; they almost gag me. I no longer have words.

When I stumble back to our position, caked with foul soil and blood that isn’t mine, Seryoga is in the trench, and seeing him alive makes my legs turn to jelly. He is sitting up, scraping dirt from under his fingernails with a knife. Dirt and someone else’s blood, probably, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I didn’t leave him to die on the battlefield with the three Nazi tanks and no cover.