A Train to Moscow(62)

What a strange place it is, this road between the rear and the front, between life and death. It is as wide and crowded as an avenue, the Nevsky Prospekt of war. We are walking away from the front, along with other wounded, drawn on sleds or piled onto an occasional truck. Toward the front crawl tanks, horse-drawn carts, and trucks filled with weapons and food. The new soldiers marching past are wearing military capes over their shoulders that make them look like hunchbacks, as if they had already been damaged.

We lumber past the everyday life teeming on the sidewalks of this avenue. The sergeant’s embrace is suffocating, but I know I am the one without the shrapnel wound, so I don’t complain. It is so cold that your spit turns into an icicle in the air before it hits the ground with a ping. We pass two soldiers sitting on a military cape spread across the snow, sawing a frozen loaf of bread into pieces with a two-handled saw. I can taste that frozen bread in my mouth, a piece of hard candy you have to roll on your tongue until it thaws. They scoop up the sawdust of bread crumbs and divide them equally.

Suddenly there are several explosions: first in the distance, then closer, then only a few meters away. On the ground, I see a soldier crouching in a puddle of blood, but all I feel is relief that it isn’t me. An older man who was walking in front of us is now on his knees, clutching his thigh. Next to him is a nurse, a girl who looks no older than sixteen, helpless, dribbles of tears streaking down her dirty face unwashed for days. She doesn’t know what to do, and I see that her hands are shaking. The older man lowers his pants, plugs the bloody hole in his thigh with a bandage, and tries to console the girl. “Don’t be afraid, dochka, don’t cry.” Dochka, he calls her, my little daughter.

We reach the hospital at dusk. The bandage around the sergeant’s throat is all red now, but he is still hanging on to my shoulders, dragging his feet in the dirty snow. The hospital is not really a hospital; it is a train parked on an auxiliary track. There are scattered bloodstained rags and too many men to count. The young doctor with a face drained of color and short chestnut hair has lost her voice. She looks as if she could faint at any minute, but she tries to project authority. She looks a little like my older sister, Galya, who is also a surgeon at the front line, near Kalinin. I carefully lower the sergeant to wait in line with the other wounded sitting on the floor of what used to be a corridor when this train was a train, when there was no war. Then I turn around to take the road back to the front. This is the closest to Nevsky Prospekt I’m going to get for a while.

And what if I didn’t go back to our trench carved in the frozen flesh of the field? What if I stayed right here and got lost among the scraps of life swarming along the war road? A seductive thought, a dangerous thought. A thought that has crossed my mind more than once, that has crossed the mind of every private who wanted to survive. A desperate attempt to stay alive that usually fails.

You clench your teeth and shoot your foot through a loaf of bread. You turn your head away and fire at your wrist through the arm of a soldier with a funnel in place of where his stomach had been only a few minutes earlier. You are desperate enough to jump into a bomb crater and detonate a grenade that will rip off your arm at the elbow. And then what? Then there is an NKVD officer with a heavy jowl from extra rations and an unflinching communist gaze who has seen all this before and who can tell in an instant a real wound from a self-inflicted one. There is no hesitation in his eyes because the front allows no benefit of the doubt for the cowardly and the weak, for those who have to think about whether they are ready to die for their motherland. If you are weak, you are killed like a rabid dog, like a horse infected with anthrax, to keep other dogs and other horses healthy and in working order. The verdict is quick: you are a deserter, so you stand in front of your platoon, your belt taken away, your pants falling down, the commissar aiming his gun at your head.

I walk along the road back to the front, back to Seryoga, into the rapidly descending winter night.



Sasha is at the rehearsal for Quiet Dawns, and she is feeling the swampy water before her with her birch-tree pole, trying to distinguish land from morass, life from death. Everything is absolute: if you make a mistake, there is no second chance. One wrong step is your destiny. You have one moment to make a decision that will define your life, whatever is left of it. A single moment can either leave you balanced on ten centimeters of firm land or open a void under your feet, a bottomless quagmire of cold muck ready to suck you in and swallow you whole. One moment Marik was standing by the fire, his feet dug into the mud, and the next thing she saw was blood from the corner of his mouth leaving a red stain on the snow.

She doesn’t want to think about the quivering depths beneath her feet, so she thinks of their sergeant, Gleb Petrovich. He is young, and giving the five of them orders makes him uncomfortable: he looks away and rubs his forehead under his military cap when he has to tell them what to do next. She has a suspicion no one has ever called him Gleb Petrovich, and every time Zhenya or Liza shape their mouths around the sounds of his patronymic, he blinks in surprise, as though the more formal name they use for those in charge should be addressed to someone else, someone worthy of command. In her thoughts, she calls him simply Gleb, and sometimes even the diminutive Glebushka when she thinks of his blue eyes and his hair the color of straw, when she admits to herself that she likes him, the way she liked Andrei when Marik was still alive: longing, not yet desire, the small, unopened bud of future love. Gleb is from a tiny village, like her, and she can tell from the pink hue that floods his freckled cheeks that he likes her, too. He doesn’t blush when the tall and beautiful Zhenya-Lara sings “Katyusha” in her deep, seductive voice or when the other three girls whisper into each other’s ears and stifle giggles.