Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel(82)

penal battalions wore the uniforms of the old Tsar'sImperial Army, with red emblazoned shoulder boards, gray felt fabric and gilded epaulets. It made dying in the mud so much more dignified and stepping on mines a matter of great honor. Even Ouspensky seemed to breathe easier with his one lung while wearing the uniform he would have died protecting the emperor in.

The men had no hair anywhere on their bodies. Under Alexander's directive, they shaved themselves daily to prevent the spread of lice. After heavy fighting, they would spend a day in the river shaving.

Alexander was often unable to tell his men apart from one another. Some were slightly taller than average, some were slightly smaller, some had birthmarks, others were clean, some were dark-skinned, most were white and sunburned. Only a few were freckled. Some had green eyes, some brown, and one Corporal Yermenko had one green eye, one brown.

In civil life, hair defined men. Head hair, body hair, but now the men were defined by war and their scars. The scars were the most distinguishing features. Scars from battle, from knife wounds, from bullets, from compound fractures, from shell grazings, from gunpowder burns. On the arms, maybe on the upper shoulders, perhaps on the lower legs. There were not too many living with scars on their chests, abdomens, or scalps.

Alexander knew his Lieutenant Ouspensky by the wheezing noise he made when he breathed, and by the scar over his right lung, and he knew his Sergeant Telikov by his white, wiry, long body, and Sergeant Verenkov by his squat body that must have been once nearly completely covered with black hair and was now nearly completely covered with black stubble.

Alexander preferred them to have fewer distinguishing features. It made losing the men easier. One loss, one replacement with another shaved, bald, smooth, scarred man.

Alexander's battalion started up in northern Russia and moved down to Lithuania and Latvia. By the time they got to Byelorussia, he had been ordered to switch fronts and go from Rokossovsky's Army Group North, to Zhukov's Army Group Center. In flat and largely woodless Byelorussia there was a rousting of the Germans such as Alexander had never seen; to do it the Red Army lost over 125,000 men and twenty-five divisions in Byelorussia alone, while Alexander's battalion pushed forward and south, forward and south, finally connecting with Konev's northern divisions of southernmost Army Group Ukraine.

After June 1944, when news came that the American and British forces landed in Normandy, Alexander's battalion covered a hundred kilometers in ten days, knocking out four German companies of 500 men each. The Soviet trucks rallied behind with supplies and food, and more men to replace the losses. Alexander was unstoppable. Like Comrade Stalin, he needed to get into Germany. Stalin may have wanted retribution, but Alexander felt his deliverance lay there.

The Black Horseman of the Apocalypse, 1941

Fed up and frustrated, Alexander volunteered himself to fight the Finns in Karelia to get as far away from the Metanovs as possible.

He asked Dimitri to come with him, mentioning valor, medals, promotions, but thinking shootings, stabbings, casualties.

True to form, Dimitri refused to go to Karelia to fight, and then was promptly sent to the slaughterhouse of Tikhvin where he was outmanned and outarmed by the Germans. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Alexander was sent with a thousand troops to push the Finns back from the supply line to Leningrad. Weeks went by of savage fighting, of gaining territory meter by hard won bloody meter. Finally, after a day of gunfire that left three hundred Red Army soldiers dead, Alexander, surveying the damage in the near dark, found himself one icy late September evening alone in a field with dead Soviet men around him and with dead Finnish men in front of him. All quiet on the Karelian front and the NKVD were half a kilometer back in the bushes, away from the front line. The fires from the shells still burning, branches broken from trees crackling, snow black from the blood of man, smell acrid of singed human flesh, a few isolated groans, and Alexander alone.

All was quiet, except the roaring in Alexander's chest. He looked back; there was no movement behind him. The machine gun was in his hands. He took a step, then another, then another. He had his Shpagin, his rifle, his pistol, his uniform. He was now walking amid the dead Finns close to the woods. In one and a half minutes he could be wearing a Finnish uniform, stripped from the body of a dead officer and holding a Finnish machine gun.

Dark. Quiet. He glanced back again. The NKVD weren't coming any closer.

Mere months with her. Months. In the vast landscape of his life, the weeks, the stolen moments, the Luga night, the hospital minutes, the moment on the bus, the white dress, the green eyes, all of it just a burst of color on the periphery, a red splash in the corner of the canvas of his life. He took another step. He could not help her. Not her, not Dasha, not Dimitri. Leningrad was going to swallow them all and Alexander would be damned if he stayed and watched. Another step. Dead on the icy blown-apart streets of a starved Leningrad.

No one moving on the flat terrain, no trucks, no roads, no men, just trenches, and downed bodies, and Alexander, another step in the right direction and another. And another. He was deep amid the Finns now. Bend down, find a tall body, take its uniform, pick up his machine gun, drop yours, drop the life you hate, one more step and go. Go, Alexander. You cannot save her. Go.

For many minutes he stood on Finnish soil amid the fallen enemy.

The life he hated had in it one thing he could not leave behind.

He turned around and slowly walked back to his platoon, his only light the flares of flashlights and the failing fires...glancing back once at the forest that was Finland.