He smiled at Krymov and grunted. ‘It’s just like being in a village. As soon as things quieten down in the evening, we start phoning our neighbours. What did you have to eat? Has anyone been round? Are you going anywhere yourself? Did the high-ups say which of us has got the best bath-house? Has anyone been written about in the newspaper? Yes, they always write about Rodimtsev, never about us. To read the newspapers, you’d think he was defending Stalingrad all by himself.’
He gave his guest some more vodka, but himself just had some tea and a crust of bread. He seemed indifferent to the pleasures of the table.
Krymov realized that the deliberateness of Batyuk’s movements and his slow Ukrainian manner of speech were misleading; in fact he was mulling over some very difficult problems. He was upset that Batyuk didn’t ask a single question about his lecture. It was as though it bore no relation to any of Batyuk’s real concerns.
Krymov was appalled by what Batyuk told him about the first hours of the war. During the mass retreat from the frontier, Batyuk led his own battalion west to hold a ford against the Germans. His superior officers, retreating along the same road, thought he was about to surrender to the Germans. There and then, after an interrogation consisting only of hysterical shouts and curses, it was decided to have Batyuk shot. At the last moment – he was already standing against a tree – he was rescued by his own soldiers.
‘Yes, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel,’ said Krymov. ‘That’s no joke.’
‘I didn’t quite die of a heart attack,’ said Batyuk. ‘But my heart hasn’t been the same since – that’s for sure!’
‘Can you hear the firing over in the Market?’ asked Krymov in a rather theatrical tone. ‘Is Gorokhov up to something?’
Batyuk glanced at him.
‘I know what Gorokhov’s up to. He’s playing cards.’
Krymov said he’d heard there was going to be a meeting of snipers at Batyuk’s; he’d like to attend.
‘Certainly,’ said Batyuk. ‘Why not?’
They began to talk about the Front. Batyuk said he was worried by the gradual build-up of German troops in the north of the sector; it was mostly taking place at night.
Finally the snipers assembled; Krymov realized who the pie was intended for. Men in padded jackets sat down one after another on benches beside the wall and round the table; they seemed shy and awkward, but at the same time conscious of their own worth. The new arrivals stacked their rifles and tommy-guns in the corner, trying to make as little noise as possible; they might have been workers putting down their axes and spades.
The famous Zaitsev looked somehow kind and gentle – just a good-natured country lad. But when he turned his head and frowned, Krymov glimpsed the true harshness of his features.
It reminded him of a moment at a conference before the war. Looking at an old friend seated beside him, he had suddenly seen his seemingly hard face in a different light. His eyes kept blinking, his mouth was half-open and he had a weak nose and chin. Altogether he seemed feeble and irresolute.
Next to Zaitsev were Bezdidko – a mortar man with narrow shoulders and brown, laughing eyes – and Suleiman Khalimov, a young Uzbek with the thick lips of a child. Then there was Matsegur, a crack-shot who kept having to wipe the sweat off his forehead; he looked like a quiet family-man – anything but a sniper. The other snipers – Shuklin, Tokarev, Manzhulya and Solodkiy – also looked like shy, diffident young lads.
Batyuk cocked his head to one side as he questioned them. He looked more like an inquisitive schoolboy than one of the canniest and most experienced officers in Stalingrad. Everyone’s eyes lit up when he started talking, in Ukrainian, to Bezdidko; they were expecting some good jokes.
‘Well, Bezdidko, how’s it been?’
‘Yesterday I gave the Fritzes a hard time, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel. You already know that. But today I only got five – and I wasted four bombs.’
‘Well, you’re not in the same class as Shuklin. He put fourteen tanks out of action with one gun.’
‘Yes, and that gun was all that was left of his battery.’
‘He blew up a German brothel yesterday,’ said the handsome Bulatov, blushing.
‘I just recorded it as an ordinary bunker.’
‘Talking of bunkers,’ said Batyuk, ‘my door was smashed in yesterday by a mortar-bomb.’ He turned to Bezdidko and said reproachfully: ‘I thought that son of a bitch Bezdidko was aiming a bit wide.’
Manzhulya, a gun-layer who seemed even quieter than the rest, took a piece of pie and murmured: ‘It’s good pastry, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel.’
Batyuk tapped his glass with a rifle-cartridge.
‘Well, comrades, let’s get down to business.’
It was just another production conference – like those held in factories or village mills . . . Only the people here were not bakers, weavers or tailors, nor were they talking of threshing methods or bread.
Bulatov told them how he had seen a German walking down a path with his arm round a woman. He had made them drop to the ground, and then, before killing them, had let them get up three times, only to force them back to the ground by stirring up clouds of dust an inch or two from their feet.
‘He was bending down towards her when I finished him off. They ended up stretched across the path like a cross.’
Bulatov’s nonchalance made this story peculiarly horrible. It was quite unlike most soldiers’ tales.
‘Come on! That’s enough of your bullshit, Bulatov!’ Zaitsev interrupted.
‘That takes my score to seventy-eight,’ said Bulatov. ‘And I’m not bullshitting. The commissar wouldn’t allow me to lie. Here’s his signature.’
Krymov wanted to join in the conversation; he wanted to say that among the Germans Bulatov had killed there might well have been workers, revolutionaries, internationalists. It was important to remember this or they’d become mere chauvinists . . . But he kept quiet. He knew that this kind of thinking was unhelpful, that it would serve only to demoralize the soldiers.
The blond Solodkiy said with a lisp that he’d killed eight Germans yesterday. He added: ‘I come from a kolkhoz near Umansk. What the Fascists did in my village is unbelievable. And I haven’t got off scot-free myself – I’ve been wounded three times. That’s what’s made me a sniper.’
After suggesting very earnestly that it was best to pick a spot along a path the Germans used to fetch water or to go to the kitchen, Tokarev said: ‘I’m from Mozhaev. My wife’s in occupied territory. I got a letter from her saying what they’ve been through. They killed my son because of the name I gave him – Vladimir Ilyich.’
‘I never hurry,’ said Khalimov excitedly. ‘I shoot when my heart tells me. I come to the front – Sergeant Gurov my friend. He teach me Russian, I teach him Uzbek. Germans kill him, I kill twelve Germans. I take binoculars from officer and hang them round neck. I carry out your orders, comrade Political Instructor.’
There was something terrible about the reports of these snipers. Krymov had always scorned lily-livered intellectuals, people like Shtrum and Yevgenia Nikolaevna who had made such a to-do over the fate of the kulaks. Referring to 1937, he had told Yevgenia: ‘There’s nothing wrong with liquidating our enemies; what’s terrible is when we shoot our own people.’
Now he felt like saying that he’d always, without the least hesitation, been ready to shoot White Guards, to exterminate Menshevik and SR scum, to liquidate the kulaks, that he had never felt the least pity for enemies of the Revolution, but that it was wrong to rejoice at the killing of German workers. There was something horrible about the way these soldiers talked – even though they knew very well what they were fighting for.
Zaitsev began to tell the story of his battle of wits with a German sniper at the foot of Mamayev Kurgan. It had lasted for days. The German knew Zaitsev was watching him and he himself was keeping watch on Zaitsev. They seemed well-matched; neither could catch the other out.
‘He’d already picked off three of our men that day,
but I just lay in my ditch. I didn’t make a sound. Then he had one more go – his aim was perfect – another of our soldiers fell to the ground with his hands in the air. One of their soldiers went by with some papers. I just lay there and watched . . . I knew what he’d be thinking – that if I’d been around, I’d have picked off that soldier. And I knew he couldn’t see the soldier he’d shot himself – he’d want to have a look. Neither of us moved. Then another German went by with a bucket – not a sound from my ditch. Another fifteen minutes and he started to get to his feet. He stood up. Then I stood up myself . . .’
Reliving what he’d been through, Zaitsev got up from the table. His face had now assumed the expression Krymov had earlier only glimpsed. Now he was no longer just a good-natured young lad – there was something leonine, something powerful and sinister in his flared nostrils, in his broad forehead, in the triumphant glare of his eyes.
‘He realized who I was. And then I shot him.’
There was a moment of silence, probably the same silence that had followed Zaitsev’s shot – you could almost hear the dead body falling to the ground. Batyuk suddenly turned to Krymov and asked: ‘Well, do you find all this interesting?’
‘It’s great stuff,’ said Krymov – and that was all he said.
Krymov stayed behind after the end of the meeting. Batyuk moved his lips as he counted out some drops for his heart into an empty glass; then he filled it with water. Yawning every now and then, he started to tell Krymov about everyday life in the division. Everything he said seemed to have some bearing on what had happened to him in the first hours of the war; it was as though all his thoughts had developed from that one point.
Ever since he had arrived in Stalingrad, Krymov had had a strange feeling. Sometimes it was as though he were in a kingdom where the Party no longer existed; sometimes he felt he was breathing the air of the first days of the Revolution.
‘Have you been a member of the Party for long, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel?’ he asked Batyuk abruptly.
‘Why do you ask, comrade Commissar? Do you think I’m deviating from the Party line?’
For a moment Krymov didn’t answer. Then he said: ‘I’ve always been considered quite a good orator, you know. I’ve spoken at large workers’ meetings. But ever since I arrived here, I’ve felt that I’m following people rather than guiding them. It’s very odd. Just now I wanted to say something to your snipers and then I thought they knew all they needed to know already. Actually, that wasn’t the only reason I didn’t say anything. We’ve been told to make the soldiers think of the Red Army as an army of vengeance. This isn’t the moment for me to start talking about internationalism or class consciousness. What matters is to mobilize the fury of the masses against the enemy. I don’t want to be like the idiot in the story who began reciting the funeral service at a wedding . . .’
He thought for a moment. ‘Anyway, I’m used to it . . . The Party’s mobilized the fury of the masses in order to destroy the enemy, to annihilate them. There’s no place for Christian humanitarianism now. Our Soviet humanitarianism is something more stern . . . We certainly don’t wear kid-gloves . . .’ He paused again.
‘Of course I’m not talking about incidents like when you were nearly shot. And in 1937 there were times when we shot our own people – yes, we’re paying for that now. But now the Germans have attacked the homeland of workers and peasants. War’s war! They deserve what they get.’
Krymov waited for a response from Batyuk, but it wasn’t forthcoming – not because Batyuk was perplexed by what he had said, but because he had fallen asleep.
56
It was almost dark. Men in padded jackets were scurrying about between the furnaces of the ‘Red October’ steelworks. In the distance you could hear shooting and see brief flashes of light; the air was full of a kind of dusty mist.
Guryev, the divisional commander, had set up the regimental command-posts inside the furnaces. Krymov had the impression that the people inside these furnaces – furnaces that until recently had forged steel – must be very special, must themselves have hearts of steel.
You could hear the tramp of German boots; you could hear orders being shouted out; you could even hear quiet clicks as the Germans reloaded their tommy-guns.
As he climbed down, shoulders hunched, into the mouth of a furnace that was now the command-post of an infantry battalion, as his hands felt the warmth that still lingered in the fire-bricks, a sort of timidity suddenly came over Krymov; it was as though the secret of this extraordinary resistance was about to be revealed to him.
In the semi-darkness he made out a squatting figure with a broad face, and heard a welcoming voice.
‘Here’s a guest come to our palace! Welcome! Quick – some vodka and a hard-boiled egg for our visitor!’
A thought flashed through Krymov’s brain: he would never be able to tell Yevgenia Nikolaevna how he had thought of her as he climbed into a dark, airless steel-furnace in Stalingrad. In the past he’d tried to forget her, to escape from her, but now he was reconciled to the way she followed him wherever he went. The witch – she’d even followed him into this furnace!
It was all as clear as daylight. Who needed stepsons of the time? Better to hide them away with the cripples and pensioners! Better to make them into soap! Her leaving him was just one more sign that his life was hopeless. Even here in Stalingrad they didn’t want him as a combatant.
That evening, after his lecture, Krymov talked to General Guryev. Guryev had taken off his jacket and kept wiping the sweat off his red face. In the same harsh voice he offered Krymov vodka, shouted orders down the telephone to his battalion commanders, abused the cook for failing to grill the shashlyks correctly, and rang his neighbour, Batyuk, to ask if they were playing dominoes on Mamayev Kurgan.
‘We’ve got some good men here,’ said Guryev. ‘They’re a fine lot. Batyuk’s certainly got a head on his shoulders. And General Zholudyev at the tractor factory’s an old friend of mine. And then there’s Colonel Gurtyev at “The Barricades” – only he’s a monk, he never drinks vodka at all. That really is a mistake.’
Then he told Krymov about how no one else had so few men as he did – between six and eight in each company. And no one else was so cut off from the rear – when they sent him reinforcements, a third of them would arrive wounded. No one else, except perhaps Gorokhov, had to put up with that.
‘Yesterday Chuykov summoned Shuba, my chief of staff. They had a disagreement over the exact position of the front line. Poor Colonel Shuba came back in a terrible state.’
He glanced at Krymov.
‘Do you think Chuykov just swore at him?’ He burst out laughing. ‘No, he gets sworn at by me every day. He came back with his front teeth knocked out.’
‘Yes,’ said Krymov slowly. This ‘yes’ was an admission that the dignity of man didn’t always hold sway on the slopes of Stalingrad.
Then Guryev held forth about how badly the war was reported in the newspapers.
‘Those sons of bitches never see any action themselves. They just sit on the other side of the Volga and write their articles. If someone gives them a good dinner, then they write about him. They’re certainly no Tolstoys. People have been reading War and Peace for a century and they’ll go on reading it for another century. Why’s that? Because Tolstoy’s a soldier, because he took part in the war himself. That’s how he knew who to write about.’
‘Excuse me, comrade General,’ said Krymov. ‘Tolstoy didn’t take part in the Patriotic War.’
‘He didn’t take part in it – what do you mean?’
‘Just that,’ said Krymov. ‘He didn’t take part in it. He hadn’t even been born at the time of the war with Napoleon.’
‘He hadn’t been born?’ said Guryev. ‘What do you mean? How on earth?’
A furious argument then developed – the first to have followed any of Krymov’s lectures. To his surprise, the general flatly refused to believe him.
57
The di
visional commander asked Major Byerozkin about the position with regard to house 6/1. Should they withdraw?
Byerozkin advised against it – even though the building was indeed almost totally surrounded. It housed observation posts of great importance to the artillery on the left bank, and a sapper detachment able to prevent any further attacks by German tanks. The Germans were hardly likely to begin a major offensive without first liquidating this little pocket of resistance – their tactics were predictable enough. And with a minimum of support the building might be able to hold out for some time and disrupt the German strategy. Since the telephone cable had been cut repeatedly, and since signallers were only able to reach the building during a few hours in the middle of the night, it would be worth sending a radio-operator there.
The divisional commander agreed. During the night Political Instructor Soshkin managed to get through to house 6/1 with a group of soldiers. They brought with them several boxes of ammunition, hand-grenades, a radio set and a very young operator, a girl.
On his return the following morning, Soshkin said that the commander of the detachment holding the house had refused to write an official report. ‘I haven’t got time for any of that rubbish,’ he had said. ‘I give my reports to the Fritzes.’
‘I can’t make head or tail of what’s going on there,’ said Soshkin. ‘They all seem terrified of this Grekov, but he just pretends to be one of the lads. They all go to sleep in a heap on the floor, Grekov included, and they call him Vanya. Forgive me for saying so, but it’s more like some kind of Paris Commune than a military unit.’
Byerozkin shook his head. ‘So he refused to write a report. Well, he is a one!’
Pivovarov, the battalion commissar, then came out with a speech about people behaving like partisans.