Alexander looked through the tents and discovered that there should have been eleven, not ten. One of the tents had been taken down and its stakes removed. The ground was still fresh where the stakes had been pulled out. Alexander thought that was a good idea and had the soldiers remove the other ten tents. The tents were big and made of thick canvas.
The fire that had been set up by the campers felt cold to his touch, as if it hadn’t been lit in weeks. There was not a trace of old food around, of trash left by young boys or by a young Tatiana.
It was late in the evening when they returned to Luga. He and his men pitched their newly found tents by the forest in the rear of the army camp. Covered in his trench coat, Alexander lay on the ground. He couldn’t sleep for a long time.
Back in America, in the Cub Scouts, they used to pitch tents and sleep in the woods and eat berries and fish they caught in the lake, and have fires at night. They opened up their cans of ham, they toasted marshmallows, they sang Cub Scout songs, and stayed up late, and during the day learned how to survive in the woods and how to make knots. It was an idyllic existence when Alexander was just a boy of eight, nine, ten. The summer months he spent at Cub Scout camp were by far the best months of his childhood.
He knew that if Tatiana hadn’t broken her neck jumping off the train, she must have found the empty camp. Maybe, if she were smart, she took the missing tent. But what would she do next? Would she come back to Leningrad?
Alexander couldn’t see that. If she had set out to find Pasha, he didn’t see how she could return without some answer as to his whereabouts. After Tolmachevo where would she go?
Luga. There was nowhere else. She would go to Luga, because that’s where she would think Pasha had gone—to help build the Luga line.
Invigorated and hopeful, he slept.
The next morning at sunup Alexander heard the distant roar of planes. He hoped they were Soviet planes.
No such luck. The black swastika was clearly apparent even from 300 meters below. Sixteen planes in two formations swooped, and he saw something drop from them. He heard screams of panic, but there were no bombs. In a few moments white and brown pieces of paper floated down like tiny parachutes. One landed in front of his tent. He picked it up. Soviet Man! the paper proclaimed. The end is here! Join the winning side—and live! Surrender—and live! Nazism is superior to Communism. You will have food, you will have jobs, you will have freedom! Now!
Another piece of paper was an actual pass to cross the front line. Shaking his head, Alexander dropped both to the ground and went to wash in the Luga tributary that ran through the woods.
By nine in the morning Alexander saw more planes, all of them with the Nazi insignia. They flew just a hundred meters above ground. The heavy machine guns inside the planes made popping sounds as they shot at workers in the fields.
Everyone ran for the trees, for cover. One of the tents caught fire. The Nazis weren’t throwing bombs, Alexander thought as he put on his helmet and jumped down into a trench. No, they were saving their precious bombs.
Then Alexander saw they might have been saving some bombs, but not the fragmentation bombs, which ultimately fell from the planes and burst overhead. Alexander heard screams muffled by the continued shelling.
He looked in the trenches for his men but couldn’t find anyone he knew. The bombing continued for another thirty minutes, after which the planes flew away, but not before they threw out new leaflets. Surrender or die! was all these said.
Surrender or die.
The black smoke floating overhead, the scattered fires, the groaning human beings looked apocalyptic to Alexander. Bodies floated in the Luga. On the banks of the river, right along the ditches and the concrete reinforced holes, injured people writhed on the ground. Alexander found Kashnikov, who was alive but missing part of his ear. The wound was bleeding freely onto his uniform. Shapkov was in working order. Alexander spent the rest of the morning helping to move the wounded into field tents and the rest of the day digging not trenches but mass graves. He and sixteen of his men dug a large hole by the forest, into which they put the bodies of twenty-three people who had died that morning. Eleven women, nine men, one old man, and two children under ten. None of them soldiers.
Alexander looked into the face of every one of the women, his heart stopping each time.
Then he walked among the dozens of wounded, but again he did not find Tatiana. He even looked for Pasha, just in case, having seen a picture of him when he was a thirteen-year-old boy, standing in swimming trunks by Tatiana, pulling at her blonde braids.
He looked for Pasha reflexively. He knew that Pasha was not in Luga.
Alexander could not find Zina again.
He finally went to talk to Colonel Pyadyshev. After standing at attention for a few moments, Alexander said, “Hard to work in these conditions, isn’t it, sir?”
“No, Lieutenant,” said Pyadyshev, a brooding, balding man. “What conditions would these be? The conditions of war?”
“No, sir. The conditions of being ill prepared to face a relentless enemy. I am merely expressing a measure of sympathy for the struggle ahead. Tomorrow we will resume fortifying the line.”
“Lieutenant, you will resume tonight, until there is no more light. What do you think, is tomorrow a holiday for the Nazis? You think they won’t bomb us again?”
Alexander was sure they would bomb again.
“Lieutenant Belov,” continued Colonel Pyadyshev, “you just got here, and today you worked very hard . . .”
“Got here three days ago, sir,” said Alexander.
“Three days ago, good. Well, the Germans have been bombing the line for the last ten days. There was bombing yesterday—I don’t know where you were—and the day before. Every morning like clockwork, from nine to eleven. First they throw the leaflets telling us all to join their side, then they bomb us. We spend the rest of the day burying the bodies and digging trenches. Their main units are advancing on us at a rate of fifteen kilometers a day. They’ve mowed us down in Minsk, they’ve mowed us down in Brest Litovsk, and they’re finishing mowing us down in Novgorod. We’re next. You’re right, we have no chance. But when you tell me that we’re ill prepared, I tell you no, we do everything we can, and then we die. That’s the whole point.” Pyadyshev lit a cigarette with trembling hands and leaned on his small table.
Alexander saluted him. “We will continue to do all we can.”
While there was still light, Alexander walked with three of his men around the front-line camp. As he passed the hundreds of soldiers on the Luga shores, waiting for the Germans, playing cards, smoking cigarettes, he was surprised by how many wore ranking colors on their shoulders. It seemed to Alexander that one out of every ten men was an officer. Many were lieutenants, some first, some second, but there were captains, and quite a number of majors, all on the front line, ready to face the enemy. Front line. Who was left to command the troops if the majors were down on the ground? Alexander didn’t want to think about it.
He combed the fields diligently, using the grid method and going up and down, looking into the face of every person either shoveling out potatoes or shoveling out trenches. He did not find her.
Alexander went back to talk to Pyadyshev. “One more question, sir. Some volunteers came from Kirov Works about five days ago. Is there any place besides here they might have been diverted to, to help in the war effort? Could any of them have been sent farther east?”
“I command these twelve kilometers, and the rest I don’t know about. These twelve are the last line of defense between here and Leningrad. After this there is nothing left. There is only retreat. Or surrender.”
“There is no surrender, Colonel,” Alexander said firmly. “Death before surrender.”
Now it was the colonel’s turn to blink. “Go back to Leningrad, Lieutenant Belov. Go back to Leningrad while you still can. And take the volunteers you brought with you. Save them.”
The next morning when Alexander went to spea
k to Pyadyshev, he saw that the colonel’s tent had been dismantled overnight, the stakes had been removed, and the holes where the stakes had been filled in. More and more soldiers arrived at the river, and the front was split into three sectors, each with its own commander, since it became increasingly clear that it was difficult to organize such a large regiment of troops with just one command post. The new commander’s tent was pitched fifty meters from Pyadyshev’s old tent. The new commander not only did not know where Pyadyshev was, he did not even know who Pyadyshev was. The date was July 23.
Alexander did not have time to marvel at the speedy work of the NKVD, because at nine the shelling started again and lasted this time until noon. The Germans were trying to kill the front-line soldiers before they attacked with ground troops. They were biding their time, but not for long. Alexander suspected that it was only a matter of days before part two of the blitzkrieg. Either he was going to find Tatiana or he was going to remain at Luga and stand in front of the German tanks.
With a heavy heart Alexander walked up and down the river, looking for her. The rest of Alexander’s men were taken into the entrenching service. Those who had been trained by him had been given rifles. They were told it was a crime punishable by death to get separated from their weapons. “To lose your gun is a crime against the Motherland!” But during the next air raid he watched three of his men drop their rifles as they ran for cover. When the air raid was over, they smiled sheepishly at Alexander, who smiled wearily back, shaking his head.
Another day went by. As soldiers took their positions along the banks, as they set up artillery cannons and mined the potato fields, as they loaded what vegetables they could onto trucks that carried them back to Leningrad, the tight feeling inside Alexander’s chest did not let up from morning until night.
Pasha was lost, that much was obvious. But where was Tatiana? Why couldn’t he find her?
5
Tatiana jumped off the train and rolled down the hill without much ado. It was a breeze compared to what they used to do in Luga, taking a running jump and heaving themselves down a hard, pebbled, steep embankment to the river. The grassy hill was positively soft by comparison. The shoulder on which she fell hurt a little.
Finding the boys’ camp in Dohotino abandoned traumatized Tatiana, and for one day she stayed in one of the tents at the camp, not knowing what to do. She swam in the pond and ate blueberries. She had brought a few dried and toasted bread pieces in her knapsack, but she was saving them.
When she and her brother were younger, they used to race across the Luga River to see who could swim the fastest. Pasha was slightly bigger and stronger than Tatiana, but what she had that he did not was endurance. The first time they raced, he won. The second time they raced, he won. The third time he did not win. Tatiana smiled as she thought back to that, smiled at the memory of Pasha screaming in his frustration, at the memory of herself squealing in her delight.
She wasn’t going to give up on her brother yet. Tatiana figured that Pasha and his campmates had been taken into volunteer work somewhere near Luga. She decided to go ahead to Luga to look for Pasha and maybe find Zina, too, and convince her to return to Leningrad. She didn’t want Zina on her conscience, the way Pasha lay on her conscience.
But the following morning as she set out, the German planes shelled the village of Dohotino, where Tatiana was walking completely alone. She ran and hid in one of the huts, but suddenly a small incendiary bomb fell through the roof and set ablaze the wooden wall in front of her. She saw the old kerosene lamp just in time. Forgetting everything, she ran like mad, and the house exploded seconds later, incinerating the hut she had been in, three surrounding huts, and a stable nearby. She was left without her tent, or her sleeping bag, or her knapsack, or her toast.
Tatiana dropped into the bushes behind the huts, crawled on her stomach through the nettles, and hid herself under a fallen oak. The bombing continued over the village and nearby Tolmachevo for another hour. She could see the nettles burning—nettles she had just crawled through burning. The bombs fell into the forest, igniting the top branches, which fell in flames to the ground on which Tatiana lay.
I’m going to die, she thought. Alone, in this village, under an oak. No one will ever find me. Who in my family will come to look for me? I’m going to die here alone in the woods and turn to moss, and on Fifth Soviet they will open up another bottle of vodka and chase me down with pickles, and say, this is for our Tania.
After the bombing ended, she stayed under her oak for another hour or so, just in case. Her face and arms felt swollen and stung—nettles. Better that than the bombs. She was grateful for the forethought that had kept her domestic passport with a stamp from Krasenko in her shirt pocket. Without it she wouldn’t get far; she’d be detained in one of many army checkpoints, or perhaps in a local Soviet office.
Tatiana walked back to Tolmachevo and knocked at a house, where she asked for something to eat. The family let her stay with them until morning, when she left and spotted a military truck near the town Soviet. Showing her passport, she asked for a lift to Luga. The truck dropped her off at the easternmost end of the Luga defense line, closest to Novgorod.
The first day Tatiana dug for potatoes and then dug trenches across the field. Not seeing any groups of boys dressed in camp uniforms, she asked an army sergeant about camp volunteers, and he mumbled something about Novgorod. “The camp volunteers were sent there,” he said, and walked away.
Novgorod? Lake Ilmen? Is that where her Pasha was? Is that where she was meant to go? Tatiana washed in the stream and slept near a tree on the grass.
The following morning the German planes shelled the potatoes, and the trenches, and Tatiana.
The fragmentation bombs were too terrifying to watch, exploding as if they meant to kill just her. She realized she had to get out of Luga at all costs. Wondering how in the world she was going to make her way to Novgorod, Tatiana wandered through the smoke. No sooner had she thought about Lake Ilmen than three soldiers came up to her, asking her if she was injured and then ordering her to follow them to the hospital field tent. Reluctantly she followed. She was even more reluctant when she found out what they wanted her to do—which was to tend to the dying. And there were many dying. Soldiers, civilian women, village children, old people. All in the hastily put-up army tent, all dying.
Having never seen death up close before, Tatiana shut her eyes and wanted to go back home, but there was no turning around and no going back. The NKVD militia stood by the entrance flaps, ready to maintain order and make sure that a volunteer like Tatiana stayed where she was supposed to.
Her heart and teeth clenched, Tatiana learned how to clot wounds by pressing on them with sterile bandages. The wounds clotted, and then the wounded died. What Tatiana could not do was give blood transfusions, because there wasn’t any blood. What she could not do was stop the limbs from infection; what she could not do was stop the limbs from pain. The doctors refused to give morphine to the dying, under orders instead to give it to the less severely wounded, who could go back to the front line.
Tatiana saw that many people could have been saved had there been some blood, or any of that new medicine, penicillin; at the very least they could have been spared the agony of death with morphine. The pervasive helplessness she felt the first night in the field hospital nearly drowned the helplessness she felt at not finding her brother.
The next morning one of the soldiers, mortally wounded in the chest, asked her if she was a boy or a girl.
“I’m a girl,” she said sadly.
“Prove it,” he said, but before she had a chance to prove it, the soldier died.
On the radio near the officers’ tents, Tatiana heard heavily accented German voices inviting her in Russian to go to Germany with them. They threw passes for her to cross the front line, and when she didn’t go, they tried to kill her with bombs and machine-gun fire. Then the Germans were quiet until evening, when the shelling resumed. In between the attack
s Tatiana washed the dying and bandaged their wounds.
The following afternoon she went a kilometer into the fields to get a potato to eat. She heard the planes before she saw them and thought, but it isn’t evening yet, instantly dropping down between the low bushes. For fifteen minutes she lay there. When the planes left, Tatiana got up and ran back to the field tent, only to discover a bonfire in its place, with charred and groaning bodies crawling out of it.
Hundreds of surviving volunteers got helmets and buckets and cups and whatever else they could find and ran down to the river and back to help put out the fire. It took three hours, well into evening, when there was more shelling, and then night. There was no tent for the wounded anymore. They lay on the ground on blankets or on the grass, moaning their last breaths into the summer air. Tatiana couldn’t help anyone. Wearing a green helmet with a red star that she had used to bring water up from the river, all Tatiana could do was sit by one woman who had lost her child in the attack and who herself was gravely wounded in the stomach. She now lay in front of Tatiana, crying for her small girl. Pulling the helmet tighter over her head, Tatiana took the woman’s hand and held it until the woman stopped crying for her small girl.
Then she got up and went near the tree line and lay down on the ground. I’m next, she thought. I can feel it. I’m next.
How was she supposed to get to Novgorod, one hundred kilometers east of here?
She washed and slept in the field with the helmet on her head, and as soon as morning broke, she looked across the river and saw the turrets and the guns of the German tanks on the other side. A corporal, who had been sleeping nearby, gathered together Tatiana and a few other volunteers and ordered them to leave immediately and return to the city of Luga.
She pulled the corporal aside and quietly asked him if there was a way she could get to Novgorod instead. The corporal pushed her hard away with his rifle and yelled, “Are you out of your mind? Novgorod is in German hands!”