Survivors
A short story by David Brining
Copyright David Brining 2012
All rights reserved.
THE traffic lights flashed amber and Nikolai Aleksandrovich put his foot gently on the brake pedal. The car eased to a halt as the lights changed to red.
"What did you think?" He turned to his wife, a frail, almost bird-like figure who was sitting in the passenger seat knitting.
"Kolya worries too much," she said.
"Because he cares."
"I know that," said the wife, "But sometimes he can care too much. He'll make himself ill, and what good will that do?"
The lights turned green and Nikolai Aleksandrovich eased the old Volga forward. Thirty years he had owned this car. Battleship grey and built like a tank, the engine no longer purred, it roared, and in the mornings it sputtered and coughed into life, a bit like its owner. Growing old together, thought Nikolai Aleksandrovich.
Poor Ivan had looked very, very pale. His eyes had looked like holes cut in a paper bag ringed with great purple smudges. The white scar on his forehead, a souvenir from a childhood accident, had stood out vividly. His smile of welcome had been wan and weak, and he had only been able to whisper his thanks as his grandparents had piled sweets, mandarins, a copy of Detective magazine and a jigsaw puzzle of Peter the Great's flagship onto the locker beside his bed.
Three nights he had to spend in the hospital ward, cramped by the beds of five other sick children, before he could go home to convalesce. The doctor, a friendly middle-aged man, had told Nikolai Aleksandrovich that Vanya should spend five days in bed, then return to the hospital for the removal of his stitches, and then it would be one further month before he could run or jump again. Ivan was dejected by that, and by the knowledge that he would have to miss the championship decider between Rotor and Spartak. He would have to watch it from his bed instead.
Nikolai Aleksandrovich had inspected the chart clipped to the foot of his grandson's bed. It showed, in graph form, the temperature readings and told the nurses and ward orderlies what he should and should not eat.
RIBAKOV, IVAN NIKOLAYEVICH
it read.
Nikolai Aleksandrovich remembered sitting by another hospital bed, one which had contained his six year old son as he had sweated and screamed and squirmed in the iron grip of scarlet fever. He remembered the terror, his terror, that they would lose him. He remembered hugging his hysterical wife, offering reassurance where there was only hope, belief where there was only faith. He remembered stroking the hot, damp hair, holding the sweating little hand, listening to the rough, irregular breathing. He remembered the weight of worry, the crushing anxiety, and he understood his son's fears better than anyone.
"You'll soon be well again, Vanushka," he'd told his grandson, stroking the pale cheek with a stubby forefinger. The knitting had continued on the other side of the bed in its clattering, incessant, unfaltering rhythm.
Nikolai Aleksandrovich had said the same words to his friend Maksim as they'd lain side by side in a war in Vienna, two trembling seventeen year olds who'd joined the Red Army in 1944 on their sweep across Central Europe, through the Ukraine, through Slovakia, through Hungary, into Austria, liberating the people from the tyranny of Fascism, until they'd arrived, in February 1945, in Vienna itself, the capital of the Fascist Monster's Motherland. Nikolai Ribakov and Maksim Korolev had battled through the Viennese suburbs, through snow, blood and mud, through firestorms and bulletstorms, fighting, eating, sleeping, waking, bound together, these two boys from the Stalingrad streets, comrades-in-arms, brothers-in-blood, children of fire.
One cold February afternoon, they had stormed a German machine-gun post, captured it intact, brought prisoners and weapons back to the Major. The two teenagers had been decorated. That evening they had been the toast of their platoon. Vodka and schnapps, games of cards, mouth organs, folk songs. Nikolai Aleksandrovich could recall every second of that February night, and still had the photograph Sergeant Kulikin had taken, of Nikolai Ribakov, tall, lean, brown-blond, a lazy grin sprawling across his ruggedly handsome face, and Maksim Korolev, short, tending to fat, his prominent Slavic cheekbones lending his round face an almost Oriental appearance, proudly displaying their medals.
"Heroes of the Soviet Union," Maksim had said proudly, polishing his Order of Lenin on the sleeve of his tunic. "Stalin's children." He'd smiled at his friend. "We're building a new world order, Kolya, the new world revolution. Can't wait to see it, to see our flag flying from the Reichstag, from the White House..."
Minutes later, the schnapps was flooding across the cracked concrete floor, the playing cards were scattering in the wind, the folk songs choking off in mid-flow and the blood and flesh raining down around their heads as a mortar shell smashed through the dug-out.
Sergeant Kulikin's backbone and a bloody mass of indistinguishable innards exploded through his chest and the Comrade Major's leg struck Nikolai in the face. The ceiling collapsed in a welter of blood and a shower of splinters and plaster and concrete. Nikolai was hurled across the room with the card table crashing down on the side of his head. He sat very still whilst the roar of the explosion rang in his ears. Blood masked his face. Other people's blood sprayed and spurted from innumerable savage gashes and wounds.
The shower of plaster eventually ceased. Nikolai flexed his fingers and toes and suffered an agonising flare of pain as he bent his broken wrist. Sobbing and gasping, he tossed the severed, bleeding stump aside, shoved the table away from his chest and crawled through the smoke and the debris towards his friend, drawn through the darkness by the soft mewing moans.
Maksim was blind. His hands, pressed to his face, were scarlet and sticky from the blood pouring through his fingers.
"You'll be all right," Nikolai said. "You'll be all right. Just you see." He winced at his own words. "Medics! Medics!!! Stretcher here!!"
The roof of the dug-out collapsed completely just seconds after Nikolai and Maksim were taken out. The corpses and remains of the others were buried in the rubble. The seventeen year old heroes of the Soviet Union had been the only survivors.
In the makeshift hospital, a scene from a nightmare, a scene dreamed up a twisted imagination, where the limbless and the lifeless were mixed in equal proportion, where the air was thick with the moaning of men reduced to producing the noises of cattle, Nikolai had sat by Maksim's iron bed, his wrist wrapped in a torn, filthy bandage, and watched the life ebb away from his friend, the bandage-shrouded head turning from side to side. Maksim Korolev had been riddled with shrapnel. Shards of steel had shredded his organs. There was no morphine. Soon, young Korolev would start to scream.
"I'm gonna die," he whispered. "You can tell me the truth."
"You're not gonna die," Nikolai said fiercely.
"You can have my medal," hissed Max. "Give it to my mother." He pressed the metal disc and the brightly coloured, blood-soaked ribbon into Nikolai's palm. "Give me a drink."
Nikolai's last mistake, and last regret, was agreeing to that last request. As he held his water bottle to his dying friend's lips, he heard a scream of agony sear his ears.
"What can I do?" he demanded, tears welling into his eyes. "What?"
"Shoot me," came the whispered response.
The tears flowed over Nikolai's grimy, blood-caked face. He closed his fingers around the medal and stumbled into the cold night air. When he returned, Maksim Korolev had died.
One in three of the Soviet Union's 18 to 21 year olds died in the war. Nikolai's own brother and father had been killed in Stalingrad itself. Nikolai had been thirteen years old when the Fascists had invaded his country, fourteen when they reached his city and the banks of the Volga on August 23 1942. He remembered watching their gunboats shelling the factories and the Red October st
eelworks. He remembered seeing the Stukas and Messerschmidts swooping over the left bank to attack the centre. He remembered trembling with terror in the bomb shelters and cellars, clutching the trembling hand of his mother. He remembered his father, Aleksandr Ivanovich, a huge tree of a man with a vast brush of a moustache, kissing them both and heading out of the house with an axe and a bag and never returning, never seen again, dead or alive. For years he had nursed the fantasy that his father had been delayed and would one day return, apologising for his lateness, saying he'd met some old friends and they'd all got talking and someone had pulled out vodka and cards and he couldn't refuse their hospitality and so on. He never knew what had become of his father.
Nikolai Aleksandrovich had become the family's scavenger. On one trip he had met another fourteen year old, a girl whose family lived in a sewer near Metallurgov. The girl, dirty but pretty in a fading, torn, floral-print frock, had lost all three of her brothers and her father was a prisoner, captured at Sevastopol in late 1941. The girl was Valeria Kiseleva. That girl later became his wife.
Romance amid the ruins of their lives had been difficult. The incessant bombing and shelling and rapid rattle of gunfire interrupted every conversation and the hunger and disease had hovered like spectres. Once