She listened to him without hearing, knowing in advance that his story would contain all the horror that surrounded them, that they encountered at every step. She was silent, remembering the day their van had entered a village recaptured from the Germans. They had begun to tend the wounded. And from somewhere or other a shriveled, half-dead old woman had appeared like a ghost and wordlessly tugged at her sleeve. Tanya had followed her. The old woman had led her into a barn; there on the rotten straw lay two young girls – both of them killed by a bullet through the head. And it was there, in the dim light, that the peasant woman found her voice. They had been killed by their own countrymen, the Russian polizei, who had shot them in the head and violated the still warm bodies as they writhed in their death throes…
They remained for some moments without speaking, then took the road back. He lit a cigarette and gave a little laugh, as if he were recalling something funny.
"When they left the yard they passed close by the haystack. I watched them. They stopped and began sticking their bayonets into it. They thought someone was hiding there…"
Twenty or thirty years later, when May 9 came round, Tatyana would often be asked this question: "Tatyana Kuzminichna, how did you come to meet your Hero?" On that particular day the whole varnishing workshop – ten young girls, three older women workers, including herself and the foreman, a bony man in a blue overall caked with varnish – holds a little celebration. They crowd into an office piled high with old papers, out-of-date wall newspapers, pennants celebrating the "Heroes of Socialist Emulation," and hastily begin to eat and drink, proposing toasts in honor of the Victory.
The office door leads out onto the rear courtyard of the furniture factory. They keep it open. After the noxious acetone fumes it is absolute heaven. They can feel the sunny May breeze, still almost unscented, light and airy. In the distance a car can be seen, raising a cloud of dust, as if it were summer. The women produce modest provisions from their bags. With a knowing wink, the foreman removes from a small battered cupboard a filched bottle of alcohol, labeled "Acetone." They all become animated, lace the alcohol with jam, add in a drop of water, and drink: "To the Victory!"
"Tatyana Kuzminichna, how did you meet your Hero?"
And for the tenth time she embarks on the story of the little mirror and the hospital in the school that springtime long ago. They already know how it goes but they listen and are amazed and touched, as if they were hearing it for the first time. Tatyana does not want to go on remembering the village burned from both ends or the old, silent peasant woman leading her toward the barn…
"That year, my friends, it was one of those springs… One evening we walked to the end of the village. We stopped. All the apple trees were in bloom, it was so lovely it took your breath away. So what do apple trees care about war? They still blossom. And my Hero rolled himself a cigarette and smoked it. Then he screwed up his eyes like this and said…"
It seems to her now that they really did have these meetings and long, long evenings together… As the years have gone by she has come to believe it. And yet there was only that one evening in the icy spring, the black carcass of the burned-out roof. And a hungry cat sidling warily along beside the fence, staring at them with an air of mystery, as animals and birds do at twilight when they seem to stir things up in people's minds.
They had one more evening together, the last one. Warm, filled with the rustling and chattering of swifts. They had gone down toward the river, had stayed stock-still for a long while, not knowing what to say to each other; then, clumsily, they had kissed for the first time.
"Tomorrow, that's it, Tanya… I'm returning to my unit… I'm going back to the front," he said in somewhat somber tones, this time without screwing up his eyes. "So, listen carefully to what I say. Once the war's over we'll get married and we'll go to my village. There's good land there. But for now you must just…"
He had fallen silent. With lowered eyes she was studying the footprints made by their boots in the soft clay of the bank. Sighing like a child breathless from long weeping, she had said in a subdued voice: "It doesn't matter about me… but you…"
In the summer of 1941, when he escaped from the burned-out village to join the partisans, he was just seventeen. He could still picture the face of the German who had killed little Kolka. It had stayed with him, the way the pitching of a staircase collapsing beneath your feet in the pallid terror of a vivid nightmare stays with you. This face stuck in his memory because of the scar on one cheek, as if bitten from inside, and the sharp stare of the blue eyes. For a long time the notion of an appalling vengeance obsessed him, a personal settling of accounts, the desire to see this man, who had posed for the photograph with the child's body impaled on his bayonet, writhing in terrible torment. He was absolutely convinced he would encounter him again.
Their detachment of partisans had been wiped out. Miraculously, by spending a whole night in the reeds up to his neck in water, he had managed to escape with his life. When he reported to the regional military committee, he had added a year to his age and two days later had found himself sitting on a hard bench with other boys in fatigues, lean, with cropped heads, listening to a noncommissioned officer's very military language, blunt but clear. He was talking about "tank phobia," explaining that there was no need to be afraid of tanks and that running away as they approached was a sure way to be had. You had to be smart. And the sergeant had even drawn a tank on the old blackboard, showing its vulnerable points: the caterpillar tracks, the fuel tank…
"In a nutshelclass="underline" if you're scared of tanks, you've no place in the ranks," the sergeant concluded, highly pleased with his own wit.
Two months later, in November, lying in a frozen trench, with his head raised slightly above the clods of frozen earth, Ivan was watching a line of tanks emerging from the transparent forest and slowly forming up. Beside him lay his rifle – it was still the ancient model invented by Mossin, a captain in the czarist army – and two bottles of explosive liquid. For the whole of their section, as they clung to this scrap of frozen earth, there were only seven antitank grenades.
Had it been possible to stand up, they could have seen the towers of the Kremlin with the aid of field glasses, through the cold fog to the rear of them.
"We're an hour's drive from Moscow," a soldier had said the previous day.
"Comrade Stalin's in Moscow," the officer replied. " Moscow will not fall."
Stalin!
And suddenly the temperature rose. For him, for their Country, they were ready to take on the tanks with their bare hands! For Stalin's sake it all made sense: the snow-filled trenches, their own greatcoats, which would soon stiffen forever under the gray sky, and the officer's harsh cry as he hurled himself beneath the deafening clatter of the tank tracks, his grenade in his hand, with the pin removed.
Forty years after that bitterly cold day Ivan will find himself seated in the humid dullness of a dimly lit bar chatting amid the hubbub from neighboring tables with two newly encountered comrades. They will already have slipped the contents of a bottle of vodka into their three tankards of beer on the q.t. and embarked on a second, and will be in such good spirits that they don't even feel like arguing. Just listening to the other guy and agreeing with whatever he has to say.
"So what about them, those men of the Panfilova Division? Were they heroes? Throwing themselves under tanks? What choice did they have, for God's sake: 'What stands behind us is Moscow,' says the political commissar. 'No further retreat is possible!' Except that what stood behind us wasn't Moscow. It was a line of machine guns blocking the way, those NKVD bastards. I started there, too, Vanya, the same as you. Only I was in the signal corps…"