It was at the battle of Stalingrad that he won the Gold Star of a Hero of the Soviet Union.
And yet he had never seen Stalingrad. Just a streak of black smoke on the horizon, above a dry steppe so boiling hot you could feel the crunch of sand in your mouth. He never saw the Volga, either, only a grayish void in the distance, as if poised above the abyss at the end of the world. Sergeant Mikhalych gestured in the direction of the black smoke on the horizon.
"That's Stalingrad burning. If the Germans cross the Volga the city's a goner. We'll never be able to hold it."
The sergeant was sitting on an empty shell case, drawing on the last cigarette of his life. Half an hour later, amid the din and dust storm of the battle, he would emit a gasp and slowly collapse onto his side, clapping his hand to his chest, as if to pluck from it a tiny, jagged sliver of shrapnel.
How had they come to find themselves with their gun on this high ground between that sparse woodland and a ravine full of brambles? Why had they been left on their own? Who had given the order for them to occupy this position? Had anyone actually given such an order?
The battle had lasted so long that they had become a part of it. They had ceased to feel separate from the heavy shuddering of the 76-millimeter antitank gun, the whistling of the bullets, the explosions. Pitching and tossing like ships, the tanks surged across the devastated steppe. In their wake the dark shadows of soldiers were moving about in clouds of dust. The machine gun rattled out from a little trench on the left. After swallowing its shell the gun spat it out again, as if with a "phew" of relief. Six tanks were already smoldering. The rest of them drew back for a time, then returned, as if magnetically attracted to the hill stuffed with metal. And once again, in a fever of activity, completely deafened, their muscles tensed, the artillerymen became indistinguishable from the gun's frenzied spasms. They had long since ceased to know how many of them were left, as they carried up the shells, even stepping over dead men. And they would only become aware that one of their comrades had died when the rhythm of their grueling task was broken. At intervals Ivan looked behind him and each time saw the red-haired Seryozha sitting comfortably beside some empty ammunition crates. Each time he wanted to yell at him: "Hey! Sergei! What the fuck are you doing there?" But just then he would notice that all the seated man had left of his stomach was a bloody mess. And then in the din of the fighting and the racket of gunfire he would forget, would look back again, would again be on the brink of calling out to him and would again see that red stain…
What saved them was the first two tanks burning and blocking a direct attack by the Germans. The ravine protected them on the left, the little wood on the right. Or, at least, so they thought. Which is why when, with the sound of tree trunks smashing, a tank loomed up, flattening the scrub, they did not even have time to be afraid. The tank was firing at will but the person huddled within its stifling entrails had been in too much of a hurry.
The explosion flung Ivan to the ground. He rolled into the trench, groped around in a hole to find the stick grenade's handle, removed the pin, and, bending his arm back, hurled it. The earth shook – he did not hear the explosion but felt it in his body. He raised his head above the trench and saw the black smoke and the shadowy figures emerging from the turret. All this amid a deafness that was at once ringing and muffled. No submachine gun to hand. He threw another grenade, the last one…
Swathed in the same hushed silence, he left the trench and saw the empty steppe, the smoking tanks, the chaos of plowed-up land, of corpses and trees torn to shreds. Seated in the shadow of the gun was an aged Siberian, Lagun. Seeing Ivan, he got up, signed with his head, said something and – still in an unreal silence – went over to the machine-gunner's little trench. The latter was partly lying on his side, his mouth half open and twisted in such pain that, without hearing it, Ivan could see his cry. On his bloodied hands only the thumbs remained. Lagun began to dress his wounds, bathing his stumps with alcohol and binding them tightly. The machine-gunner opened his mouth even wider and rolled over on his back.
Ivan stumbled around the tank covered in leaves and broken branches and made his way in under the trees. Two ruts left by the tank tracks gleamed darkly vivid in the torn-up grass. He crossed them and headed toward where the shade was deepest.
Even in this copse the forest could be sensed. Midges swirled around in the slender, quivering rays of sunlight. He caught sight of a narrow rivulet brimming with water the color of tea, dizzyingly limpid. Water spiders skated about on its smooth brilliance. He followed its course and after a few steps found the tiny pool of a spring. He knelt down and drank greedily. His thirst quenched, he raised his head and lost his gaze in the transparent depths. Suddenly he noticed his reflection, the face he had not seen for such a long time – this young face turned slightly blue with the shadow of its first beard, the eyebrows bleached by the sun and devastatingly distant, alien eyes.
"It's me" – the words formed slowly in his head – "me, Ivan Demidov…" For a long time he contemplated this somber reflection's features. Then shook himself. It seemed to him that the silence was becoming less dense. Somewhere above him a bird called.
Ivan got up, leaned over again and plunged his flask into the water. "I'll take it to Lagun, he must be baking back there under his gun."
From the citation drawn up on the orders of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union he was to learn that that day they had "contained the enemy's advance in a direction of vital strategic importance" and had "resisted more than ten attacks by a numerically superior enemy." In this text the names of Stalingrad and the Volga would be mentioned, neither of which they had ever seen. And how little these words would reflect what they had lived through and experienced! There would be no mention here of Mikhalych and his gasp of pain, nor of Seryozha in his blackened and reddened battle dress, nor of smoking tanks amid trees stripped bare and drenched in blood.
There would be no mention, either, of the little pool of fresh water in the wood reawakening to all the sounds of summer.
Throughout the war he had received only two brief letters from Tatyana. At the end of each of them she wrote: "My comrades-in-arms, Lolya and Katya, send you warm greetings." He kept these letters, wrapped in a scrap of canvas, at the bottom of his knapsack. From time to time he reread them so that he came to know their naive contents by heart. What he particularly cherished was the handwriting itself and the mere sight of those regulation folded triangles of creased writing paper.
When victory came he was in Czechoslovakia. On May 2 the red flag was hoisted over the Reichstag. On May 8 Keitel, his eye furious behind his monocle, signed the deed of Germany 's unconditional surrender. The next day the air resounded with Victory salvos and the postwar era began.
Yet on May 10, Hero of the Soviet Union, Guards Staff Sergeant Ivan Demidov, was still seeking out the dark silhouettes of tanks in his sights and urging on his soldiers, yelling his orders in a cracked voice. In Czechoslovakia the Germans did not lay down their arms until the end of May. And, like stray bullets, the death notices kept winging their way back to a Russia that might have expected that after May 9 no one else would die.
Finally this war, too, came to an end.
Two days before demobilization Ivan received a letter. Like all letters written on behalf of someone else, it was a trifle dry and muddled. Furthermore it had taken more than a month to reach him. He read that in April Tatyana had been seriously wounded, had recovered, following an operation, and was currently in the hospital in Lvov.