Dimitri was simmering, warming and angry since sunup inside the empty tank. The rest of the crew rode outside on the deck in the fresh air, Valentin with his new lieutenant’s stars, admired by Pasha, and poor Sasha, a cliche of the wounded patriot soldier with white gauze lapped around his head. Dimitri felt used. Last night rolling, crawling, with the metal tide along the road, Valentin’s boots propped out of habit on his shoulders, he felt like a horse, blinkered and reined and ridden. For the first several hours he’d muttered to himself that he was a Cossack and a hetman and many things that were not a horse, but his mumblings had been shaken out of him by the long ride in first gear and by no one to listen; now he stared out his open hatch, out of grim eyes at the exhaust smoke pouring from beneath the truck bumper directly in front of him.
A major reshuffling of forces was taking place. It seemed every able-bodied man, truck, and tank was being crammed into the area around Prokhorovka. The General had picked up a dozen hitchers since sunrise.
Valentin had told the crew they were headed southeast to join the defense of Prokhorovka. They were going to hook up with the 32nd Tank Brigade of the 211th Tank Corps. Dimitri had heard nothing about this unit. What had they done in the battle of Kursk? They were Steppe Front units, reserves.
He had been running under enemy gun sights for a week now, he’d carted Valentin and his cannon in front of a hundred German tanks, Sasha had depleted fifty ammo belts, Pasha had re-loaded his bins a dozen times.
He’d got them all out safe every time. Now they were going to join a brigade of sixty tanks that didn’t even have a scuff on the paint yet. Valentin told them the 32nd Tank Brigade was arrayed directly beside the Prokhorovka road, right in the Germans’ route. Valya was proud, calling it the place of honor. Pasha nearly shit himself hearing this. Another road to defend, Dimitri thought, as if this were some specialty they’d developed. More like a curse, he thought. He swished his tongue but found no moisture, just road dust and ire.
He pulled the General out of line, off the road. He shut down the engine and stood in his hatch, pushing past a thicket of strange legs and muddy boots to shove himself out of the opening and drop to the ground.
He looked up at his tank, it was scabbed with soldiers clinging to every open spot. He stomped into the field away from the road and the endless line of creeping vehicles, all of them going too slow. Behind him men called Hey and What’s he doing? Dimitri walked far enough into the field to not hear them, he stood looking north into open land where a horseman could clip along nicely. Out of the south the booms of combat lobbed over his head.
He expected his son, waiting with his back turned. If he sends Sasha he’s a coward, Dimitri thought. Come yourself.
Finally boots kicked through the crop rows, coming to him. He had swearing ready and his tired hands were balled.
‘Papa.’
Dimitri turned. Pasha and Sasha watched from the deck of the tank.
Valentin was bareheaded. Dimitri pulled his own padded helmet off and dropped it on the ground. He ran both hands through his damp hair, grimacing beneath his mitts.
‘Papa, I’ve got to ask you to stop this.’
So easy a trap I could lay for him, Dimitri thought. I could demand, Stop what? Make him say it. Stop being insubordinate, Papa. Stop being a danger. Stop being unpredictable. Then I can yell back.
‘Why am I so mad at you all the time, Valya?’
Valentin knew the answer, and he said it.
‘We’ve traded places, Papa. You weren’t ready for it. That’s all.’
Dimitri had seen a wife die. Comrades skewered or shot. A powerful father wasted to illness and gone too young. He’d seen a man’s life and knew he should not have this as his saddest moment. But there it was, and it seemed so wrong to be this crushed at something a boy said.
Is this what happens to every father, at war or not? Does this moment hurt all fathers this much? When did I do this to mine? Did I stare him down like a dog that got too old to hunt?
Dimitri gazed at the ground and waited for it, the notion to slap his son. Then he lifted his eyes to his son’s face.
Valentin had not moved or flinched. His son stood with the backdrop of a mural behind him, men and machines rushing to the defense of Russia, to bar the road to Prokhorovka; this Lieutenant Berko and his crew had fought in the worst of the battles for Kursk and now hurried to fight in another. Dimitri’s hands relaxed. He chuckled at himself. No matter how little else was left to him, either pride or time, he was the father of a Soviet hero. In a Soviet country, this was not so bad a thing.
When will he know me, Dimitri wondered? Never. The roads separated too soon, my son’s and mine, there was not enough time, the war and the Communists came too swiftly. This boy learned the sword and now the tank. But Valya does not know his father, as I did not know mine until now. Perhaps that’s just how it works. We do not know, that’s why wars are fought, great wars like the one in the river valley at the end of this road, infinitesimal wars like the one in the space between the locked eyes of father and son. And perhaps we will not know God the Father until too late also. Dimitri sighed for all this stumbling around blind. What a design, to make things this way, pieces that will never fit, what sort of machine is life to be like that? That’s why it runs so rough. Before his sigh was done it became a good laugh. This was Dimitri’s gift, the true Cossack’s gift, to switch sides nimbly, to pick the winner and go with him.
He eased beside Valentin, and laid his arm across the boy’s shoulders. He gave Valya’s frame a squeeze, pleased to feel muscle and grit there.
‘Have you heard from your sister?’
‘No. She hasn’t written in weeks.’
‘I’m sure she’s alright.’ Dimitri turned his son away from the free northern fields, back to the waiting tank and the clustered, diesel-choked road to Prokhorovka. ‘She doesn’t have me to deal with. Come on, Lieutenant. Put your arm around me. I’m just your father.’
Valentin’s hand did not go around Dimitri. The boy said, ‘Papa, let me go.’
Dimitri took down his arm, as ordered.
* * * *
July 11
0900 hours
Voroshilov
After the Psel river bridge at Voroshilov, the traffic thinned. They were all now within the lines of 5th Guards Tank Army. Vehicles and infantry scattered south into the fields to reinforce their assigned units. The sounds of combat batted in the air, rising on smoke. The Germans were trying hard to move up north of the Psel, to keep abreast of their advance on Prokhorovka south of the river. More soldiers Valentin had picked up jumped off the General after crossing the bridge. Open-bedded trucks waited for them. The soldiers packed themselves in and were jolted across the valley grasses to be set like pikes in the Germans’ way. Sasha, Pasha, and Valentin dropped back into their seats. Valentin stood in his turret.
Dimitri kept the General stroking ahead southeast on the road, pushing them through a ground-hugging haze of artillery smoke. The guns were firing from a nearby hill into the alley of land west of Prokhorovka, where the battle with the SS waged.
Last night’s rains and high winds had given way to a morning of rising heat and humidity. Cloud cover clamped them down to the earth like a hen’s feathered rear. Dimitri’s goggles fogged on him but he couldn’t pull them down because of the dust he drove into. He refused to lower his hatch, that would make him too dependent on Valya’s directions or the boy lieutenant’s damned boots. Dimitri had accepted his place in the confusing schemes of life and war, but this did not mean he relished it.