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No one has any questions, but the major himself, after a pause, adds, ‘Right, so you will be transferred. Only if you are willing, of course. All in? Anyone out, speak up now.’

That is all there is to it, this charged moment. Two refuse. One girl says she cannot stand heights; and one boy asks to stay grounded. We are embarrassed for them, and that is the end of the matter.

As for the rest of us? The folder with the laces is taken up a floor, delivering our personal files to the AFD. None of us pose a problem, in fact everything is splendid. We have been found worthy.

On the first floor the new directorate is taking shape before our eyes. A lieutenant colonel is pulling a chair somewhere, a wastepaper basket is being moved, someone else is doing something else.

The next day we are all in the corridor, waiting. Except for the two dropouts, of course. We are trying to look smart, feeling tense. We are called in individually. Finally, as if from far away, I hear my own name. I go in and identify myself, as trained in Stavropol. In the depths of the room two lieutenant colonels are sitting opposite each other at a table, halfturned towards the door. Towards me.

‘Comrade technician-quartermaster second class, do you play sport?’

‘I used to play volleyball.’ (Our girls’ team won the grade eight championship for Krasnaya Presnya District, but I had later given up volleyball. I forget why.)

‘Good, good. And are you a good skier?’ ‘Not brilliant, but I’ll do my best.’ ‘Good.’

‘Yes, but actually how good is your skiing? How many kilometres could you manage?’ I wonder frantically what reply to give. Five? They’ll say that’s not enough. Thirty? They won’t believe me.

‘She’ll manage!’ says the first lieutenant colonel, giving me a smile. ‘She’ll do what needs to be done!’

I feel a sense of tremendous relief, as if I have already jumped and am now dangling from a parachute. I can see we have only been going through the motions and that the whole thing is not as serious as it seemed. Their questions, my answers are neither here nor there.

‘And how about walking? Have you got good, strong pins? Stamina?’ That is the second one asking.

‘Last year when we were hiking in Svanetia… I kept up fine.’ They nod – good, good – a little conspiratorially. Then the lieutenant colonels exchange a glance and narrow their eyes as if to warn me that the next question is less straightforward and I should be ready for it. ‘How would you feel about jumping out of a plane?’ I have my answer ready. ‘I suppose it’s, well, just another form of transport.’ They laugh loudly, encouragingly, stand up and shake my hand.

‘All in? Anyone out?’ ‘To be or not to be?’ There can be no hesitation. What you fear is not what is impending, what is coming after you leave this office. What you fear is messing up here, at this fateful moment, dropping out like those other two who were not up to it, the disgrace of letting down the others. You are all in this together.

The only thing that was truthful about that interview was that, on a tourist trip to Svanetia, I had indeed trekked along no worse than the rest. (We had donkeys to carry our rucksacks through the pass in the mountains.) All the rest was total nonsense. Skiing? So-so. Volleyball? I packed that in when I was fourteen. So why did I not just say so? But no, it was nothing to do with physical fitness, it was about a state of mind. How could you not play along with their brazenness? ‘She’ll do what needs to be done!’ As to whether someone might be scared to jump out of a plane, you might have had an idea if you had at least jumped from the tower in Gorky Park! But in any case if, when you were already airborne, you panicked at the last moment, you would be shoved out anyway, like it or not, into thin air.

I knew perfectly well the questions were a formality, and they were already answering affirmatively on our behalf. It was yesterday’s major who had been checking us out for resolve with his ‘All in? Anyone out?’ Today they were just beefing up parachute brigades with the requisite number of interpreters. And there was I with my half-baked answer, ready to respond to that tricky question – ‘I suppose it’s, well, just another means of transport’ – and rewarded with approving laughter. But why was I conniving with these lieutenant colonels whose job was to turn me into a tick in a box on a larger list of brigades being brought up to strength? Why, when I still had a choice, was I being drawn with so little resistance into the maw of war?

My dear friend Yury Dikov told me, ‘There always remains the desire, the attempt to clarify that about yourself, but you will never be able to reproduce exactly what it was that made you leap into the maw. There will always be more puzzles than you can find an answer to.’

It would seem we will never break through to the truth about ourselves even if we try for a lifetime.

Active Service

The train was for Tula. Through the blackness of the night, without headlights, without warning signals, it hurtled on, hoping for the best, jolting over places where the track had been patched up. Mysterious stations, fleeting in the dark. Sudden stops in open, snowbound, January countryside.

I had the top shelf, the one for luggage. Neither the blissful hardness of the planks, nor hitting my head on the low ceiling while clumsily trying to change position, seemed to involve me in the slightest, any more than the fug from cheap tobacco, the rustling in the dim light down below, the occasional sob, the snoring, the laughter and swearing, the clinking of kettles.

The person occupying the top baggage shelf was not really me. Within the familiar shell of my muscles and joints, my incorporeal spirit was being borne towards its destination, a parachute unit. That probably sounds pretentious, but how else can I describe the peculiar sense of weightlessness and uncertainty of a body destined to parachute to earth with no knowledge of how to do so, behind enemy lines, moreover, where it will combat the enemy in a firefight without a clue about how to shoot.

Tula was as far as the train could take us. The five of us, three boys, myself and Lyudmila, spent the night in a house by the station, in the train crews’ recreation room. In this room lined with metal bunks, the washstand clattered early in the morning as the male railway workers and our paratroop lads queued up to wash, stripped to the waist and with towels over their shoulders.

In the dimly lit room their sculpted torsos and biceps seemed unbelievably strong. I was numbed by a sense of our physical inadequacy for the demands shortly to be made of us. But that was only for a moment. We moved on and everything again seemed bearable, no longer beyond our strength.

Our group of interpreters was to report to 8th Airborne Brigade under the command of Major General Levashov. The brigade was being formed as a matter of urgency, on Stalin’s orders, in newly liberated Kaluga. Also on Stalin’s orders, all freight for the brigade was to be forwarded by rail with absolutely top priority. The railway tracks, however, had been restored only on certain stretches. At crippled stations, halts and sidings, a hoarse commandant, besieged by soldiers and civilians, would glance at our orders and hastily push us on to the first train that arrived. We were on Kremlin business, we were urgently needed to accomplish great deeds. The train would move out to a barrage of furious abuse from soldiers and the wailing of hapless women left behind, burdened with their bundles, their churns and sacks.

Beyond Plekhanovo we came to a stop. Ryurikovo. From here we would be walking along the track. White, white, frozen vistas, sometimes obscured by the gloom of a blizzard but then, when the weather cleared, still there, unchanged. Snow-covered burnt-out huts, whole villages of them. Exposed chimneys of stoves like black obelisks plastered with layers of snow.