The sound of those homemade millstones grinding came from the passage from early morning – Kostya was already hard at work. A knock on the kitchen window frame was the collective farm team leader calling Matryona Nilovna to come and clear the roads of snow. The pole holding up the cradle creaked. Minka waddled over, barefoot, dully took Shurka’s foot in his mouth and started sucking. Nyurka chose a log from the pile by the stove, deftly tucked it up in a shawl and nursed it like a doll.
She, the ataman, has been told not to bring the neighbour’s little girl in any more, one of the children I had found here when I first arrived. Now it is prisoners who are brought in, to the kitchen, for interrogation, and after a day or two I am trusted to talk to them alone. My questions and the answers of the German are lost in that quiet ‘There now, Shurushochki, shush Shurushochki!’ as Kostya rocks Shurka, and in the kerfuffle caused by the calf trying to stand up in its enclosure on its weak legs.
The calf annoys Captain Borisov, and as he passes through the kitchen he wrinkles his nose to indicate he can hardly breathe because of it. He has a thing about clean air, as if he thinks we were made to live life, not to wage war.
Zaimishche has changed hands more than once. Matryona Nilovna’s house has remained unscathed up till now, but will it survive under fire from planes and shelling from heavy artillery? Her supplies, if they have not been stolen, are running low, and when they come to an end there will be no way to replenish them. She has to see to everything: what to feed the children on, how to keep them safe. In war there is no heavier burden at the front line than that of a mother, especially if she has many children. She is expected also to do her bit for the war effort, as that knock at the window, reminding her to come and clear the roads of snow for the army, testifies. Even so, she shares the last of her flaxseed cakes with us army people.
Next to her, I feel the chaos of war all the more keenly, and the poignant fragility of life itself. The innate resilience with which Matryona Nilovna protects it in these inhuman conditions, her simple-heartedness and gracious acceptance of her fate, affect me greatly.
Although I told her I had volunteered for the front, that did not register with her. She sees me as caught in military servitude, and pities me. That is not at all how I see myself, although at first it was not easy to be the only woman among men. They, too, were, as people might say nowadays, weirded out after becoming so used to an all-male environment. It inhibited them when they felt like letting off steam, when they wanted to turn the air blue and simply could not say what they really meant. At that time it was not done to swear in the presence of the opposite sex. One night, supposing I must already be asleep behind the partition wall, which had an opening draped with a cape groundsheet, they embarked on some salacious discussion. In the end I could stand it no longer, got up and went out to them. ‘Why did you do that?’ Matryona asked me from the stove. ‘I’m tired of listening to their foul language.’ ‘But they need to talk like that, to get things off their chest,’ she said matter-of-factly. She taught me to put up with it.
It did not happen again. They showed considerable tact, although it was clearly a strain. They treated me well, although we did not see eye to eye about everything. These men had retreated all the way from the USSR border, they had taken a lot from the Germans, become a real team, and now along comes someone new who does not know the score, feels sorry for the prisoners, and tries to divide Germans into those on the other side of the front line, who are enemies, and those on this side of it, in captivity, who are victims. It was indisputable, however, that an intelligence outfit with no translator would be blind, so they put up with me. What did disturb them was that I was periodically writing things in my notebook. Keeping a diary or any kind of record was for us, unlike the Germans, strictly prohibited. I guessed they would look in my diary, so I wrote in it in large letters, ‘Comrade Captain Borisov, are you not ashamed to read other people’s diaries?’ One day, when I opened it, I saw underneath my question, also in large letters, ‘Should I be?’ There it stands in my diary, which has survived to this day. They got used to me, though, and to the fact that in my field case I carried, not only a German–Russian dictionary, but also a thick notebook.
A clear-eyed, talkative, disciplined German soldier. ‘Are you going to shoot me now?’ I translated.
‘Just go to hell, will you?’ the captain told him.
‘You ought not to kill me. Please.’
In his soldier’s booklet he has inserted the Reminder for the German Soldier. ‘The Führer has said: “The Army made us men, the Army will conquer the world… The world belongs to the strong, the weak must be destroyed.”’
The wounded were staggering back from the front, stumbling, supporting each other, dragging their rifles along with them. An old woman who saw them stopped in her tracks. She was bent under a bundle of firewood she carried on her back, watching the wounded with tears in her eyes, and suddenly said, so emphatically, so sadly, ‘Who will come to help these lads?’
The time the Germans were here, before they were driven out in our winter offensive, is over and done with in the minds of the local people. It was like a war within the war, the war they suffered within the endless stream of the larger war that is still going on. ‘Everything imaginable happened,’ they say about that past war. ‘Fire, suffering.’ Someone said, it was bad for everyone. A human squeak in the midst of a raging war, a reminder that every living thing suffers. ‘What time has anyone for love?’ the young woman said with never a care. ‘You snatch what you can in the moment.’ You could see she liked that.
It is amazing the way any headscarf, any chipped saucer, any little pot, shawl, inkwell, poker, any object no matter how worn has become unimaginably special, with its unique identity, its individuality, its personal charm; and everything here is imbued with that now, because it is irreplaceable. Even the most ordinary pre-war items seem magical and extraordinary.
There are times in history when the best members of the younger generation are enthralled by the current of the times – all the most active, the most steadfast young people. That current is carrying them not towards personal gain or material benefit, but into battle, into mortal combat in which the stream will dwindle almost away. But to drop out of it is to be a traitor to your generation’s cause.
Misha Molochko used to say in the IPLH, ‘Our romantic destiny is the coming war against fascism, which we will win.’ It was a faith we all shared.
I thought: war. But it is roads and sky, children, peasants, people in towns, and death.
A tin with a wick, a lamp.
‘The German anti-aircraft gunners left it behind. It’s really clever.’