‘Fräulein, bitte.’ Something in our German is irreparably broken. ‘What was the name of that village where we stayed the night before yesterday? I would like to remember that village. That old Russian mother…’
Artillery fire, the rattle of machine guns, and shooting too. The incessant din of battle. The wounded are being brought towards us in ambulances, in the back of trucks carpeted with straw, on sledges. Our truck moves aside to let them pass and we look silently on.
The cold is merciless. We shelter from the wind in a shed and, from somewhere back when all this began I recollect a beseeching smile, black teeth: ‘Please give me a blanket. In the shed it is so terribly cold.’ Get lost. It is unbearably cold for us as well, even if I do have a blanket, the one I brought from home.
The door of the shed creaks open and even colder air billows in. A crowd of unfamiliar soldiers enters. They switch on a torch. ‘Oh, shit!’ They have spotted the German. ‘Give ’im a sniff of your rifle butt,’ someone says lazily. Then, more ominously, vindictively, ‘Pull ’im out into the snow.’ ‘Get ’is legs!’
‘Stop it!’ I shout shakily, jumping up. A torch probes me at close range. ‘There’s a lieutenant here, my fellow boyars.’ Someone else swears in the dark. ‘What you being so nice to a German for? You’d do better being nice to us lads…’
Now they’re joking. They calm down, settle in. Savelov does not wake up. Thiel, our German, is restive, probably with fear. I hear him sit up. ‘Verflucht! Damn!’ I mutter. Damn Germans, damn the war and all the violence, damn this cold.
Everything that came after that was just war, only here, perhaps, so close to the capital, it was bloodier and more brutal. The endless battle for Moscow. It was a long war and I was in the thick of it. Zaimishche was the last glimmer of light, of human warmth. Mutilated, scorched earth, cruelty and pity, dark chasms and a soaring of the spirit. War embraced so much that was contradictory, conflicting, and primal.
Somewhere, lost in the abyss of bygone centuries, is this city’s beginning – Rzhevka, Rzhova, Rzhev-Volodimerov; some passing mention of it in a Novgorod statute on pavements dating from 1010. Was that an omen? Everything is still obscure, and the territory that now lies beneath the city and district of Rzhev was disputed, it is surmised, and fought over by the feudal princes, but more often it was conquered by Novgorod. Whether that was really so remains uncertain – hypotheses, speculation, arguments between researchers: to this day the outlines of the territory seem blurred.
But then the chronicle does unambiguously note that the city was besieged during a war between Prince Svyatoslav Vsevolodovich and the Prince of Toropets in 1216. That is incontrovertible evidence of the existence of a city, the progenitor of modern Rzhev. Those are the circumstances in which history succeeds in retrieving Rzhev from the depths of centuries past. A siege! And in the ever-rolling stream of time – stop! An event has piqued the curiosity of history and makes us aware of the founding of this city!
Right now Rzhev, captured by the Germans and besieged by our troops, is the focus of everyone’s attention and history, we imagine, will not overlook it. This is, after all, the price to be paid.
16 April 1942. You manage not to lose your balance; swollen felt boots, the ‘great water’ where the level of the swamps has risen, flooding trenches, dugouts and bunkers. The roads are impassable and there is no bread, fresh or dried. People are desperately hungry, and what seems somehow particularly woeful is the mute starvation of the horses. Cavalry horses are being taken back for veterinary treatment, but they stop at a gully, retreat a little and then, lacking the strength to cross it, lie down to die in the roadside mud.
The Germans had driven the villagers away but not had time to set fire to the village. They were expelled without warning. There had been a German baling machine at work here but they took it with them. All that remained was the compressed bales of hay they had been preparing to send back to Germany.
We are in a shed and those bales are serving as our table and chairs. There are two of us: me and the prisoner, a strapping young German. I ask him the usual questions: where are the firing points, where does one unit’s sector end and another’s begin, about the bringing in of fresh troops and such like. As always, though, although I know it is beside the point, I ask about more than that: for example, why he came here?
He suddenly stands up, blocking the doorway so that it becomes almost dark in the shed. With solemn dutifulness he intones that this has been commanded by the Führer. ‘Russia must be defeated so that we can destroy our main enemy, England.’
I suddenly feel how, at moments like this, reality and fantasy fuse. I will never forget the smell of the hay, the neat yellow bales, the macabre combination of bloody slaughter and brisk, economical business efficiency; the deserted street and delicate sky, and the trial of being in such close contact with this captive enemy, his black silhouette in the doorway of a shed where the two of us are bound together in such a diabolically unnatural relationship.
In my head I hear the tinkling tune of one of their army songs: ‘With war we sail to Engel-land, and speed out to the East.’
A top secret German document dated 20 April 1942: Programme of the Chief Commissioner for Utilization of the Labour Force (circulated by our front headquarters for information):
In order significantly to relieve the burden of work on the extremely busy German peasant woman, the Führer has instructed me to deliver to Germany from the eastern regions 400,000–500,000 selected healthy and robust young women.
I turn on the radio during the night to hear the emotionless voice of a female announcer intoning: ‘Bloo-dy bat-tle in south. Stop. Our Mo-ther-land in danger. Stop. I repeat. Our Mo-ther-land in danger. Stop.’
This extract from the newspapers is right now being received by the partisans’ radio operators in the forests. The mechanical, colourless radio voice mercilessly hammers nails into your heart: ‘The fate of our coun-try is be-ing deci-ded in bat-tles in the south. Stop. I repeat, the fate…’
Outside the tent there is stillness, the scraping sound of tree branches, the challenges of sentries.
The door of the dugout is torn off its hinges and no longer fits into the door frame. It has been knocked off its bearings and so have I, a bit. There is such a ringing in my ears that I am unsure what is going on around me. If I fall asleep, I hear someone breathing in my ears. I drank vodka and suddenly felt warm. What next?
War whirls you round and grinds you down, and frees you from everything. All that is indestructible is the hearts of the village women.
During the offensive by units of the Red Army, German soldiers in the village of Podorki set fire to thirty-five houses… they did not allow people to rescue their property; they locked the houses and shot at anyone trying to do so… they shot Lavrentievna, an old woman… they also machinegunned Citizen Braushkin, a collective farmer who was moving away hay that was next to his barn.
Between two juggernauts, two belligerent armies, people are crushed. Civilians not at war but in the war.