As they were almost certain they would not meet again the next day, men in the penal companies talked to one another differently from ordinary soldiers. Very simple statements, a tone of voice that was not concerned to be understood, to convince, or to impress. Words you use when talking to yourself or addressing ghosts. Before a battle they knew in advance that a few hours later nine voices out of ten would have fallen silent forever on this earth. This made their voices calm, detached, indifferent to what the ghosts of tomorrow would think. Sometimes the narrative would break off and one could sense it continuing underground among silent memories.
"So as not to crush it, this egg," Anchor was relating two days before he died, "I tied my wrist to my thigh when I was asleep. The egg always kept warm in my armpit. Everyone in our hut helped me to hatch it. During searches we passed it from one to another. We hid it from the guards, like it was a bomb or a gold ingot. What do you expect? There's not much to do in a camp. A tractor had knocked it out of its nest. All the other eggs were smashed but this one hadn't broken. We really wanted to know what kind of bird would come out of it."
What did come out was a tiny bundle of life, a little pulsating thing, covered in down, with a gaping yellow beak that the prisoners fed with a chewed-up mess of bread and saliva. In the end the guards got to know about it but did not interfere. They understood that no one in the camp would have batted an eye if they had doubled the quotas of work, or deprived them of food, or increased the punishments. But had they laid a finger on that little creature, already learning to fly in the stifling air of the barrack huts, there would have been a revolt.
Anchor was killed and Pavel never heard the end of the story. He simply pictured a young bird, under the transfixed gaze of the prisoners, flying out over the lines of barbed wire.
When he was telling his story Anchor sometimes called himself "the brood cock." This nickname amused another prisoner, who had joined the company at the same time as him and who, unlike the rest, made a point of preserving his real name amid the anonymity of the other soldiers. If he spoke to anyone, however briefly, he would tell them his name, Zurin, happy to take possession of it again after being a mere serial number for so long. It was this desire to assert his own identity that gave him the urge to tell his story.
Wounded in the battle of Brest Litovsk, he had been captured by the Germans, had spent a month behind barbed wire, had managed to escape and rejoin our troops and then, in a reverse process, had been arrested, judged to be a traitor, and sent to a Soviet camp.
Pavel had already heard the stories of such escapees who had, without realizing it, fled from one death to another. He knew the meaning of Stalin's words when he declared, "None of my soldiers will be taken prisoner by the enemy." This meant they must never give themselves up alive.
It was not Zurin's fate that struck him but one episode in particular that the soldier related clumsily, stumbling, as if he felt at fault in admitting to his capture.
It was, he told them, the final day of the battle for the citadel of Brest Litovsk. The Germans had just dislodged the last of the defenders putting up resistance in the underground bunkers. Some of them perished when the vaults caved in, others were burned by flamethrowers, asphyxiated by smoke. They lined up the survivors on the central square of the citadel in front of the German troops, who observed them with mocking curiosity. The fighters blinked in the sunlight, too harsh after long weeks spent in the dark in bunkers. Their uniforms had been transformed into crusts of hardened mud. Bandages stained with earth and blood, solid hair plastered over their brows, lips raw with thirst. They looked like beasts that had just been hauled out of their lair. Beasts who had lost count of the days and, moreover, did not know that the frontier fortress they were defending had long since been abandoned by the rest of the army in its retreat toward Moscow.
Exactly as if they were dragging forth a captured animal, two Germans dragged out another of the fighters on a makeshift stretcher and set him down at the feet of the rest. His face touching the stone, he looked as if he were listening to a distant noise. A fragment of bone, very white amid the dirty fabric of his tunic, poked out from his shoulder. He remained motionless, lying between the Germans and the row of prisoners. One of the officers rapped out a brief command. A soldier ran off, came back with a bucket of water, and emptied it over the recumbent man. The latter turned his head. It could be seen that half his face was charred-the same black surface as the walls and the bricks vitrified by the flamethrowers. Painfully, he raised himself onto one elbow. In this face made up of burned skin and mud an eye glittered, conscious and still full of the darkness of the underground chambers.
The officer leaned forward to meet this one-eyed gaze. In the scorched face the lips moved. In place of spittle, a clot of brown blood hurtled from this mouth and flattened itself against the officer's boots.
" 'Now we've had it,' we said to ourselves," Zurin related. " 'The Kraut will finish him off with a pistol. Then they'll give all of us hell just to pay for that gob of spit.' "
The officer stood up and a fresh command snapped out. The line of soldiers quivered and with a fierce clicking of heels came rigidly to attention, their eyes fixed on the officer. He stared hard at them and barked out several words that rang across the square. Zurin understood German, the enemy's language they had learned at school, reading Heine. "This is a true soldier," said the officer. "You should fight like him!"
For a long moment the square remained silent. A line of German soldiers at attention and this man dying, stretched out on the pavement, his brow against the stone.
In the new company, made up of the remnants of the previous ones, Pavel spoke to nobody. He had already grown accustomed to the futility of forming a tie with anyone, knowing the most you might be left with from such a friendship, formed on the brink of death, was either a knife with the handle notched for days of survival or an unfinished story. And if he now embarked on a conversation one night it was because the offense attributed to this new recruit seemed too improbable. They said that on attacks this man had refused to shout Stalin's name.
The two were on guard duty and spoke in whispers, unable to see one another in the darkness. The German positions were very close, you could not even light a cigarette. The soldier's responses left Pavel perplexed. "He's pulling my leg, this guy," he said to himself from time to time, and in the gray light of the June night he tried to make out the features of his strange interlocutor. But the reflected moonlight showed only quick flashes from his spectacles and the pale patch of his forehead.
"Is it true you swap your vodka for bread?" asked Pavel, seeing this refusal to drink the statutory hundred grams before an attack as a bizarre piece of bravado: those few burning mouthfuls gave you the courage to tear yourself up from the earth when the bullets and shrapnel came whistling past. "Don't you like drinking or what?"
"I do, but I'm always hungry. You see, I was a rich kid. My parents force-fed me like a turkey when I was little."
Such honesty was disconcerting. Pavel told himself that, questioned in that way, he would have invented a rather more heroic reason for his refusal. He would have said he did not drink because he 'was afraid of nothing. He would certainly never have admitted to a past as a spoiled child.