The assault was an act of desperate bravery, a heroic last stand rather than a strategists’ decision. Long years after the war Volsky would come across references to that day in December in two history books. The first would speak of “the participation of the artists of Leningrad in the defense of the city,” without referring to anyone in particular. The second, much more recent, would refer to “a sham counteroffensive dreamed up by those responsible, seeking to clear their names in Stalin’s eyes.” Neither one nor the other would make any mention of the soldier who had just traced a line of blood in the snow, of the tranquillity of that house, safe beneath its tree, or, least of all, of the lock of dark hair that had escaped from under Mila’s headscarf and was stirred by Volsky’s breath as he sang.
No history, either, would record that line of soldiers who managed to haul themselves up onto the ridge. Their silhouettes were etched against the sky before being felled by bullets, the following wave managed to cling on a little farther up. The singers lost count of the number of times they had struck up the “Internationale,” but, at the sight of these men, as the words about “the final conflict” rang out, they were freshly apposite.
It was then that the explosions began to occur all around them. Later on, in the army, Volsky would learn to recognize this as mortar fire, with its perfidious trajectories straight up into the air, which create the impression that the shells are falling out of the sky. All he noticed at the time was the increasing accuracy of the fire closing in on them. An explosion threw up snow behind the band and, without turning around, he sensed from a jolt in the music that one of the musicians had been hit. The singers reinforced their voices with wild exhilaration, glad to be identified by the enemy and therefore counting for something in this fight.
He fell without being wounded. A singer on his right, who had caught a shell splinter full in the face, toppled backward and brought him down. In the time it took to get up Volsky saw their troupe as they must appear from the water’s edge: two rows of singers, a semicircle of musicians and gaps already left by those who had been killed. Yet the singing had lost none of its intensity. And on the ridge several dozen soldiers were fighting on, hurling grenades, setting up machine guns among the bodies of their dead comrades.
They should have fallen back, retreated, escaped to the truck. Saved themselves. No one stirred. The order to fall back could have been given but their “captain” now lay on the path leading down to the river… They sang with a freedom never before experienced. Scorn for death caused a fierce exultation to well up in their emaciated bodies. Tears shone upon their eyelashes. Volsky saw one of the singers, his head all bloody, trying to rise to his feet and return to his place. Then a cymbal went rolling down the icy slope.
And now silence swept in, the light turned into a darkness from out of which emerged words he was struggling to make sense of. So it was… The effort he made woke him up. In the cotton wool density left by an explosion he could hear a voice and when his sight returned he found himself lying among other bodies and very close to his face he saw Mila’s eyes, her dark brown locks, no longer covered by her shawl, and, high up on her brow, a long wound. He spoke but could not hear himself. The only audible words were those she was crooning softly. Lines sung by Marie, from the operetta they had been performing in…
Before losing consciousness again he stared at this woman’s face bent over him, a face furrowed by hunger and disfigured by wounds. And, very briefly, he experienced the start of a life he would never have thought possible on this earth.
He did not see Mila again, did not even know if she had been treated in Leningrad or perhaps evacuated one night in a convoy of trucks. Discharged from the hospital on New Year’s Eve, he found himself in an artillery battery a few miles from the spot where their last concert had taken place. The stranglehold of the blockade had loosened a little; it had been possible to retake a few small towns from the enemy and in one of them Volsky’s comrades picked up a packet of elegant cards with German text printed in fine Gothic lettering. An officer read them, spat out an oath. They were invitations to the celebration to mark the fall of Leningrad. The festivities were planned for December 18 at the Astoria Hotel. Volsky remembered that their choir had been singing two days before that date.
He felt proud to have assisted, through this concert, in the defense of the city. Before learning that in mid-December the Germans had been defeated close to Moscow, and that this had saved Leningrad, making those fine invitation cards, with their Gothic script, superfluous… Impossible in war to judge between the impact of collective action and that of individual heroism, the fluctuating imprecision of weighing both in the balance-this would be one of the lessons of those four years of fighting.
The war had little else to teach him. In the siege of Leningrad he had lived with death as intimately as a soldier would have done. Now, crossing fields strewn with corpses, he was astonished at their number, but the absolute singularity of each death was somewhat blunted here at the front, blurred by this very number.
Of course, there was a mass of detail, often of vital importance, for him to learn. That unharmed house in a village razed to the ground and the very tall tree he had seen during their last concert. He knew now that it was the tree that had protected the shack. A target that, logically, should have been the first to be blown up. But gunners have their own logic. They take aim by selecting a reference point (a church tower, a post, or a tree) and it is the reference point that survives amid the ruins, as a reward for its value in pinpointing targets.
He also had a memory of those soldiers shuffling about beside their gun on the riverbank on the day of the desperate attack. From now on his war was just this shuffling about, in snow or mud, and he came no longer to expect glorious feats of arms, dazzling exploits. Resigned himself to studying the crude mechanics of battle. Soon he could evaluate at a glance the steel of the armored vehicles he was aiming at. His ear could judge the caliber of guns being fired, the different whistlings of the shells. Distances, trajectories, took on a palpable density, inscribed in the very air he breathed.
And then, on occasion, all this knowledge became futile, as on a particular evening at the end of an engagement. The shooting had stopped, his comrades were rolling their cigarettes, and suddenly one of them fell over, with a little red mark above his temple: a stray fragment of shrapnel. No glorious goal would compensate for this young face frozen, this unique presence, turning into dead matter before their eyes. Yes, he learned this lesson as welclass="underline" in war the most testing moments are those of peace, for a dead man lying in the grass makes the living see the world as it would be, but for their folly. It was a spring day, the battle had taken place near a forest where the undergrowth was white with wild cherry trees in flower and lilies of the valley.
He was posted to the front defending Leningrad. Then transferred to the Volga, to a city that must at all costs be victorious, for it bore Stalin’s name. In this battle a bullet grazed his face, his left cheek was gashed, leaving a scar like a little grin. “You’re never sad with me,” he took to joking.
A year later, in the gigantic Battle of Kursk, Volsky became unrecognizable.
He had already seen what hell one day, a beautiful spring day, of warfare could be. But previously these had been hells controlled by men. This time the creators lost control of their own handiwork. Instead of an offensive in which the infantry made the running, with the artillery in support, it was a monstrous confrontation between thousands of tanks, hordes of black tortoises, their carapaces ramming one another, spitting fire, ejecting from their blazing shells human beings who burned like torches. The sky was filled with smoke, the air reeked of exhaust from the engines. No sound could be heard above the explosions and the grinding of overheated metal. With his fellow gunners, Volsky found himself hemmed in against the remains of a fortified post, unable either to retreat or properly to open fire. The duels between tanks were happening too close at hand, too fast, the gun would have had to be handled with the dexterity of a revolver. Nevertheless they tried their luck, hit the turret of a Tiger, but glancingly, and received a burst of machine gun fire in reply. A heavy black tortoise had just located them. Keeping his eyes fixed on the maneuverings of the monster, Volsky signaled to those behind him to bring up the shell. No one stirred. He turned: one gunner was dead, another sat there, his face streaming with red, his screams muted by the noise.