What followed had the slowness of a nightmare, so familiar to him, in which each action seemed to take long minutes. A shell to be lifted out of the crate, the sleek heaviness of a toy asleep in his hands, to be carried, inserted into the breech, loaded, then he began to take aim… Interminable seconds during which the tank lowered its gun toward him, as if the man aiming it were amusing himself by taking his time. No hell could be such a torment.
What happened next would be pieced together later, at nightfall, when he became capable of remembering, of understanding. He had no time to fire and yet the turret of the Tiger blew up, flinging out the bodies crammed together in its cockpit. The violence of the explosion threw Volsky to the ground and momentarily he glimpsed the angular carapace of another monster, the enormous self-propelling gun, the famous SU-152, that killer of tanks, that had just saved his life…
The evening spilled down sluggish rain. Having recovered the use of his ears he could hear the hissing of the water on the incandescent metal of the armored vehicles. Groans across the plain encumbered with black machines. Words spoken in Russian, allowing him to understand whose the victory was in this clash of steel.
And suddenly, appearing in the half-light, this teetering silhouette: a German from a tank unit, stunned, no doubt, wandering blindly among the carapaces. Volsky drew his gun, aimed… But did not fire. The soldier was young and seemed indifferent to what could happen to him after the horror of what he had just lived through. Their eyes met and, in spite of themselves, each waved a hand at the other. Volsky put away his pistol, the soldier disappeared into the summer dusk.
The night was brief and by about 3:00 a.m. an ashen pallor was already casting a glow over the surrounding area. He got up, climbed onto a low wall in the fortified post. The mist lifted over the plain to the hazy limits of the horizon. And its whole surface was hidden under the dark armature of tangled tanks. A human presence could be sensed within all this metallic darkness: wounded men, Russian or German, waiting in the suffocating heat of the turrets. Men burned, with wounds beyond hope, whose eyes could see the sky, which the rain had now left, and a star poised directly above… He thought… “above this hell,” but the word seemed imprecise. Hell teemed with little torturers, eager to inflict suffering on the fallen. Here the wounded awaited death in the solitude of a block of steel, pressed up against the bodies of dead comrades.
He caught himself making no distinction between the Russian and the German wounded. The hell created by men… Disturbed by a truth that was taking hold of him, he hastened to return to a more clear-cut judgment: the enemy had just been beaten and these Germans dying in their tanks had deserved it… Yet that perception of the suffering of all mankind was not easy to eradicate. In it Volsky sensed a great and terrible wisdom that bowed him down beneath the weight of a very old man’s experience. In the siege of Leningrad he had already come to see human lives as one single communal life and it was perhaps this perception that gave him hope.
Before the sun rose he heard a bird calling, briefly, repeatedly, with rather muted resonance. A dull, humble song, but one that rang out for all the living and the dead.
The soldier who helped Volsky to carry his comrades’ bodies greeted him oddly: “Now then, cheer up, Granddad!” Granddad! Volsky smiled, telling himself that, drained by a sleepless night, the other, a man of his own age, was babbling nonsense. He would have thought no more about that incongruous greeting but then the nurse, who was putting a dressing on his wrist, concluded: “There you are, Grandpa. Like that you’ll be all set for the next battle.” He burst out laughing and saw a flicker of doubt in the woman’s eyes. A mirror hung on the wall of the dressing station. He went up to it… And clapped his hand to his head, as if to hide it. His hair was white, that snowy white that some old men sport with such elegance.
From that day onward he stopped writing to Mila. The blockade of Leningrad continued and Volsky knew what that signified for a woman who had already been living through it for two years. He could imagine the city under siege in summer, those thousands of buildings filled with corpses… No letter from Mila had reached him: the postal service rarely broke through the mesh of the blockade. Besides, how could he be found, with his transfers from one front to another? Dreaming up all these reasons helped him to think that Mila was still alive.
On the day after the Battle of Kursk, when he saw himself in the mirror at the dressing station all these speculations about the mail became pointless. This old soldier with a strangely young face, scarred with a slight rictus, was another man.
This other man went back to the war almost serenely, telling himself that the person he had once been no longer existed, a little as if he had been killed. The extinguishing of all hope made a good soldier of him. No letters, no waiting for letters, no becoming emotional, which, in war, is the frequent cause of carelessness and hence of death. He became fused with the gun he served, became effectively mechanical, impassive, thrifty with words. And as time passed he even ceased to be surprised when young people addressed him as “Grandpa.”
He had also changed in what he had once considered to be his true nature, his dream, his gift: singing. Sometimes he would sing along in chorus with his comrades, during a halt, or as he marched in a column of men cheating their weariness with merry tunes. These songs pleased him, evocative as they were of the immediate reality of the war. The banality of death, the carefree spirit of a summer’s day, the scent of grass at the edge of a forest, a handful of berries swiftly gathered among the trees and, pausing there, as he glanced at the column of soldiers, a thought that made him feel giddy: “I’m no longer among them, I’m in this forest, there are these flowers, the drowsy buzzing of bees…” Then he would run back to take his place among the men, singing as they marched toward death.
The speed at which their faces, lit up by singing, were obliterated in the daily slaughter, the ease with which a human being could be wiped out, was the only reality that never ceased to trouble Volsky. And it was thanks to their communal singing that he kept a memory of the faces of so many men who were gone. With his professional’s ear, albeit battered by gunfire, he could recall their voices (fine, dull, touching in their enthusiasm or naively reckless), and this pattern of sounds would bring a look or a smile back to life. These lives, swept away by the war, survived through song.
Thus he came to dislike those grand operatic arias he had dreamed of in the old days. All those stentorian Boris Godunovs, thrusting out their beards the better to squeeze out the vibrations of their vocal power at the height of tragic ecstasy, now struck him as false. Ludicrous, too, those plump legionnaires in Italian opera, tinkling the scales of their brass armor. Or the ones in tailcoats, sticking out their chests like fighting cocks.