Petrov shrugged. “I doubt it,” he said. “That sounds like quite an exaggeration.” He went on to say that his army had crossed the Desna at two points, taken eight villages and reached the Roslavl highway. As before, he spoke quickly, avoiding long words.
“Another Suvorov!”112 said Shlyapin, smiling. It was clear that he and Petrov were on the best of terms and worked well together.
Early the next morning a car arrived to take Krymov to Front HQ. Colonel General Yeromenko, the Front commander, wanted to talk to him. Krymov left, still feeling the warmth of what had been a blessed day.
Front HQ was in the forest between Bryansk and Karachev. The various sections were located in spacious dugouts lined with fresh, still-damp boards. The commander’s billet was a small house in a clearing.
A tall, pink-faced major met Krymov on the porch. “I know why you’re here,” he said, “but you’ll have to wait. The commander was working all night. He only went to bed an hour ago. You can sit here on this bench.”
Attached to a nearby tree was a washbasin. Two corpulent, large-boned men went up to it. Both were bald; both were wearing braces over shirts as white as snow; both were in blue breeches, but one was wearing boots while the other was in soft leather slippers, his socks looking rather tight on his fleshy calves.
Grunting and snorting, they dried the backs of their heads and their stout necks with shaggy towels. Their orderlies then handed them their tunics and yellow belts; Krymov saw that one was a major general, the other a divisional commissar. The latter strode quickly towards the house.
The major general looked at Krymov. The adjutant, who was on the terrace above, said, “It’s the man Petrov told us about—the battalion commissar from the Southwestern Front. He’s been called here by the commander.”
“The commissar from the Kiev encirclement,” the general said with a contemptuous smirk—and went up onto the terrace.
The low clouds were grey and ragged, and the patches of blue sky looked chilly and hostile, like winter waters.
It began to rain. Krymov took refuge under the awning. The adjutant came out and said gravely, “The commander wishes to speak to you, comrade Battalion Commissar.”
Yeromenko was tall and stout, with high cheekbones, a broad face and a broad wrinkled forehead. He was wearing glasses. He gave Krymov a quick yet attentive look and said, “Sit down, sit down, I can see you’ve had a hard time of it. You’ve lost a lot of weight.” He spoke as if he had known Krymov from before his time in encirclement.
Krymov noticed that three of the four green stars on the turndown of his tunic collar were markedly dimmer than the fourth, which must have been added only recently.113
“Bravo, my good man from Kiev,” said Yeromenko. “You’ve brought me 200 armed men. Petrov’s told me about you.”
He then moved straight to the question that clearly concerned him more than anything else in the world.
“Well,” he said, “did you see anything of Guderian? Did you see his tanks?”114
He gave a little smile, as if embarrassed by his own impatience, and ran one hand through his thick, close-cut, greying hair.
Krymov reported in detail. Yeromenko listened, leaning right forward, his chest against the table. Then his adjutant hurried in, saying, “Comrade Colonel General—the chief of staff, with urgent information!”
He was followed by the major general whom Krymov had seen earlier. The major general went up to the table, a little out of breath, and Yeromenko asked, “What’s up, Zakharov?”
“Andrey Ivanovich, the enemy has gone on the offensive. His tanks have broken through towards Oryol, from Krom. And on the right flank Petrov’s front line was breached forty minutes ago.”
Yeromenko swore, soldier-style, got heavily to his feet and went to the door, without another glance at Krymov.
In the Front Political Administration Krymov was issued with a greatcoat and coupons for the canteen, but no one asked him anything at all—any interest people might have taken in his experiences was eclipsed by the day’s ominous new developments.
The canteen was in a glade in the forest. Under the open sky were long tables and benches resting on blocks of wood sunk into the ground. The dark ragged clouds looked as if they were being torn by the sharp tops of the pines. The friendly clatter of spoons mingled with the melancholy voice of the forest.
Then all these sounds were drowned out; above and between the clouds were German twin-engine bombers, heading towards Bryansk.
Several people jumped up and ran under the trees. In a resonant, authoritative voice, forgetting that he was no longer in command, Krymov shouted, “No! No running!”
Soon afterwards, the earth was trembling from explosions.
That night Krymov saw an operations map. Advance units of German tanks threatened Bolkhov and Belyov. Other units, leaving Ordzhonikidzegrad and Bryansk to their left, were moving northeast, towards Zhizdra, Kozelsk and Sukhinichi.115
Once again, as in Kiev, Krymov saw two vast German claws, now closing around the Bryansk Front.
The young staff commander who showed Krymov this map was thoughtful and sensible. He said that Petrov’s army had suffered a particularly heavy blow. Kreizer’s army was now retreating, but still fighting stubbornly.116 From information received that afternoon it was clear that the Germans had also launched an offensive against the Western Front; from Vyazma they were advancing on Mozhaisk.
The goal of this new offensive was only too clear: Moscow. Moscow was the word now in everyone’s heads and hearts.
Each month people’s thoughts and feelings, their hopes and plans, had coalesced around different words. In June the words in the minds of workers and peasants, in the minds of women, feeble old men and self-assured generals, had been “the old border with Poland.” In July the word in their minds had been “Smolensk”; in August, “the Dnieper”; and in October, “Moscow.”
HQ was in a state of near-panic. Krymov saw signallers removing cables and soldiers piling stools and tables into trucks. He overheard clipped conversations:
“Which section are you? Who’s in charge of this truck? Note down the route—I’ve heard it’s a difficult road through the forest.”
At dawn, on a truck from the Bryansk Front HQ, Krymov set off towards Belyov. Once again he observed the broad road of Russia’s retreat; once again, among the soldiers’ greatcoats, he glimpsed women’s kerchiefs, old grey heads and the skinny legs of children.
In the last two months he had seen Belorussians from the forests on the border with Poland, and Ukrainians from around Chernigov, Kiev and Sumy. Now it was Russians from Oryol and Tula who were fleeing the Germans, trudging along the autumn roads with their bundles and plywood suitcases.
From the Belorussian forests he remembered the calm glimmer of lakes and the gentle smiles of children. He remembered their parents’ shy tenderness and the anxiety with which they looked at these children. He remembered quiet huts, unhurried suppers of potatoes and the bent backs of men and women working in potato fields until dusk. He remembered a people who lived far from cities and roads and seldom visited fairs, who knew how to spin and sew, to make shoes, dresses, fur coats and sheepskin jackets. Their souls still echoed the passing seasons: blizzards and thaws, the burning heat of their sandy plains, birdsong and buzzing mosquitoes, the smoke of forest fires and the rustle of autumn leaves.
Then Krymov and his men had marched through Ukraine.
The nights were filled with the buzz of German bombers, with the smoky light of night-time fires. During the day Krymov and his men saw orchards and kitchen gardens full of huge pumpkins, splendid white cabbages and red tomatoes full of the warmth of life; beside the white walls of the huts, climbing high as their thatched roofs, were dahlias and sunflowers. Nature rejoiced in this wealth, but it had brought little joy to those who had cultivated it.
In one village Krymov attended a farewell party for an old man who had served forty years in the naval artillery and had now resol
ved to leave his family and his magnificent orchard and slip away into the forest with only a rifle. Many of the other guests were inconsolable, but they still believed that the sun would continue to shine on the earth. The old woman whose husband was leaving was distraught. For her, this was the end of the world, the last day of her life—yet she had gone on making cheese dumplings and poppy-seed biscuits with as much care and love as if the world were at peace.
Krymov saw people laughing through tears and people who first laughed, then wept. Now and again he sensed a sly reserve hiding behind loud eloquence. Once more he heard the treacherous words, “What’s been, we have seen. What’s to be, we shall see.” And he met people who hoped that the Germans would soon put an end to the collective farms.
Krymov also spoke to people who were strong, hard-working and talented, who understood that life on this rich earth is a precious gift and who were now ready to give up their lives to defend the fruits of their peaceful labour.
And now, in October, he was being driven through the fields of the province of Tula, among birches already bare, among squat village houses built of red brick, over ground that rang with frost in the early morning yet turned hot and damp as the day went on.
And the wonderful beauty of the region where he was born and raised revealed itself to him anew—in rolling fields already harvested, in bunches of rowan berries above the moss-covered frame of a well, in the huge smoky-red moon struggling to raise its chilly, stony body over the bare night-time countryside. Everything here was majestic: the earth; a sky that held within it all the cold and lead of autumn; and, stretching from horizon to horizon, even darker than the black earth, the road itself. Krymov had seen many autumns in the Russian countryside and usually the season evoked in him only a calm sadness, mediated through poems he had known since childhood: “Boredom and sadness, clouds without end . . . a stunted mountain ash . . .”117 These, though, were the feelings of people who had beds in a warm, comfortable home and who were gazing through the window at trees they had known all their lives. What Krymov felt now was very different. The autumn earth was neither poor, nor sad and boring. He did not see mud or puddles; he did not see the damp roofs or the rickety fences. What he saw in these empty autumn spaces was a fierce beauty and grandeur. He could feel the vastness of the Russian lands in all their indissoluble unity. The penetrating autumn wind had gathered its strength from expanses that measured thousands of kilometres. This wind now blowing over the fields of Tula had blown over Moscow. Before that, it had blown over the forests of Perm, over the Ural Mountains and the Baraba steppe; it had blown over taiga and tundra, and over the sullen gloom of Kolyma. Krymov could now, with his entire being, sense the unity of the tens of millions of his brothers and sisters who had risen to fight for the people’s freedom. The whole country was at war—and no matter where the enemy appeared to break through, he would be met by a living dam of Red Army regiments newly brought up from reserve. Tanks just transported from factories in the Urals were waiting in ambush; new artillery regiments were meeting the enemy with their fire. And those who had retreated along high roads and back roads, those who had broken out of encirclement and forced their way east—they too had returned to the ranks. Once again they formed part of the living dam blocking the invaders’ path.
Krymov went on from Belyov in the same truck as before.
The junior lieutenant in charge of the truck respectfully offered him his place in the cab, but Krymov refused. Along with commanders from Front HQ, Political Administration staff and ordinary soldiers, he climbed into the back.
They stopped for the night in a village near Odoev. The old woman in whose large, cold hut they were billeted greeted them warmly and cheerfully.
She told them that her daughter, who worked in a Moscow factory, had brought her here at the beginning of the war, to live with her son. The daughter had then returned to Moscow.
Her son’s wife, however, had not wanted to share her home with her mother-in-law. And so her son had settled her here, in this large hut. He regularly brought her a little millet, or some potatoes, not mentioning this to his wife.
Her younger son, Vanya, had been working in a factory in Tula, but he had volunteered for the Red Army and was now fighting near Smolensk.
“So you’re all on your own?” Krymov said to her. “Even at night, when it’s cold and dark?”
“It’s all right,” she replied. “I sit in the dark and sing. Or I tell myself old tales.”
The soldiers boiled a large pot of potatoes and they all ate. Then the old woman stood by the door and said, “Now I’m going to sing for you.”
She sang in a rough, hoarse voice that could have been an old man’s. Then she said, “Yes, there was a time when I was strong as an ox.” After a pause, she went on, “Last night I dreamed of the Devil. He appeared before me and dug his nails into the palm of my hand. I began to pray: ‘Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered.’118 But the Devil didn’t take the least notice. Then I cursed and swore at him—and he was off like a shot. The day before yesterday I dreamed of my Vanya. He sat down at the table and just kept looking through the window. I kept calling out, ‘Vanya! Vanya!’ But he didn’t say a word. He just kept on looking out of the window.”
She offered her guests all she had: firewood, a pillow, a straw-filled mattress, the blanket off her own bed. She held nothing back; she even gave them a pinch of salt for the potatoes—and Krymov knew very well how reluctant village women were to use up their last stores of salt.
Then she brought an oil lamp without any glass and a small bottle with what must have been her last, cherished reserve of kerosene, and filled the lamp.
A true mistress of life and of a great land, she did all this with cheerful generosity, then retired behind the partition to her cold room. She was a mother; she had given her guests love, warmth, food and light.
That night Krymov slept on straw. He remembered lying on straw in a hut in a Belorussian village near the border with Ukraine, close to Chernigov. A tall, thin old woman with dishevelled grey hair had appeared out of the dark, carefully replaced his blanket, which had slipped off him while he was asleep, and made the sign of the cross over him.
He remembered a September night in Ukraine when a Chuvash soldier had somehow crawled into the village. He had been wounded in the chest. Two elderly women had dragged him into the hut where Krymov was spending the night. The bandages tied round the soldier’s chest had soaked up a great deal of blood. First they had swollen; then they had dried and gone tight. They had become like iron bands.
The soldier began to choke and wheeze. The women cut the bandages and got him to sit up. He began to breathe more easily.
They stayed with him until morning. He was delirious, calling out in Chuvash. All night long they held him in their arms, crying and wailing, “My child, my child, dear child of my heart!”
Krymov closed his eyes. He suddenly remembered his childhood, and his dead mother. He remembered how painfully lonely he had felt after Zhenya had left him. He realized with surprise that during these months in fields and forests, when so many were being orphaned by the storms of war, he had not once felt lonely.
Rarely in his life had the essence of Soviet unity seemed so clear to him. He understood that, by stirring up racial hatred, the Nazis hoped to undermine this unity—as if a stinking stream could undermine a deep ocean. One image troubled him day and night—the sight of the spattered blood and scraps of women’s clothing on the front of a German tank. How, he kept asking, could this have happened? The driver, after all, was an ordinary soldier. No one had been giving him orders; nobody had been standing over him when, on the fringes of the Priluki forest, he had turned his tank against defenceless women and children.
Krymov’s life had taken shape in a world of Communist ideals; more than that, it was woven from these ideals. Long years of work and friendship had united him with Communists from all over Europe, America and Asia.
It had been true work a
nd true friendship, a true journey.
They used to meet in Moscow, on Sapozhkovskaya Square opposite the Alexander Garden and the Kremlin wall. He remembered Vasil Kolarov, Maurice Thorez and Ernst Thälmann. He remembered Sen Katayama, with his brown eyes, his lovable wrinkles and his good-natured smile—the smile of a man who had lived through a great deal.119
One memory was especially vivid. He had been with a large group—Italians, Englishmen, Germans, French, Indians and Bulgarians. They had come out of the Hotel Lux120 and walked arm in arm down Tverskaya, singing a Russian song. It had been in October: twilight, mist, cold rain about to turn into damp grey snow. Passers-by were turning up their collars; cabs rattled past.
Arm in arm they had walked on, through the hazy glow of the dim street lamps. Beside the little white church on Okhotny Ryad, the blue-black eyes of one of the Indians had looked startling.
Who among them still remembered that song? Who among them was still alive? Where were they all now? Which of them was taking part in the battle against fascism?
O sacrifice to reckless thought,
It seems you must have hoped
Your scanty blood had power enough
To melt the eternal Pole.
A puff of smoke, a silent flicker
Upon the age-old ice—
And then a breath of iron winter
Extinguished every trace.121
Krymov understood that he had not simply dreamed up the contradictions that so troubled him. These contradictions had an objective existence; they were wreaking havoc in a world now gone mad. Gritting his teeth, he repeated to himself what Lenin had said about the teachings of Karl Marx: they were invincible because they were true.122
50
ON THE road to Tula, Krymov stopped at Yasnaya Polyana.123 The house was in the grip of feverish departure preparations. The paintings had been taken down from the walls; tablecloths, dishes and books had all been packed. The hall was full of boxes, ready to be transported east.
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