The Unwomanly Face of War Read online

  One of them I later bandaged on the battlefield, under fire, and I even remember his last name—Shchegolevatykh. He had a broken leg. I was putting a splint on it, and he asked my forgiveness.

  “Forgive me, dear nurse, for offending you that time. To be honest, I liked you.”

  What did we know about love then? If there was anything, it was a schooltime love, and schooltime love is still childish. I remember we once fell into an encirclement…We dug into the ground with our own hands, we had nothing else. No shovels…Nothing…We were pressed on all sides. We had already decided: that night we would either break through or die. We thought most likely we would die…I don’t know if I should tell about this or not. I don’t know…

  We camouflaged ourselves. We sat there. We waited for night so as to try and break through somehow. And Lieutenant Misha T.—he was replacing our wounded battalion commander, he was about twenty—began to recall how he loved to dance, to play the guitar. Then he asked, “Have you tried it?”

  “What? Tried what?” I was terribly hungry.

  “Not what, but who…I mean baba!”*4

  Before the war there was a pastry called “baba.”

  “No-o-o…”

  And I never had. We might die and not even know what love is like…We’d be killed that night…

  “Oh, come on, you fool!” Then I finally understood what he meant.

  We went to die for life, without knowing what life was. We had only read about it in books. I liked movies about love…

  Medical assistants in tank units died quickly. There was no room provided for us in a tank; you had to hang on to the armor plating, and the only thought was to avoid having your legs drawn into the caterpillar tread. And we had to watch for burning tanks…To jump down and run or crawl there…We were five girlfriends at the front: Liuba Yasinskaya, Shura Kiseleva, Tonya Bobkova, Zina Latysh, and me. The tank soldiers called us the Konakovo girls. And all the girls were killed…

  Before the battle in which Liuba Yasinskaya was killed, she and I sat in the evening hugging each other. We talked. It was 1943. Our division was approaching the Dnieper. She suddenly said to me, “You know, I’ll be killed in this battle. I have some sort of premonition. I went to the sergeant major, asked to be issued new underwear, and he turned stingy: ‘You got some just recently.’ Let’s go in the morning and ask together.”

  I tried to calm her down: “We’ve been fighting for two years; by now bullets are afraid of us.” But in the morning she persuaded me to go to the sergeant major anyway, and we got him to give us new sets of underwear. So there she was in this new undershirt. Snow white, with laces…It was all soaked in blood…This white and red together, with crimson blood—I remember it to this day. That was how she had imagined it.

  The four of us carried her together on a tarpaulin, she’d become so heavy. We lost many in that battle. We dug a big common grave. We put them all in it, without coffins, as usual, and Liuba on top. I still couldn’t grasp that she was no longer with us, that I would never see her again. I wanted to take at least something from her to remember her by. She had a ring on her finger, gold or something cheap—I don’t know. I took it. The boys held me back: don’t you dare, it’s bad luck. But when we were taking leave of her, and each one threw a handful of earth into the grave, I threw some, too, and the ring fell off with it into the grave…to Liuba. Then I remembered that she loved that ring very much…

  Her father went through the whole war and came back alive. Her brother, too. The men of her family came back…But Liuba was killed…

  Shura Kiseleva…She was the prettiest of us. Like an actress. She got burned up. She hid the badly wounded among the hayricks, shelling began, the hay caught fire. Shura could have saved herself, but she would have had to abandon the wounded…She burned up with them…

  I found out the details of Tonya Bobkova’s death only recently. She shielded the man she loved from a mine fragment. The fragments take a fraction of a second to reach you…How did she have time? She saved Lieutenant Petya Boichevsky, she loved him. And he survived.

  Thirty years later Petya Boichevsky came from Krasnodar. Found me. And told me all about it. He and I went to Borisov and found the clearing where Tonya was killed. He took some earth from her grave…Carried it and kissed it…

  There were five of us girls from Konakovo…But I alone came back to mama.

  —

  Unexpectedly for me, Nina Yakovlevna bursts into poetry:

  A brave girl leaps onto the armor plating,

  And she defends her Motherland.

  She’s not afraid of bullets or shells—

  Her heart is all aflame.

  Remember, friend, her modest beauty,

  When her body’s borne away…

  She confesses that she composed it at the front. I already know that many of them wrote verses at the front. Even now they are carefully copied out and kept in family archives—artless and touching. Hence their war albums—and they show me albums in every home—often resemble girls’ diaries. Only there it’s about love, and here it’s about death.

  —

  I have a close-knit family. A good family. Children, grandchildren…But I live in the war, I’m there all the time…Ten years ago I tracked down our friend Vanya Pozdnyakov. We thought he had been killed, but it turned out he was alive. His tank—he was a commander—was destroyed by two German tanks at Prokhorovka, and they set fire to it. The crew were all killed, only Vanya was left—without eyes, burned all over. We sent him to the hospital, but we didn’t think he would live. There wasn’t a living spot on him. All his skin…all…It came off in big pieces…Peeled off. I found his address thirty years later…half a lifetime…I remember going up the stairs, my legs giving way under me: was it him or wasn’t it? He opened the door himself, touched my face with his hands, recognized me: “Ninka, is it you? Is it you?” Imagine, after so many years he recognized me.

  His mother is a little old woman, he lives with her; she sat with us at the table and cried. I was surprised.

  “Why are you crying? You should rejoice that companions at arms have met again.”

  She replied, “My three sons went to the war. Two were killed; Vanya alone came home alive.”

  Vanya lost both eyes. She’s been leading him by the hand ever since.

  I asked him, “Vanya, the last thing you saw was that field at Prokhorovka, the tank battle…What do you remember of that day?”

  And do you know what he answered?

  “I regret only one thing: that I gave the command for the crew to leave the burning vehicle too early. The boys died anyway. But we could have destroyed one more German tank…”

  That’s what he regrets…To this day…

  He and I were happy during the war…No word had been spoken between us yet. Nothing. But I remember…

  Why was I left alive? What for? I think…As I understand, it’s in order to tell about it…

  —

  My meeting with Nina Yakovlevna had a sequel, but in writing. Having transcribed her account from the tape recorder and chosen what astonished and impressed me most, I sent her a copy, as I had promised. Several weeks later a weighty registered package came from Moscow. I opened it: newspaper clippings, articles, official reports about military and patriotic work conducted by the war veteran Nina Yakovlevna Vishnevskaya in Moscow schools. The material I had sent was also returned; very little was left of it—a lot had been crossed out: the amusing lines about the cooks who washed in the cauldrons, and even the harmless: “Sir, the other sir told me to give you this…” had been removed. And in the margins of the story about Lieutenant Misha T. stood three indignant question marks and a note: “I am a heroine for my son. A deity! What is he going to think of me after this?”

  More than once afterward I met with these two truths that live in the same human being: one’s own truth driven underground, and the common one, filled with the spirit of the time. The smell of newspapers. The first was rarely able to r
esist the massive onslaught of the second. If, for instance, besides the storyteller, there was some family member or friend in the apartment, or a neighbor (especially a man), she would be less candid and confiding than if it was just the two of us. It would be a conversation for the public. For an audience. That would make it impossible to break through to her personal impressions; I would immediately discover strong inner defenses. Self-control. Constant correction. And a pattern even emerged: the more listeners, the more passionless and sterile the account. To make it suit the stereotype. The dreadful would look grand, and the incomprehensible and obscure in a human being would be instantly explained. I would find myself in a desert of the past, filled with nothing but monuments. Great deeds. Proud and impervious. So it was with Nina Yakovlevna: one war she remembered for me—“like a daughter, so you’ll understand what we mere girls had to live through.” The other was meant for a big audience—“the way other people tell and they write in the newspapers—about heroes and great deeds, so as to educate the youth with lofty examples.” I was struck each time by this mistrust of what is simple and human, by the wish to replace life with an ideal. Ordinary warmth with a cold luster.

  And I couldn’t forget how we drank tea the family way, in the kitchen. And how we both wept.

  * * *

  *1 Princess Yaroslavna is the wife of Prince Igor Svyatoslavich of Novgorod in the twelfth-century Old Slavic poem The Lay of Igor’s Campaign.

  *2 In 1904 the Russian symbolist Alexander Blok (1880–1921) published a collection of poems entitled Verses About the Beautiful Lady, expressing his spiritual-erotic vision of the eternal feminine.

  *3 1937 was the height of Stalin’s purges and the Moscow show trials; in June of that year there was also a secret trial of Red Army commanders, followed by their execution, and later in the year there was a massive purge of Red Army officers.

  *4 “Baba” is both a pastry and a familiar spoken Russian word for “woman.”

  A gray cinder-block house on Kakhovskaya Street in Minsk. Half of our city has been built over with these nondescript high-rises, which turn gloomier by the year. But all the same this one is special. “Two wars are living here in our one apartment,” I will hear, when the door is opened. Sergeant Major First Class Olga Vasilyevna Podvyshenskaya fought in a naval unit in the Baltic. Her husband, Saul Genrikhovich, was a sergeant in the infantry.

  Everything is repeated…Again I spend a long time studying the family albums, carefully and lovingly designed and always put on display for guests. And for themselves as well. Each of these albums has a title: Our Family, The War, The Wedding, The Children, The Grandchildren. I like this respect for their own lives, the well-documented love for what has been lived through. For dear faces. It is quite rare that I meet with such a sense of home, with people studying their forebears, their line, though I’ve already visited hundreds of apartments, been with various families—cultivated and simple. Urban and rural. Frequent wars and revolutions have probably broken our habit of maintaining a connection with the past, of lovingly weaving the family web. Of looking far back. Of taking pride. We hasten to forget, to wipe away the traces, because preserved facts can become evidence, often at the cost of life. No one knows anything further back than their grandparents; no one looks for their roots. They made history, but live for the day. On short memory.

  But here it is different…

  “Is this really me?” Olga Vasilyevna laughs and sits down beside me on the sofa. She takes the photograph in which she is wearing a sailor suit with combat decorations. “Each time I look at these photos, I get surprised. Saul showed them to our six-year-old granddaughter. She asked me: ‘Grandma, you were a boy first, right?’ ”

  “Olga Vasilyevna, did you go to the front at once?”

  —

  My war began with evacuation…I left my home, my youth. On the way, our train was strafed, bombed; the planes flew very, very low. I remember how a group of boys from a vocational school jumped out of the train; they were all wearing black uniform jackets. Such a target! They were all shot. The planes flew just above ground…It felt as if they shot them and counted them off…Can you imagine?

  We worked at a factory; they fed us there, it wasn’t bad. But my heart was burning…I wrote letters to the recruitment office. One—a second—a third…In June of 1942 I was called up. We were transported to besieged Leningrad across Lake Ladoga on open barges under fire. Of my first day in Leningrad I remember the white night and a detachment of sailors marching in black uniforms. The atmosphere was tense, no one in the streets, only searchlights and sailors marching along wearing cartridge belts, like during the Civil War. Can you imagine? Something from a movie…

  The city was completely encircled. The front was very close. Tram No. 3 took you to the Kirov factory, and the front began right there. When the weather was clear, there was artillery shelling. They pounded us with direct fire. Pounded, pounded, pounded…The big ships moored by the pier were camouflaged, of course, but even so the possibility of a hit was not excluded. We became smoke-screeners. A special unit of smoke camouflage was organized, commanded by a former commander of the division of torpedo boats, Captain Lieutenant Alexander Bogdanov. The girls mostly had secondary technical education or else one or two years of university. Our task was to protect the ships by covering them with smoke. When the shelling began, the sailors would say: “The girls better hurry up and hang the smoke. It feels safer.” We went there in vehicles with a special mixture, while everybody was hiding in bomb shelters. In a way, we called the shelling down on ourselves. The Germans shelled this smoke screen…

  We ate “siege” food, you know, but somehow we bore with it…Well, first of all, a matter of youth, that’s important, and, second, we had the Leningraders for comparison. We were at least somehow provided for, there was some food, though minimal, but they collapsed from weakness. They died walking. Several children came to us, and we fed them a little from our meager rations. They weren’t children, they were some sort of little old people. Mummies. They told us their siege menu, if I can call it that: soup made from leather belts or new leather shoes, aspic made from woodworker’s glue, pancakes made from mustard…All the cats and dogs in the city had been eaten. The sparrows and magpies had disappeared. Even mice and rats were caught and eaten…They fried them somehow…Then the children stopped coming, and we waited a long time for them. They probably died. So I think…In winter, when Leningrad remained without heating, we were sent to break up the houses in one of the areas where wooden buildings still stood. The most painful moment was when you came up to the house…There stood a fine house, but the owners had either died or left, but most often had died. You could tell by the dishes left on the table, by the belongings. For maybe half an hour nobody could raise a crowbar. Can you imagine? We all stood and waited for something. Only when the commander came up and drove in his crowbar could we start knocking it down.

  We did logging; we lugged boxes of ammunition. I remember I was dragging one box and fell flat on my face: it was heavier than I was. That was one thing. A second was how hard it was for us as women. Later on I became commander of a section. The section was all young boys. We spent the whole day on a motorboat. The boat was small, and there was no head on it. The boys could do the necessary overboard, and that was that. But what about me? A couple of times I held myself back so long that I just jumped overboard and swam around. They shouted: “Sergeant Major overboard!” And they pulled me out. That’s such an elementary trifle…But was it such a trifle? I later had to be treated…Can you imagine? And the weight of the weapons? Also too heavy for a woman. They began by giving us rifles, and the rifles were taller than we were. Girls walked along, and the bayonets stuck two feet above their heads.

  It was easier for men to adjust to it all. To that ascetic life…To those relationships…But we missed, we missed terribly our homes, our mothers, our comforts. There was a Muscovite among us, Natasha Zhilina; she received a medal “For Courage,” and as
a bonus she got leave to go home for a few days. When she came back we sniffed her. We literally lined up and sniffed her. We said she smelled like home. We missed home so much…We were so overjoyed at the mere sight of an envelope with a letter…In papa’s handwriting…If there happened to be a moment of leisure, we embroidered something, some sort of handkerchiefs. They issued us footwraps, and we made scarves out of them and tied them on our necks. We wanted to do some women’s work. There wasn’t enough women’s work for us; it was simply unbearable. You looked for any pretext to pick up a needle, to mend something, to take back your natural image at least for a time. Of course there was joy and laughter, but all that was not like before the war. It was some peculiar state…

  —

  The tape recorder records the words, preserves the intonation. The pauses. The weeping and embarrassment. I realize that, when a person speaks, something more takes place than what remains on paper. I keep regretting that I cannot “record” eyes, hands. Their life during the conversation, their own life. Separate. Their “texts.”

  —

  “We have two wars here…That’s just it…” Saul Genrikhovich enters the conversation. “We begin to remember, and I have the feeling that she remembers her war and I mine. I, too, had something like what she told about the house, or how they lined up to smell the girl who came from home. But I don’t remember it…It flitted past me…It seemed like a trifle at the time. Nonsense. But she didn’t tell you about the sailor caps yet…Olya, how could you forget such a thing?”

  “I didn’t. It’s the most…I’m always afraid to call this story up from my memory. Each time…It was like this—at dawn our boats put out to sea. Several dozen of them…Soon we heard the battle begin. We waited…Listening…The battle lasted several hours, and there was a moment when it came very close to the city. But it died down somewhere nearby. Before evening I went to the shore: there were sailor caps floating down the Morskoy Canal. One after another. Sailor caps and big red stains on the waves…Splinters of wood…Our boys had been thrown into the water somewhere. As long as I stood there, these sailor caps kept floating by. I began to count them, but then I stopped. I couldn’t leave and I couldn’t look. The Morskoy Canal became a common grave…